PERSONAL IDENTITY LOST AND FOUND

 

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I tend to think an awful lot about the people I know, people directly involved in the weave and flow of my life such that I'm in the weave and flow of their lives. I really do think this is where my head mostly dwells, on the others in my life. I see over years my habit-thinking of the various individuals was actually a projection of how I felt about myself. In the time I was in despair about myself, teens and twenties, I objectified others somehow, left out their hearts, addressed their minds. I wanted to know people that impressed me, and even they weren't really it. Eventually, my attitude toward self changed and along with it my attitude toward others changed. When I finally came to respect my own heart, even my inner child came to life. This happened in my early thirties. Up til then, I wanted to live solely by mind. My heart was so incredibly wounded in childhood, I did my best to shut it down, to quit feeling, because all I felt was rage and the continual depression of holding the rage inside and pretending on the outside I'm happy. It took until late twenties before I even noticed the inner rage that projected my attitude toward life. I wanted to live, but didn't know why, except to get away from parents as far as land allowed and have a go at living without their absolute control and suffocating religion. I didn't do my wild-thang time very well, between ages 18 and 23, when children of dysfunctional families run wild and fall into every kind of pit. I think of my time with them as a dog chained to a doghouse with a ten foot chain, living on a circle of bare dirt a couple inches below the level of the topsoil around it, something like a miniature baseball diamond. One day somebody let the dog loose and it ran and ran in any and all directions, heedless from inexperience, falling, getting up running, ran across a road without looking, out of control. If left off the leash, it would soon be hit by a car. I grew up on a short leash and did just what a dog does, ran til I was out of breath and couldn't move. But stumbling, uncertain, devoid of self-esteem, hesitant, not believing my own feelings and thoughts, taught not to.

 

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I fell on my face, fell on my face, fell on my face, through my wild-thang five years. The first half of it I made stupid decision upon stupid decision. Sometimes fell on my face drunk. Drunk was the easiest kind of falling on my face. I married daddy in a woman's body. When I realized I had bought myself more of same to live with the rest of my life, I bounced off the trampoline. He was done and in the past. I wasn't living the rest of my life as the life theretofore had been. I was not going to live in the same mental climate all my life. A window opened and I jumped. The US Navy seen through the lens of Oppositional Defiance Disorder was my enemy. It took me away from my life against my will, set me back two years. It took care of me in those two years when I could not have taken care of myself very well, not well at all. Working in a shoe store with head in knots. The Navy took me away from it. Navy put me on the sea with head in knots. It allowed time to untie some of the knots and learn to live with the ones I couldn't untie. During the time on the ship I mostly read novels in translation of the French Resistance in Paris during the German occupation. I read the French existentialists almost exclusively. They spoke my truth. I wanted education desperately. By the time the Navy was over, the marriage was over. Out of the Navy on Friday, started school Monday, weekend at the beach, the first days of my life. I look back at my life starting at age 23. I'd taken care of the checklist of obligation to society, church and parents. Leaving the Navy base the last time, I stepped into my new life of decisions made for my life by my self. The Navy got me safely through the time of running like a dog unchained. In retrospect, I look at how the Navy served my development as a human being by putting up guardrails when needed, and now is giving me a monthly assist. I have to say I'm as grateful to the Navy for shelter through my storm as I am the College of Charleston for opening the door to the rest of my life.  

 

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Ego having been buried for so long, it was time for ego development, discovering personal identity. A friend at the college said something that stayed with me as a kind of a minor Zen koan. He said college is the time when we create our own identities. I was thinking it meant as a kind of style, like a writer's style that is one's own, or an artist's style. Imagine it, then become it, was how I took it. I think he thought of it that way too. I wasn't able to compose for myself an identity I wanted to live by, so I left it open to see what happens. Seeing that time in the context of a lifetime, I can see that I did indeed discover my personal identity in that time. For the first time in my life, I interacted with others without the inhibition of bleachers full of judges who believed I was their hand puppet. In the beginning, I kind of became other people's puppet temporarily, because that was all I knew. Did not yet know how to make decisions for myself. It was fun to exit the chute of living by other people's decisions for my life. I can't say I did it gracefully, but got through it standing up. I learned the importance of being a friend. I loved that the College of Charleston was then a small Southern college a couple hundred years old, Old South neo-classical architecture. It felt like a grandmother's arms. It was a nurturing place that helped develop my ego, my self-identity, gave it sound principles, again like a grandmother. The honor code was absolute, no two ways about it. Caught cheating, you're out that day. See somebody cheating and don't report it, you're out same day. I remember a guy caught cheating on his last final exam of his senior year. Out. It got me over any, every propensity I might have had for cheating. It has stuck for life that cheating amounts to cheating oneself, caught or not caught. Learning not to cheat was a primal step in the progression of discovering who I am that became a significant part of decision making.

 

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In a student body of under 500, I had a handful of friends and others I only knew from classes. I had an attic one-room apartment and worked in a bookstore. All through the Navy, when the ship went into any port, I found the bookstores. With just a few hours in Nice, France, in uniform, I found a French bookstore and bought a book of poems by Jean Genet in French, an inspiration to learn French in school well enough to read it. After classes of a wide variety, my interest zoomed in on Twentieth Century American writing, prose and poetry, and American art. By the time I finished at the college, I knew these were the interests of my life. These were the longings from deep within I was unable to satisfy without education. I had a longing to go to graduate school in something like existentialist drama, something I know, and knew then, I would love. I aimed to be a teacher, maybe high school where I felt I understood the kids somewhat. By the time I'd done undergrad, I didn't want any more school from either side of the desk. But I did uncover my self-identity by letting it evolve of its own. Now looking back it's clear that the interests of my life are good writing and good art. It was in the college years I learned that. Without the years of school, I'd have been more lost at sea than I am now. I think Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti were the first poets I had experienced on my own after high school. Starting college, the first book of poetry I picked up on my own was Selected Poems by Robinson Jeffers. I lay awake in bed all night reading it over and over in awe of what I was seeing. He spoke to me like no writer had ever done before. And to this day, I can sit in awe with Louise Gluck's new collected poems, or Elizabeth Bishop's collected poems, Robert Lowell's Notebook 1967-68. I don't make my living from it, but these writers and a host of others inform my interior life. This is how I created my self-identity: I found it by being open to it, an affection for Twentieth Century poetry. It serves nothing but my own aesthetic satisfaction. It's untarnished by money and ambition. It's uniquely my own.   

