Recently I took my daughter – she was a wheelchair, sadly – to Bass Pro Shops for an outing after a couple of horrid months in the hospital. I love to go to Bass Pro Shops. For me, going there is a bit like walking through my childhood without the fire ants. It was just before Christmas and the place was packed. I did not expect people to move out of our way just because we had a wheelchair, but I also did not expect 350 pound men dressed like they had just fallen out of a deer stand to push us out of the way so they could jump in front of us to get into the elevator with friends who were loudly bitching about Obama taking their jobs.

A bit later, a woman sporting an impressive mullet nudged us out of her way as she was in a hurry to get to the fudge display in the little fake general store, leaving us in her stale tobacco-tinged wake, but not before glaring at my daughter as if being in a wheelchair was an impediment to her fudge-tracking fervor.

“Watch out.” She grumbled in a drawl that took five syllables before trailing off into a sound that may have either been a burp or a nasally snort.

“Excuse me,” I said, sarcastically. “You better hurry. They only have 40 pounds left.”

She gave me the Elvis lip curl, which all Southerners know can either be arrogance, disgust or gas.

So when did rednecks become so un-mannered? Manners used to be the one thing for which a redneck could be counted on. Holding open a door and saying “yes ma’am” and “no sir,” and letting women go first. Real rednecks had old school politeness. I am not talking about those Deliverance types. They were just crazy peckerwoods. Rednecks were a brand, a cultural lifestyle, a food group. Rednecks took pride in being down to earth. Not once did I notice basic Southern hospitality during our wheelchair visit. If this is what it has come to, I am ashamed I was once a redneck. I renounce the art form. Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be this.

It seems we need to get rid of this new fangled, angry, Fox News, fudge-aholic rudeneck and start teaching some proper redneck manners to these people. Here are six basic rules of redneckry:

1. Respect your elders, even if those elders drive slow, in the wrong lane and park crooked in handicapped spaces.

2. People in wheelchairs are usually there for a reason. Cut them a little slack.

3. Do not curse, burp or fart loudly, especially all at the same time.

4. Wait your turn, even if fudge, beer or camo’d thongs are on sale.

5. Do not have a Bible verse on a bumper sticker next to a pair of red, rubber bull balls hanging from your trailer hitch.

6. Stop using God as an excuse to hate people who are not like you. Remember, you will never find a velvet painting of Jesus wearing a camo robe.

After having typed that last one, I found this on the Internet:

He drapes his carcass on the backs of recliners and chairs and the couch for no good reason, as if anything else he does has a reason. Rudy is not a good cat imitator. Look at his face up there. You can tell his heart is just not in this thing. Yet he does it every day.

For nine years, he has chased cats and barked at them and run over at least one, hitting the scrapper like Brian Urlacher. Yet every time I turn around there is Rudy on the top of my old red recliner, almost purring.

Knowing Rudy’s personality and proclivities and snarly disposition towards any other animal with four legs, this strikes me as behavior three levels above odd, even for a dog who believes he can fly, climb trees, and make phone calls. Even the word ‘cat’ disturbs him. I once wrote C A T on a piece of paper and put it on the ground next to his water bowl and he growled at it for five minutes. I am not saying Rudy can read, but to punctuate his displeasure, he heisted a leg to it. Later, as a test, I wrote dog on a piece of paper and he walked over, sniffed it, then sat on it.

You hear me, Rudy? I am talking about you over here. Guess it is hard to hear much of anything when you’re all catted-up and licking your paws like Garfield on Valium.

“Could be he is just getting old.” says my wife.

Not likely. I found him practicing a meow the other day in front of the mirror. I swear. That is what it sounded like, a pathetic little lip-synced meeeeowww.

Rudy is smarter than a Congressman and twice as devious. He is trying to gain the cat’s trust. He has some plan in mind, I am sure. Since the cat looks in the window at least once a day, if not to torture Rudy, at least to flaunt his roaming-the-neighborhood freedom. Dogs have leash laws. Cats? Zip. They have full run of place. This injustice has always bothered Rudy.

