Strangers no more, a goodbye

LITTLE ROCK — I thought I’d ride this column-writing gig into the Arkansas sunset.

But it’s not to be. After today, the Sweet Tea stand we set up here on the Arkansas page on Aug. 22, 2004, is closed.

Linda Caillouet’s Paper Trails column will appear in this space on Sundays.

All those summers ago, my boss, knowing my obsession with the house wine of the South, suggested the name for the column, and it worked.

I like to hear someone say he had Sweet Tea for breakfast.

The Sweet Tea question I heard most often over these seven years was: “How do you find enough to write about?”

My answer: “How do I find time and space to write all the stories I hear?”

My chief regret as we shutter the place is that I have left so many stories scribbled on legal pads and untold.

But hundreds of stories survived my inefficiency and appeared in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, each a gift from someone who trusted me to share his life with strangers who read the newspaper:

The now-deceased Cotton Nixon, 83 at the time, fiddling his once famous composition, “Ragg Mopp,” in the VA hospital room where he was recovering from the wound a brown-recluse gnawed into his left foot.

As told by Pastor Paul Holderfield Jr.: Pastor Paul Holderfield Sr., turning his back on a black friend because he was embarrassed for his fellow firefighters to see him shake his hand; then decades later, going to the man’s house to apologize and seek forgiveness.

T.J. Brown, former logger and now state-bridge mender, passing along his grandmother’s secret for great cornbread crust.

I said “strangers who read the newspaper.” The thing about a column like this is that when all is said and written and read, we aren’t complete strangers anymore.

This story never made it out of my notebook, and you’ll understand why I’m omitting the name of the star and her hometown:

I met a woman who indicated she had been married more than once, so I asked how many times.

“Two,” she said, provoking her 70-something-year-old daughter to chide: “Mama!”

Mama then corrected her statement.

“Nine. After nine, I figured out men are more trouble than they’re worth.”

Now, in spite of my druthers, we close shop.

To every friend new or old who read, wrote, shared, or all three - Viola! which is Spanish for thanks.