Sunday Book Notes -- Fried Green Tomatoes at The Whistle Stop Cafe

I'm inaugurating a new weekly feature -- Sunday Book Notes. If I counted all the objects I own, the vast majority would be books. I've lived a lot of my life in worlds spun of words, so much so that when I was a kid, I often couldn't remember if I had read something, dreamed it, or lived it. Plus, I am lying in bed sick (on Memorial Day weekend! No Fair!), so I've had a lot of time to read this week.

Fittingly enough, I picked this book up at a cafe. Like the one in the book, the cafe is old-fashioned and a little disheveled, serving up unmatched tables and delicious apple pie in a sunny corner building that once was a hardware store. One wall is covered with bookcases. You are welcome to borrow or donate a book. So, when I saw Fried Green Tomatoes on the shelf, I took it home.

I've wanted to read Fried Green Tomatoes since the movie came out in 1991. I loved this quiet little film, which alternates between the story of Eleanor, a fat, unfulfilled, middle-aged housewife in the late 1980s and the tale of lesbian couple Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison in Depression-era Alabama, which Eleanor hears from an old woman she visits in a nursing home every Sunday.

Now, a strange thing happens when you've seen (and liked) a movie before you've read the book: It is almost impossible not to imagine the actors -- their voices, expressions, hair and clothes -- when you read the book. This is not necessarily a bad thing, especially when the actors capture the characters as beautifully as they did in Fried Green Tomatoes. Kathy Bates is perfect as the frumpy housewife who discovers her spine, and Mary Stuart Masterson and Mary Louise Parker are just as good as tomboy Idgie and the gentle, doe-eyed Ruth who steals her heart. So, as I've been reading the book, I've been seeing and hearing these actresses in my head. (That said, I always try to read the book first. I pity kids whose first exposure to The Lord of the Rings or other treasures is through the movie, no matter how wonderful the movie may be. But I digress.)

While the film captures the essence of the novel, it does gloss rather daintily over the lesbian relationship at its core. The book's matter-of-fact depiction of this life-long love affair is one of its charms. When 16-year-old Idgie, the fierce "bee charmer" who hunts and fishes instead of going to school, falls for "sweet to the bones" Ruth, it doesn't seem to faze anyone. Years later, after Idgie rescues a pregnant Ruth from her abusive husband, Idgie's father gives her $250 and tells her to start a business so she can feed her growing family. There's no sense that they must explain or justify themselves. It is just the way it is. Whistle Stop accepts them into the fold, just as they accept and expect segregation.

Flagg portrays the violence and racisim of the South as matter-of-factly as she does the love affair between Idgie and Ruth. Idgie and Mary are quietly subversive, selling barbeque out the back door of their cafe to blacks in spite of threats from the Ku Klux Klan, among other details I won't give away in case you plan to read the book.

The fictional world of Whistle Stop, Alabama feels real. You have the sense of observing lived lives. The book captures, in a way the film cannot, the full fabric of this little town, through vignettes of people, black and white, most of whom live on the wrong side of the tracks. It's not just Idgie and Ruth's story, but the story of their son Stump, of hobo Smokey Lonesome, Eva the town whore, Buddy, Sipsey, Big George, Onzel and Naughty Bird, with all their joys and human failings. When the trains stop coming through Whistle Stop and people start to move away, when the decades roll on by until the cafe is replaced by a McDonald's, I feel a pang of loss as strong as that when a beloved character dies.

Despite its often rather grim subject matter, this book is full of its laugh-out-loud humor. But, whenever I'm tempted to lapse into an idealized vision of a simpler time of practical jokes and tales tales and scenes of big extended families laughing over Easter egg hunts, Flagg brings me up short with a young man being beaten to death in a tar-paper Hooverville or an ominous visit from men in white sheets.