 

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A QUIET PLACE TO GO

The cold is moving in. This year I must find some fleece-lined indoor slip-on boots to wear in the house on the cold floor. And some heavy socks. This floor is so frigid in winter I want to stay in bed all the time or sit with feet up. I don't mind, however. Humans have lived with cold floors in winter as long as we've had houses. I don't care to spoil myself to central heat, air conditioning and the other luxuries. I like living with the elements, like living in a house that is not air tight. I like to feel summer and feel winter and all the weather in between. I like intimate association with the weather the same as with the world of the living, such endangered species as trees, rhododendron, ferns, running water, the animals that come out at night. I like having them around. I like it that coyotes and bears roam freely around my house. The only marauder I have is a coon that is throwing the roof off the birdfeeder in the night to eat leftover sunflower seeds. It's easy enough to replace the roof in the morning. Three possums lived under the house for awhile, until coyotes ate them. Hawks get the birds that come to the birdfeeder. They can't maneuver in among the trees; they wait outside the trees for birds flying out of the tree zone. I dreamed a few nights ago of a big pileated woodpecker pecking on the side of a dead tree, the standing trunk all that was left, the bird clinging to the trunk like they do, that red hammer-head digging for snacks.

 

 

One summer afternoon some years ago I was in the woods across the road, standing on a moss-covered rock beside the creek that runs to the waterfalls. I heard yip-yip-yip-yip, looked in the direction of the sound and saw a pileated woodpecker flying between the trees straight at me with another one close behind it. Both flew about two or three feet above my head, both yipping, like two jets flying through the trees. It was a thrilling experience. Another year in winter I was walking on the old back road along a ridge that dropped off rather steep on both sides. A crow flying low in the trees flew up over the ridge just a foot or two above my head. I heard the sound of wings and thought of the old hymn, Come Angel Band. Once, driving down my road from Air Bellows Gap Road , a crow flew a couple feet above the hood of my Toyota pickup, about where a hood ornament would be. It flew there looking back at me on either side as it flew. It went about a tenth of a mile with me. Twice I've had a redtail hawk do the same in the same stretch of road. The hawk, too, would turn its head sideways and look at me. I don't know if they were telling me they recognize me and my truck as a friendly who doesn't use a smoke-pole, or having a look at the human inside the moving shell. I've had this affection for the living beings I share my world with as long as I remember. My grandmother taught me appreciation for the world of the beings that can't talk. She taught me to transplant flowers so they don't die. She was the best teacher of my childhood.

 

 

I've come to see that this forested mountain I live on, and the culture of the mountain people, as well as the house, all come from the places I found comfort in childhood. A large acreage of woods was beyond the back yard, giving me a great area to play Indian in. The woods were my playground where the tension I carried from home relaxed. It was a safe zone where I was not being punished or berated. My grandmother lived in a room over the garage. She was my comfort in that she knew what I was going through and she allowed me to spend as much time with her as allowed. We worked jigsaw puzzles, listened to Grand Ole Opry, and talked about whatever came up. She always had a male canary singer. She borrowed a hen from a neighbor and her beautiful yellow singer produced little ones. She gave me one of the babies, which I kept until it eventually died of old age. She taught me to love canary song. She taught me how to catch a bird in a cage without hurting its wings. When I was new in the mountains I noticed everybody talked country talk like she did, using words like aint, them and other colloquialisms my parents corrected me for using. They didn't like grandma. Grandma was my lifeline. None of her kids liked her. I heard from different sources that she was a difficult woman not many people liked. She was the one I loved in the family. She was my mother hen. We kept a family of Cochin bantie chickens, a half dozen, started with a hen and rooster. They were black with feathers on their feet. She was particular about her chickens like she was with canaries. The four chicks became my pets.

 

 

I did not learn until I'd been in the mountains about thirty years that her mother and dad went to Kansas from East Kentucky, Pulaski County. It explained why mountain culture was so comfortable to me at the beginning, because familiar. It was my culture as I picked it up from grandmother, who was the same as a mountain woman, though she lived in Kansas. I've heard that two of her brothers were fiddlers. She played a guitar. And I learned her husband, my grandpa who died seven years before I was born, came from East Tennessee, Bledsoe County. Both places are in the Cumberland Plateau. I now live among the woods that were my childhood refuge and grandmother's culture. It's the world I live in. Also, my house used to be the Air Bellows School, where they held revival meetings in the evenings during summer. In the house I have school, another refuge in childhood. I loved going to school, hated going home. It was so very good to be someplace where the teachers that also served as guardians were affectionate in their attention. They were sensible, never flew off into an egomaniacal fit. They were intelligent, even rational. They were the guardians of my world that was safe. Punishment was not the purpose. The schoolhouse is the other part of my world that came from the places I went to for shelter from the storm of undiagnosed mental illness. To a great degree the church was important in childhood for refuge. The preacher was a man I could respect, a man who read books and studied the Bible deeply. The church was a comfort zone. Daddy was on good behavior in church.

 

 

I had no idea what lay ahead in 1976 when I settled the plan to move to the mountains and work manual labor on a cattle farm. It was  the same for me as throwing a dart at a map. I stepped into the future with no idea where I was, except on a map. I'd never heard of anything around here. All I knew was Blue Ridge Mountains, gravel road, lots of woods, lots of meadow, a couple of cemeteries, some old homeplaces, remains of family farms. It seemed to somebody who had never been out of a city, but on the road between cities, like the edge of the universe, land's end, the boonies to the max. That was all I knew. Of course, I'd heard of Appalachian poverty by way of photographers Walker Evans and Doris Ullman, who made Appalachian poverty beautiful. I never saw any of that Appalachian poverty. I saw old farming people. The poverty pictures come from coal mining regions, and there's no coal mining here. We have plenty who have gone to West Virginia or Kentucky to work .in the mines and retired back home. The hands of every coal miner I have shaken are hard as stone. The old time hillbilly farmers had hands of stone too. No matter what the man's character, a man with hands of stone I respect for all the really hard work in those hands. In a way, they intimidate me, because I have some insight into their commitment to a lifetime of hard labor every day, getting drunk on weekends. It's what you do until you die. I could not live a routine that goes on without end, never anything different or new, no curiosity, bent to the plow, a human mule paid the same as slave wages, not quite enough to get by on.

