THE LAST PORK CHOP
IN ARIZONAby
Don Berry
Hello. My name is Marie Antoinette Plum, and here I am clacketing through the Arizona dawn on Amtrak. First Class, reserved bedroom and everything. What a deal.For my money you can have your super-jumbo speedo whammy jet airplanes. Who needs them? I'll take First Class on Amtrak every time, with a little room I can walk around in, and play my tapes, and doze off looking out the window without falling into somebody's lap. I like my privacy, and I like my music and I like feeling a little bit privileged. There's not too many places you can do that any more. Not all at one time.
The other thing I like is small spaces. Always have, ever since I was a little girl, because the most beautiful part of my life as traveling in a trailer in the late 40s and early 50s. It was a joyful time, a kind of paradise remembered, full of music and love and excitement.
Now, as a grown up, I live in a regular house just north of Seattle, and it's fine, but deep in my heart there's a little trailer in a trailer court on Prince Road in Tucson, Arizona. I remember that trailer court the way Eve must have remembered Eden. Afterwards, I mean. After they had to leave.
And that, in a rather roundabout way, is the explanation of why I am riding Amtrak (First Class) through the dawn to Tucson. Going back to a place I haven't seen since I was nine years old. "Prince's Nest" it was called. I don't really expect it's still there after almost forty years. Trailer courts come and go. Part of my growing up was learning that trailer courts come and go, and trailer people come and go, and everybody doesn't live that way. That's O.K., too, but when I was nine I thought everybody who was anybody in show business lived in trailers.
I also thought that "Prince's Nest" was named after the Prince who really lived there, my father Mister ElDee Plum. My father was the only man I've ever known that everybody called "Mister." Most people called him by the full name, Mister ElDee Plum, but some of his close friends called him Mister ElDee. To his face I called him Papa, but that was sort of official. In my heart I thought of him as Mister ElDee Plum.
Mister ElDee Plum was a star. There's no other word for him. He was one of those people who can stand on a stage and do nothing at all, and have people applauding like crazy. Everybody in Tucson then knew exactly who he was. I still get a thrill when I hear in my memory that announcer's voice on the radio saying with rising excitement, "And here he is, ladies and gentlemen, the host of our show, king of the airways, Mister -- ElDee Plum!!"
We were a show business family, you see.
There's a knock on the sliding door of my Amtrak bedroom and the car attendant tells me the first call for lunch will be in about 15 minutes.
"I think they still have a few pork chops from the dinner menu last night," he says.
"Could I get one for lunch?" I ask him.
He winks. "Wouldn't be surprised," he says.
"Thank you," I say.
I go to the sink to wash my face and put on my makeup. For the ten-thousandth time I thank God I'm pretty. I really shouldn't thank God, I should thank Mama, who was truly beautiful, with wide cheekbones and large, light eyes that seemed to glow at you. My face is thinner than hers, but the genes of beauty are there, the genes are there.
I don't take any personal pride in being pretty, but it has made my life a whole lot easier, and I'm grateful for that. It isn't that I mind being 47 -- but I do sort of like it that people always think I'm well under 40. I am a Regional History Specialist in the county library system, and people are always surprised to find someone single and attractive doing scholarly work.
I make my way down the corridor of the other sleeping car that lies between my bedroom and the dining car. The train is rocking some, and I hold my elbows out to steady myself against the walls.
The rhythm of the wheels has a nice beat, a forward kind of Western Swing beat, and there's a little tune in my mind that tinkles around it the way I remember Leon playing pedal steel guitar around the melodic line. Leon was hot, and I can still hear the voice of Mister ElDee Plum saying "Aw, yeah, Leon! Take it away, boy, take it away!"
The dining car attendant puts me at a table with a young college couple. They're a handsome pair, the kind that immediately makes you think "This is the quarterback of the football team and that's the chief pom-pom girl." Turned out not to be true, but then, so do a lot of lovely images.
"Do you think I could get a southern-style pork chop?" I ask the waiter. "Like the ones at dinner last night?"
"Surely can," he says, smiling. He writes it in by hand on my meal voucher. (When you travel First Class all your meals are paid for, and all you have to do is sign the voucher at the table.)
I talk to the college couple while we're waiting. They're going back to Kansas City. The first meeting, I gather, between the girl's parents and the boy. I think they're a little bit nervous about it, and I tell them it's going to be just fine. It's always reassuring for a young person to be told everything is going to be just fine. I can think of times in my own life, when just a word from a grown up made all the difference.
