Pickles and Peanut Butter

I find myself eating pickles and peanut butter, as I’ve had a hankering for days.  No, I am not pregnant.  Far from it.  Instead, pickles and peanut butter are an old staple I picked up from my days in the borderlands of Dixie, which is really just Dixie under a defensive name, in Kentucky.  More so, the Maysville kids generally all know the simple joys of pickles and peanut butter. 

That town, a sleepy little one of about 9,000 along the Ohio River in northern Kentucky, has resonated in my mind’s eyes for nearly twenty years now.  We lived there for two years of high school, but those two years—and not withstanding the total of nine states I’ve lived in—seemed to have shaped and marked me the most.  Perhaps it was that I was in high school, perhaps it was that the kids did well on bringing me into the many folds, clichés, and complexities of Maysville.  Perhaps . . . perhaps it was just the natural course of life, and the trials of existence since that have bounded my mind’s eye so closely to one of the only two places I call home.  As you already know, I am a New Yorker with a residual southern hybrid accent.  I thrive on this city, I can not imagine my life without this city, and I can honestly say two years away proved to me—and anyone who knows me—that this place is my home.  I have never been so happy . . . it has only taken me thirty-five years to say that. 

In many ways looking back on those days Maysville appears as an angelic story-book tale.  We lived in an ante-bellum house on West Second.  Story tells that that stretch of town used to be called Plumville, on account of rich plum trees that filled that small stretch of hillside, all the while still maintaining its Maysville distinction.  That house, two stories of quaint bliss, overlooked the Ohio River.  My Momma spent hours upon hours rockin’ on a porch swing watchin’ the steam boats travel up and down stream.  My Dad and I have our own horror-story-meets humor of checking the water heater, which was half under and half on the side of the house in a room of limestone.  As we crawled in there, hunched over, my Momma turned on the water in the kitchen.  I’m sure anyone who saw us clambering up the hill that day (that house was on a steep hill, so much so that Dad wore golf cleats to mow the grass and it was a coin toss on which steps you were taking to get to a road).  We scrambled into the kitchen, by that time covered in grass and mud from falling up the damned hill, and Momma yelled at us something about being fools.  Yea, I probably should tell you that we had just watched Silence of the Lambs.  That stupid boiler room looked like the pit from that movie.  Oiy.  I am still traumatized.  Come to think of it, I’m not sure either of us went in there again. 

None-the-less, Maysville resonates in a variety of ways.  The First Christian Youth Group was probably something akin to a cult, but we loved our Sunday evening hysterical antics.  Shortly after the downtown fountain was finished, by what those of us from back then all called “the hole in the wall,” a girl named Whitney and I spent the better part of an afternoon spinning in circles near it.  I think we were singing a song, but in all honesty all I can really remember is the laughter and the moment that stuck then (and now) like a scene from a romanticized movie.  The preacher’s son was nearby, the boys he hung with, and more of our friends.  There was most likely Cokes and our feet dangling in the river later on.  When we left town that memory stuck in my craw as our U-Haul took us to Virginia. 

At some point we all move on.  Some of us went to college, some of us moved to other parts of the state, some stayed.  I moved to Virginia in high school, and then in college I went to Kentucky Wesleyan.  Yup, that little Methodist based school over in Owensboro.  Aside from Maysville, some of my fondest memories concern the Kdub days.  I guess there is just something about the Bluegrass.  Sometimes I think it is because I drank so much of the limestone flavored tap water that my DNA has been altered.  Though, I frequently tell people that before a KY college would give me a degree I had to have two things: A) an accent and B) a love of bourbon.  We already know I’ve aced both.  I’ve moved around so much that I am one of those American gypsies without a concrete home.  Yet, if I get homesick for anywhere (besides those two years of mournful longing for NYC) it is for Maysville.  Yet, when I mention this to folks in these parts Yankees snicker.  One friend says I’ve bleached my roots because I can’t live there anymore.  

Well . . .

