ONE YEAR AFTER

the master resting



At 10 o'clock this morning I met with 3 members of Jr's family (second cousin, her husband and her mother, Jr's cousin in-law), at his grave to celebrate him with a drink of some liquor he gave me about a year before he went on. I took his drinking glass, an orange juice glass, and we each had a sip from it, passing the glass around, like communion. In fact, when I handed the glass to the first one, I said, "This is communion." We didn't do prayer, ritual or anything like that. We stood at the grave, talked about him, each of us had a sip of his liquor. All said, "This is smooth," wide-eyed. They didn't know Jr only drank the best liquor in the land. I knew who made it, that the "recipe" goes back 4 generations, that this is liquor good as liquor has ever been made. I kept that part to myself, not because it was a secret, it just didn't feel like the place or time to be bragging about the liquor Jr shared with me for 5 years. We each took a sip, then poured a sip on the grave. We all laughed saying if he could see us from up there he would be having a good time
laughing over our way of remembering him.

One of the many benefits of being a friend to Jr Maxwell was that he told me his life in 2 hours a day chapters while we each sipped two drams of liquor so good tasting it was candy. When he told me he wished he could pay me for what I've done for him, I said he'd paid in advance with 5 years of sharing the best liquor ever made in this world with me. I started the sentence meaning it in light hearted humor, but as I heard it said, I realized his gift was tremendous indeed. Where pay-backs are concerned, I was in debt to him. I helped him out in his year of helplessness because I knew the story of his life , I knew who he was, I knew he couldn't eat cornbread anymore because crumbs stuck in his throat and "strangled" him. I knew the depths of the great sorrows of his life. He loved his place and his people: Whitehead.

I had never thought of helping as an exchange. I refused any offer of money from anyone all along the way. I didn't want one dollar to taint what I was doing. This was my "service to humanity" after I'd realized one person is the same "humanity" as all 9 billion or however many they are of us. By then, I knew God had sent me to Jr. All the way along before his decline, I was the one benefitted, learning, really, at the feet of the Master. I saw Jr someone way beyond me on his spiritual path. I was sent to him by God with the instruction to pay attention to this man.

I've likened our relationship a few times already as the abbot monk and the novice monk, the novice monk helping the abbot monk in his time of helplessness.

I think of Joshua, one of Ezekiel's novice monks who insisted he be with Ezekiel when his spirit ascended. As Ezekiel departed he passed his "mantle," perhaps a length of cloth worn over the shoulders to keep them warm, to Joshua. (I may have these names and the story all wrong; going by memory from a long time ago) It was symbolic of his power, his spiritual power. It was then that Joshua received the grace of his enlightenment. Jr passed his chariot to me, also an insulated long-sleeve plaid winter shirt someone had given him that was way too big and fit me just right. I knew him well enough to know it was all important to him that he die at home in his own bed. Jr Maxwell lived too honorable a life (I'm not talking about church going and running references in the Bible--not at all) to be shelved in the lumberyard of the dying. Nobody else could come forward for him, so I had to. It turned out I was the only one who could not allow Jr Maxwell to die of despair. I was also the only one who saw it that way.

That's why I believe God sent me to him. God paid really close attention to Jr Maxwell as one of his own. He knew what was ahead for Jr and sent someone who would benefit as much from knowing Jr as Joshua would from knowing Ezekiel to the last moment. It was God looking after both of us, individually. Where Joshua's enlightenment is concerned, I certainly had at least a mild form of enlightenment. I'm different now. I tend to feel the "spirit" of a place, a gathering of people, people, animals. Taking Tapo to the vet, one of the symptoms I gave was her spirit is weak. It's not like there is something new I've never seen before. It's a subtle sense of awareness of the feeling in a place or an event, or just my surroundings wherever I am. I feel an understanding of others like never before. I don't mean like reading minds or intents, not like that, or even being able to tell if somebody is lying. It's an understanding that we are all individuals unique as our fingerprints and all are important, no matter how low down or how high up.

I'm comfortable with the people of my world without respect to their assets anyway, and get along easily with nearly everyone, because I like peace in my world, in my mind. The "enlightenment" I came away with, from the experience of helping out somebody I respected a great deal, is a subtle awareness of peace within, an ongoing calm that I deeply appreciate. It's put me in a place where reading the words while singing the songs in the Primitive Baptist hymnal sends tears flowing down my face. I feel their meanings like never before. It's like it's right there in plain english just like it really is, where before, that "plain english" was sometimes impenetrable, just couldn't grasp it. Perhaps it's what is meant saying a veil has lifted. Whatever it is, I'm happy to accept. I like everything in my world a whole lot better. My part in our celebration this morning was done from a heart overflowing with gratitude.

*

SEEING MARY LEE

white




This picture I got by accident. It has no intent of the human mind in it. Somehow I pushed the button without intending to and have no recollection of when, though I recognize where. It's the ceiling light that shines on the musicians Friday night at the Front Porch Gallery. I like accidental pictures. They're even more free of conscious composition than a small child's first snapshots. In this, there isn't even a subject. The mind wants to make the lights and the track the subject, which is ok by me. I still like the picture as itself. Different shades of white and one black line.



Met Mary Lee this morning, grief counselor with Hospice, who was a tremendous benefit in the time of Hospice helping keep Jr out of the nursing home. She didn't help with the changing of diapers, etc. Her role was more working with the caregiver going through emotional turmoil, sorrow, fear, helplessness. Whenever I felt the need for someone to talk with who understood what I was going through, a phone call to Mary would have her there first minute she could get there. Her's was one of 4 cars that when I saw one coming up the driveway, it was the same as seeing an angel flapping white wings like a crow flying low up the driveway.



Once, I felt like I needed to dive deep with a psychotherapist looking for something I couldn't find on my own. I asked Mary to come and spend an hour with me. We sat on the porch, Jr inside, and I explained my need to dive deep with someone to ask me leading questions. At this moment I don't remember the issue, but do remember by the end of the hour I saw into what what it was I was looking to find. It was a significant discovery at the time. We mostly talked about frustrations, joys, sorrows. Primarily, I needed somebody to talk out my meanings to and Mary provided the understanding ear and encouraging words. In addition to that, she's somebody I like knowing. We talk easily.



We had a great deal of laughs this morning. We took a corner in the coffee shop on Main St, Backwoods Bean, and did our private talking there. Two men in the place were out of their minds with curiosity about our conversation. It was animated and full of good humor, obvious we were having fun. There was a time each of them, one at a time, walked within earshot of us to hear what we were talking about, trying not to be obvious, like getting off the seat in the bar, walking over by us like looking at a picture on the wall, then back to the seat. It was funny, not a problem. We talked loud enough that if they wanted to hear us they could. We weren't hiding anything. They were, for me, part of the good humor. It was totally innocent. The time came they were eaten up with curiosity so much they had to hear something to make sense of our conversation. They made it real.



There have been times I've gone to her office to talk about something that was bothering me at the time. Mainly, I think it was a need to talk about Jr with someone who knew my meaning. Like today, it was for my part mainly a chance to talk about Jr. I tried the best I could to explain to Mary my meaning when I say I feel Jr's presence all the time now. It's not like a ghost, a spirit, or even anything psychic, just presence. All that I learned from knowing Jr, which is considerable, is now incorporated into who I am. In that way, he is with me all the time.
I told her about keeping the interior of the car clean, because Jr liked it kept clean. He never cleaned the outside, and I don't either. It will always be "Jr's car." I love it that he passed his old-man chariot on to me as I'm entering my own old man phase.



It felt good being back in touch with Hospice. My awe for these people is tremendous. A year must pass before a caregiver is allowed the opportunity to volunteer with Hospice. A year is passed first of November, I said I wanted to do something volunteer, thinking of being one who gives a caregiver a break for some hours, which amounts to reading a thick book. She had some other thoughts in mind that we talked about for awhile, something to do with understanding the grief process, the journal aspect of the blog before, during and after, keeping a record of the feelings one passes through. While going through the whole process, writing a blog entry every day became my friend. It was a kind of archiving the subtleties of a universal experience like making the videos at the Front Porch Gallery and putting them on YouTube for whoever happens to see them. Sharing valuable experience that uplifts the spirit. I look forward to a future associated with Hospice.

LAYERS OF MIND

airbellows outdoor art museum



Driving up the mountain this evening a doe standing by the side of the road caused me to slow down. It dark with headlights, there was no guessing which way the deer would run. She turned and ran back away from the road. I spoke to her in my mind, calling her Beauty. Hello, Beauty. She has her herd of a few more does and a buck, some little ones. She has a life. She's not just a deer by the side of the road bewildered by headlights, she's the same as a person to me, somebody with a vision problem blinded by headlights, somebody not accustomed to our human world of unforgiving machines, except to stay away from us.



