Speaking of a village and its people

FISHTRAP HOLLOW, Miss.-The fall woods are not brilliant this year, but dry and brittle and going from green to brown and the ground without anticipated and spectacular color in-between. The coyotes are relentless. The predicted rain did not amount to four drops.
I am as blue as a Lucinda Williams song.
It is other things, not politics, that made me sad. Politics is like a bad movie playing in the next room, a comedy that isn't funny, droning on because I can't find the energy to get up and turn off the set. Politics is like the coyotes' howl; almost too surreal to matter till you are attacked.
And then I read my good friend Johnny Williams' new book, "Village People, Sketches of Auburn," and its wisdom and kind humor make me remember where I've always gone when times are sad. I seek refuge in a book. I find myself thankful for written words, which, if you choose well, never let you down. Johnny quotes William Butler Yeats: "Who could have foretold that the heart grows old?" And though that quote is in an essay deep in the book, it might have been the introduction. This is a book about people and things he knew as a youth but now, somehow, knows better.
Johnny grew up in Auburn. He went to Auburn University. He ran a print shop for a few years in Auburn after graduation. So a town so many of us mostly missed while immersed in the university side of things, Johnny saw. And when Johnny Williams sees something, he searches for meaning.
It doesn't matter, either, if Auburn is not your chosen football flavor, or if you've never passed through the town that would be typically small in characters and complexion but for its college core. Johnny hits the mother lode of richly distinct but universally understood personalities so that anybody can enjoy this book. Even folks from across the state and stadium-"the vile pompom-shaking roachnest," as he describes Alabama fans-would identify. If they read.
I most love the chapter called "My First Seven Teachers," when Johnny decides: "I think the fact that women were entrusted, or rather, left with, the responsibility of instilling the dominant cultural vision into our young proves that we are a more matriarchal society than we recognize. We intuitively gave this vital underpaid job to the best people to do it, and made men overpaid bureaucrats to get them out of the way. The best way to nullify something is to make it Important."
Of his first-grade teacher, he writes: "Mrs. Umbach was soft and plump, like a human cumulus cloud, pillowy but capable of spits of lightning."
There was a flamboyant dance instructor in Auburn for decades that even those of us oblivious to off-campus life knew about, or thought we knew about. He didn't drive, so you'd often see him sashaying on the side of the road from here to there, graceful and exotic with black Roy Orbison hair.
When Johnny was a printer, he printed Lynn Curtis' spring dance recital program. " and one day a big car drove up, and what might have been Little Richard arriving at a show, but was Lynn Curtis arriving at Village Printers, emerged from the back seat in a white ensemble with a shoulder bag "
Lynn Curtis was an integral part of Auburn, as accepted as the eagle, and makes you wonder, if you are inclined to thought, what has happened to acceptance of our differences, not to mention strong women, since.