FOR BEING GOOD TO A KID

robert motherwell, red

It was in my first years in the mountains, late 1970s, that Malissie Pruitt told me something that stuck with me. In those years I was enamoured of country wisdom, still am, though the old wisdom is going away with the old people. About all that's left of country wisdom by now is in nursing homes on the foggy mountain top of memory loss. I remember Malissie was standing at the sink working in the kitchen and I was standing beside the refrigerator, we were talking. I don't remember what we were talking about, but she said, "Be good to a child and you'll have a friend for life." That's the kind of knowledge I think of as wisdom. I tend to be sympathetic with kids, appreciate them as individuals, am able to listen to kids and roll a ball back and forth without end. I like a child's point of view that is not yet corrupted with traditional ways of seeing and thinking, expectations, and then the sexual confusion at whatever age puberty happens now that puts an end to childhood like a door slammed in your face. It's easy for me to be good to a kid, and I did see over time that kids I knew continue to know me after they grow up and we're always glad to see each other.

Then, maybe five or so years later a kid was born I didn't yet know. When he was about two, I became acquainted with his daddy putting up hay and working together. Became friendly with the family and visited them more and more as time went by. I became a friend with everyone in the house. The boy was having a rough time that I recognized as a version of the hard time I went through in my vulnerable years. An insane daddy. In my time, a couple who were friends of my parents, Jack and DeLouris, became my "witnesses," meaning they witnessed what I was going through at home. I found in a book I think by Swiss psychologist Alice Miller that a witness is very important to the child in cases of what we call now abuse. Then it was called getting the shit beat out of you every day, for any reason, even "general principles." I learned that hitting kids only makes them angry and breaks down systematically the bond of love a child automatically feels for a parent. The child is put in a place where survival within oneself requires backing away into deeper and deeper resentment until it turns to hate.

In the register of deeds vault I was doing my work and a lawyer I knew was in there. Somebody he knew saw him and came into the space talking to him about a turn of events in his life. He lost his boy. The boy left and won't have anything to do with him. He was down in the heart about it. I felt nothing even remotely close to sympathy for him. I thought: treat somebody like shit and this is what you get. You had plenty of time to think about it. I left my parent situation and went as far as land allows, to the coast. Love for both parents was beat out of me by the time I was ten. From then on, the hitting and wisecracks only further alienated me. And of course, guess what. It's MY fault. It's always the kid's fault. The kid won't mind. I hated to let go of love for daddy and mommy, but to hold myself together, I needed to separate myself from them. My silent mantra upon being berated and knocked about was, You can control my body all you want, but you will never have access to my mind. And I shut myself off to them. Around them I wore a mask of obedience, and behind the mask I was myself. Didn't know who or what myself was, but I was I, and neither one of them would ever see who I am. Because no matter what I was or was not, it was in need of ongoing correction. Not guidance, but punishment. When I left them I never wanted to see them again the rest of my life, and I knew that. It wasn't an emotional reaction. I have seen them, but it's always been duty, like going to church.

I saw this little boy going through what I went through from that age. Watching him grow up was for me a review of my own relationship with my daddy. An anti-relationship is what it amounted to. I saw my little friend's daddy creating an anti-relationship with him, too. I chose to continue being a friend to his daddy, not out of respect, but because his wife told me that "when you're here, he's an angel." And I never saw anything angelic in the way he treated the kids. I thought then I can't do anything to stop the abuse, but I can be a witness for the kids, one who understands that they are right in not liking being beaten daily. And it's not their fault. By my presence they were treated less viciously. That was the best I could give them and still be able to know them. I'd think to them without saying it, just hang on, do the best you can, and bear with it til you reach the magic age of liberation, eighteen. Then you're free. Nobody can help you now. Social Services would only make it worse. Assassination works, but it's not an option. I watched my young friends bear with it. It brought back much of what I'd been through. What I learned was that I was not the problem. I was the target of an undiagnosed insane man who thought he was a rooster. I was better able to understand my own situation seeing it objectively outside myself. I was able to extend understanding to my young friends, and they got it. By "they" I mean his little sister too. We couldn't talk about it, but I believe telepathy flows over lines of love. 