I felt my heart go through what it goes through when I see a deer or one of the wild critters like a fox or a hawk, I feel sorrow for them having their world taken over by lawns and roads. The same sorrow I feel for the mountain people losing their heritage and their land. I feel the same sorrow for the Indians in concentration camps called reservations. I can follow that on down until I'm so depressed I need a nap, thinking of how little regard our civilization has for life itself. I can follow that on to our taxes supporting the Death Star that will be destroyed. Babylon will fall. Then I have to pull myself back to perspective, reminding myself that this ideal of beauty I hold so high is something to keep to myself, something I've known since childhood. I don't live in a world that shares my appreciation of what I think of as beauty. It has to do with life, life energy that is everywhere at all times. It's the life energy in others. I find where I hold highest appreciation is with the life energy, the soul in people I know, the animals I know. When I see a deer I see a consciousness exactly like mine that sees through the eyes, hears through the ears, learns by experience, and the best part, has a heart at peace.



That's a beautiful being to me. A psychotherapist asked me once why I want to know the varieties of people I know. It's because all people are unique like all basketball games are unique. Some people like watching basketball games, I like knowing people, knowing people well enough to sit and talk at ease, laugh, talk about whatever comes up. Each individual, to me, is the size of the universe. So much is different from individual to individual, it's like different movies. There is such a wide breadth of possibilities, that all are interesting to me. Some are a bit difficult sometimes. But that's just who they are, the sum of their experience. I don't believe we're born bad and made good. I believe we're born good and made bad. There are so many different kinds of people only God can see the complexity of humanity, so desperately in need of ongoing forgiveness, each one of us with our own experiences, and a whole world of each one of us with our own humanity. Every individual on earth the center of the universe. That would include individuals from other star systems as well. I believe it boils down to consciousness itself is the center of the universe.



I often think about the time in Jr's fade when his mind went away, didn't work any more, was all the time blank, his consciousness was there, as was what is called the subconscious. I didn't realize how well I connected with Jr's subconscious and how dominant the subconscious is. The missing mind part was the file cabinet of information, memories, things we think about. All the rest of Jr was there. He was completely there, as far as I could tell. His mind didn't retain more than a second, but he understood things like before. We could talk clearly with understanding. When his mind was gone, I felt he was still there. We communicated as well as before. Explaining anything to him was hopeless, but it wasn't such a great option before. It seemed like it was just details that dropped away. The big picture was still there, just couldn't zoom in on any one place or another. I felt some understanding of his condition. Some, several, would have said he was being crazy. I saw he was doing what he had to do, like the time he spent all night changing clothes and ended up with both legs down one leg of a pair of sweat pants and his head through an arm hole in a tshirt.



I helped him get situated and set him back in the wheelchair to return to changing clothes all he wanted to. He went back to bed and a couple days later was gone. In that time his mind was useless as a ship on the bottom of the ocean. Yet we were able to communicate. It was basic, but he was there. The nurses said Alzheimer's is most often accompanied by a radical personality change. Jr's cheerful nature I saw went all the way to the core of who he was. He was open and caring with everyone, same as he was when he had mind. He was easy to get along with before, and the same degree of easy to get along with after. The experience with Jr gave me insight into the nature of consciousness, the subconscious and the conscious in ways I don't understand from reading. I'm closer to able to identify them in myself. It turns out, this many months later, I remember the weeks when his mind was gone quite a lot. And his life story, joys and sorrows enough for 5 lifetimes. Perhaps it interested me most to see that when mind went away, the same Jr was present as before. It told me he truly was who he was. Nothing was being held down or bottled up waiting for a chance to explode. I felt he went out as innocent as the day he was born.

NEW BEGINNING

joe shannon, hammer dulcimer, scott freeman, fiddle


At the Front Porch Gallery in Woodlawn, Joe Shannon played hammer dulcimer, concertina, harmonica, guitar, banjo and hammer dulcimer. It is a beautiful, angelic kind of sound the hammer dulcimer makes. I thought I noticed that the sound of the hammer dulcimer is Joe's own personal sound. He plays banjo, concertina and harmonica with a similar sound to what he gets from the hammer dulcimer. It's a full-bodied delicate sound and felt like its sound is his own inner sound that guides the sound he pulls out of the other instruments. His harmonica playing was as beauiful as on the hammer dulcimer. It was quite different, but came from the same place within.



I found tonight the first effect of not being a mountain music dj any more. I wanted to buy one of his cds for the radio hour, but didn't buy one because there's no reason to anymore. I didn't care about it so much for myself, but wanted to give my listeners a chance to hear what somebody in Boone is doing with hammer dulcimer. I'll save about $50 a month buying cds to play on the air. Now I'm ready to go through my collection and take some more to the library. I even thought of buying one of the cds for the library. But talked myself out of it. The reason to find new mountain music is over.



This doesn't mean I'll stop gathering information for the Alleghany music website with Lucas Pasley. It doesn't mean I'll stop looking for recordings of musicians of our county. It seems like what is happening is I've completed a 7 year cycle that started when I stopped to see Jr to ask how he felt about a music store in town selling mountain music and strings. Every day I went step-by-step toward setting the store into motion. Started the radio show same day as the store's opening. This is the time I started spending time with Jr talking about putting the store together. Then I met Jean Phillips, Jr's neighbor and friend, and the 3 of us stopped at Jr's in the evenings, sometimes Jean making supper for us. We became a gang of 3 who got together almost every evening at Jr's to sit at the table and talk. Jr and I drank from our drams, Jean drank coffee and smoked cigarettes. A lot of the time we listened to bluegrass on WBRF as we talked.



4 years later Jean died. Then the store died. A few years later Jr died. Jean and Jr became 2 of the closest friends in my life. Now that Jr's gone, the radio show is gone. 7 years from start to finish. By the time Jr began needing help, I was ready to assist in every way I could. I had earned his trust, which was valuable to me, and I couldn't leave him to be taken care of by people he did not and could not trust. Trust was important to Jr. He didn't give it lightly. It was through Jr I learned the importance of trust. In that cycle, both my friends found in the cycle died inside the cycle, and now the radio show has died too, putting an end to the whole 7 year cycle. Not only were Jr and Jean two of the most remarkable human beings I've had the good fortune to know, I actually felt like I was sent to them, because God wanted me to know them. There is also the perspective He wanted them to know me. It was like that all the way around with us. We were there for each other. It became a kind of support group among us. Jr didn't talk psychological talk like Jean and I did. He tuned out when we went off that deep end. Jean's years in institutions taught her a great deal about the psychoanalytical process and about herself.



In that time I met a lot of new friends through the store. I met a host of wonderful people in there, many of them friends now. Jr's friends are now my friends. I've found the music world that is something like an underground lake. You don't know it's there until you're in it. I'm acquainted with Old Time Herald, and have a good working knowledge of mountain music I didn't have before this cycle. The end of one cycle is the beginning of the next. I can figure the next cycle started yesterday. Like the last cycle, it will be entirely unpredictable. I'd like to go on playing mountain music to the people of the county that love it, but it looks like that's over. I may not like it, but I didn't like Jr dying either, nor Jean dying.



Words from a Bob Dylan song,

Everything passes, everything changes,
Just do what you think you should do.
Who knows maybe, someday baby
I'll come running to you.

DRIVE

grouse in the road



Driving home this evening I came up on a mother grouse and her 3 chicks that were grown close to her size. I stopped and let them cross. A grouse doesn't concern itself much about a car coming. They look at it like it's a puzzlement what this thing is. I took the camera and got some snapshots of them through the windshield. It seems like a grouse's casual attitude toward vehicles I'd see a dead grouse from time to time in the road, but I never have. Evidently it takes some skill to shoot a grouse. They fly low through the trees, moving this way and that. An experienced grouse hunter told me he'd shot every sapling in two in Southwest Virginia before he learned to hit a grouse.



Another good day of time spent with Jr's friends who are now mine. Good conversation everywhere. Jr's cousin Richard Joines was one who needed the cd. I was on a schedule when I saw Richard and couldn't talk as much as I wanted to. Richard is a wealth of knowledge of the musicians in the county. His dad, Howard Joines, was one of the county's better fiddlers. Richard, himself, is one of the better bass, guitar and mandolin pickers. Arthritis has made it difficult for his fingers to do what they one time did. Richard and his wife, Francis, both are what I think of as true human beings. Richard raises beagles and hunts with them. He told me once that he believes a dog bred to do something like chase rabbits is happiest when it's doing what his nature wants to do, chase rabbits. He sees how happy the dogs are in the chase. He doesn't take a dog for something dumb as a post either. Richard has a good understanding of dog nature. He has a good understanding of mountain music too.



I sat in a chair in the shade of the garage with one of Jr's friends, another who is now my friend, talking about Jr in appreciation. He told me some good stories of Jr's past that were funny and some of sorrow. Jr had a life that was straight ahead, just like he plays banjo. His music had drive. His life had drive. I've found no one has anything near a kind word for his last wife who chewed him up and spit him out. It's good she lives as far away as she does. No one in Whitehead or the county wants to see her again. Never wanted to see her to start with. All of Whitehead warned him and pleaded with him not to marry her, but he had his own reasons. It was one of the episodes of his life that caused Jr to see himself a fool.



