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| Some pleasures too good to share, plus 2 more |
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We may strive for fame and fortune, but it’s the little things (sometimes tiny things) that give life its zest. We stockpile these treasures, sharing them only with people who treasure them much less than we do. Life’s charms may include: • A friend who has read the three greatest novels of the Western Hemisphere: Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” Herman Melville‘s “Moby-Dick” and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” • A downtown parking meter that sticks with 20 minutes until time expires. • A meadow in the Pryor Mountains where a small stream flows from the mouth of a cave. Fat brook trout crowd the pool at the cave’s mouth. Nearby, June berries ripen in August. Lazuli buntings and calliope hummingbirds garnish the scene. • A small-town juke box that plays Roy Acuff’s “Wabash Cannonball.” • • • While still hoarding the blessings posted above, I have persuaded myself to share these listed below:Pie! The Prairie Winds Café in Molt serves homemade pie that will make you hug yourself and giggle. This isn’t pie like mama used to bake. This is pie mama wished she could bake. Consider these flavors: Peach crumb, buttermilk walnut, raspberry cherry crumb, blueberry crumb, triple berry, rhubarb berry and oatmeal. The Prairie Winds occupies the only brick building in town. The sign above the door reads, “Hardware.” The sign is a souvenir of decades past. The hardware store closed and the building housed a grocery store and post office. Just before the grocery store folded, a wanted poster featured an attractive and forbidding photo of a black woman, haloed with a large Afro - Angela Davis, a 1960s political activist and university professor who was associated with the Black Panther Party for Self Defense and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The post office that occupied one corner of the building is gone. Tables cover the floor, which was once divided by grocery aisles. Knickknacks, curiosities and antiques fill the shelves lining the walls - Red Wing crocks in several sizes, a hornet’s nest as big as a shoat, several old signs and three Bill Long albums. Bill Long (known to members of his lodge as “Traveling Bill”) played the fiddle and was an in-demand judge of old-time music. The music he loved is featured every Saturday at the Prairie Winds. Come early if you want a seat. You will find Molt by taking Rimrock Road out of town and continuing for 35 miles west. The café opens at 9 a.m. and closes at 3 p.m. Breakfast is served until 10:30 a.m. If you arrive too late for bacon, eggs and flapjacks, have the pie for breakfast. Have the pie for lunch. Have the pie for goodness sakes. • • • Gospel music to fill your soul and thrill your heart. A friend invited me to go to church with her. Accepting her invitation was easier than trying to wriggle out of going. “Church” was the regular Sunday morning service at the All Nations Church at 2520 Fifth Ave. S. All Nations is a sizable fragment of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 2508 Fourth Ave. S., which was splintered by a clash between the AME pastor and some of his flock. Both All Nations and the AME Church are predominantly black. Both welcome everyone. The two churches are a block apart. All Nations dispenses “ol’ time religion” with a liturgy that includes altar call, requests for baptism, a passionate sermon and song. The minister announced the hymn by its number. A half-dozen women took their place in a line before the pulpit. The opening was a jubilant moan. The hair on the back of my neck stood erect as practiced voices blended as one instrument. They sang “God Is on the Main Line.” It gave me the shivers. “God is on the Main Line. Call him up. Call him up … If you want to heal your body, call him up, call him up.” They sang “Amazing Grace,” “In the Garden” and the “Old Rugged Cross.” They sang the hymns of my childhood and sang them with a power that rattled my reverie. Maybe sometime, somewhere, perhaps in the deep South in a church at an unmarked crossroads, I might someday stumble into a feast like the one served at All Nations that morning. More likely, I will pay $45 to $60 to hear a gospel singer who has quit the home town to cash in on God-given talent. Or, I could return to the All Nations Church on a Sunday morning. |
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