Idle Minutes

Sometimes life is simple.

My grandfather kept a weathered, beaten up wooden table in his carport. It was kitchen counter height, about two-and-a-half feet square. It remained up against the red brick half wall surrounding the carport, in front of the white Chevy Impala, next to the decorative wrought iron corner post supporting the roof. Sometimes objects would be on it, like a bucket, or some fresh picked vegetables, or a stone, or hat.

The only time I knew that table to ever leave its assigned post was when it was time to cut up a watermelon. He would drag it away from the house out into the yard. On it he would place a large watermelon, ice cold from a galvanized steel tub of ice.

Then, from behind his back, stashed between his belt and waistband, would appear a very large, almost machete looking kitchen knife. With the compact and sudden swing of Babe Ruth’s bat, he would come down on the unsuspecting melon with that knife…and in the blink of an eye…it would lie in half on the table. He would proceed, less dramatically, to cut the halves into smaller, people sized pieces.

We would sit, family and neighbors…all ages, genders, and levels of refinement…and bury our faces in those watermelon pieces until nothing but hard rind was left. Slurping and spitting seeds and stopping for a breath, a chuckle, maybe a comment or two. It made for coolness on hot summer evenings. It made for wet faces, laughs and fine memories. It was simple entertainment…fun.

It is one tiny, maybe even mundane experience of many, that I associate with being a child of the South.

I know people all over this country have eaten watermelon outside in the summer and happily enjoyed it. They too have fine memories I’m sure. But to do so with the sweet, polite, drawled voices of Southern women bouncing comments back and forth…and the loud laughs and wheezing snickers of the Southern men sitting in a roughly formed circle of nylon webbed lawn chairs…and the cicadas buzzing loudly in the tall trees over our heads at dusk…that is what makes it a uniquely Southern experience for me and something I am very glad I can recall.