A DAY IN MY WORLD

beverly pepper

I need to consult somebody about what the planets are doing. Mars has something to do with the mix. I can see and feel Mars manifestations everywhere all day long. There is something going on that feels like a planet arrangement. The nice part is the planets are in motion and will move out of this arrangement in time. I'm going into the third week of nuttiness. Dropped in at the grocery store for catfood and carrots, primarily, and found traffic flow in the store was all out of sorts. Four times I came to the end of an aisle into a bottleneck of buggies, and one time in the middle of an aisle. Making the turn to go to the register, it looked like the gates opened at a horse race. I stepped into a herd of buggies mounded up high like they were racing to the register. I found a way around a bottleneck of four buggies that were then stalled by another bottleneck. I avoided both bottlenecks by slipping through an opening before it closed behind me, clean air into the open area in front of the registers. I found the aisle with one of my favorite checkout women, nobody ahead of me. A very strange feeling coming out of a major traffic jam of buggies going three different directions, into the open area, only one buggy each at three registers and one free. And I was gone before the bottleneck of mounded buggies I detoured arrived at the registers. I went for the opening, like Brad Keselowski, and won the race, thanks to a pile-up. I've had moments in the grocery store every once in awhile when a bottleneck occurs at the end of an aisle, but not very often. Four times in one brief grocery store run is a noteworthy record. Reading events in a day like a dream, it was a great grocery store dream. It was so odd it had a dream quality to it.

beverly pepper

A woman from a Fellini film was in there. Approaching the tuna section, she was slowly walking in front of me, very slowly walking. Predictably, she stopped in front of the tuna. She didn't look at the cans. She gazed around the aisle like her mind was gone and she was looking for something familiar, a clue to where she was. I thought, no problem, she'll figure something out in a little bit. She turned and looked at me. Seeing she was not standing there for the tuna, just a place to stop, I said, gently as possible, seeing she was adrift on painkillers or something, "You're standing where I want to be." It sounded really stupid hearing myself say it, not knowing what to say. It sounded spoiled by privilege. And I didn't mean anything like that. I saw she was a benign soul, old with hair dyed black, out of the house, on the verge of losing the ability to leave the house alone. I did not want to push her nor disturb her reverie. She generously moved ahead enough to let me reach the tuna cans. I moved on and she moved on. Old women were in there today, people I've never seen in the grocery store. Perhaps it was the shut-ins day out. The experience was an odd sensation from one end to the other in the grocery store, something like stepping into a Fellini film. And I saw the old Chinese woman from the Chinese restaurant bent over her buggy, red sweater, hair dyed black, a wall of bread loaves behind her like a big Warhol silkscreen titled, Bread. The whole experience in the grocery store was so dream-like I'm inclined to call it interpretation of what I saw. I remember, then, that these images are outside my mind. These are individual people in the grocery store pushing buggies at the same time, and I'm one of them. I am the camera. As was each of the others. It was so out of the ordinary, it felt like I walked into a movie scene in progress.

beverly pepper

From there to the mechanic who takes good care of the car, Catfish, to change the oil. He keeps the Mt Airy radio station WPAQ online for best reception. I step into the garage and hear some old-time fiddle and banjo in the air playing Cacklin Hen. Some gospel music came on next, hillbilly gospel, the kind I love, and I just spoke out loud when This World Is Not My Home I'm Just a-Passin Thru was playing. "This is my song. The song of my life." The angels beckon me from heaven's open door and I can't feel at home in this world anymore. I saw Crystal and Sheena, watched them work peeling stencils from boards they are painting words onto. Crystal is the most inventive mind I know. She is self-taught and knows how to make things work, one step at a time. She's got drive like a drummer in a hard-core punk band. Sheena I've known since she was a baby. From there, in town I saw by chance my friend April, I've not seen in some time, more than a year. A refreshing visit. April is a beautiful soul. I'm always happy to see her. I went to the Subway for a sub to take home. A beautiful young woman the other side of the counter, big, round, Polynesian, beautiful milk-chocolate complexion, a tiny diamond in each earlobe. At home, a movie in the mailbox. I was ready to either take a nap or watch a movie. I'd rather see the movie. MONSTER'S BALL, with Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry. Powerful film. Half way into it, I was thinking if this were a South African I'd be calling it a great film. It's American and tells a particularly American story beautifully. Halle Berry showed me an actress as artist, subtle in her character. Billy Bob was Billy Bob making another classic character. Not many American films can jerk my tears, though at the end of this one my eyes were so wet the white credits on black were white blurs. 

beverly pepper

Two people who were bottoming out within came together in an unlikely mix, a white Southern prison guard racist and a black woman meet in a way that draws them immediately together. Her son had just been hit by a car and killed. Billy Bob drives by and stops, picks the kid up, puts him in the back seat and they take him to the hospital to find he's dead. She doesn't know it, and he doesn't know it, that he was involved in the execution of her husband just a day before. Both were reeling from the experience of the execution, how it got her without income, a kid to take care of, losing her job from the stress of the moment. They fell into each other's arms against their own will, and very much by way of their own will. It became complex. His dad, an old Mississippi retired prison guard racist, a shut-in using a walker. Billy Bob's was a story of a man who had only lived in hate, he and the old man hated each other, both were hateful people. After the execution, things changed inside Billy Bob. He was automatically drawn to help lift up this woman in her most vulnerable moment. When they were first discovering each other, he said, I want to help you. She said, I need help. They were drawn to each other, but their pasts kept them apart. I have to say hats-off to Halle Berry. She showed me a mature actress handling a major role well. She became the role immediately. It was Halle Berry, the artist, with Billy Bob Thornton, the artist, working together to make a beautiful film. I saw one yesterday, Stop-Loss, an Iraq war film that was good until it went totally cheezy at the end. Monster's Ball ended as well as a film can end. It let the viewer finish it in the mind.  