Driving today I was thinking of how Jr lived in the now with minimum expectations. I wondered if the emotional depth of the heartaches he's lived with was so deep he didn't like to let his mind go back there. Throughout the 5 years we sat at his table sipping liquor almost every evening he told me his memories from childhood all the way on up to present. And when he came to the end, there were no more stories and we were in the present from then on. A few times he mentioned while talking about the past that he didn't like to talk about the past or think about it. He did anyway, because I wanted to hear it and I felt he liked having someone to tell his life to and review it himself. There is plenty going on right now to attend to, or think about. Every day we told our stories from that day. By the time he was unable to do much but lie in bed for days at a time, I'd keep him abreast of the weather, the temperature, the rain gauge reading, the wind direction, how much wind. He liked to know what was happening outside. Outside was where he lived his life. All his work was outdoors in the weather. He lived his life outdoors.



In this time of the sorrow subsiding, going around to his friends and relatives I've enjoyed hearing accounts of Jr's life as someone else knew him. And I like telling stories about Jr. I vowed to him long ago that when I talk about him or write about him it would be told as though he were standing or sitting beside me. I will never disrespect him in death as I did not in life. I never told him, but I vowed to myself that Jr Maxwell will be remembered in his county as long as I'm living, like the time I told him he'll never go back to a nursing home as long as I'm living. The entire social services system worked against me on that pledge. I seldom think about all the misery they put us through with ongoing threats. It just now popped up in mind and I laughed. I see it allegorically as a Stephen Seagal movie. The services system wanted his last years or months to be lived in the worst kind of misery. And I was all he had to keep him out of there. I got it done and have tremendous satisfaction that I was able to keep my word with him.

PAIN AND PLEASURE

morgan freeman as nelson mandela



Today's movie was Clint Eastwoods INVICTUS, a new one with Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon. The story begins with Nelson Mandela's release from 27 years prison at Robben Island, South Africa. I have paid attention to Mandela since the time he was in prison and it looked like he'd never be let out. I was impressed most when he became president of South Africa his refusal to let revenge get in motion when the black people became free to outnumber the whites in elections. He was mild mannered and toned down the popular will among the blacks to strike out and eliminate the whites. Mandela articulated the ridiculous in that approach and actually led the way for the integration of the races. Wise politician is an oxymoron, but that's what he was. He stabilized the country by example and inspiration. Alas, when he was out and Thabo Mbeke took his place was the beginning of political corruption and ineptitude. Mandela's purpose was to raise the people up and have South Africans working together instead of against each other. When the political machine people came in, that was the end of wise government in South Africa. Not much improvement for the black people has happened in Mandela's absence. Again, a founding father of genius to pass the nation to self-focused politicians, until in the American case Alice's Tea Party rises against a president who puts the nation first because he's the N-word, which word I'm sure is the password in Alice's Tea Party.



I used to have an issue with Clint Eastwood for making movies devoid of emotional experience. He must have seen it too, because that started to change from movie to movie. This one had emotional tugs all the way through, legitimately, not cheep Hollywood shots. There is the occasional obligatory American need to explain the obvious to be sure you don't miss it. It's a Hollywood truism that you must explain the obvious. In Hollywood they know very well about the American attention span, the level of American education that sinks in. In journalism courses it is taught to keep writing level down to the level of 4th grade comprehension. And they operate by cliches that work, like if it bleeds it leads. It's not like that's worse than any place else. It's no different in other countries. Like Ronald Reagan said justifying his regime at the end, "It could have been worse." Yeah. Eastwood's film had less than half a dozen of those American moments that say, in case you don't get it, here it is spelled out. Shakespeare did that all the time. I found every verbal enigma I came upon reading him was explained within a few lines. He made himself perfectly clear to his audiences that were largely illiterate but for the ruling class. He wrote to both. Hollywood does too.



I have to give this film 5 stars because of Morgan Freeman's rendering of Nelson Mandela that gave much insight into Mandela himself. Also because of Clint Eastwood's correction of his dearth of feeling in the films. Of course, he came out of the action genre into drama and they're different. The only emotion an action film plays to is fear. Other feelings distract. After UNFORGIVEN I quit watching Eastwood films because I found them consistently flat emotionally. MILLION DOLLAR BABY began to have some fairly strong emotion going on. By the time of this one, I find Eastwood cured. He has a good balance in his films now. I've never experienced a Clint Eastwood film until now that fully satisfies me as a worthwhile film. He named it after a poem he described "Victorian" that he passed to Matt Damon's character to study the poem that kept Mandela going through all the years of prison. It's title was INVICTUS, written by William Ernest Henley (1849-1902), English, from Gloucester. The poem has some powerful meaning, as did Mandela. You can find it online googling: invictus poem. Goes straight to it. This movie INVICTUS demonstrates that Eastwood has reached his potential he'd been working toward like on a staircase, one step at a time. Morgan Freeman was exactly right for Nelson Mandela. Freeman gave me glimpses of the silence in Nelson Mandela after 27 years of living in silence, nobody to speak to, only berated and knocked down.



Mandela, himself, made his prison cell into a monk's cell and came out of it a wise man. It's said that wisdom comes from suffering. The Buddha said this world is characterized by suffering. I take it to mean, then, that this world is the path to enlightenment, because it's all about suffering, our great teacher. I recall a time I was bent over with kidney stone pain for 40 hours. Came out of it with a little bit of wisdom I didn't go into it with. The 7 months of sorrow after Jr left the body taught me a very great deal too. It's like suffering drives us deeper into ourselves. I come out of it knowing myself a little better, a little better understanding. A bit of grace. The pain cleared my mind of its ongoing nigglings of memories, motivations, desires, worries in general. When the pain subsided, my mind came back. I hadn't realized how clear it had been through that time of pain. When mind came back, I wanted the pain again, but settled for mind. Didn't like the pain that much. When I see people with multiple piercings and tattoos I wonder if pain is a rush for them. There's enough pain going around in everyday life, I can't see paying somebody to help me feel pain. I wonder too, if pain is an affirmation of existence. It says: I exist. If so, an awful lot of people must question their own existence and need something to nail themselves to it. It couldn't possibly mean there isn't enough pain living in this world and we have to go out and buy some from time to time to feel existence. That's a little too complex for me.



A spiritual master named Upasni Maharaj recommended regarding pleasure as pain and pain as pleasure to help to hurry oneself along the Path. I've thought about that for years. I believe there is something to it, but I've never felt tempted the first time to try it. I can't quite get my mind around it. I suspect there might be something to it, like one of those things you can't foresee the benefit of. You have to try it on faith. On the other side, it's a deeper, more inclusive way of seeing. I have no inclination to martyr myself to pain because I have convinced myself it's pleasure. Maybe so, but I don't get it. I'm not one to go to S&M bars looking for somebody to beat me up so I can feel the pleasure of pain. The only way I can see that is twisted. I'd rather go on in ways I can believe a little bit and aren't so severely neurotic. I'm not one to sit cross-legged and practice little rituals. I think I prefer to face it straight on like Jr did. That's one of the aspects of who he was that I admired, even something I hope I learned and assimilated from his example.

LAYIN DOWN THE OLD BANJO

by the side of virginia hwy 72

I fumbled about for several hours getting 22 songs on a cd to take to Woodlawn tomorrow to have made into several more. Made a copy to play Saturday morning. What a thrill that will be to play Jr and Art Wooten together on the radio show. They played well together, too. I've noticed times when Jr's banjo is riding the same wave as the fiddle, note for note. And there are times when he goes off into his own moment of abstract exploring new ways to dance with some of the notes. I want to take copies to his friends who are now my friends. I'll give them to radio stations, folklife centers, wherever archives are kept of mountain music that I can find. I'm doing it, like I do much of everything else, because nobody else is doing it and I believe it needs doing enough to do it myself. It's for the memory of Jr. It's for Alleghany County's heritage. It's a record of some musicians in the county who weren't afraid to make music, musicians who didn't record and weren't interested. Somehow they got recorded.

5 or so years ago Jr got a call from somebody in Boone associated with the University and the Appalachian program. He told Jr that his band was the first bluegrass band in the region. We both think he meant county. He said he wanted to visit and ask questions toward a book he's writing on early bluegrass in this part of the mountains. He never turned up. That was the end of it. Jr and I both forgot about it until a few years later when we had a good laugh. Jr didn't want to see him anyway. He asked me what good was all that. I had a hard time. What's important to me was not necessarily important to him. I want the county to have awareness that we have and have had some good musicians here. Bobby Johnson is another good banjo picker who never recorded anything as far as anybody knows. The people of the present and future will never know the sound of his pickin. That was how it looked for Jr, too. Every bit of music I've found by him, I've sent to the folklife center in Chapel Hill. I'm grateful for the field recorders who have traveled through these mountains saving the older ways of playing. The music changes in time, and Jr's band was in its place and time. Bluegrass took hold in these mountains from the start.

