MY FRIEND HAROLD HAYES

john singer sargent

 

My old buddy, Harold Hayes, continues in my mind after hearing him mocked for his failure at political correctness. The old boy is of a generation that doesn't even know what it is. His mind has been gone for at least ten years. He still has enough mind to drive his pickup and go to town every once in awhile to get out of the house and see some people. He's very difficult to talk with. Talking to him, he misses almost everything. When he talks, it's the same thing every time I see him. This does not bother me, I've known Harold a long time, since before his mind went away. Several times in the coffee shop, Harold has come in for a cup of coffee and to see if anyone was in there he could talk to. His head wobbles and his eyes are kind of far away, but Harold is there. Mind out of control, about all that is left is the fine human being that he is all the way to the soul. He was always welcome in the time Selma had the shop. It was in Selma's time I would see him in there. He always embarrasses me when I see him, wherever it is, Farmer's Hardware, any of the places he drops by to visit. He feels compelled to tell everyone in the place, calling their attention, to tell them what a great friend I am. He wants to tell that I took care of his closest friend in his life, Jr Maxwell, in his dying. He stumbles around with words and few know what he's talking about but me.

 

john singer sargent

 

Harold used to be a bluegrass bass player, and a guitar player. I say "used to" because he sold his bass. No point keeping it when he couldn't play it any more. For much of his adult life he made music every weekend for dances. He played bass with Jr Maxwell's band, The Green Mountain Boys, with fiddlers Art Wooten, Johnny Miller, Ernest Johnson, and some others. He learned the bass from Jr's wife, Lois, who was the band's bass player, and took her place. She taught Harold in order for him to take her place. He and Jr were probably each other's closest friends throughout the rest of their lives. In my time of taking care of Jr, which lasted about six months intensive, and a year of looking in on him twice a day and spending time with him. He was lonesome and simply needed some company. His home with nobody else in it was a void for him. Lois died of cancer, and his wife after Lois was a woman from Away who took him for having money, a farm, and left him when he didn't die soon enough. To take Jr for having money, her sights were not set very high. She ran through everything he had in twelve years and left him when he had nothing left and in debt to a degree he'd never been in his life. Then she left him and tried to take his house and his business, which, fortunately, the judge saw through. Everybody in the county abandoned her and she had to leave the county. Nobody would have to do with her. She'd speak to people she knew before, and they'd look away.

 

john singer sargent

 

Jr Maxwell was one of the better respected men in the county. Not that the people who call themselves society had anything to do with him. The people of the county, outside a closed circle of climbers in Sparta, all respected Jr for legitimate reasons, for his character. Outside Sparta, the people of the county have their own culture that interacts not at all with Sparta, but for hardware stores, groceries, gas and bank. In the world of the people of the county, everyone of his generation knew each other. Among the mountain people, they know each other for who they are, not their assets or stylish appearance. Among the mountain people, humility is regarded a virtue. Among the white suburbanites coming into the mountains and taking over, arrogance is a virtue, humility regarded stupid. Mountain people do not take to arrogance in any form or from anybody, and do not tolerate it among their own. I have a bad case of it too. Somebody comes at me from an arrogant place, I absent myself. I've found the best way to get rid of them is to drop some hillbilly grammar. The one I like best is saying them for those. Once is all it takes. They look at me askance and they're gone. I don't even have to go for a walk. Every year, Jr Maxwell would take a day and go around with his tractor to plow the gardens for the widows of Whitehead and the old people past able to do for themselves. Every snow, he took his tractor and blade around to the people of Whitehead who could not do for themselves and scraped their driveways. When Jr became unable, himself, somebody cleared his driveway.

 

john singer sargent

 

Harold Hayes was one of Jr's friends who dropped in on him periodically, sat and talked with him awhile about whatever they talked about. It wasn't a matter of what they talked as much as that they talked. Jr was Harold's closest friend. He looked up to Jr actually as if on a pedestal, regarded that well. I knew Harold before the time of Jr's inability to take care of himself. Every time he visited Jr in the time I was staying there, he made it a point to be sure I understood how much he appreciated what I was doing for Jr. A deep love ran between them, the love between friends of many years. All of Jr's friends became my friends in that time. The day his spirit left the body, one said to me, "Now Whitehead knows who you are," and another, "You get into any kind of trouble, all of Whitehead will back you up." Those were the most valuable sentences ever spoken to me in my life. I value those sentences, the people of Whitehead, the ones who said them in the core of my heart. Harold Hayes would embarrass me when he came into the coffee shop with all the praise from his heart that I'd helped his friend. It never ended when it started. His mind was gone, though his heart wide awake. I am Harold's connection with Jr now that he's gone. And likewise, when I see Harold, I see Jr. We have a bond we both value. My face automatically lights up in a big smile when I see Harold. I don't take kindly to my friend being dismissed by the people who value arrogance. It reminds me why I love the mountain people so deeply.

 

john singer sargent himself

 

 

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STAND BY YOUR FRIENDS

It's amusing that in Thanksgiving cartoons the turkeys are always brown wild turkeys. The turkeys in the oven today were white turkeys raised in huge factories where the turkeys are raised in boxes called buildings, fed by machine, gathered by machine, killed by machine, and made into the bare-skinned blob in the grocery store meat department by machine. Instead of showing wild turkeys in the cartoons, why not use one of the grocery store featherless corpses in the cartoons? This is the only way we know the turkeys. Almost nobody knows what the turkeys go through from birth to death, and don't want to know. Out of sight, out of mind. Don't want to know because it will spoil the Thanksgiving dream. I've heard it said that if you take a tour of a hot dog factory, you'll never eat another hot dog. That can probably be said of all food processing factories. I don't eat canned food much, except in restaurants, because they are so laden with salt, such that I'm eating spinach-, bean- or corn-flavored salt. I don't like to be too particular about such details in food. To be so particular, I'd have to move to a city that has a big farmer's market, live nearby and consume only fresh vegetables. I don't want to live in a city and don't want to get that involved in cooking. Cooking is not my art form. I eat whatever is before me. I figure people have lived on meat from the beginning of humanity. We've survived it thus far. I'm not going to edit what I eat by reading the ingredients list of unpronounceable words starting with xyz that tell me the product is lethal. I take it for granted and take it for the nature of the world I live in. Don't like it, must accept it.   

