THE WILD THINGS

      caterpillar lioness

A squirrel has lived in the trees somewhere near the house for several months. I put up a bird feeder and the squirrel discovered it. The squirrel jumped from a tree to the roof of the birdfeeder. It's a little wooden one with a roof. At first, it was something new for the squirrel, but the benefit of the birdfeeder was negligible. A lot of work for very little. I started throwing seeds on the ground for the squirrel and birds that like the seeds on the ground. There was a period of time I didn't see the squirrel. What looked like at least half a dozen chipmunks ran about under the feeders nibbling seeds they could find. None could get past the squirrel guard. I threw seed on the ground for them. I don't mind who gets it. I put it out there for whoever comes along. A raccoon discovered one of the birdfeeders. When I put in too much during the day for the birds and there is some left in the night, the coon will sometimes throw the roof off the feeder and tear it apart getting at the seeds. I can't defeat the coon, so I put the roof back on and try not to have any left over by dark. If there is, it doesn't matter. If it gives the coon a vicarious thrill to feast on some morsels from a birdfeeder, I say go for it. Give it all you got. I don't mind the coon having some sunflower seeds the same as I don't mind the birds eating them.



I've been seeing what I thought were two young squirrels on the ground around the birdfeeders. So I've been throwing seed on the ground for them. Since they have come around, the chipmunks have vacated the birdfeeding area. I never see one. Earlier in the day I noticed two of the young squirrels running up and down a cedar tree outside the window that looks to the meadow. Then I saw a third one join in their game running up and down the trunk and the branches. Thought I saw a 4th one, or maybe the 3rd one again. I watched them all run up the trunk of the cedar to a nest. It looks like the squirrel that jumped on the birdfeeder from the tree had some babies and they're now big enough to run about on their own. One day last week I had the door open. I noticed Caterpillar on the inside of the screen door and one of the young squirrels outside the door and they were looking at each other. Caterpillar at age 14 is heavy enough she can't jump onto the footstool, needs to climb or be lifted. On a sunny day she lays on the ground like a gray rock and watches the flying candybars.



Caterpillar is long past catching birds. I saw her one day when she was a couple years old stalking a snowbird. From about 6 feet beyond Caterpillar the bird took off and flew over Caterpillar. She leaped straight up and swatted at the bird that was about 4 feet above the ground. She tapped one of the wings and set the bird to wobbling, and I saw she'd done that before. Three young cats was the end of birds around the house for a long time. No danger lurks here for birds or chipmunks or squirrels now. I sit at the desk with 3 windows and Caterpillar looking up at me wanting to be touched. Needing a few minutes of attention. Not a lot. She doesn't like too much attention. When she wants me to pick her up, it's for no more than a few minutes. If I act like I don't have time sitting at the desk looking at the rectangle of light, she can sit at my feet and beg plead until the end of time. I've learned when she wants attention, pick her up, talk to her, pet her and inside 2 minutes she wants down. She's satisfied. That was all she needed, held and touched, keeping the cat batteries charged.



I have a nest of squirrels now. That feels good. I've let trees grow around the house and made the ground like in the woods, a carpet of leaves, some rocks, some ferns. I like it that a squirrel chose to nest maybe 20 feet from the house. I laugh at myself. That means the attic space of the house has a good chance of becoming a squirrel apartment this winter. Exactly what I don't need. How do I get rid of them? Bring home a young cat. Then it's back to no birds or squirrels or chipmunks. Martha, the dog from next door, who spends her days here, is no bother to the critters. Dogs are good to keep critters like possums and coons from taking up under the house. A few weeks ago Martha killed a rabbit that ran under the house when it saw her, and Martha knows under the house like a kid knows its own bedroom. The rabbit didn't have a chance. While they were thumping around under the house, Caterpillar was listening with her ears alert, eyes inward, seeing with her ears. I didn't worry about Caterpillar feeling bad for the rabbit. If she were able, she'd have at least attempted to catch it. Martha brought it to the door to show what she'd done for me. Half-heartedly I told her she's a good dog. She picked it up and carried it off someplace to eat it.



