Justice can readily do her job blindfolded; she cannot function gagged and deafened, least of all when the means of gagging and deafening her are not remarked.
Markham Shaw PyleIf T. S. Eliot had stayed in St Louis, he would never have held that April was the cruelest month. Well, unless he was a Browns fan.
At this moment, in the ragged middle of February, it begins: beneath the snow, roots quicken. In the Deep South, already trees begin to bud. And all over the land – indeed, all over the world, in Japan, in the Caribbean, in Australia – a certain class of mammal, fubsy, amiable, sweet-natured, begins to twitch and wake from hibernation: the baseball fan. Is it the lengthening of the days? Is it some subtle signal that causes them to begin to emerge from a stupor only lightly disturbed by meetings of the Hot Stove League? Naw. It is the magic phrase, ‘pitchers and catchers to report….
Tags: baseball
East Texas is red dirt – not red, in sober truth, but the orange of rust, which it basically is, ferrous oxide – and magnolias and azaleas and dogwoods, old fields long since cottoned-out, far from the Mississippi River bottomlands that were ‘rich as six feet up a bull’s ass’: a land of hogs and hominy, and a tangled, grim past of slavery and segregation. It could as easily be the country as far eastwards of the Mississippi as it is west: it would fit all too readily into the area between Brandon and Meridian, Mississippi, hard by the Bienville National Forest.
Markham Shaw PyleTags: texas deep-south east-texas piney-woods
As it happens, however, no one in my family recognizes the existence of an impossibility. (We’re not specially courageous, we’re just bullheaded as all get-out, and the whole lot of us as independent as a hog on ice. Every last one of us would argue with a wooden cigar-store Indian.)
Markham Shaw PyleNo matter where you go in East Texas, ‘Deep’ East Texas is always about twenty miles further in than wherever you are.
Markham Shaw PyleTags: texas deep-south east-texas piney-woods
In keeping with the Laws of the Prophet Bubba and the Code of the UIL, as set forth in the Book of First Downs, as the sun sets on Friday nights the rites of the Texas state religion are celebrated: high school, smash-mouth football. ‘And lo, the children of Jim Bob do take to the roads in caravans and they do go up unto the stadium by tribes, the Indians of Groveton, the Panthers of Lufkin, the Mustangs of Overton, and the very Wildcats of Palestine, and who shall withstand the traffic jams thereof?’ Thus is it written, and so it is and shall be.
Markham Shaw PyleTags: football texas deep-south east-texas piney-woods
But that’s the thing about East Texas. Red dirt never quite washes out, and pine pollen is tenacious as original sin. You can leave East Texas, for Houston, for the Metroplex, for the Commonwealth, for New York, or Bonn or Tokyo or Kowloon; but you can never quite leave it behind.
Markham Shaw PyleTags: texas deep-south east-texas piney-woods
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