I’m not really a southerner.  Anyone in Dixie will tell ya that my accent is not distinctive enough.  A Yankee now . . . case in point.  Two weeks ago my Environmental students watched a video on Appalachia (more so, Pike County).  They came to class telling me that they heard my accent in everyone speaking.  Yet, a counterpoint is that I work with someone from Kentucky.  When he met me, after talking for a bit, he furled his brow and said “Where’s that accent from?” I said my dribble about moving around, and he said “I hear some southern . . . a little Kentucky.”  Only someone from Kentucky can pin point the Kentucky in your words.  When I first heard him talk I nearly fainted.  I’m not the type to ask about accents, since I get cornered on mine nearly every day.  Yea, I nearly fainted since I hadn’t heard a Kentucky accent up in Yankeeville . . .  Took me back, and of course his made mine come out by default. Round about this time I met my neighbors.  One of them is from Kentucky.  Yea, we are like the mafia baby. 

Yet, even though I am more Kentucky than most would readily identify with me, I still get lost in moments of awe from days gone by.  The people we were then.  The people were are now . . . the preacher’s son now lives in Lower Manhattan with his very fabulous wife.  He’s a computer programmer, and I tell people that I made NYC so cool that they had to follow me.  In all reality, it was part of their life plan.  The girl named Whitney is now a mother of two and a lead forensics investigator for the state of Kentucky.  Some of us became social workers in neighboring communities, others teachers, and some moved away to only return once in 2003 for a few hours.  That was me.  I came in and out for a wedding . . . that girl named Whitney’s to be exact. 

Of course, in that small town some of us crossed paths in college.  The now Sheriff was in Owensboro back then.  Literary prowess would have me tell you some classic ruff and gruff story, fulfilling expected stereotypes of small town Sheriffs.  Yea, I don’t have any of those stories.  He was always a nice guy.  And when you put that knowledge into the category of Maysville it really does make some of us look like we were pulled from the pages of storybooks.  Yes, some of us have more than crossed the line of civility and the law.  There are some doing various levels of time in the big house, and there are others who we haven’t heard from and we aren’t sure we care to hear from again.    

These past two years I’ve been back in the Bluegrass for a week in June, over in Louisville.  While scoring mounds of AP exams old friends and I meet up at night for drinks and laughs.  This year . . . this year they wore me out, so much so that I slept for two days upon returning to my beloved NYC.  As for why Maysville and Kentucky are on my mind most likely comes from the time of the year . . . the leaves changing, the crisp cool air, bringing on my favorite season.  Though, I have a hunch it comes from my Urban Studies seminar.  The past few weeks have been discussions on revitalizing downtowns and restructuring them to bring in life and vitality.  When we moved to Maysville in 1991, shortly after the Wal-Mart opened in we all called “up on the hill.”  We, very literally, watched downtown gasp for air and struggle to breathe.  Parts of it have survived . . . others are boarded up.  Signs of progress, change, recession . . . I’m not sure.  Jimmy’s Donuts, the long loved shop, for donuts and transparent pie closed down years ago.  Yet, life has continued to breathe on.  Markers of my youth have faded like the layers of paint on the old advertising signs to cast eerie glows of yesterdays for the generation coming up.  Though, the other aspect of Kentucky bein’ on my mind is that stupid Yankee remark.

It seems that whenever Kentucky comes up in the conversation up here some fool has to say “Kentucky Fried Chicken” with a big stupid grin.  Yea.  Well, here’s some irony.  When I lived in Maysville, we had to take the Simon-Kenton Bridge to Ohio to get Kentucky Fried.  We only had a Churches back then.  Pfft.  As for that stereotypes of Kentucky . . . there are many.  But, writer’s like Bobby Ann Mason come from there, this writer once lived there, Kentucky is one of the two leading states (California the other) for domestic growth of weed, the Clooney family birthed in Kentucky, the Louisville slugger, a Kentucky Baptist “invented” bourbon, the first female Nascar driver came from Owensboro . . . do you see where I am going? Okay, the weed reference isn’t so great, but you get the point . . . We are more than blue people (mostly hidden in the mountains), poor coal miners, and toothless rednecks suckin’ down fried chicken.  More so, that fried chicken you call from Kentucky ain’t the real stuff served on Sunday supper tables.  Trust us. 

I can’t say that I want to live south of the Mason-Dixon line again, or that I long to wake up in the rolling Kentucky hills, but . . . in the strange way that life takes us, memories pull us, and the heart longs for us Maysville will always be the one place I call home.  Of course after NYC that is.  And as I write this I’m wearing my favorite sweatshirt, my only KWC one, stolen from someone long ago.  Yes, I still roll up my cuffs.  And . . . don’t tell anyone but my Coke has peanuts in it today as I hear the subway rock a few blocks over and a police siren screams into the approaching dusk.