THE RACE AT VADA'S HOUSE

vada

What kind of day is this? I woke up early to fog and rain, a good feeling. It seems like I hit the ground running this morning. I'd hoped to be home all day Monday, not drive to town for any reason. This morning I put the last catfood down for Caterpillar and the donkeys are close to out of carrots. On the phone to make appointments I don't want to deal with. Write checks to pay bills and drop four of them off in town, get gas, probably stop at Subway for a sub and drive home completely exhausted, flop down on the bed and sleep for four hours, wake up just as it's getting dark and think it's morning in early light, then lie in bed waiting to see if the sky goes lighter or darker. This is what I'm facing the morning of a day I wanted to stay home, write to you, sleep, read, make a little progress on an art project. A day of watching the clock when I want to forget the clock. Now I want to get this written before going to town, which will put me in town just as everybody is getting off work. Because I can't stand to go any earlier, because I'll lose the day if I go too early. I'll get this written, go to town, do what needs to be done and return in the rain and fog, carry bags of packaging and food, drop them on the kitchen table for later and take a nap, Caterpillar under foot, saying, Welcome home. But now I'm feeling pushed, rushed, scheduled, the world of money out there calling for mine. They don't just ask you for the money anymore. You get a threat with the bill warning they'll wreck your life and have a good time doing it if you don't pay NOW. I went out with carrots to see the donkeys. They were in shed out of the rain and wet. Their coats were wet, their manes wet. I took camera to get some pictures of donkeys in fog, to distract self from mind that was driving me nuts reviewing the growing list of things to do today, none of which I want to do. This is why I come home from town exhausted, a couple hours of involvement in activity that bores me out of my mind. It's a boredom similar to sitting in the laundromat for two hours looking at a People magazine that's three years old, reading every word on every page in horror that this is the world I live in where tv celebs are the focus of attention, people who, without a script, are just like the rest of us. 

vada's tattoo

Yesterday was race day, Watkins Glen, a track I'd rather hear on the radio than watch. I like all-out race on an oval track the best. The track there is a formula-one track, the reason I don't have much interest in that kind of racing. Instead of cultivated European taste, I have American redneck taste when it comes to car racing. I like to see them going 200mph where they are the same as driving on the slickest ice there is. I see the ice when one loses traction and hits the brakes. The car slides so far it is almost inevitable it will hit a wall or another car before it stops. When they go off into the grass, it seems like the grass makes them go faster. I don't glory in wrecks. The race itself is what I watch. I like to see a good race. We listened to most of it on the radio in the basement while it played on the tv upstairs. None of us cares much for the W-G track. Yet, after a big wreck that stopped the race for an hour and a half repairing destroyed guardrails, the race was on when the race began again with not many laps to go. A caution at five laps. The guys out front were itching to go. Four of them at least were determined to be number one. They were a joy to watch. The four of them actually battled it out, using every strategy and trick they knew to get around somebody and to block somebody from passing. Consider that all these drivers are really good at getting around a driver who is good at blocking, and good at blocking somebody good at passing. They were banging sides like at Martinsville. Allmandinger held onto the front, holding off the two behind him wanting to get by. He worked for his win. They all do, every time. This time, I saw him in my mind's eye attempting to push the gas pedal through the floor, standing on it, driving on ice with two wanting to pass. For somebody like me, who really likes a good race, the last laps of the race satisfied my fascination for a good race in abundance. In victory lane when Allmandinger was being interviewed, his mind was going faster than he could talk. He was revved. He spoke in phrases leaving out everything in between. It seemed like what the Chinese language must be like without verbs. 

by vada

A wreck happened so spectacular they showed it at least twenty times. It is tattooed to the inside of my skull. Neither driver, nor any others, was hurt. They crawled out of the wrecks like emerging from a barrel they'd just survived a dive over Niagara Falls in. The part that held my attention was the first car to hit the guardrail after losing traction from contact with another car. The guardrail pitched it back onto the track spinning around. Cars were getting banged up slipping around the spinning car out of control. By way of a tiny window of chance, a thousandth of a second window, the left rear wheel of the spinning car hit the right rear wheel of a passing car. The entire axle housing acted like a hammer hitting a nail. It knocked the axle housing out from under the other car the same as driving a nail. The impact threw the second car backwards into the opposite guardrail taking away the entire back half of the car, everything behind the driver gone. He crawled out his window ok. And the day before, Tony Stewart had his grave misfortune. Stewart is being judged every which way, esp the most dramatic and exciting, murder. I saw video. The guy hit the wall, was out of the race. He blamed Tony Stewart. The driver crawled out of his car on the race track, the number one no-no for drivers. Unless it's burning, they are instructed to stay in the car. It is, after all, a race track, not a good place for pedestrians. He was shaking his fist at Tony's next time around, and it looked to me like he stepped in front of Stewart, raising all kinds of hell, cussing him, the kind of behavior that gets a man killed. Whoops. This will be on Tony Stewart's name from now on in the Nascar record book. It will torment his heart the rest of his life. Kevin Ward, Jr, dead, his soul is off to the next whatever it is. He's feeling no pain. He's in bliss. Tony has a lifetime of suffering ahead of him. This is one of the reasons I pray never, by freak of chance, to kill somebody. It's hard enough for me when I run over a coon or possum or cat that ran under a tire too fast for me to respond. When I see kids playing near a road, I pay close attention, knowing how heedless kids can be from inexperience in this world.

