Muscadine Season

When the wind picked up
And the fire spread
And the grapevines seemed left for dead.
And the northern sky, looked like the end of day,
The end of days.
— Death Cab for Cutie, “Grapevine Fires”

Beginnings, like endings, are awkward and often painful.

That’s not always the case; starting a softball game, for instance, is pretty easy as long as you’re not doing it in the dining room—the one with the Swarovski crystal chandelier. By contrast, being born is no picnic, or so I’m told. Honestly I don’t remember. Do you?

The problem with which I am vexed is how to convey to you, dear reader, everything I want to tell you in a single sentence. But at least, in contradistinction to all things Covid, I have options:

I could go all earnest and deep and tell you that I want to examine all the moments of my life, boiling them down to their various emotional cores in the hopes of finding universality with my fellow humans, as represented by y’all.

Or I could wax poetic [1] and tell you that I’m striving to explore the nexus between dreams and loam, where lie the roots of everything that has borne fruit or withered upon the vine, in pitch dark, gripping at the soil, aware of the world above only as the flavor of the sugar flowing down from the leaves. Yeesh.

I could just be honest and say that I think I can make compelling stories about the more or less random assemblage of history and raw information that I’ve amassed over my half century aboard the body I’m using to type all this stuff. It’s amazing what happens to a person, and what sort of weird bridges and wormholes you can find through culture and knowledge when you’re traveling without a map and stupid enough to sail out of sight of shore, which, well, we’ll get to all that later.

The simple truth is that I’ve been largely silent for a long while, and the water has reached the top of the dam. Like so many things in my life, the hand of chance is manifest; my unexpected but not unwelcome sidekick. This little moment of mine just happened to coincide with perhaps the most significant politico-historic moment most of us have ever known. I didn’t plan it this way, but I’m delighted to be able to offer something useful. What, exactly, am I offering? Well let me tell you a brief story:

Years ago I worked as an assistant librarian at Vanderbilt Music Library. My boss was a five-foot tall woman with Q-tip hair. Her name was Shirley, and she was old enough to remember the Flood. She was both scary and fun, like all really unique people. How she came to be in charge of a library is a deep mystery, because she was easily the most disorganized person I’ve ever known. Her office, which in my tenure there grew beyond its four walls to consume several carrels throughout the library, would have been inviting to any archaeologists employed by the university. Every horizontal surface was invisible beneath sedimentary towers of paper. The wobbling stacks were like arctic core samples revealing glimpses of the library’s history—a random sheet drawn from one of them might have been dated thirty years earlier.

One afternoon, waiting for Shirley to dress me down for doing nothing for an entire shift or for destroying the front desk computer monitor with the book demagnetizer, I idly picked a document out of the stack it had probably inhabited since Igor Stravinsky still walked the earth. It was two yellowed sheets of music, stapled at the corner. I don’t remember what it was, something for flute and piano maybe. A divertimento for glass harmonica? Anyway, at the top of the page there was a stamp that read, “Published by Schütch und Schütch, Berlin, August 1945.”

An auspicious date! Berlin, in August of 1945 was nothing more than a ruin; only three months had passed since the Soviets had swept away the shattered remnants of the German army to fly the hammer and sickle over the burned-out shell of the Reichstag. Whatever we think of our current circumstances, think of theirs: decisively defeated, utterly demolished, exsanguinated, leaderless and facing condemnation for heinous national criminal acts. Imagine living amid broken buildings filled with dead bodies, without electricity or flowing water, not even knowing where you could get a loaf of bread. The thought makes Zoom calls seem downright cuddly.

And yet, in the middle of the rubble and the horrors past and still being revealed, someone thought it would be helpful to oil his printing press and give the world Reichard Schlaftschott’s Third Elegy for Harp and Alpine Horn. People weren’t just moving bricks, they were trying to keep one another happy. They were digging graves but they were also planting seeds.

I’m planting a seed.

For the benefit of those who have not shared an elevator or the line for the Opryland Floom Zoom with me, allow me to introduce myself. Most of my time is taken up sleeping, so I guess professionally speaking I’m a sleeper. I also have a family—more about them in the future—and a job fiddling around with computers. I’ll get to that in due time as well.

The author in Paris… Tennessee.

I live in Atlanta, in the heart of the often unreconstructed South. I’ve written a few things about this, and will probably write more. Frankly, you might get sick of hearing about it. 

