The View From The Jury Room Window

It has been said that America's best days are behind her.  I don't believe it.  The color palette of life here is too vibrant and has too much to offer the world.  These colors are most vibrant in the small towns - especially in the south.  That's where I grew up.  The great hope of America was born in its small towns.  It lives there still.     

 

We have a chain store here and there, but there's a lot of those solo operators too.  I like them the best.  There's usually a story behind every one.  If the old Coca-Cola signs that hung around here for decades could talk, oh what stories they could tell. 

There was once a man I know in the town where I grew up who was a pharmacist.  He had his own pharmacy which he opened not too long after he graduated from pharmacy school at the University of Georgia. It was there before I was even born and it's still there to this day.

Before going to pharmacy school, it had been his goal to get an education and one day come back to this small town which he was from and provide a service to the people he grew up among.  It worked out pretty good for him and the people who lived in the small town went to see him when they needed a prescription filled.  He would try to help his customers out in other ways if he could.  Every now and then, people would need help with changing the batteries in their wrist watches or hearing aids and he would fix them.  There were other people who lived in the town who couldn't afford things like crutches, walkers or wheelchairs.  The pharmacist would buy secondhand items like this whenever he saw them for sale and he would keep them on hand to give to those who couldn't afford to buy them on their own.  Other people just needed to talk to someone because they had no one else to talk to so the far end of his pharmacy counter became a familiar place to many. 

One day after he had been there for some time but while his children were still riding bicycles with training wheels, a chain pharmacy expressed its intent to place a pharmacy in the small town. The location would be very close to the pharmacist's store.  In fact, the location was within a stone's throw from his store.  The company told him he should sell out or else face the wrath of its corporate machine.  Put another way, "hang it up or we'll put you out of business."  The only other private pharmacy in town closed under the shadow of the impending doom and shuttered its doors.  But the pharmacist I'm writing about didn't.  Of course, it was worrisome, even threatening but he held the line and stayed put.  He had to have had a belief about those customers who had allowed him to make a living in the small town but, as with all things in life, nothing is certain.

What the big outfit failed to factor into their plan was a reality that was hidden in plain sight.  It was a theme woven into the fabric of the small town.  That fact was that the pharmacist was the only pharmacist in the county who would get out of bed at 2:00 a.m. on any random night to fill prescriptions for those who had just returned from the emergency room after a scare from a heart condition or after their child had been hurt or had a fever or for any other time when there was a need.  The chain didn't offer that service and never would.  But the pharmacist always did.

If you've read this far and you're from around here, you probably know by now the pharmacist I'm writing about is my father, Joe Sumner.  If you pass through Wrightsville, Georgia on Highway 15, you'll see Sumner Pharmacy just across the road from the courthouse.  I think the arrival of Rite-Aid was the best thing that ever happened to him.  It's probable that the customers of the private pharmacy that closed shop simply moved their business across the courthouse square to Sumner Pharmacy, the only other private pharmacy in Johnson County.  He's no longer the only pharmacist there these days.  They have three now.  And they even have a Facebook page!  Who would have ever seen that coming after almost five decades?  Be sure to Like em'. 

After I graduated from law school and began practicing, I was set start a jury trial in the Superior Court of Johnson County and I was going through all the hypotheticals in my mind.  I had worked for days trying to cover every last detail so I'd be prepared for everything the other side might try to pull.  What a jury will do with a case is inherently unpredictable.  If a lawyer ever tells you that a certain result is guaranteed, they're either lying or too inexperienced to know better.  In the process of it all, I sat down with my client to prepare for trial.  I went through the scenarios with him and started discussing the upside and downside and he cut me off clean and said,

"I hear what you're telling me and I appreciate it and all but I'm gone tell you I think we in pretty good shape here."

"I think so too" I said, "but I just want to make sure we cover everything...".

He cut me off again.

"You want me to tell you why I think we in good shape?"

"Yes sir, I'd love to hear it."

"Well, cause our side of the case is accurate and truthful and I believe in the people around here."

So I said, "I agree but you never know who will wind up on a jury so that's no guarantee."

"Well" he said, "I still feel pretty good even aside from that concern.  You ever sat on a jury?" 

"I've been called for jury duty and showed up but never actually sat on one."

"You know what juries do when they thinkin' about a case and especially if they get bored?  They get up and walk around and look out the window of the jury room.  That's what they do."

So I said, "What in the world are you trying to tell me here?"

"What I am trying to tell you is if you look out the jury room window of the Johnson County Courthouse, what you gone be staring right square at is Sumner Pharmacy.  And, n'case you didn't know by now, your daddy is the only man in a thirty mile radius who will let folks charge their diabetes medication, heart pills, blood pressure pills and Viagra.  Hell, I feel real damn good about it... how many of them jurors you think is gone look out that window and think the same thing about that Atlanta lawyer we been dealin' with?  Not a single one.  So I feel real damn good.  Yes sir I do."

He was right.  The case settled.