Jr figured out the banjo when he was 14 and played square dances in his late teens and early twenties. He tired of it. He called it "draggy," too slow. He was a mountain boy. Wanted it faster, faster, like a car. There was a time he had a 56 Ford and said it was the fastest car in the county. How do you reckon he found that out? I don't think he figured it out on paper. He quit playing several years. Bluegrass brought him back. He wanted to do that finger roll. Bluegrass was the only music he listened to. He could listen to country on WBRF afternoons in an empty house. He heard country, listened to bluegrass. Nothing else was even music to him. One of his sayings about old-time, was "if old-time aint got drive, it aint got nothin." Some object, but I'm with it. Whitetop Mountain Band, for example, is an old-time band with drive. Good musicians, good drive, good music

I've sat with him in the evenings listening to bluegrass on WBRF while we talked. When it was Wake Forest basketball, football or Nascar races, we left it off. Jr needed no white noise. He watched no television. Nothing interested him on tv except the few minutes of weather in the middle of the regional news. We had it timed pretty good so I could turn it on the momen the weather started and off the minute it's over. I like silence. Jr liked silence. Both of us were comfortable in silence. If he needed to have a tv on, I'd have never spent any time there. Of course, there's some that's good. There's good stuff going on in New York, too, that I'm missing, just like I'm missing the good stuff on tv. I miss almost everything in this world, because I can only be one place at a time and must rest now and then. So I rest a lot and miss everything. Tomorrow night at the Front Porch frame shop behind Bobby Patterson's Heritage Shoppe, where he sells mountain music, emphasis SW Virginia, Steve Lewis, Scott Freeman and Willard Gayheart will be pickin and singin. Small place, a dozen or so people, some of the finest musicians in our area. Steve can lay it to a banjo. He can tear up a guitar too. And he's a true human being. He's an artist.

I've been immersed in hearing Jr's banjo, Art Wooten's fiddle, Cleve Andrews's and Ernest Johnson's. Johnson is in Wilkes County. He was a fiddler Jr thought a great deal of, also Johnny Miller, another Green Mountain Fiddler, perhaps the last one. Now if something could be found with Tiny Pruitt on it. They say he could light up a fiddle. Jr told me that after Bob Caudill died, which was the end of the Green Mountain Boys, he with Tiny Pruitt and Vick Daniels, a guitar picker from Independence, decided to start working toward recording an album. One night at Jr's house they worked on a song of Vick's composition. On the way home that night, Vick died at the steering wheel of a heart attack. Not much later, Tiny, working in his alignment shop in Wilkes was up on a ladder, fell off, popped his head, that was it. Jr put up his banjo. His last wife didn't like bluegrass and despised banjo. He played despite her, but then there came the time he had nobody to make music with. He was out of heart. Peace with his Scorpio Yankee wife was an ongoing concession. Maybe if he quits playing, she'll like him better. LOL.

He sold the banjo to Richard Woodie, took the money from the banjo and put it in a redbelly Ford tractor that he kept parked in the shelter of a shed below the house. It was his banjo in storage. I mistakenly believed picking banjo again would help his spirit, which was dragging bottom a few years after his wife took him for all she could get and went back up north, but it hurt his noting fingers that had lost their calouses on the tips. He couldn't make his fingers do what he wanted them to do. The banjo was too heavy to hold comfortably standing up and he didn't like to play sitting down. He couldn't remember the tunes he used to play. The ones he could remember, he didn't remember the whole thing. It became a frustration for him I regretted bringing up. I wasn't the only one. Nearly everyone he knew was at him to pick his banjer up. Another lesson for me in letting things be as they are.

A NEW FRIEND

my new friend the horse



What a long nose you have. All the better to sniff you with. A vacuum cleaner with two pipes. Mike Love has been keeping a couple of calves in the meadow by the house. They escaped and
went over to the next farm where a bull was. Mike and crew were out on 4-wheelers looking for them for quite awhile. They found them and put them in another meadow. The brought a horse to this meadow yesterday. I went out a little bit ago to see about getting acquainted with the horse. Nothing to it. The horse practically came running when it saw me walk toward the fence. A tame horse. That's nice. Tapo wanted to investigate too. She watched me talking to the horse from afar. She came hobbling along like she does. At a certain distance, 8 or so feet, she stopped and wouldn't go any closer. When the horse leaned it's head down to meet her, Tapo's eyes got bigger and rounder, on the verge of turning to run, but held it and watched the horse from as close as she dared. She'd never seen a horse before. When I saw her shrink from its size, I was sympathetic. I've never believed a horse had to obey me. I'm no match for a horse. If a horse wanted to take me down, it wouldn't be but a few seconds. They don't have to, but they do. They let us tailless monkeys ride them and corrall them, beat them, treat them like they're not at all conscious.



I will never ride the horse. That's not my goal. I walked up to the horse talking to it, complimenting its coloring, its stature, its eyes. I held my hands out open far enough from the horse's nose to give it a choice if it wanted to sniff. When it reached for my hands I approached it and let it smell both hands, above and below. She sniffed my shirt, rubbed the side of her face on my shirt once. Tame horse, I thought. A happy horse living with people who understood it. I thought I'd get a horse brush from Farmers Hardware and start brushing the horse, for the horse and myself. Seems a human dimension thing to do. Until a century ago, thereabouts, we rode horses, worked horses like tractors, We've known horses intimately in the past and now they are a hobby for a few people and that's about it. I have a fair ability for communicating with the 4-leggeds, not psychic, but paying attention. That's all. Pay attention and they tell me what they want. Like with the horse, I wasn't scratching or petting in ernest, because I didn't want to start something I couldn't stop and I didn't know how much she wanted to be touched. I touched her neck, kept my hands off her face. I couldn't help but imagine what I'd think about it if some other species came up to me and rubbed my face. In a little bit, she leaned her head against the top of a fence post and scratched herself behind the left ear. I scratched behind her right ear and her eye flashed me a look that said, Yeah, that's it.



I came to the house and returned with camera. I let her smell the camera and got some pictures of her. When she started acting spooked by it, I put it down and told her it's all right, I don't have to do it if i scares her. She perked up and let me take all the pictues I wanted. I petted her gently, rubbed her sides, making the decision to get a horse brush and keep her coat fresh for her. We'll have a good, friendly relationship. I've wanted to know a horse for a long time. Not as a creature to dominate and ride and make do my will, though I know that's what the horse wants to do, but one to know, to be a friend with, a chance to experience horse consciousness, which everyone who knows horses say is way up there in intelligence. I think of Gulliver's Travels. If my relationship with the horse is a friend who brushes it, brings it grain sometimes, asks nothing but don't step on me, talks to her, only makes friendly gestures around her, I figure we can't help but have a good relationship. Maybe we can walk around in the meadow together. Just walk and talk. Photo shoots every once in awhile. She may start posing when she catches on to what I'm doing with the camera. One of my dogs did and one did not. By the time I'd finished getting pictures, none of them really worth looking at, she wasn't shy about the camera. I was after pictures that caught her eyes without focusing in on an eye. I was wanting a picture of her eyes seeing. Kind of caught it a little bit.



By the time I came back to the house, I was comfortable believing we can get along very well. Already we've communicated. She has noticed I pay attention. When she taught me to scratch behind the ear, I knew we were connecting. We pay attention to each other now, so we can get to know each other well. This could help salve what I miss most about TarBaby, our communication. I like communication with 4-leggeds. They are not far from us except a major leap of consciousness, like the leap between them and bird consciousness. When I had a dog and chickens, I saw the dog could commnicate with the chickens about like I could with dog. The chickens were two great leaps away from mine, and it's a chasm to cross. But I still was able to
understand to some degree their consciousness in their behavior, how automatic it was. It's that automtic behavior they survive by. A horse to know, to have a mental communication with, will go a long way toward salving the loss of TarBaby. Their minds are gentler than ours by so much it's unimaginable. Earlier today I was typing at the computer and Tapo was hunkered down beside me on the paper to the left of the computer. She was dozing quietly, being nearby.



Things started happening I wasn't expecting and couldn't control, from striking the wrong key with little finger. I set to cussin and Tapo's ears went back. It wasn't like she was afraid of me from tone of voice, but it was like it literally hurt her ears and it wasn't loud. That really gave me pause. I know Tapo has an extensive vocabulary of my words she understands the meaning. She knows the difference between "I love you Tapo" and "Get out of the way." She responds to each according to my words, also tone of voice that aids the meaning. They're very attentive to tone of voice. It made me laugh that I started cussing and Tapo shut her ears down. In advanced Eastern teachings, they say such words carry vibrations that are harmful to the ears of the truly righteous. I've never known a 4-legged, or bird, that wasn't truly righteous, as innocent of human folly as the Savior. The way I see it, is where they are, the Garden is, because they're still in it. We're the ones put out of it, not them. We think too much for our host planet's good. It's the Garden. Our minds want to go off into space, when I figure we're already in space. Right here is the planet that nurtures us. It's home. Why not treat it like home. All the Amazon rivers are mud. The Mississippi is mud. The rivers in Asia are mud. How do fish live in relentless peasoup fog? Catfish that scoop off the bottom are about all that can make it.



