A Waiting Room in Alabama

Kiffen's adventures in Alabama

I will call this short piece, “Kiffen’s Adventures in Alabama” or “Bats.”

My husband, Kiffen, is way more southern than I am, fourth or fifth-generation southern or more. His great uncle, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, was a songcatcher and fiddle player in the mountains. The Lunsford family goes way back, hailing from the mountains of Western North Carolina along with the Stroup and Collins families, also his kin. But Kiffen lived in Los Angeles for 35 years and is still new to Birmingham, so he’s been specially tuned into conversations he overhears while getting the tires changed or sitting in a waiting room. When he hears something interesting, he retells it because he’s also a natural actor.

Today, we were in a waiting room to see an eye doctor, and I got called in for the appointment. Kiffen was trying to read the latest Tommy Orange, Wondering Stars, but couldn’t concentrate because of the conversation next to him.

Later, when he told me about it, I asked him to please write it down.

Overhead in a waiting room this morning in Birmingham by Kiffen

Scene: A woman was talking to another woman and her husband.

A: I left the house at 7:30 this morning. They were working on the roads, and they are using that dry cement nowadays that they spray down with water and if you get that under your car, boy it’s done for. You own that car. You just bought it. So, I left before they even started, and I’ve just been toodle-lollying around since then until my appointment.

B: That was smart. Good thing. You know, we've had a time of it ourselves lately. We had to get rid of bats.

A: Oh no, bats?

B: Bats. Awful. Folks just showed up in hazmat outfits. They put in a two-way screen so those bats could fly out, but couldn’t fly back in. But the house just started smelling like cat pee. Those hazmat outfits had to come back out again and take out all the insulation and spray down some rafters before they replaced the insulation. It was just awful, but then we were sitting out on the deck having drinks the other night, and we noticed that the bats had just moved two doors down to our neighbor's house cause we saw them flying out of the gables.

A: Oh my.

B: You can’t kill them. Protected species. We had to call some special environmental service to remove them.

A: Well, those bats sound just like our Cody, they live at home, they don’t pay rent, and they make a mess.

B: Well, at least Cody’s conservative. He’s got one thing going for him.

***

Stay tuned for more of Kiffen’s adventures in Alabama.

In a few days, I’ll be writing about my history with Flannery O’Connor’s work and getting to see the new film “Wildcat” and talk about it with the author Amy Welborn at Sidewalk Cinema. And speaking of southern waiting rooms, there’s also a powerful waiting room scene from O’Connor’s short story “Revelation” in the film directed by Ethan Hawke. His daughter, Maya Hawke, plays Flannery O’Connor, and many of the characters in the stories, and Laura Linney plays Flannery’s mother, Regina O’Connor.

Kiffen’s great uncle - Bascom Lamar Lunsford