 

 

When my parachute put me down in a remote spot I'd never heard of, it seemed random in the doing. It seemed like chance and circumstance, like letting go and floating free to see where I land. In that time of the life, I was paying close attention to chance, playing with chance, even attempting to flow with chance and see what happens. I let go and gave chance the rein to see where it might go. I'd made nothing of my life using mind. Thought I'd give not-mind a chance. I wrote mind off as a failure---my mind, anyway. Been through a lot of school, read a lot of really good books, known some interesting people, and still didn't know anything. I continued adrift at sea within. I'd thrown everything to do with God out of my life. I gave no attention to the supernatural. I became an existentialist, not the intellectual writing books kind, but the everyday life kind, the kind that sees this physical lifetime is it, same as the church I grew up in. The preacher was a Swede from Minnesota. It was the same religious belief system in childhood that made Ingmar Bergman the existentialist he was. It did the same to me. It seems like I feel Bergman films from the inside, because we were created by the same belief system that both of us rejected as a dreadful fairy tale. I first discovered reading by way of fiction by Camus, deBeauvoir and Sartre, for two years. I had found writers who saw it as I saw it. DeBeauvoir and Sartre, each had a series of novels of the French Resistance during the German occupation. I read all their novels through the course of time in the Navy and some of their philosophy, plus plays by Sartre and Genet. I was using this time in the Navy to learn how to read with comprehension. These are the people who taught me to read. They prepared me for Freshman English.

 

 

By the time I came to the extremity of needing a major change, giving chance a chance, the Divine hand started guiding me in seemingly supernatural ways, like messages in everyday events, things people say. It seemed kind of eerie, like a consciousness was watching me. It also felt interesting. I'd been reading some Hindu and Buddhist writings. These chance occurrences began to have an order and pointed me to Meher Baba's center between Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach, a hundred miles north on highway 17. I wanted nothing to do with anything like that. I was bored with rock stars and gurus. I wanted a quiet place where I could be entirely alone and not be bothered. My initial plan was to take a bus to some unknown small town in South Carolina, rent a cheap motel room until I ran out of money or got it, whatever it was. During three days and nights there, I got it. The direction I called Forward turned 180 degrees. I think of it as the turning point. Shoot an arrow straight up, the farther it gets away from the source, the slower it goes until it finally stops, turns and falls back toward the source. I'd spent my adult life, theretofore, running away from a stifling belief system's interpretation of God. In just a few days at the Center, all my questions were answered by picking up books of Meher Baba's words from a communal bookshelf, opening one randomly and reading the first paragraph my eye fell on. Each time I did that, it was a direct answer to a question that was in the front of my mind. Looking back from now, I can see those three days were the where and when my light was turned on. All my questions were answered and I came away with a whole new set of questions. Mountains seemed like a good place to go.

 

 

 

 

*

 

 

MY INNER CRIMINAL

jasper johns

Monday's and Wednesday's encounter with perceived authority has my nerves still rattled. Some inner stuff came to the surface I didn't see coming. It's still raging. I continue to see the dead eyes I looked at that were the same as a statue's eyes, eyes that are looking but don't see. I looked at his name tag, because I like knowing the names of people I'm interacting with. It turned out I was the only one interacting, meaning there was no interacting going on; it takes two to interact. When I spoke it was the same as talking to a statue of John C Calhoun, somebody from so far away in time and so high on a pedestal that I, meat puppet on the ground, have no relevance for attention. I had to remind myself this is how police state works. This is what 1950s propaganda told us the Communists were like. Be careful what you hate, because we become what we hate. After all the Cold War time of hating Communists (people without rights), here our side is, the Christian side, manipulating the population by propaganda, police state. In America now the cops give us attitude that they have power over us, that I can be put in prison by their whim if I give a smart-mouth answer to a smart-mouth question.

jasper johns

Yesterday and today, all day, I swam in my ongoing subconscious argument with authority figures, militarists who like marching, shouting orders, saluting, obeying. My time in the Navy was a time in hell for me. It was a culture totally alien to who I am. It was about killing. I am not. My childhood was spent dominated by a Jar Head who was proud of it. "I'm a marine!" I'd think: Hot dog! You're big an bad! Liked uniforms and badges and guns. I'd hear, "I want some respect outta you!" I'd think: Show me something to respect. I'm not an actor; I can't respect on command. These memories from the past came up in the presence of being looked at and talked at like I was automatically a criminal because I'm a citizen. I knew the authority figure could see absence of respect in my eyes. I saw stone deadness in his eyes, he saw disrespect in mine. Lack of respect really sets off obedience robots. In the place called home, I was beat into the ground to start showing respect, and never broke. I saw myself one of the tough guys on the pirate ships in 40s and 50s movies strapped to the mast being whipped, never showing on his face a wince of pain and never in his eyes a glint of repentance. You can beat me all the way to death and you will never see a split-second of respect in me.

 

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Officers in the Navy saw it in me. The most authoritarian ones saw it on sight. They saw they would never control me, that my obedience was superficial. All authoritarians see me, on sight, the enemy. It has to be my eyes. My eyes don't brighten up with respect, nor do they show fear. They show indifference, because I know I am face to face with the same to me as a dead man, one who thinks manhood equals obedience to authority. I'm possibly as anti-authoritarian as it gets. I'm not a reactive anti-authoritarian who obsesses with contempt for authority. I totally ignore authoritarian figures. They have no part in my life, in my consciousness. I do my best never to attract the attention of a self-important authoritarian robot. It's why I wear what I call my old-man hat that says Farm Bureau on the front. Old people are past being regimented and authoritarians know it. I have a friend whose job requires a uniform, badge and gun, but he's not an authoritarian personality. He's not somebody who would stop you and say, "What's your hurry?" or another one I've heard, "You going to church?" No, I'm goin to a pot party; we're gonna have a orgy and play cards all night, might shoot beer cans off of each other's heads with a shotgun. Stuff came up from way far back, things I would think when threatened. Couldn't say anything, but nobody had any control over my thoughts. Not even me. There was, "I oughta hit you for what you're thinking." My thought: If you really knew what I was thinking, you'd kill me. You don't have a clue. That's what authoritarians see in my eyes. They want to hit me for what they perceive me to be thinking. They want respect for nothing and I don't have it to give. Respect is earned or not at all. And it's not that I'm devoid of respect, because I respect a lot of men and women and children I know. I lean toward the people I respect, and away from the others.

jasper johns

I know cops I respect. They've earned the respect. I think of them as good men. They don't use their uniforms to bully people. They're obviously not authoritarian types or I wouldn't know them. This week's encounter with obedience robots has unsettled my nerves like I don't remember happening since quite awhile. I don't like it when this rage comes to the surface. It takes me back to the part of the life I prefer never to think about. They say in old age we remember way far back clearly. I don't look forward to that. I don't want to get that old. This week told me that rage and hatred for authority is still burning in a furnace in my heart. Maybe it came up to be looked at before I fade into thinking I'm spiritual or something hi-fallutin when a blue flame of rage continues to burn in the deepest part of who I am. I don't even want to go there to deal with it. Can't even stand to watch cop tv shows or movies. In cop movies, I tend to pull for the criminal. Possibly this rage inspired identification with Plains Indians in childhood, enemy of the white man that speaks with forked tongue, authority in a hierarchy of obedience. Obedience is what it takes to make a good military. I am not military. I don't want to kill others who are every bit as uninterested in being killed as I am, nor be a part of the legion that does the killing. Like I don't want to be a mechanic who works on planes that drop bombs that kill many and hurt more, people who aren't even a problem, just anybody. The enemy? I'm the enemy.

