The Nature of Rich(es)

or

The Second Annual Carpetbaggers’ Ball

or

Bless Their Hearts


The early Tennessee sun has baked my black plastic mailbox hotter than a skillet-load of biscuits in a wood stove. I go to pull the door open and then jerk my fingers away.

Hatcha hatcha!

Fortunately, the heat has mummified the spring black widow crop. Behind their shriveled little bodies I find a thick stack of mail. Utility bills, credit card statements, and slick glossy catalogs of slick glossy models in slick glossy lingerie. Sad evidence that for the past several days I have been Neglecting my Duty.

So I open one of the catalogs.

Hatcha hatcha!

~

Thus preoccupied, I fail to notice the letter from Noah until after I’ve walked up the hill, through the woods, and past my tomato garden. But before I can open the envelope I meet my friend Rich in the driveway. He’s sweating and shoving a kayak into the back of his SUV. He shoves and shoves and eventually shoves it right on through the windshield.

Rich is doing his darnedest to destroy this vehicle. It is, after all, a Rental. People’s Exhibit A: on the way home from kayaking at Rock Island he and Kenny contrived to explode one of its massive off-road tires doing an illegal U-turn through a cactus garden donated to the City of Dayton by the Daughters of the Confederacy.

But Rich and Kenny and Mark and Sue—and all the other Carpetbaggers who have come to my refuge in the hill country to kayak and shoot the breeze and drink beer for a few days—all of these people are strangers in Dixie. They do not understand our ways.

Bless their hearts.

~

Written letters are a treat. Nobody writes anymore.

Noah and his wife Sarah live in a Mennonite community a short distance away from my house. Well, their community would be “a short distance away” in Rich’s SUV, but it’s more like an hour in Noah’s horse and buggy.

I’ve found them to be honest, hardworking farmers who eschew modernity, praise God in High German, and grow vegetables to shame the Devil. Perhaps Noah writes such good letters because he’s never owned a telephone.

When I get one of his letters I sit on the porch and unfold it in my lap and read it. And then I rock in the sun for a while before reading it again.

My wife and I first met Noah at the Mennonite community’s little produce market, where I was buying tomato seedlings. Noah invited us to visit his home. We did so, and learned the following:

Noah and Sarah have thirteen children.

Adam was the first farmer. “Be fruitful and multiply” was one of God’s first commandments to him.

Hatcha hatcha!

~

One of the Southern Ways the Carpetbaggers are slowly learning is that down here you can say anything you want about anyone as long as you bless their heart immediately afterwards.

Kenny comes out on the front porch carrying a dripping box of neoprene gear. “You got my boat loaded yet?” he hollers at Rich.

“I’m working on it,” Rich hollers back. “Only thing heavier than your boat is your fat ass that rides around in it!”

On the other end of the porch, Sue and Mark are rocking and observing. “Rich, you have to bless his heart now!” Sue calls. A quick study, our Sue.

“Bless your heart, fatass,” Rich says to Kenny.

Mark, wise in the ways of warfare, only reaches into his cooler for a beer. In Tennessee it’s been five o’clock since April 9, 1865.

~

But I’m ignoring Rich and Kenny. I sit on the steps reading Noah’s letter.

I’m fairly atheistic and Noah has taken me on as a project. As if I were a prize vegetable, you might say.

We talk a lot about the nature of happiness.

“I can tell you’ve thought the thing of riches through & through,” he writes in his simple, spare hand. "Certainly happiness does Not come From Riches.”

I shake my head. Oh, if only he knew the Riches I know.

He writes further down: “There is prob. also tooo kinds of happiness. One comes by Faith and contentment, the other is always short Lived.”

And at the end: “Love is stronger than Hate!”

~

Later that day Sue and Mark and Kenny and Rich and I are high in the Tellico Gorge. We’re paddling one of those clear, moss-rocked rivers you see on wine labels. The water is strong and cold. It fountains sweetly off sandstone shelves into shady pools, where rainbow trout surf the riffles slurping caddis flies like sommeliers.

I am so tranquil I am damn nearly floating.

But suddenly Rich is not. He blows his line entering a nasty ledge and he gets rolled over by a foaming curler wave. From fifty yards downriver I watch him jarring as the water slams his body against the sub-surface rocks. He tries to Eskimo roll and he misses once, then twice. He washes over the main body of the ledge, inverted. There’s a gut-wrenching boom as he bottoms out in the pool below.

Whereupon: nothing. He’s not trying to roll up at all.

It occurs to me that Noah’s list isn’t quite complete. There is a third kind of happiness. As I watch Rich’s boat go still, I wish I had some of it.

~

But there I go, wishing for more stuff when I’ve already got so much.

Noah’s comment about “the thing of riches” is his response to something I had written in my last letter to him.

“Very few of the ‘rich’ people I know are actually happy,” I wrote. “A few are, but their happiness seems to come from non-material sources: family, art, faith, and so on. I’d say that knowing the difference between riches and wealth is akin to knowing the difference between knowledge and wisdom.”

Well.

This is what passes for deep thinking when you’ve been fizzing your brains with booze and chemicals for twenty-five years. It’s been five o’clock for me since junior high.

Bless my heart.

~

Kenny digs his way across the pool so quickly that he literally leaves a wake. He’s a big guy and he puts every bit of his muscle into his paddle strokes.

Rich’s boat starts jostling around in that funny way that indicates he’s trying to swim free. If Rich swims, though, the water’s going to grind him through a hundred feet of boulders and tree limbs.

It’ll be cactus garden vs. tire all over again.

But then Kenny’s on him. Kenny leans down and with one arm he manhandles Rich and his boat upright.

Rich coughs and gags. There’s snot all over his face. He doubles over. His rib cage works like a blacksmith’s bellows.

“Pull it together, fatass,” bellows Kenny. His smile is wider than the Mason-Dixon line.

~

The reason people should write more often is that the stuff on the paper winds up being more factual than what actually happened.

We all know that Rich survived this year’s Carpetbaggers’ Ball, of course. And we all know that Kenny and Rich are the best of friends, despite their Floyd-and-Ethel routine.

On the other hand, as long as I’m making up stories, I’m sure Rich had rather read how he hooked up with one of the slick glossy models from the lingerie catalog in my mailbox. This screed about him getting skull-cracked in an imaginary rapid is probably giving him the jeebs in his teeth.

And my hippy-trippy harangues about how I’m getting stoned on raw happiness in the wilds of East Tennessee…well, that shit would bore the aphids off a tomato plant.

But since I’m the one writing this: tough titty. Write something yourself and see what happens to it.

~

In closing I leave you to speculate on the difference between riches and wealth. Here is one hint:

On my Wealthy People list, Noah and Sarah are numbers two and three. Rich and Kenny are four and five.

And with friends like these, guess who’s number one?