Category Archives: Mayville Memories

Our People, Our Place

A couple months ago, I watched a documentary about a young woman from my hometown. She was murdered, and the circumstances surrounding her murder were tragic. She was a mother. She was especially young — still a teen, if I remember correctly. They found her on a football practice field. I think about her when I drive past that field, which has since been landscaped with a garden in her memory.

Throughout the documentary, there were repeated mentions of how football has always been a huge cultural asset in our town. This is the kind of place where you have to make your own fun — throw a house party, go to someone else’s to hang out, or drive around looking for other people who don’t have anything else to do. There are restaurants that serve alcohol, but there aren’t any bars or clubs. The only “big” opportunity to get out and be around a crowd of people is to go to the Friday night football games, where there’s almost a guaranteed chance that our team will win, no matter who they’re playing against.

The town’s high school football program is near the top of the list of the “most winningnest schools” out of all the high schools around the country. It’s true that the football program is ancient, and that’s part of the reason they can claim so many wins. But football has cemented itself in this town. It’s the kind of thing that children are scouted for, from the time they’re six or seven – if they have talent, they will be playing football when they’re sixteen.

When it comes to professional sports, I’ve generally been more of a basketball fan than a football fan. But always I love to see local kids play well and get recognized for it. I’m always happy when they make it to the state tournament, because … well, they’ve earned the praise.

The documentary I mentioned earlier — about the young woman from our town — seemed respectful. The narrative covered more than the football program. Although the story of our town is intertwined with the stories and the fate of the people who live here, our town is more than just tragedy or triumph. The story of the town and its best features isn’t the same story as the story of what happened to her — her life and her death, and her family’s path to seeking justice.

It’s not winning titles that makes this town worthy of praise. The people around here are the ones who make everything what it is — from the teams to the neighborhoods, from the crowds at parades and games to the folks you see in passing. Not to sound overly sentimental, but the people around here make the town what it is.

Our people — the ones who care about each other — are really our best feature.

Natural Disasters

In this part of the country, we’re no strangers to big storms. We’ve survived thunderstorms, wildfires, and tornados.

I personally also survived doing tornado drills in too-tight low-rise jeans. I had to cover my backside with both hands, just to make sure I didn’t give away too many of my secrets. None of which were endorsed by Ms. Victoria.

Anyway, we live right alongside an earthquake zone. The last time we had a big earthquake, we were given — by the miracles of plate tectonics — an inland sea, otherwise known as a sag pond.

Next time, I hope we get a geyser. I want to have a mini-Yellowstone. Not like the TV show — more like the national park.

I’d prefer a geyser to a volcano. I don’t think I’m ready to try to handle any kind of lava, besides a chocolate lava cake.

My Cousin Died — And It Warped My Mind

I had planned on writing a much, much longer essay on how I became a germaphobe — something I struggled with at the beginning of the 2010s, managed to overcome by 2017 or so, and then struggled with again after March of 2020. (For obvious reasons.)

But this has been a tough thing to write about — and I really wanted to explore my germaphobic tendencies on a deeper level. I may get around to that, eventually. For the time being, here are some early notes I made on how I was personally/directly affected by the pandemic.

The mental strain was enormous, to the point that it spilled over into physical pain. I could feel the tension in my body, the ache of anxiety. And the tingling tension wasn’t the only physical manifestation of my stress. For about six months, I had a wound on my hand that wouldn’t quite heal.

My cousin’s death — during the height of the pandemic — rattled me. I was shocked, I was sad, I was pained.

Some would probably say that I should link that to the “excessive” hand washing we did back in the early part of 2020, but — no. I’m glad I tried to stay hygienic. And the hand washing was only part of the process. I would cover the wound, I would change the bandages, but it never quite closed over. The wound itself would itch and itch and itch, and it seemed like it would never heal. It was a visible manifestation of the way grief lingers.

Eventually, the wound began healing. It took months, though — and even now, I can look down at my hand and my memory can retrace the borders of the pain.

