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their own, some of whose opening couplets, inspired by readily pronounceable towns, I still remember:
    A lady who lived close to Mystic

Had only one characteristic.
    An overlooked person in Brooklet

Endeavored to learn from a booklet.
    There once was a woman of Leaf

Whose husband lacked several teef
    There once was a housewife in Cumming

Who wasn't aware she was humming.
    Lots of domestic tension in the Georgia limerick, as there was in my life at the time. I figured it was that way in everybody's. Maybe if I had managed to grit my teeth and hang in there, I might have become a miserable local institution. Verse sometimes popped up on the
Journal's
editorial page under the nom de plume of Georgia Keats. I could have been Georgia Keats. Author of
Peach Fuzz (And Other Things You Just Have to Work Your Way through in Life, to Get Down to Where the Goodness Is).
    Actually I guess you can usually find a faucet or spigot, indoors or outdoors, where you can rinse the fuzz off of a peach or more precisely, damp down the down. But here's the beauty of having a niche: my second book could have
been Real Men Don't Rinse a Peach,
which happens to be something I believe. My father wouldn't run water over a peach, he'd bite right into one, fuzz and all, and my mother would shudder, but you could tell she found it dashing. She freely admitted being impressed by another aspect of his audacity: how he would pass up any number of fairly close parking places in the confidence that he would find one right next to where we were going in the car. “I couldn't stand to do that,” my mother would marvel. There was niche-finding for you. When I was writing for the
Journal,
my father—after decades of frustration in the automobile business (Packard and Edsel)—had at last come into his own, in the Atlanta area. He was a self-denying, warmly appreciated savings-and-loan president pretty much à la Jimmy Stewart in
It's a Wonderful Life.
I don't recall any pagan namesake son in that movie.
    I couldn't keep my column in the light-verse mode, at any rate, because there were people in Atlanta who, despite the city's motto, were not too busy to hate. Managed to find the time somehow. One night I was writing at home in the wee hours, typing away against bigotry, when the phone rang and a woman said in a slow sultry voice that she liked what I had written that day, she wanted to get together with me, why didn't I come over and see her. In that afternoon's paper, I had written something snide about a local man who'd been outed as a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The woman made a moist mouthy sound. “Mmm, scuse me, I'm eatin’
uh peach,
uh good rahp one,” she said, “and you know how that juice'll jes’ git awl ovuh y’ mouth 'n’ lips, 'n’…”
    My then wife, who had gone off me, pretty much for good (maybe because I put too much of myself into Georgia limericks), was asleep,and I was tempted. But, for one thing, I had not been brought up to depart from the straight and narrow anywhere near that abruptly, alas, and for another thing, it sounded like a setup to me. I often wonder, though. Maybe I should have gone out and met that woman, maybe she wasn't—come to think about it,
she probably
wasn't—a Klan seductress, maybe she would have rocked me till my back didn't have no bones just purely in appreciation of how much of myself I put into my column. And she and I would've moved to Mystic or Leaf, and I'd have made a bundle writing shamelessly inspirational lurid novels while she bustled around the house—all sweaty in just her slip—eating those peaches of hers. Or, say she
was
an operative for the dark side. Maybe that's where I missed the story of my life. I know I'm feeling around for it at the moment. The poet John Keats, England Keats, wrote:
    When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has glean d my teeming brain…
    If Keats had lived to be my age, I guarantee he would have gotten over those particular fears. I have