A Guitar and a Pen

by Robert Hicks

  The Point

  Monty Powell

  Which one is it, Daddy?” asked ten-year-old Carolina.“I’m not sure,” came the reply from the other side of the SUV.“It’s hard to tell—none of these houses used to be here.”

  Richard Nance was telling the truth. When he and his family had made their annual pilgrimages to Fripp Island, South Carolina, in the early 1970s, none of this long row of ostentatious beachfront retreats had been built, save one, which still existed a world apart from the rest. It was perched on the last gasping point of this tiny three-and-a-half-mile-long barrier island, commanding a view of the ever-changing sandbars that loosely defined the southernmost tip of its domain. The house was a lone sentinel, the last outpost, as ahead of the curve of the 1970s Southern real estate renaissance as Da Vinci was ahead of his own in fifteenth-century Italy.

  Every summer since the late sixties, Richard’s family had rented this same retreat precisely because it was so isolated. For a mile on either side of the house there had stretched only unbroken sand, sea oats, and slate gray water. Gulls and sandpipers had outnumbered sunbathers a thousand to one. Back then, the pavement simply ended as the last, long thrust of this isolated spit pointed its finger, like Adam, into the watery Sistine Chapel of the Atlantic, stretching its way to the God of the mainland. Physically, the land was close enough almost to touch across a ribbon of tidal creek that could be waded in less-than-knee-deep water on the right low tide, but psychologically, it was an insurmountable geographical feature that would always separate the islanders from their landlocked neighbors.

  To Richard Nance and his family, that last mile where civilization ended and the road became two beckoning concave tracks in the sand was the most holy ground on the planet. To bump across the last blacktop speed bump and onto that seldom-traveled lane signaled freedom. Freedom from school and work, freedom from the dog-day swelter and humidity that covered north Georgia every summer as completely as the wall-to-wall carpeting made in its ramshackle mills covered sumptuous living rooms from New York to San Diego.

  It signaled the start of the week that everyone dreamed about all year long. So powerful was the pull of this hallowed place and this sacred time that Richard’s hyper-extended family— including aunts, great-uncles, and twice- or even thrice-removed cousins— would begin packing months in advance. Meticulous grocery lists were drawn up and haggled over. A sumptuous menu was created and teams of people from different families were assigned a respective night of the week to carefully prepare their specialty: roast beef or “Fripp meat,” as it was so casually called, Melea’s spaghetti, Mama Joy’s chocolate chip cake. Everyone had their thoroughbred dish, and each one would get its chance to run. For one week out of the hectic year the whole extended family simply packed up and moved. They traded their tiny north Georgia hamlet of Resaca, so claustrophobically hemmed in by I-75 on one side and old Highway 41 on the other, for a paradise bounded only by the endless salt marshes to the rear and the limitless horizon of the unending ocean to the front.

  “I think this is the one, honey,” Richard said as he picked Carolina up and placed her bare feet on the too-hot hood of his Ford Explorer.

  “Ouch, Daddy!” she cried.

  “Sorry, baby,” he said as he placed her down in the even hotter sand.

  “Daddy,” she protested. So he swept her up in his arms and held her there, trying to get his bearings, letting the years peel away until he could picture this place thirty-five years ago and hopefully spot the reason he had made this detour in the first place.

  “Yes,” he said softly, “that has to be it.”

  Old and battered, the house kneeled in the shadow of the magnificent mansionettes that had been erected on either side of it. He laughed to himself as he eyed the clumsy new structures. Rambling, overwrought, and architecturally vapid were his immediate thoughts. It was as if some rich Atlanta socialite had eaten an entire mall of Restoration Hardware stores and then vomited on a series of empty waterfront lots. He laughed as he thought of how they had purchased their nostalgia, and a curious sense of pride welled up in him at the thought of the many years it took to earn his.

  For years the lone house that was now so besieged had been the roof over as many as twenty people at a time for the big week. There were pallets and couches, air mattresses and sleeping bags scattered around upstairs. Kids slept at the feet of the beds of their parents, boyfriends and unacknowledged lovers were relegated to the dank basement, where palmetto bugs and mosquitoes fought for dominion over the crowded little bedrooms that housed the transient vacationers. Who was to say if the same boyfriend would be around next year? For decades the basement held a parade of ever-changing temporary family members who, for a week at least, were considered Nances and treated like part of the family.

  The house was, as often seems to be the case, smaller than he remembered. In his mind as a child it had towered over the point like a striding medieval castle. Now it looked plain squatty. Its old-school Florida cinder-block basement and peeling cedar siding looked cheap and insubstantial next to the fifteen-foot cement pilings and Masonite clapboard of its upscale neighbors. But, no doubt, this was it; this was where he’d grown up. At least that’s how he had always seen it: as a kid he had lived fifty-one weeks of his life in the gentle foothills of the worn-down Blue Ridge Mountains, but for reasons still unknown to him, he had always marked his passage time here. Everyone else’s years ran from either January to January or from birthday to birthday, but not for him— no, in his mind he would always grow up here, summer to summer.

  “Can we go inside, Daddy?” Carolina asked.

  “No, honey, we can’t,” he said.“But let’s walk around it a bit.”

  He held her hand as they picked their way through the sea oats and sand spurs to a well-worn path that led through a rickety gate to the front of the house. The sight of the old screened porch, still jutting out majestically over the dunes, dilapidated but stately, the queen of the point, wearing the rouge of thousands of blustery saltwater days and the patina of too many slanting setting suns, brought an upwelling of something untouched in him for a long time. Richer than nostalgia and purer than melancholy, it was like a vortex, the null point where joy and pain cancel each other out and you are left wholly with your own accounting of just how much of yourself you can bequeath to one place, to one experience. For Richard, it was like finding a pocket full of twenties in an old pair of jeans, but every bill had his picture on it and the currency was his very life.

  He had told Carolina the stories so many times that she knew the punch lines by heart, but standing here flicking the sugary white sand up with their toes, he felt it become real for her for the first time. He was introducing her to a long-lost friend, like a pen pal she’d known so well from a distance then finally got to embrace. This house, his family, his story. She got it; he could tell. And that was enough.

  As they rounded the other side of the fence on their way out, he noticed that a police car with a flashing light had pulled in behind his parked Explorer. As he got closer he saw it wasn’t a cop car at all, but a sedan labeled FRIPP ISLAND SECURITY.

  “This your Explorer?” the fake cop asked.

  “Yes it is. Is there a problem . . . er . . . Officer?” Richard asked, trying not to show contempt for the guy, whose only job was to make sure “undesirable” people didn’t loiter too long around real estate they clearly couldn’t afford.

  “No problem,” he said, “just saw you had a visitor’s pass for the day and you really can’t park here unless you own or are renting property.”

  “I used to own a lot here,” Richard said, which was true. Years ago, in a different marriage and what now seemed like a whole other life, he had taken what savings he had and purchased a tiny interior lot on the small trickle of a tidal creek that poured in and out twice daily through the bowels of the island. That this qualified as “waterfront” was still something of a great inside joke to him, but, like every other piece of dry san
d within a five iron of the ocean, it had increased in value at a rate far quicker than any other investment he had ever made. It had been sold as part of the amicable but gut-wrenching divorce settlement between himself and Carolina’s mom. At the time, so much in his life was questioned and unanswered that he hadn’t cared. Now he suddenly felt like he had pawned his childhood dream and couldn’t get it back.

  He stood there in the uncomfortable silence between him and the “officer” and chewed on the disorienting feeling of being considered an outsider.

  He glanced down at Carolina and watched her as she carefully placed a tiny sun-bleached, skull-white scallop shell she had found deep into her pocket. He silently wondered how many million children before her and before him had absently walked along some long-forgotten sandy trail and innocently reached down to harvest some tidbit that caught their eye. He marveled over how uniquely human it was to try to capture in a solid sculpted form the wonder and timelessness of a moment written only in wind and tide and memory. She had found a shell that was forever to be her token of this long-awaited encounter with his past.