Perhaps I'm also drawn to the book because it sheds light on my grandparents and parents. Mom and dad spent their childhoods in hardscrabble Oklahoma during the Depression, and Whistle Stop, Alabama reminds me of pictures of my grandmothers standing in their faded cotton dresses in front of sagging frame houses, babies draped casually over their arms.

I also enjoy the disjointed nature of the book, which shifts time periods and narrative perspective from one short chapter to another. We may hear about an episode first from a brief item in the chatty local newspaper, then observe that same event from an omniscent perspective in the next chapter. As I a writer struggling with structure in my memoir, I'm fascinated by Flagg's deft handling of this technique. I wonder if she wrote the book chronologically, then moved the chapters around afterward?

I suppose I ought to give the some stars or thumbs up or something. I'm tempted to use tomatoes, in honor of the book inaugurating this weekly feature, but that's already been done. So how about pies? Every time Evelyn visits Ninny in the nursing home, she takes her pie or cake or biscuits or some kind of tasty treat, and reading this book made me hungry.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe: 4 slices (out of a possible 5).
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Piles of Pillowcases

I used the line “from pill bottles to pillowcases” in my bio blurb because I liked the alliteration and rhythm. I never considered what would be involved in actually finding something interesting to say about pillowcases. But regular readers know I am rarely at a loss for words. So here, as promised is a post on pillowcases. (Yes, I am literally airing my linen in public.)

We have 3 kinds: The ones we inherited or held onto from our childhoods, college days, and first marriages; the ones that go with “bed in a bag” sets; and an enormous quantity of orphans that don’t match anything and seem to reproduce with abandon in the dark privacy of the linen closet. We put most of them to good use. We have 6 or 7 pillows on our bed and never have enough matching pillowcases. We compete over who gets the 4 down pillows, which we call "numphies." (Embarrassing detail of the day. Like most couples, we have a private language.) There's nothing as satisfying as sinking your weary head into a numphy, especially one stolen on the sly from a sleeping partner.

We have two bedspreads (with matching shams and pillowcases) that we rotate. The purple and maroon one is the most glam. I’m usually not much for frou-frou, but purple is my favorite color, and when I saw this set on sale, I had to have it. With its mix of rich velvet and gauzy chenille it looks like something you would find in Cinderella’s castle after she marries the prince. If she was ever the victim of an economic downturn, she could even turn it into an elegant gown a la Scarlett O'Hara. I got an incredible bargain on it…you might even say it was a steal. The department store (Macy’s) was having a half-off sale, along with a coupon for another 20% off. When I took the bed-in-a-bag set to the register, it rang up for about $120 less than it should have. I don't remember exactly what the problem was, but I pointed the mistake out to the clerk. Her response was of the huffy “we don’t make mistakes, this is the right price, don’t make me do any extra work” variety. I tried again,and her attitude became even ruder. So I smiled and accepted the price, getting my $400 bed set for around $70.

Frink has been most gracious in tolerating its frou-frou-osity, but recently he found this Frank Lloyd Wright inspired duvet cover and pillowcases online. The only problem is that the cats like to sleep on it, and their hair shows up quite starkly against the white. Thank goodness it’s washable.

My favorites pillowcases are ones we don’t use often: the 100% cotton cases that were decorated with cross-stitching, embroidery, rick-rack, and ribbons by my mother and grandmother. They are to linens what tuna casserole is to comfort food. Laying my head down on one of these old-fashioned pillowcases softened by decades of wear is a delicious feeling, like being tucked in on a cool summer night or wearing my feet-pajamas to the drive-in movies. Read more!

Preserver of Posterity or Pack-rat?

Putting together my recent post about my small collection of Barbie doll clothes got me thinking about what you do with things like these. I have a shoebox filled with the Barbie clothes my mother made for me some 40-odd years ago, along with several doll dresses and a tiny quilt sewn by my grandmother (just like the full-size ones she made for her children's beds.) I even have a red & white cap and skirt my great-grandmother knitted for my mom when she was a little girl.