Rudy is pretty sure the cat will buy this new act. In the past all the cat sees is Rudy’s tonsils flailing as Purina breath slams against the glass door. Now, what the cat sees is Rudy, leisurely perched on the back of a chair, bored and calm – like a cat. It is pathetic.

Right now, the cat is out there looking confused. Perhaps it is cynicism? Could be trust, but I doubt it. False hope is a sad thing to see, and it is hard to tell whose hope will be false first, Rudy or the cat. In the meantime, Rudy is snoring on the chair, with one eye open, waiting, grunting a wannabe purr under his breath: “Here, kitty, kitty.”

Recently it has come to my attention that one of Big River’s fellow tenants called us “circus people.” Granted, this comment was heard by one of our “circus” people while sitting in a restroom stall playing games on an iPhone, but that is usually where the truth comes out. Circus people. Really?

To be honest, our office does not look like a regular business; I will give them that concession. We have a surplus of glass and steel and concrete and rough-hewn timber and chairs made of leather and bark and giant stumps for table bases and a big boat hanging from the ceiling and more food than a Montana survival cult. There is probably beer in an ice chest over in the corner and several VCU Brand Center students hanging out and a few motorcycle parts greasing up the floor. Those Star Wars Light Sabers and all those left-wing-counter-culture-square-pegs-in-the-round-holes Apple devices do not help our misfit notoriety, to be sure, especially if you are a Microsoft drone who spends all day whacking your Dell. Nor does the open door policy to anyone looking to think differently or strangely or not at all debunk our circus train stature.

Fred is on the couch sometimes in the main conference room (we circus people call it “The Lodge”) with his shoes off, possibly sleeping, possibly solving a problem, possibly watching a basketball game. So what? Scott plays his guitar when the mood hits him. It is not like he is swinging on a trapeze from the ductwork. My wall does sort of look like the closet of a serial killer, and there is Noel’s homemade, cardboard periscope and Geoff’s huge fruit fly genus poster and Marcel’s severed Spock ear and Jimmy’s Phish paraphernalia and Dee’s bourbon-of-the-month stash and Kim’s Playboy magazines (those are for a client, I swear) and Margaret wearing sunglasses all day. Jeff has been known to remotely control people’s computers and Jan, while small, is not circus small by any means. We talk loudly sometimes. Okay, it could be considered screaming if you were out in the hall near our front door, but still, circus? I saw Water For Elephants. We’re not even close.

I walked down and looked at their offices the other day, the offices of the people who called us circus people. Standard equipment. Compared to their space and the untrained eye, perhaps ours looks a little like the circus, especially to a person sitting in a cube farm crunching numbers.

To give the devil his due, it could be the way we dress that has given us this P.T. Barnum-ish moniker. I don’t know about you, but I get up every morning, stand in my closet gazing at the stacks of sweatshirts and denim and wonder, “What would Bozo do?”

Seriously, I have never seen anyone at Big River wear giant polka dots. Well, there was that one time, but who am I to question what women wear when they leave home in a hurry? Normally we wear jeans, t-shirts, athletic shoes and, okay, maybe my checked bedroom slippers are a bit circusy, but there are a lot of clowns in business wearing suits too. Then there is Noel’s hat up there in that pic. I cannot defend that.

I think our circus rep probably happened in the elevator. We have done some strange things in there, all of them legal, however. We did not leave that big wad of gum in there no matter how many times we were accused.

The aforementioned restroom may have also sullied our honor, although the guys from the other company could compete with any pack of elephants or chimps in there. One guy left a half-eaten banana next to a toilet. One dumped his drink in the stall and tossed a few squares of paper into the massive puddle and ran. One laid his Subway sandwich on the sink while he was otherwise occupied. I found a spreadsheet in there on the floor next to a cookie with one bite taken out of it. These are just a few of the printable observations. Let us just say that in the restroom, the circus is losing this game 100-17. Yeah, I admit we scored 17. We have adhered some interesting verbiage to the walls in there. But usually it is just mildly offensive or insulting or juvenile. Look, we do ideas for a living. No company would ever want us to balance their books.

