The Memoirs of Remus Turlington III: Page 1

It is at a great crossroads in my life that I have decided, not only for my personal satisfaction, but at the behest of certain members of my family, and by family, I mean those closest to me through great joys and tragedies; I don’t limit relations to genealogy for the very reason that I have known drunkards, saints, highwaymen, philanthropists, carpetbaggers, and yankees, and have shared a drink with all of them on one occasion or another, especially the cork pullers; however, they don’t need an occasion to drink, merely a libation put in front of them paired with their predisposition; my predilections are more anecdotal and, I would like to believe, philosophical: the love of wisdom, a concupiscence for understanding, if you will, but I digress—It is with great reminiscence, more of the nostalgic than that of regret, with a fond remembrance that I look back at my life at my ripe, old age: the age I am, not that I act; the truth being that only my dear mother and father, God rest their souls, know the true date of my nascence, and because of the subjectivity of age and the ephemeral nature of life, I have decided that such subjects are irrelevant to these memoirs, which is why I have excluded, for the most part, any sentimental reveries of childhood, which are inevitably obscured not by what we, as grown adults, would have liked them to be, rather, what we think really happened seen through the limited vision of adolescence; nonetheless, I will begin at what I believe is the pinnacle of my younger days, while although I was still full of pith and vinegar, I had settled into a tranquil contemplative time in my life: the halcyon days, as I have titled them here, the time just before all the salt of life stirred me from my naïve stupor: the era of heartbreak, funerals, disappointments, failures, and broken trust: years I wouldn’t trade for all the riches of the Spanish kings of old; heretofore unmentioned in this anthology, for I merely used them for an allusion, not to be treated as their own subject of discussion, so it is with some perspicacity that I dip my quill, figuratively that is, in order to recapitulate, not adumbrate, for what greater tragedy is there than to truncate when a detailed account will only do justice to a life lived in anticipation of the every moment and savored like crawfish and cherry wine; do not mistake this for a mere trumpet blast, but rather a sonata that rhythmically excites yet sooths the reader, so with out further ado, I would like to dedicate this to my father: Arlo Turlington, a man of many words, but few of them articulated, on account he lost his tongue in the war; to my mother, Louisa May Sanders-Turlington, a woman of inexplicable beauty; to Eloise Apache Druthers-Turlington, my little wife who is, I might add, the reason for my very existence and the mother of my next dedication—to my thirteen daughters: Chloe, Eloise, Ophelia, Margarete, Kimberly, Allison, Faye, Gail, Jane, Cynthia, Clarise, Desdamona, and Dixie; the most important women in my life who are, without a doubt, as precious as they are pernicious, which is why I feel obliged to honor them, even Desdamona, who ran of with that colored boy from Yale, by committing every minute detail in these chicken tracks that follow the page much as our lives follow the footprints in the sand toward the inevitable passing of each precious petal of the late summer mums, that wilt like northern folk in the Mississippi sun, which blazes hotter than the fires of hell, a hell which can only be circumvented by true understanding of the manifestation of all virtue, which, in its purest form is the paragon of what the good Lord intended: charity, by which I mean not giving egregiously from excess for accolades and stature, but charity in the sense the we, as decent human beings attempt to find the one true meaning to our existence: