Category Archives: Tingles

I have been reading around more in Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.  It’s a pretty odd book, as I said, about the time he and the photographer Walker Evans stayed a month or so visiting off and on three sharecropper families (all white) in Hale County, Alabama in 1936.  Oddly, while there are people in the book—the members of these families—Agree spends a lot of time describing the objects that surrounded them, and not much at all of their actions, or feelings or attitudes.

There’s a whole section on overalls for example, what they look like, when they are new and when they are old and what they feel like when you wear them especially when it’s hot and you don’t wear a shirt under them.  And their shoes which the men sometimes slit open along the sides to get some air to their feet.  He also describes their houses.  There’s a good bit about what can be found under one of their porches.

There in the chilly and small dust which is beneath porches, the subtle funnels of doodlebugs whose teasing, of a broomstraw, is one of the patient absorptions of kneeling childhood, and there, in that dust and the damper dust and the dirt, dead twigs of living, swept from the urgent tree, signs, and relics: bent nails, withered and knobbed with rust; a bone button, its two eyes torn to one; the pierced back of an alarm clock, greasy to the touch; a torn fragment of pictured print; an emptied and flattened twenty-gauge shotgun shell, its metal green, let­tering still visible; the white tin eyelet of a summer shoe; and thinly scattered, the desiccated and the still soft excrement of hens, who stroll and dab and stand, shimmying, stabbing at their lice, and stroll out again into the sun as vacantly as they departed it.

Well, that brings back some memories since I diddled with those doodlebugs myself in the dust under Grandma Tingle’s backporch.  And as I recollect too it was a wonder to drag your fingers though the fine dust since you never knew what you might come up with: like a bottle cap maybe or a nail or bolt or something.

Once recently visiting back there, I took a Prince Albert can out from under the side of Grandma Tingle’s place as a keepsake.

Honestly, though, I don’t remember the chickens strolling under Grandma’s house.

To say WB. Jr. and I didn’t cotton to each other doesn’t cover all the bases.  To say we didn’t see eye to eye doesn’t do the trick either.  And then when you stuck him together with Joan the situation would get impossible.  I would call and get Joan usually and then I would hear him start swearing in the background, maybe because Joan was on the phone too long, or maybe he wanted her to do something, or maybe she was hogging the phone, or maybe he was swearing up a storm because I didn’t call frequently enough.  The two were joined at the hip in some sort of hellish psychological dance macabre.

The same when we visited if only for a few hours or part of an afternoon.  Over the years I began to assume a distance in those visits.   There was no point in talking about anything meaningful since there was no telling where such a conversation might lead: to him swearing or Joan crying or most likely both.  But even the non-conversation visits didn’t work. Sure, there were no bizarre outbursts but afterwards I would still feel down, blue and murderous for a week or more.  It was as if being around them I caught a psychological flu.  Somewhere Freud speaks of a psychological contagion. That’s what it felt like.  A contagion.

I don’t know how many sessions I spent with my shrink going round and round about these visits and phone conversations.  I was trying to figure out what I was feeling and also really I was considering breaking off all connections to the two of them completely.  But my shrink said she had seen people do this and it hadn’t really helped.  It meant giving up all hope, and while, she said, I probably should have no hope that my parents would ever change breaking off all connections meant giving up even the possibility of hope.  Something like that.

Still, I worked at it.  WB would tell stories about his childhood.  They didn’t make much sense to tell the truth, but I wanted to find out what I could that made him tick and act the way he did, and maybe his childhood would shed some light on that.  Also I have always been interested in history and in the South, so I hit on this idea of having him tape record some of his stories for posterity as it were. I bought a little cassette tape recorder and took it down on one of the visits and said I would appreciate it if he talked into the machine now and then with some of his stories.

