Dion Wright called from
He and Ruth were driving through, touring.
He was visiting restaurants that had his statues
in them, seeing how they looked, in situ. He was towing
a camper with his sculpting equipment. An oxy-acetylene torch.
A vise. Hammer and tongs. Welder’s goggles. He liked to go
to flea markets and look for silver spoons he could bend into caricatures
and sell at crafts shows. I invited him to come and stay with us.
We had a trailer hook-up and a place to park, although no facilities
for dumping his sewage. We took them to a bluegrass festival in Chipley.
The boys sat in with various groups. There was also gospel music, and some
black groups. Mostly rednecks. Dion called it a hootenanny. The black and whites
shared the music, the soul food. They were both used to working for Captain Charlie.
Whoever the banker, the lawyer, the judge, the real estate tycoon—the local employer—
was it wasn’t them. They were the local surplus labor. The local structurally un-,
or underemployed. The local day late and dollar short. The have-nots.
Dion used to edit a magazine called Irregular Quarterly.
He had a feature on me in the same issue as
a feature on Harry Partch and a feature on
Lord Buckley.