There is a wonderful sign in the Milwaukee airport when you’re flying out of town, just after you’ve gone through security. You juggle your shoes and belt and ticket and ID in one hand, try to zip up your bags after their x-ray examinations with the other, and scour the immediate horizon for some place in which you might pull yourself together with a modicum of dignity. Dignity is in fact a hopeless dream as you limp barefoot without a belt or jacket or jewelry, dragging half-open luggage behind you, through any large industrial space.
But in Milwaukee, just when you are about to succumb to reality and sit down on the floor, you see a sign over a group of benches just ahead: The Recombobulation Zone. At this point in my story, you need to understand that discombobulation is one of my favorite words in the universe. Right up there with shenanigans. And discombobulation has been a fairly accurate description of the state of my daily life for most of my life.
But the notion of re-combobulation. How wonderful is that? In desperate moments like those post-security-frisk ones, and other even more existential contexts, recombobulation well describes a wrenching need in our lives. A hunger and hope for wholeness that hovers just beyond the horizon. (That fades forever and forever when we move.) Leave it to those wonderfully practical Midwestern people of Milwaukee to articulate that longing for us and wrestle it to the ground.
Recombobulation of course assumes that some sort of combobulation has taken place at some point in the past. It’s a sketchy assumption. As we get older, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that as combobulated as we may have imagined ourselves to be in any given era, it was probably an illusion. And yet. Assuming that at some point we did in fact have it all figured out and pulled together, assuming that the frayed nature of our more recent past has simply been a blip on the steady screen of our progress … there is in fact something very comforting about the notion of a Recombobulation Zone.
That’s where I’d like to imagine myself now. For me, the assumption of any previous combobulation is even more of stretch than it might be for most. Nevertheless. I feel that maybe, just possibly, things might begin to coalesce. Memory. Music. Words. Songs. The easy connection I’ve always had with music, in particular. To return to that. How it would be so wonderful to have music as the ground of the last chapter of my life.
Last week, my sister and I visited what we call Grandmommy’s house. In fact, the property belonged to and was nurtured for over fifty years by both our grandparents – Paul and Roxie Scates. The “house” no longer exists. It burned down in 1996. Even when it was still around, “house” wasn’t just a house. Grandmommy’s house was also grass and trees and water, more than 5 acres of heavily wooded land with almost 100 yards fronting Donegan’s Slough. The slough, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the area, is in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. It was formed when TVA backed up the Tennessee River with the Wilson and Wheeler Dams. All sorts of low lying water ways, in this case McKiernan’s Creek, were flooded to create larger, peaceable backwaters off the river. My mother says that when she swam across the slough as a girl, she could feel the cold creek water still moving through its old course as she moved across it.
When I was little, we visited my grandparents every weekend. The only houses around belonged to the families that had lived in Colbert County for generations. No one lived across “the lake.” We just saw trees on the other side when we sat down to summer dinner on the front porch. These days, there isn’t a porch any more. And all manner of horrifying things abound on the other side: condos and jet skis, multi-storied piers with savage looking speedboats, nasty McMansions and off-water trailer parks.
But even among all this ridiculousness, and even without the house, the land remains magical. (I will find a post-able picture of the log house soon … it was a large hand-built log structure put up by a group of hunter/drinkers for their clubhouse in the early 1920’s.) My sister and I visited at a perfect time. Late May, when all the green was still exploding, lush and full, but the mosquitos hadn’t yet arrived in force, and it wasn’t nasty hot. We didn’t have much time to explore. And we were more than a little wary of critters and snakes, seeing as how no one pokes around the property all that much on a regular basis any more. (Caveat Trespasser: a wonderful man and his wife across the road keep things under control as well as a sharp lookout, if you’re getting any ideas. And he’s got a gun. More than one, actually.)
There’s something about a special piece of land that has the ability to lodge itself in your heart. The ultimate Recombobulation Zone. The ultimate center of gravity. Grounded earth memory. An obstinate affection that refuses to die.
My mother is very sick. When she is gone, my sisters and I will have to decide what to do. The property would fetch quite a lot of money on today’s market. Waterfront condos! Raze the trees and squeeze a thousand in! A developers dream! But I will fight savagely against a sale. I have this dream:
I want to make it a music place. Muscle Shoals, after all. Rebuild the big beautiful house. Create a performance space in what was the huge great room of Grandmommy’s house. Put studios in the basement underneath. And bedrooms for family upstairs.
Both my grandparents would love the idea, I think. Both were musicians. It’s how they met, in a Methodist church choir in Knoxville that my Granddaddy directed (and played cornet in), and where my Grandmommy sang alto. She played organ and piano, too. After many years of music together, when I – their first grandchild – was about 12, Granddaddy bought Grandmommy a brand new reel-to-reel tape recorder to set down the songs she had written. She had a dream of making a demo tape – at the age of sixty something – to send to Nashville. She wrote a lot. Maybe I should cover some of her songs.
In any case – a dream. Dreams are by definition recombobulations, yes? Music once again takes hold of my life. Muscle Shoals. Donegan Slough. A Recombobulation Zone. More to come.
Dawn Aberg 