peach brandy / couldn't get drunk until sundown

Above Historic clay jug, as rendered in a painting by American illustrator Bisby Finley, for the Index of American Design (1939).

•••

Stark Young, The Pavilion: Of People and Times Remembered, of Stories and Places. NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951, p. 77—

Micajah McGhee had many acres in peaches for making brandy. His constitution was such, the history says solemnly, that drink as he might he was unable to be drunk till sundown, once a day; but as the infirmities of age crept on him he was able to be drunk twice a day. The Methodist exhortations converted him to some of sort of reform by which he agreed to limit himself to a daily quart of brandy. In a fortnight he returned to say that he could not endure it, and his advisors said, very well, they would pray for him and he should what he could; the matter was between him and God.

hoop and holler when little pig got under skirt

Stark Young, The Pavilion: Of People and Times Remembered, of Stories and Places. NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951, p. 106—

My father had a brother-in-law, Uncle Henry Hargis, who had married my Aunt Elizabeth. She had been long since dead and the only thing remembered about her was that she went on wearing hoopskirts years after they were given up, because her legs were too weak for skirts pressuring against them, and that a little pig had got under the hoop one day and the more she kicked and screamed the higher he jumped.

Banality epidemic | a nationwide memory loss

Poster (©2017) Roy R. Behrens

Studs Terkel in Touch and Go: A Memoir. New York: The New Press, 2007, p.232 and 236—

“Banality” is the operative word…

Britney Spears, a pop singer, shaves her head and goes into rehab. Most Americans know her name. She is a celebrity. None of the contestants in a recent episode of Jeopardy, a popular TV quiz show, knew who Strom Thurmond was. For most of the twentieth century, on the floor of the Senate, he was the drum major of segregation. Not even his fathering a black child was within the ken of the Jeopardy participants. Nor did they know the name of Kofi Annan (the newly former United Nations secretary general).…

What happens to all Alzheimer’s sufferers is tragic. What I’m talking about is what I call a national Alzheimer’s—a whole country has lost its memory. When there’s no yesterday, a national memory becomes more and more removed from what it once was, and forgets what it once wanted to be.

We’re sinking under our national Alzheimer’s disease. With Alzheimer’s you forget what you did yesterday. With Alzheimer’s finally, you forget not only what you did, but also who you are. In many respects, we [in the US] have forgotten who we are.

We’re now in a war [in Iraq] based on an outrageous lie [about “weapons of mass destruction”], and we are held up to the ridicule and contempt of the world. What has happened? Have we had a lobotomy performed on us? Or it it something else? I’m saying it is the daily evil of banality.

Oh, the farmer and the cowman must be friends

Dude (2019)

Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma! (1943)—

The farmer and the cowman should be friends,
Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends.
The cowman ropes a cow with ease, the farmer steals her
butter and cheese,
But that's no reason why they cain't be friends—
Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends.

•••

The American poet Robert Penn Warren (whose voice I love to listen to) came from Southern roots, and some of his ancestors had served on the Confederate side during the American Civil War. In Warren's wonderful memoir (which I have just finished reading), Portrait of a Father (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988), he recalls a misunderstanding he had when, as a boy, he was visiting his maternal grandfather's home. Here's the story—

There was another remark among the daughters which seemed related to the notion that the old man [his grandfather] was a visionary. They had said, more than once in their protracted and loving diagnosis of their father, that he was a "Confederate reader." Or so it seemed. I would wonder what a "Confederate reader" might be. But as my vocabulary widened, it suddenly dawned on me that the old man was an "inveterate reader." In fact, he was. As long as eyes held out.