DON'T WORRY - BE HAPPY

A warm, sunny day, 76 degrees, fluffy white clouds drift so slowly they're barely perceptible. Multiple shades of green everywhere I look outside. The green world, these mountains, taking stale air, making fresh air, our air filters beautiful to look at, good to burn in winter for heat, good for building our houses and everything else made of wood. Also good for keeping the water table up. As the deciduous trees that lose their leaves in the fall go away, so does our water.

We're not going to stop cutting down trees, so we're piping water to town from the river. In the back of my head I continually wonder what it is that's so blinding about the obvious. Like the problem with disoriented bees unable to find the hive that was thought to be cell phone signals. It didn't take long to get it that if the cell phones were, in fact, responsible for the demise of the honey bee, good-bye bees. End of subject. We never did get any more findings, one way or the other, on that subject. Nobody cared, or not enough cared to matter.

In this time of my life I've let go of concern over what other people do or don't do, what our government does or doesn't do. If it weren't for this, if it weren't for that, if only, if only. I've come to see, in myself anyway, that

grieving over the extinction of the polar bear doesn't do me any good and it sure doesn't do the polar bear any good. How do I accept it and say, Oh well, and retain access to compassion? I can't help but mourn the loss of the polar bear, and undoubtedly the penguin at the same time. But if I'm going to mourn everything that goes extinct, I'd never have a minute out of mourning. So where's the sense in mourning?

I can't change the forces that are heedlessly taking all of us with them. I find a certain satisfaction, however, that the architect who designed the Titanic sank with it. In the land where Mammon is holier than God, we end up with mountains of trash. They used to put it underground in massive pits, now they make mountains of trash with bulldozers. Hard times come, up go the yard sale tables full of stuff we wasted money on.

And the ocean, the world's sewer where barges of trash and ships offload their waste. All the nastiest rivers in the world flow into it. In films I see the Amazon River is now as muddy as the Mississippi. The Yellow River in China is mud. This is recent too. Last night I saw a Chinese film made in the 'social realism' period, 1950s, and the water in the river was clear. You never see clear water in a river in China now. Just like here. Just like Russia. Just like Europe, Africa, South America, Australia. Even though the New River is clear after it's not been raining awhile, it's loaded with nastiness too.

I used to believe it was men in charge of everything, men separated from the rest of the world by country club boundaries, men devoid of aesthetic senses, occupied with numbers every minute of every day. Then women started jumping into the arena. They're just like the men. No difference at all except for dresses and hairdos. So I tell myself I must adjust my own thinking if I'm not going to be aggravated all the time by collective willful refusal to see we're collectively in crisis. The Amazon is every day coming one giant step closer to the Sahara and they're putting more chainsaws in than they're taking out. It may already be irreversible.

Oceans are rising, most of our population lives on the coast. It won't rise in one tsunami and sweep everybody out to sea. It will creep up and then hurricanes will destroy cities and everybody will head for the hills. We think we've got a real estate crisis now, we're going to need all the water we can get, and our water is going away. Maybe in that time they'll do like Bermuda and paint the roofs with white lime and collect water in rain barrels, their only source of water.

I tell myself it must be in the me-first-others-last state of mind that is the mind of the western world. Yet in the east where the rule is others-first-me-last, it's the same. I haven't been able to find any one approach that would make a difference in the direction of poverty and death around the globe, the indifference of nearly everyone toward any people below themselves on the status ladder, unless we had a collective attitude change that happened everywhere at once. I think they would call that the Lord coming again. It would have to be something of at least that magnitude.

It looks like the next generation of people will be facing some serious dilemmas. But, you know what, we always are. Every day we're facing a serious dilemma, making money to pay expenses. Every time has its particular needs. Over the last not many years we needed to train an enormous number of computer technicians. It seems like everybody under 30 is a computer geek now. As the need arises so do the people to make the next thing work. We're changing all the time, we just don't know it very well until one's retirement ceases because the company went under. Then we notice.

What is it? Every day has its own evil? I don't have any business making assessments of what is bad or good where something like 3 billion people are concerned. I don't even have control over myself. I ask myself how I arrogantly assume if I figured it all out I could make it all right? Then what is right? I don't have a clue. In fact, I don't know what I'm talking about. When I reach this point is where I break out laughing at myself for putting so much energy into illusions. I'm not here to experience someone's life in Palestine. I've got all I can handle at Air Bellows, just me and three cats, and the cats are the least of it.

What can we do, but just do as we do, just keep on keepin on? Don't worry, be happy, is where I always come to when my mind starts trying to

make sense out of three billion dots, every one the center of the universe and all of them in motion.

