If rambling disconnected writing about Tippah County, Mississippi isn't your idea of fun reading, consider yourselves warned.
The following are fragments of a work in progress of what will someday become a book of short stories about my youth. When I get finished with the stories, this little post will make a nice archival laboratory snapshot.
This is ideas for the story about the dump people:
North Mississippi. Tippah County. Ripley. Where the shadow of the Colonel Falkner looms over the Pizza Hut. Hot green summer mixed with red clay and sky pines.Garbage dump on the peak of a hill that just seemed to rise and converge with the atmosphere. Humidity, heat, and stink of refuse. But the dump people were not refused. Allowed to build shacks around the periphery, the dump people circled their way through life like buzzards. White and black trash turned pioneer recyclers. They were noble and proud though grime encased, my cousins and I were not allowed to play with the dump children. We were poor, but not that poor. Plus the dump children were multi-culture before there was such a term, predominately black, but there were still plenty dirty white boys and girls. My grandmother's little four-room shack was below the hill where the dump resided and dump kids would come down from the mountain of waste cruising by on scavenged bicycles. They were never normal, but bike's cobbled together from the discarded bicycles at the dump. Low riders with steering wheels where the handle bars should be 4 wheeled bicycles. The kids would coast by the house with effortless precision and we were not allowed to speak to them. We were too frightened anyways even if there was a mysterious allure to these vagabond like children, an appealing grubbiness. They were usually headed to the small convenience store a few hundred yards down the road. It was not a convenience store in the modern sense, but a concrete covered dark store selling groceries and gas and Lord knows what else according to my grandmother. Since I was mainly in Mississippi during the first two weeks of July, it always seemed like Wimbledon was on the television the store had. It was the only television I got to see since my grandmother did not have one. No air conditioner at grandmother's house. We took baths in big tin buckets. She just had a radio that was tuned to the top forty-country station from town. It was always a great treat to be allowed to walk to this store and buy ice cream or a Sunkist, and it was always a drag when the place was closed. The owner never bothered with keeping steady hours.
"Just stay away from the dump people", our parents warned us when we went to the store. Dump people cussed, not anymore than us really, and they smelled, not that we smelled that great, and they were mobile. The mobility was a big factor of our admiration. It was a rare occasion for a cousin to bring a bicycle with them to grandmas. One serendipitous such time happened during one of my visits and I took off for the very first time ever on my cousin Lisa's bike. Parents were screaming at me to get off the street, but I didn't care. I had tasted freedom of sorts and I pedaled that horse all the way to that same dark store. The dump people had nothing on me now. And they lived on top of garbage. It was an airport for flies, with runways of diapers, and scrap metal.
We lived in Mississippi for one year as my parents pursued a dream of running a restaurant (Raney's). It was a trucker's favorite out by the city limits next to a salvage yard and a shoe factory. Not much better off then the dump people; we lived next to a field filled with effluvium waste from the shoe plant. My dad loved visiting with the dump people and salvaging through the remains looking for some treasure, or at the least, some copper wire. Gold and silver were thought of being the most precious and desirable metals, but copper ruled my father's life. He was like some conduit missing a piece of his soul or something; he had to find some copper he could turn into cash. I would go along and dig in the garbage with him hoping to find some abandoned toy the dump children had yet to find. My father was always thought of as a weird bird by my mother's relatives and perhaps he was (My father didn't get along all that well with my mother's brothers. They said he was a strange bird. He would cut his eyes when he was in the same room with them, looking across and back with what they termed shiftiness. I figured he was just trying to make sense of them or perhaps find some hidden truth in their besotted eyes that he was blind to). Unlike them, he would talk to the dump people. Not only that, he treated them with respect and not as pariahs. They were fellow seekers with an even deeper commitment then him. I believe he would have liked to join them there at the dump where everyday was a treasure hunt and where society's rules of decorum need not apply.
There's much of that kind of junk left to post so if it interests you, that's great. If not, don't worry there will be plenty of pop culture to discuss and music to review.
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