Two poodles, a hound, and a beloved magazine
Every couple of months, Garden and Gun magazine will arrive in our mailbox at our home in Atlanta, and on the evening the issue arrives — each with its beautiful cover of glossy hunting dogs, or banjo players, or mint-juleps, or cast-iron pans filled with cornbread or fisherman’s stew — my wife Mary Howard (yes, a double-name), and I will turn to the story section of the magazine called “Good-dog,” and engage for 20 or so beautiful minutes in one of the very best rituals of our marriage.
Mary Howard will sit on the chaise-lounge in our bedroom with her two, blackish-grey toy poodles (Louis and Huck) and a glass of wine, or some other spirit, sometimes bourbon, sometimes scotch. I’ll sit on the bed next to our brindle hound-mix rescue (Angus The Man, named after my father’s Old English Sheepdog of the same name), and I’ll read with the best Tennessee mountain accent I can conjure. Every story details the author’s first person experience with some honorable canine that brought love and tranquility and frustration and joy to the author’s life, and then, eventually, taught the author some universal truth about what it means to both love, and to say goodbye.
These stories, mixed with end of day fatigue, the flush of good alcohol, and the love we feel for our own dogs, invariably succeed in choking us up. Me, as much as Mary Howard. And so we read of dogs together, and feel the security and gratitude that can sweep over a person when they’re moved by the experience of it all, and perhaps more directly, by the trusting eyes of the pups in their care.
The most recent issue of Garden and Gun arrives at a strange time. We are roughly a week into widespread quarantining in response to the spread of Coronavirus. Without a plan for collective action from the federal government, states are acting independently, and 48 hours ago California mandated what is effectively the state-wide house-arrest of tens of millions of people. The economy, especially Main Street, is grounding to a halt, and restaurants that have been long-standing community public houses are facing bankruptcy overnight.
The subject at hand in the current issue of Garden and Gun is saving the south, and its pages are dedicated to the heroism of 30 people who have given their lives to preserving ecological, culinary, architectural, and artistic traditions across the Southeast. With the uncertainty and fear that looms across the world right now, the current issue is even more inspiring than it could have intended to be. The issue is introduced by Jon Meacham, the famous historian, who was raised on Missionary Ridge, overlooking Chattanooga, and his essay is a reminder of the South’s great centrality to the American experience. To its traditions, rituals, landscapes, and foods that we should strive to preserve. And to its original sins — African slavery and the liquidation of indigenous peoples. But, as Meacham writes, the South is to be loved in spite of its sins, for it is more than a region. “We think of it as a region, but really it is a realm, a sovereign entity beyond geography and beyond time: it defies easy categorization,” he writes.
The fact of the matter — well, truth be told it is no fact, just a turn of phrase — is that Meacham’s introductory essay, concisely delivered at barely ~1200 words, is a masterful expression of what makes living worthwhile: the ritual of place, the necessity of honoring memory without falling captive to it, the unending conversation between past and present, the confrontation between dreams and constraints. As Flannery O’Connor observed of Southerners, they have “enough sense not to ask for the ideal but only for the possible.”
Meacham references Robert Penn Warren, who wrote, “poetry is a redemption from the accident, error, and evil of life — and of our lives.” And also Thomas Wolfe, whose protagonist in You Can’t Go Home Again describes memories of his native North Carolina, “I had known… the magic of young green in April… and October with the smell of fallen leaves and wood smoke in the air… The forgotten moments and unnumbered hours came back to me with all the enormous cargo of my memory, together with lost voices in the mountains long ago…”
As a historian, Meacham’s responsibility to us all is to provide memory that is as balanced and objective as possible. When historians are successful, they bring to remembrance both the acknowledgement of our failures, and the courage and inspiration to maintain an ancient human enterprise: striving to improve life for those we love, most especially our children. As Tennyson’s Ulysses said, “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
What’s beautiful and powerful about Meacham’s essay are the references and ackowledgements he makes to some of the region’s greatest artists. Faulkner, Penn Warren, Wolfe, Baldwin, O’Connor… But the American south is more than Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, and so forth. It is also the Cherokee Nation, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Ireland, India, Scotland, Spain, Morocco, and on and on. When Meacham writes, “we’re a part of all that we have met — for good and for ill — and what we’ve met in the American South must never be forgotten,” then the south, too, has some strand of origin in Tennyson’s windy plains of Troy and Ulysses’ hungry-hearted pursuit of knowledge.
If the essence of being human is storytelling, then all we encounter is mythology. The companies we work for, the nations we’re born in, the money we use to comfort and feed ourselves, the people we fall in love with and marry. If all is mythology, then ritual is central to the preservation of it all. In a few short months, if we are lucky, Mary Howard and I will read the next issue of Garden & Gun, and we’ll weep (or laugh, as we are susceptible to both) over some glorious terrier, retriever, hound, or shepherd. Angus will look lazily up at us, as we fawn over him, and the two little poodles will jump around in a state of near delirious enthusiasm for Mary Howard’s affections.