grumpy old bastard with lollipop

by vada

Baby friend Vada charms me. I walk in the door, looking like Charles Bukowski drunk with white hair, and she ran to me, wanted me to pick her up, and we hugged and hugged. She said, Daddy said it was Melvin. I said, You were surprised, weren't you. She nodded her head. We talked about the panda on her tshirt. She wanted me to see her Scooby-doo candy dispenser. It had this little cartoon head on it. I didn't know who or what it was. It looked like a character based in a Chihuahua. I said, Is that Speedy Gonzales, knowing she had never heard of him and this toy was not him. She shook her head. Scooby-doo. I said, Hi Scooby-doo. I gave her a lollipop I'd found at a convenience store where I stopped for gas. Melvin arrived a little later, and she ran to him and wallered Melvin like she did me. Melvin with a child becomes a child. I enjoy seeing Melvin and Vada interact. Makes me want to be more spontaneous and free with a child. But if I were the same as Melvin, then I wouldn't be me. Vada wanted to use my camera I'd brought to get pictures of her with. She took several of me. I don't often look in a mirror, so when I do, it's a shock. I haven't shaved or cut my hair in weeks. I'm comfortable at home and never think of what I look like someplace else. Vada's pictures woke me up. Worse than a mirror. We look at mirrors subjectively, photos of ourselves objectively. I think of Snow White. She asks the mirror who is fairest of them all. "It's you, Snow White." In front of a mirror, we're Snow White. It's the opposite when we see photos of ourselves. I got one picture of Crystal I thought the best picture I've ever made of her. I showed it to her in the camera, saying this is the best one. She shrieked in horror. "It's AWFUL!!! I better not see this on facebook," and shook her fist in my face. I said, "Is that the best threat you've got?" It's not necessarily a "good" picture, but I like the spirit in it. She said, "What was I doing?" I said, "Saying cheese." It's what she was doing. It was kind of a mock pose like Vada will do when she's done having her picture taken and sticks out her tongue. I still like the image. Thought I'd put it here. This isn't facebook. 

crystal

*

THERE IS NO DEATH

roller rover, by william wegman, 1986

Over the last year I've been watching a baby come into awareness, a day at a time, everything new, drawn to the familiar, mystified by everything, curious, uncertain about everything, directed through the day by diaper changes, getting picked up, fed, put to sleep, played with. At Vada's birthday party, it was a time when she was discovering standing on her feet. She wanted to stand on her feet like everybody else. With 20 or so adults there, every time she managed to get on her feet, somebody would pick her up afraid she'd fall. The look on her face every time she was picked up was a kind of frantic PUT ME DOWN, she was standing up. All day long she spent her time by herself climbing a chair leg to stand up, then somebody picked her up. I'm so fascinated by her, I sit and watch every move she makes, enchanted to see somebody coming into a body with no mind, seeing the mind develop through experience. Yesterday I noticed that she is privately interested in the sky. She was sitting on the deck playing, rolling a ball, and every once in awhile she'd take a break and look at the sky like she's trying to figure out what it is. It's blue sometimes, white sometimes, gray sometimes, bright, dark, different about every time she sees it.


Three years ago I was taking care of a friend and watched dementia come in and take over, saw mind gradually slip away. Finally, in one week I saw his mind go away like a bathtub that takes a week to drain. It just went away. At the end of that week he had no mind. One day, a couple weeks into the state of no mind, he said, "I've got to go to the doctor!" I asked what was the problem. "Something's wrong with my mind!" At the end of the sentence, he forgot it. At the same time that I hated to see my friend fade away without mind, and return to the state of a baby needing diaper changes, needing every kind of care from feeding to cleaning and watching closely, because he'd lost his defenses with his mind. He had become dependent as a baby. Nothing was familiar anymore. All was new. One time he fell out of the bed. He said he had parked his car on the roof, stepped out of the car and fell through the roof. He was worried about the car on the roof, that it might fall through. No, your car is in its parking space where it belongs. That was the end of it. For him, the car on the roof was as real as the car in the parking space was for me.