He seemed to like the idea, but nothing happened.  I didn’t hear back, and finally—I don’t know how long it was—it came out he had been unable to operate the buttons on the machine maybe because his sight was starting to go, and had gotten frustrated, as he easily did with mechanical things that he didn’t understand, and thrown it across the room and broken it to pieces.  And somehow or other Joan made it seem my fault that I had not gotten a machine he could work.  I could have said, well, screw it, but instead I went and bought a big machine with big buttons on it, and stuck a cassette in it, and I labeled the “play” button “push here.”  So when he pushed it, the tape would play and he would hear the instructions on the tape for how to operate the machine.

Finally I got maybe 40 minutes of tape out of him.  And going through papers, as part of our ongoing cleanup, I came across ten typed pages that I wrote 10 or more years ago describing WB’s childhood as he had described it on the tapes.  I don’t remember having written it, or what my intentions in writing it were exactly.  It’s just the sort of thing I do.

In any case, I scanned in the pages and have stuck them up on the Tingle Territory web page.  It’s an easy read and a bit interesting.

Brother Dan is mending.  He drove out my way to get out of the house I expect.  He is somewhat at loose ends, knocking around the house for the next month, before he can try to go back to work.  The cut from the operation is pretty visible along his neck but not so bad.  Also I think he is a bit worried.  He remembers as he woke from the anesthetic fog the doctor saying, “We did all we could for you.”  Well, he was too out of it to ask for clarification of that ambiguous phrase. Did the guy mean we did everything that it is possible for a human to do or we did everything that we could humanly do for you as a person?  

Anyhow that “could” is bugging him.  It would bug me because it makes me wonder how much they were able to clean out that artery.  Maybe not that much, maybe only all they could.  But he will have another scan of some kind in a few days and that should tell the tale.  Not that he wouldn’t have had to have had it done in any case.  But one would hope of course for the artery to be now 90% clear rather than 50% clear.

We talked a bit and drove around in the old Volvo that I will give to his son, my nephew, Dylan, if the kid wants it.  It’s hard to know what the kid wants these days though because he appears to be in a pretty severe I-don’t-want-to-do-a-damn-thing teenage, high school slump.  Maybe the idea of getting his license will get him unstuck a bit.

Dan started laughing when he got in the Volvo because it is really a mess inside.  The previous owner left the sun roof open; it rained and the interior roof sort of rotted out leaving little pieces of fabric hanging down here and there.  Also the exterior is not so hot.  But I got the car for 800 dollars from a professor.  I told him my Honda was giving out and he said he had this Volvo sitting in his driveway that he wanted to unload.  The damn Honda was actually pouring out black smoke.  Actually it only poured out for a couple of minutes, but that was enough for people to yell at me or give me the finger.  I would yell, it’s going away but they didn’t care.

I have had that Volvo for six years I guess and it has been a faithful car.  It’s an 86 with 175 thousand miles on it.  I wanted to get it up to 200 thousand.  I took it in faithfully for its 3000 mile check up and oil.  And, aside from having the front brakes redone, it hasn’t cost much to maintain these past three years.  I figure the car has another 50 thousand miles on it at least.  The engine and transmission are still in wonderful shape.  The battery gave out some years back and I had to look all over for the replacement.  Finally I found a place that sold them for 95 dollars a pop.  That’s a lot for a battery but the guy said those Volvo engines need plenty to turn them over since they are really redesigned tractor engines.

So I will give Dylan the car if he wants it, though as I said, it is hard to know what he wants these days.  But I have to get rid of it in a couple of weeks because each family in the condo complex is allowed only two cars.  We have three, now that Carol’s mom gave her a Toyota, so the Volvo has got to go.

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That’s the old Volvo. 

Tingle Road is making me nuts.  I mean so what?  The Tingles have a road named after them.  No big deal.  After all it was named for them since it went right through their property.  The road was called Tingle because they owned it. I found a Tingle Bridge on the web.  Probably that’s because the Bridge is located on Tingle property.  It’s not like Tingle Road was named after a famous Tingle like all those Lincoln Roads all over the country are named after a famous Lincoln.  And hell, take a look at Tingle Road…It’s barely a road anymore.

