“Fly Around, My Pretty Little Miss”
pastel pencils, oil pencils, and watercolor
7″x12″
2013
First of all, guys?…..this is a small picture, but you’d still do well to notice that there’s a wedding ring on the lady’s left hand. Sorry….but?…
Otherwise?…..I’ve known Caroline since she was 16 or 17…..whatever. She was VERY young when she came up from Alabama to Sewanee to visit her cousin Walter Givhan (my fraternity brother).Perhaps she came to visit the admission office; I can’t really recall anything definite beyond the fact that everyone (at least all the guys) were forewarned that she was very pretty, and you would be killed-to-death by one or another of her cousins if you were anything short of a complete gentleman around her during her visit.
I didn’t see her for years after that visit….until she showed up as a counselor at Camp Merrywood (I THINK it was Camp Merrywood…I was working at High Hampton Inn, and every English major from Sewanee seemed to be employed at one North Carolina summer camp or another that Summer in 1983). She was still pretty and smart and funny and well-liked; some things never change for some folks.
Then?…I never saw her again for years, until I came to Duke to take a doctorate, and it turned out she’d graduated from Sewanee and had come to Chapel Hill for her MFA in creative writing.
Basically? Caroline (strictly in terms of my own, self-referential life) is like a very benign and welcome version of a Manhattan traffic ticket you never paid….it/she just keeps popping right back up, just when you thought that was the end of that.
These days? Caroline lives in Raleigh, is quite married to remarkably nice Dane Huffman (this is not a recent development), has two children, is active in her church, holds down a job, supervises a snappy corgi (I tried to warn her, but did she listen?????), maintains a cheerful attitude concerning just about everything (I certainly don’t), and is generally quite wonderful. Whenever we meet?….I inevitably feel (as I did when I first met her, years ago) very stupid and ill-prepared and (to be frank?) cloddish.
In case you wonder?….
I’ve seen her without make-up or fancy, dress-up clothes……trust me…she’s still just as pretty….and certainly just as smart & funny.
I’ll be giving this picture to her husband, Dane.
Of course, the ONLY song that could “go” with this portrait of Caroline is Johnny Cash’s “The Ballad of a Teenage Queen”. Go to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hWW8Lr-Ajg
—-david. thursday morning. 8 August/