How many times I heard, "I want some respect outta you!" All I could think was, Show me something to respect. It goes without saying, I was not allowed to say anything. That would be talking back. The biggest problem was that I dared not ever say what I thought about any of it. I could only speak a long string of expletives supporting the occasional word toward eventually completing a phrase. I remember with a laugh the time he said, "I outta hit you for what you're thinking." I laughed inside, thinking, If you really knew what I was thinking, you'd kill me. That I live tells me you don't have any idea what's in my mind. I was free. Like a good schizophrenic, I dove within, the only place where I was free. My body and my decision making were shut down. But my mind was my own. I recently saw a guy in a Norwegian movie, ELLING, who had been similarly driven within, alas so far in that he couldn't come back. It's a beautiful movie if you can tolerate subtitles. I only watch subtitled movies, so it's no problem for me.

My young friend whose childhood I witnessed for his mental health sake turned eighteen. Daddy rooster went apeshit at the loss of control, brought an ultimatum to me that I can't be friends with both of them. OK. It wasn't even a decision for me whose friend I was. That was the end of friendship with the daddy I had lost all respect for by then. I told young'un he had some years of inner wildman cut loose going off in all directions ahead of him. All I asked was he survive it. And he did. By now, he's turning thirty next birthday, and has turned out to be one of the very best friends of my life. I won't try to grade my friends in best, next-best, or anything like that. It is a love in the heart that is the same in every case, like loving your kids. In my adult life, my friends have the most value of anything else in my life. Friends come first. No two ways about it. Less than a year ago, somebody I know was throwing off on my young friend and I had to interrupt him and mention that he was the same as my own, so when it comes to taking sides, that's already set. What all this is coming down to is I was good to a kid and now that kid has grown into a friend I could trust absolutely, in the true sense of the old-fashioned, pre-facebook meaning of friend. He has a fabulous wife who loves him and kids that love him. He loves all of them. And I am happy to see he is able to have a life post-eighteen of effusive love in his own home.


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THE DAY AFTER THE SUPER BOWL

 



photo by rob carr/getty images

There's no yesterday's news like the day after the Super Bowl. Like Christmas, when it's over, it's over. Christmas is over the moment the last present is unwrapped. Big hype, big expectation for weeks. Then it's over. Poof. Gone to the zone of memories. The Super Bowl game was a truly memorable game for me. The story of the brother coaches, the parents and entire families there for the game, were the real story of this Super Bowl. The worst for the losing brother was this was the first time SF lost a Super Bowl, evidently. SF's last play, fouls committed by opposition overlooked by referee, set the SF coach to wringing his guts. Had the receiver been able to catch ball, both his feet would have landed out of bounds and the pass ruled incomplete. From coach's perspective at the sideline a long ways off looked one way; it was different from the perspective of the camera in close. Hearing news people make noise about the overlooked passer interference turns my ears off like hearing Donald Trump wanting to see the president's birth certificate.

I enjoyed every minute of the game. The best was when Reed ran the ball 108 yards to touchdown. It was the most beautiful run I think I've ever seen. He ran through a channel that opened in front of him as he ran. Ran through the opposition and then outran his lone pursuer. Simply outran him. I enjoy seeing two people running all out and the one in front pulling away from the one chasing him. I believe this was Reed's last game too. Beautiful video to have of that run in his last game. I was pulling for Baltimore, because my friends I was watching the game with were pulling for them. It was important to them. To me, it was White against Red. I could have pulled for the Red as easily as I pulled for the White. The game did not have many good plays at the line, not many runners wiggled through the line. Line defense on both sides was tight. It looked to me like most of the advances were made through the air. I say "looked to me" because if I'd see stats of the game, they would probably say the opposite of what I thought I saw. The teams were so tight that the driving force and the inhibiting force were equal, making for a steady back and forth rhythm.