American business talks about innovation constantly – until it runs into creative people in a restroom or elevator. Then it scares them. If you go to any of those tech startups we all read about in the Wall Street Journal or Wired or Mashable or in the New York Times, you will see people wearing shorts and sandals and sleeping on the couch next to their dog. I used to bring my dog, Rudy, to work. Then one day he pooped right in the middle of the front door. I guess his business manners fall on the circus side of the corporate divide.

Sounds like Rudy may be visiting the office soon.

On my way home from the grocery store, after I called my son to excitedly tell him about the new donut shop that just opened next to the pharmacy, I caught site of the man beside the road. He was wrestling with a strand of blue LED Christmas lights. I have seen this guy putting up his lights before. The first time, probably three years ago, a little boy was assisting him. The second time there was a younger woman, as I recall. Now it was just him and a dog. What are the odds of seeing the same man putting up the same lights for three years in a row?

The tree was a Charlie Brown job leaning achingly to the west, limbs all knobby like an old man bowling. It was hardly the kind of tree that deserved decorating. As I passed, I noticed he was struggling a little to reach the higher limbs so I drove down to the intersection, pulled a uie and went back, pulling up in front of his house. I could tell it sort of scared him from his defensive motion, as if he thought I might be there to rob him of his festive LED’s. I have done a few things I am not proud of, but stealing Christmas lights from an old man decorating a tree in his front yard is not one of them.

The dog, a brown female mixture of at least three breeds I recognized, positioned herself between the man and me. She did not bark, her ears up, her tail straight, her eyes fixed on mine. She looked friendly, just weary, not unlike the old man, not unlike me on this particular day.

“Hi there,” I said in a way that I hoped would diffuse the oddness of my actions. “I know this is going to sound strange, but I’ve seen you do this for about three years and since these were the first LED lights I had ever seen back then, and you are still putting them on this tree –”

I could tell he was getting nervous that my introduction was taking so long.

“I kind of thought you looked like you could use some help,” I said quickly to get it out.

He stared at me like I was from the tax assessor’s office. “I ain’t following?” he said.

Awkwardness filled the space between him, the dog and me.

“Sir, a lot of people have been mighty kind to me and my family in the last month or so,” I said, thinking about the last six weeks of sitting in a chair, staring at monitors and tubes and wires connected to the fragile girl struggling to breathe under the sheets, wondering what would happen in the next hour that would change my life forever. I pinched the thought from my mind. He did not even know me. To him, I was the strangest stranger in the world.

“People have shown us more care and love than I ever figured I was owed. Saw you here, the lights, the tree, and thought I would pay it forward.”

From the confused look on his face I could tell he had not seen the movie. I tried to make my offer clearer.

“If you need some help putting these lights up, I’d be happy to give you a hand,” I said, feeling like I should have just kept going, admiring his scraggly, blue LED-lighted tree from afar.

Reluctance or reservation or just plain old remembering ran across his face. He looked at me. He looked at the tree. He looked down at his hands holding the strand and he nodded slowly. I took a step forward. He shook his head, squeezing a tiny branch between his calloused fingers.

“No. I appreciate you stopping by to help me, I really do,” he said. “But this is a little job I do by myself. My grandson and I planted this tree. It ain’t much, as you can see. Thought Irene was going to take it down. It’s still here, though.”

He paused, looking down at the dog.

“And as long as it’s here and I’m here, I’m going to keep putting these blue lights on it.” He smiled, draping some over a limb.

“He’s been gone a year now. Would have been seven.”

The words caught in his throat. I looked toward my car. I should never have stopped. It was more than I wanted to know. And yet saying the words out loud seemed to brace him.

“He liked these better than the red ones. ‘Blue Christmas’ he called them.”

It seemed like the old man was going to say something else, but he did not. He was finished talking. It was getting dark. A November breeze rustled the tree. The smell of a distant fireplace made the jostling lights seem even more like Christmas. I did not ask any more details. He did not offer. His details were probably not too different than mine.

