Sometimes, it can be a chore to travel back to Ladoga, or an errand. I’m usually there to run errands with my grandmother who lives just off Johnson St. in the southeast, in the vicinity of the turkey processing plant that gives the area a distinct smell. She’s old and doesn’t drive anymore, so I stop by when I have the time to drive the forty-five minutes it takes to get there, usually every other week. Even at eighty, she is very lively and I imagine that she will live many more years and I will have a date to the state fair in Raleigh for a while; my girlfriend refuses to go, she has never understood the charm of the state fair and if I’m being honest, I think that she may even be afraid of it, all of the huge pigs and vegetables. She told me about a nightmare she had once; she was stumbling through the various attractions at the fair, chased by a wild boar with huge tusks. I like the ribbon contests but I don’t press the issue with her, I wouldn’t want her having flashbacks during the announcement of a blue ribbon winner. My grandmother doesn’t have those hang-ups and actually entered the pie contest in her youth, though she never placed. I liked to hear my grandmother talk about the life she’d lived, it was interesting to hear how the world had changed.
Aside from my grandmother, there aren’t many people in Ladoga that I keep a conversational attachment to. Or, I had never really attempted a real, sit down, talk it out, relationship with anyone else before. I sometimes run into teachers that I had when I was younger, and those interactions are all the same, questions about my life since school, how the school has changed. I can’t say that I’m not interested in talking to them about anything; their lives, their opinions of the state of education in the city for example; it just never comes up naturally. Old school friends are similar. We can talk about our kids, our partners, our jobs, but never real conversation, just the details that could be just as easily found online. How do you get people to engage without sounding nosey or without asking the very awkward obvious question; would you like to have a conversation? Because if you have to ask so blatantly then the conversation will be painful; long pauses where each participant scans their recent memory for interesting topics of discussion that will no doubt fizzle out in no time.
I figured out, though, that good conversation springs up if you ask the right questions.
My grandmother does a lot of canning and everyone in the family gets gifts of mason jars with homemade jams or preserves. She likes to go to the farmer’s market on the edge of town and I drive her there at the end of each month to see what fresh fruits and vegetables are available. It was there that I made an adult friend who wasn’t a coworker or old school mate, a man named Danny Brown who lived in nearby Stallings but drove to Ladoga to sell his collard greens because he always made more money at our farmer’s market than he did in his own town. Every time I went to the farmer’s market after the first time I met him, Danny and I would talk, laugh, and even though we were friends, it was fine that we only saw one another at his table, covered in greens. Sometimes changing the scenery of a friendship can ruin the friendship; maybe that says more about the friendship than anything else.
One day we were talking and he mentioned that he was souping up his car for drag racing. He whispered that he and his friends drove out to Rockingham in the middle the night and used the abandoned track for their clandestine drag racing club. They all had classic cars with loud engines and he was slowly restoring a Charger that he hoped to have up and racing soon. I was eager to try it for myself but he discouraged it, showed me a long scar that stretched from the bottom of his neck and up to his head.
“Flipped four times; came around the turn, damn car just flipped. Knocked my brain loose, wasn’t supposed to wake up. But here I am, still doing it.”
The racing lost its cool then. I asked him why he continued to do it.
“It’s fun. And while my brain was rattling around my head, I was dreaming, and something about those dreams made me feel OK about racing again. Like, that’s the kind of stuff life is supposed to be about, if you’re living it.”
I asked about the dreams he’d had and he couldn’t tell me. “I only know that I was doing something that made me feel OK.”
I wondered if he kept racing in hopes of finding those dreams again, for good this time, but I didn’t ask him. I didn’t want to accuse him of being suicidal.
Another time we talked, he told me that he sometimes went to Waxhaw late at night and woke the bull on a farm he’d found in the rural part of town. “They sleep standing up and if you smack ’em hard enough on the back, they wake up screaming and running.” He showed me the piece missing from his abdomen where the bull had gorged him and ruptured his spleen. “Doctors said I was the luckiest man they’d ever seen, damn bull could’ve ripped my guts out.”
“Did you dream again while you were in surgery?”
“I did,” he said, “I swear I did, but I just don’t know what.”
Danny wasn’t married, but he said that he had proposed to his daughter’s mother on more than one occasion. “She thinks I’m trying to kill myself.”
“Are you?”
“Nope. Why would I do that? I got everything I need. I ain’t rich but I get by, make enough between growing stuff and doing construction jobs with my buddy in town. My daughter loves me, I can provide for her. And I got my cars. I’m happy, man. I just like to have fun and I ain’t scared of nothing. I don’t think there’s any reason to be.”
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