BLUE RIDGE GALLERY

Last Tuesday I was driving home the Pine Swamp way as the Whitehead way is blocked for tearing out the old bridge and putting in a new one. I've aimed to stop at Blue Ridge Gallery ever since it opened. It's open Thursday, Friday and Saturday. I came up over the hill before New Salem church and there on the left I saw the sign. It was open. I thought: next time. I want to get home. That is what I always think. Passing it, I hit the brake enough to make right rear tire squeal and leave about a 5 foot slightly black mark.


I backed up and turned up the driveway that almost suggested a maze in a christmas tree patch to the building with the red roof. I had the time, was in no hurry. It is Judy Carmichael's brother Joe Edwards and Joe's wife Melia's place. It is two-level, and suggests subliminally a log cabin and a country store at once, without looking like either. The interior is all bare wood. Log cabins were dark. This one is good light inside.


I had not even a guess what was inside, except the sign by the road said Blue Ridge Gallery. Judy had told me a little about it some time ago. I only knew that Judy's painted glass was in there. It turned out to be two big rooms, one above the other, loaded with gem and stone wonders, chunks of purple amethysts, fossils from before dinosaur times, interesting pottery, paintings and photos Joe made. Big jars made of a colored stone found only in central China where they work the stone into all kinds of pottery-like shapes. Multi-colored stone worked perhaps with a lathe. I think the stone is called Serpentine Jade. Very nice.


Joe makes beautiful wirewrapped jewelry from all kinds of gems and stones. He has several paintings around on the walls. No one was in there, so I was able to visit with Joe and Melia and they gave me a tour of the whole place. A new house is what it is, different things in different rooms. I especially noted a pair of giraffes made of flattened and hammered tin by someone in Haiti. I saw a couple of stone sculptures from Zimbabwe, another of the poorest places in the world.


It seems to me a unique thing to build a country store look alike in the middle of a Christmas tree patch, a red roof among rows of green cones. Brings to mind the Jefferson Davis monument at Fairview, Kentucky, a lesser obelisk than the Washington monument, but just as majestic. Corn in all directions to the horizon. Flat as east Texas. This obelisk sticking up in the air was visible from a long ways. Who can miss a red roof in amongst Christmas trees?


When we came down from upstairs Judy had come in the door and had some people with her, Joe Jones and his wife. They lived in Kansas City before they came here. We got acquainted soon after they arrived because I recognized the tag on their car was KC. Joe's a Republican and I'm not, so we know not to go there conversationally. Better to talk about children kidnaped and sold into slavery in Chad. That way we don't get our backs up and start scratching the floor with our feet, red faced and snorting through flared nostrils. We're friendly Americans who allow the other to believe it as he sees it. It doesn't mean we can't enjoy conversation, just leave off the politics so we don't start acting like cats, 'Pssst! don't you touch me!' We do better than that. We shake hands and say, 'How you doin?'


What Joe Edwards and Melia and Judy are doing there seems like a sensible thing to do. A place out in the country, outside Sparta a few miles. They don't have town rents to pay. And people do come to them. By the time I left, more than half a dozen were in there. I brought home a chunk of the purple amethyst that seems like an indigo purple. The color has the rich warmth of indigo. It's outside taking in the sun, the moon, the rain, the green all around, the air.

THE LIBRARY

The present library building, the front half, used to be in the parking lot between the gray stone senior center and the old courthouse. It was moved from there to where it is now, and the half to the right of the side door as you go in was added at that time. If my feeble memory serves more or less correctly, I believe Bessie Duncan put up money to build the new wing; hence, the portraits of Bessie and Edwin painted by Rachel Tepker. Rachel was wife of Harry Tepker, landscape painter who made some extraordinary paintings and prints of our county.

The librarian in the original location, the first one I knew, was Mildred Torney. Mildred was one of the first people I met here, and I think the first I met in Sparta. Of course, my first time in Sparta, the next stop after the gas station was the library. New in Sparta in 1976 was the same as invisible; that is, unless you drove a Cadillac.

There came a time I got used to being stared at in the laundromat like I was a television. I'd speak to whoever it was staring at me and there'd be no reply. They kept on staring. Many times I thought of that childhood saying, take a picture it'll last longer. We didn't have Pee Wee then, but only Pee Wee Herman can say that grown up and it sound right.

Mildred spoke to me like I was a visible person, like she actually saw me, and next time we met she remembered my name. In that time in Sparta, a foreigner was the same as an alien from outer space, let alone Mexico. The suspicious eye, what do you want here? That was constant, something to get used to. Of the people I met the first couple years in Alleghany, Mildred Torney and Jr Maxwell were the only ones I can remember who knew my name the second time we met. It made them stand out for me. They were like shade trees on a hot summer day. It was a lonesome time.

Debbie carries on the tradition Mildred got going of hanging pictures by artists in the county, whatever they are, without judgment. In the old place, Mildred had a pegboard on one wall where she hung the pictures.

