Gordon and I made two trips over to see the Widow Thurman during my visit to the Cumberland Plateau. She was away both times. I was sorely disappointed not to see Lois. I wanted to hug her neck, and hold her tight for a minute. I haven’t see her since Bill passed.

Pam thinks maybe Lois has gone off to Florida to be with her son for the holidays. This has been a very hard year for her. I recall a conversation that Gordon and I had about Lois back in March. She has a heart arrhythmia. Gordon was telling me how worried Bill was about her.  They made several trips to the doctors, trying to ascertain how best to help Lois.

She won’t slow down for nothing. She mows, cooks, cleans, weeds, cans, collects the eggs from her hens. About the only thing Lois won’t do is sit still. Bill and Lois are about the hardest working retirees I’ve ever come across.

Oh, sure they did their fair share of seeing the world. Bill saw quite of bit of it during his two stints in the Navy. You remember me telling you about that, don’t cha? He enlisted twice -- once to get to the Phillipines and the second time to get home after his native girlfriend tossed him out on his butt when she learned he didn’t have PX access or a regular paycheck any more. Bill loved telling that story and I loved hearing it. The other thing Bill loved was that I could out talk Gordon. Not many people ever been able to do that, Bill said.

I last saw Bill when I was up to his and Lois’s place this summer, when I went to pick up Shelby and bring her home. Bill told me then that he had been having some problems, but the doctors thought it was colitis and gave him a prescription for pills that cost something like $400. I told Bill that if he didn’t have colitis before he got that bill, he ought to have afterwards. He laughed so hard at that. Bill said he was feeling good. He was real proud that he’d lost 20 pounds since I’d last seen him in April. He was back to his Navy weight.

As it turned out Bill didn’t have colitis at all. He had pancreatic cancer. There was nothing to be done for it. After a week at the VA hospital, he came home. He knew he was dying. He told Gordon he wasn’t in any pain. Now Gordon wonders if maybe Bill was just saying that, his way of not burdening others. Bill was that kind of guy. Never wanting to be a bother to anyone. Always willing to be of help.

It was Bill that Shelby called the day Butterbean killed the groundhog. Shelby was hoping like heck Bill would come on over and bury the dern thing, but instead, Bill told Shelby were to find the shovel. He didn’t know I’d raised a city girl.

Bill, who had one of the finest gardens in all of Crossville, seen to Gordon’s after Gordon fell ill in May. He and Hassel Ray, Gordon’s Sunday School teacher, made sure the plants got watered, fertilized, picked, and when the time come, turned under.

I keep thinking of all that’s happened in one gardening season. How Gordon and Bill fretted over Lois’s health, both of them thinking, fearing that Lois might collapse on them any minute. But instead, it was Bill who was gone, and Gordon who collapsed in May, just one short week after I’d been to visit him and Bill and all our other Crossville friends. I was in Auburn, Alabama when I got a frantic call from Pam. She told me Gordon had a stroke and was on his way to Chattanooga. I couldn’t believe it. Gordon, a stroke?

Turns out that was just a symptom to a bigger problem – a brain tumor -- the IED of melanoma. I spent a week with Pam and the kids, pacing the halls of a Chattanooga hospital, sleeping in the CCU waiting room, sunglasses on, no shower for days, trying to will Gordon better, certainly praying incessantly for God to give him more time. With his family. With me.

I was telling Gordon this past week about the day Charlotte, his sis, introduced me to some of his family in that hospital waiting room as “This is that gal Gordon met on the Internet.”

Charlotte didn’t mean nothing by it, but it came across for everything like I was one of those girls. Gordon had a good belly laugh over my telling him about that.

“Not too many folks have a friendship like ours, I guess,’ he said.

It’s an unusual friendship, I’ll admit. One borne out of stories. I’ve never met a person with more inventive use of words and stories than Gordon, and that was before his brain injury. I wish like anything I’d gotten him telling some of those stories on tape. The best I ever did though was type some up.

Gordon has come a long way since May, when he lay in that hospital bed, fighting enemies only he could see. He thought the Russians had killed everyone but him and Pam and they were after the two of them. A result of the invasive surgery and the post-operative drugs.

During his rehab, when Bill was tending to the tomatoes back home, Gordon grew exasperated with the cell phone. Unable to read or to recall how cell phones worked, he would hand it to Pam, call her Charlotte, and tell her to put it away.

Out in the hallway, on the way to his speech therapy, he cried, told me he was dying and how bad he felt for putting Pam through all of that.

I missed Gordon most in the mornings. He’d always wait till Pam was off to work, have his coffee and oatmeal, then call me. We’d talk about anything and everything. Sometimes, he’d call while he was out hunting rabbits. He’d hold the cell phone up and say,“Here that? My dogs!”