 Still, for all that, I was upset to note, as I have previously said, that according to Google maps, Tingle Road is slowly disappearing.  It used to run from clear down around Blout up into Butts County.  I have a Monroe County map from 1988 that clearly shows that to be the case.  Now on Google maps at the south end only a little tiny bit of Tingle Road remains.  The big piece going north is now called Graham, maybe because some interloper named Graham now owns the property through which the road runs.  So be it.

But to the north, I have pictures taken in the 90’s that show actual road signs with the name Tingle on them.  One at the corner of Brownlee and Tingle Road and the other at the intersection of Tingle Road and High Falls.  Actual pictures.  BUT Google maps now say that end of Tingle Road is Teagle Road.  I got the feeling strange people were trying to wipe out any remnant or memory of Tingle Road maybe because there are no Tingles in the area that I know of to defend the memory of Tingle Road.

Yes, memories must be defended to.

Now I have concluded that Google is screwed up.  For while they call it Teagle Road at the north end, if you type in Tingle Road in Google maps, up comes a Tingle Road in Jackson that is pointing—you guessed it—to what they call Teagle Road.  From this I conclude somebody collecting the data wrote Teagle for Tingle and so it no longer appears on Google maps.

This makes me wonder about history in a general way.  How the hell accurate can people be?  People forget stuff all the time.  I can’t remember yesterday.  How could a person in his or her 80’s say such and such occurred on such and such a day with anything like accuracy?

Anyhow Tingle Road is driving me nuts.

So now I have four google picture sites:

 Tingle Road
Cemeteries and Churches
Grandma Tingle’s Place
Pappy Tingle’s House

All can be located at.  So take a jaunt through Tingle Territory.

Oh, I have tried to make a google map of Tingle Territory, but I am not so hot at maps yet. When you get to the google map page click on the tab for My Maps (those being my maps) and when that page comes up click on Tingle Territory.

Most of another day in the garage cleanup.  For Carol at least.  I am stuck and can’t do much more till the shredding gets done, and I upset her by bring out yet more paper junk from the condo.  She started feeling overwhelmed.  So I stopped doing that.

She finds it hard—and me too—going through all that crap.  The crap makes you think about your life and where you have been and what you have done and what you haven’t done over the years.  That’s probably one reason people don’t throw out stuff; they really don’t want to remember anything.

Take that bike there in the picture.  I don’t know how many years back I decided I would be eco conscious and get exercise by riding a bike.  It’s only a couple of miles to the university, so on top of that I would ride to the club or just out on a bike path that runs from the university to downtown so that I was averaging like 13 miles a day or better over about a three year period.

But then my neck gave out and I started having pains in the neck and pains going all down my shoulders to my hands.  The bad office chair I had then and the bike were both responsible.  I got a new chair but I had to stop riding the bike.  I had bags on it for my books and stuff, and a lights for at night in the front and the back and a speedometer so I could torture myself with how slowly I was going when all the younger people just whizzed by me.  It told me the number of miles I had gone too.  I would get pissed when it would lose the connection and not work because I wanted to keep track of how many miles I had gone.

So I had to park the bike.  But it still seemed like a good bike to me and I would take it out occasionally and ride over to this park on the ocean, but then the pedals started slipping, so I took it in for a tune up, and the guy took a look at it and said “no way.”  He said I had biked it to death.  The bike as far as I could calculate had about 10,000 miles on it.  Damn I thought a bike would last more than 10,000 miles.

So now I am throwing it out.  Once on a hill, I got going about 40 mph on that thing.

I worked on Tingle Territory a bit more.  I moved all the collection over to the Google site.  It’s pretty cool.  You can click on the slideshow and the captions come up too if you want or you can turn them off, and down on the lower left of the page is a Google map so you can mark where the pictures were taken.  So if you have Google earth on your computer you can click on the map, log on to Google earth, and look at the pot via satellite.  The only problem is I don’t think I have done a very accurate job of pin pointing things.

