I drove out to Ed's Shed on the causeway today to have lunch with Roy Hoffman and John Sledge. Roy and I met several years ago at Jacksonville's Much Ado About Books Festival. A terrific event where I was fortunate enough to meet many of the folks I still consider good friends. Roy wrote a book with one of the best titles ever -- Chicken Dreaming Corn. http://www.southernscribe.com/zine/authors/Hoffman_Roy.htm

Roy has the best hair of any writer I've met to date -- male or female. Great hair might be a sign of success. I think the rest of us tear ours out -- or each others.

Now Ed's Shed doesn't look like much from the causeway. The parking lot is gravel. There's standing pools of water. There were a dozen or so motorcycles in the parking lot. And a sign on the chalkboard declaring, "We serve comfort food."

They ain't bragging. Just telling the truth. I ate the best bowl of turnip greens I've ever eaten at Ed's. And the shrimp was big and fat and, praise Jesus, not overly fried. Just mmm, mmm, good.

Roy had called ahead of time and told me a little more about Sledge. I knew him as the book reviewer for the Mobile Press-Register, but not much else. Roy told me about Sledge's work, specifically his Cities of Silence, art book about Mobile's cemeteries. I marched straight out my back door to the library and sat down and read the book. If you love cemeteries, and I do, this is a compelling book. It opens with the story of Emma, a young girl who dropped dead during a game of softball with friends, when her young heart just give out. 

The photographs in Cities are a study in and of themselves. None are more heartbreaking that the one of Emma, laying still in death, her chestnut curls as lovely as if she was dressed for Easter Sunday. But there's that creepy photo of one of the Merry Widows, a mystic club in the region that visits the grave of a man named Cain, I believe, sometime shortly before Mardi Gras, carrying on continued grief for a man long dead. Like we ain't got enough to grieve over. We gotta be carrying on over someone we never knew. I am going to visit a couple of the graveyards that Sledge highlights in his book. The tombstones are works of art that I want to see for myself after reading Sledge's stories.

Roy also told me about Sledge's daddy, E.B. Sledge, who wrote one of the most defining books on WWII -- With the Old Breed. It has been regarded as one of the best pieces of war literature ever written. Here's a sample:

"Even at a distance Peleliu was ugly with the jagged ridges and shattered trees. Haney came up alongside me and leaned on the rail. He looked gloomily at the island and puffed a cigarette.

"Well, Haney, what did you think of Peleliu?" I asked. I really was curious what a veteran with a combat record that included some of the big battles of the Western Front during World War I thought of the first battle in which I had participated. I had nothing in my experience to make a comparison to Peleliu.

"Instead of the old salt comment -- something like "You think that was bad, you oughta been in the old Corps" -- Haney answered with an unexpected, "Boy, that was terrible! I ain't seen nothin' like it. I'm ready to go back to the States. I've had enough of that."

"A common misconception has it that the 'worst battle' to any man is the one he had been in himself. In view of Haney's comments, I concluded that Peleliu must have been as bad as I thought it was even though it was my first battle."  

                                                                       __________

We sat out on the deck, with the wind whipping the bay water like a pissed off Rachel Ray. John, smart boy that he is, wore an Oxford Square Books cap. But Roy and I had to contend with hair blowing everywhichaway, as we discussed World War II, Vietnam, & Iraq. We talked of writers and growing up and the politics of it all. Then we posed for a photo and parted ways. Good turnip greens and thoughtful conversation, what more could any person want in a day?