At five a.m. this holiday morning I awoke at the same time as always, more or less, after a dream of meandering through two old red brick towns, the first a very real one. Peg and I were driving through Leary, a nearly dead town from another century tucked into a deserted corner of Calhoun County, in southwest Georgia. Leary has always held a fascination for me, because the downtown boasts quaint Victorian architecture, and is completely boarded up.
There is no sign of life anywhere--it might as well be a dead silver mining town in the Sierra Nevada.
The South is full of these abandoned shells of failed post-bellum boosterism. What has always held Leary in my imagination, after driving through it dozens of times when I was in law school and running Athens and Panama City, is the bust perched at one end of the grown over public green.
Who is this latter day Ozymandias, forever proudly contemplating the town he loved that died not so long after him?
The inscription tells us, without imparting anything substantive, that this is Philip Edward Boyd, a pillar of the community that once was.
Obviously his neighbors sort of liked him.
How sad. A booster for a town that didn't make it, the equivalent of our modern small town Rotarian, his image left to spend eternity surrounded by ghosts.
I feel sort of badly for the guy, sitting out here by himself. Maybe his descendants could come find him, and get him a job on the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland. At least he'd have some other busts to jawbone with, and he'd add a little diversity to the ride with his thick Southern drawl.
A little online research tells us only that Boyd served in the Confederate Army, and was a successful merchant and farmer in Calhoun County until his demise early in the 20th century.
The statue used to sit in the middle of the main thoroughfare through Leary, but folks kept hitting it with their cars so they moved it to its solitary roadside perch. Judging from the cars, Leary was still a viable town as late as the 1950s.
In my dream we drove north from Leary, P and I, and into a generic New York small town. These small upstate towns all look the same, and even in their economic distress appear viable, with glass in the windows and people on the sidewalks. This pic is of a pretty typical town, which could have been the one in my dream or could be any town in upstate New York. This one happens to be Oneonta, the hometown of my childhood country music hero, Jerry Jeff Walker.
As a Southerner by osmosis if not upbringing, I cringe at the contrast. Why is so much of the rural South a crumbling shell, even as we're filching all their light industry from up north with the promise of tax breaks and the 21st century equivalent of slave labor? That's an essay for another day; this is Thanksgiving, and I'm writing about my dream last night.
But maybe I shouldn't keep telling that story. Because in my dream I drove into the spotless New York town, and dropped off Peggy at an appointment where she would be tied up for an hour or so. I needed to go amuse myself while I waited, and found a combination coffee shop/brewpub that seemed to meet all of my immediate beverage needs. I walked into a crowded room where folks were waiting for their coffees (or beers, I suppose), and suddenly felt overcome by a cramping attack of Montezuma's Revenge. I bolted for the men's room, realizing as I entered that there was no door and the patrons could see me settling into one of the stalls, which in turn had a partition wall so everyone to my left could see my feet and the fact that I was, tragically, wearing white linen pants puddled around my ankles but no underwear. I didn't quite make it, and pondered what to do about my telltale, defaced trousers. Just then I realized the sink was out there in the lobby, so I had to walk out of the bathroom and publicly work through tidying up my situation.
A Jungian analyst would have a field day with that one. The whole world can see my excrement? I guess that's this blog, in a nutshell.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. If you're sampling unfamiliar food today, be sure to wear dark pants.
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