PrettyFakes

For my birthday Lula took me up to Clarksdale and we stayed two nights at the Shack Up Inn, in the best shack there, the Robert Clay. Named after the man who lived in it and raised seven sons, and likely the flat-out coolest place I have ever been in my life. I’m not going to spend too much time trying to write down what it meant to me; pull me aside one night and get me to tell you about it, how the walls are decorated with the mementos of a hundred patrons, the cupboards are lined with bottles stuffed with love letters to no one, how there’s a piano and a Danelectro guitar up front so if you feel like playing you can.

On Saturday two of my favorite people in the world strolled down from Memphis and we drank Boone’s Farm and drove out to Merigold to the McCarty Pottery outfit. I got a beautiful cobalt birthday bamboo mug (really a small vase) and we wandered the gardens.

I think we ended up at Ground Zero at some point—and I know we bought some records and some posters at Cat Head, along with some fine work by J.D. Sipe (Lula got a R.L. Burnside shrine, while I got a little portrait of Kenny Brown). The rest is a blur but a good one, and the next morning I got up early and cooked up some cheese grits, biscuits, and real + faux sausage so everybody could have something in their belly for the ride home.

We transferred a Polaroid of the shack onto the copper door of our bedroom and loaded up the car. And on the way back, all I kept thinking was, we gotta go back—!!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 9:19 am and is filed under Gorjus, In Mississippi, Polaroids. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.