Eudora Welty - A Visit of Charity

 Tomorrow's story for the Eudora Welty reading group is "A Visit of Charity" from "A Curtain of Green."  The story is about Marian, a little girl and member of an organization like the Girl Scouts (but not the Girl Scouts) who visits the Old Ladies Home to gain points for her organization and her reaction to the women in the home.

The Old Ladies' Home was a large wooden structure just east of the Jackson Zoo.  My grandmother was a contemporary of Miss Welty but a few years older.  My father's mother, she was deeply involved in the Girl Scouts most of her life, and in middle age, she and a group of women she knew became very involved in helping with the Old Ladies' Home.  As time passed, the City of Jackson became less and less interested in maintaining the Old Ladies' home, so it fell on private citizens to help maintain it and provide for the residents.  

Eventually, it became really difficult to maintain the old wooden structure, and only a few residents left living there, as most people had begun using nursing homes rather than the Old Ladies' Home.  Since I was on the board of the Zoo, she asked me to help facilitate giving the land and the building to the Zoo.  I told her we didn't really need the extra five acres (and another old building to maintain), but as the City of Jackson ultimately owned both properties, I felt certain there was a way to make it happen.

Sometimes, it's hard for me to read Welty's stories from an academic viewpoint because her subject matter seems so very familiar.  She wasn't family or anything, but it's really close.  It wasn't hard to imagine my mother or grandmother as Marian, the protagonist in this story, as both had stories about visiting the residents at the Old Ladies Home, as I'm sure Miss Welty did herself.

An avid gardener, she creatively includes her beloved plants in nearly all her stories.  For this story, she mentions cineraria as a small potted plant her antagonist brings as a gift for the ladies at the Old Lady's Home.  Sometimes called "climbing fig," you see cineraria in many Mississippi gardens.

Put on by the Mississippi Archives and History and the Eudora Welty Foundation, I'm really enjoying these weekly zoom sessions to discuss the works of Eudora Welty.  Many thanks to Catherine Freis for telling me about it.  

That Super Bowl Party

So, every year, rain or shine or covid, they have this big party, so big they call it the "Super Bowl," and people put quite a bit of store into it.  They spend months and months prior to the party pushing each other back and forth, trying to secure an invitation to the party.  Even though they advertise it as the world's biggest party, they're still pretty dang stingy with the invitations.  

When I was little, pretty much everybody assumed that folks from Dallas would get an invitation to the party, and, sure enough, the years came and went and the folks from Dallas almost always got their all polished-up invitation to this dang stupid party.

In the last few years, though, things have changed.  They're having trouble keeping the lights on in Dallas, and the Senator who's supposed to take care of them just sneaks off to a Mexican beach vacation.  I don't know what happened.  Maybe they're not wearing the right kind of shoes.  Maybe they don't know all the right dances, but it's been a while since folks from Dallas were invited to this party, and they're getting just a little bit sore about it.

Last night, the folks from Dallas got in a scuff-up with some folks from Wisconsin, of all places, hoping they'd get somebody's attention and get invited to this year's Super Bowl party.  Well, it didn't work out that way, and the once mighty folks from Dallas will be staying home and ordering a pizza while the big party goes on.   I'd feel sorry for them, but to tell the truth, Dallas fans were always kind of jerks, so maybe this will help teach them some humility.