Caterpillar, the lone cat now, seems to be happy with her place as the best and only. She didn't like the other two cats. Caterpillar has a solitary nature. She did seem to me to feel sorrow for a few days after TarBaby and Tapo had been gone long enough to see they're not coming back. I learned to communicate fairly well with my cats, enough that I believe I could tell sorrow when I saw it. She felt it. But like a cat, it lasted a short time, then it's back to the concerns of the day. Extended mourning is a mind thing for humans. I've learned from cats that our human way of standing over a grave or lingering at something sentimental is superficial. A cat sees a thing one time. That's all it needs. Second time, it doesn't need to look. It's already seen. When I took Jr to the cemeteries to visit his mother's grave and his dad's grave, he walked up to each one, looked at it a brief moment, turned and walked back to the car. He didn't need to stand over the grave. A look was what he went for. When I visit his grave, that's what I do, see it and leave. I learned it from him and the cats.    



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DEATH AND KARMA

        willem dekooning, pirate, 1981

Had a call this morning from my friend Judy who lives near Atlanta. She's back from a few days in NY seeing her sister. She went to Museum of Modern Art and saw the present show of deKoonings. She said he painted like a master in all the styles he painted through his lifetime. I would love it. MoMA is a reason almost good enough to live in New York. I don't think I was ever aggressive enough to live in New York and didn't want to become New York aggressive. I'd need a lot of money to live there. I'd want to be going to some sort of concert or art show every evening. There is so much that is wonderful in New York. The only problem, as I can see it, is it costs a fortune to live there. I'm too sensitive to other people's psychic energy to live in a honeycomb with people in every cell. It seems creepy to me. Times I've been in the city, I'd look at apartment buildings with all the windows; people above, below, to the sides, out the windows. It seems unnatural to me to live where just about the only part of the natural world is people. Above, you have clouds. I need the world of tree frogs, flying and chirping birds, trees, bugs too.

I like it that hunters hunt all around where I live. It's a good place to stay indoors during hunting season. This hunter and that hunter might be good and never take chances. Not all of them are like that. Some hear something and take what they call a "sound shot." It only takes one. It was somewhere between 10 and 20 years ago, a news story from down in the flat part of North Carolina. Father and son hunting. Good hunters. Dad takes a sound shot. Finds his son with a hole in the head, blows his own head off. Happy Thanksgiving mama. Stories like this happen every year in every county up and down the mountains from Maine to Alabama. I like living in a place where people hunt, because that's where the wild things are. When my dad was visiting here many years ago, he stepped out of the car, looked around and said, "This is where I need to live," so he could hunt all the time. I thought: that's the reason the mountain called me to it and not you.

My first month in the mountains, associated with the farm, some rangers from forestry came to tell us about something to do with Christmas trees. They were talking with Ted Stern and I was tagging along behind. I was the one they were to give the information too, but he was the important one. I heard one of the rangers telling him about what the Bible says, that the Lord gave man dominion over all the animals. He took it to mean the right to kill them. My jaw dropped. I took dominion for the responsibility to take care of. Dictionary says dominion is supreme authority. That still doesn't say the right to kill. Say I'm the admiral of an aircraft carrier with dominion over the entire crew. Does that mean right to kill? I don't think so. But that is a puny way of looking at it. Killing is the major factor in life on earth. Everything that eats has to eat something that's alive, and it sometimes needs killing first. Sometimes, like grass, it is killed as it's eaten. I suppose what makes killing something reprehensible among humans is killing without intent to eat. Like killing all the buffalo and leaving them to rot was not responsible dominion. The Plains Indians were in awe of what manner of man could do such as that. It wasn't believable, but there it was.

Like the ranger was talking about hunting deer to eat, God and dominion, it makes more sense to me now, many years later, after I've come to see that death is nothing in God's eye. Intent to end somebody else's life for revenge or rage or money or whatever, is an egoic act all the way. When it's egoic like that, then it's an issue. When a man has to eat, he brings home a deer, cuts it up, puts the parts in the freezer and his woman feeds the family with it through the year. I have a hard time with shooting crows for target practice. Every hunting season thins our crow population considerably. But, as long as I'm not the one doing it, it's not an issue for me. The crows are advanced to their next lifetime. I don't know what kind of karmic debt would go with killing crows, incredibly intelligent birds that live in families, for target practice. It doesn't compute for me, but killing is a rush for a lot of people, an ego rush. Crows will stay out of your garden if you throw them the daily garbage. The garbage will go a whole lot further making friends with the crow family that shares your territory than it will in a plastic bag in a landfill. 