jasper johns

That brings to mind a moment in the Navy that cracked me up at the time. A lieutenant talking to a bunch of the boys, talking every old star-spangled cliché there ever was, remember Pearl Harbor, Communists, the enemy. I stood there, "at ease," laughing inside, thinking: Hey man, I'm the enemy. But kept quiet. Didn't want to draw attention to my behavior. The enemy is not out there. He hated me too, for my superficial obedience. I didn't get in trouble, much, because I obeyed, but they all knew I was not converted to automatic obedience and never would be. I could not dedicate myself to murder and be proud of it. I was pist off at my country for putting me through mandatory warrior training. I'm not a warrior for anything or anybody until the threat is real. Then I'm in front, ready to fight. No matter what I may do to intellectualize my distaste for authority bullies, give it rational associations, it comes from childhood and has nothing to do with the US Navy or police or any other form of social authority. It came from daddy. There it is, the thing itself. Because I rejected his irrational unto arational authority controlling a child by fear, it is a deep down within rejection of what turns out to be his insanity. One day not very long ago mommy said in a light-hearted twinkly way she glosses over denial, "Well, you had your share of discipline." I couldn't stop it--it came out of my mouth bypassing my inner editor. I heard it at the same time she heard it. "Mine wasn't discipline. It was insanity."

jasper johns

All I could think was:  It must have needed saying. She didn't take it hard. She already knew I knew. She knew it too, just kept the denial lid on it. The blessing I derive from this neurosis is that I am not an obedience geek. I am happy to the very core of my heart this is the case. The only freedom in this world is in disobedience. It's why our prisons are so full. No matter where my rejection of obedience came from, I'm glad I have it. I'm glad I don't like having cops look me over like if they look hard enough they can find reason to put me in prison. I am a criminal at heart, and they know it. I don't want to steal anything from anybody, don't want to hurt anybody, don't want to kill anybody, don't want to kill a cop, don't want to run over a dog. I just want my American freedom to be who I am, suspect as that may be. I don't like it being expected that I should want to be an obedient warrior. In a world where war is ongoing, I don't want to be expected to kill teenage kids conscripted by the other side, like me, when American wars are about more money for the rich and less for the working people. Why would I even want to put myself in harm's way toward such a self-destructive end? That's how I saw it then and how I see it now. I'm guessing that what the men in authority positions see in my eyes is that furnace of rage flaring up, confronted by a man demanding respect for nothing. No wonder they dislike me so intensely as soon as we meet. I'm glad they don't like me. Keeps them away so I don't have to deal with them, except when the spider catches the fly.

 jasper johns

 

 

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TED STERN AN HONORABLE MAN

     cleve gray, red thrust on gray

This is the day Ted Stern had his memorial service at the cistern, by his request weather permitting. I found a short video Channel 5 put online of the flag-wrapped bier with a friend of more than half my life inside it dead. First time I went to google to look for info on his passing, I saw "Ted Stern dead at 100." It knocked me for a wobble on my track. Dead. It was a little bit hard to take. Dead  is such a dead word. It's inert like a cinder block. A name and memories. The first time I saw him, he was walking across the cistern on his way into the main building. We at the college knew we had a new president, though I hadn't seen him. One day I was walking into the quadrangle through the gate between the library and the main building (1968) and saw Ted Stern walking over the cistern. At a distance and at a glance, he looked somewhat formidable. He walked with a self-confident air. I'd heard he was retired Navy, which turned me against him automatically. I'd been in the Navy too, though he and I had very different experiences there. The Navy was good to him. He gave it his all. The Navy was not good to me, because I gave it my time that it had usurped in the period of the draft, and nothing else. The ultimate authority. I resented having two years of my life taken because I was born a boy in USA. In retrospect, I have an entirely different version of the time in the Navy. Yes, it took me out of my life, but I needed it at the time. The time in the Navy was my transition from rule from outside myself to making my own decisions for myself, which theretofore I'd failed at repeatedly. I needed to get outside my life at exactly that time to assess the pit I'd fallen into of my own ignorance.

I'd come out of a family situation where I had been taught to reject authority. In photographs I've seen of self in childhood, I see that rejection of authority started about the age one and a half. That's when the deep furrows between my eyes started their very early development. Resentment. Hating being hit. Hating the ongoing berating. By the time I left parents, I was dead set against authority and dead to parents. Him for the hitting and berating. Her for never protecting the boy child from his insanity. Hitting the kid sublimated hitting her. Resentment of male authority runs deep in me. Like I say, all the way back to age one. The child within hated being hit daily without recourse. Didn't just dislike it. Hated it. Hated. Going to a Kansas fundamentalist church five times a week, it was hate that was developing in me, not love. Love was nasty. It was a four-letter word. Bad. There wasn't any of it going around in our house, anyway. Certainly not in the church. Church was duty. Or else. In my time in the Navy and the College of Charleston, love was a word I scorned. Had no idea about it. Experienced some heat, but it wasn't anywhere near love. It was a peep hole, nonetheless. A beginning.

I tell this for the origin of my rejection of authority. The authority I grew up under was wildly irrational. There was no reasoning behind it, no guidance, no correction. The only thing I was required to understand was No, Don't and You Better Not. I was promised a better life if I could start everything I do with no-dont-you-better-not. A kid has to move. A kid has to talk. I refused the straight-jacket, so I was in trouble every day. Existence was the cause of my trouble. It doesn't sound good to resent parents openly, but when your mother tells a neighbor woman, "He's my kid, I'll kill him if I want to," and then tells the kid about it, proud of herself, it causes a child to question the advisability of living with these people. But there was no place to go to. It was a matter of seeing I was born in prison with a sentence at least through high school. Free from parents and church, then I had the prison sentence of the military to go through for being born in Amerika. Then there is the prison sentence of you-better, you-oughta, you're-supposed-to, you should, the rules unspoken, but you're expected to know them and go by them. When-ya-gonna-get-married-when-ya-gonna-get-married-when-ya-gonna.... I got married, because of supposed-to.  I'm an Hephaestus personality drawn to an Aphrodite personality. He failed to see the humor in his wife's infidelity.

