Clinton, South Carolina, Friday, February 21, 2020, 11:20 a.m.

Everything I’ve done this morning leads me in the direction of a song.

I posted some thoughts on Facebook, and two people noted that it sounded like a song could be written from it. I am thus presently thinking about one.

As soon as I finished that post, I picked up my guitar and sang my favorite Tom T. Hall song, “Homecoming,” as well as a Jack Clement favorite, “I Know One.” For some reason, “I Know One” is often the first song that comes to mind when I play guitar.

I started thinking about the understated wisdom of Tom T. lines.

Tossed and turned the night before in some old motel, subconsciously recalling some old sinful thing I’d done …

If you tell me she’s not here, I’ll follow the trail of her tears, that’s how I got to Memphis …

All the time she’s been waiting on him, she’s been waitin’ on you and me …

She never said a word to him but said a prayer for me. I told her, in a way, that I’d been praying for her, too …

The man who preached the funeral said it really was a simple way to die. He went home from work one afternoon and never opened up his eyes …

I know there’s a lot of big preachers who know a lot more than I do, but it could be that the good Lord likes a little pickin’ too …

Don’t let them big-city people get to you ’cause money’s the name of the game, don’t you see? They might pat your fanny and say you’re a dandy, but they still don’t like pickin’ on network TV …

Then I drove up to Steamers, and Debra asked me if I wanted the usual, said she almost just put it in without asking, and I told her if I’d wanted something different, I wouldn’t have said anything but just waited for the next time I came in. She doesn’t work on Saturdays, so she has no way of knowing I usually get the country-fried steak and white gravy with my eggs and grits on that day. Besides, she was right. This is Friday.

Big Don Fulmer was eating with a friend of his at the next table, and he said we ought to get together sometime and go see the Greenville Drive. Don, who bought my granddaddy’s grocery store many years ago and ran it as Don’s PDQ, and I always talk baseball. I told him it was going to be like New York in the 1950s this year in Los Angeles, because Mike Trout is like Mickey Mantle and Mookie Betts is like Willie Mays. Don knows I’m unhappy about that.

Then Ronny Page walked in, and Don came over for a minute, and I said it was like me going to a Big & Tall store because it was the only place I ever bought anything off the left side of the rack. I’m 61, Ronny’s 65 and Don is 78, and I told them this was the only place in town where I was still a kid.

I pointed out that we’d all reached the age where we were one germ away from disaster, and they both nodded their heads.

Ronny’s boy Brandon runs Steamers now, and we talked a little about the old Red’s Burger Masters days, which live on in Steamers’ burger menu, along with stories about the early days of integration, and Joe Cagle, and Billy Watkins, and my daddy, and other folks that most of time forgot.

I told Ronny that the thing about life I like the least is that most folks have no idea what people really think of them while they’re alive.

 

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