I don't know about anything having to do with death, what's on the other side, anything. Only that when it happens, like Lou Reed said, "it's the final thing to do." More Lou Reed: "Why don't you take your old lady by the feet and drag out in the darkened street and by morning she'll be just another hit and run." One of his many New York stories. It's like his heart is with the down and out people, and for all the comfortable people he seethes with contempt. His album called New York is one of my favorites.  I've been a Lou Reed and Velvet Underground fan for a very long time. The songs are portraits of New York street people. They bring to my mind the American poet Edgar Lee Masters, who also wrote portraits of people. In the New York street scene, death is common; OD, murder, suicide, every kind of way. In the country a rabbit runs under your tire, a deer jumps out in front of you, a dog runs under the wheel, so many unavoidable moments of killing without intent. I say a prayer for their souls and write it off to the modern world. I don't like it, but got used to it. 

I don't know if I'll ever understand the subtle world of intent. Some time in the 1980s I was called to jury duty on a local murder. It came down to we had to decide whether it was intent or accident. She swore it was an accident. The sheriff swore it was intent. The jury decided it was accident. When I handled the shotgun passed around the jury, I realized everything she said was true. The stock was made so when the thumb pushed the lever to open the shotgun, it automatically moved the forefinger to touch the trigger, which in this case was a hair trigger. She said she pushed the lever to open it and it went off. Sure enough. When I saw she was telling the truth, I saw how much the sheriff was making the story what he wanted it to be, and was not being the least bit objective about it, wasn't from the start. He wanted her put away. It was going around the county among the men that it won't be safe for a man to take a shower. After the trial, a man said that to me, and I asked him if he had reason to worry. It was a hot trial. I saw with my own eyes the sheriff lie to the prosecutor. She was drilling somebody on the witness stand, turned to the sheriff and with a look asked if he'd done what was said he did and he shook his head no. I was glad to see the defendant go free. I heard later the judge agreed with the jury's decision. That was good to hear.

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TED STERN AND THE NEW SOUTH

        american zeus by tj worthington, 1991, 30"x30"

A week ago today I had an appointment to meet with the biographer of Ted Stern, owner of the farm I once worked, the farmwork that brought me to the mountains. He had come into the College of Charleston as the new President in my last year there. The president before him who served one year was more of a problem than the solution he was hired to be. The board of directors hired Ted Stern, recently retired Navy Captain for damage control. Every semester it was a question of it being the last one. A lot of people transferred anticipating the end of the College. When the board hired Ted Stern, they were looking for action after a year of less than inaction in a time of crisis. They found action in abundance. Nobody saw coming what started on the day they hired Ted Stern, sailor of the dense marine. That was the day they cranked the smaller engine on a bulldozer that cranks the big engine. They didn't have a clue what they'd started. Even their hopes didn't go as far as what took place over the next ten years.



In short, he transformed a small municipal college about to go under into a state university with a population that was approx 450 when he arrived and 5,000 when he retired after ten years. He transformed the main building, which was the building where all the classrooms and offices were when I was there, into offices eventually when the classroom buildings and the new library were built. They went up in a hurry, too. With the contractor's bid he also was given a date it would be finished. Each day after that would have a fine of some sort. He was strict with it, too. It was enough to make them finish on time. He didn't fool with any dilly-dallying. He kept his finger on every construction activity, individually, as well as the faculty, student body and administration. He knew everything that was going on, and he, personally, was in charge of every aspect of making the college into a state university physically after getting it on paper. He was the captain of the ship.



Parallel his work with the College of Charleston, he quickly became at one time president of 35 different business organizations in the city. Charleston was still in the Old South in that time. The New South was starting up in Atlanta, but hadn't yet reached Charleston. Ted Stern worked with the businessmen of the city inspiring them to get going, teaching them how to maintain what he helped them set in motion, then he stepped out and went on to assist another. Individually, he went around Charleston teaching conscientious altruism. He taught that it works out better for self to work toward the good of the whole; then self gets his own reward and everyone around self benefits too, making self's world all the better to live in. I saw the change in Charleston, gradual in the beginnings as nobody wanted change, and once it started rolling it was overnight a new city, self-sustaining, flourishing new businesses, law offices, brokerages, etc.  Restoration of the whole city from its low place after a century long Depression following the Civil War, until it has become certainly the most beautiful and perhaps most prosperous the city has ever been.