Rural America isn't perfect but it's the only place where you can still see a living Norman Rockwell painting if you know where to look.  If huge cities are the economic muscles of America, then small towns are its heart.  And Wrightsville has a big heart.  If you break down here, we'll look out for you and, if necessary, get your prescription for nitroglycerine refilled if you happened to have left yours at home.  Go to the pharmacy on the corner across from the courthouse.  If they ain't open, I know someone who will drive back into town to take care of you. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Little Monuments

I spend a lot of time in the woods walking and working on tracts of timberland.  The face of the south is constantly changing.  In some places, it changes because of urban sprawl and development.  In other places, the land changes simply because change is in the natural order of things. 

 

Part of change is loss.  Loss of what once was.  It's a difficult thing to grasp but it's part of the human condition.  Sometimes, the loss is personal to us.  Other times, it's not and we can only see evidence of the loss as we walk the same ground long after the lives involved played out. 

 

The two graves above belong to Dollie and Izza Sumner.  They would have been my paternal great aunts.  My grandfather, Carl Sumner, used to take me with him when he put flowers on the graves of his family members who are buried in the cemetery at Bethany Baptist Church and in the Wrightsville City Cemetery.  He was the youngest of eleven children and outlived them all so he had a lot of graves to tend to.  He made the rounds on every special holiday and sometimes at random on regular days because he just wanted to put fresh flowers on the graves.  I was with him on just about every mission.  Especially when school was out.  I asked him question after question about everything thing under the sun as we travelled the dirt roads of Johnson County in his pickup truck.  I had particular difficulty with the size of the graves of Dollie and Izza since it appeared to me that they were mighty small and it was my belief at the time that only "grownups" of advanced age died.  He explained to me over the course of those afternoons that they were his baby sisters who had left here to live in Heaven.  Granddaddy wasn't born until 1918 so Izza would have been twenty years older than him.  I assume he referred to them as his baby sisters simply because they died as infants so that's how his mind's eye always viewed them.  Regardless, I finally came to terms with it and thereafter assumed them to be angels who watched over us on our routine journey.

 

Now that I myself am a grownup, I understand the harsh reality of what had happened... they took ill shortly after birth and there was nothing any medical doctor of the day could have done to save them.  This is change and loss in the worst way.  But, again, it is part of being human.  It makes me understand now why Granddaddy always insisted that I wear a jacket in the winter.  He didn't want me to "take cold." 

 

Behind the cemetery in which Dollie and Izza Sumner were buried as infants is another cemetery.  It is on a hill that, in its day, would have looked out over vast agricultural fields.  Monstrous pine and white oak trees now tower over the land and keep vigil over the last remaining hint of lives that were.  

 

This cemetery has kept its secrets well.  There is little to no record that I am aware of as to who was laid to rest there.  Scattered among the graves are seemingly wild growing Easter lilies.  Maybe they're descendants of those originally planted by the families of those who are buried there.  Those who may have known are long since dead.  Every one has a story but we'll probably never know it. 

 

The likelihood is that this was a slave cemetery though it was probably used some after the Civil War.  The hill is pockmarked with graves but you have to know what you're looking for to realize it.  Were it not for a few grave markers, I might have never known it was hallowed ground.  Now that I do, I have been able to identify the depressions in the earth as graves.  It is covered with them. 

 

The one that strikes me most is marked very simply, "Babe."  Probably a stillborn child.  I have often wondered what caused his or her passing.  I have been to see it more than once.  It's a 4x8 monument to a life that may have been.  Yet, the child's parents who had to have been poor clearly loved him or her enough to place this little monument on the hill in hopes that it would stand for the ages.  It has.  As long as we own the land, it always will.  But, we too shall pass and time and the earth will constantly grind away to reclaim it. 

 

This leads me back to what Granddaddy told me about Dollie and Izza.  Their time here was short but their permanency wound up existing where you'd want it to be.  Jesus loves the little children.  Granddaddy was right... Dollie, Izza and Babe could care less about what happens to their little monuments.  It's where they are that counts.  

 

 

 

    

 

Chapter One: A pine cone fell.

In one way or the other, my life is inextricably linked to pine trees and small towns. Some see it differently, but I've always thought those two things to be positives in my life. I always will. The confluence of the two have made me who I am. There are stories of both that are at the same time legendary, hilarious, despicable, depressing and triumphant. I hope to tell them all here and expound upon my observations on walking the path of life that chose me as I never really had a choice in the thing.

 

I have come to know and love old trees and old souls. I have walked along sunny pine ridges punctuated by the morning sun and in deep swamps shrouded in fog and low hanging shadows and Spanish moss - both literally and figuratively. The ground I have tread in life has been about as varied as you can imagine. I have learned from every step and misstep along the way.

I was dealt a fortunate hand on the day I was born. I was born to parents and grandparents who loved me and gave me opportunities in life that I didn’t deserve but for which I am eternally grateful. They taught me to appreciate things in life which I hope to write about. I want to point out the goodness in the lives and the stories and to make sure what I have learned doesn’t die with me. As a childhood bystander, I came to value people and to listen to their stories. Every person has a story and some of the best are from those that you will never hear about unless you live among the people I have known. The tales are varied but each one is unique. I hope I can do them justice. They deserve it. Stories like this are just as big as any other, they just need to be told.

I hope you enjoy what I put out there. It is a pleasure to be able to write it. All of it is from my perspective of growing up under tall Georgia pines.