MY FRIEND JOHN WHO LIVED TO 103

william halsey

I think every day of my friend John who left the body a week ago at 103, in sound mind and body until the last few months when he needed hospice. I know he went out in good hands. John stands out for me for his attitude toward life. He had the coolest bookstore in the South, the Book Basement, in Charleston. I worked with him every working day for five years. He was such an essential encouragement for my education, I may not have finished without his sound counsel. After a certain point, I lost confidence in American education and its value. I went into school wanting to be a teacher. Left school wanting no more to do with the education system from either side of the desk. I would have liked to go to graduate school in something like Existential Theater or Egyptology. Couldn't have afforded it if I'd wanted to. So I read about those subjects and others. Bookstore was the only kind of work I wanted to do, though these were the last years of the small bookstores before the gigantic corporate bookstores and amazon, which is so easy I don't even miss bookstores.

 

william halsey

 

A small bookstore custom fit to its customers seems to me a major cultural loss across the land. So much of the interpersonal business as it was in another time is gone over to the anti-personal corporate bookstore that does drone deliveries by GPS. It's a new age. Rents are out of range now for a small, personal business, and have been for a long time. John was fortunate to be able to keep the store going well unto retirement age. He was the WW2 generation, was a radioman in the Navy stationed in Alaska. He also went to the Citadel before the war. It was the time of the Depression (economic downturn) and he could not afford college. He went to the Citadel for free. He hated it, but it got him an education. To his last years he had nightmares of being late to some lineup drill they did. He was reading Dickens before first grade.

 

william halsey

 

John grew up Catholic and had intense reaction to it similar to my reaction to fundamentalism. We were in theological agreement: no to all that. He had thrown off supposed-to morality and followed his guiding light of lines from Shakespeare, To thine own self be true.... It was the scripture he lived by. It had no organization around it, no church, no authorities, no supposed-to. I can't say that I ever saw or heard of John engaging in deception. He was inhibited, though not deceptive. He was one of many Southern liberals. Through my decade in Charleston, I only knew liberals. The reactionaries outnumbered the liberals. The divide then, late sixties, was like it is now, though without the influence of Rupert Murdoch and Karl Rove, to name a few instrumental in making the right wingnuts socially aggressive.

 

william halsey

 

John was good to the people around him. In his retirement, he gave several annual scholarships to foreign students in the music department at the College of Charleston, scholarships that made it possible for them to study there. He contributed to his community in his own personal ways, ways he believed important. His career was distributing books to readers. Looking back over my own path from perhaps its last chapter, from this perspective I have come to see John a gift from God in my educational transition from Kansas through the Deep South to the North Carolina Blue Ridge. I did not know it then, but I knew something was ahead, a reason not to commit to Charleston. I had no idea what it was, but intuited I'd be going someplace else. The day the door opened for the possibility to relocate to Waterfall Road, then Road 1131, I knew this was it, knew I was going to the mountains, no turning back. Only a handful of my friends took the chance to go to the mountains a great opportunity. John was one. The ones who said I'd be back, I don't even remember most of their names. The five who saw the mountains my next step continue to be my friends. Though John has left the body, he continues.   

 

william halsey himself

 

 

*

 

 

 

 

 

 

HANGING AN EXHIBITION

 

circles inside circles

 

This morning I packed art objects made over the last year into the car to take to the library and hang on the walls in their exhibition / meeting room, Sherry's office space, for the month of October. Took two hours hanging them, got plenty of stair-step exercise stepping onto a wooden chair often and back down. I get them up on the walls and they look so puny in a big room. That's neither here nor there. It's hard for me to say if it looks good or not. I know them each one, individually, intimately unto conception. I know the why behind them. I need to write this out in a kind of artist's statement for anyone who is curious. First and only rule for every piece was Simple, simplest possible. When something became complex visualizing it in mind's eye, I'd stop and say, no complex---simple only. Each one is about getting the max out of the least. I decided to call the show Punk Art. Had a good time in there. Hung the pictures as low as the hanging chains allowed. I wanted them down where kids can see them easily. I've asked the people working in the library to suggest to kids who come in to go have a look.

 

the foot of somebody's bed

 

First of the month, had some cash, decided to treat self to a good meal while in town. Went to a small restaurant called La Mexicana. The spirit is the best in there since Consuelo, of Bogota, Columbia, opened it. She served Venezuelan, Mexican and Columbian cuisine for lunch. Her cooking had the quality of a chef. Her personality was vibrant, a woman who likes to dance on weekends. She's moved to Charlotte, last I heard, the restaurant has been through I think two owners between Consuelo and the people who have recently taken it over. I saw an article about the new owner in the paper a few weeks ago. He is from Spain and his wife from Bolivia, La Paz. She does the cooking. Several Mexicans came in while I was there. The food is real Mexican. The Mexican restaurant in town for years, Mis Arados, is Tex-Mex. La Mexicana is the food they eat in Mexico. I love Latin cooking. Flavor is important. I will return to this place often, already feel at home there. Good meal, good vibrations.

 

hanging line

 

Walking from the car to the house told me I was worn out from hours of physical activity, not strenuous, but motion. Emptied pockets right away, shed shoes and socks and fell down on the bed, covered up and slept a few hours. Did not want to get up. Did not want to write. Wanted to be still. Could not get back to sleep. Thought I'd watch the movie in today's mail, Love & Mercy, Brian Wilson's story of the Beach Boys. Set it in motion, sitting back with Sophia, feet up, in for a couple hours. Phone rang. It rang a long time for me taking so long to rise from my nest and get to the phone. My friend Billy Potter from forty-five to fifty years ago. I knew when I heard his voice, my friend, his uncle, John Zeigler had left the body at 103. So when he told me, it was already redundant. John was the owner of the bookstore I worked in part-time during the years at College of Charleston, the Old South College of a student body of five hundred. Now it is ten thousand, a state university, has a big art department, big music department, big science department.

