Oakleigh

When I was 12 years old my mom and dad bought a house in the Oakleigh Garden District in Mobile, Alabama. The year must have been 1974 or 75. I remember the day we moved in. My brother and I had a bedroom with 12′ ceilings. There we three doors, one fireplace and no closets, and that was just our bedroom. We played a air hockey game and couldn’t believe our folks had bought a house like this. This house was built in 1896 and they have been taking good care of it for the last 35 years or so. If you didn’t grow up in a house like this or in a in-town neighborhood then you might not know what I am talking about.

I am attracted to old, rundown, industrial neighborhoods. I love old stuff. Always have, always will. It is something that has grown not diminished over the years. Since we moved into that great old house, I have lived in really old places. Except when we bought a brand new house in one of the oldest neighborhoods in Atlanta, I have lived in old places.

For years we lived in the Castleberry Warehouse District, in Atlanta. That was a lot of fun. We explored 100 year old warehouses that were empty. We explored the railroad tracks. There were about 8 tracks that ran between our warehouse loft and downtown Atlanta. We live there in the mid-eighties, not a lot of others lived in that area yet.

Anyway, I think what I’m talking about is growing up in old, downtown environments. As small as Mobile was, living downtown made it very different. I met all kind of different people and I lived in all kinds of different places. Went to Atlanta and did the same thing.

Now we live in a house built in 1917 in East Point, a suburb of Atlanta. We are slowly renovating it. So far we have finished the kitchen, one of the bathrooms and one of the bedrooms. The livingroom is good but, we still have a bath and two bedrooms to do. It’s slow work but it’s worth it.

Someday I want to build a house. I plan to use lots of old salvaged parts. Some of the materials I have stored away, some I will look for when I start and let what I find lead me in the design of the house.

I make my living building furniture from old salvaged wood. It seems just about every other house around here is either being torn down for new construction or being renovated. That means lots of antique pine for the taking. It’s on the way to the dump and builders are happy for me to take it. The furniture I build is either finished in a distressed paint or stained. It all looks old when I finish with it.

Lately I have been painting pictures. I use the same approach to painting as I do with furniture. I like to make them look old. I will paint the picture on plywood and when I am happy with it I take a sander and blowtorch and rough it up a bit. It’s a lot of fun to make a living this way.

So you can see “old” is a big part of my life. I know the reason I like old stuff, old neighborhoods, ect. is because of that house my mom and dad moved us into way back when. I think watching them work so hard to fix it up, and watching others doing the same, I new it was a labor of love. And has become the same for me. My parents have done a beautiful job with their house, it is the place where everyone gathers a few times a year for some really cool occasions. I will tell you about some of these events sometime in the near future.

Mississippi

I’ve been to Mississippi and I like it.

Not long ago Stacey and I spent a few days driving around the central Mississippi area. We didn’t know for sure where we would go, but we had a book written by John T. Edge on places to eat in the southeast. The name of the book is ” Southern Belly” and a new edition has just come out.

Edge is one of the folks responsible for the Southern Foodways Alliance. He has become a leading advocate for the promotion, preservation and documentation of southern culture. Food is his specialty. This book will lead you from one great place to eat then another, nonstop. We were also lucky enough to find a few things on our own, such as the Alluvian Hotel, in beautiful downtown Greenwood Mississippi, what a cool town to spend the night in.

First of all we headed to Mississippi from Tuscaloosa Al. We had just left my sisters home in Hoover, Alabama. We were going to find us some tamales. That’s right tamales in Mississippi. We are headed to Clarksdale, straight across the state, looking for Oscar Orsby. Oscar set up shop on the corner of 4th and Yazoo St. He’s there every Friday and Saturday from noon til ten. The tamales are good and so are the hotdogs. The tamales are not what we are used to, they are smaller and drenched in a not to hot red sauce.

Now tamales may not be the first thing you think of when you think Mississippi, but they are everywhere in the delta region. Story goes, the Hispanic labours came from Texas during harvest season and of course they would make tamales, with corn being so plentiful. So when they left after harvest season the local African Americans who had starting eating and preparing them with their coworkers continued to make and started to sell them on the streets to make extra income.

Next we head for Greenwood. When we get to town it’s getting kind of late in the afteernoon so we start looking for a spot to spend the night and I tell Stacey, I got the feeling there’s a great place for us to stay in this town.

We drive towards the downtown district. By checking out the old buildings and the size of the downtown area, I know we are gonna find something good.

Well, we turn the corner and there sits the Viking Range showroom. I had read recently the story behind the Viking Company. I remember one article, in the New Yorker magazine, about their first customer. She lives in N.Y.C. She had lots of trouble with the frist stove, but spent years working with Viking getting things right.

Right across the street sits the Alluvian Hotel. A cosmopolitan luxury boutique hotel right in the middle of small town Mississippi. Stacey went straight in and got us a room and then walked across the street to check out the Viking showroom. It’s all a big deal and worth a weekend trip to the hotel and cooking classes at Viking. Viking has lead the way in the revitalization of Greenwood and it’s something to see.

Stacey and decided to order room service and enjoy some wine we had with us. So we sat in bed, ate gourmet food and drank wine, not bad. The next morning we had breakfast in the hotel. They laid out a southern breakfast fit for king and I ate like one.

We checked out and hit the road. Headed for Marvell, Arkansas.