All this to say that in the first view of Ted Stern at about fifty feet and maybe ten seconds, I saw Authority. He was big with a big Jewish nose, which I respected. I'd known a few people of the Charleston Jewish community, liked them all and respected their intelligence. Upon seeing him with his Hebraic schnoz, I was entirely disposed to rejection, though with curiosity. The Jewish part told me this is not the average white man. It indicated that the board hired him for reasons that cancelled any prejudices among the Southern white men of the Old South way of thinking. Still, it didn't matter to me, one way or the other. Navy. Authority. Why did this have to happen at my school? Within, I was braced against him. There came a time I did something arrogant, disrespecting his authority. He handled it like King Solomon. I was so impressed by his way of "taking me to prayer meeting," rationally, intelligently, as well as firmly, I came away from it respecting his authority. He did it in front of about thirty people, never letting on who he was talking about, never making eye contact with me to say, I'm talking about you. I sat in my metal folding chair red faced in awe. I had never experienced such intelligent authority. My respect for Ted Stern started that day. It didn't change anything between him and me, because I didn't know him to avoid him or cultivate him. I just stopped talking down about him among my friends.

It was not cool to admit I admired him suddenly. His pattern all the way along in his time in Charleston was to turn the people most dead set against him into his most ardent supporters. I saw it even in cases I never believed would be sympathetic with him, like my own. He had a great deal of opposition in his first few years with the college, and he played through it. I'm recalling a Miles Davis concert in England, Isle of Wight Festival, in a documentary about his music. It was a big outdoor show of what is now called classic rock, the Who, Hendrix, Janis, the Doors. Miles was playing his electric music. Audience was throwing every kind of trash at the band, booing them. At a certain point in the music, the bass player told Miles he couldn't take dodging flying bottles and being booed any more. He wanted to quit and leave the stage. Miles said, "Play through it." By the time they finished the set, the booing and bottle throwing had ended and the audience went nuts in ovation wanting more. This sentence, play through it, has been with me since Ted Stern's passing. He played through it when metaphorical bottles were thrown at him and he came out of it beloved by the people of a great Southern city, his funeral a major moment in the history of the city of Charleston. For the College of Charleston, corny as it sounds to say it, Ted Stern was indeed its founding father. His obituary could be reduced to three words, an honorable man.


*

DREDGING THE BLUES

henri rousseau, the sleeping gypsy

Have I ever been in a mood. Go to sleep in a mood. Wake up in a mood. The subject of mother's belief in her absolute control of my thoughts and beliefs swirls in my mind. She has never had control over any of these. My thoughts and beliefs have been my own since first grade. Neither parent ever wanted to hear anything I thought. I was there to be told what to think. As I look back at the experience, I was there to be told, period. I've been avoiding going there, because I hated my childhood from ages 5 to 18. When I say hated, I don't mean disliked, would have preferred it another way. I mean I hated it. I hated it wth all the power the word hate carries. A child crying himself to sleep every night with face in pillow to muffle loud bawling is not a happy child. I've been avoiding going here, but something is stirring within. Big stirring. I think I've had my buttons pushed. Mother's eruption from finding out she does not control my mind and hever has controlled my mind, is blamed on me, of course. This is where she learns she never will control my mind. I've never wanted to address these issues with mother, because of that thing I found in psychotherapy of mommy and daddy putting the responsibility for their happiness on the child who was hit and berated every day. I think I made them happy being somebody legal they could take their frustrations with each other out on, defenseless in the absolute, a target.


One night at age 14, I got with myself when I started crying, "You will never cry one more tear over him or her for the rest of your life, no matter what." And it worked out that way. The only reason I went to his funeral was to see him dead. The oppressor of the defenseless. It didn't even give me satisfaction. I didn't want to see him at all, dead or alive. Don't think I forgot to wrestle with Bible sez 
in my mind. Bible sez honor thy father and mother. Honor them even though they hit you every day, berated you multiple times a day, tell you you're stupid and nobody wants you around, orphanage looming in the background, the threat. Like in China they'd say, "If you're not good your mother will sell you." Perhaps 20 years ago I read Swiss psychologist Alice Miller's book FOR YOUR OWN GOOD. Yes, that's the justification for hitting kids: for your own good. What parents taught me was it was not for my own good at all, but for the good of the ones doing the hitting. It gave a sense of being right, an adrenaline rush, perhaps was even a surrogate for ejaculation, as he didn't get a whole lot, maybe once a month. He was losing his mind from sexual frustration. She knew it. She kept him there. Control.


As I'm writing this, I'm reminding myself that when someone hears of parent-child problems, it is ALWAYS the child's fault. Every time. He won't behave. He won't mind. He doesn't pay any more attention to me than the man in the moon. He's her kid, she can kill him if she wants to. The Bible does not say anywhere: honor thy children. Only thy parents rate honoring. This is another problem I have with Christendom, that children have no rights. They have the right to turn their backs to their oppressors and run away. I wasn't brave enough to run away, because I would not turn back. It had to be all or nothing. My grandfather's brother, Sam Worthington, was beat by his dad, my great grandfather John, with a chain in the barn when he was 16. Sam staggered out to the road, walked down the road and they never seen nor heared of Sam again. I say Go-Sam-Go, don't look back. When I left parents' house, in my heart I never wanted to see any of them again. I wanted to go to either one of the coasts, as far as land allows, get away from my lifelong enemies and start fresh. Daddy told me it was a "cold, hard world out there." I've never found "cold, hard" out here in the world anything like living with them. Not anything near. Only Gitmo is close. It's been an easy life without them. It's been a life of healing without them. In fact, so much I call good has come with the healing process, I'm almost grateful to them for alienating me. The process of healing characterizes my adult life.


Out here in the world I at least have "home" to go to. When I lived with them, I had no home. It was my friends I went to for comfort, not home. Home was the problem. Home was the only part of my life I didn't like. I loved school because the teachers were rational people who did not have the hornet nest of insanity buzzing in their minds. I questioned God a million (literally) times why I was given to such people as I woke up a baby finding myself among. If I wake up as their baby next time, I'm committing SIDS. If next time, I have parents like them, I will force upon myself the courage to run away and never return. Big cities have their subcultures of runaway kids that band together. Of course, they get blamed for making mommy and daddy worry so much. Ever thought about how much mommy and daddy made the kid worry for the kid to jump off into the unknown to get away from them? Ever think about what it does to a kid where guilt is concerned to seriously contemplate killing his daddy for survival? Night after night, face in pillow crying. I tell myself the reason I didn't do it was I couldn't find a way to get away with it. I wasn't going to prison over him. He's not worth a tear, and certainly not a prison sentence. I regarded my life with them a karmic prison sentence. It was like God telling me: You were born in sin; you need to start this lifetime in prison.