The waiter comes back.
"Sorry, ma'am," he says. "The pork chops are gone. Would you like to make another selection?"
"Oh, that's too bad," I say. "I was looking forward to it. They looked so good at dinner last night, but I had steak."
"Sorry," he says again. Another waiter comes down the aisle with his tray held at shoulder level. On the tray is a plate with a steaming baked pork chop, with rich, brown southern syle gravy.
"That's it," my waiter says, gesturing to the tray. "That's the last order."
"Will there be any more tonight?" I say.
"No, ma'am," he says. "Not on this run. That's the last pork chop in Arizona."
It is a phrase that has a ring of something Absolute, something irreversible, something finished, once and for all. The last pork chop in Arizona.
In my mind I hear another voice, a gentle voice, but with the same awful finality, saying, "The music is over." It is my mother's voice, and she is speaking very quietly.
Suddenly I am terribly frightened.
I don't know how other people keep their memories. Odd, because as a historian I deal with other people's memories every day, and I should have some sense of how they keep them. But I don't.
I keep my memories like a file of picture post-cards. They are mostly still shots, with the bright colors of Kodachrome, a film invented to portray the world as one great circus. I have always loved those colors, colors never seen by the naked eye, but representing a world that is gayer and more vibrant and lovelier than the original. The sky is bluer and the clown's nose is redder. It is the perfect film for keeping memories, because naturally you want your memories to be at least a little better than the original.
In my own memory file I even have some duplicate postcards; one of the way It Really Was, and one the way I Choose to Remember It. I have pictures like that of Nogales, for instance, where Mister ElDee Plum took me many times when we lived in Tucson. The main difference is that in my Chosen-Memory the hills are steeper and crowded closer together than in the Way-it-Was-Memory. I also remember thinking that Nogales was the Mexican word for Carnival, until somebody told me otherwise.
But sometimes when I take out my memory postcard of Tucson, I realize there is a part of the picture that is not in focus; a part that is hidden from me. It's like there's a piece torn out of the middle.
The rest is perfectly clear, as are all my memory postcards. All around the edges are the crisp, sharp Kodachrome images of a perfect life. Walking through the little cemetery to get to school, having my poem about the Saguaro cactus read aloud by Miss Carbeaux in third grade, winning every Jacks tournament I was ever in. I was one slick Jacks player, and it was not just the plain stuff either. Scooping up to ten was nothing for me. I played Flying Dutchman (with the backhand catch), and Pigs in a Pen (scooping the Jacks under your palm, and a backhand catch), and Eggs in a Basket and I always won. Always. I was the luckiest girl in the world, and I knew it. But it was only fitting, because I was the daughter of Mister ElDee Plum.
My memory postcards of Tucson are of paradise, a paradise partly of Kodachrome, but mostly of music; music and laughter and music and good things to eat, and music and happy people. Ever since then I have always had music in my mind, music all the day and night. We were so happy there.
I want to take the Amtrak back to those golden days and see if I can find any traces of those delights, some physical sign the world was once as beautiful as that. Everything in our lives in Tucson revolved around the trailer courts and the music and the radio show and our happiness. And, of course, Mister ElDee Plum, the center of the whirpool of gaiety and excitement.
He was a tall man, more than six feet, and he only weighed about 140 lbs. He had a shock of blond hair that shone in the Tucson sun like gold, and white teeth that flashed the most joyous smile, particularly when he was bantering with the audience. He was as slim and beautiful as a stalk of pampas grass waving in the sunlight.
Everywhere Mister ElDee Plum went there was excitement. He attracted energy around himself, energy and music. ElDee, of course, were his initials, L.D. But at the same time, not really his initials. When he was only a little boy he had renamed himself Lucius Duane Plum. I never knew what his first name really was. By the time he was my Papa he had gotten disenchanted with the idea of Lucius Duane and had just gone to ElDee.
It was the radio show that made Mister ElDee Plum a star.
When we first came to Tucson in the trailer, it was almost an accident. I think we were supposed to be going to Phoenix, which even in 1951 had a much, much larger population than the 50,000 or so people in Tucson. This memory isn't very clear, but I think we actually got to Phoenix and then turned around and came back to Tucson.
