WE RECOMMEND (THE GOOD PART)

When I was at the Piggly Wiggly in Frayser buying a big sack of turnips the other day . . . Well, I’m not really sure where that one is going, but I just had to say it because it is true. I have found myself in some pretty strange places in the past few days. Yes, I was in Frayser at the grocery store buying turnips. They were for a beloved family member who lives out in the country in a lovely bucolic setting with a lake and bluebirds and a forest full of wild violets and a creek and a garden and flowers and peach trees. It was beautiful. I was in the midst of a full-blown panic attack the entire time I was there (this is taking over my life, like I need more problems). Maybe it was because I had also tried to buy her some fresh asparagus at said grocery store, but it was so old and dry it looked like Thai stick. I did, while driving through the countryside listening to my new Train tape, shout the words, “I’ll not leave this place without a goat!” And I do intend to go back and get one for my backyard. And then there was the Saturday-morning yard-sale shopping spree. While trying to follow some signs and track one down, my friend and I happened upon an automobile accident. A fresh one. Woman laid out on the ground, next to her smashed-up car, on a stretcher, in a neck brace. It was horrifying, and I kept shielding my eyes from the sight while stopped at a red light. Naturally, I couldn’t help it and began to stare, only to become even more horrified– because as she lay there, me thinking she was dying or in some kind of agony, she got one arm free from the stretcher restraints and pulled out a cell phone and began chatting. The good person in me kept thinking she was probably notifying a family member that she’d been injured and was on her way to the hospital, but something else in me could only hear her calling a friend to check on a certain outfit she’d seen at the mall. It was scary. Not as scary as a few hours later. It seems that during an early-morning foggy (my head, not the air) stop at one of said sales, I had purchased a really beautiful print of a Native American sitting on a horse, both of their heads lowered as if they were praying together against an intense turquoise-blue sky. Tossed it into the car, thinking it would be great for a good friend’s young kids’ bedroom. You know, the praying Indian and horse. Very spiritual. When I showed it to my friend, very enthusiastically saying, “Don’t you think the kids will just love this?!,” a look of horror and confusion appeared on his face, followed by laughter. Confused myself, I looked at the print more closely. It seems that they were indeed not praying but had been impaled by a spear. It was sticking through the Indian’s back into the horse’s neck. The Indian was dead and the horse was going down and about to be. Blood all over the place. Lovely. And then I ended up eating tamales and dancing in a parking lot at midnight in the rain on Highway 61 near Mississippi, and that’s the end of this stupid story.