Road Apples by Tim Sanders
June 4, 2012

Al fresco, Al abama style

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A couple of weeks ago the phone rang and Marilyn answered. It was Johnny Usry and he told Marilyn he had a surprise for her.

For those of you who may not know, Johnny Usry’s is a familiar face here in Cherokee County. He is the owner of the county’s largest cemetery, Cherokee Memory Garden. He is a conscientious owner and a good landlord, and runs a nice, quiet, restful community over there just southeast of town. His residents have an excellent view of the old Piedmont Highway, and no worries about annoying telemarketers, excessively high electric bills, or plumbing problems. The neighbors all tend to stay out of each other’s business, and there are no domestic disputes. In all the years I’ve lived in the county, I’ve never heard a single expression of dissatisfaction from any of the Memory Garden residents, and to my knowledge not a single one has ever requested relocation for any reason whatsoever. When it comes to customer satisfaction and low turnover rate, I would stack Johnny Usry’s little neighborhood over there on Highway 9 up against any similar establishment anywhere in the country.

Of course with a reputation like that, the prospective customer list is a long one, and you may have to wait awhile to get in. But tribulation worketh patience, as they say, and patience is the quality all of the Memory Garden residents admire most, so just hang in there. It will be well worth the wait.

But back to that phone call. Marilyn and I have several friends and relatives who’ve moved into the Memory Garden neighborhood. So when Johnny, who is not known as a practical joker, called and told Marilyn that he had a surprise for her, a single thought flashed through her mind. “A surprise?? From the owner of the largest cemetery in the county? HAS SOMEBODY COME BACK?” She told me later it didn’t stay in her mind but for an instant, so she didn’t mention it to Johnny.

The surprise from our friend at Memory Garden was that Marilyn had won a patio set. She’d purchased some flowers there a few weeks earlier for her dad’s grave, and had filled out a ticket for a drawing. Marilyn wins things. Once, many years ago, she won a bicycle in a drawing at a local drug store. It was a good, sturdy bicycle, and although she admired it, and seriously considered riding it for exercise, she finally decided she might do herself some damage on the thing and sold it. The patio set, on the other hand, was something we could actually use without hurting ourselves. Unless there is a windstorm involved.

In the summer of 1978 there was a family that lived in the Tampa, Florida area. I believe they were the Cobb family, but they may have been the Silks, or possibly even the Stalks. I do remember that the name had something to do with corn. One evening a sudden wind from the Gulf of Mexico lifted their patio umbrella out of its moorings, and Mr. Cobb was barely able to grasp the end of that long umbrella pole before he and the umbrella were lifted several hundred feet into the air. Fortunately, the wind died down after a hundred and fifty miles or so and he and the umbrella landed safely across the state in a pine forest south of Jacksonville. Florida National Guard radar trackers said he made the trip in just under two hours, although it would have taken much longer traveling by automobile.
Marilyn and I already had a small patio set, with a round metal table and four plastic chairs, but they were all subject to major rearrangement on our deck during tornado season. One spring our patio umbrella caught a gust of wind and was carried over the house and deposited unceremoniously on the front lawn. We bought a much larger umbrella, operating under the theory that larger meant heavier which in turn meant less likely to achieve liftoff. Of course we soon learned that larger only meant more aerodynamic. Our new, larger umbrella was lifted to treetop level one cloudy evening and flew away. We instituted a neighborhood search, but all to no avail. My guess is that it came to rest somewhere in Georgia. Had I known about things like flying patio umbrellas when I was a kid, my attempts to parachute off our garage roof wouldn’t have been limited to my mom’s umbrellas, and might have been much more successful.

But we have that new Memory Garden patio set now, and it is very nice. The table is rectangular and has a glass top, which makes it heavier and less likely to fly away. The chairs are not nearly as light as our old ones, and I’m currently devising some sort of scheme for keeping the whole set grounded and together. I suggested maybe logging chains and cement block anchors. And a generous amount of duct tape to keep that umbrella from soaring heavenward during windstorms. Marilyn, of course, didn’t like my ideas, but she never does. Whatever we do, my plan is to have a patio set that we can use during gale force winds without parts of it flying off. If this umbrella goes, it’ll have to take the whole kit and kaboodle with it.

So if one windy summer afternoon you should happen to look skyward and notice some folks spinning around over head, still seated on their patio chairs precariously strapped to a rectangular patio table, all held aloft by a large umbrella, don’t be alarmed. It’s not an alien invasion, it’s only the Sanders family enjoying a stimulating al fresco meal.