Baltimore setting out like they did, making the score at the end of the first half 21 to 3, if I remember correctly (I'm sure I don't), did not get my hopes up the least little bit. I was remembering about a month ago seeing Atlanta subdue SF first half to the same degree. Second half, Atlanta didn't score anything and SF caught up with and surpassed them in the second half. They came close to repeating that performance. There was even the time with four minutes left in the game I figured SF would score for certain and win. They were down to the 2 yard line with four downs. Baltimore defense held them in place. SF chose to go for the touchdown on 4th down and it didn't work. Tight game. I like a tight game like that. I also like a loose game. There is something about tv football that satisfies a liking for seeing something different every time, like watching a flame in a fireplace. Years ago, I asked Ted Stern how he could watch tv games, football, basketball and baseball all the time. He answered, "The same way you listen to that music you listen to." I got it. He couldn't have answered it more clearly. It told me he understood that I was hearing something that's equally satisfying to me.

It's the skill I like to watch in the players. I believe that applied for him too. I'm learning a little bit about strategies, though I really don't care to know. I'd far rather listen to music than watch football, though I like to watch football too. Of course, we like to think the games are not "rigged." Yet, considering a Super Bowl game is the biggest money tv event of the year, where it's important that Beyonce NOT lip-sync, and trillions up to be won or lost by gambling enterprises all over the world. Where that much underworld money is involved, it is hard to believe some big money is not drifting around under the table, too. The Super Bowl is about money and nothing else. Four million for a half minute commercial, tells me advertisers know the power of television. In cogressional hearings, they let on like they never heard of television having any influence on anybody. When you can watch films and tv shows about killing around the clock without even trying, the influence on our society is becoming more obvious every week on the evening news. Our tv is about slap-stick comedy, sports and killing. Sports amount to subliminal killing. It is ours to learn to immunize ourselves to the influence of solving problems by killing, every day of our lives. Like everything else that requires an effort of awareness, few will bother. So it's not a solution for the whole, only for a few.

None of us watching the game believed the power outage occurring when it did was anything but sabotage. Before the game, Justin told me the "odds" favored SF in the gambling arena. The lights going out came when SF needed their turn-around that the half-time gave them before. I've seen over and over the half-time change the dynamic of a game. After the 2nd half started, SF had not made the turn to take charge of the game. It was the same momentum as in the first half. When the lights came back on, the dynamic had shifted. SF came out swinging. I saw something today making reference that Louisiana being a "work free" union free state, no electrician union standards were met by the electricians there working the lights. My thought then was that without the union, it would be easy to send somebody in to do one thing in particular and disappear. It has nothing to do with unions or not unions. Offer some working class guy a house on the beach at Waikiki and a million a year for life. His tongue would be hanging out and dripping. He'd be saying, Tell me what to do, boss. Tell me what to do. I was glad to see the ruse was just a few minutes too late for the time SF needed in the second half.

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SUNFLOWER SEEDS

ai weiwei sunflower seeds

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Talking on the phone with my friend Carole a little bit ago, my eyes were gazing out the window at a downy woodpecker picking at a place on the bark of a birch tree where it stops by every day for whatever woodpecker food that place supplies. It is the female of the pair that visits the birdfeeders. I saw a snowbird standing close to the woodpecker on the bark watching. I wondered if that was the same snowbird I see peck at that area of the bark sometimes. Snowbird watched the woodpecker from just an inch or two. The woodpecker wasn't hammering. It looked like it was picking up bugs with its tweezer bill. Woodpecker flew off. Snowbird started pecking at the bark in the same place. Evidently this snowbird has been watching the woodpecker and learned to extend her range of foraging to bugs in tree bark, if that's what it is.

