A 3 Day Trip

No, I didn't get stuck on Gilligan's Island or take a heroic dose.  
 

This past Friday I flew to Atlanta and then drove up to Chattanooga to attend my uncle's funeral and memorial events.  It was a beautiful send-off and a great gathering of family and friends.  Chattanooga was looking good, with Spring in full swing, the trees and flowers bursting with life.

I was traveling with my sister, and on the drive back to Atlanta yesterday morning, we took a side trip to Summerville, Georgia to visit the Rev. Howard Finster's Paradise Gardens compound.  Finster is best known for his work with R.E.M. and Talking Heads.  R.E.M. filmed their first music video there.  He did the cover artwork for their second album, Reckoning, and Talking Heads' Little Creatures albums as well as singles for both bands.  In his time, he was considered America's premier Folk Artist, an eccentric fundamentalist preacher who viewed each of his works as visions from God, always noting the exact date and time his visions came to him.  

When I was seeing the Grateful Dead at the Omni in Atlanta in late March of 1993, a group of my friends were staying at one of our friend's mom's house in Atlanta.  She said, "oh, y'all are here to see The Grateful Dead?  You should go up to Summerville, and I'll show you something that will really blow your minds!"

We were game, and all trundled up the 75 before exiting west onto a little country drive into Summerville.  Paradise Gardens was surreal.  Howard's artwork was anywhere and everywhere.  Everything was a potential tableaux.  His devotees had used different colored glass to make mosaics on the walkways.  Funeral statuary mixing fauna, mushrooms, and angels were mixed together in hallucinatory displays.  His work was displayed in a ramshackle gallery, basically three hallways in a zig-zag pattern with his original works simply nailed to the walls.  
 

At the end of touring the grounds, we checked out the gift shop.  Howard was seated giving a rambling monologue/sermon while a British documentary crew filmed it all.  People would ask Howard questions.  He never answered directly, but if you kept listening, 10-15 minutes later he would work in a response.  It was a memorable day.

Howard's gone off to eternity now, but Paradise Gardens is still there.  My sister is an artist in her own right, and I knew she'd enjoy seeing it.  We got there before it was opened, so we mostly just circled the exterior.  It was almost 30 years to the day since my last visit.

After leaving Summerville, we headed down to Atlanta to visit with my sister's daughter and her husband.  We were celebrating my niece's recent birthday and took them out to lunch.  After a great meal (Atlanta is a Foodie paradise) we went out for a walk around the neighborhood.  I heard a booming amplified voice, and looked down the street expecting to see a street protest or rally.  We were just across the street from the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial.  I was hearing tapes of his famous sermons and speeches.  We toured the grounds, also viewing the nearby Ebenezer Baptist Church and MLK's boyhood home.

It was an inspiring coda to a poignant, bittersweet, but ultimately beautiful and reaffirming weekend.  The flight home was uneventful, the turbulent skies from the storm that had flattened Rolling Fork, Mississippi having already passed through the night before.  
 

Life can bring love, beauty, hardships, and misery in equal measure.  It's good to be reminded that we are never alone, and are surrounded by the saints and angels.