Almost 3 years after losing him, Jr remains most affectionately in my mind during his last months as mind and self-sufficiency were slipping away. Though his mind was gone, I could still communicate with him. I knew the soul was there, the subconscious was there. I came to see the subconscious as something like a basketball, for a model. Around the surface of the basketball electrical chargers dance everywhere. The electrical charges are mind. When the dance of mind is done, the subconscious is still there, the soul is still there. Only surface mind is missing. I saw that most clearly one day when he was down to just a few days to go, 3 of his friends had stopped by to visit at the same time. We were all in the bedroom looking at him in the bed, just barely awake. He didn't recognize any of them. I started telling them about how he was doing and he spoke up with rational mind. He'd been hearing what I'd said and corrected me. That hit me powerfully. I never talked about him in front of him again. I realized he is aware on some level. Though I couldn't see the awareness, I knew it was there and honored it as if I were seeing it.


It's the same with baby Vada. I believe she understands what is being said to her. Her mother and daddy believe she does too, from their experience. I've found that my cats and dogs understood what I was saying when I spoke to them in sentences and paragraphs. They knew exactly what I was saying. I know because their behavior afterward indicated clear understanding. Vada's behavior after being told something in sentences suggests she understood. Pre-language, I've an idea babies and our pets read us telepathically, to whatever degree I can't guess. Probably a different degree per individual. In the baby is a subconscious, the basketball; and the soul, possibly the air in the basketball. The soul carries experience from the previous lifetime and the other lifetimes past, it carries experience from one individual to the next. It can just about be assumed that some of the inexplicable things we know have come from a previous lifetime. It's from the zone where everything is seamless and can't be categorized, elusive to put a finger on, like mercury. Like if somebody in this lifetime is afraid of driving a car and refuses to learn to drive, it leads me to suspect that individual may have died last time in a car he was driving that wrecked. That's not a certainty, but a suggestion. It has happened to a lot of people all the way around the globe.


My friend Sandy Hayes, who lives at Boone, had a pain in the left side of her upper back all her life. Not a sharp pain, but it was always there, for no apparent reason. In a past-life regression she found that she had been at the Sandy Ridge massacre conducted by General Custer, a Cheyenne (if my feeble memory serves well enough) woman, running from the mayhem, carrying her baby, was shot from behind in that spot of her back, and died. She found the connection in her name too. That moment of being killed trying to save her baby was evidently very powerful for her, she still carried it. I've learned how important it is to a given lifetime how we leave the body, from a little bit of experience in that seamless place where it's difficult to interpret, and from reading about it. In Jr's time of leaving the body I was aware of the importance of how one leaves the body. I wanted Jr's soul memory to carry a peaceful, quiet passage in his own home, in his own bed with no worries.


It was important to me to be able to give him that. I was communicating with his soul in the later weeks, like a mother communicates with a baby's soul in the early weeks. My own reason for not wanting him in a nursing home, was that I wanted him taken care of by somebody who understood him and cared. It was important to me that I regard him and everything I do with complete integrity of spirit, because he was still there, despite no mind. The hospice nurses complimented me over and over on the quality of my care. It was because the man I respected to the sky was still there, completely there, just missing those little electrical charges we call mind, and I was there to help him in his time of leaving the body to have it as comfortably as possible, taken care of by someone who cares. Same as coming in, we need to have someone who cares. I believe going out requires caring too, for it to be best. I could not tolerate leaving him to poorly paid people who work in shifts. There, he was the same as a small load of lumber. I thought of nursing homes the lumberyard for the dying. I could not allow Jr to be regarded indifferently in his important time.


My feeling around baby Vada is that I want her passage into this lifetime comfortable and happy, laughing instead of crying. I am aware she is bringing with her several lifetimes of experience. It's a strong suspicion I have that Vada was born a happy baby, because she found the two souls her soul already loves to the max. When I'm with the three of them, it feels to me that they have all three found each other, and they're all happy. I'm glad for Vada that her entry into this lifetime is a happy one with people who care as deeply for her as she cares for them. That's what we want for all babies, though some don't get it. I'd love to watch her grow up, but am satisfied to see she is in loving hands that will always take good care of her. It has been and still is a learning for me that I can't help but see having divine guidance. First, I watch someone I care about fade away mentally and die. Second, I see someone born (not literally) and watch this new person develop mind from that seamless no place into differentiation of shapes, objects, words. I see her gaze around at all these strange colors and shapes and movements in curiosity. I've noticed her recently looking at the sky trying to figure out what it is, often. I've seen fade-out and fade-in. Death, where is thy sting? appears right now to be a facet of my learning from the experience. Go to sleep there, wake up here. There is no death.