I have a horse friend now. A new friend from inside the Garden. Communication is what I find I miss with Jr. We had very different expriences, similar foundational ways of thinking and seeing. Even when his mind was gone. At about the same time as the picture in yesterday's entry, he said out of the blue, "I need to go to the hospital." I asked what for. He said, "Something's wrong with my mind. I want to find out what it is." The main reason I couldn't allow the lumberyards for the old have him, was because they didn't know him. I knew him. I knew how to communicate with him with mind gone. I knew that even though he didn't have mind, he understood. Maybe for a second only, but that was the only second it was for. The moments I had to face doing the dirty work, I reminded myself, "I fought for this," and that set me in motion without regret.

ONE YEAR

elizabeth laprelle--picture borrowed from old 97 wrecords
website. Thanks Steve.


This morning's radio show was a jam from start to finish. I even took it over into gospel hour after shutting out the news for good music. First half hour was Elizabeth LaPrelle from Rural Retreat, a girl still in her teens, 2 albums later, and sings old time mountain songs in a way that's real from the heart. Fiddle and banjo from the Durham old-time band, The Hush Puppies, accompany her on her albums. John Newlin plays the fiddle, an accomplished fiddler with a place of his own in North Carolina music. Amy Davis plays the banjo, and I tell you what, the woman can pick. She has a beautiful sound that is all her own. The Hush Puppies are a North Carolina band of excellent musicians who play very well together. Jim Lloyd plays guitar with LaPrelle. He's from over that way around Rural Retreat and I believe played with Brian Grim (fiddle) and Debbie Grim (banjo), made 2 albums as the Konnarock Critters, 2 excellent old-time albums. Lloyd has a new album of his own, which I'll be getting from County Sales soon. He's a terrific picker and sings a good song too. For more about LaPrelle on her label's website: http://www.old97wrecords.com/elizabeth-laprelle/index.htm


The music was jammin old-time all the way along. After the weather report on the half hour, I played Skeeter & the Skidmarks. That's Scott Freeman, mandolin, fiddle and vocals, Willard Gayheart, guitar and vocals, Edwin Lacy, banjo and vocals, Sandy Grover, bass and vocals. They made 2 albums that are out of print, Hubbin It and Alternate Roots. I played selections from Hubbin It today, not by design, it just happened that way. They made some jammin music too. Since their albums have been out of print for so long, Scott and Willard continue to hear of interest in the band. They've made a new Skeeter & the Skidmarks album that's due available any day. If I can remember, I'll give you a website where it's available. Probably CDBaby for sure. I don't yet know if they made their own label or if they're with the label in Bristol, Mountain Roads Recordings, that is doing Scott's fiddle album, also due any day. Whitetop Mountain Band and Big Country Bluegrass made their latest recordings with this label. http://www.mountainroadsrecordings.com/ Since Hay Holler label in Roanoke shut down, this one has come up in its place.


I only talk on the show to identify the songs and musicians, naming everyone in the bands, give the weather and a commercial. Since I've been writing the blog, my own voice opening up, I find I talk a time or two during the show, a little bit of information in story form. Like this morning I felt compelled after about the 4th song by LaPrelle, by which time it was perfectly obvious this girl could sing an old-time song, to tell an experience of talking with an old-time musician, one not from the mountains, old-hippie musician, a good one too. I mentioned Elizabeth LaPrelle and it pushed a button that got this old gal a-goin. She can't sing. She's no good. I can't stand her nasal voice. I sat listening to this woman, remembering the very first rule #1 every mountain musician learns at the start, you don't talk down about other musicians, ever. All the time she was on her harangue on LaPrelle, I was wondering if we were talking about the same person. We were. I imagined it had more behind it than she was letting on. My imagining is she had issues with the Hush Puppies, another old-time old hippie flatland band that maybe got more attention than her band. Probably not. I don't care.




Anyway, I felt like telling that story briefly, giving no clue to who it was, though I've never played any of her band--flatland, not mountain. Concluded saying I saw then how ugly it is for a musician to berate another. I find I like to talk a little bit now, a brief experience or something, whatever I feel compelled to say. Unless I feel compelled, I say nothing. I can't tolerate jabbering djs, We're Number One!!! They're the reason I never listen to commercial radio, unless it's WBRF in the evenings for bluegrass or WPAQ during the day when the weather is right and I'm in certain places. Can't get it at the house. Cell phones don't work here either. I'm really glad about that. A cell phone dead zone. It doesn't get any better than that.


The sun has set, we're in the gloaming, the light after sunset. Peepers have begun peeping. One is just outside the screen door. Several are nearby. Brings to mind a vocal piece I heard by Meredith Monk on YouTube. Forget its title. But I've never heard anything like it. It was using the human voice, 6 voices if I remember correctly, like crickets in a field, like peepers outside the door, several going from different distances and directions, none peeping in sync with any of the others, yet the whole chorus makes a music like composers John Cage and Toru Takemitsu could hear. I don't have to put on a cd, turn on the radio, use electricity in any way. Analog. If my blog were to have a theme song, it would be peepers as I'm hearing them now. Then there's katydids. When they get going I can't tell if they're outside or inside my head. It sounds like they're all in my head, like ringing ears. I can't tell the difference between ringing in the ears and katydids or whatever it is that makes the long extended notes. It's so much better to hear than sirens and honking horns, the sizzles of thousands of tires, jets arriving at and leaving the airport, mechanical noises by machines we've made for convenience that have made things so complex for us that the way we were before when we wanted conveniences turns out to be way we look to with nostalgia. Wasn't it better walking and riding horses? Evidently not. Everybody that had a choice went for the tv and recliner. Can't leave out the 4wheel drive SUV.


My Blue Ridge Mountain Home. That's the only song by Dolly Parton I really love. Now that the weather is good I want to go be with my mountain more. I'm wanting to put up a tent and stay the night among the trees. I don't want to leave Tapo and Caterpillar. I'd like to take them along, but the 2 of them in a small tent wouldn't do. They could tolerate it, because I would expect it of them, but they wouldn't like it. They can make it through the night. They did it for a few years while I was with Jr. That was hard on the cats for me to be gone so much of the time and for so long a time. It got the best of TarBaby. Caterpillar and Tapo are happy to have me with them round the clock and when I go out the door it will only be a few hours before I'm back. They like having me around. I like having them around. We know each other well, we're good company, and there is very real love between us. I'm not exaggerating or jesting when I say my house is full of love. Inside the walls of my home is love supreme. The safe place. Coyotes can't get the cats. The Alleghany News had a good cartoon this week of coyotes surrounding a house calling for the cat to come out, the cat's face in the window, eyes big and round. It's not an exaggeration. It's an illustration. An awful lot of people have lost cats and small dogs to coyotes.


Today is the one year point in the ongoing blog. Only missed 3 times, if I remember correctly; once because I forgot to, and twice on account of flu, feeling so miserable I couldn't even think. It started as a project to make myself write something every day. I've stuck with it a whole year, which is part of the project, to do it when I don't feel like doing it, to sit down and write when I have nothing to say and find in retrospect those were the times the best was said. The year has consisted of Jr's decline, death, and my grief. I committed and carried through all the way. It tells me about myself that I have what it takes to hold to a commitment to the unknown, whatever happens, to help someone I could not allow to live the end of his life a piece of lumber in the lumberyard for old people. It was a beautiful time, the very best of my life when it comes to doing something I feel in my heart is important. It was not easy to witness his decline unto death and find that my sorrow goes as deep as it does. There is no wanting him back into a skin-draped skeleton. It was time to go home. What I miss is Jr's company, the spirit that was Jr, the soul I have confidence still is.

SWEET UNSWEET

spring buds

A cousin in Kansas City sent an email with her email address on it so we could write back and forth. It was long, having to do with horses and feathers. To respond to her about it, I hesitated to use the word Indian, because only Indians use it. White people now say Native American, which the Indians think ridiculous. I don't like to use the term, because it's so PC, politically correct. It's an American school phenomenon of conformity cranked up the next notch to class mind control. What it amounts to really is white middle-class think. I think of people who live in a subdivision so huge it is a maze; all the multi-plexes are exactly alike and painted the same color. Like Malvina Reynolds' song about little boxes on a hillside, they're all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.

I chose not to use that term, and chose not to use Indian, because my cousin is white, a nurse, works in a hospital, a conscientious woman who wants to be respectful of everyone. She doesn't live in a ticky tacky subdivision. I don't know what she makes of the word Indian, like it's colonialist to use that word. When PC is the rule, middle-class, I know without having to decide. But cousin Barbara is a working class woman with a fairly middle-class way of thinking. I couldn't predict with her. I chose not to use either. I said her email address seemed pow wowish. That seemed neutral to me. Pow wows are about the only way Indians are known now by white people in person. She wrote back asking why I don't like her email address. She said she didn't quite know how to take it, so she took it I didn't like it. I had to write her back and explain I didn't mean it disrespectfully.

