a fifty-five-gallon drum of a thing that could hold every pretty line and good paragraph I ever read. All I had to do was reach inside, rummage around, and come out with a fistful of Thomas Wolfe, or Eudora Welty, or Twain. Sam the Lion lived in there, with Atticus, Ignatius, Santini, Beloved, Ben Quick, Willie Stark, and a dog named Skip. ¶ I was no scholar, no bon vivant in a seersucker suit and bow tie, quoting Faulkner and searching for the perfect bistro. But I so loved the Southern story, and it was one of the great pleasures of my life to get to know some of the people who wrote them. ¶ Now my mind seems more like a teacup, a thin and brittle thing trembling in the hand of some faded Daughter of the Confederacy as she teeters across an uneven floor, talking to the walls about that time she had to hide in the root cellar because she heard the Yankee cavalry comin’ through the longleaf pines. ¶ A lot of it, I figure, a lot worth remembering, just sloshed out. ¶ It is not that I wobble on the edge of mental illness; I am merely getting old, and I was probably never that sharp to begin with. A man needs a kind of gimmick, a trick, perhaps, to recall. And it seems, more and more, that I find the writers, and. ¶ I find Willie Morris, staring into a cup of black coffee in the wee, sobering hours of the morning, telling me what a reader loves above all things. I find Pat Conroy, tears in his eyes across a white tablecloth, talking about a mother who read to him every night, and why, years later, he sent flowers to mine. ¶ I find others, living or lamented, in an ambrosia of chicken-fried steak, or on picnic tables outside cement-block barbecue joints, or in a hundred other places, over humble and haute cuisine. I guess it should not come as a surprise that the great storytellers are bound up with good food. Southern writing, I have always believed, should be like sausage gravy. It may not always be good for you, but at least it won’t bore you to death.