I learned never to tell them what I thought or felt, primarily because at every minute it was rage at them. Walking home from school, I knew I'd be hit before and/or after supper. I recall times with an elderly neighbor woman I liked in childhood, the same age as my grandmother, my only comfort. She talked to me like I was a person. One day during summer I saw and spoke to Mrs Thornhill, who was outside pulling weeds among her flowers. We talked. She invited me in. We sat and talked a long time over oreos and milk. I felt like we had a great time. She was so comfortable that I unburdened about my life in the church wing of the insane asylum. She listened. Strange. Nobody wanted to hear what I had to say. She listened. I talked. My first psychotherapist. She even seemed to understand. It felt good having someone who understood. Next day all hell broke loose like an American land mine, the kind made specifically for children, to blow them to shit. Evidently, she talked with mommy about what the kid was going thru. Mommy, of course, told her I was lying, like a good Baptist. I was informed that what I committed was Talking-About-Us-Behind-Our-Backs. A felony. A crack in the shield around their failure as human beings. I was never to speak to that old woman again.


These are the reasons I dread loss of short-term memory to be replaced by long-term memory. I don't want to lie in bed at night remembering crying from the soul, all the way that deep, way down there where it really hurts, where you're so lonesome you don't have anybody, not even God or an imaginary friend for comfort. I was talking with my friend Justin yesterday, and mentioned that since I brought up the issue that I don't obey the thought police, the shit's about to fly. I told him that if I refuse to take her orders on getting saved (again) and submitting to her collar and leash, she has the capacity to disown me, to tell me she has no son. She can do that. She doesn't care all that much about me as who I am. She cares for an idea: her son. He looked at me with big eyes and said, "Really." I smiled and said, "Really." Now that she knows I am disobedient and secretly always have been, unrepentant about it and will go on as such, it's up to her what happens. I'm feeling the anger from back then. It's considerable. I'm having to edit myself closely not to go too far. I don't want to go into exaggeration. Don't need to. Anything I say about living in the house among them sounds like exaggeration. To put exaggeration on top of it would be automatic overkill. That's how she got away with telling people I was lying. What I said sounded like exaggeration. Nobody could believe it.


In high school years I customized model cars with an artist's passion. A hobby shop was a short bicycle ride away. The guy working the place lived in a wheel chair and wasn't very old, maybe 20s or 30s, as it seemed to a 17 yr old. After we knew each other awhile, I was a good customer, one day I was in an especially depressed state, he asked what was up, I told him shit that was going on at home. A day or two later I'm informed by daddy, again with much drama, I'd committed the felony of Talking-About-Us-Behind-Our-Backs. I went to my room and packed all my model cars, the assorted parts I'd kept, tools, everything involved with making model cars. Next day I took the box to the hobby shop, left it with him, turned and went out the door. Didn't say a word. Couldn't speak without breaking the dam holding back the rage I was feeling toward him. Never saw him again. Never messed with model cars again. I do not like these memories. I don't like long-term memory. It takes me back to my time in the desert of feeling mid the cacti of anger. I've spent my entire life healing from the years subject to their neurotic whims. It wasn't until I fell in with Meher Baba at age 33 that the healing began in earnest. My spiritual path has largely been about healing the cripple within. And not by parroting preachers. By this time in my life, I can honestly say without hesitation that I am no longer a cripple. I've made it. By age 70 I can stand as who I am before anyone, unafraid. Thanks to the people of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where who you are is what matters most, the inspiration of my adult years.


* 

LEARNING TO LIE

baja rock

 

Did I ever stir up a hornet's nest today. I let my mother see what I'd written about my spiritual path, something I thought she'd be interested to know about. Hell no. That I'm not a respecter of the devil was a major grievance. She sent a long paragraph parroting a Baptist tract, scripture and references to scriptures. The worst part for me was it dredged up all that old belief system I threw off first thing when I got out from under belief system by duress. The day I moved out of their house, I threw that belief system in the trash and left it behind. I spent the next 15 years squeezing the last remaining dregs of it out of my system. It was used to rule me before; after, I'm out of control. I'd very seldom seen expression of love in the house. All I recall was griping and threatening. By the time everybody was in the car to go to church, daddy was in a storming rage because mommy takes so long getting her makeup and everything together. We drove to church in silence, because daddy was mad, arriving at the last minute. Daddy was always mad. He didn't think he needed a psychiatrist, but he did.


After church, daddy and the kids sat in the car while he fumed, smoking Lucky Strikes, because mommy was always, every time, the last one out the door before it was closed. She had to talk to all the women, one at a time. I knew it was a game she was playing. It was every time. I think she was tired of his pouty self-centered ways and decided to give him something to fume about. I don't know if she knew what the kids went through in the car with him while lava was spewing out the top of his head. It wouldn't matter. Better the kids than her. All the years I lived in their house, no choice about church five times a week, I don't recall love in or near the house or the church. The "love" was supposed to be understood; that's why it didn't show. There was no question love was there, because it was supposed to be. But supposed to never manifested in action or expression or speech. Evidently not in thought or feeling either.


The issue from here on is she will never let up on the nagging. Finally, maybe ten years ago, I got her to stop the nagging. I finally had to spell out what I'm not going to do, fill in the blank, ever, so please drop the subject. This one will only end when the first one of us dies. As evidence of what I said that you can't trust your salvation in the baptist religion, she was telling me how to get saved, like I didn't get it; she already enforced that one years ago. She enforced baptizing too. Now, it must not have taken. She told me Adam created sin by not obeying God. I don't recall the origin of sin a matter I'd addressed. I was looking at a definition of sin, what it means. Not the Bible book of records for who sinned first. Then a paragraph of Jesus died for our sins, like I'd missed that one through an entire childhood of preaching, brow-beating, control by guilt, and missed all of it. If I don't believe in the devil, I'd "better think about it." That mind is so far in my past I forgot. I had forgotten her adamantine mind. I'm of the mind that a blockheaded woman has a blockheaded man behind her. In her case, it's the blockheaded preacher man. She holds preachers as high up as I hold them low down.


I found it uncanny when I read her objections to who I am. Of course, she was replying point-for-point, but it struck me odd that she gave evidence for every one of my reasons for getting away from her and the religion. Immediately, I began to regard myself an agnostic, convinced the God business was about money and control, which it is, though not really certain about whether or not God, indeed, is. It took several years to come to a place I could honestly call atheist. This was in reaction, as the God put before me only convinced me this is not the case where God is concerned. Where is the love? Where is the love? The question I ask over and over where they are concerned. By the time I left the religion, I didn't know the first thing about love except that what I'd seen called love was not love. (I only hit you because I love you. LOL) In the time I thought I really was an atheist, the spirit of God came to me and showed me I was not. That was a surprise. Then showed me it's about love, not tightropes.