 

 

eclipse

 

When I went there, the main building and the old library were it. The plaster walls were cracked and patches gone. Old, old maps hanging in some of the classrooms, plaster busts of Greek and Roman generals lying about. Tall windows. Old wooden floors, old desks. Some of the professors were present day people, several of them were from the Old South past. It was fascinating for me, a culture, the South, after growing up in a world without culture. I loved being in a culture and learning the ways of the culture. Throughout my sentence of involuntary servitude, every port the ship stopped in, the other guys went looking for the bars. I went looking for the bookstore. I became acquainted with several bookstores along our southeastern coast and the different ports in the Mediterranean. I bought paperbacks every place the ship pulled into port. I fell in love with bookstores and wanted with all my heart to work in one. I became acquainted with the Book Basement in Charleston and bought several books there, quite a lot.

four quartets: the universe

 

When I started at the College, I asked John about working there. He always kept a college student part-time. The guy working there had one more semester to go. If I could find something to get me through til then, I'll get the job. I made do and got the only job I ever wanted. I believe I learned twice as much by way of the bookstore as I did in school. It was a hyper-learning time. I was learning the ways of the Old South. The New South had yet a decade before it reached Charleston. I loved the Old South. I loved the massive live oak trees that made a forest canopy for the quadrangle. I loved the College's neo-classical architecture. While talking with Billy, I told him John taught me authentic morality. The morality I grew up in was you-better-not. John's morality had to do with practical everyday life, the morality of "To thine own self be true and it must follow as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man." Shakespeare. He kept a small calligraphy copy of this sentence framed on the wall in the store. I saw it every day multiple times. It was the core of John's morality and became the core of my own.

 

e f g

all ouvres by tj worthington

 

 

*

 

 

 



PERSONAL IDENTITY LOST AND FOUND

 

jessica stockholder

I tend to think an awful lot about the people I know, people directly involved in the weave and flow of my life such that I'm in the weave and flow of their lives. I really do think this is where my head mostly dwells, on the others in my life. I see over years my habit-thinking of the various individuals was actually a projection of how I felt about myself. In the time I was in despair about myself, teens and twenties, I objectified others somehow, left out their hearts, addressed their minds. I wanted to know people that impressed me, and even they weren't really it. Eventually, my attitude toward self changed and along with it my attitude toward others changed. When I finally came to respect my own heart, even my inner child came to life. This happened in my early thirties. Up til then, I wanted to live solely by mind. My heart was so incredibly wounded in childhood, I did my best to shut it down, to quit feeling, because all I felt was rage and the continual depression of holding the rage inside and pretending on the outside I'm happy. It took until late twenties before I even noticed the inner rage that projected my attitude toward life. I wanted to live, but didn't know why, except to get away from parents as far as land allowed and have a go at living without their absolute control and suffocating religion. I didn't do my wild-thang time very well, between ages 18 and 23, when children of dysfunctional families run wild and fall into every kind of pit. I think of my time with them as a dog chained to a doghouse with a ten foot chain, living on a circle of bare dirt a couple inches below the level of the topsoil around it, something like a miniature baseball diamond. One day somebody let the dog loose and it ran and ran in any and all directions, heedless from inexperience, falling, getting up running, ran across a road without looking, out of control. If left off the leash, it would soon be hit by a car. I grew up on a short leash and did just what a dog does, ran til I was out of breath and couldn't move. But stumbling, uncertain, devoid of self-esteem, hesitant, not believing my own feelings and thoughts, taught not to.

 

jessica stockholder

 

I fell on my face, fell on my face, fell on my face, through my wild-thang five years. The first half of it I made stupid decision upon stupid decision. Sometimes fell on my face drunk. Drunk was the easiest kind of falling on my face. I married daddy in a woman's body. When I realized I had bought myself more of same to live with the rest of my life, I bounced off the trampoline. He was done and in the past. I wasn't living the rest of my life as the life theretofore had been. I was not going to live in the same mental climate all my life. A window opened and I jumped. The US Navy seen through the lens of Oppositional Defiance Disorder was my enemy. It took me away from my life against my will, set me back two years. It took care of me in those two years when I could not have taken care of myself very well, not well at all. Working in a shoe store with head in knots. The Navy took me away from it. Navy put me on the sea with head in knots. It allowed time to untie some of the knots and learn to live with the ones I couldn't untie. During the time on the ship I mostly read novels in translation of the French Resistance in Paris during the German occupation. I read the French existentialists almost exclusively. They spoke my truth. I wanted education desperately. By the time the Navy was over, the marriage was over. Out of the Navy on Friday, started school Monday, weekend at the beach, the first days of my life. I look back at my life starting at age 23. I'd taken care of the checklist of obligation to society, church and parents. Leaving the Navy base the last time, I stepped into my new life of decisions made for my life by my self. The Navy got me safely through the time of running like a dog unchained. In retrospect, I look at how the Navy served my development as a human being by putting up guardrails when needed, and now is giving me a monthly assist. I have to say I'm as grateful to the Navy for shelter through my storm as I am the College of Charleston for opening the door to the rest of my life.  