It's like unsweet. I'd have done better to say, Native American. Indian would have been ok too. I had to complicate it until the meaning was lost. I learned years ago, years ago, thousands of experiences ago, never in the South do you order tea without sugar. It's unsweet. Unsweet is all the waitresses know it by. Every time I say tea without sugar, which is automatic for me with a mind that pays attention to words, the waitress says, "Unsweet?" I finally caught on a year or 2 ago, but still I slip and say tea without sugar, and invariably get the answer, "Unsweet?" They're training me. I'm trained, but sometimes lapse when I'm not thinking. I remind myself every time I want tea without sugar it's unsweet. Like 7up is the uncola. What? You mean it had cola in it and they took it out? The tea had sugar and you have to take it out to make it unsweet? Seems like it would be an expensive process to take the sugar out of Southern iced tea, and it would cost more, but it costs the same. Ought to cost less.

I came to the mountains all those years ago to get away from urban thinking, which I found largely superficial. I checked out the urban first looking for something real to live by. Our civilization had become so incredibly superficial that I wanted out on the edge of it, not in the thick of it. The real landscape in a city is the human mind. It's a forest of human minds. They're all whirring all the time, day and night, money, money, more money. I thought it would be better for my mind, for living with my mind, to live surrounded by the world of flora and fauna, the "natural" world, what's left of it, where the vibration is harmonious with the spirit of life. When I'm in a city, the energy I feel is drive, stop, wait, start, drive, stop, wait, start, get out of everybody's way. They're all in a hurry and I'm not. They want more money than I do. They want position I don't want. They want big things I don't want. They want status I don't want. They want big tombstones and I don't want any. I tend to like a plain rock for a tombstone. It's what I've given all my pets I've buried. I like Jr's daddy's tombstone, polished black marble and no words, no ID.

I've thought about old man Wiley's life after Christmas 1945 when his son, who was up in his 50s with his 2 kids in their 30s, killed his second wife, seriously maimed his in-laws, then killed himself, leaving their baby an orphan at 4 months old. I can't help but suspect the block of black marble represented to him his heart. A man of constant sorrow. He didn't even get a chance to know the grandbaby, which he'd surely seen a time or two. He's buried next to his boy who did all that, and he knew in advance where his grave would be. It was such a trauma in the family that Jr, age 23, left here, divorced, ended up in Decatur, Alabama, operating heavy equipment in construction. Had a good woman there, intended to never return. Not only did Welter kill his wife and himself, he killed the Maxwell name. He told me some time ago Maxwell is a bad name in the county. All on account of a brother who was "too quick to use a gun." Old man Wiley was 80 when it happened and lived 13 more years. I'd say they were years of relentless sorrow. Today, they'd have him so jacked up on mood enhancers he couldn't do anything but sit in front of a television and feel good.

The blow to Jr's mother, who was not Welter's mother, was devastating. It was devastating to Jr's wife, Maggie. Welter played fiddle, Jr played banjo, Maggie played guitar and sang. They made a lot of music together and were close. Jr's heart never recovered from that time. I talked with Maggie in Maryland after Jr died, and she was still reeling from it, had all her life. She lost Jr, her man she deeply loved and continues to. At 87 years old, she said, "I just don't know what happened." Meaning, I take it, that so much changed that night so drastically, she still can't digest what happened. I find it interesting Jr chose to be buried with his mother and wife Lois in another cemetery, his mother's family cemetery, the Joines cemetery in Whitehead. I never asked Jr questions about what it did to his dad and mother. It was such a painful subject, and had to do with private lives, family, the part most private, he didn't like going there. I wonder if it wrecked the relationships between all Maxwells, there weren't very many. He tended toward his Joines relatives because they were so many and neighbors. A lot of his first cousins and uncles were musicians. Every Whitehead/Pine Swamp Joines I've known has been good people, the kind you want for relatives.

What does this have to do with political correctness? You're not going to find much of it in Whitehead and Pine Swamp except for transplants. I can't help but think the people caught up in PC are people who really wasted their college years, shouldn't have gone in the first place, except that parents demanded it. I went into college with the most unrealistic of expectations, that it would be about learning. In my first year, a man who'd gone to the U of Chicago told me college is not about education, it's about socialization, learning to socialize. I had a hard time accepting it, because I was investing in learning, but the only way I could miss that what he said is evident everywhere would be denial. And there you get American school conformity. Too much school, too much conformity in adult life. Too much conformity and you get all the girls in high school looking as much like Barbie dolls as can be done. It's shocking for somebody who came up in the 50s when Barbies were new to see that Barbie is now the model young women follow. It's really a corporate tv reality of a look that sells. Britney Spears--corporate living Barbie, nervous breakdowns, losing her kids and all. The American Girl grown up. The worst thing that can be said of somebody, she's / he's different.

SERAPHINE, THE ARTIST

bluets



In the past I've scooped up a handful of dirt under a small cluster of bluets and put it in a teacup. A teacup is the right pot for bluets. I'll probably get one in a day or two. Nice little indoor bouquet of the bluets of spring that stay in flower for a long time. They don't require any more care than occasional watering, and not much of that. They have a fresh air about them. They delight the eye with their tiny magnificence. When the flowers are done, I can put them back in the ground and they'll return next year. They're hardy little things. They make me think of Asheville poet, Jonathan Williams, who had a book of poems titled, Roots and Bluets. I think 'roots and bluets' every time I see bluets.



Everywhere I look, trees are in full bud, some popping open, some yet to. This early warm spell we had didn't seem to hurry the trees about buds opening. The buds have their own ghostly beauty. A tree in full bud amounts to a haze of the colors orange, pink, yellow, red, and the colors in haze behind it can be seen through it until there are 2, 3 and 4 layered tree-shaped hazes of these brilliant spring colors. It has been several weeks the trees are waiting for the time to be right for the leaves to open.



Two calves, white with reddish brown spots, each decorated in its own way, are lying down in the green meadow where the grass is to their ankles, an abundance of what Tom Pruitt called, fresh green shoots. They're comfortable. They've been together all their lives and probably will go to slaughter together. They have a good life; plenty of grass to graze, a salt block, periodic grain delivered, a friend for life to pass the days with, a fence around their territory to keep everything else out. The meadow is their safe place. It's all theirs. Not a bad life, considering their purpose is to become Whoppers and Big Macs. Burgers on the hoof. Out there chewing their cuds. Light coming in at a sharp angle in the evening glows on their backs, a nice warm feeling when its 61 degrees, the last kiss of sunlight before morning.



There's nothing like losing a good friend to make me raise the value of my living friends. Now that I'm out of Sparta, I like to get up with people I've not seen much, spend some time together, talk over whatever comes up, people whose company I enjoy, ones I didn't get to see much in the past for looking after Jr and running a store and everyday life busyness, the quiet people I don't run into because, like me, they don't go anyplace much. People I've come to know through Jr I want to see periodically to keep in touch. I suppose they feel the same about me as I feel about them, memories of Jr. I'm happy every time I talk with somebody I knew through Jr, because we talk about him, and I like to talk about him, hear tales about him, tell tales about him. He can trust me in death as in life to always be on his side, to confirm his good name. I'm glad for Jr's sake that he had someone he could trust to come through for him in his helpless time, look to his interest when his mind was gone as much as when he had his mind, behind his back as to his face.



I saw a film this afternoon that was so real it was like it was happening instead of scripted, acted and filmed. Seraphine. French film, subtitles, the true story of an artist in a small French town who was a cleaning lady. She amused herself making pictures. She was the bottom of all pecking orders until an art dealer from Paris found her by chance. It was the time between WWs 1 and 2. The actress who played Seraphine was like she wasn't ever acting. Her resemblence to Jean in her life as the one everybody talked down to really took ahold of me. Jean liked to make drawings too. I didn't encourage her to paint more, unlike the man in the movie who encouraged Seraphine. She had a period of time with good income and a big studio, due to his encouragement and sales. But that was before the hammer fell. She became obsessive painting all night long, working late in the day, ran herself down, the Depression put an end to sales, put her standard of living back to what it was before, which was OK, but a few screws fell out and and her mind went a little wacky.



If people around her could have just allowed her to act out her harmless fantasies, she'd have been fine. Hers was a life of other people helping her out until she ended up tied down and straightjackedted in an institutional bed in a cell with a window. It felt to me like a story of the disasters interfering in other people's lives can create when the intent is so to the good. It works like that so often. Like people coming into Sparta with a business idea that's what Sparta needs, like me. Turns out Sparta didn't need it. A lot of other people have learned Sparta didn't need whatever it was they thought Sparta needed. I was cautious about trying to do something that would be to Jr's good, because it seldom works out as imagined, imposing my will on somebody else's karma, their own flow, their own track. It's what happens when you get knocked off your own track onto somebody else's and it's not going where you need to be going. I liked to respond to Jr's will as it arose, instead of imposing onto him what I thought best. I knew him well enough to know he knew himself better than I or anyone else knew him. When it came to who made his decisions or determined his directions, he did, up to the last breath. That's what I felt like I was doing there, helping him to live by his own decisions all the way along.