Driving away, I thought about my little girl many years ago, her face illuminated by Christmas lights, her big buck-tooth grin pushing her cheeks into squinty eyes looking into the sky wondering if Santa was up there somewhere, heading this way, bringing something good.

I have strange dreams around holidays. The one about Santa and a family of elf zombies kept me freaked for days. The pumpkins and nuns dream still bothers me on Halloween. My most recent dream fits today’s holiday if you live in certain parts of the country where Thanksgiving parades are not sponsored by Macy’s, but do involve flatbed trucks decorated with paper mache and waving girls in some stage of winning a beauty pageant. I say this not to make fun of any regional group, mind you, but to prove that I have, indeed, decorated such a float and dated such a waving girl, and I figured this experience gives me a small amount of credibility on the subject.

In my dream I was on one of these floats wearing a camo’d pilgrim hat, a big belt buckle and – here’s the weird part, just in case you thought I had gotten to it already – I was deep-frying a cowpigdeerturducken while waving to people who looked at me as if I had either given a large contribution to the First Baptist Church or stolen that very same thing. Strange, not going to lie.

The dream sort of hung around for my morning Coke and Pop Tart and I almost told my wife, but thought better of it since she was busy with our own bird and already wonders what I dream about that makes me grunt and yodel now and then. It has bothered me all morning, to the point that I Googled “Cowpigdeerturducken” just now.

No such animal combo on the Internet. Zip. That is how dreams work. They mess with you at night with un-invented things even Google cannot find just so you will spend some of your day trying to understand a way to justify their unconscious stupidity.

Then again, in a Bass-Pro-Shopped world of Cajun marinade injectors and ten-gallon deep fryers, why has no Bubba ever tried to create the ultimate redneck feasty beast? A Cowpigdeerturducken would be a whole episode of Extreme Chef.

Finding a deep fryer big enough to do the job on a cow stuffed with a pig stuffed with a deer stuffed with a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken would really be a 50-gallon drum perched over a bonfire, and even that might not do it. In my dream it was kind of like that. The whole float was a little greasy and slippery. That much boiling oil would be a dangerous job even for Paula Deen in a fireproof NASCAR uniform, although imagining Paula Deen in that uniform is not a dream I would admit to having.

None of this really matters, though. It was just a dream brought on by a biscuit I ate too late last night. No such thing as a cowpigdeerturducken, nope, just a weird dream. Besides, Gander Mountain and Bass Pro Shops sell everything from camo’d long johns to camo’d couches, but there are no camo’d pilgrim hats in either place. I checked their websites. And not one item big enough to help a man cook a cowpigdeerturducken. Part of me says thank God and the other part wonders why no one has done it yet.

As you watch the parade this Thanksgiving morning, imagine yourself on one of those floats dressed like Larry the Cable-Pilgrim, riding beside a sloshing drum of boiling oil frying a cowpigdeerturducken puckering into a crispy critter while you wave. And my wife wonders why I grunt and yodel in my sleep.

(NOTE: Even though I could not find a cowpigderturducken or a camo’d pilgrim hat on the Internet, I found that pic up there. That is the best I could do)

When you drive past a “Dead End” road sign on your way to the end of a peninsula, things can only get more interesting. Off to the left, in the middle of the ocean, a huge white home sits on a rock island just big enough to fit the foundation, its façade bathed in a stunning, peach sunset.

“That’s one of the seven homes of some CEO,” said a local, greeting us in a wary friendliness exhibited by people who live near water. “Brought it in on a barge and slid it over to the rock. Pretty exciting.”

She said this in a manner that told me she had, indeed, seen more exciting things, but she was being kind to me since I was infatuated by a house on a rock in the middle of the water that she sees every day of her life, just off the coast, just out of reach.

Trees are almost naked on each side of us. Hurricane Irene wrinkled up concrete and docks and decks and roads and first floors of homes all along the coast. The one on the rock, however, looks untouched. The irony is not lost on those who glance at it while cleaning up their middle class messes. Rich people do not just get better tax breaks than the rest of us, they get bigger lives to go with their bigger houses and bigger cars and bigger bank accounts.

