“Wild Sweet Orange Ride: Journeys Home”
Author: Julia Gregg
Publisher: Vineyard Stories
Pages: 101
Price: $19.95 (Hardcover)
Julia Hightower Gregg has been a columnist for the “Evansville Courier and Press” in Indiana for 25 years but before becoming a Hoosier, if indeed one can ever become a Hoosier, Gregg grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, took a BS from Auburn University, then took an MS from Vanderbilt Peabody College and an MFA from Murray State University in Kentucky .
“Wild Sweet Orange Ride” seems to be composed in part of her columns and some additional pieces, surely written for this book, her first.
The book contains 41 short (2 ½ page) essays which cover a range of topics but are controlled by the idea of the “search for place.” Gregg left her home place, Alabama, and what was most familiar.
In the Introduction she writes that her travels, both personal and literal, were not smooth ones, with “jarring off-road detours…mistakes, regrets, and trials.” Life has not been altogether joyful but, she insists, “if we are willing to be open to an introspective journey, we can learn, finally, to balance and to breathe.” Her theme throughout is that “alienation and hurt are healed by unconditional love and friendship, by work accomplished with pride, and by art—words well written.…”
These essays, which occasionally draw on the language of motivational speaking and self-help, are meditations on hope and nostalgia.
Gregg invokes her childhood home on Finley Avenue in Montgomery and her grandmother who taught her a valuable collection of life lessons including: “You must pay what you owe.”
The Montgomery of Gregg’s childhood was the period of school integration and she seems to carry the guilt of segregation with her, especially personified in Delores Boyd, a black childhood acquaintance, one of the first to integrate a white public school, whom she seeks out to settle unfinished business. Gregg had wanted to include Delores at her senior party but Gregg’s parents said no.
But Gregg’s major subject is motherhood. She writes of Zach, her son, and the difficulties of divorce and single parenting and the worry of any parent: “parenting has been a crucible, burning away all pride and pretense, leaving only what is real: such effort and hope and tenderness.”
Mothers are hypersensitive to their child’s pain. Her boy Zach mourns the death of his dog, which seems normal enough to me. “I found no words to tell Zach that life is complex and fragile and I don’t know how to fix everything.” When Zach and his friends all make the soccer team, she is hugely relieved. Gregg quotes Elizabeth Stone on this subject: “To have a child…is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”
(I prefer, I think, the less emotional phrasing by Sir Francis Bacon [1561-1626] in Essay No. 8, “Of Marriage and Single Life”: “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.” )
It seems Gregg was overly protective as Zach chastises her for not raising him to be tough enough: “In many ways you didn’t prepare me well.” “Why aren’t, weren’t things perfect, he wants to know.” He must have been reasonably sturdy emotionally, however, because he insists on going to college in NYC, not Auburn. Gregg has to let go. But she does get to visit him in the City, which is more exciting I am sure than a visit to Auburn.
Gregg, a literary person, makes a pilgrimage to Monroeville. There she drops Harper Lee “a carefully penned note.” Ms. Lee has been “an inspiration…she and Capote remind me that even in the heart of a provincial Alabama town, miles off the interstate, insulated and insular, genius and a different way of seeing and thinking can spring up….Deep, rich spirit sprouts in all kinds of places.”
Gregg doesn’t really expect a reply to her letter. She doesn’t get one.
One of Gregg’s readers declares these essays “tug at the heartstrings” but have “not a hint of the maudlin.” I personally think she crosses the line into sentimental repeatedly, but one must not deny other readers their taste. Midlife, middle-class readers, probably female, with an affection for the optimistic, sincere and heartfelt, will find these prose/poem meditations rewarding and thoughtful.
In a small format, with attractive illustrations, three by Janice Glass Williams and two by Linda Warren Goodridge, “Wild Sweet Orange Ride” might make an attractive gift book.
This review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio. Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark” and the editor of “A State of Laughter: Comic Fiction from Alabama.”