  He knew instinctively that they would never speak about it, that she would cherish it always and that it would reside in some special, out-of-the-way place in the homes she would make as she grew into a woman. It seemed such a small and insignificant gesture, but with it his mind was suddenly and forcefully knocked down like a child hit by a rogue wave. He felt like he was being swept along by the riptide current of time, slowly sinking into the full realization that for most of his natural life, his immovable intention had been to raise a family, make his mark in the business world, and then to retire here. He was to come full circle back to the place that had defined his youth and make his final rite of passage here at the confluence of this sand and water, to grow, and to grow old, embracing his death like a lover, to let the full experience of it rush through him like the wonder and awe of a first kiss on a sunset pier and to let the ocean be the only witness to the seduction powers of the last great mystery, the last great mistress. He had counted his years here. He could trace every significant milestone event in his younger life back to this spot. Surely, he thought, this is where it would also end.

  He knew now in an instant that it was not to be. The island and its lifelong hold on him would fade after this trip. New memories would rush in like the eight-foot floods that daily blanketed the saw grass and mudflats. The aching pull of those glorious summers would slip away as silently as the redfish tails on an autumn ebb tide.

  Carolina looked up at him and said, “Daddy, thanks for showing me where you grew up.” Her small voice broke the spell.

  Richard laughed easily.“You’re welcome, sweetheart.” He winked at her.“You were named for this state, you know.”

  “I know, Dad— you’ve told me a hundred times,” she said.

  He looked over at the security guard, who had that twitchy look in his eye of a voyeur who has seen something too secret and sacred.“Officer, we’ll be leaving now,” he said.

  The man slowly tipped his hat, nervously shuffled back over to his car, and eased away.

  Richard cranked the Explorer and felt the compressor struggle to cool them off as he sat there for a moment idling. Carolina was quiet, looking out the window and silently toying with the newfound souvenir in her pocket. He slipped the car into Drive and slowly rolled away.

  Although the pavement was smooth before him, in his soul he felt the jostling of the deeply worn ruts from so many years ago. He had shared his most vulnerable self with his own flesh and blood, and he had learned more than he had taught. He knew now he would not die here and that he would not return again to this spot in this life. But he also knew with the unerring certainty that only comes when fathers are alone with their daughters that when it was his turn to die, and he lay in rest, that a small, white scallop shell would find its way into his folded hands. He would make the final journey over sand and sea to the island of the last secret keeper, where he would rejoin the boy he was at ten and twelve and sixteen and the man at twenty-one and thirty. He would embrace these separated souls of himself, the memories that had spoken to him so often and had waited so patiently for his return in an eternal dance as fluid and powerful as the cresting waves of his childhood.

  She would remember. She would do that for him.

  Monty Powell

  As a music-business veteran for nearly twenty-five years, Resaca, Georgia, native Monty Powell has successfully honed his craft and found his niche as a songwriter-producer who often collaborates with such artists as Keith Urban, Chris Cagle, Rascal Flatts, James Otto, Diamond Rio, and many more. His recent successes like the multi-week number-one singles “Days Go By” and “Tonight I Wanna Cry” for Keith Urban, and “Miss Me Baby” and top-five hit “What a Beautiful Day” for Chris Cagle keep him at the forefront of Nashville’s top tunesmiths.

  Apart from songwriting, Powell coproduced Diamond Rio’s first three albums, two of which are now platinum and one gold. In 1994, he won a CMA Album of the Year Award for his production work on Common Thread: The Songs of the Eagles. In addition, Powell produced “Working Man’s Blues” by Jed Zepplin (Steve Wariner, Lee Roy Parnell, and Diamond Rio) on the highly acclaimed Mamma’s Hungry Eyes: A Tribute to Merle Haggard. Powell also produced and engineered jazz-pop singer-songwriter Anna Wilson’s debut record, The Long Way (Asylum/Curb), and her sophomore effort, Time Changes (2007).