I think about that while standing next to the “Dead End” sign, looking at a dead tree lying across a brown and dying yard as the sun goes away and night turns everything to shadows. As if on cue, my smartphone chirps a CNN news blurb: “Apple announces founder Steve Jobs…” I did not need to click the Breaking News app to read the rest of the story.

In the coming dark, with the wind turning into my face, I think about a very rich person who just wanted to do something bigger than making money. And I think he did it.

Another story has me walking in, uninvited, wearing only a pair of Larry Bird-length gym shorts and carrying a pencil. That’s untrue as well. That happened in high school, not here.

The story most often told involves me magically appearing one day with a bunch of boxes. In this version, I just started working without ever having been hired. Again, not true. That was Fred.

On the occasion of Big River’s tenth anniversary, I have been asked to tell a story I have never told in over 900 blog posts. I’ve been saving it for this moment. Here is the story of how I became the third person at Big River.

In the beginning, there was Fred. Then he talked Jan into being Big River person number two. She and Fred sat down in the first Big River office just in time for two planes to hit the World Trade Center and another to hit the Pentagon. By the time he called me a few weeks later, there were two desks, a couple of chairs and a round, lazy Susan table that Fred’s wife was going to throw away.

While describing the vision he had for his new company, Fred started talking about tributaries and streams and I think he may have mentioned three men in a canoe. For the first twenty minutes of the conversation, I thought Big River was a fishing company. The early décor did little to dissuade that misconception. We had a lamp made from oars, pictures of bigmouth bass jumping in mountain lakes and maps of rivers from all over the country. I think I remember a reel and rod somewhere in a conference room. Our Christmas ornaments that first year were from a tackle box. No joke.

Margaret came next. Someone had to figure out what the hell was going on. She was about 16 years old at the time. Okay, maybe 19. I cannot remember exactly, but I have shirts older than she was back then. I’m wearing one as I type this.

Big River sort of started from there. In the wake of 9/11, we pitched some new business and got it. We pitched some more and got it. Ten years later, we have 27 people and clients all over the country. This story is pretty dull compared to the six-pack, strippers and boxes tale.

There is one small bit of truth to at least one of those stories up there. The boxes. I still have several of those boxes I brought in ten years ago. They’re sitting over in the corner of my office right now, pictures of beaches taped to the sides. I think about opening them now and then, just to see what is inside. Old books or maybe a coffee cup with the stains of 2001; could be anything in there. I don’t open them, though. The idea of a piece of the original Big River still perfectly intact and untouched like a time capsule from 2001 stops me. Then again, it could be the thought of old gym shorts and a six pack tucked in there.

I heard his story as a young boy growing up in South Alabama. The names were different, except for Murder Creek, which despite its name, is a good place to canoe.

Long before he got killed, Lemuel Pitsimons was a dangerous man. Not that he was a mean man by any accounts. He was not. But Lemuel was a man not to be taken lightly if you got on his wrong side. And if the stories are to be believed, 12 people did just that before he was buried down near Murder Creek in 1953.

The creek got its name honestly. In 1788 a group of men traveling to Pensacola for passports before heading to the Spanish province of Louisiana were slaughtered in the thick woods near the crooked water north of where it flows into the larger Conecuh. It has been called Murder Creek ever since.

Lemuel’s contradictory reputation was not easy to decipher. He grew up fishing under the narrow bridges and swimming in the chocolate water that moves smoothly through the rural hills. A lot of boys did. Neighbors saw Lemuel there almost every day, even when he should have been in school. After he died, old women from the church said he probably ingested too much of the cursed water for his own good. A lot of boys did. Such a thing is impossible unless you believe in curses instead of genetic meanness. If Lemuel had any of the latter, he kept it hidden. His killing was fair and on the level and usually in self-defense or in the defense of others. That is how the law saw it. And they might be right. But people talk.

“Some people need killing,” he once told a judge after stabbing three men who tried to rob a widow behind a grocery store. “If not, they’ll hurt more people.”