Seraphine was a beautiful soul, who loved God and had a good life cleaning for other people, no family near or far, painting pictures for the fun of it. She was on her own cloud and had a good life there, albeit lonely and poor. The actress, Yolanda Moreau, was the character on first sight. While it looked like she was not acting at all, it was an acting tour de force, because it didn't look like acting. An unforgettable character. I, in my own life, have come to see my art as something I don't want attention for, will not pursue the fame and money game for. I've come to wanting my own art to be like music to the mountain musician. It's what you do because you love doing it, you've worked at it a long time improving as time goes by, you live the rest of your life too, what little you make from it is supplement, like new tires, a dentist visit, like that. A sale makes it possible to catch up a little bit. I don't need for a sale to buy me a house on a beach in Florida. I want my art to be an at home thing, no ambition for New York, no ambition outside the world of the people I live among. The ambition here is to honor the individuals I paint with a portrait in the world to be remembered by a long time after they're gone. Not that I believe that is especially important, because a fire could burn them all up. But I believe honoring them is important. Just the act of doing it. Like a musician's delight is in making music. These are the thoughts I gathered from witnessing Seraphine Louis's story of reaching too far for something that wasn't there. The art market world both energizes and destroys. It depends, like Hollywood, on which wave you catch, the one with the great white shark in it or the one without. I'm not a surfer, so it doesn't mean a bowl of Mexican jumping beans to me. That's how I like it. Let everybody else fight it out.

THE THREE OF US

a good year for apple blossoms



It's a beautiful spring every way you look at it. Some of the trees are still in bud and some are opening. Birds are trickling back in. My cats won't be the danger to birds they once were. Tapo and Caterpillar are too slow now for catching birds, though Caterpillar brought me a mouse one day last week. It's open season on mice year round. The rain has been at night and the ground wet during the day, sky somewhat overcast (partly sunny), keeping the colors vibrant and the small leaves coming up out of the ground too. It's a happy spring for the green world.



I used that word green. So tired of it. It's like the word natural was used to death in advertising 35 years ago, such that now it's meaningless, but it looks good and continues to sell products. Now they're doing the same with green. It's green! Voila! Green is not a color any more. We have green lightbulbs that give white light, and now we have green footprints. Maybe a tarheel is a carbon footprint. That's getting weird, calculating carbon footprints. So much is weird now, I've been calling up News Of The Weird from my new MSN homepage. It's a lot more interesting than corporate news. Somebody mailed somebody else a big boa constrictor in a box. What do you do when your pet boa outgrows the house? Mail it to somebody. Of course. The news of the really weird is young guys getting themselves maimed for life, physically, mentally and emotionally, willingly, for a fake war that's been known as such since before it started. Keep the working class in poverty and there's an endless line of young guys looking for a job.



I'm thinking of Jean lately. Always do, but more recently. More than likely it's because I've bought some African violet potting soil and fertilizer to repot the pair of African violets she gave to Jr a few weeks before she died. I kept them going for him, as he was partial to them as they represented Jean, his friend of 15 years, who appreciated him in ways he didn't understand, for who he was, for Jr himself. When he'd pat her on the ass, she'd turn around like Tapo when Caterpillar touched her, and hiss at Jr, "I love you Jr, but not like that!!!" He'd smile to himself, got himself a cheap feel. It irritated the hell out of her until she quit coming around. I tried to talk to Jean, like a man, "So what if he touches your ass. What's the big damn deal?" That only told Jean I'm just like all the other men. I don't get it. He wanted her to marry him and take care of him in his old age. He had enough assets to make it worth her while. She was mortified. He was scrawny and old and physically repellent. I was thinking she'd had nothing but seriously abusive redneck husbands, why not a gentle old man who thinks she's hot? Out of the question. I thought of a young woman I'd worked with not long before. A guy working at one of the banks had a thing for her. He was clearly infatuated. He ask her out, she declined. I asked her what was up, the guy drives a dually. She said he'd be too nice to her. She doesn't like guys that are nice to her. Ok, whatever trips your trigger. I think Jean was the same way. Could be it's a daddy thang. Familiar. Home. The guy mom divorced because she couldn't live with him and his baby doll missed him so bad.



When I see the violet I speak to Jean in my heart, telling her how I've managed to keep it going in her memory, how the new potting soil and fertilizer perked it up instantly. The years of sitting at the table with Jr and Jean bonded the 3 of us into what we didn't know at the time was a triumvirate of friends way deeper than any of us knew, so much deeper it's incomprehensible to all of us. That was my main purpose in asking Jean to let it ride when Jr felt frisky, to keep the 3 of us together. It was like there was something going on I couldn't comprehend and neither could Jean or Jr. It was so deep, it wasn't usual, therefore none of us had any experience with what we had for a relationship. It had soul importance for all of us. Maybe if I had some scrawny old woman in her late 80s pawing me, I'd feel like I had my own rights in the matter when enough can be enough. Yeah, that gives it another meaning. I wanted to say something to Jr about his hands on Jean, but it was his buisness. It was between them, totally had to do with their relationship, not mine to even think about. As it turned out, Jean had to face her mortality head on, and evidently needed her own space to handle what she had left. Of course, we imagined Jr would go first, me next, Jean last, according to age. Jean went first and it dumbfounded Jr and me.



Jean was such a value to my life, it was incomprehensible, like Jr's value, which I don't even feel compelled to sound to find its depth. I'm satisfied our three-way bond was for whatever its purpose, Jr's table the place where only kindness went around. This gathering went on for a few years, and though no one ever stopped by and listened to us talk around the table, all kinds of people knew exactly what was going on and told it about, every kind of thing that could be thought of by people that think like that. We paid it no mind. We knew what was going on and the people that weren't there were welcome to stop by and see for themselves, but never did. It was good for all of us, in my way of looking back at it. We all benefited. Jr was in the despair of loneliness he couldn't handle. I thought when I had the first few drinks with him that loneliness was his only real issue. I can't do anything to help somebody else psychologically, but I felt like I could stop by and see Jr regularly and relieve loneliness a little bit, give him somebody to talk with, have a drink with, listen to bluegrass with, somebody who respected him plenty to start with, and the respect over time grew into something bigger than respect. It was the same with Jean. Respect for different reasons, but respect all the same.



Jean had a life of major blows like Jr had, several, and much of her adult life incarcerated in mental institutions, where she would go to get away from the world of her relatives and husbands. She was never able to make a decision of her own for her own life to such a degree she withdrew to institutions where they kept her comfortably numb and she spent her time helping the staff with the patients. She loved them. She helped take care of people way out there, understood them and comforted them when no one else could get in there to them. We came to wondering if this might have been her purpose in this life, to give a little humanity to people whose minds don't work right and they can't help it. She'd been through so many sessions of psychotherapy, individually and in group, it was how she thought. She understood a great deal more than the average woman in her late 50s. The difficulty of her life that overwhelmed her had her at the bottom, walking by the side of Hwy 18 in Whitehead, "The Crazy Woman of Whitehead," between her house and Jr's. The righteous looked the other way when she walked by. She told me first time we met she was bipolar. Later she told me she'd learned to tell everybody she met up front, because when she became friends with somebody, then told them, they rejected her and it hurt. So she started telling first encounter with anyone. When a stranger never sees you again, it doesn't hurt like when a so-called friend abandons you over something they know nothing about.



I never go to what we call parties, because I learned long ago I'm more one for one to one or half dozen or less. When it comes to standing around with a throng of people holding drinks, wine now, used to be liquor until drunk driving laws made cocktail parties sober events, is not my idea of a good time. I'd rather ride a roller coaster 20 times in a row. At least it would be fun. I did that scene before moving to the mountains to get away from that mind. I gave myself permission when I moved here never to go to another cocktail party if I don't want to. I've never wanted to, but I've gone to a few, and none of them was worth the gas to get there and back. I took Jean to a few, because I wanted my friends to meet Jean, to see this is an extraordinary individual. My friends took to her like someone they hadn't seen in years and wanted to see more of.



Every once in awhile I'd see someone turn the nose up at Jean and walk away. Every time, it was someone I think of as false, somebody whose life is a fake, a fraud of a human being. I recall a man I watched snub Jean at a Christmas gathering, causing me to stay away from him. A couple years later I met him somewhere else and he said, "I think we've met." I said, "No, we haven't met, but we spent some time in the same place once." And I knew not to take anything seriously about this man. Just stay away. I took Jean to a wedding party for some friends of mine. 5 women snubbed Jean, all of them women who surprised me. If I'd thought about it, I could have anticipated it, but it never entered my mind to think about it. They hugged up on me, glad to see ya, turned to Jean, the nose went straight up, they turned literally on a heel and walked away. After the 5th one, I said to Jean, "Are you ready to go?" She said, "Yes," and out the door we went. I saw that I was in the wrong place, with or without Jean, and I could not subject her to another snubbing. We drove to Floyd, Virginia, and heard the Jugbusters play at the Floyd Country Store. Much more fun than snooty people.