 

jessica stockholder

 

Ego having been buried for so long, it was time for ego development, discovering personal identity. A friend at the college said something that stayed with me as a kind of a minor Zen koan. He said college is the time when we create our own identities. I was thinking it meant as a kind of style, like a writer's style that is one's own, or an artist's style. Imagine it, then become it, was how I took it. I think he thought of it that way too. I wasn't able to compose for myself an identity I wanted to live by, so I left it open to see what happens. Seeing that time in the context of a lifetime, I can see that I did indeed discover my personal identity in that time. For the first time in my life, I interacted with others without the inhibition of bleachers full of judges who believed I was their hand puppet. In the beginning, I kind of became other people's puppet temporarily, because that was all I knew. Did not yet know how to make decisions for myself. It was fun to exit the chute of living by other people's decisions for my life. I can't say I did it gracefully, but got through it standing up. I learned the importance of being a friend. I loved that the College of Charleston was then a small Southern college a couple hundred years old, Old South neo-classical architecture. It felt like a grandmother's arms. It was a nurturing place that helped develop my ego, my self-identity, gave it sound principles, again like a grandmother. The honor code was absolute, no two ways about it. Caught cheating, you're out that day. See somebody cheating and don't report it, you're out same day. I remember a guy caught cheating on his last final exam of his senior year. Out. It got me over any, every propensity I might have had for cheating. It has stuck for life that cheating amounts to cheating oneself, caught or not caught. Learning not to cheat was a primal step in the progression of discovering who I am that became a significant part of decision making.

 

jessica stockholder

 

In a student body of under 500, I had a handful of friends and others I only knew from classes. I had an attic one-room apartment and worked in a bookstore. All through the Navy, when the ship went into any port, I found the bookstores. With just a few hours in Nice, France, in uniform, I found a French bookstore and bought a book of poems by Jean Genet in French, an inspiration to learn French in school well enough to read it. After classes of a wide variety, my interest zoomed in on Twentieth Century American writing, prose and poetry, and American art. By the time I finished at the college, I knew these were the interests of my life. These were the longings from deep within I was unable to satisfy without education. I had a longing to go to graduate school in something like existentialist drama, something I know, and knew then, I would love. I aimed to be a teacher, maybe high school where I felt I understood the kids somewhat. By the time I'd done undergrad, I didn't want any more school from either side of the desk. But I did uncover my self-identity by letting it evolve of its own. Now looking back it's clear that the interests of my life are good writing and good art. It was in the college years I learned that. Without the years of school, I'd have been more lost at sea than I am now. I think Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti were the first poets I had experienced on my own after high school. Starting college, the first book of poetry I picked up on my own was Selected Poems by Robinson Jeffers. I lay awake in bed all night reading it over and over in awe of what I was seeing. He spoke to me like no writer had ever done before. And to this day, I can sit in awe with Louise Gluck's new collected poems, or Elizabeth Bishop's collected poems, Robert Lowell's Notebook 1967-68. I don't make my living from it, but these writers and a host of others inform my interior life. This is how I created my self-identity: I found it by being open to it, an affection for Twentieth Century poetry. It serves nothing but my own aesthetic satisfaction. It's untarnished by money and ambition. It's uniquely my own.   

 

jessica stockholder

 

 

*

 

A WORLD OF VARIETY

For a couple weeks I've paid next to no attention to the news. The most interesting media broadcast came to me by way of BBC radio. In Mogadishu, Somalia, teachers are having a problem enforcing no cell phones in class. That struck me as news worth hearing. We only know of Mogadishu from Black Hawk Down, a fairly good military action movie. Somalia we know of for pirates abducting oil tankers for ransom, a country of extreme poverty without government, the place we'd like the Teabaggers to go where they can live without government and have all the guns and ammo they want. But, as they say, "That's not what we mean." I see Sarah Palin's face and Ted Cruz's face every time I got to facebook. Finally, today I made comment to the source of a Ted Cruz article about what a bozo he is: His game is name recognition and you're helping him out. Fact is, I'm helping them out here using their names while dismissing them. Their advisors have taught them name recognition is all that is important. It doesn't matter that Sarah Palin said Jesus celebrated Easter. A year from now, nobody will remember. Ten years from now, everyone will remember the name Sarah Palin. The real horror story is that she is so popular. Faux tv can't keep her off the air by viewer demands. We who like to think ourselves somewhat rational see Ted Cruz a blithering buffoon. Yet he is wildly popular. Because he's a moron. That's where I scratch my head. I already know anti-intellectualism in America has degenerated to anti-paying attention. And here it is, popular ignorance, the legacy of the Reagan Revolution.

 

 

 

I've become shy of calling my mother. Her new husband is a Faux tv enthusiast. They live in separate apartments in an assisted living facility, but they watch tv together in the evening. Last time we talked, she said, "Obama is ruining our country." It took me back to age 16 when I was listening to Little Richard and she said, "The niggers are taking over." Then, as now, I could only think: What? The woman who has parroted preachers all her adult life is now parroting Faux tv. I wanted to say, Please stop watching that ignorance. But her fundamentalist religion has a tv news channel now. Her new political awareness via indoctrination tv is the political equivalent of her religion. It took me fifteen years to shake off the belief system she enforced. I had to throw out the baby with the bathwater, as they say. I turned my back to all of it by way of education. I went to college to flush the ignorance out of my system. One of the first things I learned studying 20th Century American poetry, dogmatism is not where it's at. Turns out I'd thought it was. It was a shock. One of my initial attractions to Bob Dylan was his dogmatism, which caused me eventually to say good-bye to him. Then his last five albums happened and each one pulled me back  Sitting in front of a preacher several times a week through the entirety of childhood was crazy-making. I'm reminded of a brother and sister I know whose dad made them sit and listen to Rush Limbaugh before they went to school every morning. Daddy was a preacher man. Eventually, I came to see preachers as culture cops. They enforce culture. If they paid any attention to "Jesus' word," they'd be promoting loving one another instead of guilt.  