Whether or not I fall for the virgin birth has nothing to do with living a life of love with God and the people around me. Calvinist doctrine is nothing at all in relation to love. Doctrine is about control. In my theology, God is love. That's the beginning and the end, the long and the short of it. The gospel in a fortune cookie: Love God and treat other people right. I don't give a shit about virgin birth, supposed-to, better, damnation, free-will or predestination, church, rules or regulations. God is love. Love is not driving back and forth, to and from church in a fury, keeping everybody in the car beat down with brooding silence, silence broken by threats. We looked good all dressed up going to church, doing what we're supposed to do, God's will, smiling, good little sheep, never questioning the grocery store manager in the pulpit, because he didn't have any answers. God doesn't want us to know about things like that, was his answer to my questions.


I'm feeling feisty. I've realized that I brought it to her attention, subconsciously, to square up with mother on my spiritual life in my last days on earth. I've allowed her to believe I think and believe like she does, because she won't have it any other way. It's the easy way. The way of water flow. She really isn't interested. She's right---no two ways about it. She's only interested in whether or not I'm going to hell when I die. The mistake on my part was not foreseeing that she will picture me unrepentant in hell for eternity if she doesn't come to the rescue and browbeat me with her equivalent of the Chinese water torture, never letting up, never letting up, never letting up. She'll be calling the whole church to pray for me, now that I'm going to hell. And I can't help her see it otherwise. For once in my life I have allowed myself to open up with my own personal truth with my mother. When I was little, she told me if I told her the truth she wouldn't punish me. She'd only punish when I lied. That didn't work out even the first time.


First time I told her the truth of whatever the matter was, I got punished. I lied, I didn't get punished. She taught me well. Being punished every time I told the truth, she taught me to stop telling her the truth about anything. So I stopped. She didn't want to hear it. This was the first time I've let her in on one of my own truths. She couldn't handle it even worse than I'd imagined in worst-case scenario projection. She'll just have to see me burning in hell fire for eternity, unrepentant, unsaved although saved, for refusing to ally myself with nonsense. It doesn't make a bit of difference to me how she projects me. I was just thinking maybe, once, before I depart the body, I could let my mother in on my own vision of my spiritual path and she'd be interested. Shoulda lied.


*

A LIFE IN RACISM

      maya lin, civil rights monument, montgomery, alabama

Reading in Howard Zinn's The People's History of the United States. I wanted to start at the place where I first became aware of our collective dream show of "what's going on," the Kennedy assassination. I'd paid a little attention before, but not enough to mention, like the Kennedy vs Nixon debate, which was just another tv show. I remember how exciting it was to have a "young" president who could count all the fingers on his hands and a lot more. Kennedy's charisma was the great attention grabber. Though he was not, he seemed to be sympathetic with the 99%. Soon after the assassination I was inducted into the Navy. I paid attention to current events because I was interested in the struggle of the black people. I believed it was valid and necessary, necessary for all people. The black struggle was the first political subject I took an interest in. I felt it was urgent and important for the black people to be accorded at least close to equal rights in court, a good place to start. I don't know about prejudice. Some people both sides of the fence have it. Racism comes from so deep in our roots and goes back so far, I don't even think about going up against such a dark behemoth. I can't stop it or change it. The best I can do is not be it.



In the early years of integration, it was strange. When I went into the 7th grade, the black kids, who before had taken buses to a black school, Sumner in Kansas City, Kansas, suddenly had to go to the white school and they were scared. I'd known some black kids in my early years, and we were friendly-like, but with immense distrust between us. They knew better than to trust a white kid to treat them like they're human, and I didn't know anything about them except cliches I'd heard from my grandfather, and not much of that. Pre-school, maybe age 3, my mother took a train from KC to the Marine base in NC because the war was over and daddy came home. Shortly afterward, I went on the train with grandmother to see daddy in E North Carolina. Mother and I lived in base housing, a tiny trailer. Two black women did the cleaning in our cluster of trailers. One of them I had a real connecting friendship with, so it seemed to a toddler. She was wonderful to me and I always looked forward to seeing her. My first experience with the race. My first experience outside immediate family.



Later, when daddy was out of the Marines, we fell into a house close to where he had grown up in Argentine, just up the hill from Argentine high school, close to the football stadium. I was playing on the front porch, age 4, and a black woman walked down the alley beside the house to get to her home that was down the alley a ways, then down the hill a ways. A nice spot surrounded by woods. We talked when I saw her. One day I asked her why she was brown. She told me that when the Lord made her he had run out of soap. This was 1946. I didn't know what to make of that, but adults said a lot I couldn't figure out. Parents and grandparents thought it was so cute that little TJ asked the nigger why she was colored. I hated what they did with it. For me, it was a moment of real conversation with my new neighbor, a nice old dark skinned woman. I was already disposed to like her, because of her blackness, because my experience before was so good between two people who make eye contact and notice one another. Like in the John Prine song, "Hello in there." She was black, I was a little kid, nobody saw black people and nobody saw kids, but we saw each other. I thought she was special.



 By the time I reached the 7th grade in 1954, the year of integration, I knew some black people just from a few people that lived nearby. Plus, walking through the black section going to the movie theater I saw the same people over and over. We spoke and nodded. As far as I could tell, they were no less human than me. The men were terribly depressed, but I didn't know that's what it was at the time. The tough looking guys weren't friendly, but the older people were. I wanted to know them, but they were taboo. I was also afraid, because I was in the territory of black kids my age and if they chose to they could kick my ass. It was the same in the Mexican neighborhood. All through grade school, my best friend was a Mexican, Mitchell Ledesma, who had been kicked out of Catholic school and exiled to public school. All his Mexican friends left Catholic school after the 6th grade, so in 7th grade he had his Mexican friends. We were still friends, but our friendship faded and we each drifted back into our own cultures by 8th grade.



A year after high school, this time in Wichita, Kansas, I had fallen in with people of liberal thinking, people who believed black people deserve basic American rights. Walked in a Fair Housing march, 1961 probably. My grandparents were visiting that weekend. On Sunday morning my picture was on the front page of the paper, easy to spot. I pointed to it for grandpa. He said, "Boy, I oughta shoot you." I said, "I know where the shotgun is. I'll get it for you." Grandmother said, "You boys, now cut it out." When I left parents, I left the baptist religion same day. My mother is one who will hound you with the same question all your life until you simply tell her to stop it. In this time, I didn't know telling her to stop it would work. She forever wanted to know if I'd found a church. So I went to a Unitarian church, thinking it as far away from baptist as I could get and not go Catholic. I had been reading about Thoreau and civil disobedience. I was getting to know varieties of people, not just white working class baptists. I've been interested in people of other cultures, other races, other parts of the world, other experiences from mine, all along the way. I'm wondering if that experience with the black cleaning woman in faraway North Carolina motivated my interest in the cause.