The dogs haven’t been rabbit hunting this season. But Gordon has learned how to use the cell phone again. He calls me most mornings. He doesn’t tell me nearly as many stories as he used too. And sometimes I have a difficult time making out what he’s saying, like this evening when he was asking me about that gal I wrote the book about. We had to go through this elimination process of what book, what gal, and what information it was he was seeking. I finally understood he was asking about Judge Rufe and her daughter Beth.

It’s frustrating, sometimes, to try and guess what Gordon is trying communicate. Sometimes we both just give up, and move on to another topic. He’ll say, “Awww shit. I just can’t get it.” I ‘ll laugh and tell him that it seems to me he remembers cuss words pretty well.

But sometimes, Gordon’s inventive language underscores for me that it is the context of the words that we use, and the way in which we use them that means as much as the words, themselves.

Like the other day, after we’d been by the Widow Thurman’s house. Gordon was telling me about Bill’s last days.

“Hassel Ray asked me if Bill was a kneeler,” Gordon said. “I didn’t know. But Hassel said he was just going to ask Bill. Bill told Hassel that he’d asked Jesus to come into his heart. He didn’t go to church, but if he asked Jesus into his heart, I think that makes him a kneeler. A man can be on his death bed, and if he’ll ask Jesus into his heart, then the Bible says he’s a kneeler. Don’t matter what else he’s done, or ain’t done. If he believes in the Lord Jesus Christ he’s a kneeler.”

Sometimes, when Gordon is talking like that, I just wonder if maybe being so close to death, the way he’s been lately, if maybe Gordon doesn’t see heaven better than the rest of us.

We think believing in the Lord Jesus Christ makes us Christians. But maybe Gordon’s right. Maybe believing in Jesus ought to make kneelers of us all.

Instead of calling this Thanksgiving Day, maybe we ought to call it Kneelers Day. Instead of bowing our heads around the table, we ought to get out of our chairs and fall to our knees and thank God for his healing power, his constant grace, and his everlasting mercies. And while we’re down there, on our knees, we ought to beseech him for peace on earth – around the world and especially in our homes, where our stories are being recorded every single day by those who observe us best – our children.

When my story ends, I hope I'm remembered best as a kneeler woman.  

Fairhope's Welcoming Party coming out to greet us.

Fairhope is home to something like 17 published authors. Big pants authors like Winston Groom and Fanny Flagg and other prolific folks. But don't be fooled. They come to Fairhope for the fishing, as much as the books.

Suzanne Hudson is the creative spark behind Ruby Pearl. Suzanne teaches 8th grade English and looks like a harmless soul, but read her novels and you agree that she makes Hitchcock look like a Sunday School teacher.

  

Shari Smith of Claremont, N.C. kept me up with tales of Walker and Avery, and a school principal who needs to have her mouth washed out with soap. Shari is good friends with Rick Bragg, oh, him of Shoutin fame. She's working on her first book. Or dern well should be.

Amy can find a friend anywhere she goes. I introduced her to Peggy from Mississippi and within minutes Amy learns that Peggy was her girlfriend Molly's 7th grade Sunday School teacher. Molly is a big celeb singer now, who kept calling Amy from the tour bus. Peggy exclaimed, "Molly is my baby girl!" when Amy asked if she knew her. "Is that what you say to everyone who asks if you know me?" I asked Joe Formichella. "Of course," he answered.

Joe stands in his kitchen, surveying the spread. The other thing folks in Fairhope llike to do is eat. Those cheese grits were to die for. As were Joe's own special crescent rolls. They can lay out a spread. We had gumbo two nights in a row.

I feel bad about not getting more photos of all the celebs that read at Fairhope. I have none of Miz Jackson or The Fennelly-Franklin duo. None of Mr. Sonny or the beautiful Pia, and her charming husband, Malcolm, though she is supposed to send me some. I wouldn't dare take a photo of Maude Schuler Clay, the famous Delta photographer, though I wish I had gotten a photo of her lovely daughter. Or at least one of Doug Crandall, of the Flawless Skin of Ugly People fame. Doug read a hilarious story about the year he went out for cheerleading to piss off his father, the coach. Funniest reading of the conference. He was delightful.

I wish I'd taken photos of the home of Skip and Nancy Jones, built right along the bay. Nancy said she has a hard time leaving the house since Katrina because she fears losing it again. It's a fine home built on property owned by Skip's grandaddy. I only wish Skip's father had lived to see the house that he's built. He would have been so proud of him.

I can't believe I didn't get a photo made with the beautiful Karen Abbott who read from her bestseller "Sin in the Second City." But then, again, maybe it's for the best. Standing next to someone that pretty can be harmful to one's image.

And I wish to a barefoot Jesus that I had taken photos of the home of  Mayor Everett of Water Branch. There's just no way to describe it. I'm hoping that Anne finds a way though. She & Alex are grad students at Ole Miss and both are fine writers. I think she ought to write a piece on the Mayor for Oxford American. Maybe during the shoe burning scheduled for this Saturday?

If you get the chance to go to Fairhope, telll my people I sent you.