I didn't give them to my nieces when they were young enough to actually play with them because they're just too precious and delicate. I suppose I'll give them to the girls when they grow up and have daughters...but of course, the doll clothes will be even older and more delicate then, and those children won't be able to play with them either. So what do you do with things like these?

It seems downright wrong to get rid of such family heirlooms. So, after I took the photos for this post, I put them back in their shoebox in the linen closet. And there they will sit, rarely seeing the light of day, except when they will be passed on so they can inhabit another generation's closets. Which doesn't seem quite right either.

Frink says I should put them on the cat. But I'm pretty sure one of the reasons Frink loves me is precisely because I'm not the kind of person who dresses the cats. (Even though, perversely, I love the website Stuff on My Cat.)

Anyone out there have any better ideas? Read more!

(Distant) Family Tensions: What Should I do With Great-Grandfather's Sword?

UPDATE: The votes are in! 66% of voters said I should give the sword to my nephew.

When I visited my Great Aunt Jackie a few weeks ago, she made a request that left me feeling a little confused and disturbed. How do you say "no" to the 95-year-old Great Aunt who more or less raised your father?

Here's the story: We were sitting on the couch in her family room. Frink and Aunt Jackie's daughter, Annabelle, were conversing at the other end of the small room, and Annabelle's 30-something son (Lawrence) was sitting in an easy chair listening to both conversations. (It was the first time I had seen Lawrence since he was 7 or 8.) A few minutes earlier, Lawrence had opened up one of the glass doors of a book case and showed us "his" pipe -- an elaborately carved German pipe from 1800 that used to sit on great-grandfather's mantel. Aunt Jackie is leaving the pipe to Lawrence.

Anyway, my Aunt and I were chatting along, reconnecting after not seeing each other for more than a decade, when she sighed and said, "I wonder what ever happened to my father's Knights of Pythias sword."

"Oh," I said. "Dad gave it to me." Aunt Jackie, I should note, gave the sword to my father 35 or 40 years ago. She was at my wedding 25 years ago, where the sword played a small part in the ceremony.

"I would so like to have it back," she said. "When I gave it to your father, I didn't have a grandson. I would so like my grandson to have it."

I looked up and noticed that Annabelle and Lawrence were listening with keen attention. It was obvious that they had all talked about this before Frink and I arrived.

I stammered out that the sword was one of the only things dad owned that had belonged to his grandparents.

"I sure would like it to go to my grandson," she repeated. "I didn't have a grandson when I gave it to your father."
The object in question is an elaborately etched silver ceremonial sword like the one in this photo. Such swords were widely used by fraternal organizations in their rituals from the late 1800's until WWII. It's not worth much -- $250 at the most. But it belonged to my great-grandfather. I have always intended to pass it on to my nephew, who shares his grand-father's and great-grandfather's name. (For the story of how dad changed his name when he was 6, choosing the name of his beloved grandfather, see the related posts below.)

The sword is one of only 5 or 6 of my great-grandparents things that was passed down to my dad, and through him, to my sister and me. Everything else--antique furniture, silver, china, artwork, scrapbooks, photo albums, and so on -- went either to my father's sisters when his mother passed away or will go to Aunt Jackie's daughter and then to her children (including Lawrence.)

I know this sounds complicated, so here's a little family tree:
This conversation left me deflated and disturbed, casting a shadow on an otherwise wonderful visit. I stand in the same relation to my great-grandfather as Lawrence does. If I were a male, I wonder, would Aunt Jackie make the same request? If my father were still alive, would she ask him to give the sword back? Would my father reply that he wanted it to go to HIS grandson? (Knowing him, probably not. He would think it, and he would be very hurt, but he would probably give it to her.)

Thirty-five or forty years seems a long time. At what point did the sword cease to be Aunt Jackie's and become my father's? I think back to the gaudy diamond cocktail ring another aunt left me a decade ago. It wasn't my style, so I gave it to a distant cousin I hardly knew. If I could do it over, I'd give it instead to one of my nieces. But I can't imagine asking for it back.