 

 

 

 

The culture of my developing years was Kansas creationist, before Creationism, fundamentalist. Of course I believed it. But something is amiss when what it did to a kid of a questioning mind was pack him so full of sewage that he had to open the release valve and get rid of it all. That is the process that took fifteen years. Westboro Baptist church that's frequently in the news is Kansas fundamentalism. It looks odd from the outside, but on the inside, that mind is a dynamic force. That the likes of the Koch Bros are from Wichita surprises me not. All my life I have questioned myself and God about why I was destined to grow up in Kansas this time. Could I have read The Wizard of Oz in my former lifetime? Could the horrors of the previous lifetime, Europe subdued by Nazis, have made me long in my heart for the "free world," for Kansas, "there's no place like home." To quote Lou Reed from one of his songs, "Just goes to show how wrong you can be." When I question how I came about my parents by way of karma, then I wonder how they came about me? If I was the torment to them that they were to me, I know they were glad to see me go. Mother lives in a state of denial and I can't get a straight answer from her about anything. Denial is what it takes to keep her equilibrium. I was taught denial in depth, and never to talk about anything that might run a ripple across her smooth lake of denial. Next, I find myself drawn to people of these characteristics. First thing I did was marry daddy. Then came the day I said this will not be the nature of my life. I will not live with him in a woman's body all the way along. I've already done my time with him. I felt like a kid born in prison. I was not going to drag that ball and chain through the rest of my life.

 

 

 

At age 23, as far away from Wichita as land allows without the extreme of Alaska, the checklist of obligations to rule by others, parents, school, church, marriage and military, was done. The marriage was divorced after two years when I realized I was living with daddy and liked it less every day. I turned my back to all of it. Release from the navy, then release from marriage, I started at the College of Charleston because my X had told me I would not be accepted there. Challenge a Taurus. I started the first day of my life that would be my own at the College of Charleston. The entire student body would not fill an auditorium classroom at a state university. It was not a high-powered school. It was still an Old South college. I loved that about it most of all. I had longed throughout childhood to feel the soul of the South. Most of my friends in the South have been non-racist people of several races. The great southern writers are not racist. I know there is a great deal of fervent racism in the South, but I don't care. It's everywhere. It's worse in New York City. In the South I learned not to let other people's belief systems be a problem for me. They allow me mine, I allow them theirs. I've found it to be a Southern code wherever I am in the South. I don't mean to apologize for barbeque culture or any of the parts of Southern culture I don't participate in, only that in the South we allow each other to be who we are. So you think different from somebody. So what else is new? I've found the Southern people best known individually.

 

 

 

From the outside the southern people are judged collectively by abstractions without meaning. People outside the South think they know all about the South. I'm here to tell you, nobody outside the South knows anything about the South. The South can only be known from the inside. Southern people don't care that Yankees think they're ignernt racists. It keeps them away. It's a good thing. When I found out about a Yankee I know who told a sheriff deputy living a couple doors down the street in town to keep his dog at home--it's shitting in his yard, I said, What! Man! This is the South! We don't do that shit! I don't mean the South is Ozzie & Harriet forever. I mean there is a bond between somebody from North Carolina and somebody from Alabama when they meet at a convention in New York. I saw recently in the news that a couple in Johnson City, Tennessee, were renting out their teenage girls to make porn films, getting paid pretty well, subsistence. They started when the girls were 9. Shit happens in the South same as shit happens in the North. We're all a world of people, all of us endowed with human nature, whatever our culture. I love about the South that it continues to be a culture even after all these years of television. I don't like to leave the South anymore. After the second half of my life in the mountains, I don't like to leave the mountains for more than a very short time. I don't like to leave my county anymore. The people of Alleghany County allow me to live among them and many of them have a place in my heart. I've walked my own walk, talked my own talk; I love living among the Southern people and am grateful to them for allowing me to live happily among them.

 

 

 

 I really don't care if somebody is racist or not, whether somebody is republican or not. I've known enough people of other races to see they're racist too. In the South, you take it for granted everybody is republican and leave it be at that. I don't care how they vote. People I like are people I like. I don't want all liberals around me. I don't want everybody around me agreeing with me. I want different kinds of people in my life. Somebody's racism is their own business. Somebody's politics is their own business. Same with religion. In the world of people I know that I live among, it is a wide variety. I like that every person I know is unique among all the others. Last week I saw a friend who is 81, bluegrass bass player, good a man as you'll find on earth, haughtily rejected for his PC insensitive language. He was hurt by it, didn't understand it. I was perplexed. I stood there and watched my friend be rejected by intolerance for his unconscious clichés of intolerance. I had to remind myself this world is not necessarily rational. That I have reminded myself so many times explains why it shocked me to hear Joe in the coffee shop say that something to do with somebody's behavior was not logical. That rang every bell I had. I didn't know that Joe took the logical for the norm. And I'm not sure he really does. It's a conjecture from one word. All I mean to say is it shocked me to hear it, no matter who said it.   

 

 

*

 

MEMORIES OF TED STERN

 jim dine, gate

I'm flooded with memories of Ted Stern over the last few days. Today I was remembering his first year at the college, my last year, when the sound throughout the campus every day in class was the pounding of telephone pole sized steel tubes driven into the ground in a grid where the new library was being built, and another place nearby where a new classroom building was being built. BAM - BAM - BAM all day long, the pile-drivers beating those huge things into the ground. This was every day. It was not objectionable. It was the new college. It was evidence that the college was going to survive the financial crisis it was going through. In a way, it was hope. Charleston the city was wasting away after business went to North Charleston and the suburban malls. Charleston then was in a place similar to what Sparta is in now, businesses barely making it and shutting down. Four movie theaters closed. Only one restaurant and two greasy spoon diners. Even the sailor bars and strip joints moved to North Charleston. For students, faculty and staff at the college, a new university was being built around us. Big change. Some liked it. Some didn't. I didn't like it at first, but when I saw what was happening, I liked it.