I believe the rule is that to put in one thing, another thing has to go. It was the city's diversity of population that had to go. Every income level lived on the Charleston peninsula, and every educational level. The well off and the poor often lived next door to each other. Corner grocery stores here and there. By now, the poor and the black have been squeezed out to North Charleston, the middle class and upper middle class have taken over, run real estate prices so high no one else can live there. The city, like the college, was going under. Shopping centers out in the suburbs across the rivers, a short drive, kept business out of the old part of the city. As real estate went up and Spoleto Festival put Charleston on the international map, upper middle class moved in, a white tsunami, as happened in the mountains with the white middle class moving in. Joe Riley, Jr, the mayor from then to now, orchestrated the changes with conscience, in the same manner as Ted Stern orchestrated the changes at the College. Both the College and the City of Charleston were transformed into their new styles with integrity. Anyway, that's been my observation, the integrity. The integrity is what I've learned to respect in Ted Stern.



The biographer, Robert Macdonald, looks as Irish as his name. Black haired Irish. Before our appointment, I googled his name to see what he'd been up to. Retired curator of the Museum of the City of New York. Evidently, he raised it from a minor museum to a museum of note. Ted Stern is from New York. It tells me Macdonald knows New York, which I'd think would be essential for Stern's biographer. Stern grew up there. WW2 put him in the Navy and 27 years later he retired from the Navy and went straight into the College. I thought it funny how close to my case it was. I was out of the Navy on a Friday and started at the College on Monday. Both of us came to the College from the sea. While Macdonald was here, I found he knew all the fact information about his life. He has a good bead on what Ted Stern is. He was looking for who Ted Stern is, talking with people in Sparta who knew him in the part of his life here. I was struck by the blank I drew when it came to looking for some experiences that would have bearing on defining his character. Though I could think of hundreds hypnotized, but with my atrophied left brain, I have to seek, and when I seek, it all goes away. I have to not think about it and let it come in on its own. I call it the white hair disease.



All week I've looked for samples of who Ted Stern is, the man himself. That is, the Ted Stern I've known for the last 40 years, and I have a hard time finding samples of who he is. That's because I'm thinking about it. I'll close my eyes and wait. One thing came up. He was a bit awkward at social behavior, always, though he handled it. He handled it going way overboard, so much so it reeked of bogus, "HI, I'm SO GLAD TO MEET YOU!!! so loud and so over zealous it's like you're inside the house next door and the windows are closed. It's kind of overwhelming and drips of the appearance of phony, but it's real. It's who he is. He is glad. And next time he sees you he'll remember. On the telephone it's like phone service in some place like Albania, talking loud like it's a bad connection and he can barely hear. He sounds distant and far away, yelling to span the distance. But he's not. He was a man with a mission, no time or room for the extraneous. In one of our conversations on the highway, we were talking about our individual approaches to living on earth. I said I'm like in a canoe, I let things happen. He said he's like in a bulldozer, he makes things happen. That's why he'll have an obituary in the NYTimes and I won't.



Kindness is a word that comes to mind. I believe his kindness was so innate as to be in the nature of his soul. It's automatic and there's never a lapse because it's not directed by mental command. It may have been early in his life, but by late in the life kindness was the same as breathing. His years as an officer in the Navy gave him the charisma of someone to salute. He walks into a room and the people in the room feel in the presence of a leader. A leader he indeed was. I don't mean past tense like he's not living now, but his time of active involvement in the big decisions in Charleston are in the past. He has told me several times he has outlived himself and become a has-been, a once-was. He accepted it, but I can't say he has ever been comfortable with once-was for his self-identity. He's noted for his past achievements, not what he's involved in now. It's difficult for him not to be involved. I remember in the years of working Stern's mountain farm, old man Tom Pruitt in his 80s, when I'd be splitting wood, he couldn't watch me work without helping. He wasn't able to help, so he couldn't watch, had to go to the house where he stared at the wall and thought about whatever crossed the screen of his mind. Ted Stern, now 97, watches tv sports and thinks about whatever is crossing the screen of his mind.



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CAN RACISM EVER DIE OUT?

             constantin brancusi, endless column

Reading in Howard Zinn's PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. Every page I'm thinking how curious it is that the events and people he wrote about were the ones I paid attention to, from around 1960 when I started paying attention to the world that is the context of the world of my immediate experience. The world out there beyond my experience becomes over the years a mythology in my head. The same parts in somebody else's head are arranged differently. We of this place, time and culture carry the mythology of history as it happens daily in our heads as "reality."
Like Zinn, I've paid more attention to the fate of the American people in possibly the most racist country in the world, where, passing the buck, they point at the South and say that's where the racism is. It's everywhere in America, even in the desert. Racism is part of the mythology we all know, but each of us differently. White people tend not to think about racism in their love for denial, and pretend to care by reacting in horror to the word nigger. Of course, what the reaction really means is: Look at me! I'm PC! It has nothing whatsoever to do with black people.