I was blessed with just enough musical ability to know that I will never be a professional musician, and cursed with enough passion for music to regret it. But you can still listen to my album (“Summer” makes an excellent soundtrack for this post):

I enjoy disassembling things, and have amassed an absurd collection of tools in the interest of doing so. I’m not quite as much into assembling things, which means I have a lot of half finished projects sitting around, but I’m also borderline-psychotic about not paying professionals to do stuff, so I get myself into a lot of trouble doing things like removing the transmission from the family car. I’ve got a lot of stories on this score and I think you’ll get a kick out of them.

I love baseball, though not nearly as much as I did a decade ago. I have no interest in other sports though I will gladly watch people play hockey as long as it’s not on TV. 

And, of course, I can string a sentence together. That’s why we’re here. 

So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this concludes the syllabus portion of RCB #1. I’m sure you’re itching to read something that doesn’t sound like the first ten minutes of a blind date, so let’s talk about the food, shall we?

But first, an aside: one of the benefits of putting something out fortnightly is that I’ll be less tempted to talk about what Tucker Carlson said last night or what that quivering orange fatberg tweeted this morning, and so forth. The 24-hour news cycle is the scourge of reflection and therefore meaning, and we’re all trapped in it just the same as if we were manacled to a wall in the dungeons of the CNN building. My first memory of “news” is talking to my friends Winter and Donovan about the Iranian Revolution in early 1979 and although I remember very little about the conversation, I do remember that someone, somehow, got slapped very hard on the side of the head with a rubber garden hose and there were lots of tears and everybody felt terrible about it.

And let’s be frank: this is exactly what it feels like to absorb the daily parade of abominations.

Fortunately for everyone, it’s muscadine season! Muscadine grapes are, to me, nothing short of paradise—a little scrap of the Garden of Eden that somehow survived the Fall and now lives among us like some sort of botanical Mozart, blithely dispensing wonders with the phlegmatic majesty of a lion tearing apart a gazelle. I understand not everyone feels this way; my sister, when I informed her that I had purchased and eaten two quarts of muscadines the other morning, described the vitis rotundifolia, the speckled golden-green and stout claret globes after which I lust obscenely in the darkest and most private moments of my life, thus: “It's like someone took an old shoe and went, here, have a grape."

Ok, given: muscadines have tough skins. But that’s what gives them their wild character. Ordinary table grapes live up to their name: grapes born for the table. Subservient, soft like overfed hens, serving themselves meekly to us like a cartoon pig offering up its own flesh on a roadside barbecue sign. Muscadines are having none of that. You’d better be bringing a mouth full of teeth to this rumble, because the muscadine is a mongoose. It’s about self-respect, people. Muscadines have it. Concord grapes? Jesus, I can’t even look at Concord grapes. Have some pride, grape [2].

And yes, I know that some of you are thinking about the seeds. I’m not gonna argue here, it’s unpleasant to bite innocently into a muscadine, cleaving the leathery skin with that delightful popping sensation, sinking slowly through the quivering translucent mantle, only to hit a pile of bitter gravel. It’s like the opposite of a bon-bon; mirror-finish dark Belgian chocolate exterior, a layer of soft, artisanally crafted salted caramel, and a granule of dried cat shit at the center.

On the other hand, seeds are a literal manifestation of new life and fertility. If we weren’t sitting around in dimly lit rooms, wreathed in pot smoke and sucking down the dregs of a beer while reading improbable essays on the Internet, we’d probably be blown away by the staggering fecundity of these tiny pebbles and we would build ceremonies around the consumption of some sort of tea made from muscadine seeds before dancing a dance celebrating the fact that we are alive and equipped with magnificent thinking machines to plan ahead and design solutions to problems, to say nothing of these marvelous armatures of bone with actuators attached that we can control with those impressive brains to actually execute the very solutions we’d imagined, as though we were living visions of God imbued in our turn with our Creator’s capability to create! And that’s cool and all but myself, I just kind of enjoy digging with my tongue tip for the seeds and spitting them into a ramekin like a guy in an old Western expectorating tobacco juice into a spittoon. 

“It's like someone took an old shoe and went, here, have a grape."

Of course, it’s easy to knock grapes because they aren’t sentient and can’t defend themselves. But let’s be fair: two flaws shouldn’t be sufficient reason to write off an entire variety of fruit. Humans have way more flaws than that, and yet we keep watching them pretending to be other humans or making pleasing sequences of organized noises or causing little marks to appear on liquid crystal image-producing devices in an effort to make other humans re-think their ridiculous little thoughts along with them just for fun. And furthermore, unlike humans, muscadines have virtues. Scratch that, that’s a horrible thing to say about a species that produced both Peter Paul Rubens and R. Crumb, who depicted essentially the same fetishized version of women four hundred years apart from one another—there’s that fecundity thing once more. 