There were the four of us: Mister ElDee Plum and Mama and my little sister Carolyn, three years younger than me, and Me, Marie Antoinette. I know my name seems exaggerated to some people, but re-ally, it was one of the most conservative names in the whole family. I had a great aunt named Fairy Queen and one named Felicity Harmony, and the whole family was in show business. Fairy Queen used to have a high-wire act until her partner fell and broke his hip. Then she became a booking agent and did very well -- the only one of the three generations who ever made good money at it. The rest were satisfied with a good show-biz life.
We were in the music end of the business. As soon as we got to Tucson, Mister ElDee Plum set about with his usual energy to get us set up, and his big idea was a radio show.
There was a good radio station in Tucson at the time, called KVOA. "That's the Voice of Arizona," he said. "That's what we're going to be, Marisie. The Voice of Arizona."
My Papa's idea was, in one respect, far ahead of its time. He somehow decided that the audience he wanted was the trailer people, and there were a lot of them around Tucson at the time. He concentrated all his efforts on building an audience from the trailer courts.
He even started a little newspaper called the "Tucson Trailer Times", which had little bits of gossip and news about the trailer people, including, of course a lot of promotional material about the radio show. It wasn't mimeographed, either. It was printed offset, like a real newspaper, and I remember going to the printer and watching in awe as the little drums with their rubber mats turned around and around at amazing speed, turning out the "Tucson Trailer Times" in what seemed like thousands and thousands of copies. The presses had a good rhythm, too, but it got stale after a while.
The trailer people weren't just a passive audience, the way people are today. They were really part of the show, because Mister ElDee Plum broadcast the show live from the courts.
This was the deal: Each week, unless there was bad weather, we'd broadcast from a different trailer court. Each court would provide some kind of a feast -- barbecue, potluck, whatever they wanted, and it was always plenty. There'd be long tables covered with butcher paper, and people would dress their kids up in their best clothes, and tell them to behave themselves which, much to my disgust, they never did.
We had a frame wood stage for the performers we could set up in twenty minutes flat. KVOA provided a big van that had all the transmitter equipment in it, and then we had another, smaller van that had refreshments. Mama ran the refreshment van, and we got to keep the money from that.
There was a good variety of acts, all of them musical. In addition to the band there was Walt Kowalchek, a harmonica player who had been with the early Harmonicats. He was hot, too, like Leon, but he played a single. And there was a balladeer who went by the name of Montana, and a retired clown from Ringling Brothers who sang comic songs.
Mister ElDee Plum was the host of the show, and it was a kind of combination of talking to people in the audience, and introducing the musical acts and having prize giveaways. The sponsors would donate gifts for the contests, and people could usually win them by answering some simple kinds of question. We had a wire recorder at the time, and one of the "quizzes" I remember was to identify songs that were recorded on the wire recorder and played backwards.
Part of every show Mister ElDee Plum encouraged people in the audience to do a little act -- sing some song they remembered, or play an instrument or tell a joke or something. This was always very popular, but it got out of hand, too. I remember one woman, she must have been 150 years old, who got to singing "You Are My Sunshine" and they couldn't get her to stop. She didn't know any of the verses, just the chorus, and she kept singing it over and over and over, hanging on the big microphone stand like a monkey on a branch.
But for me, the feasting and the audience and the excitement were just background for what was really important -- the music. I have always had a perfect memory for music and sounds of all kinds. I remember clearly the time Mister ElDee Plum said "You have a perfect ear, Marisie." He said it kind of off-hand, but it was something that made a deep impression on me and something I treasured close to my heart. A perfect ear. If you could ask for one gift in this world, that would be it. A perfect ear.
The show band was "Larry Cockerell's Sunset Riders." The Sunset Riders were famous around the Southwest for their costumes, which were absolutely terrific. They were made back East by somebody called "Turk." That seemed to be important to everybody.
All of them, including Rose, had satin shirts with the most amazing amount of embroidery. They favored a heart design all over, with rays coming out around the edges and neat little things in the middle. There was so much embroidery you sometimes couldn't see the shirt. And Leon had embroidered hearts all down the seam of his pants. He used to put the pedal steel guitar sideways on the stage so the audience could see his embroidered legs.
In contrast, Mister ElDee Plum had no decorations whatever. He was magnificent, a perfect vision all in white. His suit was white leather, the softest leather I ever saw in my life, with just a little western fringe. His cowboy boots were just as white, and so was his hat. He was so slim and sophisticated in his white leathers it just took your breath away.
In a way, it seems very strange to me now that everybody dressed like cowboys, even show business cowboys. They didn't play cowboy music. They played Western Swing, which isn't the same thing at all. But that was just the costume of the time, I guess.
