This weekend is Heritage Days, Rogersville’s weekend long celebration of history and culture. What this means for me is – company’s coming.
Each year during the festival, a host of family and friends who’ve long since flown the Hawkins County coop, will return to roost, reunite, and temporarily fill my space with laughter, voices, jokes, laundry, children, tall tales and tons of shared memories with variations on the details.
Jacqui, my best girlfriend from college, has even made the trek to Hawkins County from her new spot in Chicago. She hasn’t missed a festival since back in`94 when I had to swear a solemn oath that, despite the notable lack of black folks on the street, Rogersville did not have a secret city ordinance banning brown from downtown.
Anyway, Jacqui arrived yesterday and stopped by on her way to her mother’s to confiscate my Heritage Days Guidebook.
Jacqui is a meticulous planner of all things, including fun. Every year, she combs through the Guidebook, cover to cover, highlighting every activity or performance which has some appeal. I don’t mind her thievery since I’m too far to busy preparing for company (translation: buying earplugs, cheap bourbon and locking up the valuables) to highlight cloggers and banjo pickers.
Plus, after the kids used the last package of highlighters to color the windows – so they’d be pretty like the ones at church – we added those to our list of “Items Not Permitted Indoors.” This list also includes Sharpies, sidewalk chalk, nails, frogs, potato guns, motorized vehicles and the water hose.
Besides, my Heritage Days routine never varies. The family arrives on Saturday. We all attend the festival. I stay until the kids spend my money, which takes approximately 15 minutes. I go home where I will referee 42 fistfights between feuding cousins, eat, drink, and be penniless but happy. By Sunday afternoon, no longer am I happy and wish everyone would go home so that I can begin the intense genealogical research, which will indubitably prove I am adopted.
On Monday, I will miss them all terribly.
In short, I barely skimmed the pages and when Jacqui called squealing about Rough Edges in the guidebook, I thought she’d gotten a paper cut or was having a hairdo problem. Then, I thought maybe this was in reference to a conversation we’d had, which I’d forgotten but should have remembered. Either way, I was convinced somebody was losing their mind – but I couldn’t determine if it were her or me.
Apparently, Rough Edges is a bluegrass band of which Chip McClain is a member. Years ago, Jacqui caught him doing an important bluegrass performance with important bluegrass type people at some important event about bluegrass – which I woudn’t know about because well… it’s bluegrass. She says Chippy is immensely talented… and handsome.
I was shocked. Not because there’s something terribly odd about a black woman digging bluegrass. I came to terms years ago with Jacqui’s quirks, most of which fly in face of stereotypes.
I was just caught off guard by the whole process of discussing lil’ Chippy McClain as though he were a rock star. I mean I’ve caught Chippy too. He was walking in the local Wal-Mart with his wife, Tina, and their baby. I assume they were probably off to buy something mundane like diapers or balogna.
And it’s not that I think he can’t be renowned or good looking – it’s just that I’ve known Chippy since… well for so long that I can’t remember meeting him. His parents, Louise and Bill, lived beside my Aunt Joan – and still do, I guess. Chippy and I were in the same class all the way through Keplar Elementary School. Our Mamma’s were in PTO together. Our Daddies used to pick-n-grin on occasion.
Even back in grade school, he had some good qualities. He didn’t stick peas up his nose. He didn’t smell funny. He was good on the monkey bars. He didn’t wipe snot on his sleeve and his Mama was just the sweetest lady.
Seriously, Chippy was always a bright and talented boy. But, I think, if you grew up with someone and you’ve known them that long, you’ve seen firsthand how their Mama dressed them (and we were reared in the age of polyester and bell bottoms) – you never see them as grown. Despite the addition of wrinkles, widsom, children, accomplishments, acclaim, and years – to me, he’s still little Chippy from down the road.
So, I think it’s rather cool that the lil’ boy from Beech Creek is a bluegrass bigwig with such a large fan base it includes a half-crazy black lady hailing from Chicago.
You know, often our memories of people as they were cloud our vision of who they’ve become. Perhaps that’s why I love these festivals, when family flocks home and old friends come to visit. For in the midst of all these people, new and old, with complex patterns connecting us all, we have the unique opportunity to see people in a whole new light.
With that having been said, check out Rough Edges this Saturday at 4PM. While there, if you happen to see a black lady swooning near the stage, ya’ll might want to come get me. Also, according to Jacqui, Moccasin Gap will be at the festival. I gather this is a good thing – and I’m just guessing but I’d say they aren’t making shoes.
