[From] Bring Your Girl a Tangerine

First post:
Ok, since I have some free time I decided to start working on The Pretty Good American Novel. I think it’s gonna be pretty good. The bad news is it won’t be completed until 2019. The good news I’m taking pre-orders now!!!! If you like the first couple of paragraphs you can go ahead and send me a check or money order for $19.95. For tax reasons, though, I’d rather you just dropped a 20 in my mailbox.

Bring Your Girl a Tangerine
“She’s long, she’s tall, she’s six feet from the ground. She’s tailor-made. She ain’t no hand-me-down.” Of course, I never met her, but in the pictures she looks like the first woman to wear pants… like she invented them. Katherine Hepburn must’ve studied her from afar, somehow. I know my pappy did…and from close up, too. Whatever angle he could get was fine with him, because she was that kind of pretty. She might’ve been blonde and she might not’ve. You can’t tell in black and white and I never asked him. Pretty much all you can make out is that she had a curly bob and the fence-posts loved her. They used to have a bus that ran regular between Soddy-Daisy and Sale Creek and that’s the one she took most weekends when she came to see him. She had family there, too, and that’s where she stayed, but really Pappy was the only reason a girl would ever willingly go to Sale Creek.

If I were to say, “He would wait for her at the station, astride his horse, Rex” you would think I was exaggerating. Very few men can be described as being “astride their horse, blank” without it seeming grandiose. Alexander can carry that phrase, and so can Bucephalus, Robert E. Lee and Traveler, maybe. Certainly, you can picture John Wayne “astride his horse, Old So-and-So,” but my Pappy? Really? “Astride his horse, Rex”? Yes…he would wait for her at the station, astride his horse, Rex, wearing tall leather boots that laced up almost to the knee and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled-up to just below the elbow. Six-foot two, dark-headed…the pride of the Tennessee Valley and probably some other valleys, too.

Next Post:
Alright, getting a lot of likes but very few 20’s. Here’s that start of Chapter 5.

Put the right kind of man in the right situation;
cheap land, cheap labor, friends in the right places,
and he can become a baron in just about anything.
Railroads, copper, popcorn…certainly oranges.
Sure he’s got to calculate and ruminate, work hard,
and stay up late…but wouldn’t you? If the price
was right?

Around here the orange is king and pays its own way.
On its dime, great stadiums have been built, coaches
fired and championships won. The orange buys Cadillacs
with cash, finances mistresses and divorces, and gets to
let a whole lot of other things just kind of slide. The first
to be picked, boxed, shipped, and squeezed or taken for a
free ride from Florida to Indiana in the trunk of a Buick;
it’s always Christmas for the orange. Despite its excesses,
the orange has a way of saying, “hand me to your grand-
mother,” and people usually do.

Put the right kind of man in the right situation he can
become a baron in just about anything…certainly oranges.
But, not in tangerines. The poor cousin of the orange, in the
pecking order of citrus fruit the tangerine can rightly look
down its nose and the tangelo and the kumquat, but that’s
about it. Easier to peel, easier to eat, seedless and sweeter
than the orange, it’s a mystery why the tangerine never took
off. It just didn’t.

People try not to compare apples and oranges, but, as far
as I know, no one has ever tried not to compare apples and
tangerines. And, so you see my point, but, not that of the
tangerine.

–October 15, 2017