I realize now that we were really a little old-fashioned. Western Swing was at its high point maybe ten years or more earlier, in the late thirties. There were already big changes happening in music, changes that altered pop music forever. You were starting to hear a lot of country music.
Western Swing wasn't country music. It was more a city kind of music, and was instrumentally quite sophisticated. Some of the best fiddlers anybody every heard were playing Western Swing, and the wail of that pedal steel guitar was something. There were a lot of different elements from black music, too, and pop and jazz. Blues, and boogie piano, and some traditional pieces, and bits of Latin rhythm. It was a combination of lots of different kinds of music, and always with that forward push, that good swinging dance beat. But already, by 1951, Hank Williams was starting to come on big in the Southwest, and I really think it was Hank Williams that changed the direction of the music. Western Swing was strong on the band. It had fantastic musicians, particularly fiddlers, piano players and pedal steel players. Really good instrumentation, and good players. The vocals were pretty much secondary. But when Hank Williams came along with that gravel voice and that power, people began to concentrate on the singers, and the bands slipped into being just accompaniment for the vocalists, and to my ear the music got more boring as the singer got the spotlight.
Anyhow, the music that had been developing as an urban style started to get more countrified, with backwoods accents and a hillbilly kind of humor that we never had. Mister ElDee Plum certainly told a lot of jokes, (some of them I know he cribbed out of a joke book KVOA had), but they weren't country jokes, they were city jokes.
There was one joke I've been trying to remember for years, because it was somehow very important. It was a joke about a "statuary ape." That's the only thing I can remember, and I don't even know why it seems so important. At the time I didn't even know what "statuary" meant, but I remembered the sound of the words in my mind.
I even learned a lot of vocabulary from some of the lyrics of those Western Swing tunes. Some of it, being only nine years old, I learned wrong, I must say. But I always had a perfect memory for the words.
There was one song called "Oh, Sugar," and the chorus went, "Oh, Sugar, just pop into my Oolong and sweeten my days for me."
I was just a little kid, and I didn't know Oolong was the name of a tea. In my mind I had a picture of an Oolong as a kind of little hut, about the size of a trailer but without wheels. I always thought that someday, when I was older and established in the music business, I'd have a little Oolong of my own just outside of Tucson and ask people to pop in and sweeten my days for me.
The Hotel Congress is right across the street from the Amtrak station in Tucson, and when I started out to plan my trip I made a reservation there. It was for convenience, mainly, but it turned out to be just the right place.
There is an artist working there when I get in, decorating the whole place from lobby to corridors with a combination of Southwest Indian motifs combined with Art Deco. It sounds a little crazy, but it works out just right. It feels good. It feels like a place things could happen.
On the first night, coming back to the Hotel from dinner, the night is almost completely silent. Tucson closes up early, even today. Behind the hotel, facing the Amtrak station, there's a small parking lot, with one great tall lamppost cascading a cone of light on the pavement below. There's a modern kind of sculpture, all spikey and painted a brilliant turquoise.
In that pool of light, in perfect silence, are three men; a black man, a Mexican, and an Anglo.
The black man and the Mexican are fencing, and the Anglo is refereeing. It is real fencing, with face masks and chest protectors and regulation foils and a considerable degree of skill. I am too self-conscious to stand and watch them for very long, but I can see them a little from the corner window of my room and I watch them until they go away. Still in silence. I never find out what it is all about, but it makes me feel good. I have always welcomed the unexpected.
I look in the phone book, and sure enough, KVOA is still in business. Now, of course, it's a big network TV station, but nevertheless, it is another good sign to me.
The next morning I call around to see if I can get a good deal on a rental car. The best place I find is a U-Haul place called the Road Runner. They are quite a ways away from the Hotel, but they offer free pick-up and have a good price. Also, when I check them out on my Tucson map, lo and behold! they are only a few blocks away from Prince Road, where the "Prince's Nest" trailer court had been. I feel as though I am almost home.
Road Runner is not your corporate giant Hertz or Avis, understand, but a kind of mom and pop business that has a few cars to rent, including a four year old mud-brown Dodge that has seen better days. ("No compacts available, ma'm, but we do have a nice mid-size for you.") There's no visor on the driver's side and the radio doesn't work and the right front fender has been rather casually pounded out from its last mishap. However, the air-conditioning works, which is more important, and it drives pretty well, and the price is right.