* 

SHIT

     andy warhol by nat finkelstein

Had a great big shit happens moment last Sunday. About every Sunday I watch the race at Justin's. This week we were not able to watch it because the tv was temporarily out, not working. It just happened to be the day Jr Earnhardt won his first race in 4 years. It so happens he is the driver Justin pulls for in every race. Not only did Earnhardt win the race, but led much of it, drove a stellar race. Justin is disappointed every week Earnhardt doesn't win, for 4 years, and now the Sunday the tv is out, Jr Earnhardt won the race. That's what I call a shit happens moment. Not "it" happens, as they say on tv, but shit happens. It is as natural a law as gravity, evolution and Murphy's Law (paraphrased: if something can go wrong, it will). It's too bad the natural law of shit happens has a word in its name the white middle class is afraid of. Makes you sound low class, like you don't have an education. The way I see it, it's too bad for you if it takes not saying shit to show your education. All I can say is, an education aint much if all there is to it depends on the use of one word. You can do stupid stuff all the time, talk down to children, shun the working class, hoop&holler with a beer can when a football team makes a touchdown on tv, and then go about thinking you're taken for clever and astute for not saying shit, and for correcting others who do. When they look in the toilet after they're done, I know they don't think, "manure." They look at it every day or two, but get all tore up when somebody speaks the forbidden word.


A moment came to mind from childhood. A neighbor kid was in the house and I was showing him information I'd found on American Indians, plains Indians in particular. I forget what form it was in, like book, comic book or whatever else. At the term "buffalo chips" he asked, "What's that?" My mother was in the same room, so I leaned toward him and whispered, "shit." Mother said, "You could have said manure." I couldn't give her an answer, because I was thinking: I could have said poopie, ca-ca, doo-doo, number 2, but shit is what it is. However, like Steven Seagal says just before he shoots somebody, "Wrong answer." Gulp it down, say, "OK." OK in that time was the same as "Whatever" is now. I can't help but think it an absurdity to forbid the word shit. It is NO BIG DEAL. It is just a word. Even for kids. Babies play in it and are taught it's "dirty," not so much in the physical way, though it is pretty much the essence of dirty, but in a moral way, like it's BAD, it's NOT OK, but you're supposed to do it. Icky poo, don't touch. Babies don't know it stinks. They're taught it stinks by adults. I don't believe it would "stink" nearly so much to us if we were not taught from baby on up that it stinks. I believe it can be taught that keeping clean of it is practical and healthy without making a great moral issue of it. Of course, in our time, we do it indoors, so it becomes an intimate issue. So we can't say it. We can't talk about between-the-legs nastiness. Bad manners. Dirty.


I learned in the time of taking care of Jr Maxwell when his dementia was so far along he had no mind at all, no conscious mind, no memory, living totally in the present. This was a large part of why I found watching him closely so fascinating. He was living totally in the present moment, no thought of past or future. Like a baby in that way. Everything new, chairs and tables just objects without names or purpose. And that was the time he shit like a baby, as it happened, wherever it happened. Before that phase started, I said that's where I draw the line. Nursing homes is where they clean up shit. That's more than I can handle. The first time was horrible. Incredibly horrible. The smell was overwhelming. The second time was easier for me, didn't smell nearly as bad. By about the 5th time I didn't smell anything, and it was no problem to deal with. Put on latex gloves and when I'm done, peel them off, drop them in the trash bag, done. I never learned to like it, didn't try to. Gradually the nastiness went out of it for me. I dreaded cleaning it up, but in the time of actually cleaning up after a shit storm, I had a routine set, one step at a time, The washing machine paid for itself in that time.


I look back at that time not feeling gross and nasty, like I would be an Untouchable in India if I touched it. I'm not in India. They can do it their way. My way is to get done what needs doing, what Woody Allen calls, "Whatever it takes." I have to confess too, that each time I had to approach such a mess, I tended to walk in a tight circle in the living room for a few minutes thinking about the steps of dealing with this particular incident. When I got it lined out in my head, I went to the kitchen closet for the bucket and sponges, the tools. Warm water from the bathtub faucet. There was nothing sacrifice about it for me. It wasn't dirty either. It was one thing and one thing only: shit happens. I was taking care of a friend I respected to the sky, someone I believed God had given me for a teacher, the only man I've known with wisdom. In him I learned wisdom cannot be found in the academic world, in the world of books, in second-hand learning. Wisdom is experiential, comes directly from experience. The spiritual path is a path of experience, first-hand direct experience. It would only be right for a man of wisdom to be found living as a farmer, a sawmiller, a bulldozer operator. His work had always been solitary, as farming is. A man with a good mind for figuring things out and all day every day to think and assess experience is a lot closer to wisdom than a PhD in Philosophy, and I don't mean to throw off on Philosophy or PhD. That's knowledge, information, which I have no problem with. It's just that knowledge is not where wisdom comes from.