I have a culturally diverse feeding station. Nuthatch, cardinal, titmouse, snowbird, wren, woodpecker, chickadee, bluejay, sparrow, red squirrel, gray squirrel. No cats around. Caterpillar is past wasting any effort to catch one. She just gazes at them through the window, a cat movie. The birds are really hungry this bitter cold morning. I throw a lot of sunflower seeds to them on a day like this. They need all the energy they can get to keep themselves warm through the night. They're my miniature chickens. It appears to be a balanced place where the big birds don't bully the little birds. There is plenty of grub and space for everybody, so nobody has to rule the roost. When a squirrel wants to sit in the feeder and stuff its jaws, it doesn't deprive any birds. There is plenty on the ground for them. These are the birds of my neighborhood, my neighbors, the ones that live in the trees around the house and across the road. When I go out the door they don't all fly away. A few chickadees fly to a tree branch nearby where they can watch to see if I'm bringing anything for them. A few snowbirds hang around too, watching from rhododendron branches.  

I feed the crows on a patch of gravel beside the mailbox the other side of the road. Yesterday it had snowed a half inch in the night. I was going to wait until I took the netflix dvd to the mailbox to take the crows their day's ration. I saw a crow up here at the house standing at the edge of the road watching the birds pecking from the ground. The crow was wanting to get in among them for a morsel, but hesitated to step in among the trees. Too vulnerable a place for a crow. It alerted me that the crows are hungry. Snow on the ground. I took them some seeds. This intense cold has about doubled the population of bluejays feeding here. They're big birds; they need a lot more than a chickadee. Chickadees are the ones that speak to me when I step out the door. On the way to the car I'll pass under a chickadee or two or three and they'll call to me. It's fun to be known by the birds of my hood.

Every day when I scoop a cup of the big sunflower seeds, I cannot help but think of Chinese artist, Ai Wei Wei, from the documentary about him called NEVER SORRY. An art project he exhibited at the Tate in London was called Sunflower Seeds. I think it was a hundred million sunflower seeds made of porcelain and individually hand painted, made in a town traditionally known for their porcelain. He hired hundreds of people to carry out the work. The exhibition amounted to a space that looked about the size of a basketball court. But camera's distort size and I can't really tell. I'll say it's half a basketball court. Anyway, it's covered with the porcelain seeds four inches deep. A perfectly flat surface that can be walked on. He encouraged people to walk on it. Floor sculpture is not new anymore. I think Carl Andre in New York might have been the first to use the floor. He put a collection of flat tiles on the floor, like linoleum tiles, but made of some sorts of steel. He also arranges bricks and blocks of wood on the floor. He too invites the viewer to walk on his tiles. At YouTube is a 14 minute video, AI WEIWEI: SUNFLOWER SEEDS, that shows the people working on the project.

LA RATERA AND THE BOWL OF ORANGES

 
oranges, by tj worthington, 30 x 30 inch oil on canvas, stolen


This Thursday morning a window opened to such satisfaction as I have seldom known. I don't even remember last time I felt complete satisfaction. It was the satisfaction of revenge, like Medea felt when her husband's young Medea-replacement bride went up in smoke at the altar. It's not quite that dramatic. It has to do with the theft of one of my paintings from the mid 1990s. The thief I'll not identify by name, so I'll call her LaRatera. Her name is not important for the public narrative. It's not important for any reason. Her name and face have become synonymous with theft and betrayal in my personal symbolism. We'd been friends probably close to fifteen years. I mean good friends, anyway from my side, which turned out to be the only side involved. She was niece to some people I knew here in the county, lived up north the other side of the Mason Dixon Line. We were not lovers. Friends of the heart. I believed we were friends for life. Not. We wrote back and forth often, talked on the phone, visited, were friends wide open, supportive of each other. Like a line in one of Lou Reed's songs, "Just goes to show how wrong you can be." She gave me a bitter pill for about fifteen years. I've been waiting for her to turn up on facebook or run across her email address, anything, an opening. I only needed an opening for one sentence. Didn't know what the sentence would be, but knew when the time was right it would happen.