Progress was Ted Stern's guiding light. At that time in my life I took progress for a dirty word. It was progress that was messing everything up. I recall a time after I had been in the mountains some years, Ted Stern retired and needing to go back to Charleston for some meetings, I drove his new Cadillac, a really nice ride on the highway, going with him to visit some of my friends there. Charlotte was putting up a beltway all the way around the city during that time. Going out of Charlotte on the southern end of I-77 we saw what to my eyes was uttermost devastation. Not anything growing as far as could be seen, a red clay desert. Big cement structures were up and a highway being built between them for an up in the air experience cloverleaf sort of configuration. Big earth-moving equipment, the kind with tires ten feet high, real American he-man Heavy Equipment. Giant Tonka toys. Ted remarked about how beautiful this was, progress, people at work, new highway being built to accommodate more cars coming into the world every year. It lit him up like it would light me up to see that much acreage in virgin forest. Knowing him taught me to appreciate progress. Years later, I passed over that same stretch of highway, even drove around on it, feeling eerie that high up in the air. It's a beautiful area, really beautiful to my eye.

I'm remembering the time he told me of how his father, Hugo, died. The telephone rang, somebody told him the stock market crashed, the phone hit the floor, he hit the floor and that was it. Ted said the people that came in to clean the body stole his gold cufflinks, his money clip and the money in it. He said he was not going to die over money. He never let money be that important to him. Money was important in that he kept track of it and did his own taxes every year, kept up with the new loopholes. Every time he bought something he'd ask what kind of deal could be worked for him, and he'd get a good deal. In his later years he leased a new gray or silver Cadillac every other year. It was a better deal than buying them. I came out of the College of Charleston thinking I was educated. Over the years post-college knowing Ted Stern as the caretaker of his farm and one he could talk to about decisions he's involved in with the college, Spoleto, whatever it was, aware that I would not be telling any of his business around, I learned that compared to Ted Stern I was a dumb shit every way I can be looked at. I was his ear in that way to the point I taught myself to forget Charleston business he told me, because I was serious about not letting any of  it slip. I did one time, but by chance it did not go any further than the moment. It taught me. Never again will that happen. It was good training for other aspects of my life too. Several old mountain people have told me the stories of their lives with the confidence I would not blabber any of it around. I've told them that if-when I write about them it will never embarrass them.

Ted and I have had some differences too. That I look up to him, respect him highly, it doesn't mean I haven't seen his human side too, which is more on display at home than at work. A year or two after I came to the mountains to work the farm, Ted Stern was having a cocktail party event for the business leaders in Sparta. He said I would wear a white shirt with a bow tie and serve drinks. I told him I would not. He told me I would. I could not convince him I would not, and he could not convince me I would. His final word down at the wire was that I would do it. Mine was you'll see. I told him I have to live here. I was not Ted Stern's step-n-fetch-it, and the gossip around Sparta would never be that I was. I did not know those people then, but knew I would eventually. It might have been a pride thing. I don't care. There wasn't any way in this world I was going to do such a thing. Not that I have a problem with pouring a drink for somebody. I worked among people in bib overalls, bluejeans, workboots and ballcaps. This was my new world I was having to learn in a hurry working the farm. Nobody was ever going to see me in a bow tie, anyway. Especially in my new life among hillbillies that I was quickly coming to appreciate. Ted Stern did the drink pouring at the party or made it a communal pour-your-own. I don't know. I wasn't there. I had to problem with it. I never once told him I would. I only told him I would not. He never let on later like he had a problem with it. I know I paid for it in some way, but don't know how and don't care to know how. If he'd told me to get my ass off the farm, I'd have said ok.

As for somebody to work for, I've only worked for one employer his equal when it comes to being consceintious toward employees. Attorney Donna Shumate. Tom Pruitt, the old farmer who lived nearby and helped me with the farm had a great deal of respect for Ted Stern because all his financial dealings were straight up, on time. He never had the first money issue with the man. That impressed Tom mightily. After living in a culture of poverty awhile I learned why. In a life of poverty people need money all the time, really need it. A dollar or two you're entrusted with won't last long. It's a culture where you have to know somebody very well before you can trust them. Trust doesn't extend beyond family very often in the mountains. By now I've come to understand and feel the same way. I don't ever trust somebody I've just recently come to know, from here or from Away. It now takes me years to know somebody before trust becomes an option. I was told by a smart-ass one day at lunch when we were talking about trust and I mentioned my hesitation. "I'm sorry for you," he said in his superior tone of voice that says: how stupid you are compared to me. I didn't pay him any mind. I knew him for a long time, would never think of trusting him. He taught me not to several times. Ted Stern never talked down to anybody about anything. He regarded everyone with respect and was someone who could be trusted absolutely.


*  

TED STERN AN HONORABLE MAN

     cleve gray, red thrust on gray

This is the day Ted Stern had his memorial service at the cistern, by his request weather permitting. I found a short video Channel 5 put online of the flag-wrapped bier with a friend of more than half my life inside it dead. First time I went to google to look for info on his passing, I saw "Ted Stern dead at 100." It knocked me for a wobble on my track. Dead. It was a little bit hard to take. Dead  is such a dead word. It's inert like a cinder block. A name and memories. The first time I saw him, he was walking across the cistern on his way into the main building. We at the college knew we had a new president, though I hadn't seen him. One day I was walking into the quadrangle through the gate between the library and the main building (1968) and saw Ted Stern walking over the cistern. At a distance and at a glance, he looked somewhat formidable. He walked with a self-confident air. I'd heard he was retired Navy, which turned me against him automatically. I'd been in the Navy too, though he and I had very different experiences there. The Navy was good to him. He gave it his all. The Navy was not good to me, because I gave it my time that it had usurped in the period of the draft, and nothing else. The ultimate authority. I resented having two years of my life taken because I was born a boy in USA. In retrospect, I have an entirely different version of the time in the Navy. Yes, it took me out of my life, but I needed it at the time. The time in the Navy was my transition from rule from outside myself to making my own decisions for myself, which theretofore I'd failed at repeatedly. I needed to get outside my life at exactly that time to assess the pit I'd fallen into of my own ignorance.