Back in the fall of 2020, as the pandemic was about to enter its first big wave, my older cousin — my mom’s cousin — contracted COVID. Within a few weeks, as she thought she was recovering, she had a stroke. She went to the hospital, and then to a nursing home. From there, she came back home — but this was only because she was placed in at-home hospice care. A few days afterward, she passed away.

Several things can be true at once. She was a bit older – but she wasn’t ancient, and she was still very active. She was disabled, true, but this was because of a recent car accident. A car accident that someone else caused, I should say, lest she be accused of being “old and senile.” Old people and senile people deserve respect and protection, of course — but my cousin was not doddery. She wasn’t the type to hurt herself or anyone else. She was agile and active and alert.

She could still walk just about anywhere — and she did. She went places. She was active — and not just in an I-like-to-go-out-and-sit-in-a-corner-of-my-garden way. That’s something that I do — and I’m not quite 30.

For her, activity meant being active. Moving. Being out and about with people. Going to a major social gathering, with hundreds or even thousands of people. That’s likely how she became sick in the first place.

But because she had a stroke, and then never recovered from that, it did something to me. It snapped some synapses or something.

I became afraid of ending up in her situation, fighting off a deadly disease, fighting for my (boring, but precious) life.

And I still think about her. I think about her all the time. Whenever anyone mentions the pandemic in the past-tense, as if they’re glad that it’s all behind us now, I think about how it causes lasting trauma in my own family.

I am sorry that my family is traumatized. Not because it inconveniences or annoys those who want to minimize the impact of the pandemic — but because I’m sorry that such large-scale trauma happened in the first place.

It’s something that lingers. Just like the happier memories, grief and trauma have a way of holding on, of not letting go. Of making an invisible wound — or a spot that closes over, but leaves an unfading scar.

“Jamais Mayville”: Explaining The Name

Have you ever heard of Peter Mayle? He wrote a bunch of books about living in Provence, which is a beautiful place that smells of lavender and sunshine and dreams.

Have you ever heard of Sally? She writes a blog about living in a Kentucky town that’s been anonymized with a fake name — a town called Mayville, which is a comme ci, comme ça place that doesn’t smell like lavender. It smells like vape clouds.

One of the wonderful Peter Mayle books is called Toujours Provence. For this blog, Sally turned that on its head and Googled toujours antonyme, to double-check her high school French. She decided that Jamais Mayville would be an appropriate name to convey … whatever it is that she wanted to convey.

And that’s how this blog was born.

Authenticity

I’m making a list — and I’ve already checked it twice. Earlier this month, I mentioned that there are some people obsessed with proving that they’re “authentically country” or “authentically Appalachian” or “authentically Southern.”

If you’re authentically doing your thing, then you probably don’t need to take great pains prove yourself. I don’t feel like I have to flash my credentials, but if you’d like to see them:

  1. My mom’s mom’s mom’s family — the folks on my maternal side — were sharecroppers. They picked tobacco and corn under the blanket of humidity that smothers western Kentucky every spring and every summer.
  2. My mom’s dad was a cattle farmer. He wasn’t a rancher — he was a farmer, with a small-ish farm and a wood lot and a pond for the cows and the snakes.
  3. My mom’s dad’s dad and his family were sorghum farmers.
  4. My dad’s mom’s brother and his family were cattle dairy farmers. They had cattle, but they mostly did dairy operations. They milked cows all the time and all of that. My dad would go over to the farm and bale hay. My dad’s cousin — one of his favorite cousins, a man whom we all remember fondly — would muck the stalls and sing “It’s Such A Pretty World Today” while he was … tidying up.
  5. My dad’s dad had a tobacco patch, but he never planted again after coming up a nickel short on his crop. (He didn’t make a profit. He lost money on that enterprise, is what I’m trying to say — and he never planted another tobacco patch.)
  6. My dad’s dad was a miner. He ran a dragline and did above-ground strip mining in the Western Coal Fields.
  7. My dad’s dad’s dad could sharpen an ax finer than anyone else in the county. (I’d noticed that this was the kind of job you could do while sitting down, which suited him. He was a pretty … casual man. He would always weigh down his bushels of turnips with rocks before going to the market. That’s just … that’s just how he was.)
  8. My dad’s dad mended and tarred his own fishing nets. He loved to go fishing out on the Tennessee River.
  9. My dad’s dad’s dad was a bona fide alcoholic. He would get … a little bit happy and float down the river — mostly for fun, but also because he didn’t have a license or a vehicle.
  10. My dad’s dad was good friends with the local bootlegger.
  11. My dad’s dad’s dad’s uncle was the oldest living Union Army veteran in Kentucky.
  12. My dad’s mom’s brothers played the violin and the mandolin. The mandolin-player put out an album when he moved down to Arkansas. (He was also a long-haul truck driver. He was a cool guy.)
  13. My mom’s dad’s mom played the guitar. She was a tiny little woman — unlike me, a big-built gal — but she was apparently quite the entertainer.
  14. My mom’s mom — my beloved grandmother — was a hairdresser and a laundress and a housecleaner.
  15. My mom’s mom’s mom ran a hamburger stand and worked in a munitions factory and a clothing factory. She was the real deal. She was hard-working and objectively beautiful. I only inherited the first part, but … I’m glad to be like her, in some small way.
  16. My dad’s mom’s brother was a long-distance trucker. I only found this out years and years after he’d retired. (I guess I mentioned this earlier — but it deserves a separate mention!)
  17. My dad used to drive a dump truck, while we’re talking about big trucks.
  18. My dad’s mom’s brother was blinded in a spar mining accident.
  19. My mom’s mom’s mom’s brother’s wife was blinded when she got chemicals in her eyes while sharecropping.
  20. My mom’s mom’s mom’s brother was shot and killed on his own brother-in-law’s front porch.

The guy who wrote Hillbilly Elegy has nothing on me.

Trouble

There were two times I got in trouble in high school.

The first incident involved a “mean” op-ed I wrote for our school’s newspaper. It was about a local high school that had 20 valedictorians while our school only had one valedictorian. (Two at most. One year, they dragged the GPAs out by four or five decimals and the students were still tied for first place — at least that’s what I’d heard. That time around, they awarded it to both students.)

The column basically said, “Wow, grade inflation is wild. They don’t do that at our school, and it’s probably a good thing, because they’re just getting us ready for college/the real world/the reality of being average.”

Apparently, students, parents, and administrators at the other school got mad at “being accused of being soft” or something like that. They were so mad that they called the superintendent of our district, and he came and smoothed things over, for me and for the newspaper staff. That was really, really great of him — to intervene on behalf of his students.

But sheeeeeeesh at the other school district’s superintendent, for trying to penalize and punish students at our school. Not because of violence, not because of threats, not even because of crosstown rivalry graffiti — because of 400-something words printed in a school newspaper.

I often say that I’m one of the most progressive, left-minded, open-minded people. But I can’t wrap my mind around arguing with a teenager over an opinion piece that honestly wasn’t too inflammatory.

Because of this incident, I learned a valuable lesson. Whatever words you write — even if it’s a relatively inoffensive statement — there will be someone who gets their panties twisted thong snapped. We live in a “You love pancackes? So you hate waffles, then! 😡” kind of world. It’s time to accept that.

Eat your pancakes, ****ers! Eat your pancakes! 🥞

The other time I got in trouble is less interesting. I nearly “failed” a drug test at school, because I’d already gone to the bathroom that morning. Ultimately, they had a teacher take me over to the local drug testing lab — where they test people who are starting new jobs, and where they test also people who are on parole, I guess. They had me come in around lunch time — after I’d had a few hours to chug a bunch of water — and then I was able to submit a sample.

I didn’t even do anything wrong — but everyone was put out by my inability to go to the bathroom on command. What can I say? I have an enormous bladder, and I wasn’t using any drugs. I swear.

