The Day After Christmas

It is the day after Christmas and all through the house, not a creature is stirring--except for me. Outside, there is a dusting of snow, the remains of the first white Christmas this old Alabama hillbilly has ever seen. Inside, the beautiful Redhead is still fast asleep upstairs, her favorite old quilt pulled up to her nose. Beside the bed, the widow Dolly, still grieving and needy, snores and probably dreams of her lost love.

I will meet Dolly's potential new beau tomorrow at our vet's office. A late Christmas present of a sort. He is a big strapping brindle male, two years old and well-trained (or so says the owner) who must be relocated due to a divorce. I am hopeful that he will be the one who will run beside her, racing along ahead of my ATV, sending gray squirrels bouncing along the ground toward safety in the trees. Maybe he will be the one to play tug-of-war with an old blanket left in the yard for that purpose. He will be the one who lays beside her in a sunny patch of ground on a cold Alabama day. Because as a suave crooner used to sing "Everybody needs somebody sometime..." He was right, for dogs as well as people.

Santa was good to me. Beside me is a stack of books almost two feet high, most of which were written by people I know or have seen at book fairs and writer's conferences. Books written by fellow southerners who have succeeded at their craft, who inspire me to work harder to write something worth reading.

There is A.M. Garner's "Undeniable Truths"; Rick Bragg's "I am a Soldier, Too"; Tom Franklin's "Crooked Letter Crooked Letter"; Janis Owens' "My Brother Michael"; and William Gay's "Provinces of Night" and "Twilight." These are books filled with words I will savor, chewing each sentence like a fine fillet, as if I could absorb some of the magic that inscribes the word to the stark white empty spaces of the blank pages.

These are books I will hold in my hands. I will admire their covers, feel their heft, turn their stiff pages until they become well-worn with the turning and re-turning. And hopefully someday, at the next conference or book fair, I will hand them to their creators and ask them to autograph and personalize my treasures.

In other homes across the land, others will hit the "on" button on infernal machines with names like Kindle, Nook, Hanlon, Ipad, and LIBRIe. They will download and read their "e books" without leaving the comfort of their homes. But they cannot and will not have the same experience. Their magic will be different from mine. My magic is stronger, more powerful, because it is physical, sensual, and above all personal. It requires real work, physical exertion, sweat, and sometimes even blood to produce. It is even "green", requiring the use of renewable resources in it's creation.

My hip friends scoff at me--tell me what I am missing--call me a dinosaur. It is the future, they say. But I don't care. Let the future pass on by this hillbilly. I am comfortable with my mojo. It suits me just fine.

Black ink on white paper. It is a glorious, mystical thing. May it live forever.

And maybe, just maybe, one day "Words not on Paper" will become words on paper. That would be real magic.