  Monty currently writes for Universal Music Publishing Group, and has recently written songs that will soon be released on upcoming albums for Rascal Flatts, James Otto, Aaron Lines, and Anna Wilson, among others.

  Monty resides in Nashville when he is not chasing fish with a fly rod on the gulf coast of Florida. You can visit his Web site at www.montypowell.com.

  Mr. Munch Has a Murmur

  Mark D. Sanders

  I can only write in the first person; it’s the only person I can write in. I me me, I me me, I me me I.“It’s always all about you”— that’s how my ex likes to put it, and she likes to put it right between the eyes: kapow, knock me down, bruise my ego, beat the crap out of me in a very civilized way. And I used to take it hard, but now I hardly take the time to listen. And even if I did listen it’d still be the first person for me. Always. But lucky for us she plays no part in this story and we don’t have to worry about her busting in with a helping of her righteous indignation, which is the only indignation of which she is capable. Forget that shit. Leave it in the past.

  The past, that’s when this happens, but I can’t tell you exactly when ’cause right now I don’t know for sure exactly what, and anyway you tell me who ever knows for sure what happened, ever. And when did you show up here, and how do you know you’re somebody I want to read this. You don’t know my ex, do you? God forbid you tell her and she calls or writes one of those letters, and I see it’s her and know if I open the envelope or pick up the phone there will be a price for my soul to pay. If you’re a friend of hers please stop reading right this minute, stop reading and go get yourself one of those chocolate croissants. Share it with her other friend.

  So I was in New York, a place I’ve only been to twice, being from and loyal to the West and wanting to travel in that direction when I travel. But I was in New York this time, because I had to be because that’s where the story happens. And there are sidewalks in New York and on the sidewalks are people walking, lots of people walking, and people selling hot dogs and sugar-coated peanuts, which will make you a little sick if you eat two bags in a row. Yes and there are people with briefcases full of watches and people with bedspreads and blankets full of knockoff purses and those people are moving most of the time only a few steps ahead of those who are Policemen. Oh— and there are the people who are homeless except for this particular sidewalk and maybe that particular set of stairs down to the subway when the subway doors are locked and available for leaning.

  I am walking. The sidewalk is crowded so I reach back to make sure my wallet is there. My wal
let is there, so I reach down to make sure my zipper is zipped. My zipper is zipped so I rub my nose to make sure there isn’t something hanging off my nose, something that might offend even a New Yorker who must not be too easily offended if the sidewalks are like this all the time, but something that would offend my ex because of her refined sensibilities, way more refined than mine ever were since I was from the West and my family was in no way sophisticated or cultured or mannerly and she was from the South where they still like a little class distinction and where you can tell which families are hanging in there with a bit of success because they’re in church on Sunday. No, not the new suburban nondenominational church but the Methodist and Episcopal and Baptist and of course the Presbyterian, where the bankers wear the same suits they wear to work, or at mass on Saturday night, something I still don’t understand, why Catholics want to do what they do on Saturday night at 5:30. But she kept telling her parents that it— our getting maried— would work out. It didn’t and there wasn’t, not in my nose at least.

  Something needs to happen, and soon, or I’m gonna lose you. Or are you gonna be like my ex and keep threatening to leave but never go ’cause where the hell was she gonna go, who would have her, you tell me. But come what may my phone rings, right there on the sidewalk:

  “Mr. Sanders, this is Elizabeth at Dr. Fawcett’s office. I’m sorry, but can you hold a moment, please?”

  You go to New York, you gotta do something with the cat, so you leave him at the vet’s and you figure why not get his oil checked while he’s there so you tell the vet yeah, check him out, see if he’s a quart low smile smile smile. And the next thing you know you’re standing on the sidewalk, stopping traffic, on hold. Mamma Mia, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Toys “R” Us, these are the thoughts running through my mind as I wait for his majesty the doggie doctor. And who would name a cat Munchkin and call him Mr. Munch, which means, as a former friend likes to point out, that I got a pussy named Mr. Munch. Who needs friends, anyway.