We saw my Aunt, Annabelle, and Lawrence again at brunch the next day, and the sword didn't come up. But the whole matter tarnished my visit a bit, and left me uncertain about what to do. My sister says it wasn't fair of Aunt Jackie to ask for the sword. But how do you say no to a direct request from the 95-year-old Great Aunt who practically raised your father?

What would you do? Cast your vote in the sidebar at the top of the page.

Related posts:
The Party Grandma
Stumbling Down Memory Lane
Willa Cather and my Grandfather's Peace Pipe
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Girlie Girl Things

I don't think of myself as a girlie-girl and yet I have a whole array of girlie-girl baubles. (That word, "bauble," is itself a girlie girl word. Stern librarians and macho generals do not have "baubles.")

My two antique perfume decanters belonged to my great-grandmothers, and although I didn't know either woman, I like to think they reflect their personalities. The one that belonged to my father's grandmother is sleek and cool, made of leaded glass sliced at angles like ice slivered apart by a pick. It belonged to The Party Grandma's mother, whose husband built her a large home in a then-posh part of town. I can imagine my grandmother playing with it when she was a little girl, lifting the heavy lid to dab perfume behind her ears, pretending to be the sophisticated flapper she would one day become.

The other decanter is gaudy and overdone, a brass filigree design of flowers and glass amethysts. This belonged to the farm woman who peers out of old photographs with a care-worn face that reminds me of Dorothy's Auntie Em. This was my mother's grandmother, and I imagine it was one of the nicer things she owned.

Nestled among the decanters is a small pile of brooches and necklaces, in various shades of monochromatic sparkle. These, too, belonged to my grandmothers and great-grandmothers. I rarely wear them, but I enjoy looking at their cobalt blue, hot pink, and diamond dazzle.
My mostly staid and ordinary closet probably is also embellished with a flourish of beaded and mesh handbags. Only one came from family – a leather, beaded bag. I found most of them, in shabby disarray, at various yard sales and flea markets. The only one that ever gets to go out for an evening is a black quilted bag with a nickel handle decorated with swans, but it's a cheap date: It cost all of a dime at a church rummage sale 30 years ago. I don’t know what the appeal is in these tiny, all-but-useless bags that hold little more than a lipstick and mad money. Maybe they remind me of a more elegant time of kid gloves, long gowns, and penciled names in dance cards hung with ribbons. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to live in those days when women wore corsets and couldn’t vote, but there is something charming about them nonetheless. One day I'll give them to my nieces. In the meantime, I keep the purses on a wall in my closet, along with another girlie-girl item, a cross-stitched picture of two Southern belles in ballgowns.

I made the picture back in the 80s, for my great aunt Mary. Now that was a girlie girl! She wore gigantic diamond cocktail rings and high-heeled fluffy slippers like she had stepped right out of a Vargas drawing. Her entire house was decorated in shades of pink and powder blue, including her Christmas tree, which was covered with butterflies and rosebuds. Although she lived alone, Aunt Mary always set her table with fine china and silver. She even ate Snickers bars elegantly, cutting them into pieces with a knife and eating them like fine chocolate.

I’ve always had a hard time meshing the somewhat mincing Aunt Mary I knew in her old age with the woman in yellowed photographs, who wore dungarees and waders, fishing in Colorado’s streams or camping out in a canvas tent. I got to know her in her later years, when she had settled into a genteel femininity, enhanced by increasing age and the first real financial security she had known in her life (thanks to a good retirement plan and careful investment by my father.) So, when I was going through a cross-stitching phase and found this pattern with its Southern belles, I immediately thought of her. It took months to make, but she was pleased and surprised by the gift. She hung it in her bedroom and even showed it off to her friends.

It’s too frou-frou for my own décor, but I keep it on the wall in my closet with all of my other girlie-girl things. Like Aunt Mary’s waders and jeans, which she kept in the basement just in case she ever got the urge to go fishing, they allow me to keep a side of myself nearby, just in case. Read more!

