Tied to the Tracks

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Tied to the Tracks Page 37

by Rosina Lippi


  Patty-Cake Walker has recently received her Georgia State certification as a dental hygienist. You’ll find her at Dr. Tab Darling’s office five days a week. Come by and let her polish up your smile.

  Miss Junie Rose tells us that our own Caroline Rose is at the top of her class at the Culinary Institute in Hyde Park, New York. Once she’s finished with her studies, Caroline intends to open a new restaurant called Southern Comfort in Hoboken, New Jersey.

  If you’ve been following our coverage you’ll know that Zula, the documentary that premiered at the college’s 150-year anniversary celebration this past June, has received prizes and honors at film festivals from California to France. Tied to the Tracks has begun work on a new documentary on the North-South cultural divide, with funding from the NEA and other organizations. If you’ve got stories to share, please contact the Tied to the Tracks branch office on Main Street, make an entry in the new memory book at the Piggy Wiggly, or stop by John and Angie’s. They’d be pleased to see you, anytime.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Zula Bragg is an entirely fictional character, and so is everybody else in this novel. Thus: any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, and the figment of somebody else’s imagination.

  There is no Ogilvie College nor is there a town called Ogilvie in Georgia. I have put my imaginary Ogilvie southeast of Savannah on a railway line that is mostly fictional. The Seaboard Coast Line once existed, but in 1986 it was subsumed into the less poetically named CSX Transportation, and diverted.

  All reference works quoted here also are fictional, and of my creation alone, but Farscape, Rivera’s and Angie’s favorite sci-fi television program, is indeed real.

  Lots of people lent a hand with this, many of them born-and-bred southerners; others who came to the South by choice or chance. These include Bruce Beasley, Penny Chambers, Thor Hansen, and Suzanne Paola. I’m especially thankful for the thoughtful reading of early and not-so-early drafts by Pokey Bolton, Cheryll Greenwood Kinsley, and Ruth Czirr. Ruth was tremendously helpful in sorting through some of the complexities of southern small-town customs and social structures. Joy Johannessen provided much-needed and very welcome editorial commentary and a new perspective, which were immensely helpful. Joe Vassallo answered a lot of questions about documentary film production with great clarity and patience. As always, mistakes are not to be laid at anybody’s doorstep but my own.

  Thanks especially to Jill Grinberg, for thoughtful feedback and encouragement when it was most needed, to Leona Nevler, who fell for Ogilvie just as hard as I did, and to Bill and Elisabeth, whose faith in me seems to have no bounds.

 

 

 


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