A DAY OF UNKNOWN SORROW

elgato tarbaby

I don't feel good today in a whole lot of ways, but don't feel bad either. I forced myself to get outside and do some work with a shovel and to cut up some big tree limbs on the ground and throw them on a brush pile I'll be working on until the next rain when I'll burn it. The right-of-way people have been through here cutting limbs away from powerlines, leaving the limbs on the ground. I'll be going around gathering their leavings to put on the brush pile too. It seems ridiculous to be thinking about a brush pile in a subdivision. Back when we were working farms, brush pile burning was done quite a lot, the leavings after cutting up some trees for firewood. Now it seems odd to be doing something like that around here with Christmas tree patches and exurban houses, new cars up and down the road, like going back to the 19th century for a day, something that doesn't require a computer.

I've had the blues the last few days. I've identified it missing Jr, missing his talking, his way of thinking, his way of seeing. Today I called Mary Lee, the grief counselor at Hospice to make an appointment to get with her and talk about what I'm feeling, to keep myself reminded this is as natural a process as water flowing downhill. I want to talk with somebody about Jr. In my mind's eye I see moments from the last few months, those moments I didn't like at the time, but look back at now as a blessed experience. The little sponges on sticks like tootsie-pops with water in them to keep his mouth moist when he was unable to drink from a cup. At the time, staying with him was my commitment to take care of him to the last breath.

At the time, it was what I was doing, keeping him as comfortable as possible, mind largely in the present. From 4 and a half months later, I look at those last days, weeks and months as an enormous commitment by one human being for another. I didn't then see it as now. Then, it was immediate. It was struggling against service agencies and nursing homes that were a serious threat. Without a stubborn bull like me, they'd have got him. Perhaps what has hit me the last couple days is the enormity of that, how major an act it was for a friend. When he told me with just a couple days left that we're closer than friends, more like brothers, it took hold of me. It was the magnitude of my respect that made me want to do whatever it takes to keep him out of a nursing home. When someone I respect that much says we're like brothers, it means something to me. It means more as time goes by.

At the same time as I'm feeling this surge of missing Jr, TarBaby is missing. He's been gone over 60 hours. He has gone off for 3 and 4 days at a time rambling. He also stayed away about 4 days after a serious cat fight where he hid someplace and licked himself back. I have a concern about a dog attacking him, Jolene in particular. She had blood on her face yesterday from a nick in her ear, which I took for a groundhog bite, but it could have been a cat claw. I suspect Jolene, because she attacks cats, even at home. I've had to run her off from TarBaby a couple of times.

This evening I couldn't get it out of my mind that TarBaby was hurt or maybe dead. Not knowing what to do, I called my friend Kay in Ohio, who can touch in with animals in a psychic way. I told her how long he'd been gone. She got off the phone right away and went to see if she could get in touch with him. A half hour or so later she called. She said she had a difficult time reaching him, but when she did, she knew it was TarBaby by the light she's seen from him before. She had the sense he was hurt and hiding someplace. She felt like he was licking himself. And he's trying to get back to me. I felt like she was right. She said she's convinced he's alive. So I wait til morning light.

This could be a real problem in my relationship with Jolene and Martha. If it turns out to be the case, which I feel like it is, that Jolene attacked TarBaby, I'll keep them away from the house and from me. When they come around, I'll run them off, and keep on running them off until they never come back. And I'll keep the cats in the house during the day, which is the rule from this minute on. Jolene and Martha have killed every possum on the mountain. My .45 can make a racket that will set them running down the road. I'd never shoot at them, but it's the loudest noise I can think of to scare them out of their wits. This is just fantasy. I don't know what's going on, though I'm inclined to believe what Kay found, because she's done it before with all my animals. She was accurate every time. I have such a close psychic connection with TarBaby, not the way Kay does, but closeness by feeling, I'm wondering if I've been picking up the last couple days from TarBaby, what he's feeling, hiding, in pain, healing himself, wanting to get home, unable to make it yet.

Could I have been feeling TarBaby's situation unable to connect with where the feeling is coming from, getting it mixed up with missing Jr, which I've not been quite certain of? It was an inner sorrow I felt, feel, that I couldn't find where it was coming from. Now I don't want to sleep. I want to go out with a flashlight and look for TarBaby. I'd say he's within a radius of 200 yards from the house in one of possibly 5 directions. First light in the morning, I'll be going to places I suspect as I search in my mind the places he might be hiding through probably a sleepless night. The best thing I think I can do right now is remember the drama I created around the sheriff, the helicopter and men in 2 pickups. Let it go as a drama and wait until morning, because there is nothing I can do in the night but pray.

THE DIGITAL THERMOMETER

stoneface

A beautiful sunny day of blue sky and white puffy clouds drifting over Carolina blue. I see a crow in the meadow pecking around. Black chickens. I want to attract them to the house so I can see them. The fence between here and the meadow keeps the dogs this side of it. I don't want to lure them too close for their comfort, just close enough to see them better. It's been a cold day in the 30s and 40s. I think it went up to 46 or so and is on the way back down for the night. 44 now. The digital thermometer sits here on the computer tower receiving signals from the transmitter on the side of the shed out the window.

I bought this digital thermometer for Jr some years ago, 3 or 4 maybe. He needed a new thermometer. The one by the door with the red line that went up and down had little numbers. He had to go up to it to read it, so I read it when I passed through the door. I went to Radio Shack, believing I'd seen such a thing there. $30 then. I wouldn't have spent that on one for myself, but it seemed like this was what Jr needed. He'd declined to the place walking was difficult, going outside even more difficult. The numbers on the screen are at least an inch high. When I put it together for him at the coffee table, read instructions (yes, I do that--I learned it putting model cars together) and put the batteries in, trying to explain how this thing works when I don't have any idea. What I understood was easy to tell. He got it. It's just that it was something he'd never imagined existed. Like me if somebody walked in and gave me an iPad telling me I need it. I'd have to beg to differ.

Batteries in, it started working. I took the transmitter box out and put it up under the porch's roof out of the weather and the wind, 8 or so feet from the window. From the moment it started operating he sat and watched it like it was a little television. It was far more interesting to him than anything that's on tv. He would watch it all day long. He watched the numbers change as the air went cooler or warmer. I came to see it that he lived his life working outdoors in every weather. He liked the feel of the outdoor air. The temperature told him how the it felt. A string about a foot long hung from the clapper in a bell on the porch post below a cast iron tractor somebody had given him and he wouldn't take nothin for it. The wind kept the string going. It told wind direction and wind speed.

The way the house sat in relation to the wind and the row of white pines beside the house created patterns of turbulence that sometimes sent the string going in every direction. A memory came of a day when big snowflakes were drifting down. Caught in the little bit of turbulence directly in front of the window, the snowflakes drifted up and down, around. It was a window full of lightly dancing snowflakes. Jr said of it, "Seein those fnowflakes floatin around out there - looks like they can't hit the ground." And that's how they looked. The window told him everything about the weather visually. He saw the curve in Hwy18 at Rifle Range Road. That curve was in his view. That's where he read the traffic. He could tell by how many trucks and the kinds of trucks what kind of business was going on and how much. He watched the trucks carrying trusses die down to almost none. Logging trucks too. Weekends brought the motorcycles and Wednesdays the paper told how many of them wrecked someplace.

I've sat and looked at the scene out the window with him to where I know it pretty well. From time to time, not often, he would mention what he was reading in the traffic. I'd been watching the same traffic and didn't see any of what he saw. I was seeing landscape in seasonal and weather changes, vehicles running through it from time to time. He was reading cattle markets and every kind of thing to do with commerce on the roads.

A lot of them he knew who they were. He had the eye of a hawk. Seeing Jr confined to the house was like seeing a race horse put out to pasture. The digital thermometer cost the same as nothing as far as I was concerned for what it gave Jr. It gave his eyes something to watch while he sat thinking. That's why he didn't watch tv or listen to the radio. He'd rather think about things. He could solve about anything in a sleepless night.

When he wanted to know what I paid for it, I told him it wasn't much to start with and I got it on sale. That was my way of telling him I'm not going to be paid for it. It's a present. Thinking about buying it, I didn't have any idea it would be so great a present as it turned out to be. It gave his eyes something to focus on that didn't distract him from his thinking. It was so right it felt divinely inspired, because I believed so completely I was sent to him to help him in his helpless time. I marvelled at God's conscious setup to arrange for Jr to have somebody on his side he can trust. It didn't matter to me whether Jr believed he could trust me or not. I knew he could trust me absolutely, that the last thing he would know would be that I kept his trust. That was important to me. It was important to Jr too. Because I knew he could trust me absolutely, I didn't feel the least bit anxious about whether he thought he could. I couldn't tell him he could trust me. That's the same as saying he could not. Time would tell it. And there is always time.

And time for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

- TS Eliot

The thermometer is now with me. I became interested in the temperature after watching it so closely with Jr. I asked for it upon his passing. I knew no one would want it. I did. Before, I didn't care what the temperature was. A look out the window at the rhododendron told me. I have a lot of ways of estimating the temperature. I don't need closer than an estimate. What to wear when I go out the door. Now I watch the numbers change to the 10th of a degree. My old thermometer with the red vertical line doesn't do the trick any more. It's good for backup when the batteries die out in the digital. With rechargeable batteries, it goes on and on. It's the best object for a memory of Jr I could have.