Cleaning up after the only man of wisdom I knew, who had become a friend over the years and had no one to help him stay out of a nursing home. He was mortified of going to one. I had the time, Social Security to cover my own monthly expenses. I wanted to help him have the right to die at home in his own bed, as he wanted it. By then I had become a friend he could trust. I wanted to show him how I valued his trust, how I respected who he was/is. In the time his mind was going away, he said to me, "I wish I could pay you for what you're doing for me." I said, "You paid in advance. Five years of sharing with me the best liquor made in this world is worth a lot. You're paid in full." Initially, I meant that to be a joke, humor, something light-hearted to say, something to make him smile. I heard the truth in it as I heard myself say it. I think he did too, at least his version of it wherever his mind was at the time. It was my way of telling him I wouldn't do this for money. This has nothing to do with pay or gratitude or anything not present tense. I was there because he needed help, no one else was either able or willing to help him stay out of a nursing home.


Our birth dates and death dates are all that are left of us in the future. I wanted my friend's death date to be at least where he wanted it to be. It makes me grateful to see that I have become who I have become. In youth what I imagined I wanted to become involved position, money, things. I see now that what I have become to some degree is in the world not of it. By now I couldn't be "of it" if I took lessons in it. Memory isn't good enough to retain any of it. It's been my Dream as far back as I can remember to reach that place, not really knowing what it is or how to get there. I'm finding that just living my life, taking care of buisness, gettin-er-done, enjoying my life, I feel very much in the world, not of it. I don't think it has anything to do with not drinking, or not this, or not that, or not anything from a long list without an end, the list of You Better Not, but everybody does. Withdrawing from "the world" it is necessary to have at least something like an oxygen tank to carry on the back until varieties of wants have fallen away. "The world" has to do with desire for money, for status, desire, desire, wanna, gotta, needta. In this time of my life I don't want anything I don't already have, unless it would be a new tank of gas every few weeks and enough food to get by. I'm glad when things don't work out as intended to know about the natural law that sums up why.


*

PASSING GEAR

animal by jaap mooy, 1915-1987

This morning the local branch of Hospice put on a talk by Amy Douglas Green on dementia. This was what happened to Jr Maxwell. I was wide awake to everything she had to say. She gave the science behind it, dying brain cells, something on the order of hardening of the arteries, plaque. It happens in brain too. Seems like with all the tiny blood vessels running through the brain they'd plug up easily with plaque. There are several kinds of dementia, Alzheimer's one of them, and there are several kinds of Alzheimer's. I guess that comes down to it's individual like everything else about us. It brought back my experience with Jr, brought it back happily. Happily in that it was such a precious time. He had become the same as a baby, everything strange and new, nothing familiar. I saw when his mind went away that it was only the surface mind that fell away. The subconscious was still there, which is to say I never felt like anything happened to who Jr Maxwell was. He was still very much present. He was enough not present that I was glad it was me and not someone else taking care of him who would not know him well enough to see his self there. I wanted him to have someone with him who understood him, who would allow him to stay in his own home when he was unable to take care of himself.


I talked today about as much as Amy did. Several of us talked. We were a vocal bunch. It was all interesting. Everything Amy talked about was familiar to me, the stages along the way. Somehow having explanations of the particulars of what is happening in the brain to cause certain behaviors makes it easier for me to think about; therefore, deal with.mind loss. I've known older people all my life and I've seen the processes they go through, collectively, in the aging process. Like now I forget a lot, to the point I don't even attempt to remember anything anymore. I've seen it happen so regularly in older people I take it for perfectly natural when it happens to me. A lot of my peers resist it, get mad and hate forgetting, but I see no point in that. Fingers get arthritis. I wear a medal around my neck, an alloy of 4 metals, one of them copper, no arthritis stiffness or pain. Leave it off for two weeks and the finger joints start stiffening and hurt. Rather than become debilitated by arthritis, I wear copper. Easy. With forgetting I can make notes. I see a need for making notes rather overwhelmingly. A few days ago I thought of 4 things I needed to do in town the next day. I didn't make a note, thought I'd remember them. Next day, time to go to town, I couldn't remember any of them.