It was the beginning of the time I started making my own decisions. I'd known black kids from the 7th grade on to the 12th, liked the ones I knew. In gym class the guy exactly my size and weight I had to wrestle with when we did wrestling was a black guy whose name is gone. He kept a pint of liquor in his locker and stayed lit through school. He smelled pretty bad and was easy to beat, because he didn't care. He never got in trouble for drinking, because school authorities didn't care what the niggers did. Just don't attract attention to yourselves. Though integration was forced, the black kids were not comfortable being minorities in white schools. They had to cling together in gangs for self-defense, and once they become a gang, they become a threat, and round and round it goes. White people win, black people lose. Again. They're used to it. I liked my wrestling friend about as good as I liked any of my friends in high school. I thought he was brave and bold to drink in school. Of course, it meant he had no future. He had no future anyway. School's boring if you're not looking to college; if you're looking at a lifetime of being shut out because you're black, then school isn't worth the time of even appearing for class. He was a sharp guy, and I felt for him that he had no hope.



In my own beginnings, I wanted to join the bandwagon to help the black people and let them see not all white people are the same. Black Panthers came along and the fake friendliness that went with integration went POOF. Hostile attitudes started coming to the surface. I saw this is not my struggle. I have my own to tend to. I decided then that the way I'll do my part to express my support of the American ideal, equal rights for all, is make every encounter with someone black the same as with someone white, if they'll let me. Some won't. Ok. Whatever. If they don't want to allow that I'm ok with them, I can't help it. Black Panthers going into white liberal gatherings in the North with shotguns demanding money for reparations made me laugh. When I saw those bits of news during that trend of Panthers demanding (demand was the verb of the time), I'd think: Try that in a First Baptist church in the South. That extreme swing of the pendulum didn't last. We got a few good books out of the time by Eldridge Cleaver, George Jackson, Malcom X and some others. There is so much anger running both ways now that the best I can do is stay out of all of it. Now I just see people I know and people I don't know. I've lived long enough to see there is no difference between races except the culture that goes with them, which is the same as a collective personality, and that's easy to translate.



*

SEEING LITTLE PEOPLE

air bellows gap air current




Pink and gray 1955 Ford convertible. In that year of pink and gray cars and blond furniture, friends of my parents, Jack and DeLouris, had both. I thought they were so cool. Rock & roll was kicking off with Bill Haley & the Comets, Chuck Berry, Little Richard. Delouris liked the new music too. I was in the 7th grade when Elvis's first movie came out, then Elvis Presley--his last name hadn't been dropped yet, Love Me Tender, I think it was called. Love me tender, love me sweet, love me like you love your feet, take the dirt between your toes and rub it on your big fat nose. My sister was 5 years younger in the 2nd grade when this verse went around that she brought home. Generations later, a girl who now is mid twenties and then was a child thought it amusing to sing, pretty woman walking down the street, pretty woman I can smell your feet.





In both cases I'm amused remembering that time in myself how funny feet were. My sister and I would say to each other, smell my feet, stinkin feet. As an adult I can't find anything humorous about feet in such a way. Our daddy had stinking feet. I think it was because he wore his shoes two sizes too small. In every generation of children's humor, feet are one of the really funny subjects. In this time of showers and easy water, there probably isn't much stinking feet going around. I expect in the old days, grandpa who worked the farm and only took a bath once a week had some pretty rich feet. We're more particular about our scents in this time. One of the delights about DeLouris for a kid was she got a kick out of knowing kids. She'd laugh at kid jokes, listen to what's important that a kid had to say, and Jack was the same. I wanted them to be my real parents, though I'm not sure that would have worked.




Pink and gray together always bring Jack & DeLouris to mind for their 1955 classic car that was classic when it was new. And they had one. In the 7th grade starting to pay attention to cars and style and music and keeping up with what's cool, I couldn't go see Elvis Presley's movie, Love Me Tender, because I needed parents for transportation and they weren't going to a ridiculous movie with Elvis the Pelvis in it. "He won't last." They were put out that rock&roll was squeezing out Sinatra, big band, Andrews Sisters, and the kid was listening to that screaming Little Richard. They could take most of it, even hip-shakin Elvis, but drew the line at Little Richard. I could only play him when they were not in the house.




The other kids in 7th grade were seeing the new Elvis Presley movie and talking about it in school, how it made the girls cry, how great it was. I was aching to see it, because I thought he was great--Heartbreak Hotel, Love Me Tender, two of the coolest songs I'd ever heard at age 13. Jack and DeLouris took me to see it. DeLouris and I cried when Elvis was shot and died at the end. Oh no. Dead Elvis. I don't even want to think about seeing it now, but then, it was art to a kid just discovering pop culture. Also discovered at the same time MAD Magazine, which started as a comic book until the comic-code was initiated to get rid of it. It went to magazine and is still funny as it was then. DeLouris thought it was funny too. Jack and DeLouris were my friends until they both died, Jack of cancer, and DeLouris of old age.


They were very important people of my childhood. Very important. They were adults that paid attention to a kid who was only waist high, easy to overlook. I wondered why it was that more adults didn't pay attention to kids like kids really are conscious people. In my adult life, Jack & DeLouris are an ongoing example of how important it is to pay attention to a kid. I don't always do it. In fact, I'm like the majority when it comes to not paying attention to kids. Now and then, however, I get to know a kid from knowing the parents. When I know a kid like that, I extend myself to them, let them see I'm open to pay attention to their interests. That's when I start seeing their intelligence. Some years ago when my friends were having babies, I'd sit on the floor and roll a ball back and forth, ask them about their toys. That's all it took. They run off and return with an armload of toys, spread them on the floor and tell me the story of every one. I've regarded those moments among the most precious of my life that I'd have missed by only looking over the top of a kid's head, probably would have missed had I not known Jack & DeLouris.


DeLouris and my mother were friends in high school, Shawnee Mission in Kansas City, Kansas. DeLouris's mother, who had her own apartment in the other half of the house, was from Charlotte NC and cousin to Billy Graham. My mother loved it. DeLouris hated it. My mother became what we call a church nut and DeLouris couldn't humor the extreme my mother became, and my mother couldn't go on being friends with an unrepentant sinner who drank beer. They eventually fell out and Jack & DeLouris fell away from my life. Many years later I got back in touch with them and visited a few times. We drifted apart, but continued to have our places in each other's hearts. That will always remain. Kids I've been friends with are grown up now and continue as valued friends. It's a wonderful thing, watching kids you care about grow up and go through all they have to go through in their teens and twenties; marriage, babies, debt. Now I'm knowing their kids. I remember Selma Diamond on the Tonight Show, the only time I'd ever seen her or heard of her, talking about baby-sitting and how much she loved it. Carson expressed dismay. She said, "Children are just little people." That's as precise a definition as I can think of.



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