I'd come out of a family situation where I had been taught to reject authority. In photographs I've seen of self in childhood, I see that rejection of authority started about the age one and a half. That's when the deep furrows between my eyes started their very early development. Resentment. Hating being hit. Hating the ongoing berating. By the time I left parents, I was dead set against authority and dead to parents. Him for the hitting and berating. Her for never protecting the boy child from his insanity. Hitting the kid sublimated hitting her. Resentment of male authority runs deep in me. Like I say, all the way back to age one. The child within hated being hit daily without recourse. Didn't just dislike it. Hated it. Hated. Going to a Kansas fundamentalist church five times a week, it was hate that was developing in me, not love. Love was nasty. It was a four-letter word. Bad. There wasn't any of it going around in our house, anyway. Certainly not in the church. Church was duty. Or else. In my time in the Navy and the College of Charleston, love was a word I scorned. Had no idea about it. Experienced some heat, but it wasn't anywhere near love. It was a peep hole, nonetheless. A beginning.

I tell this for the origin of my rejection of authority. The authority I grew up under was wildly irrational. There was no reasoning behind it, no guidance, no correction. The only thing I was required to understand was No, Don't and You Better Not. I was promised a better life if I could start everything I do with no-dont-you-better-not. A kid has to move. A kid has to talk. I refused the straight-jacket, so I was in trouble every day. Existence was the cause of my trouble. It doesn't sound good to resent parents openly, but when your mother tells a neighbor woman, "He's my kid, I'll kill him if I want to," and then tells the kid about it, proud of herself, it causes a child to question the advisability of living with these people. But there was no place to go to. It was a matter of seeing I was born in prison with a sentence at least through high school. Free from parents and church, then I had the prison sentence of the military to go through for being born in Amerika. Then there is the prison sentence of you-better, you-oughta, you're-supposed-to, you should, the rules unspoken, but you're expected to know them and go by them. When-ya-gonna-get-married-when-ya-gonna-get-married-when-ya-gonna.... I got married, because of supposed-to.  I'm an Hephaestus personality drawn to an Aphrodite personality. He failed to see the humor in his wife's infidelity.

All this to say that in the first view of Ted Stern at about fifty feet and maybe ten seconds, I saw Authority. He was big with a big Jewish nose, which I respected. I'd known a few people of the Charleston Jewish community, liked them all and respected their intelligence. Upon seeing him with his Hebraic schnoz, I was entirely disposed to rejection, though with curiosity. The Jewish part told me this is not the average white man. It indicated that the board hired him for reasons that cancelled any prejudices among the Southern white men of the Old South way of thinking. Still, it didn't matter to me, one way or the other. Navy. Authority. Why did this have to happen at my school? Within, I was braced against him. There came a time I did something arrogant, disrespecting his authority. He handled it like King Solomon. I was so impressed by his way of "taking me to prayer meeting," rationally, intelligently, as well as firmly, I came away from it respecting his authority. He did it in front of about thirty people, never letting on who he was talking about, never making eye contact with me to say, I'm talking about you. I sat in my metal folding chair red faced in awe. I had never experienced such intelligent authority. My respect for Ted Stern started that day. It didn't change anything between him and me, because I didn't know him to avoid him or cultivate him. I just stopped talking down about him among my friends.

It was not cool to admit I admired him suddenly. His pattern all the way along in his time in Charleston was to turn the people most dead set against him into his most ardent supporters. I saw it even in cases I never believed would be sympathetic with him, like my own. He had a great deal of opposition in his first few years with the college, and he played through it. I'm recalling a Miles Davis concert in England, Isle of Wight Festival, in a documentary about his music. It was a big outdoor show of what is now called classic rock, the Who, Hendrix, Janis, the Doors. Miles was playing his electric music. Audience was throwing every kind of trash at the band, booing them. At a certain point in the music, the bass player told Miles he couldn't take dodging flying bottles and being booed any more. He wanted to quit and leave the stage. Miles said, "Play through it." By the time they finished the set, the booing and bottle throwing had ended and the audience went nuts in ovation wanting more. This sentence, play through it, has been with me since Ted Stern's passing. He played through it when metaphorical bottles were thrown at him and he came out of it beloved by the people of a great Southern city, his funeral a major moment in the history of the city of Charleston. For the College of Charleston, corny as it sounds to say it, Ted Stern was indeed its founding father. His obituary could be reduced to three words, an honorable man.


*

TED STERN FLIES AWAY

     hallelujah bye and bye

Three hours ago the news came to me by email that my friend of 40+ years, Ted Stern, left the body this morning. The email came from Robert Macdonald who is writing his biography. He was hoping Ted would live long enough to see it. He's projecting to be finished with the writing around April. This morning I found an email from Macdonald telling me Ted was not feeling well. I responded by email and then his return email was to tell me Ted had gone on. All morning I'd been thinking about calling Ted. I thought I'd wait until 11:30, before lunch and plenty of time to be alert after getting up. Macdonald's email came through at a quarter to eleven. I set out to send Stern's grandson Eric an email. I'd started to put down his address, had written "eric" and the phone rang. It was Eric to tell me he'd had a call from Uncle Sandy. I sit here looking out the windows at the birds picking up sunflower seeds on the surface of the snow. When I gaze back at the monitor it turns pink and aqua from snow blindness, followed by a moment unable to see at all, then I can see ok. Caterpillar is on her window seat watching the slate-gray snowbirds hopping about and flying against the white background. From time to time she'll squeak and her whiskers will twitch in the Maine Coon way. It excites her so much to watch the birds that it triggers this involuntary twitch of the upper lip.