His father, Samuel, was a backwoods, crude, lawless man capable of giving Murder Creek its name without historical precedence. It was said he killed nine men and two wives before Lemuel killed him in, of course, self-defense, on a Saturday night after Samuel came home drunk from a Klan meeting and started beating 12 year-old Lemuel. The old man just needed killing.

Some people are born into rough circumstances. Luck, however, played a miniscule part in the things that happened to Lemuel, even if people did say he was unlucky. Lemuel made his bad luck by looking for trouble with a determination usually reserved for people trying to survive a terrible situation like cancer or kidnapping or imprisonment. At one time or another, Lemuel dealt with all of those things. Not any of them killed him however. Cynese Willburn did him that favor. If she had not done it, she would have been number 13. That is what she told people at the trial anyway. Ironically, she killed him in self-defense with his own gun, a little snub-nosed Cuban pistol.

Killers often seem like decent people thrown into bad times. For each killing, though, Lemuel offered a good reason and no court ever disagreed. While he spent time in jail and even prison, not a single person would have called him a murderer. Some even called him a hero. On his way home from jail one night, he saved 4 young girls from drowning in Murder Creek after a hard rain when their car swerved into the flooded water. Both parents drowned, their bodies found a week later at the mouth of the Conecuh River, bullet holes in their heads. Questions were asked. No answers were given. Lemuel had no motive. The police had no case. The four little girls were alive because of him. It was complicated and made more so when a rumor started that the parents owed Lemuel money. If they did, he never got paid.

Lemuel helped people down on their luck more than a few times. He built pews at a church for free and painted houses all over south Alabama. He fixed roofs for poor families and fed hobos off the rains coming up from Mobile. All the while, however, no matter how many good deeds he did, deep inside, something chewed at him; something he never talked about; something no one understood until 48 years after his funeral.

Vampires only exist in stories and nightmares. Yet there were people who said Lemuel was one. Ghosts live in horror tales, unless you lived near a store where five people died at the hands of a man described as “tall, lanky, big eyes and pale as limestone.” As usual, Lemuel fit the description.

“Either Lemuel is a murderer or people around him are unlucky as hell,” said Harker Jernigen, a man who would know. He was as close to Lemuel as anyone alive, until fishermen found his body a week after saying those words to his wife. She never blamed Lemuel. Others did. There was no proof.

Over the years, Lemuel went to a lot of funerals. And caused most of them according to Revered Garner Ward. Even when he smiled and laughed and appeared as gentle as a speckled puppy, people feared him. What they did not know was how much Lemuel feared himself.

Things are seldom as clear as we want them to be. Life is messy. Mistakes happen. People get hurt. People die. We seldom forgive those we fear, even if they are innocent. Our fear is enough to convict them. Our blame is enough to make them guilty. And sometimes we are those people.

On her death bed in 2001 an 82 year-old Cynese Willborn confessed that she did not kill Lemuel on the banks of Murder Creek in 1953. “He shot hisself,” she said. “He asked me to say I did it in self-defense. Said everyone would believe it.”

They did.

“Why?” asked her granddaughter. “Why did he kill himself?”

“Maybe some people just need killing,” said the old woman, “or they’ll hurt more people.”

I am standing under a Magnolia tree (or bay tree as my grandmother called it) in humidity so thick I can taste it. Its trunk – thicker than a 50-gallon drum – pushes up into twisted, low branches holding hand-sized leaves that slap away some of the heat above me. Our old house used to stand over to my left, the tool shed to my right, and the chicken house behind me. A small pile of bricks mark the filled-in well like a neglected grave. Cicadas scratch loudly and birds call Bob White’s name exactly the way they did in my first memories of this place. And my first memories are of this place.

It wasn’t much of a farm, even back in the 1960’s when my grandfather had to hang up the big plow and get a job with the county clearing brush beside the road. Nine-hour shifts turned into 15-hour days when you added the corn, peanuts, soybeans, peas, a few desperate hogs and a pen full of scraggly chickens. Once he hit 17 years old, my father married my mother and finally left to get a real job in town as a butcher at the Piggly Wiggly. Cutting up hogs on a hundred cold days makes a boy pretty handy with a knife. Yet even in hot or cold weather, flush or lean times, this place was home. And still is to a large degree.

