Nostalgia, Just Like It Used to Be

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Nostalgia arrived by e-mail, like a martini with an early twist of pain. It came just after we returned from Jackson, Mississippi's terrific "Glory of Baroque Dresden" exhibition. It arrived on the wings of recent photographs my Brother sent of our Parents' long abandoned roadhouse, "Porky's Home of Fine Foods, U. S. Highway fifty-one, at Ullin, Illinois ~ twenty miles north of Cairo," it read on the menu covers.

Porky's

Ullin was an eight-hundred strong German settlement, with a large gathering of freed Africans, two prolific Irish families, another named Redcloud, said to have sprouted from seed dropped along the nearby Trail of Tears, and a grocer who attended the Methodist Church but was rumored to be Jewish.

French-named Cache River and an unnamed woods lay on the land behind Porky's. In front passed the above mentioned U. S. Highway 51, known as "the hard-road" when my Brothers and I were boys. We thought our Father owned that stretch of highway. He did own the woods down to the river and, as far as anyone in Ullin cared, that bit of river, too. The building housing Porky's began life as a saw miller's office, built when French and German immigrants came up "le Cache fleuve," (then a highway of immigration) and settled where it met Indian Creek.

Our Father's nickname was Porky. He was an expansive man who hung pictures over the bar of himself in Ullin Aces' baseball uniform. He loved talking to the travelers who played his slot machines and ate his fine foods. "Fifty-one was the first trans-American highway," he would tell them. I guess it was. It was surely his and mine. "Two brick lanes running all the way from Canada to New Orleans."

"At Cairo, where Tom Sawyer was taking 'Nigger Joe,' " he would say, "you will cross into Kentucky, and when you do you will see a change in the highway's condition." He was proud of being an Illinoisan, and a Son of a Son of the frontier. In his youth he had hauled rock to build the road's bridges, and when it was finished he drove rum over it from Canada to Southern Illinois. His hard-road passed beside his establishment so it seemed as much his, and ours, as the woods and French-named river beyond.

My Brother's photographs can be turned and trimmed on the computer showing up-close how advancing trees and their attending brush invaded Porky's kitchen years before and recently reached the front door, from where they eye old 51 lying quietly in good repair but little used. Two miles East a giant freeway swoops travelers off to Memphis or Chicago, with little notice of an Ullin off-ramp. An Ullin off-ramp? If hope were not eternal would Ullin have been given an off-ramp? Embraced by a single cloverleaf sits a new Porky's. Our Mother gave the name to its new owner saying, "No one else had as much use for it."

U. S. Highway 51 took friends of our Parents down to New Orleans and brought back pralines. Of course, 51 was the road I first drove here, in the middle Seventies. President Eisenhower's Interstate system had long been completed in the rest of America, but it was still under construction in South Louisiana and the churned up wetlands beside the hard-road looked to me like a giant's compost bed. My first taste of coffee with chicory and that giant compost heap, from which Interstate highways would grow, and I knew I had found an earthly paradise - damn the murder rate! Old two-lane 51 can be glimpsed today, like prey beneath the gangly Interstate as it spider-legs its way across the marshlands above New Orleans. The Swamp will soon reclaim the old roadway, it is seldom used now except by an occasional body-dumpster or sport boater. Then the road home to a home long gone will itself be gone.

One day, back home long ago, loving my Father admiring my love of the garlic in what he very descriptively called his "Spanish rice with okra and tomatoes," he told me I should go live in New Orleans when I grew up. It has been a perfect fit, this Big Swamp City and me. How did he know?

Recently, friends driving back from Chicago stopped at the new Porky's. They brought me a blue flier trumpeting Sunday chicken and dumplings. I expect they are good, but not like those served from memory. The coffee was strong they said, but lacked chicory.

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Jackson's The Glory of Baroque Dresden exhibition is highly recommended for deep nostalgia. It runs through September 6.