BIRD IN THE HOUSE

morris graves

 

A bird flew through the room a little bit ago. I saw a dark blur streak through the room in a straight line like an arrow from the open door to the door opposite to another room with a window. It was such a faint blur that caught the corner of my eye, I wasn't sure if it was a figment in my eye or actually a bird. Didn't hear it hit the window, but had an idea it would be there. Looked. Sure enough, a young thrasher with a mix of baby feathers and adult feathers. Sometimes birds are easy to catch in a window and sometimes not. The screen door was half open for Caterpillar to come and go. I opened the screen door all the way in case I could not catch the bird, to give it a way out when I scared it and it flew to the next opening the bird saw. It turned out to be an easy bird to catch, perhaps for being so young. An open hand on either side of it, I gently closed in on its frantic fluttering in the window's corner, embracing the bird rather than grabbing it. One of its wings was off to the side between two fingers. I opened the hand enough to give the bird a chance to pull the wing to its side. I did not want to hurt a wing. Wing in place, hands closed in around the beautiful bird with such a long tail, held it loose in the cups of both hands, a small sphere the bird could move easily inside and not feel the panic of being grabbed, caught.

 

morris graves

 

I closed fingers in front of the bird so it could not see. Birds calm down immediately when they can't see. This includes chickens. The bird settled right down while I walked it to the open door. I stepped outside and opened my hands. Bird flew in a beautiful straight line out of my hand. I was happy it was such an easy one to catch. An experienced bird will not let me close enough to it to reach it with hands. It flies to another window or something up high it can land on, like a picture frame. I close the entrances to other rooms, leaving only the door to outside open. I will keep the bird in motion with a walking stick or broom handle. Either right away or eventually, the bird will land in a place where it can see the open doorway. The door standing open closes the sight of the opening to half the room. Bird in a good place to see the doorway, I leave it alone, let it sit there, let its blood pressure settle, wait for it to calm down and assess its surroundings. Once I feel like the bird is situated in its mind and calm inside, I clap my hands once. It flies straight out the door.

 

morris graves

 

In my early time here, a bird came into the house and I felt like I had to catch it. What madness that created. I'd keep the bird in motion until it wore itself out, flying from window to window not so energetic, then capture it in a window corner. I tried letting them find the door on their own, but they don't. They hunker down in a place they feel safe and stay there. I also learned the longer one stays in the house, the greater the risk of a streak of white bird shit down a painting on the wall. It better be cleaned up while it's wet, too. The first attempt to catch the bird doubled as a gesture to set it in motion if unable to capture it. I don't like to stress them too much and really don't want to hurt one. Over time, I've learned the easy way is the best way, and the easy way is to understand, first, the bird is conscious, it has a mind. Now, when I can't catch one, I gently assist it, allowing it to use its own mind, give it time to figure things out, let it read the room and find the open door. Just a clap of the hands, something to startle it into motion, it makes a bee line out the door.

 

morris graves

 

My hillbilly grandmother taught me about birds all through childhood. She kept a beautiful male canary songbird in a cage by the window. She loved canary song. And she loved her birds. She had an especially good male singer and she borrowed a hen canary from a friend of hers and a larger cage for them. They mated and we watched five baby canaries grow up. She gave me one I named Chi Chi, she kept one, the one with a weak leg she called Spraddle,  and gave the others to her friends, one to the woman, Mattie, she borrowed the hen from. Parakeets came along and she kept a parakeet in a cage too. Then I had to have a parakeet. Named it Davy Crockett, the coolest kid show on tv. My mother grew so weary of hearing the kid say Davy Crockett over and over trying to teach the bird to say its name, she made me change the name. She could not hear Davy Crockett one more time. Grandmother kept chickens too, Cochin banties, and I made pets of them. Walking home from school, I'd call to them from a block away. The whole flock ran up the street to greet me. I had to pick them up, one at a time, on the way to the house, gathered around my feet, hopping up and down, waiting for their moment to be held. I feel fortunate that grandmother passed to me her love for birds. Now, I live in the cage and watch the birds outside.      

