Of course, I’d seen Eudora Welty’s house more times than I could possibly remember. Not that it was all that memorable, mind you: a dingy, two-story Tudor-style home set back from the street, with a yard that seemed covered in pine straw the whole year round–messy, but not in a trashy way. Well, not much. I lived just around the corner.
Every so often, she’d show up on campus, wandering around, probably brought over by one of the profs who moved to Jackson because she still lived there, in the same house she’d inhabited since she was little. She was never much to look at, even when she was young. Buck teeth. Limp hair forever at shoulder length. A sizeable hump on her aged back. If you’d been at church on a Sunday morning, you wouldn’t have given her a second glance ’cause she’d have looked just like every other lady coming out of senior bible study class, doddering down the hall toward the 10:30 service: apparently outdated.
I have two very specific memories of her: the first was the fall of my sophomore year. My fraternity did this food drive thingamajig where we’d send out brown paper bags to folks in certain neighborhoods–only certain neighborhoods, mind you–and then a couple of days later, we’d split up into groups of four and collect ’em. A good number of folks would have left the bags on their front porches, already stacked up with canned goods for the food bank so we didn’t have to ring the doorbell and bother anybody on a Saturday afternoon. Every so often though, we’d have to knock and explain who we were and what we were doing and listen to “Oh, I completely forgot!” or “Goodness gracious sakes alive, I thought that was next weekend!” then wait patiently on the stoop while they went inside and pulled together a few rusty containers of cranberry sauce and black-eyed peas.
She was one who had forgotten. I rang the bell–“She can participate just like everybody else,” I said to myself–and waited. And a few minutes later, she herself arrived at the door (no help on the weekends, I guess), bulky, yellow, too-big dishwashing gloves on her prized hands. I gave my pitch and she responded in kind and shuffled off and came back with a smile and some cans, just like every other man or woman I’d spoken to that afternoon. Just like every other one.
The other memory I have of her was about a year later. I was driving over to the Jitney Jungle after class to do some grocery shopping and to stop in afterwards at Parkins Pharmacy for a malt. (By and large, the whole pharmacy/soda-jerk thing was something my parents talked about but which I’d never seen, at least until I got to Jackson. Even then, Parkins was the only working soda fountain I’d ever come across. But the malts and shakes were particularly good there, and as I was a college student, I became particularly fond of them.) Anyway, I’m driving over to the grocery and this car pull out in front of me. It’s an ancient Buick Regal, like the kind many of my friends had driven back in high school–hand-me-downs from aunts or grandparents. I can barely see the top of the driver’s head, and I figure the reason the car’s going so slow is that the driver can only barely reach the gas pedal.
Well, needless to say, I was an impatient young man of twenty: I honked. Not loud or long, but I honked. The car didn’t speed up. It just kept creeping along, puttering down the same neighborhood streets I was, as if the driver were following me but had somehow managed to get ahead. This kept up ’till we reached the Jitney, when the driver finally found a parking spot and pulled in. I hit the gas and whipped through the lot, found my own space, and stormed off toward the store. And just before I stepped inside, I looked over my shoulder to see twenty yards away, moving steadily toward the front door leaning on one of Jitney’s orange and red shopping carts, a living legend: the greatest American author yet alive, the last of a generation, an accidental, effortless survivor, Eudora Welty. My remorse was sudden and painful. I should have apologized, but I didn’t.
I wrote a poem about her not long afterward. Looking back, I can see it’s really bad–not just bad, I mean really bad. I’d ridden my bike to the downtown post office, and it was such an amazing afternoon, early spring, the quality of the light, the color of the sky, crisp air. At the time I was enrolled in a course on Milton and in another in classical mythology, so naturally, in the poem I became an aeolian harp. The piece was mercifully short, in the Imagist style of Amy Lowell. The gist of it was that I was, metaphorically, a harp, played by the wind as I rode my bike to the P.O. I remember the feeling I had, being alone on a backstreet, with that big, beautiful sky above me, feeling really quiet and peaceful, but I fumbled when I tried to put it into words. Somthing she never did.
Goodbye, Eudora. Thanks for leaving so much behind.
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