The wildest thing about all of this is that they made every student who parked on campus take drug tests — and since I drove myself to school, the test was mandatory. This seems like the kind of overreach they’d only be allowed to get away with at some uber-parochial charter school. But I attended a public school.

The public schools around here are freakishly uptight — and if you need proof of that, look no further than the first few paragraphs of this post.

Those are the only times I remember being hollered at, or reprimanded, or glared at. Well, that last part isn’t true — I was always being glared at. But those were the only times I ever got close to getting a detention or a suspension.

One time, I did skip class and went to the drive-in with two of my friends. I just straight-up skipped class — and I went out to eat with probably two of the smartest, kindest kids in my math class. They were like, “Don’t worry about it! We won’t get in trouble, because it’s almost summertime! They won’t mind! No worries! 😇”

We didn’t get in trouble. They were absolutely right. Teachers really liked them, and … well, they were good kids. They really were!

That day, I learned another important lesson. I learned that, if I can befriend people who are more likable than I am, other people will give me grace — as long as I’m standing beside a cool or kind person.

It makes me want to be a kind person, too. Being cool isn’t in the cards — but I can be more likable by being more kind.

And I can do that much. I know that I can.

A Good Thing

The best part of living in this town?

The coolest person you know — someone who you admire, someone who you’re jealous of, someone who you want to impress — will never, ever want to move here.

You will never run out of the house with unbrushed hair (or unbrushed teeth!) and unexpectedly bump into them in Walmart or Save A Lot. It just won’t happen!

Not so bad, right?!

Judge of Character

For every person around here who sucks, there’s usually an explanation for their behavior. Not always — but more often than not.

I don’t mean an excuse — I just mean an explanation. I tend to consider that first, now that I’m older. I can figure out — either through recognition or through gossip — whether someone had a terrible childhood, an abusive relationship, a history of addiction, or some combination of these.

So I’ve learned to shut up — about some things. If I see racism or prejudice or some other shitty bullshit behavior, I still say something. But if I just see a miserable sadsack walking around with their crack* showing, then I try to realize that this person is probably just used to living like that.

That’s actually one of the reasons why I won’t settle in a relationship. I know that there’s a bigger, better world out there. And I know that most people around here have been beaten down by life — in a different corner of the world, their life might be much, much better.

Or worse, perhaps. That’s also possible. But the point still stands.

So I think about the folks I see around here, and I feel a degree of protectiveness for my brothers and sisters. These people are struggling. And I don’t look down on them — I look across the way at them, and I tell myself, “This is what the world has done to us, has made for us, and we can all try to be better. But we’re all just working with what we have.”

* Of the bottom variety. Not the nose candy variety.

Shell’s Belles

I like to gas up at 5:00 on a Friday, because it gives me a few minutes to pause and think. Because, by 5:03, I’ll be back on the road, trying not to get roped into a drag race with some guy in a V8.

I’m firing on six cylinders, so there’s always some show-off who wants to race. I’ve raced some people, sure, but I’m usually too emotionally exhausted to put much effort into impressing a guy in a big truck.

I stopped at one of our local Shell stations this evening. I was enjoying my little break before the long journey home. As I was gassing up, I noticed a guy with a big trailer was trying to pull into the gas station.

Now, my dad has a son, too, but he made sure that his youngest daughter also learned how to tie up/wrap my chains whenever someone needs to hook up a trailer. You have to tie the chains a little, you see, so that they’re suspended. So that they won’t drag on the road.

The chains on this trailer weren’t just dragging across the ground. They were making music, baby! So much janglin’ that I thought I was at an Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros concert. It was wild.

I looked away, because it was almost time for me to hang up the nozzle. And that was when I noticed a cobweb on the sign over the pump. I was torn: the side of me that likes cleanliness wanted to sweep it off. But the side of me that likes spiders — I really do! — didn’t want to disturb their web-weaving.

I ended up leaving the web alone. I’m not going to evict any spiders, because I’m not a landlord. Thank goodness.