Happy New Year

New year's day we went for a drive. Rainy days are good for that. I took my camera along, and here's what resulted: a short film I've called "You're Never Too Far From a Bologna Sandwich."

It's why I love Tennessee, the south, rural places. The road is addictive. And the people are, too. We zig-zagged all over Dayton mountain, on asphalt, mud, gravel.  Once we turned on a muddy clay road that wound for half an hour through a pine stand, past deer blinds, scattered budweiser bottles, through orange puddles the size of our car. Around lunchtime, we stopped at a country store called "Last Chance." Don't ask me where it was.

Trae ordered a bologna sandwich. Cheese? 20 cents. Mustard?  Free. And of course, Coke in a bottle, the sugar kind. When I paid, the elderly woman behind the counter asked "He gonna make you pay?" and the young girl sitting on a stool in the corner behind her, staring at her long blue nails, looked up for the first time with a smirk on her face. I handed over a 20 dollar bill and we both laughed.


I love days like that. Here's to aimless wandering, the lure of the road, and the reassuring proximity of most places in the rural south to a bologna sandwich. The kind that sticks to the roof of your mouth.

Happy 2013.