Life imitates art

I have recently been reading some little books by Clyde Edgerton, an author who has been described as belonging to "the genre called 'Southern Writers.' Say the phrase and one immediately thinks of Faulkner, Williams, Wolfe, Welty, Morris, Styron and, increasingly Clyde Edgerton." His work is delightful - I encourage you to try him out.

Most recently, I read a story called "Walking Across Egypt" which features an elderly, widowed lady of the South, Mattie Riggsby, who - forgetting that she had sent her chair seats out to be recovered - accidentally sat down in her favorite chair and got stuck. Really stuck. Mattie was not rescued until the next morning when the dog catcher she had summoned the previous day came out to the house to pick up a stray.  It's only a small part of Edgerton's story, an accident that turned out well and plays a bit part in the rest of the novel.

But the other day, there was a story in the American-Statesman about Evelyn Rogers, 75, of Liberty Hill, who had gone out to water her plants one evening, sat down to rest on a canvas bottom-chair, and when she absentmindedly pulled on a piece of plastic sticking out underneath the chair's bottom -- the bottom ripped out and she fell through the opening and became stuck. Just like Mattie Riggsby!

Here's the newspaper account:

"I couldn't get out of it, and I couldn't turn it over,"

Her son and his family, who live in the house in front of hers, had left that morning for the beach at Port Aransas, she said. She didn't go with them because she thought it would be too hot. All she was left with was her Chihuahua, Lucy, who stood by her, she said.

"I screamed until I couldn't scream anymore. I told myself I couldn't scream anymore because it wouldn't do any good because there were no real close neighbors. I told my little puppy, 'We got to wait for the paper boy, because Mama can't get out of the chair.'"

So they waited.

Rogers said she wasn't afraid of the dark. She didn't even care that ants were biting her. But she was afraid of dying. "I didn't want the kids to come home from vacation and find me dead in the yard!" 

And the paper boy did show up, early the next morning. Ethan Mueller, a 30-year-old student at Austin Community College, was delivering the American-Statesman about 5 a.m.and  heard Rogers' dog barking "pretty furiously." He got out of his car and found Rogers "just sandwiched between two bars of the chair." A call to 911 brought help, and after treatment at the hospital, Rogers is back home.

Perhaps I should send her a copy of "Walking across Egypt" so she can find out what happens next.