October 22, 2015 - Orange Beach, Alabama

Did you miss me? Probably not. I was out of town this past week in Orange Beach, Alabama and I bet you didn’t notice because, here I am,sitting in Pensacola writing this, while waiting to catch a flight back home and making sure a week doesn’t go by without my weekly column. Orange Beach was warm. The skies were clear and brilliantly blue. The Gulf of Mexico was calm and filled with dolphins, mullets, and other leaping fish. But I was inside all day attending a workshop. I know. It’s hard not to feel sorry for me. But the good news is that Orange Beach, Alabama is only a couple of hours south of Monroeville, Alabama the home of Harper Lee and Truman Capote. So the day after the conference ended I drove north past cotton fields ready for harvesting and sorghum fields too. This literary pilgrimage was well worth the trip. Monroeville, the town on which Maycomb is based upon in both “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Go Set a Watchman” is a county seat with the court house sitting smack dab in the center of the town. Driving around the square, a new courthouse has been added. In that courthouse some of the action in the “Go Big Read” book, “Just Mercy” takes place. The old courthouse with the iconic courtroom is a museum now. A replica of that courthouse was created for the award-winning movie of the same name. It was quite the thrill to stand at the defense attorney’s table and pretend to be Atticus Finch for a moment. It was fun to sit in the balcony looking down on the courtroom as Harper Lee looked down on it so many times when her daddy, Amasa Lee argued his cases. When Marja Mills, the author of “The Mockingbird Next Door” was at our library this spring, she told me to give her a call if I ever went to Monroeville, so I did. On her advice I visited the bakery where Nelle Harper used to pick up baked goods for her 100-year old sister. I visited Dave’s Catfish House where Harper and friends would go to eat (and ate grits, greens, hushpuppies and fried green tomatoes), I drove past the red-brick ranch-style house where the Lee’s moved after the years described in the book. I visited Mel’s Dairy Dream and had a soft-serve cone. This was the site of Harper Lee’s childhood home and right next door are the stone and brick foundations of the Faulk home, where Truman Capote spent his summers. The summers that became the stories of Jem, Scout, and Dill in “To Kill a Mockingbird”. That two such literary giants could come of out a county-seat town in rural Alabama seems so improbable, that it seems like a plot device in a novel. Speaking of novels, you will find some listed below, which I hope you enjoy. (By the way, there were actually mockingbirds in the trees and bushes surrounding the courthouse and I will post some pictures of them and other points of interest on the library’s Facebook page when I get a chance.)