Though I do believe I have located the ARP in Ora and Grandma’s house a little down from that.

On my first trip back to the South in some 30 years, I set about locating Tingle Road.  I was surprised to learn there was a Tingle Road.  But Joan said there was one in Blount, Georgia.

We pulled off the interstate from Atlanta to Macon to see if we were headed in the right direction.  When I said we were looking for Blount, the kid behind the desk said, “What would you go there for?”  I said I had people there though I didn’t tell him they were all underground.

Blount is one of those places you wouldn’t know existed unless you had a map telling you it was there.  As far as I could tell it was just a crossroads with the Payan Baptist Church sitting there at the junction.  Church was just getting out, so I approach a fellow, and asked did he know where Tingle road was, and he said Mrs. So and So might know, her being the local historian.  Mrs. So and So was a really old, little lady and she said all I had to do was turn to the right at the first dirt road right past the church—that would be Gregory–drive on it a bit, till I crossed a little bridge and pretty soon after that on the left would be the entrance to Tingle road.

Sure enough we found Tingle Road and drove on it till we saw the chimneys marking the Tingle House of Archebald Daniel Tingle I believe that had burnt to the ground some time in the 1930’s.  The remains of seven chimneys suggest a pretty big establishment.  But we couldn’t see much beyond that because the undergrown was so thick, and I had heard there were plenty of ticks in there.

I wanted to drive clear to the north end of Tingle Road though Carol was getting a little freaked out what with us driving on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere and on private property too, though there didn’t seem to be a living soul anywhere about.  I insisted on driving a bit further, till we topped a knoll and saw that the road ahead was ankle to knee deep mud.  I decided to exercise a little prudence then.

I don’t if it was that trip or the next one but eventually we drove around and found the north end of Tingle Road near Mount Vernon Baptist Church located just across the county line in Butts.

Recently, checking out Goggle maps,  I learned to my disgruntlement, that Tingle Road is disappearing.  The road is still there but for some reason the people in the area have renamed the road especilly at the north end.  But maybe Google maps made a mistake because they call the north end of Tingle Road, Teagle Road.  Teagle is awful close to Tingle, don’t you think.

Here’s a link to a Google Map of the South End of Tingle Road.  The old Tingle place is located on what Google calls Tingle Road.

I thought to distract myself a little from my worry about Brother Dan’s upcoming procedure (tomorrow) as well as channel my perpetual anxiety that I would recreate a website I had up a good while ago called: Tingle Territory.

This site consisted mostly of pictures of Tingle places I have visited in Georgia and SC in search of my roots. 

The last TT was a regular web page; you scrolled down the page to see the pics.  This time I am using some goggle freeware to create a webpage with thumbnails.  When you click on the thumbnail the pic gets bigger and some captions I have written should also appear.

This is sort of a test run.  This first page I call "Pappy Tingle’s House."

Click here to see the test run. 

  To the best of my knowledge this house was built at the turn of 20th century.  Back in that day, there was no air conditioning; so you had to build a house that helped you to cope with the heat.  The high roof and ceilings had apparently some cooling properties.  One big corridor runs right from the front door to straight to the back door, so you could let cooling breezes, if there were any, go right through the house.  Along the corridor were two big rooms on one side and two big rooms on the other.  And back when the house was first constructed the kitchen was out back and not attached to the house.  But the kitchen is long gone.

I don’t know if this type of house is called a shotgun shack or not. 

I visited the house first in 1963 when the family came back to SC for a visit.  I remember sitting there in the heat feeling I was in the middle of nowhere.  Back then there was a scupponan arbor along one side of the house.  I ate some.  They were good.  I think that is the one and only time I have eaten scuppons.