In the new addition, the new wing had a space specifically to hang pictures by area artists. Debbie has various cultural activities at the library, old-time music show, tall tales show, puppet show, every kind of thing like that there is around here, Debbie gets them to come to the library to put on a show. It's quite an active place.

Some years ago, I heard about someone writing a history of the county, but haven't heard any more since then. My barber Basil Landreth suggested years ago I write a history of the county, but I don't have organized enough mind to take on such an extended project. I'm a right-brainer.

Mildred always talked with me when I went into the library. She was good to get books on interlibrary loan from all over the state, things like essays of Paul Valery. Mildred's husband, Guy, was fading and she had to leave work to take care of him, leaving the library to Pauline Jolly. Debbie worked there all along. Debbie is a hard working county employee. When the library came to Debbie, she stepped right up to it and has kept it running very well.

Debbie's staff at the library is good as you could ask for. I'm sure everybody who goes to the library misses Lucy Roe, who has sailed away into retirement. I expect she'll continue with the clown troupe. Doug works the desk and makes wry remarks with a sense of humor all his own. He loves old-time fiddle and banjo music. Sherry is wife of Arnold Clodfelter from Piney Creek. She and Jean were friends.

None of them acts like you've interrupted their coffee break when you ask for help of some sort. In this way Alleghany County office staff are different from our surrounding counties. The others are surly by comparison. We are fortunate to have that attentive attitude in our county employees.

Debbie runs the library on a tight budget. Recession/Depression is nothing new to the library budget, except it will get tighter. Computer access is one of the great services the library offers. The computers are busy nearly all the time, such that the library needs about twice as many as they have. It needs much more space. Then all the other county services need more too. And the town needs water from the New River. So much to do and so little resources to do it with.

JEAN

Surprise. I didn't know I was going to tell you about Jean today, but I happened to see her picture looking thru My Pictures and there it was. I've seen it other times, but this is the first time it said, now. This is the last picture I got of Jean. It so satisfied me that it told the Jean I know, that I never wanted another one, and it made her feel awkward getting her picture taken anyway.

We were setting out to see Alternate Roots play in Jefferson, her favorite band and mine. I had decided when I left the truck to get a picture of her and carried the camera inside. I stepped in the door she was sitting there, I saw the picture I wanted instantly, Jean just like that. I told her not to move. That cracked her up, like what a nice thing to say when you walk in the door. What I saw was the face framed in black hair and black blouse, something like a Greek Orthodox icon, her life all around her.

All that was incidental. What I saw was her face in a black frame that set it off in ways she didn't seem to be aware of. She had a beautiful face, beautiful eyes and was wide open with compassion for everybody in the world. I never showed her the picture. I put it in a show at the library of portraits of people I know. Didn't tell her. Somebody she knew saw it and called her. She went into town next day to see it and told Sherry at the library when I take a picture of you there's no telling where it's likely to turn up. This is my Jean picture.

It felt to me like Jean was a beautiful, gentle, quiet soul. She dreamed once of herself as a page-turner for a concert pianist, a dream she never forgot. She grew up at Boomer, Wilkes County, daddy made liquor and left mama with the kids to get along the best they could. A lifetime of hard times. Married three times, the same type of man every time. She gave her life to each one and took it back when it was threatened mortally. She had her spirit crushed many times along the way by the people closest to her. One, a boy on death row and the other boy dead.

All her life she'd been like the hen at the bottom of the pecking order. Everybody could peck on her, and she couldn't peck on anybody. Even her grandkids pecked on her. Then TJ came along and told her she didn't have to take all the abuse she was taking. It was like the time I told Tapo she didn't have to take all Caterpillar's pouncing. Jean believed she had to take it. And she quit taking it. It sent a shockwave through the people who couldn't abuse her anymore.

They didn't know how to regard her anymore, because she wasn't even in the pecking order. All the ones abusing her in their disrespectful ways of regarding her stayed away for a few weeks. They came back testing her and she stuck by her declaration of independence. They all gave in and started treating her with a little bit of respect for the first time.

The first time I met her she told me she was bipolar. I thought little of it. My actual thought was: who isn't? Duality is the nature of this world. Everything has a dual nature. The duality in our lives is like 0 and 1, the foundation of computer language.

Of course, she was talking about a medical condition she took medications to keep under control. She told me later she told people at first anymore, because when she'd get to be friends with somebody and they find out, they're gone. This way she's up front at the start and the disappointment is less when they leave.

The day her soul left the body I saw her all day long in my mind's eye in such blinding light the features of her face were in white like the features in the full moon. Her face was beaming with joy and so full of light she was barely visible in the intense light. All day long I saw her beaming with joy. I had no question about where she went.