I type into my phone well I’m by Milo’s in Birmingham and Aerosmith is on the radio. Time is a flat circle, and then head into the Wal-Mart to see if they have any Cotton Bowl t-shirts.
Around Hickory, Mississippi, Polaroid SX-70 (all photos 2021)
In movies the characters are always going home and their trophies from high school and posters are all still displayed in their bedrooms, like a pre-college time capsule. My mom put up black floral wallpaper and installed a white daybed in my old bedroom. It’s like an exhibit in a museum tour; no one even goes in there.
Hueytown, Alabama, SX-70
Every time I go to the grocery store I always look to see if there’s someone there from high school. There never is, and I’m always kind of disappointed. I would actually like to see someone from high school. We never even managed to have a reunion—got close once, but it devolved into two separate Facebook groups sniping at each other over how much we were Committed to the Spartans. I just kind of wanted to hang out and eat pizza.
They’re out of poinsettias at the store so I get yellow roses for my grandparents’ grave instead. My Nana always loved yellow roses anyway.
There’s some other people coming into the cemetery when I get there and I smile and wave at them. I arrange the roses as best I can to look pretty, snapping off the bottoms of the long stems so they’ll lay better in the vases installed on the sides of the headstones.
Birmingham, Alabama, SX-70
In the early 80s the Methodist church in Sandusky put out a cookbook; my Nana, an ardent Baptist but able social creature, managed to place a few recipes in it. My mom dug out her copy and gave it to me for Christmas, along with a set of knives and a new Alabama pullover hoody and a book commemorating the Tide’s 2018 championship.
I was excited because the cookbook had my grandmother’s pecan praline recipe. I’ve only had pecan pralines once since she passed away and they looked beautiful but were rubbery as a used volleyball. A section in the back featured recipes, some real and some fanciful, from the children in the church.
Sitting on the grave on my grandparents, I read to them the “Recipe for Sleep,” by Wesley Johnson, then aged 5 years:
You just lie in bed and think and think . . . about things like God and Heaven and Murray and my Pa Pa and Bear Bryant and all that green grass and that pretty blue sky until your eyes just won’t stay open any more.
I sit there for a while in the sun and wipe the tears away after reading Wesley’s recipe and when the other people who were visiting a grave up the hill drive past they smiled and honked and waved, and the honk is surprisingly loud, and I smiled and waved back.
Paint Rock, Alabama, SX-70, on Christmas Day
I’m already tired en route to Chattanooga and pull over at a rest stop outside of Rainbow City. On the radio Bonnie Raitt is singing about how the years just flowed by, like a broken down dam. In the car is the weirdest group of travel snacks ever assembled. In trying to steer clear of Little Debbies and Doritos I picked up some kind of fried chickpeas and those Kind bar breakfast things that are shockingly small but like 500 calories plus a tiny bottle of cold brew. It’s just junk with better fonts.
What does it take to escape the gravity of where you grew up, I wonder. What is the escape velocity of the self.
When I pull out the rest stop I notice two women praying, kneeling on small rugs at the edge of a copse of slender pine. Make me a poster, Bonnie drawls, of an old rodeo.
“ESCAPE VELOCITY” is this week’s installment of GORJUS, a newsletter devoted to art and life in the South and instant film. If you like it, consider sending it to a pal. Just like anything, some weeks are better than others. I’m gorjusjxn on Instagram, and you can see more Polaroids at McCartyPolaroids.