Sunday Night Church

When we were growing up, we went to Sunday School and church at First Baptist, then at night, we went again--first to Training Union, then to church again.  In Training Union (aka BTU) we sat around in a room of kids our age and each of us had a part to read out of the manual--about two paragraphs each.  Then we talked about it and had punch and cookies and walked over to the sanctuary for church, just like morning church but better because there was more singing.

I sometimes played the piano for Sunday Night church--which is one reason I still know all those hymns by heart.  Usually while our parents talked on the lawn, Betty and I sat in the car and philosophized.

Tonight, Mike and I are feeling puny from the heat.  He worked in it all morning and while I went to a funeral, and it was 115 in the car when we set out to buy the matching chair we'd agreed to buy, but the owner called to say he wanted to keep it, so we came home and listened to an Audible book I'd been saving for Mike.

My Southern Journey by Rick Bragg is terrific--especially if you listen to it with another Southerner who knows the funny parts as well as you do, stories about preaching and aunts and dogs and food and cars and pocket books.

I'm sure the book is good, but listening to it in Rick Bragg's own voice is way better. Nobody but a real Alabama man can do Alabama talk--and this book takes Mike and me down the red clay roads we know so well. This is Sunday night church when it's too hot to go anywhere but into the voice of a storytelling man.

"It's the Mona Lisa of redneck living," Mike said.

It is that, sort of, but better.  Bragg manages to tell the stories without caricaturing the South or turning it into a cliche.  Maybe you had to grow up Southern to love it, but we did and we do.