My strategy is to see if I can locate the school I went to, and kind of backtrack from there. I deduce that a school would probably be in the same place, not for historical reasons, but just because it would be easier to build a new school in the same place than to make a new baseball field in a different place.
I am right, and that gives me good satisfaction. I think it is a pretty smart deduction about the way of the world. I find the school almost immediately, only a couple of miles down Prince Road from the Road Runner.
But now I don't know quite what to do. The school, of course, is nothing like I remember it. It's vast, all built up, but with the baseball field right where it always was. In 1951 there was only one permanent building and a lot of portables.
I drive around a little, then I swing back on Prince Road and pull into the little parking lot of a hardware store. I think I will buy one of those little coils you put into a cup to heat water, so I can make tea in my Amtrak bedrooom. That would be perfect.
It is almost 80 degrees in Tucson, and coming from the cold and rain of Seattle winter, and I think the climate change has made me a little dizzy. The sky is clear, and there is a long remembered feeling of desert, even here in the city. Somehow, I am finding it a little difficult to catch my breath.
Passing along the aisle I catch sight of a children's toy. It's a kind of cardboard picture of a person, but you can separate the head and body and legs, and replace them with others, to make different characters. I remember something like that, but it wasn't a toy you could buy. I think it was an assignment that Miss Carbeaux gave us, something like that.
The clerk tells me she saw on TV there is great flooding in Seattle, and extends as much sympathy as though I were a refugee from a great disaster. But she does not stock the little cup heaters. I go back out to the mud-brown Dodge.
I want to rest for a moment, and I cradle my head on the steering wheel. I am really feeling rather peculiar. I close my eyes. I seem to feel the rocking of the Amtrak still.
I reach out to turn on the radio and realize with a panicky flash that it doesn't work. I keep turning the dial back and forth but I can't find a station with any kind of music. I put my head back down and breathe deeply.
Outside the car, a vaguely familiar voice says, "Can I talk to you for a minute, Miz Plum?"
I look up, startled, but there's no one there. The traffic light changes on Prince Road, and a stream of cars accelerates past the hardware store.
"Of course, Arthur," my mother says. "Come on in the trailer and have a cup of coffee."
"No, ma'am," Arthur says. "I've got some bad news, and I think we better talk about it. It's about Mister ElDee, ma'am."
"He's not hurt -- Arthur, has something...." Mama's voice is alarmed.
"No, ma'am," Arthur says. "He's not hurt."
"He'll be back from the station in ten minutes," my mother says.
"I know," Arthur says.
Now, in my mind's eye I can see Arthur again, looking down at the ground. He is holding his officer's cap in his hand, and his tan uniform is crisp and neat, with light reflecting from his polished badge. Behind him his police car with the big shield on the door is idling, sitting there with one door hanging open. I am inside the trailer. I have just come home from school, and I am hearing my Mama and Arthur through the little window just by the door.
Arthur takes a deep breath, and looks up directly at Mama. "We're going to have to take Mister ElDee in, Miz Plum."
There is a long silence, and then they say something I can't hear, but finally Mama's soft voice says, "It's the girls, isn't it, Arthur?"
"Yes, ma'am," Arthur says.
My heart is in my throat. I think he means me and Carolyn. I think somehow Mister ElDee Plum is going to be taken away because of Carolyn and me.
"One of the girl's mothers took down his license number. And there's the checks, too, Miz Plum. It keeps on happening."
"But that was a mistake, Arthur. I paid off that check right away, that was months ago."
"It keeps on happening, Miz Plum. I've got to take him in. There's a warrant. I thought maybe you wouldn't want to be here when it happened."
They talk a little more, and then Mama comes back in the trailer. Her eyes seem very large and light, and I can hear her breathing. Her hand is trembling, and she touches me on the cheek. She seems confused.
"Marie," she says, "I'm going to take Carolyn down to the laundromat for a while. Do you want to come?"
"No," I say. "I want to stay here." I don't know what is happening, but I don't want to go to the laundromat. Now I can feel my own breathing, too.
"All right," Mama says, distractedly. She goes to the back of the trailer and wakes Carolyn up from her nap, dresses her.
I am frightened. I can hear all the words, but they are not what is happening. I don't know how to ask Mama what is really happening. I say the first thing that comes into my mind.
"Mama, it's all right with the music, isn't it?"
Mama takes my face in her hands and kisses my forehead. I can feel the shaking of her fingers against my cheek like little butterflies.
