Busted Flat in Paris

I woke up in Tupelo to Winnie jabbing me in the back at 6:58 in the morning. “Come on. We gotta get outta here.” It pained me to recall the place we were in, but the dead crickets on the floor were undeniable. We shot out of that parking lot dragging our gloom behind us, figuring in no time we’d be sipping coffee and filling up on grits and being joyful again.

But apparently in Tupelo it’s hard to find a cup of coffee on a Saturday morning if you’re not staying at the Holiday Inn. We drove around for what felt like hours as the caffeine withdrawal started to pinch our brains. (It was only about 30 minutes, but surely if you use your imagination you can feel the agony of us poor, cranky women.)

Then suddenly we were in a booth at Cindy’s, and plates of eggs and bowls of grits and even a few strips of perfectly crunchy bacon for me lay before us. An old man with an oxygen tank sat nearby and the steady intake of his machine was like a mantra, reminding us to breathe. He also reminded us we couldn’t leave Tupelo without visiting Elvis’s birthplace, so that was the next stop.

I can’t decide what was most remarkable about the little 3-room house around which a museum, fountain and chapel have sprung in the last 30 years. Was it the impossibly large, Aquanet-laced comb-over of the gal working the museum’s register? Was it the soothing atmosphere of the chapel, where you can sit as long as you like, listening to Elvis sing spirituals on continuous loop? Or was it the sign on the bona fide church across the street, reminding you to WORSHIP THE REAL KING & SEE ELVIS IN HEAVEN?

We were buying Dr. Peppers at the General Store in Paris, MS by noon, our moods sufficiently uplifted, our sense of humor back on track, our delight about the stone WELCOME TO PARIS, MS sign being overgrown with – well – not kudzu, just crabgrass – making us giggle. At the Paris Village Things You Love shop, we met Carol and Cynthia and June, three ladies making a go of selling antiques and old stuff in a town nobody’s even heard of 13 miles from there.

“We were wondering about the name. How did it get its name?” Win asked.

“Whadn’t it some guy name Paris came here and called it that?” Cynthia asked June.

And the history of the town? June drawled, “Yeah, there’s some history here all right. There’s some history.” That’s about all the history we were going to get, apparently, other than the fact that they’d had other visitors who were seeing all the Parises. One was a journalist from some New York magazine who’d come through on a motorcycle a few years back. Another was a young couple of newlyweds who’d started in Paris, France and come home to do all the Parises. “I’d like to know how they could afford it,” Carol said.

We drove to the cemetery for a teensy peek into some more history when we discovered the flat. I thought I was going to finally, for the first time in my life, become a woman who knew how to change a tire, and was really excited about the prospect of Winnie teaching me. But by the time we had all the camping gear out of the trunk and the donut extracted, a father-and-son pair of angels from Water Valley had taken over and even used the air compressor they carried in their truck to top us off. “Only place to get that tire fixed is Walmart up in Oxford,” the dad regretted to inform us.

And that’s where we finished out our day. There was certainly a cosmic, spiritual lesson to getting busted flat in the last Paris of the Southern Tour and winding up in a place I’ve boycotted for more than 8 years, a place with such a ruthless monopoly on America in general and Oxford, MS in particular that it took over 4 hours to put a $10 patch on a tire so these road-weary women could get themselves back on the journey. But I was damned if I was going to find it.

Then a merry-eyed belle from Jackson strolled in with a beatific smile on her face. “How long y’all been waitin’?” she asked.

“Four hours,” I answered through clenched teeth.

“Oh, lawd,” she said and her laugh was a long, melodious titter. She threw her head back and glanced at her husband. “Wade, you better get comfortable.”

We swapped our blow-out stories and our how-we-got-here-from-where-we’re-froms. She listened to ours with her mouth hanging open and a certain measure of awe. “I’m tryin’ to think of a girlfriend I’ve got who’d travel with me like that. But they’d all want to be home before 5:00 traffic.”

The entire day turned around and all this angel had to do was open her mouth and introduce herself. She said she was Mamie Couch: “Mamie like Eisenhower, Couch like you sit on.” We about had her convinced to fly to Zihuatanejo but she was afraid they wouldn’t understand her down there. “I was in Paris, France once, trying to get my husband’s payants prayessed. And they even spoke English! And I was tryin’ to show them” – she pantomimed ironing – “but they just looked at each other. And one of ‘em asked the other one ‘What language is she speakin’?’”