It’s no secret – in fact, it’s becoming “fabled” pretty quickly – that Tink and I come from worlds as far apart as Mars and Jupiter.
He is descended from Mayflower Pilgrims who, for generations, were well-respected New Englanders who then, in modern times, took a ride across the country to find success in “television land.” I descend from Scotch-Irish debtors who were tossed out of County Antrim, in Northern Ireland, and took an unappreciated ride across the sea. As of late, my people were backwoods Appalachians who believed – mostly in equal parts – in the King James Bible and moonshine.
His people were regal. Mine had a history traced with illegal.
While I do want to point out here that his ancestors fought valiantly against the British in the Revolutionary War, it was my people who preserved General Washington’s victories by darting out of the woods and shooting accurately as the Redcoats fought their way down to the Upper Piedmont. They were already mad at the Crown for tossing them out of their home so revenge was their pleasure.
Plus, my people gave the world, Dolly Parton. So, there. We’re even. Almost.
There’s a point to this background and it has to do with an Italian marble statue of a poor, barefoot little girl, an urchin, carrying coals and kindling sticks to sell, with a teardrop on her cheek, a scarf tied around her head. Tink’s maternal great-grandfather owned coal mines. He bought the statue in Italy, then had it shipped to the United States. He was obviously prescient that a descendent of his would marry a poor girl like that.
As I tell the story, his mother lived out her final years in a luxury penthouse on the beachfront in Naples, Florida. Tink’s version is: it was a condo on the top floor.
He cannot deny, though, that her balcony faced the beach and high tide brought the water within yards of her building.
When she died several years ago, Tink and his three siblings were dividing up her belongings.
The Tinkers are mostly unsentimental people. Tink has the most sentimentality of all. When his father died, Tink took his corduroy jacket with suede patches on the sleeves. It was tailor-made 40 years ago. Tink wore it for four years until I convinced him that its day had come. And gone.
Most of his mother’s things went to friends and Goodwill with each child taking three or four boxes apiece. Tink was insistent on bringing home the little girl marble statue that weighs about 400 pounds.
“Are you crazy?” I asked. “We live on a farm. Where are we gonna put it?”
When my husband puts his foot down – which is rarely – it is nailed down. He was away, shooting a television series, so he arranged for the statue to be crated, then trucked 13 hours to Georgia.
When I saw the bill for that, I knew our grocery budget would need to be severely reduced. The driver refused to truck it up our long, precarious, gravel drive that climbs a gentle, sloping hill.
Tink called me from the set and explained. “Oh, thank God,” I replied. “Is he going to take it back to Florida?”
“No, I told him to put it down at your Mama’s.”
This caused a little dust-up because I knew wherever it was dropped off was where it would stay. For years, was my guess. This expensive masterpiece resided in the carport of my modest childhood home for THREE years.
Finally. FINALLY – after many “discussions” – the poor little girl was moved to the backside of the Rondarosa where she sets next to a Japanese maple between two barns. You can’t make this stuff up.
We’ve been approached about doing a reality show, which we would never do. It’d be sure to cause a divorce.
However, reboots of old television shows are pretty popular in Hollywood. If we ever did one, we could just call it a reboot.
Of the Beverly Hillbillies.
Ronda Rich is the best-selling author of “Sapelo Island: A Stella Bankwell Mystery.” Visit www.rondarich. com to sign up for her weekly newsletter.