Today’s Walk

Remember the blue back and orange back biographies that proliferated our library shelves in elementary school? I read every one of them. Hence the comments on my report card, “Jennifer reads too many library books.”

Presented as nonfiction, many of these biographies were doctored to present a more noble heritage. True or not, they did not dampen my enthusiasm for biographies, autobiographies and memoirs.

Glimpsing into other people’s lives intrigues me. I’ve learned how to solve problems, how I want to be and, surely, how I don’t want to be. Most of all, other people’s lives enlarge my world. The life of Bobbie Ann Mason took me on a journey through my childhood.

Her discussion of one of her books, Elvis Presley: a Life, during the 2016 Conference on the Book in Oxford, Mississippi, had introduced me to her writing. While not an Elvis fan, I am a fan of successful writers, always hopeful that I will learn something from them. 

Following this introduction, I read her novel In Country, which is about a Viet Nam veteran who returned home to Kentucky forever bearing the burden of that war. I’ve been researching/writing a biography of a Viet Nam war correspondent and thought I might learn something. I did. This led me to more of her writing.

Only pages into reading Clear Springs, I discovered Bobbie Ann Mason and I share connections—lots of them. We both are Kentucky natives. She arrived a bit before I, but in the same cultural time frame. My family’s peripatetic lifestyle began early and took me from the state when I was a toddler. But it wasn’t long until the family journeys landed me in a house on Highway 45, an asphalt ribbon connecting Bobbie Ann in Kentucky and me in Tennessee.

It was Highway 45 that Bobbie Ann followed from her house in Kentucky, past my house in Tennessee, and on to Tupelo, Mississippi, to find Elvis Presley’s childhood home.

Hwy 45 was a death trap for Bobbie Ann’s pets as well as for many of my cats that followed me the short distance along the highway from my house to the church next door where my father was pastor.

Reading was, and is, a way of life for both of us, but who knew we both had an affinity for the Bobbsey Twins? I still recall the opening lines to The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore. Bobbie Ann’s memoir pictures her grasping The Bobbsey Twins at School, but she didn’t stop there. She wrote about these adventurous brother and sister Girl Sleuth: A Feminist Guide.

The Weekly Reader was a game changer for me, and it seems so for Bobbie Ann. I loved getting this newspaper at school, being able to order my own books through WR and having them delivered to my classroom, a foreshadowing of today’s book buying. As an adult, I found a copy of the first book I ever ordered, Blue Willow. It is in my library.

Bobbie Ann and I picked strawberries, a product so popular in Highway 45 country that schools dismissed in early May so children could pick strawberries. Bobbie Ann writes that her crates contained six quart-boxes and she got a nickel for every quart. I recall pint boxes and a penny a pint. I should have picked with her.

We loved Fabian. He was soooooo cute and, by our teenage standards, had a wonderful voice.

Other connections found in Clear Springs:

• The nearby town of Paducah. I have several dolls Santa found for me in Paducah.

• We were children of the “great polio scare” and that new-fangled television’s Howdy Doody. I don’t know about Bobbie Ann, but I got all my polio vaccines and watched a lot of Howdy Doody.

• Murray State College (now University). When my parents married at age 19, my father had only two years of high school. After earning his GED, he began his formal educational quest, which he completed when he was 37 and I was 15. Everywhere we lived, he enrolled in the nearest college. Murray State College was one.

• As first-born children, Bobbie Ann and I share burden to be perfect.

• We wrote for our college newspapers.

• As career newbies, we interviewed celebrities and famous people.

• We had a family member who “went to Memphis” for mental health issues.

• She was 21 years younger than her mother. I was 22 years younger than mine, a short distance that weighed heavily on me when my mother died.

• Bobbie Ann’s stories about grandparents on the farm mingle with mine. I didn’t live on a farm but just went farther south on Hwy 45—and closer to Elvis—to my grandparents’ farm, which turned into a kind of amusement park for my cousins and me.

• Our grandmothers made quilts for us. Mine began making a half-bed quilt for each grandchild as he/she graduated from high school. I was Number 4. I still have my quilt, which was made from my dress scraps as well as those of my mother and my cousins. As and adult, I bought more quilts from my grandmother.

• Milk cans were integral to our grandfather’s work. I didn’t wash my grandfather’s milk cans as Bobbie Ann did, but I still see why grandfather rolling a wooden cart with two milk cans out to the road to be picked up.

• She shares the conflict of leaving the house on the farm, where she was born and grew up. I understand some of that because I spent so much time in my grandparents’ house and around the place, pretending to be a farmer. So many of my memories, especially the good ones, center on that farm. I was in their house once after both had died. I could not stay. Memories filled every inch, but the most important ingredient was gone. When the house was demolished, I was given two bricks from the fireplace. They became bookends in my library.

• We share a period of mourning. Bobbie Ann and I had grandfathers who died the same month of the same year, the first immediate family member to die.

• We had an Aunt Hattie. Mine was a great aunt, but I knew her, and she is memorable because she helped “raise” my father.

• We had relatives who “ran” or managed the local county home. Mine was my great grandfather and great grandmother. They provided a place for people who had nowhere to go. My mother told stories of spending the night with her grandparents at the county home and being “paid” ten cents for her help. The nursing home where my mother spent her last days is located on the site where that county home once stood, just a stone’s throw from where my grandfather’s farm used to be.

• The family stories from a time so hard on people. For me, it was when my grandmother was “flat on her back” for a year. Ida was hired to take care of the five children. The time when my grandparents’ only two children had contracted diphtheria, taking their first-born, Lucille, and leaving their son with health life-long health issues for life. Their daughter’s obituary breaks my heart for those young parents. Fittingly, one of Lucille’s books is in my library.

• We had ancestors who died early and no one remembers or knew about that person. I grew up thinking one of my great grandfathers was an only child. But in the first census in which he was recorded, a younger sister is named. She appears nowhere else in official data or anyone’s memory.

• In college, Bobbie Ann thought everyone was smarter than she. From first grade through graduate school, I felt the same way. Now, I always choose friends from the smart kids group.

• The best connection, however, is Bobbie Ann and I love words, the reading of them and the writing of them. And we have spent our lives doing just that.

I suspect that if Bobbie Ann Mason and Jennifer Kay Bryon had lived closer on Highway 45, we might have become best friends.

To get the full details of Mason’s life on Highway 45, read Clear Springs. Her life is way more interesting than mine!

“Google” Bobbie Ann Mason and you find a complete listing of her books as well as the other writers to whom she is compared. They, too, are some of my favorites.