beverly pepper

*

TRUST AND RESPECT

beverly pepper

A couple weeks ago I was knocked off my track and have not yet found my way to get back in the flow. It came from trusting someone I found too late to be fickle. It's a valuable learning, though it didn't feel valuable at the time. I'll never count on this individual's word again. Good learning. Disillusionment equals enlightenment. I have been enlightened by said individual. I must get over being mad about it. It's an anger I can do nothing with but to learn from it, which frustrates the anger unable to express, then depresses me and saps my energy, turns a fun project into sour experience. I get mad at myself for getting mad. This leads to telling self to go ahead, be what I feel. Go ahead and be mad and let it run its course, let it wear itself out. Just don't get stupid. My mind is in a gloom, stays in a gloom. I actually spoke it out loud today that I could start crying any minute. I call it impotent rage. Nothing I can do about it but let it be a good learning. This isn't the first and it won't be the last. It goes with living in this world. We learn by trial and error who we can and cannot trust. Burnt a good one, I don't go back for seconds. I keep it as a rule of thumb that I give the people around me the benefit of the doubt. Learning to withhold trust from particular individuals is one at a time, and it hurts every time. I've found that people who cannot be trusted small cannot be trusted big. I don't need to cut off association or even do anything to show my displeasure. I know to withhold trust. I can go on and be like usual. I'll never be as friendly as I have in the past. That part's dead. When I can't trust somebody it colors a whole lot. 

beverly pepper

I've even been asked, in the coffee shop, where else?, why trust is important to me. I couldn't answer. I couldn't imagine somebody who asked the question could understand an answer. I said something to get out of it, "I'm just peculiar like that." Respect is another of those words that have little meaning outside the world of the mountain people. Actually, it's from the mountain people I learned to value trust and respect. I was not always trustworthy. I came here with a city fickle nature, unconscious. I found that here in the Blue Ridge trust is absolute. It's all the way or not at all. It took me a little while, a few years at least, to become truly trustworthy. In the time I knew friend Jr Maxwell, I learned much about trust. He was someone who could be trusted absolutely. When I needed Jr's trust, I had it with assurance. I strove consciously to be as trustworthy to him as he was to me. I couldn't ask him if he trusted me. I had to show him I can be trusted in small things as well as large. At the end, weeks before leaving the body, before his mind drifted away, he told me I turned out to be the only one he could rely on. I was heartened I could give him someone to count on in his last year. I felt I learned about trust from a Master trust was important to. The one at the coffee shop, who questioned the importance of trust, wondered why it was an issue for me. Like what am I hiding, like something on the tv show, Law & Order. Trust is important to him; therefore, he's hiding something. Like in the Fundamentalist religion: rational thought equals doubt equals Satan. 

beverly pepper

What I mean by trust is basic. I buy fifty bales of hay from somebody who says he'll deliver it Thursday. I like to know that the one I'm talking with actually will show up on Thursday. Some do, some don't. First time is trial and error. Hay turns up the following Wednesday with, "Somethin come up," and I buy hay from somebody else next time. He brings it when he says he will and I buy hay from him next time. This is what I mean by basic trust. In the years of revenuers raiding stills and arresting people for making liquor, it became a code among everyone in the mountains you don't rat on anybody for any reason. The code doesn't hold anymore, the culture is gone. In the old hillbilly way of life, you kept what you knew about what somebody else was doing to yourself. It was so pervasive it became culture. It's a prison code, but I like it. I like that I've learned to live by it. I'm grateful to God I have the experience of learning about trust, living in a culture where it matters. People come in from outside and it's a foreign culture to them. It was to me. I took an interest in the culture and dove in head first. It took a little while to learn about trust in the absolute, but when you fall into a culture, it's like learning French living in France. I'm grateful I had the experience this lifetime to study the importance of trust. And I'm not talking in terms of money where trust is understood, but in everyday life, living in a world of others, every one unique in every way. I find it valuable to know who I can and cannot trust. I find it valuable to be trustworthy, too. Word gets around in a community when you can be trusted. It becomes part of your name. An old, old saying of my great grandpa's generation: a man is only as good as his word. It continues in the community of the mountain people who live at home. 

beverly pepper

The old mountain ways are gone, but they continue to live in the younger generations. My friends just turned thirty continue to value their grandpa's and grandma's ways. I like it when I see the lines of influence from the old mountain ways into the newer television generations. The old-time morality is long gone, and that can be a good thing in many ways. It's the time of breaking down of traditions all over the globe. It's the change that is the end of the world as we know (knew) it, the beginning of the world to come. I've learned to accept television as a quickening of the process of completely tearing down the old, making way for the new. It is shaping an international mind. The cell phone generation seems like as great a break with all that went before, history, the works, like the Dadaists did in 1915. The one I mentioned above who disappointed my trust is a twenty-something and from someplace else, who, I imagine, can spell trust, but knows nothing else about it. Span of attention of a cat chasing a laser dot, or so I've come to see what I thought before had foundation. Here I am holding a twenty-something to a code I live by for myself, a code I learned from people I respect for the human presence they were in the time I knew them. They became models for me. They were the age then that I am now. I listened to everything they said. Whether I agreed was neither here nor there. I learned about respect from the people who were the last of the old-time ways. I had the treasure in life to arrive in the mountains in time to see the tail end of the old ways, the people who grew up and lived the early part of their lives before electricity. Last week I said to my doctor, laughing at myself, "I still go by Nineteenth Century values." I gave so much attention to the values of the old ways as they were going out, I cannot expect the people around me, who are evolving away from values of any sort, to share my interest in such values as trust and respect. They're gone, but for in particular individuals. These are the people I like to know.    

beverly pepper herself

*