Jitterbugging for Jesus

Yer Jitterbugger is back from a trip on church business to Nashville, which has always been high on my list–probably No. 1, in fact–of friendliest cities in the country. The friendliness on this visit started almost as soon as I took my seat on the plane and met a friendly Southern gentleman and Titans football fanatic from Nashville, whose last words to me as we stepped off the plane were, “I hope you enjoy your stay in Nashville.”

I did enjoy it, and have always enjoyed Nashville, as it’s a nice city to visit and probably nice to live in, although I would think it would help to be a country music fanatic to live there. I have very discriminatory tastes in country music and tilt toward the older country music and stars and moreso the long-dead country stars, back to Bob Wills and beyond. I wouldn’t walk across the street to see, say, Toby Keith, although “Beer for My Horses” is sure-enough a great title for a country song.

Nashville has abundant grits, and I love me some grits, although it wasn’t always so. For a couple of years in my growing-up years I lived with my grandmother, a few blocks from my parents. She was such a strong-willed pioneer sort of woman–born in the 19th century and married at 16 with little schoolin’–that when she announced she wanted me to come live with her there was no argument from Deanie and Goldie McKay. She never learned to drive and she had become too feeble to do much walking, so she moved me in with her and Miss Trannie Franklow–an old school teacher and spinster who rented half her house to my grandmother–so that my grannie (“Nannie,” as we called her) could send me walking to the grocery store almost daily to pick her up two cans of Garrett snuff. She dipped snuff pretty much all the time except when she was eating grits or oatmeal. She was always going to cut down but she never did or could cut down at all, which is why, when I walked into the corner grocery store in downtown Navasota, Texas, they threw down two Garrett Snuffs on the counter before I could get the coinage out of my pocket.

Oatmeal and grits were her staples–and especially grits. She ate them at every meal and force-fed me with so many grits (“eat them grits [or that oatmeal]–they stick to your ribs!”) that it was about 35 years before I could look at another grit or a bowl of oats.

But I did eventually regain my taste for the grit and for oatmeal too, and I eat a lot of both now. One of the best parts of my trip to Nashville was the hotel’s breakfast buffet, which had good, hot grits available by the ton. One of life’s simple pleasures is dropping a scoop of real butter onto hot grits and watching it melt before you stir it in and get those white grits all jaundiced up.

I leave for my trek around China in a couple of weeks and I’m thinking I may have to take some grits, along with all the peanut butter I’m packing as I figure I’ll need lots of peanut butter for a quick and homey taste as all my hosts over there keep telling me the delicious treats they’re going to serve me like pumpkin soup. I’m trying to withhold judgment on pumpkin soup until I’ve tried it but I’m thinking I may need to chase it down with some peanut butter and crackers. Or grits.

Americanized Chinese food is not one of my favorite foods by a longshot, which is yet another reason I’m crazy for planning a trip to far-flung places in China where the Chinese food is, I would think, very Chinese. But I can subsist on peanut butter, which I pretty much subsist on anyway, and as long as I can whip up some grits to stick to my ribs on occasion I will have no fear of going hungry.

BTW, one of my hosts-to-be in Kaifeng, China, asked me in an email if I play ping-pong, which is the national sport in China, along with drinking tea I think, which seems to be the national pasttime. (Guess what everybody will be getting for Christmas from Jitterbugger this year. If you guessed all the tea in China, you got it right.)

I play ping-pong–who doesn’t, or who at least hasn’t played ping-pong–although it would probably be foolish to take on a ping-pong player in China. I had to explain to my friend in China that here we are big on football, which entails 22 men crushing each other’s bones into powder–and basketball and baseball. I had to explain that ping-pong is down on the list of American sports and we’re talking wayyy down the list.

However, I’m told that China now has basketball courts for the kids even in far-flung locales these days, thanks to Houston Rocket Yao Ming, so I’m packing lots of Houston Rockets and Dallas Mavs t-shirts to win favor with the kids over yonder. I’m sure they’ll like those.

Whether they’ll like grits remains to be seen.

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