I find myself reminding self from time to time that this is the day Ted Stern left the body. I've only seen him a few times in the last years. I knew he was in comfortable circumstances at the very expensive assisted-living facility nursing home where they're paid to pay attention to you, not just to clean up after you. He had his own apartment with his own decorations on the walls, furniture from home, and people of his society for neighbors. His peers. He had his books he read during the daytime and football, basketball and baseball to watch in the evenings after the news and a drink. He was a master of self-discipline. It gave the appearance of a neurosis, but I felt like I knew him well enough to see that it was learned. He didn't operate by reaction. Unless somebody really pist him off. It wasn't then that the other would suffer the consequences, but later when it counted. Hitting was not a solution for him. He learned a very great deal of his public service acumen from his cousin in New York, where Ted is from, Robert Moses, the man who could be said to have designed modern Manhattan. I'd met him a few times in his 90s and found most notable Ted's visible respect for him. Ted regarded everyone with respect, so it appeared no more than with anyone else, but his respect for Moses had a golden glow about it. Reverence for the Master. Robert Moses was his teacher, sensei, his spiritual master, guru, cousin and close friend, confident. Moses was the only of Ted's relatives who went to Ted's wedding when he married outside the family religion.

My respect for Ted Stern is that kind of high. He has been my teacher in many ways since we first became acquainted. He was hired to be president at the College of Charleston when I was in my last year. Straight out of the Navy, which I'd been in too and had no love for. I had a hard time respecting a lifer from the military. It was the time of campus activism, not that anything political was going on at College of Charleston. Charleston is not a place for a demonstration. It's like, suppose you gave a demonstration and nobody came. There were half dozen of us that played the anti-war role in our minds. I went to DC in 68 for the march on Washington concerning Vietnam. I'm glad I went, only because it killed my interest in politics except to look at from afar and never commit to. I was a bit insolent after that time. A week or more later my thinking from what I'd seen educated me with new data I needed to know. Stay out of all of it. I hold Johnson down there with Reagan as the very lowest. My regard for Johnson took a nose dive and crashed. Not from what happened at the rally, but from learning afterward the lie he told the press to report in a press conference before the event. The press reported as told, like the good soldiers they're paid well to be, all of them knowing that if they reported what actually happened they'd be shut out of journalism as a career, or any other corporate job. I saw it first reported by Nat Hentoff in the Village Voice, the only journalist brave enough to tell it. Then it turned up in Norman Mailer's book Armies Of The Night. He was at the press conference too.

I pained under the disillusionment that was also a dissolution, beliefs falling away. I didn't know it then, but learned later that disillusionment equals enlightenment. So enlightenment must be the result of being disillusioned. I can't say that Ted Stern saw through the illusion, because I don't know, but he saw through an awful lot of illusion. He spoke in favor of government decisions at the time, respected Westmoreland, and I took it he bought the package. Did I ever find out different. Some years later I saw him in the hospital after an operation; I don't remember what was removed. He was sailing on some pain medication. He spoke freely and conversationally like he was largely unable to do otherwise. He wasn't much for talking unless it had to do with some sort of action, like relating to a mind full of decisions to make every day. He told me his vision of what he sees civilization coming to in the near future. It was darker than my own. Mine has a light at the end of the tunnel, albeit down to like f22. His tunnel was a long cave. I never heard any of that kind of talk again. In his fully conscious mind he saw the illusion of taking care of business, but also saw we need something to keep us going or we revert to shoot-outs, no law enforcement, heavily armed bandits plundering until the ammunition runs out. His desire to make the world a better place as a result of him having been in it transformed the College of Charleston, a little Southern college going under the third time like somebody drowning, into a nationally respected South Carolina state university inside ten years.

He was instrumental in getting the Spoleto Festival to happen in Charleston. He became a friend and confident to Jean Carlo Menotti, the self-centered composer nearly no one could get along with for any period of time. Arbitration was Stern's talent, his learned talent from Robert Moses and possibly an admiral or two along the way. Menotti needed an arbitrator at his side like he would need a translator if he didn't know English. For Menotti, Ted Stern was his harbor pilot who guided Menotti through the minefield of troubles he created for himself. I think Ted took Menotti for somebody who needed help, the kind of help Ted had to give. The way a big kid will sometimes take care of a little kid. He respected Menotti and liked him. He gave him the Ted Stern treatment that he does for everyone close to him, if they'll allow it. Respect is what the Ted Stern treatment amounts to, an encouraging pat-on-the-back respect. The middle class has lost respect for just about all but money and things associated with money. The Ted Stern kind of respect, respect for your humanity first, stands out. In the mountains he was respected by the people that knew him because he respected them first. Respect is very important in the mountains. He was respected here for his respect.

He has told me his life over the years I've known him. I've also learned in conversations with Robert Macdonald writing the biography that I know very little of his early life. I knew upper West Side New York, Jewish, somewhat privileged, the very definition of Capricorn, Johns Hopkins, Navy 27 years, Charleston. At the same time he transformed the College, he did the same with Charleston, transforming it into the ultimate tourist town that is gracious and beautiful, rewarding to visitors. It's odd how a New York Jew's parachute landed him in the quadrangle of a Southern college going under, a truly Southern place in the latter days of the Old South, and it wasn't very long before he was received like the latest thing from Goodwill Planet. The spirit of friendliness that runs through Charleston now is a part of Ted Stern's making, too. His is the optimistic can-do spirit that supports and encourages. The new Charleston was built in that spirit. There was a time in the early 1970s he told me he was president of 35 civic organizations besides the College. The business community paid close attention to him. He became a friend to the black community because he didn't bullshit them. I suppose he would best be called a visionary in that he visioned the new College of Charleston and the new Charleston into existence, step by step. He has been a loyal and true friend to me all the time I've known him. He was instrumental in getting me to the mountains, my home sweet home, before I knew Air Bellows Mountain was the home of my soul. I know he is being received happily today on the other side of the veil.