 

 

Finally, by noon today, the temperature had risen to about 35 degrees from 14 degrees it went down to in the night. The donkeys and the calves are lying down, full sides to the sun, thawing out their bones. It may take all day. The day's full sunlight must feel good to them after last night's bitter cold--it had wind in it, too, wind full of air dragons. Down here in my little valley between ridges, air dragons seldom fly through. Late in the day I went to a neighbor's house across the road and on the ridge where the wind blows freely. I was in the kitchen area and heard the sound of the glass storm door like somebody had opened and closed it. I looked. Nobody there. The corner of the house creaked at the same time. I realized it was an air dragon. I heard several roar through while I was there. The air dragons seem to like it up on top of the ridge where they can fly eel-like through the barren trees, then *BAM* into the side of a house. I visualize the air dragons something like what we call dust devils. In the summer on a dry dirt road, occasionally the wind will whip up a miniature tornado that goes spinning along the road surface a ways, and it's gone. I'm seeing air dragons spontaneously stirred up, swirling through the air maybe a few hundred feet, then flying apart. Or flying into the side of a house like a bird flies into a window.

The temperature has been so bitter cold that outdoors is good where it is. I was glad for the donkeys the meadow beside the house breaks the wind for them when it comes in from the west like it did the last few days and nights. I'm glad they had a good day of sun with temperature above freezing to dry out from the rain before the temperature drop. Marsha told me not to be concerned about them keeping warm. Marsha is my contact for horse nature. Wednesday morning I went into Farmer's Hardware for a Christmas present and some turpentine. Sat with Marsha in the back of the store with the coffee pot and we talked about horses and donkeys for an hour or more. Marsha is also my contact now with the old-time mountain culture that is going away with the wind. These were our subjects we could have gone on all day talking about. I enjoy conversation with Marsha. She knows these mountains and the mountain ways as somebody who has paid attention with appreciation, seeing it slip away in sorrow, We talked much of our own particular appreciations of these mountains and old way of life. It is hard for both of us to see a society that once was truly classless be swept aside by the country clubs and middle class people moving in here, making the mountain people the working class, the people on the wrong side of the tracks. The same happened to the Tibetans when China took over Tibet and moved people from overcrowded cities in eastern China to Tibet where they outnumbered the Tibetans that stayed behind instead of leaving for refugee camps in India. The Tibetans in their own land are the lower class out of sight, like the American Indian, like the Australian Aborigine. And now the mountain people are becoming outcasts in their own homeland.

I don't believe I'll ever get over seeing my friend Harold Hayes disrespected, talked to like a dog by an urban Florida woman who thinks living here is such a good place to raise the kids. I've fallen into the weave of life in a community where you have to be careful who you talk about, because it might be somebody's cousin or sister or aunt or grandson. In the mountain way, I don't like seeing my friends disrespected. I take it the same as it happening to me. Harold and I have a special bond. He was one of my friend Jr Maxwell's closer friends. He played bass in Jr's bluegrass band, The Green Mountain Boys, for several years. Harold appreciated that I took care of his friend Jr in his last year unto his dying. Our handshakes are the same as a hug. Harold is in his 80s and does not understand political correctness. Doesn't even know what it is. He has some nutty ideas about political subjects that everybody knowing him accepts as "that's Harold." The people I know who know Harold have a deep affection for him. He's a good example of what I call a good man. All the way around. Wherever I am when I see Harold, I stop and visit with him. He speaks to me by a different name every time I see him. He can never remember a name, so he makes one up and that's your name for now. Then you get people who are insulted because he can't remember their name. I always plead his case. I suppose, to put it simply, Harold is someone who cares about the people he knows. And the people he knows care about him. I'm one of the people who cares about Harold. To see him disrespected is hard for me.

I'm of the attitude that where my friends are not welcome, I am not welcome. It takes me back to the day I came up with my maxim for living in the mountains: Anybody too good for a Pruitt is too good for me. A Pruitt, here, can be anybody of these mountains, anybody not considered on the social ladder. It has served me well using this rule of thumb to identify people to stay away from. My maxim applies to mountain people generally. I've been told a few times I'm wasting my time with people of no consequence. It only makes me laugh and think: there's nothing psychic about you. I've been told it would be to my benefit to pay more attention to the exurbanites moving into the mountains. Again: not very psychic, are you? It amazes me when somebody who doesn't know you at all starts telling you what's best for you, what's right for you, A Rolling Stone lyric comes to mind, "I'm giving you a piece of my mind, there's no charge of any kind." What do you say?, Yeah, thanks--What do I owe you? The way accent crept into my voice after years of living among people of a certain accent, various aspects of the culture have rubbed off on me. One aspect is standing by your friends. It runs all over me to see someone I regard a friend disrespected, someone I respect about the highest. I have a hard time respecting somebody who disregards Harold for not knowing the new people require political correctness in your language, just like in church. I can't help but think anybody too good for Harold is too good for me. My friends are my friends for multiple good reasons.

 

 

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