"Not for a while, child," Mama says softly. "The music is over."
It was like a language I did not understand, words that seemed recognizable, but made no sense. How could music be over? Can the sky be over? Can the sun be over? Music is all that is central to life -- how can it be over unless life itself is over?
Mama takes Carolyn by the hand and they walk slowly out of the trailer court, Caroyn scuffing her feet in the dust the way she always does.
I go to my upper bunk in the back room of the trailer, and close the door behind me. I am waiting, but I don't know for what. I get out my round tipped scissors and my crayons and a jar of paste and my drawing from Miss Carbeaux's class.
It is a drawing of a lady with her arms outspread. It has a line down the middle and a couple of lines across it. You can color the picture, and then cut it apart, and paste it back together again on another piece of paper. Carefully I cut along the lines until I have the lady in six different pieces. When I look at the pieces they look very complicated, and I'm not sure I can get them back together again.
I begin to color in the sections. It is important to be neat, and I try hard to stay inside the lines. Bright yellow for her hair, dark blue for her skirt. I put some red on her lips. I think I was supposed to color the picture first, and then cut it apart, but I forgot and cut it first.
I can see out the trailer window from my top bunk, and I can just see the chrome grille of Arthur's police car, parked at the entrance to the court. There is another police car there, too.
I've finished coloring the lady now. I get out a piece of thin cardboard and open my jar of paste, and start to paste the lady back together again.
Pretty soon I see the slim, gangly figure of Mister ElDee Plum striding through the entrance of the trailer court. He waves cheerfully at the police cars, waves at Arthur. As he comes down striding tall down the path to the trailer, Arthur's car slowly noses into the court and follows him. At the steps of the trailer, Mister ElDee Plum stops and looks back at Arthur. They start talking.
There is a kind of thump-thump in my ears, and I can't see too clearly. I rub my eyes, and look down at the cardboard where I am putting the lady together.
"Sorry, Mister ElDee," Arthur says.
"I can make this right, Arthur," Mister Eldee Plum says. "I can cover those checks in a day or two. It's just temporary."
"It's not just the checks, Mister ElDee. We've got four charges of statutory rape. There's charges on the checks, too, but it's the statutory rape that's the hard one. I got to take you in, Mister ElDee."
"Arthur, you know I never hurt those girls."
"I know that, Mister ElDee."
"I loved them, Arthur."
"I don't know about that, Mister ElDee. I just know I got to take you. Now."
My sight is blurry, and I look down and realize I've pasted the woman together wrong. The right side of her skirt is on the left side, and her feet turn inwards instead of outwards. ÊShe looks as though she has been split down the middle and a big piece taken out. I try to lift up the paper, but the paste is already almost dry.
"Can I take a few things?"
"Surely," Arthur says, and they both come into the trailer.
Through the closed door I hear Mister ElDee Plum in the front of the trailer, rummaging around in the chest of drawers.
I am as quiet as I can be. I hold my breath and try to scrape the drying paste away from my picture, but the paper begins to tear. I feel the tears starting to run down my face.
Then they both walk out of the trailer and I see Mister ElDee Plum's shock of blond hair, golden like a stalk of pampas grass, nod, as he ducks to get into the police car. Arthur drives away very slowly, not raising any dust in the dry roads of the Prince's Nest.
I never see Mister ElDee Plum again.
I am sitting in a rented mud-brown Dodge outside a hardware store on Prince Road in Tucson Arizona, crying. I am an intelligent woman, 47 years old, and I have a good job and respect and a house two thousand miles away from here.
Bad things happen to everybody. All children have their tragedies, some great, some small. It is the human condition, and you can get used to it. You can go to live with your grandmother on the farm in Indiana; a beautiful place, but without music. No fiddles, no pedal steel, no feasts and no carnivals. You can get used to anything, except no music.
You can even learn to live with the knowledge deep in your heart that on any ordinary sunny day you may come home from school and the world will end without warning. That the gods, in a moment's inattention, can allow a universe that is full of music to be extinguished in the flickering of an eye.
I have lived these things, and many more besides. Like all others in this world, I have adapted to whatever Fate had in store for me, and I have done well.
But I know, as well, that some things are final. I will never get the woman pasted together right, after all. The last pork chop in Arizona is gone. The music is over.
And sometimes in my good, calm life, without warning I get scared.
Oh, god, sometimes I get so scared.
end The Last Pork Chop in Arizona
© 1995 Don Berry