*

TED STERN INTERVIEW IN CofC MAGAZINE

ted stern by jack alterman

charleston magazine

The present edition of the College of Charleston magazine appeared in the mailbox a week or so ago. I flipped through it back to front briefly and put it down. On the cover is a blonde in pink boxing gloves, an '00 graduate. Inside, a picture of a sniper caught my eye, thinking, What? Of course. Snipers go to school someplace. It brought mental images from Tom Berringer's movies, Sniper one and two, and the third one literally son-of Sniper, though not cliched. I enjoyed every one of those movies. I like Tom Berringer as an actor, and saw the films as fictional documentaries giving an unrealistic movie version of an experience that I'm sure is not exactly the same, but enough to give a movie watcher a sense of that world, living in dense jungle with the grace of a wild animal. Having these three views of what it's like in the forest hunting and being hunted at the same time, I felt a profound respect for him. Though my initial response to the picture in the magazine was, What's a Guns N Ammo article doing in there? But a second or two of images from the films running through a slideshow in my head punched my awe button. I saw him for a moment reading the wind, figuring the distance in yards, the pull of gravity and force of the wind in relation to the particular gun he's using. It's impressive. It's impressive like driving in a nascar race at 200mph bumper to bumper, side to side in the pack.

I put the magazine down and left it, thinking about picking it up later to read the sniper article. A few hours ago I went into the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee. Returning to the chair I saw the babe in pink boxing gloves and picked up the magazine, thinking I'd read about her too. It's a cold, windy, overcast day, a good day for reading. I'd been in the first pages of a 1987 Chinese novel by Jia Pingwa, TURBULENCE. Howard Goldblatt translated it. It's so beautifully written that I foresee 500 pages of all-out good reading. He doesn't write like James Joyce, but has a quality that brings Joyce to mind. I can read a page from Turbulence and see it visually, feel like I understood an insight into a character, easy flow in the reading. I go back and read the page again; it's the same information, but it's so much more clear it's like I completely missed it the first reading, even when I got it, almost like I had never read it. I love that quality. I may reread frequently through it. Though it's translated into English, the writing is some of the very finest that characterizes contemporary Chinese writing in attention to detail, appreciation for subtleties, so visually written it's like watching a film.

I'd applied two colors to the new canvas earlier and was feeling good about getting a few things done and slowing down enough to read for awhile. Opened the magazine and there was Ted Stern's almost full-sized face looking exactly like he looks in this time of his life, which is not a great deal different from before. Under the picture it said, Wisdom Of The Century. I thought: somebody has been paying attention. I used to wonder if I'm the only one to see it. I only know a few people in his world, so I really have  nothing to go by, having no idea how other people see him, except that each one is uniquely itself. I looked at the next couple pages and saw him doing pushups on the wall, as he would do, the photo of the dedication of the Stern Center piece of what struck me very respectable architecture in a very functional occupation of its given space. I thought it a beautiful building. It carries the integrity of the campus's older architecture translated into the latter 20th Century. Inside, it feels spacious everywhere, plenty of room for a lot of people to flow in opposite directions at the same time. I was there for the christening and felt good for him; it was a major big day in his life, a monument to his devotion and his ability to get things done.

I'm remembering the day on his farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Air Bellows in Whitehead Township, where I worked as caretaker for seven years, '76-'83. He said, "I don't understand my successes and the money that has come to me. I don't know how to do anything." He was watching me sharpen the chainsaw during a break cutting firewood toward a long winter. I understood his meaning, because operating a riding lawn mower and a weed-eater were the apex of his mechanical abilities. I said to him something on the order of, Your work is of the mind. It pays better than making a chainsaw buzz. On the page opposite the dedication photo, a b&w of the Captain of the Ocean Sea, four gold bands on his sleeve, a studio portrait. Turn the page and there is the Ted Stern I know, sitting back holding a vodka and tonic with a quarter of a lime, the welcoming smile, the paper on the SPORTS section. I started reading a few sentences in the list of questions followed by an answer. Straight-ahead questions and straight-ahead answers. I read the columns of questions and answers backwards, not by intent, but the one at the top of the third column caught my eye and attention, then the one under it, then the one under it. It became amazing right away. I was hearing the Ted Stern I know answering these questions that by the end, in my case the beginning, gave a broad range of insight into the man most people know of making speeches, fund raising, talking on tv, in an office. This interview brought forward who the man is behind his decision-making that transformed the college and the city together.

Soon into it I couldn't stop reading. I was seeing the Ted Stern I've known over 40 years as I know the man. Question: Most critical item in a man's wardrobe. Answer: "I'm not a materialist. I don't think a man of honor or integrity, or a man of force needs physical attributes. He needs moral, social attributes to be successful." That is the Ted Stern I know. Another Question: Best lesson from the playground. Answer: "Be fair. Don't cheat." Reading over his answers on the pages, it sounds like him talking, like him thinking. I liked this form of interview better than the talkative kind. This interview covered a great deal of who Ted Stern is, better than an article about him. I felt like the content from this interview made a good preview to the biography Robert Macdonald is working on with what I believe is an integrity equal to Ted Stern's integrity. It tells me the biography will be the true story of a man whose ethics and attitude toward life have been good examples for me through the greater part of my adult life. The interview is online, can be found at: http://magazine.cofc.edu/2012/10/25/ted-stern-2/


*