Shopping with Miss Phyllis

I love my mother. I, being a southern lad (we're all momma's boys), feel a great attachment to my mother (even since that cord thingee fell off). She is fun and not what you'd expect from a woman 62 years young. She drives little white Camaro for goodness sake!

My buddies (especially Mr. Burt Moody) call her "Miss Phyllis" in a typical southern way. She was, in many ways, mother to myself and all my childhood friends. She hauled us around before we could drive and she was always around with pound cake and cookies at the most opportune moments.

Mom showed up over at my place this morning to let me know she was headed out and to find out if I was free to tag along.

You see, recently, she opened a new bank account and wanted me to have access to it in case "something happened". As a compromise I suggested that she put me on the checking account and to get a check-card in my name and have her carry around in HER purse so that if "something happened" that I could use it for whatever she needed... Thus, all the responsibility and none of the awkwardness of me having access to her money.

So, this morning we went to the bank to get the check-card finalized and then we decided when hadn't been to wal-mart recently enough... I bought a present for and some blank tapes for tonight's episode of Buffy while my dear mother attacked the VHS new releases like a rabid wolverine.

Welll... what's a trip to the store without lunch?

Like lightning we struck the Mall food-court, leaving no survivors... two chicken sandwiches died for our ravenous and un-natural (ok, entirely natural) hungers...

No trip to the mall is complete without a jaunt to the Candle Store. After an olfactory sampling of the merchandise, two more presents for Shell went into the bag and the strange and surreal call of the book store could be heard.

As I stalked the fiction section, Mom perused the "Atlanta" section with a gentility found only in "Women of a certain age". She lamented the loss of Lewis (Louis is a Yankee's name) Grizzard and praised the talent of Celestine Sibley and the book "Dear Store" (about the old Rich's building mom worked at in her youth)...

As we left, our booty secured, she smiled and squeezed my arm and told me she loved me. In that moment, the years melted away and I was 10 again... Shopping with Miss Phyllis

The Yeager Road Diaries: The Mood and the Dude

In the early summer of 1977, I and my parents moved across town to a little 3 acre single-story ranch on Yeager road in Douglasville, Georgia.

I was 12 years old and we moved in three days before the end of school... That was trauma enough for anyone. That summer was not particularly interesting. I got the nickname of "That Kid that is always mowing the lawn" in the neighborhood. You see, when we moved in the grass was about 3-feet high; I push-mowed the whole three acres... It took about two weeks. A little movie called "Star Wars" came out that summer and I went to see it with my elementary school friend Trey Lambert after my parents and I returned from our vacation in Florida.

Somewhere in all of that I met Burt Moody.

Burt was a little guy with a head full of wavy, sandy colored hair. He was 9 years old and he had a baby sister named Debbie. The Moody family lived on a gravel road that bisected our property and a small Farm that belonged to Bill Moody (Burt's grandfather). No one ever saw Burt's dad, he worked at the Bulk-Mail center for the post office and came home at midnight every night. Burt's mother was a wiry little woman full of love and nervous energy. Her name was Tommie-Lou and she made the best biscuits in Douglas County. At our house she was known as "That woman who drives to the store every two hours". My mother used to joke that if we charged Tommie-Lou a toll at the stop-sign that we could have paid our house off in a month.

Somewhere in the years that followed, my parents and Burt's parents became great friends and Burt and I became as good a friends as two boys of such disparate ages can be.

When Burt started High-School, his mother asked me to give him a lift each day... And truly, that is where our friendship began. It seems strange, looking back, that our TRUE friendship began as our respective childhoods were on the verge of ending. But we made the most of the hours we had.

I look back and it seems like I've known Burt for a million years... And in many ways I have. Because somewhere in those years we became more than friends... we became brothers. Girls, Cars, Drinking, Smoking, Movies, Gaming, Teen-Age Heart-Ache, Joy... we shared it all.

The summer of 1982... Those words fill me with a strange nostalgia. If you said those words to me... To Burt... to Terry Lewallen, Shaun Rossman or Keith Barron you would see a strange smile cross our faces and a moment of silence as our minds drift away to the 90 days that we spent nearly every waking hour together...

After that it became complicated. Jobs, College, the Military, Marriages, Divorces, Anger and Pain... In the end, it was only Burt and I... and even that paused for a moment in time.

There are a million stories I could tell you. I could tell you of the time that Burt and I drank Jack-n-Coke till I puked while Keith watched and wagged his finger. I could tell you of the Camaro-Brothers. I could tell you of Burt and his (then) girlfriend arriving at my home and the FBI... And all of them would take a million life-times to tell.

But, this is today's story. When I divorced, Burt and I grew apart. I left much of my life behind, risked it all, for good or ill to live a different life. A few years ago, Burt and I re-connected, we spoke and the conversation picked up where we left off and the years melted away... to 1982.

I spent a good part of this last weekend talking to my brother Burt. We talked about where he is and how he got there. We talked about the philosophies that guide our lives and where his heart dwells now. And I was 17 again... The tears of memory struggled at the corners of my eyes and the ache of 20 years pulled me back to the hours that we both cried: the hour I thought I would leave for Florida and never return, the hour that two girls (who matter not at all now) broke our youthful hearts, the hour that we buried his mother...

My father told me a lie when I was 16 years old. He told me that no friendship lasts forever... he was dead wrong...

Now I sit here and watch the words spill out of me and across the page with a pain and a love and a loss and a gain. We shared music this weekend. We shared a pain in the heart and a need and a friendship and I, for one, am going to hold those hours close and make the frequency of those pleasant times arrive more often. I missed my Brother in ways I could not comprehend. And I think he did as well.

There was a summer... the summer of '82 when they called him "Mood" and they called me "Dude" and the music of the 80's played in our cars and in our hearts and in our eyes and we were young... and now we are not so young... but the music still plays... and the Camaro-Brothers ride again on the back-roads of my mind...