I'd sent LaRatera a photograph of the painting of oranges in a glass bowl recently finished in a letter. I'd sent the painting to a gallery in New Orleans. La Ratera went ecstatic seeing it, had to have it, loved it, couldn't live without it, had to have it. I called the gallery in New Orleans and asked them to send it back to me. I told LaRatera she could have it for half what I was asking for it. I like my friends to have my paintings so I give them serious discounts. And I wouldn't have cared if she'd never paid me anything. I'd rather my friends have my paintings than me have some temporary money to pay bills with. I UPSed the painting to LaRatera. It was received. Never had a reply. Never heard from LaRatera about anything. I called. No answer. Turns out she packed everything up and vanished, not in touch with even family. Nobody knew where she was for ten or more years. She'd done this before, bottomed out, went dragging back to mom and dad to start over. I'd heard she had made contact with family over the last few years, though I had no interest in seeing her or hearing from her. She'd prairie-dogged in a corn state, associating with family and others, her whereabouts no longer secret. I never heard anything from her. No thank you, kiss my ass, up yours, nothing. The kinda thing that lets you know where you stand. The only thing I wanted to do was to let her know I do remember her, as LaRatera, not as my friend. Just to make it personal.

It was not a big deal, but it floated in the back of my mind all these years. Resentment. Regret. Then saying fuck it and getting on with it. No more feelings toward LaRatera, because she had died to me. In my heart, she's a corpse in a cemetery. I know, I'm not supposed to be like that. I don't give a shit. That's how I feel. There is really nothing I want to say to LaRatera but to remind her she's remembered not as a friend, but a traitor and a thief. I wanted to do it for my satisfaction, the satisfaction of doing it. I didn't care what affect it had on her end. She could laugh at it and I'd be fine. She could mourn for a month and I'd be fine. One would not satisfy me more than another. But I kept this part of my mind waiting for an opening, like a deer hunter in a tree stand. The deer walked into my sights. No wasting time to think about it. Pull the trigger. The resentments I've felt for her have turned to comedy a long time ago. It has become such that when I chanced upon the photograph of LaRatera this morning in winter weather, her face covered by a part of the coat's collar to keep the wind off the face, there it was. I knew before I did it I'd be unfriended for it. Collateral damage was the only way I could look at that. Shouldn't have been sunbathing on the roof with a known terrorist, anyway. Thanks for the assist, sorry you don't like it. But you know everything behind it, and though you may not like it, I know you understand my meaning.

I looked at the picture. All that was showing was her eyes. I looked into the eyes to see if I could see her in there. Her eyes looked dead to me. I wondered if that was me projecting onto them my feeling for her, LaRatera. I'd thought about forgiveness, but some shit gives me such a hard time I just have to allow not forgiving, then it drifts away of its own. Then it prairie-dogs again in a corn field in the snow. LOL I don't receive betrayal lightly. It's not like I'm going to get in my car with a stolen credit card and drive to wherever LaRatera may be and blow her brains out. Not even a remote consideration. Not even for imagination til I wrote that sentence. No. She has serious issues within herself. Duh. LaRatera. If she were to appear at my door, my heart would be overjoyed and I'd long to hug her and bring her inside and hug her some more. But not a particle of my mind that would allow it. I looked at my friend hiding her face who had betrayed our friendship to the umbilical cord in a knife-in-the-back sort of way. There's an awful lot of shit I don't go back to for seconds. In the picture it felt right that she had her face covered, held there by her hand. With sorrow I thought, I'd cover my face too, if I'd shit everybody that had ever known me. There it was. I wrote it in the comment box. I'm sure it's been deleted for many hours by now. I only wanted it to be seen once. LaRatera stepped into my range. Only to remind her I remember her --- out of the blue.

It was a powerful satisfaction. It said everything I had to say. There goes another attachment to somebody who posed as friend. I don't mind letting those kinds of people go. Must be something in my horoscope this month about shedding friendships that have turned out not to be real. I have no problem with that. It's painful to say good-bye to a friend after a betrayal of the heart, the betrayal being the same as saying fuck you, get out of my life, I got what I wanted. I'm so OK with that, I've been OK with it so long I don't remember when it became OK. Because LaRatera in my heart is a corpse in the ground, snow-covered ground. Thank you, LaRatera, for starting my day off with a good laugh and the satisfaction of just the scent of revenge. Sounds like a Latin perfume. A black label, a red rose embossed on it. The Midnight In Paris of tango ballrooms in Buenos Aires.

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