As you probably know, Montgomery is the capital of Alabama, so we drove by the capitol building and other historic monuments, including many from the Rebel days of the Confederacy and Civil War. Montgomery was the first capital of the Confederacy. I'm not sure how many tourists visit Alabama as a destination, but I assume many focus on this city. My only reason for bringing it up, however, is that this is where my mother's baby sister, Ann, settled with her family. My Aunt Ann looks a lot like Shirley Temple, and when my mom was a little girl with dark curly hair, she said people told her she looked like Shirley Temple too, so I would guess that Ann always had to live up to the straight A's and sweet attitude of my mom. In addition to being a great mother and wife, Ann had a successful career with AT&T. When I think about the fact that this family was raised in a house without indoor plumbing, I am amazed at how the different family members blossomed and led the way for their descendents.
When my family moved to California, I was six months old, and the story goes that my teen-aged Aunt Ann picked me up in her arms and ran off, temporarily delaying my family's departure. Within a few minutes, we were on our way, but that strong attachment between my Aunt Ann and our family remained. She married Roy, a wonderful man from Tennessee, a short time after we moved, and a year or so later, she gave birth to my cousin Steve, who became one of my best friends over a series of summertime vacations. Upon returning to Alabama on this Bi-Centennial trip, Steve and I immediately had that same rapport again.
Steve took me to one of his new favorite restaurants, Pizza Hut, to have a shrimp pizza along with his beautiful girlfriend, Cherry. I had to ask what a babe like her was doing with my cousin, and she just laughed. This was definitely different than the old days playing at the farm, but it was again fun. In fact, Steve to a large extent was the reason I stayed longer in Alabama than I had planned. He took me to a car race, and I think on this trip we also went to a demolition derby, although that might have been on my 1970 vacation. He also had tickets for a country rock concert a few days away, and I ended up sticking around to see Tanya Turner and several others whose names now escape me. The festival was quite different from the ones in Los Angeles. It was more spread out, and everyone was more sociable, almost like a family reunion. As I recall, we spent a lot of time standing near Steve's car, so it was almost like a tailgate party with live entertainment. When I saw ZZ Top with my buddy Mike in Texas last year, it had that same affable feel among the crowd. I have lots of stories about Steve, but for now I'll just say that after college, he became a cop, and for me that at least puts a hole in all the stereotypes of southern cops from the movies. He is a good man with a sense of humor. When my family drove off from the airport in our rental car in 1991, I was surprised to find the flashing lights of a police car behind me. What had I done wrong? When the policeman stepped out of his car smiling, I knew immediately that he was cousin Steve pulling my leg.
Steve's little sister Angie was separated by enough years that we considered her the baby when we were kids. One time when I was about twelve, I remember Angie picked up a loaded revolver and pointed it at us, smiling broadly and yelling "Bang, bang." That led to a short lecture about gun safety, but it didn't stop people from leaving loaded weapons lying around. Everybody was comfortable with guns, and shooting cans was always a highlight of the trips for me. Angie was a pretty teen-ager in 1976, and when I returned in 1991, she had become a gracious hostess, letting my family stay with her family in their beautiful log cabin in the hills about twenty minutes outside Montgomery. That's something amazing about Montgomery. While it is an urban hub, a short drive out of town you can be totally in a different world, surrounded by trees, streams and wild animals.
My Uncle Roy also spent a lot of time with me on this trip. He brought me along as he traded CBs off the side of country roads. "This one'll walk and talk," he'd say as a sales pitch. I don't know what that meant, but everyone was affable and smiling, and the trading was fun. He had been a mechanic for Hall Brothers Dairy much of his life, and he is a mechanical genius. He engineered many innovations for the dairy, complicated systems that recycled manure to fertilize fields where cattle feed was grown and others that milked hundreds of cows at once. Like Tim Allen, he reads "Popular Mechanics" and "Popular Science" with the glee that a teen-aged girl might read "Seventeen."
In 1976, he looked at my long hair and warned me to watch out for people who didn't like hippies in those parts. He showed me a magic trick with something that was like a spike with a loop of rope tied to it, and then he gave me the device. "This is a fun little trick, but if you get in trouble," he said, and then he gripped the spike like a weapon and made a quick upward motion. He raised his eyebrows. "Ya understand?" Imagine that little speech delivered by a southern Steve McQueen, which is how I've always thought of Uncle Roy.
I decided to mention Lake Martin at the end. When I recently checked at Realtor.com, I noticed that Lake Martin has become a big-time vacation spot, with lakefront home prices that such places demand. My cousins took me up there again on this trip, driving through those beautiful mountain roads. I think it was Donald's speed boat, but it might have been Reba's or Reggie's. Anyway, they taught this city boy to water ski. All of them got up right away and skied like experts, and I was sure they must be playing a trick on me when every time I tried to stand, the boat would either slow down forcing me to fall on my rear or speed up, pulling me off my feet, both of which resulted in uproarious laughter from those on the boat. Eventually, I got the hang of it, and that was a magical day. I never went waterskiing again until Julie and I went on a Windstar cruise to Tahiti a few years ago. Unless my cousins had a very elaborate hoax set up, I have to say that I probably was as bad as I seemed on that 1976 waterski adventure. In fact, it was probably their generous spirits that allowed me to stand at all. I wish I had some photos of that day.
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