Rather than get mad at myself and blow a gasket, I laugh. It's funny. I'm doing old age stuff and it's the same me as was 15, 10, 5. Teens have their difficulties, twenties have their difficulties, as do 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s. Each phase of our development and degeneration is common to most of us. I've seen old age symptoms all my life. Every person goes into and through old age differently. It depends on the individual's attitude toward life how we get through, as in the other phases of our lives. Since I turned 70 everyone around me says, "you don't look 70." That's not what I see when I look in a mirror. I see 70 loud and clear, as much as on anybody else. I think it's that I'm not a grandparent and don't have grandkids graduating from college making me feel old. As it is, I don't feel an age. I feel a phase in a process of my own biological development and undevelopment. What I feel like more than I feel like 70 is I don't have a lot of time to go. That's what I identify with inside more than 70. There are a few things I'd like to do before I go, none of them urgent, and I have a bunch of friends I really don't want to leave. But, everything changes. Stop one thing from changing in a tapestry in continual change and you've got a flaw, a broken thread, a still point in a pattern of perpetual motion.


I feel like I'm flowing in this time of the life with my own rhythm. This is what Social Security allows. I like it not only for myself, but for everyone who gets its assistance. I'm grateful with every moment of every day for Social Security. It is allowing me a life as I want it for myself, time to paint, time to write, time not to worry about it, time to visit friends, time. Early in my life, while still in school, I reasoned that living a life is a matter of time or money. If I want money, I give up time. If I want time, I give up money. I chose time. Money is something I don't need beyond necessities. I don't want luxuries. A 93 Buick century suits me as good as a 2012 BMW sports car. Better. Takes less gas. Costs lest to insure. Costs less. Makes nobody envy me. Makes nobody jealous. Makes nobody look up to me for the wrong reasons. Makes nobody want to steal it. My old Buick says it's owner is not between anyone and what they want. Not a stepping stone nor a rung on a ladder. No conscious inclination to impress. I like a car that says this is nobody to suck up to socially, nobody you want to notice. The owner of this car can get you nowhere.


Working in Winston-Salem on a job in the late 80s, a woman I knew there who drove a Mercedes said of my blue 78 Toyota pickup with red driver's side door, "You still driving that old trap?" I said, Yeah. I was thinking, Let's race up 21 mountain and see who gets to the top first. If you do, I won't be far behind, might be pushing you. That thing was a go-kart. I loved it. It handled like an expensive car, took curves good. This 93 Buick is everything I need for get-up-and-go. First time I pushed pedal to the metal, passing gear, it threw me back in the seat and jerked the steering wheel out of my hand. I was ready the second time. Now it's like, let's go! I imagine gas consumption in that moment about 1mpg. It takes off like a rocket. It's front wheel drive and the back end drops like the bumper is going to drag, front end goes up in the air like a minor wheelie and I'm a-gettin it down the road. None of my pickups before had that "passing gear." It's not like something I'd miss if the Buick didn't have it. But it is handy when I need to get around somebody in a hurry. Once on hwy 21 between Twin Oaks and the state line, I passed a couple of college age guys in an open Jeep. They sped up like they wanted to race. I laughed at them in the rear view mirror. First car I've ever owned that would do that. It handles well in curves too. If I needed to I could drive the wheels off the thing.


The Buick has good center of gravity and good power. On the highway with a car wanting to ride up close behind me, I separate myself from it in the curves. I will take a curve faster than I know the other is able to handle it, give it gas in the curve, drive through the curve picking up speed while the car behind is fading back in the curve. It catches up to me in the straightaway and I open the gap between us through the curves. I really dislike somebody on my bumper at night with headlights. My eyes are getting psychedelic. Headlights approaching and in the rearview mirror now have rays of light going out from them in all directions. Sometimes it's a light show on hwy18 going toward Sparta, heading down the hill toward the Napco road at the bottom. The yellow reflectors in the centerline of the road, the white reflectors in the guardrails on both sides of the road, signs beside the road activated by  headlights, headlights coming the other way and in the rear view mirror make a psychedelic experience. Then it's a nice glide up the hill and around the gradual curve to the left, then to the right and we're headed into Spartaritaville 35mph.


  *

FOGGY MOUNTAIN TOP OF THE MIND

        eva hesse, drawing

     

I'm finding myself in a phase of life where my peers are breaking down, ailments galore, dying, what have you. One thing I find is I stay home more, like all the older people I've known. Out running around spending money is a youthful activity. Older, you have other things on your mind besides how you look and the name brands of your clothes. I know how I look. I rarely look in the mirror. Just not curious. I've quit shaving and run over my face about once a week with hair clippers and let it go for another week. Hair same way, though less often. This is something I grew into, like driving up the mountain into a cloud, which on the ground is called fog. The fog is a place of the mind, less active, even at peace, uninterested in confict, long spaces of no thinking, peaceful blank spaces of no mental agitation. Lots of forgetfulness goes with it. Names disappear when you need them. I can see them go away. I think of them running down the groundhog hole. I've seen this natural progression in a number of people I've known well enough to see declines in mental and physical abilities. Almost every one of them was annoyed by being less able to do what they could easily do before.