Yellow River oozes past the back forty, its muddy banks and chocolate water thick with cottonmouths and bullfrogs on its way down to Blackwater Bay and Pensacola. Loblolly pines shade the possums, deer and a panther or two. Unless you are a high school football fan or a vacationer on your way to the Panhandle beaches of Florida, you’ll never see this part of LA (Lower Alabama). It is not exactly a tourist destination. But I am no tourist here.

I grew up in these fields, dancing with fire ants, chasing rabbits and running from rattlers. My grandfather tried to instill in me a healthy fear of snakes, but seeing the old man catch them by their tails and snap off their heads in a whipping motion made me want to play Indiana Jones with every one I saw slithering around the mucky bottoms near Five Runs Creek over near Babbie. The head-snapping part always eluded me, however, so after a few tries I gave it up. Probably why I’m still alive.

I tasted homemade ice cream for the first time and drank well water and learned to drive a John Deere at about the exact spot where that picture was taken at the top of this page. The first fried chicken, and biscuits, and butter beans and watermelon went down my throat here too. The ground under that St. Augustine grass holds hundreds of old .22 shells from when I was a kid learning how to drill a can from 100 yards. That same grass was watered by gallons of sweat from a hundred years of my family. Eventually I came to the same conclusion they all did: I could not make a living here either. Farming is romantic until you have to do it to survive.

That one photo up there contains so much of my life that I see something different every time I look at it. The best Christmases of my childhood happened here. Thanksgivings too. Learning how to hold a bottle rocket by the stick until the last minute when the fuse meets the powder happened here. Every person I know in my family sat under these trees at one time or another. Every one of those people are gone. My grandfather and grandmother died just to the left. My father fell there towards the end of his life when his brain and legs could not see eye to eye. Chickens whose necks I had rung tried to outrun a frying pan somewhere near the middle of that photo. Probably a thousand bushels of pecans have fallen over to the right up there. It looks like an empty field, but I see 50 years of family and friends inside that square.

If you live in a city – and I have for most of my life since leaving the farm – you may not appreciate the fecund smell of fresh-turned earth under a coming storm. This far out in the country the sound of creatures roaming the trees can hardly be called silence. It is affirmation that you are not the most important thing in the world; you are just part of something more important. At times, you may be the least important thing you hear.

The longer a person stands far away from the daily bullshit we treasure, the less that person needs it. The money in my pocket seems less valuable out here. The deadlines are not pressing anymore. Simplicity is not a word, but an attitude. I have felt this way in other places, but this is where I felt it first.

It only lasts for a few minutes before my cell phone rings. Things to do. Places to go.

Urgent voices talk as I drive away, leaving the good part of me behind under that big old bay tree.

Being a Dudeist Priest, with an official license recognized in some states, means I can now perform marriages and funerals and such, not that I have an extreme urge to do either, but if someone is in need of a cleric, I can pinch-hit for a preacher. The good news about Dudeism is, however, there are no preachers, just Dudes. I’ll explain.

Oliver Benjamin, a journalist, started the Church Of The Latter-Day Dude in 2005 as the “slowest growing religion in the world.” It is legit, so the website says (dudeism.com), just like Baptists or Catholics. I hope this means I get a special tax deduction or something, but I doubt it. No matter, I’m pretty stoked about my newfound religion.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2PPgcNjols

Keep in mind, Dudeism exists with other religions perfectly. It makes no judgements about others, no hell-fire and damnation or passing the plate (unless you go to the Dudeism Store), and no “I’m going to heaven and you’re going to hell” pronouncements. The goal is do what the Dude would do; the Dude being Jeffery “The Dude” Lebowski from the Coen Brother’s movie “The Big Lebowski.” Jeff Bridges knows him all too well. You don’t even have to bowl or drink White Russians to follow this faith. It’s cool. Just hang loose and watch it roll, baby.