Let me try again: Muscadines, unlike humans, are delicious. Of course I don’t know what humans taste like (or do I?), but I do know what muscadines taste like and if you think that, divorced from all other aspects of the fruit—let’s imagine for a moment muscadine Kool-aid—if you think they taste bad, well I don’t know what. You’re clearly out of your mind. 

I should clarify though, muscadines aren’t whores. They’re delightful and sophisticated after-dinner confections, eaten from small china plates in the drawing room with the boys, everyone in formal black but just starting to loosen the bowties a bit as the cigars are distributed hither and yon. What they are definitely not are the kind of cheap green tarts you see hanging around the grittier parts of the produce section... nature’s Pixie Stix, in various manners of speaking. But you know what? That’s fine: we’re adults, we don’t have the palates of 8-year olds. 

And really, folks, you can’t tell me there’s anything disagreeable about the flavor of a muscadine. You just can’t.

Oh, but let’s not forget that the muscadine is a grape. An honest-to-God bonafide raisin- and wine-precursor grape. So if you don’t like the skins and you don’t like the seeds, well raisins probably aren’t going to get your vote either, but wine! Who doesn’t love wine?

Ok, I don’t really drink wine so I don’t know much about it, but hell I drink beer by the tanker truckload; I probably oughtn’t be so picky about my alcohol delivery vehicle. I’d drink gasoline if I thought it would make me forget the screaming heebie jeebies from the Republican Nat… <deep breath>... Sorry, reality is pernicious. You see what I mean, though, yes?

Anyway, the point of all of this doesn’t really have anything to do with how you feel about muscadines. To me the muscadine is peace. It is something insulated from the seething caldron of hatred and terror that bubbles and splashes and burns us daily from the crimson orifices of our so-called communication devices. Buildings may fall but here’s this plant that, in spite of the vast geologic forces of climate change, is, at least so far, doing just fine thank you; continuing to digest the soil and the sunlight in order to carry on, with infinite patience, its eons-long project of making fruit for animals to enjoy. And all they ask in return is that the animals that eat the fruit swallow the seeds and shit them out somewhere else, which frankly, the animal was going to do anyway. It’s a beautiful thing, and every year, shortly before the anniversary of my own beginning, when the muscadines begin to hit the store shelves for their brief autumn hour of glory, I remember that somewhere the seasons continue to pass, the sun shines, the rain falls, and things grow and nothing much happens but that life goes on.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the time we’ve spent together today. Before you go back to editing spreadsheets or welding plate steel or bagging groceries or disarming improvised explosive devices or whatever it is you do for fun or money, please allow me to thank you heartily for reading. As my wife can attest, I amuse myself—audibly—when I write, and that’s worth something, but when you yell into the void it yells back into you. I’d much rather yell at y’all. So thanks, really. If you haven’t subscribed, please do, and please inflict RCB on anyone you think needs to hear things about grapes and the rest—the more of you there are, waiting for the next communique, the more likely I am to actually write it and write it well.

I’d also like to issue a special thanks to James Palmer for his hard work on Red Clay Bestiary’s delightful logo, which can be admired by going back to the top of this page. James is one of those killer artists whose work seems capable of evoking virtually any emotion or idea effortlessly, but I picked up a few clues about how hard he works. His stuff is marvelous. Check him out and tell him how terrific he is.

Colossal thanks too to my old friend Ken Gordon for helping me get RCB out the door. This project would never have happened without him, and after all the inspiration and helpful legwork, he even edited this heap of words out of the goodness of his heart.

And finally thanks to Lora Moore for her muscadine illustration and—I’m probably burying the lede here—for giving birth to me and keeping me fed and housed until I was about twenty-four.

That about wraps it up for now. See you again in two weeks!

Fletch

Notes

[1] Apologies to actual poets. My version just boils down to wrapping a few ten-cent words in gauze.

[2] I’m kidding of course. Concord grapes are off-the-charts delicious. And to own the honest truth I’d eat anything labeled “grapes,” including ball bearings. Muscadines aren’t nearly as tough as ball bearings, ergo, they should be acceptable to anyone with the wherewithal to pierce a Pringle.