I have come to take it as natural as baby fat going away or growing pubic hair and all the hormone whirlwinds that go with that period of one's life. My teen years were the ones I'd dislike having to live again. The confusion in my head was opaque. I prefer this time of drifty mind and driving slower than ever. I find I'm driving 45 now in the 55 zones of Highways 18 or 21. Scared of highway patrol too. I can't afford a $50 ticket that will run my insurance rate up so it ultimately costs around a thousand dollars. I maintain the insurance corporations ought to be paying the highway patrol expenses. Insurance corporations get the thousand dollars over a ticket that is $50 for the state. The state is paying the highway patrol for the insurance corporations. Tax dollars from the people that work for a living, not even getting a living wage. Corporate lobby makes laws in favor of the corporations on the state level as well as the federal. This has been going on for so long, they've got us by the throats and they know it. They aim to keep it like that. And they will as long as they're able.



I'm reminded of a joke Dave Vaught of the VWBoys told onstage last time I saw the band. He was speaking of the bass player, Fat Albert Blackburn, who was bald, saying he grew up through his hair. I find myself growing up through the beginning phases of what we call old age. I tend at this time in the life to think of old age when one becomes feeble. Everyone dreads feeble. When I was looking after Jr Maxwell in his old age, feeble hit him hard. I was able to make it not a problem by being able to get him a glass of water so he didn't have to make the effort and end up on the floor. I carried him a few times when his legs could not hold him up. He protested that he was too heavy. I told him he's no heavier than a hay bale. And he wasn't.



First time I scooped him up, his eyes about jumped out of his head when his feet left the floor. It was momentary fright, about like picking up a cat. Some years ago Caterpillar would have a moment of anxiety being lifted up from the floor. From the moment her feet left the floor, her eyes got big and round. I realized when she was a kitten I was probably picking her up so fast it disoriented her. So I raised her from the floor slower and she relaxed into being lifted. Fast, she braced against it. I suspect it made her head swim. I was aware of this in cats and saw the same in Jr. The times I had to pick him up after that first time, I did it more slowly, deliberately, giving his mind that had slowed down considerably a chance to stay with the motion. It was disorienting the first time. But not the second time. I only had to carry him to get him through a doorway in the house when his legs were about as sturdy as wet spaghetti.



I'm growing up through the different phases of old age; first, the white hair, then memory fading away. The latest science says coffee is good for inhibiting Alzheimers. I drink some good Kenyan or Etheopian coffee every morning. Not because of this Yahoo! news bite, which I look at as may or may not be so. But because I like it. This news bite justifies it when I'd been questioning it. I'm not interested in going all the way into Alzheimers or have the mind just go away like it did Jr. I wouldn't want to be in that situation. In a nursing home I wouldn't notice that everything they fed me had the nutritional value of jell-o and ketchup. I wouldn't remember I'd been staring at that ceiling for months and months. Like everyone, I don't really care to drop off the edge into complete helplessness. Considering that's not my call, I really don't believe it's in my future as I grow up through the cloud on the mountain of age.



Everyone my age is looking at this. Some worry about it, some don't. I'm among the ones that don't. I think. When the doctor diagnosed heart failure, he said, "You're gonna die." His actual words tattooed on the vacated drive-in screen of my mind. All I could think to say was, "Duh." The only thing that really bothers me is thinking of the mess I'll leave behind. Australian Aborigines had it. One spear. That's it. I'm a post-WW2 American consumer who would rather buy onions and potatoes in the store than grow them. Hoeing a garden is not what I was put on earth to do. It is not among my talents. I have come to like the gradual changes. When I take the fear out of the changes, they can be fun. Like I'm reversing letters in typing rather regularly now, like whne for when. Sometimes I even leave out words, like the implied "you" in get me a beer. I don't mean that one, but several that are two or three words left out. I understand they're "implied," but no reader would. That's what rereading is good for now. It's ok. Like Jr said, "If it aint one knot in a log, it's ten." There's always something. These are just some of the things we grow into.



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OLD-TIME HILLBILLIES

osborne homeplace



Driving up to the stop sign on Wolf Branch Rd at Mahogany Rock Rd, I saw on the right a house I hadn't seen in a very long time due to foliage grown up around it. In my very first years here, late 1970s, a couple of old Osborne brothers lived there, John and Dewey. I'd never seen Dewey, as far as I knew. Maybe once at a glance, maybe drugstore parking lot--no recollection where or when. I'd heard people tell about him that when he came back from Korea he wasn't right. His brother John stayed there with him, both in their 70s or 80s then. John I saw around town a good bit in a 56 Chevy, one of those old boys you don't want to get behind on a road with no passing lanes. In that time there were several old men around the county living mostly alone on the old homeplace after everybody else was gone; parents to the grave, sisters and brothers to the cities. There are still plenty of them scattered around the county, the next generation. Old man John wasn't right either, but he could get around pretty well.