Stumbling Down Memory Lane

Frink and I spent the weekend road tripping through Oklahoma and Arkansas, putting 1200 miles on the car and doing our part to stimulate the economy. It was a combination tour -- some architecture gawking, some reconnecting with family I haven't seen in years. We spent several hours with my 95-year-old Great Aunt (my grandmother's younger sister.) Her stories confirmed some details of family lore and helped set the record straight on others.

For one thing, the peace pipe I thought was my grandfather's actually belonged to my great-grandfather and is much older than I realized. It was my great-grandfather who loved the American West and traveled all over the frontier in a stagecoach, visiting the area that would become Yellowstone National Park; the Rocky Mountains; and Denver ("Queen City of the Plains"), where he met his future wife. Unfortunately, any letters he may have written from these days are long gone, although my aunt has almost every other object her parents ever owned.

Her living room is furnished with a pair of elaborately carved ebony chairs that great-grandfather bought at least 100 years ago in San Francisco, straight off the boat that carried them from China, and with the same Victorian furniture that graced her parents' parlor (although the silk upholstery has been recovered more than once in green velvet.) The peace pipe sat on a fireplace mantel in the house my great-grandfather built in 1909. That house, where my great aunt was born and my father spent his childhood, is no longer in family hands and is sadly deteriorated. The leaded glass windows are hidden behind an ugly metal storm door, and the floorboards on the once-elegant, wrap-around porch (a necessity in the hot, sultry South in the days before air conditioning) are sagging and rotted, covered with green outdoor carpet.

The family home was lost, in part, because of my ne'er-do-well grandfather (husband of The Party Grandma.) In addition to the heroin and alcohol addictions, which I knew about, it turns out that he racked up huge gambling debts. The mafia wasn't much inclined to let such debts slide, even for men with wives and young children. He also ran some kind of scam, selling policies for an insurance company, but instead of turning the money in, he gambled it away. Aunt Jackie, who would have been around 13 or 14 at the time, remembers a lot of closed doors and tears. The debts nearly bankrupted both sides of the family. Grandfather's parents paid part of it, leaving town not long after to reestablish themselves in Texas. My great-grandfather, who had pledged surety on the insurance money, scraped together the rest. This was just before the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. He had to close his once-thriving restaurant across from the town's finest hotel, and the family never recovered financially.

My childhood recollections of the Party Grandma proved accurate, at least as reflected through the eyes of her younger sister, who had to clean up after her for most of her life. Lily liked to have a good time, as two bulging albums of filled dance cards attest. This was during the Roaring Twenties, the days of bobbed hair, short spangled dresses, and the Charleston. Lily fell for a rakish young man who shared her enthusiasms for drinking, dancing, and good times. After he lost everything, Grandma left her husband and came home in disgrace, her two toddlers in tow. It was shocking to be a divorced woman in 1929 Bible Belt America, no matter the reason, and most of grandma's friends dropped her cold.

Lily's poor choice of a husband nearly destroyed my aunt's chances of marrying at all. Even in 1935, when Jackie became engaged, the taint of divorce hovered over the family. Aunt Jackie's beau was forbidden to marry a woman whose sister had disgraced the family by divorcing. He defied his parents and married her anyway, moving into her family home to help her care for Jackie's widowed mother, divorced sister, and her sister's children.

Like the heroine in Kate Chopin's The Awakening, grandma was not "a mother woman." It was Aunt Jackie who raised my father and his sister, who ironed and mended their clothes, who walked with them to Sunday School at the church around the corner. It was Aunt Jackie who consoled my teen-aged father when his mother remarried, Aunt Jackie who consoled him again when he washed out of Naval flight-training at 17 due to poor eyesight, Aunt Jackie who consoled his sister, a young wife whose husband was shot down over Germany, where he was a POW for two years, not even knowing he had an infant son.