Now before some of you organized religious folks get all Jesus’d up on me, remember, Jesus was the original-dude. Just because he drank wine and ate fishes and loaves and Fig Newtons (according to a Forum post I read from a dude named Lazy Dude) doesn’t mean your organized religion can’t mix with an unorganized religion such as Dudeism. Jesus talked about loving those who hate you and helping the sick and poor (all things few Americans like to do these days). In fact, Jesus is listed as one of the Great Dudes In History along with Lao Tzu (creator of Taoism), Hereclitus (stop it), Snoopy (yeah, Charlie Brown’s dog), Quincy Jones (urban Dude), Sarah Silverman (in our world, we don’t stereotype genders, so girls are Dudes too, even girl comics), The Buddah (meditating Indian Dude), David Grayson (alter ego of writer Dude Ray Stannard Baker), Jerry Garcia (duh), Joni Mitchell (troubador Dude), Gandhi (peace-loving Dude), Walt Whitman (hobo Dude poet), Julia Child (cuisine Dude), Jeff Spicoli (surfer Dude, AKA Sean Penn from Fast Times At Ridgemont High), and uber Dude, Kurt Vonnegut. Just for the record – and I have messed this one up before – there are no Dudettes, just Dudes, no matter if you are male, female, animal, vegetable or mineral. A unisex approach simplifies things.

Please don’t get Dudeism mixed up with Wiccans, or Satan worshippers or vampires or werewolves or atheists or any other group you may see on True Blood or the Twilight series of movies. We’re easy on the theology, dude. Chill. Sit back. Take life as it comes. Forget the past and the future. You can’t change either one. Right now is what we have. This minute. That’s it. Make the most of it, dude. If that sounds like some freakish mantra, perhaps you need to go to iTunes and purchase some better tuneage.

Being one of only 130,000 Dudeist priests in the world comes with some pretty special privileges besides the aforementioned license to wed and bury people and dispense Dudeish advice. I have an official certificate (shown above), I get the Dudespaper and I am somewhat well versed in the Dudeist Bible, known to lay people as “The Abide Guide.” This handsome volume contains the tenets of the Dudeist religion. By the way, that thing in my cheek is my tongue. Even my dog, Rudy, is a practicing Dudeist Priest:

If you go to Dudeism.com, you’ll see that Dudeism is a mellow, laid back faith described thusly: “Down through the ages, this “rebel shrug” has fortified many successful creeds – Buddhism, Christianity, Sufism, John Lennonism and Fo’-Shizzle-my-Nizzlism. The idea is this: Life is short and complicated and nobody knows what to do about it. So don’t do anything about it. Just take it easy, man. Stop worrying so much whether you’ll make it into the finals. Kick back with some friends and some oat soda and whether you roll strikes or gutters, do your best to be true to yourself and others – that is to say, abide.” And say it like Sam Elliot.

The four books of Duderonomy lays down some simple ways to live, like “Whenever possible, try to get paid in cash in order to avoid getting bumped up into a higher tax bracket.” And “Respect everyone’s point of view. It’s just, like, their opinion, man.” Of course there are several obvious ones as well: “Unless you’re a high-ranking member of society, don’t expect too much from the police.” And the ever-true “When confronted by unfortunate circumstances, forget about it. You can’t be worrying about that shit. Life goes on.”

How do you know if you might be a candidate for Dudeism? Do you like to listen to Creedence? Have you seen all of the Coen Brothers movies? Did you download the Big Lebowski app for your iPhone? Are you tolerant of differing opinions? Have you had enough of the hatred practiced by other religions? Do you prefer not to shave? Do you like really comfortable shoes? Then you may have found a church home.

Dudes, I will say this, though: the whole Abide thing is not for everyone. Some people like their religion unleavened, no salt, straight from the can, no balance, no levity, no shit. But if you believe in loving your fellow man and think Jesus was cooler than the people out there using his name right now, perhaps you should think about Dudeism, but don’t think about it too hard, man. You don’t want to hurt yourself.

Okay, let’s all stand, turn to hymn number 342 and do a little Abiding and takin’er easy.