Two old boys I drove to church for several years, Sherman Scott and Bert Holloway, were neither one of them "right," but they could get about and do their business. Sherman drove a red-belly Ford tractor to town with a box fixed to the back to carry groceries, and not a very big box. Lines of cars half a mile long would follow him in and out of town. You can drive a tractor without a license in NC, or could then. Bert didn't drive. He'd ask people he knew for rides. One time I was in Food Lion and saw him walking around in the store like he was looking for somebody. At the checkout counter he saw me, someone he knew, and asked me to drive him to his house. Of course. Men of his generation told me he was mean, he'd fight ye. They said when he fought, when they was kids, he'd take a board to ye, anything. Nobody picked a fight with Bert, because he went full-tilt wild man aiming to create some pain. He was the one to pick fights. Make him mad, he'd lay into ye. I only knew Bert as an old character who talked about girlfriends and money all the time. He lived in a little cinderblock cottage in Pine Swamp, inside the bend in Pine Swamp Rd where Fraser Rd comes into it.



Sherman Scott lived in Pine Swamp too just off of Bullhead Rd in the one bend in the paved part of the road. His farm is now divided up into tracts with houses on them. I can't even make out the landscape there any more it is so radically different. He lived in a little house he lived in with his mother and dad, Charity and Jim. Sherman lived in one room, like old man Tom up the road from me. Sherman grew up here at Air Bellows on what is now the Willis land, then known as the Jim Scott place. He was a slow kid who took to math. He grew up among a rough bunch of boys, between the Pruitts and the Caudills. He went to school in my house, which was then the Air Bellows schoolhouse. Then, the house was located a couple hundred yards to the west of where it is now, in the place that served as the loading pen for Stern's(Caudill's) farm. The driveway to Jim Scott's house went by the schoolhouse.



Sherman and Bert in the seat of my pickup riding to church and back was a good time for me. They were so funny that when they made me laugh, it made them laugh. In a stretch of the imagination way they brought to mind Laurel and Hardy from the slapstick early movies I saw on tv as a kid when tv was new. Goofy is what they were, but also good people, good as gold people. They made me happy I was able to allow people who weren't quite right into my life. I didn't see them as not right. I saw them as people just like the rest of us with a little twist in the mind that makes their reality a little bit different from ours, but not much. I'd rather wash feet in church with one of them, which I have done several times, than just about anybody else. I didn't realize it at the time, but washing feet with someone in an old-time Regular Baptist way makes a spiritual bond that never goes away. Driving Sherman home from church after washing feet was a good drive. The best part was that Sherman was the only individual in the house whose feet needed washing. A truly humble man.



It may have been around 1980, in the time when Lowe's was located in the parking lot and county jail lot behind the courthouse. I was approaching the stop sign on the street that ran between the two at Hwy 18. Old man John Osborne spoke to me through the side window, his car parked in the space behind the courthouse, and asked me to help him out. His car, the 56 Chevy, wouldn't run, he couldn't get it going, the battery was dead, he didn't have any money to get it fixed. I thought if he wanted a ride home, I'd take him. He wanted me to tow his car behind my truck with a chain. He had the chain. I saw the road between there and his house in my mind's eye, and by the time we arrived, the front of his Chevy would be bashed so bad the radiator would be in the fan, and probably tear off my back bumper. I couldn't see that done without incident, the Chevy handled by a really good driver.



A tow bar is what was needed and I wasn't equipped. I offered to give him a ride home. No, he needed to get his car home. We parted and I figure he made it home somehow. He was at home in Sparta. A lot of people knew him, ones who really could help him out. As he was one of the people God takes care of, I turned him back over to God. Next time I drove Mahogany Rock Rd his car was parked at the house. It looked abandoned when they lived in it, but for the car. I was curious to see the interior, as I knew it would be looking way back in time, but never enough to knock on the door. Eventually, I heard Dewey died, and they might have put John in a nursing home, because I never saw or heard of him again. The house has been so surrounded by growth for at least the 35 years I've seen the place, thicker all the time, I've never really had a good look at the house. I drove up on it Thursday looking naked. Remembering Jr when his mind was gone, the time a hospice nurse was bathing him in his wheelchair, he said, "I'm ashamed." I saw that little old house of another time standing alone on its barren ground, being dismantled, exposed, ashamed.



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