Prayer Is A Place America's Religious Landscape Observed

Chapter 1 All stories, even "Once upon a decade" ones, must continue with "and in a certain place" if they are to tell themselves completely. For this story, the place is Lucy, Tennessee . . . Lucy, where all things begin now and where, pray God, they will also arrive someday at their natural ending. Lucy, when Sam and I brought our children here in 1977, was a clapboard, cinder-block, and tin-roofed village of no more than two dozen houses. It was surrounded by sparsely populated farmland and possessed of one aging general store, one magnificent old county school larger than the township, a railroad track with a spur, a Baptist church, a United Methodist church, two A.M.E. churches, and--incongruous as it may seem at first blush--a genuinely Anglican one. The school was testimony to the stature that Lucy once had enjoyed; the railroad with its spur was the explanation behind that stature. Lucy had once been a bustling railroad stop for passengers and cargo on their way south and west toward Memphis. The general store had been both way station and cafe, while the village's shade trees had functioned like oases in the midst of the desiccating heat of West Tennessee summers. But as with much of rural America, the coming of affordable cars, then of good roads, and finally of huge trucks had obviated the railroad and, thereby, the town, long before our arrival. When Sam and I first moved to Lucy, we and such neighbors as we then had used to quip that Lucy was only twenty miles but over a hundred years removed from Memphis. The twenty miles have held constant since 1977, but the number of years has shrunk considerably. We old-timers are forced now to admit--with unstinting regret--that we live only about thirty years away from the city these days. We still operate off septic tanks, in other words, but by order of the Shelby County Health Department we all had to have our wells closed off and cemented up a few years ago, lest our use of them somehow contaminate Memphis's aquifers. We still keep coal-oil lamps--or at least the Tickles do--handily placed about, though we lose power no more than twice or three times a year now. There is no television cable strung in to us and there are few fancy telephone wires, but satellites and cell phones have more or less obviated them as well. The old general store withered first into shut-down gas pumps and then into only a few shelves of staples before it finally closed; but it has been replaced by a thriving operation where the older men still gather every day for checkers and where the shelves bulge with every kind of tool or supply needed for restoring old houses to meet suburban expectations and for building new ones to meet a bludgeoning suburban demand. Most of us still grow our produce, but few of us still preserve it for winter. Instead, there's a Wal-Mart just a few miles up the highway that sells us our winter provender handily as well as cheaper. Besides, for Sam and me at least, there is no longer any need . . . no need, that is, to prove a point. He and I came to Lucy not to be villagers but to be a pair of her surrounding farmers. Sam is a physician--a pulmonologist, or specialist in diseases of the lung. For sixteen years, while he was building his career and I mine, we lived in Memphis in a kind of conclave of doctors and professionals that was, literally, almost within the shadow of the University of Tennessee Medical Center and the major hospitals that are its teaching as well as its healing hub. There was nothing wrong with that settled, tree-lined, well-maintained area. It still goes, in fact, by the name of Central Gardens, primarily because that is exactly what it is--central and as chock-full of pleasant gardens as of pleasant people. Our concern in the mid-1970s, then, was not with the place where we were, but with who we were. If this, however, is to be anTickle, Phyllis is the author of 'Prayer Is A Place America's Religious Landscape Observed', published 2005 under ISBN 9780385504409 and ISBN 0385504403.