I hope every family has an Aunt Jackie, the unsung caretakers and consolers, the keepers of heirlooms and lore.
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The Party Grandma

I didn't much like my father’s mother when I was a child. I dubbed her "The Party Grandma," in contrast to my mother's mom, the dimpled and doughy "Grandma Grandma," who wore a hand-made apron and baked pecan pies. The Party Grandma had been a flapper in her youth, sporting bobbed hair and cigarettes, and to her dying day at 81 she liked make-up, music, and martinis. She loved a good joke, and when I picture her, she is laughing. But somehow, in spite of the laughter, something about the Party Grandma made me sad. Her eyes rarely smiled, and even when I was very young, I sensed that her exterior was a lie.

I know little about her life, other than that my grandfather, a heroin addict and drunk, abandoned her when my father was young, and that she had to go to work to support her two children -- a humiliation for an upper-middle-class Southern woman in the 1920s. My Great Aunt Jackie, a stable, thick-ankled, religious woman, more or less raised my dad and his sister while grandma spent her evenings out.

Two of The Party Grandma's visits to our home in Colorado became part of our family lore.

When I was four or five, grandma was leaving after a visit that to my mind had gone on far too long. I was sulking in my bedroom, and when my parents summoned me to come see her off, I marched to the door and shouted “Good bye, Good luck, and Good riddance!" I don’t remember grandma’s reaction, but my mother was highly amused, and after repeated retellings that phrase became a family mantra.

Then there was the time grandma drove into the Safeway on Main Street, which, until she got there, was not a drive-through. I suppose she was getting up in years -- the previous week she had backed into a tree when she had taken us on a picnic. On this particular morning, she was driving my older sister and me to the grocery store. As she pulled up to the curb directly in front of the store, her foot hit the gas pedal instead of the brakes, and we ended up in the frozen food section.We weren't wearing seatbelts (I’m not even sure they existed then), and my sister, who was in the front seat, broke the windshield with her forehead. I was in the backseat and flipped over it to land in my sister's lap. We weren't hurt, although Molly had a small cut, but grandma was considerably shaken, and she cried for what seemed like days, terrified that my father would decide that she was getting too old to drive. What I remember most, however, is some old boy in a trucker hat surveying the damage. He took a long look at the cracked store window, the crumpled front end, and grandma's license plate. "Yup," he said laconically, "just like a Texan."

Grandma spent her entire life in Texas and Oklahoma. I don’t know when she moved to Odessa, but it must have been after she had remarried. My father had joined the Navy by this time, signing up at 16 by lying about his age, and he never really got to know his half-sister, born when grandma was 44. Grandma's second husband was a low-level oil man, and the family lived in a clapboard house on the edge of town. No Country for Old Men got the look of that flat and dusty West Texas town, with its hammer-shaped pumps and desolate vistas, just about right. Sometimes I wonder if Lillian Lemont was disappointed by her life, whether the no-longer-young woman with the bobbed hair ever looked out at the scraggly trees and the laundry drying in the sulfurous air and dreamed of something better.

I never met grandma's second husband; he had died before I was born. But I do have some rustic, post-card-sized watercolors he bought in Peru in 1918. My grandmother gave them to me when I was visiting her once in Odessa. I was in college, and I was fascinated by old family photographs. We went through them together, and as she told me who the people were, I penciled their names on the backs. But that was all she shared: names, birthdates, a few key places. Like my father, she never talked about the things that really mattered, and she never once mentioned my grandfather. When she died, the bulging envelope of photographs, along with her red '66 Rambler (my first car) came to me. Her two daughters took most of the antiques – the carved ebony chairs and the fine porcelain knickknacks, reminders of a more prosperous time -- which left my father feeling mutely hurt. My father was one of the least acquisitive people I've known, but I think he would have liked to have a few more things that had belonged to his ancestors.