I have to say Thank You to the spirit of Howard Zinn for writing this parallel to the history of the dates of our wars and names of our generals. It is indeed a history of the people, demonstrations, protests, prison riots, people killed and beaten by police on a regular basis along the way of our history from the beginning. The Indians, who laugh at being called Native Americans, narrowly escaped complete genocide thanks entirely to liberals in places like Boston, New York and Philadelphia, the big cities back east, outraged by the news of eyewitness reporters writing about the Indian wars. like the news reporting of Vietnam started making some people tired of seeing villages burned and simple farming people (gooks) slaughtered in a war to keep our economy going, government contractors, big money, good-paying jobs in the war industry, rapid advancement and pay among the officers. Zinn's history is the people at home in America, the model democracy, struggling for basic rights guaranteed in the Constitution, of all places.



We have an entire middle class seeped in political correctness adoring the Native Americans for their beautiful culture and their long suffering. At the same time, everywhere in the country near a reservation or a place with an Indian community, the Indians are held in the eyes of the white middle class even lower than black people, the same in spirit as the Aboriginal people of Australia, the "natives" of 50,000 years, give or take however many. White people don't have a bit of use for any other race, and that's the bottom line. It's one of the perks that go with the privilege of whiteness. The percentage of exceptions is so low and so disregarded that we have a lot of white people who are exceptions to the rule of racial arrogance and keep it to themselves. I've seen the futility of resistance to the behemoth and have retreated into living what I believe. Instead of trying to make other people think like I think, when I see Ricky Bryant, a black man, I shake his hand and we talk. When I see Harry Taylor, a white man, I shake his hand and we talk.



In the early 60s I got involved in a couple of "demonstrations" about racism, when I was 19 and 20. Then Stokely Carmichael told white people to stay out of it; it's their own struggle and can only be real on their own terms. It made sense to me. I'd even thought of it, but only in a mind that flew here and there like a chickadee. I was glad to hear him say it, because it told me he was serious. I stepped aside from involvement and have watched the gradual changes, seen how slow social change really is, even when it's fast. Over time my sense of urgency, wanting change NOW, settled down to satisfaction that the change in a given direction has been set in motion, time (sequence of events) will take it through the stair step process to completion when what Martin Luther King called his dream will be how it is. It's a universal good dream. Looking at the state of racism, not only in this country, but all others all the way around the globe, I can't imagine it ever changing. Yet I do see change, I see a big change.



Where racism itself is concerned, I've seen it go from above ground to underground. The laws changed, inhibiting overt racism, which before, was approved, so it became something you didn't talk about and certain words you didn't say in front of certain people. Let the black people tell you about underground racism over the last 30+ years since the killing of King with at least a nod from J Edgar Hoover the Remover. There are plenty of books written, probably documentary films on the matter of corporate racism under the table where money changes hands. Laws is about as close as it looks like we're going to get for awhile. Real prison reform isn't going to happen any time soon. Convicting black people to prison for being black is so commonplace it can be called the system with meaning. My part, on the mountain, is seeing it and paying attention to it, being aware of it. I can't do anything beyond my own world about it, and I'm not a missionary for any cause, as far as I know, democracy maybe. In my world, I regard people I see or meet of another race the same as anyone white, as far as I know. I see individual people, have since birth.



In a section of Kansas City, Kansas, called Argentine, where once had been a silver mine, and where then was a big railroad yard, a big one, I grew up in the white section. There was a Mexican section and a couple of black sections. As a white kid I didn't walk in either of those neighborhoods, same as kids from the Mexican or black neighborhoods stayed out of white neighborhoods. I would sometimes take a shortcut to the movie theater through the black section or the Mexican section when I felt brave enough. They looked like people to me. I couldn't see what was wrong with them. I never had a problem. Sometimes black kids would take a shortcut through a white neighborhood and that was ok. This is circa 1950. I had to walk by a black bar with a few old men sitting outside it in wooden chairs. We'd speak as I passed, became acquainted with a few from seeing them nearly every time I walked to the movie theater. An old man without teeth, whose mind was "not right," would rub his hands together and say, "Mush mush. Mush mush." I rubbed my hands and said, "Mush mush." He'd laugh. I'd laugh. It was our "hello." I always see him when my mind goes back to that time. The days of Amos and Andy. I see it a happy association between a black grandpa and a white kid. No problem between us, except the world we live in.



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