I visited the house again with Carol many years later in 1994.  We drove by, stopped, took some pictures.  Finally, I went to the front door and knocked.  Mrs. Webb came to the door.  I told her I was a Tingle.  She didn’t quite follow and started telling me a Tingle lived right down the road.  When I made it a bit clearer who I was, she and Mr. Webb invited us in and they let us take a look around the place.

 They seemed very proud of their big freezer that ran along one wall of the corridor.  They opened it up and I admire the stuff in it though I couldn’t have said what it was.

Mr. and Mrs. Webb are now both dead.  Mr. Webb, suffering from a prolonged illness, killed himself out in the backyard.  Mrs. Webb died some years later.  I don’t know who owns the house now.

Pappy Tingle was the father of William Berner Senior, William Berner Senior was the father of WB junior, Neal, Edith, Addie, Carl, Mamie and Doublas.

So he was my great-great grandfather. 

 

As the observant viewer will note, in WB Stone: Part 1, the space below the birthdate of Joan K. is blank.  But for eighty dollars, Mr. Wilson of Wilson memorials drove over to the Ora, ARP graveyard and chiseled Joan’s departure date.

It’s odd to think that the blank space below Joan’s name will only be blank in photographs of the gravestone before she died. Now, the blank is filled and will remained filled.

I find it odd to think about this and to look at those pictures.  But maybe there is something to this stuff, doing these things I mean.  In prior times, people had sometimes extended periods of mourning after the death of a relative.  And at times, I have wished that I had been wearning a black arm band to signify why I was (am still) more morose even than usual.  

I was wondering why I was thinking about brothers yesterday and remembered that after class, Tuesday afternoon, a student ask if she could interview me for a paper she had to write for “Family Communications” on siblings, and since I had mentioned somehow in class that I had siblings, she thought I would do.  Also she wanted she said to interview someone that was “old.”  So ditto—I fit the bill.

So she interviewed me for about 20 minutes; she seemed to want to track siblings’ degree of closeness or non-closeness over a life span.  She wanted to know whether I and my three brothers had been close and when.  I said I really didn’t know.  I had no point of reference.  What’s close?  What isn’t?  Well, if something bad were to befall you, where would you turn?  First to my wife I said, then to my shrink to talk it over, and then to my brothers.  I know that if my little condo were to be hit by a meteorite and Job like I were to lose everything, one my brothers would take me in at least for a while and let me sleep on the floor or possibly even a bed, were one available.

We have kept in touch over the years, sometimes more, sometimes less.  Curiously, we are all computer literate and so have used email a good deal over the last 6 or 7 years.  Before email, we did not call each other much over the phone, because I think we all have a phone aversion.  We have not loaned each other money over the years.  That’s a good thing, I think, but then we haven’t asked each other for money because we haven’t had to.

Talking to the student, I realized suddenly that we are all non-religious.  None of us belong to a church or attend regularly.   I don’t know where that comes from, exactly.  But as a group we are not into institutionalized religion.  I don’t know if they are atheists, as I am. I think Brother Dan may be.  Brother Dave possibly.  Brother Steve though must have a spiritual side because at one time, as I recollect, his career choices were minister and captain in the merchant marines.  But I don’t believe he has been to a church in years.  In times of stress, I know for a fact, he does not read the Bible but Stoic philosophers.  So maybe he is a Pagan.

I don’t know if my brothers vote or not.  I expect possibly they do.  And we are all relatively of the same political persuasion.  Mostly we hate and distrust all politicians and think the current administration stinks to high heaven.

There was the mini-series on HBO called Band of Brothers about guys fighting together WWII.  These guys would praise each other to the high heavens, especially if they were praising somebody who died in the war.  But once they got home, it was clear they had little or nothing in common, though over time they did start to attend reunions.  What they had holding them together were common memories of horrible experience.  I think that may be what holds my brothers and me together: common memories of a miserable experience.  Growing up in our parents’ house.