One thing he did carry home from the funeral in Texas was a tall green and gold china vase that had long ago been promised to my mother. My parents were divorced by this time, my father happily remarried, my mother single and bitter. The vase was a focal point of her resentment. It had actually belonged to my great-grandmother, who, following our family's tradition, had willed it to my mother by writing her name on a piece of masking tape stuck to the bottom. But instead of giving it to mom, my grandmother kept the vase after her own mother passed away. It sat in a prized place on her mantle, making her living room a bit less shabby and my mother absolutely livid.

My mother had never liked her mother-in-law. One of her favorite resentments was how grandma had tricked her into spoiling dad's favorite meal. Dad loved beef stroganoff, and as a young newlywed, mom asked her mother-in-law for her recipe. Grandma complied, but she craftily altered a key ingredient, substituting water for milk. In this way, she insured that mom's beef stroganoff could never compete with her own. The vase only added fuel to the flame. And when mom learned that dad—and thus, his second wife Betty—had taken possession of the coveted vase, she seethed with indignant anger.

This green vase, my dad's new wife, and Grandma were all tangled together in my mother's mind. Mom never felt accepted by dad's family; even as I child, I could see that she was an outsider when grandma and dad's sister were around. The three of them shared the same sense of humor and bon vivant good times, and my mother was always on the periphery of their laughter. And, after she and dad separated, mom was hurt and humiliated when dad took Betty to Texas to meet his mother, even before telling his own wife that he was seeing another woman. Mom simply could not tolerate the idea that Betty now owned her vase, and for years almost every time I saw or spoke to my mother, that prized piece of porcelain inevitably found its way into the conversation.

Finally, whether to bring peace to the family or to save myself from listening to her complaints, I asked dad for the vase. I drove to his house, in a town a few hours away, wrapped it in an old towel, and took it to my mother. Although it clashed with her décor, she put it in prominent spot on her mantel, where it sat until the day she died.

And, just as my father did after his mother died, when mom succumbed to cancer, I returned home with that green vase in my arms. It doesn’t go with anything I own, but I will always keep it, a gilded symbol of the complex dynamics that make a family. Read more!

Willa Cather and My Grandfather's Peace Pipe

Willa Cather, knew all about the power of material things, as this description from Lucy Gayheart shows: "Lucy stuck the telegram in her mirror and hurriedly began to dress. She was thinking that years from now, when she would probably be teaching piano to the neighbours' children in Haverford, nothing would recall this part of her life more vividly, or make it seem so real, as that slip of paper."

I have most of Cather's books, two copies of some of my favorites. I prefer the buff-colored Vintage Classic editions. Unlike most paperbacks, whose covers and spines bend and crack, these are supple and flexible, with a clothlike feel that makes them comfortable to hold even with one hand. I got my Vintage Classic edition of Lucy Gayheart, along with several other books, in Red Cloud, Nebraska, at the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial. They cost more than they would have if I bought them used or on Amazon, but I enjoy knowing that they come from the very town where she spent most of her childhood.

There is much of Cather's own material culture in Red Cloud, but the object I remember most didn't belong to her at all, but to Annie Sadilek, the real woman on whom My Antonia is based. I will never forget standing in a frame house, in the tiny bedroom where she slept. Seeing her modest iron bed and faded quilt was incredibly moving. I love My Antonia. It pulses with life, not only Antonia's, but the life of the prairie, where there is "motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping."

Cather's descriptions -- of the wolves chasing the bridal party's sleigh through the snowy forest or of Mr. Shimerda frozen in a pool of his own blood on the barn floor -- form part of my mind's architecture. And I will never forgive Jim for his inability to respond to Antonia, for his need always to see her as a mythologized set piece in his imagined Arcadia.

I'm not sure I understand my fascination with things touched by those I admire, the pull that draws me to visit places like Red Cloud so I can stand where Cather stood, see the very Bible in which she changed the date of her birth (making herself three years younger), touch the white picket fence surrounding her home. But in addition to the books, several objects in my own home intersect with the same cross-country trip that took us to Red Cloud and other places where imagined and real lives blend together.

After we left Nebraska, we headed north, taking in the Badlands, Mt. Rushmore, Wall Drugstore, the Corn Palace. My partner (who prefers to be known in these pages as "Frink") will never let me forget that we drove a hundred miles out of the way and paid a farmer $3.00 to see what Frink calls "The Hole in the Ground." But this wasn't any hole in the ground; it was the actual place where Pa built the dugout described in The Little House on Plum Creek. I snipped a few stalks of grass from the field bordering the creek, which I keep in a vase of dried flowers. Seeing them makes me feel a tangible connection to Laura, who lives in my mind as surely as the grass grows next to the hole in the ground on the banks of that creek. (Truth be told, this was the second hole in the ground we visited on this road trip; we also saw the wagon ruts from the Oregon Trail, which sent shivers up my spine but left Frink cold.)

We also went to Pipestone National Monument, on the South Dakota/Minnesota border. I didn't even know that the monument existed, but as soon as I saw it on the map, I wanted to go there to trace the history of one of the few things I own that once belonged to my grandfather.

My grandfather was the black sheep of his family, a heroin addict and drunk who abandoned his family in the 1930s when my father was six. My father never spoke of him and even changed his own first name to distance himself from a man he seemed to resent bitterly until the end of his life. (Of course, the fact that his first name was Wirt might have had something to do with the name change.) I know little about my grandfather, but I do have a few photographs of him. In one, he is about 13 years old. He stands, looking out with a more imperious version of my father's face, his hands resting on a beautiful, long-legged white dog. This formal drawing-room photograph does not at all jibe with the whispers I have heard about my grandfather, or with another of his things that has been passed down to me: a brick-red stone peace pipe, which I've been told he purchased in 1905 on a trip to Yellowstone. So, when I saw how close we were to the pipestone quarry, we veered again to visit yet another hole in the ground. Frink liked this one far better than the first two.

Pipestone National Monument is small and lovely, with a bubbling creek, a pretty waterfall, and the thin seams of pipestone from which Native Americans still quarry their sacred pipestone. The artist George Catlin, who collected Native American pipes (especially the pornographic effigy models), recorded the origin of the pipestone:

At an ancient time, the Great Spirit, in the form of a large bird, stood upon the wall of rock and called all the tribes around him, and breaking out a piece of the red stone formed it into a pipe and smoked it, the smoke rolling over the whole multitude. He then told his red children that this red stone was their flesh, that they were made from it, that they must all smoke to him through it, that they must use it for nothing but pipes: and as it belonged alike to all tribes, the ground was sacred, and no weapons must be used or brought upon it. (Sioux account of the origin of the pipestone, as told to George Catlin, 1836, from park website.)

By the time Catlin was collecting and drawing such pipes, they were being produced for the tourist trade, and I'm sure my grandfather's pipe was never used in a sacred ceremony. But it is weighty and beautiful in its simple elegance, decorated only with rows of concentric circles carved on the bowl and stem ends. I keep it on a bookshelf in the living room, nowhere near the Cather books, which are upstairs in my office, or the prairie grass, which is in a green vase on the dining room buffet.

Still, these things are all connected in my mind -- Willa Cather's novels, a prairie landscape which for most of my life I knew only from books, a pipe held by a grandfather I will never know at all. The thing that unites them might be simply the roadtrip through the prairies, but it feels deeper than that, like the prairie itself. I remember hearing somewhere that for every six feet of grass growing on a prairie, there are 18 feet of roots growing beneath the ground. That's how these objects feel to me. Somewhere under the surface they are all tangled together, woven by memory and imagination and by a longing for something that remains elusive and mute. It can only be felt, like the heft of a cool stone pipe in my hands.

Click here Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial website. (If you're a photographer, you may be interested in their current photography contest.)

Click here to visit Pipestone National Monument.

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