I am shocked by how serene I am since moving back to America – to Birmingham, Alabama – from Budapest. Everything I love about life in general is in Europe. But to my surprise and regret, it’s not home. I don’t know why I was wrapped so tight by anxiety in Budapest, but I was. I had a great life there, no complaints – except for no church community, which wasn’t Budapest’s fault, just a matter of my inability in local languages. Being back in the US, in a place where I have access to an Orthodox church in my own language – well, I can literally feel the anxiety uncoiling within me. I can’t explain it, but I’m not going to think about it, just be grateful.
I went to church yesterday at St. Symeon, the Orthodox Church in America parish in town. I had been told by a Baptist friend that the choir is exceptionally good. He undersold it. Man, that was what they call havin’ church! How beautiful it is, and full of young families. I now have a church. No apartment yet, but the more important home has been achieved.
My friend Lee met me for lunch at Johnny’s, one of the town’s Greek diners and it was so unbelievably, gloriously delicious. I had lamb meatballs, black-eyed peas, a double helping of turnip greens and cornbread. Perfection. It’s what the South tastes like. Lee is a Walker Percy fan – we met at the Walker Percy Weekend in St. Francisville a decade or so ago – so he drove me by Percy’s childhood home and then we motored around the beautiful old neighborhoods. After our tour, Lee took me by a dive bar called the Garage. I ordered a cold beer and we sat on the back patio, steaming in the heat and humidity, smelling the aroma of the flowering magnolia tree.
The heat and humidity are horrible, but as I told Lee as we walked back to his truck, this is what home feels like. That feeling you have in the Southern summer, of thinking you’d better not sit in one place too long or a kudzu tendril will wrap around your ankles – that’s here. I hate it, but I also kind of love it, just because it’s nostalgic. Ambling down the sidewalk reminded me of being a little boy wandering around my grandmother’s yard in the summertime, near the hydrangeas, taking in the pungent smell of the mold (I guess) in the part of her yard under the crape myrtles where the sun never shone. A couple of times I climbed up the sweet olive tree next to the screened porch, crawled on to the roof of her cottage and thought I was king of the world. Under me was the porch where the old folks would sit after Sunday dinner, talking. My older cousin Andy told me not long ago that in the early 1960s, when he was a kid, he would sit there listening to the elders talk about “the War” – meaning the Civil War. A hundred years and two world wars on, that was the War to them.
I learned very early in my life that king snakes were our friends. Aunt Lois and Aunt Hilda told me that. There was an old king snake living in the brush outside their cabin. They said as long as he was there, he would keep the bad snakes away. Once, when I was seven or eight years old, I walked through the pecan orchard with my friend Charles Frank to visit the old aunts. There, stretched across the pea gravel driveway, was the old king snake, sunning himself, his yellow-green speckles glittering in the summer sun on the black surface of his body. Charles Frank froze in fear – it was a snake! – but I just stepped over him. The king snake was our friend.
The aunts were bony old ladies, born in the 1890s, and sometimes even lit a fire in the summer. Their exceedingly modest antebellum cabin, shaded by a huge Chinese rain tree, was always cool, no matter how hot it got outside. The truth is, the deepest desire in all my life is to get back to their cabin in their enchanted garden. They taught me how to read when I was yet two years away from kindergarten. They had books on the shelves and art on the walls. They taught me about the Great War, in which they served as Red Cross nurses, and about what was happening in our world today. They told me who Kissinger was, and Brezhnev. My love of Europe, and my love of the world of news and journalism, was seeded right there in that cabin. They also nurtured my love of books.
Aunt Hilda was an eccentric Episcopalian. She took out a book about palm reading from the Audubon Library in town. One day she took my fat little hand into hers and read its lines. “See this one?” she said. “It means you are going to travel far in life.” I had hoped it was true, but even then, as a small boy, I figured this was nonsense. It came true, though. And now I’m back in the South. For how long? Who knows. I’m just happy to enjoy the moment while it lasts.
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