 

morris graves himself

 

 

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REMEMBERING UNCLE MILTON

edward hopper

I saw the date just now, shocked to see it the end of June. Last I recall was coming to terms with it being the middle of June, and before that, the first of June. It's like looking at the moon one night seeing a crescent. A couple weeks later, what seems like next night, I look at the moon and it's full. And sometimes it feels like every other day is Friday. I've gone into the zone where I have to ask the date every time I write a check at the grocery store or hardware store. One day bleeds into the next. Took a nap at six this evening, woke at 8 thinking it morning. The light was the same as 8 in the morning. I was thinking this is Sunday, will go see the race later. Got up, thinking about taking carrots to the donkeys, and realized, stepping into shoes, it's night, not morning. Groggy, boiling water for some tea, the phone rang. It was mother. I sounded like something out of a Rob Zombie nightmare. Sipped a cup of tea while we talked and gradually was able to talk without sounding like a giant clam blowing bubbles from the bottom of the ocean.

edward hopper

She was shocked by a picture she saw of me on facebook, white hair and white face hair. She said I looked like her grandfather Forster. I had a feeling she would say somebody on the Forster side. She said I even look like her uncle Milton, her mother's brother. I knew Milton in early childhood. It was uncle Milton who told me when I was 4 that if he ever heard of me sucking my thumb again, he'd take a butcher knife and chop it off. He added my mother would tell him. I knew she would. I was boxed. Nothing to do but stop. I was afraid of uncle Milton and crazy about him too. He was good to kids and cut up to make kids laugh. He had a belly, smoked a big cigar, talked gruff, and I knew he meant business. When uncle Milton spoke, the ground shook. This is from a child's point of view. From an adult point of view, he was a good natured man madly in love with his wife, Pearl, and she was in love with her man. They were regulars at Tony's bar nearby. To the kid, hanging out at Tony's gave them the golden glow of really neat people. 

edward hopper

Grandpa, Milton's brother-in-law, took me into Tony's a few times, gave me a coke. We sat at the bar. The bartender's name was Tony. It was one of the last neighborhood bars, at 39th and State Line, Kansas City, if I remember correctly, which I don't. It was just over the state line so people from the Kansas side of the line could have beer there easily. It was like an Edward Hopper painting with a golden light in my visual memory. I was Jim Brink's grandson. Everybody was friendly to the kid. Tony's is one of my favorite moments in early childhood memories. The mystery place grandpa and grandma went. They would have been in early forties. I don't have much recollection of Milton's facial features. I remember dark hair, cigar, a WC Fields nose. I'd recognize a photograph of him from that time, but can't call up an image without an assist. I can see him in my mind's eye, but features blurry. I don't recall ever seeing a photo of great grandpa Milton Forster. Uncle Milton was a junior. I had a feeling I'd favor someone from the Forster side. My feeling is my soul connection was with mother. 

edward hopper

Great grandpa Forster, a man I know next to nothing about, has my respect for one thing I know of. My mother's mother was born in a covered wagon, birth certificate at American Falls, Idaho. He had a wagon with kids, a pregnant wife, traveling those long prairie trails and Rocky Mountain passes. Somehow or other they made it back to Garden City, Missouri, just south of Kansas City, where grandmother grew up. Grandmother worked as a waitress and grandpa worked on a golf course making good money as a caddy and later groundskeeper. Grandpa's mother and dad were German immigrants. My feeling is they met on the boat from a German port on the Baltic to New Orleans, a long ride. They took a boat up the Mississippi to the Missouri to the Kansas City area, a stockyard. Jesse James territory and time. Grandpa told me once he grew up in a gang. I thought he meant hanging out with the boys. No, he meant a gang. He and his older brothers were German. They were rough. Probably a gang of German immigrant kids bonding together for protection from the Irish gangs, Mexican gangs, the children of the people who worked the stockyards. They scared the hell outta me the kid. Their grandkids my age scared me too. I might see what I can uncover about great grandpa Forster. 

edward hopper himself

*

GRANDMOTHER VISITS IN THUNDER SHOWER

The rain, as we say around here, is just getting it, though the way it's spoken, is jist a-gittin it, sounds better, has momentum, iambic emphases. If it were "just getting it," it would not be a sayin' used by 'bout ever-body for its flat tone. "Jist a-gittin it" means it is raining hard, lightning, thunder, a thunder shower, not a thunder storm. I associate storms with wind. This is a straight down rain, lightning and loud thunder. Lightning rumbles in the distance as the cloud passes through. I felt no danger from the lightning, traced it by sound moving from west to east a few miles north of the house. It sounded like it was following the air flow over Wilkes Gap that follows highway 18. The rain has ended now. It is a day of clouds in motion. Rain fell earlier, cleared up and sun came out. Sun may be back after this rain. I like this kind of rain. Fewer people use the old expressions every year. Younger generations grew up on school grammar and television. The old-time grammar don't sound right no more. My grandmother spoke the old way. I was discouraged from saying aint, and them for those, by mother who did not want her kid sounding like a hick, especially her mother-in-law. She, in her family, was the first generation not to grow up on a farm. First generation city girl growing up in the Twenties and Thirties. Home influence and school influence had me believing city life was the only valid existence, until I learned I'd jist-a-soon go with the country people.  

I thought of grandmother, Christina (Tina) Marie, the sanest one in the family. I don't think anybody liked her, except me. She was head-strong, opinionated, gossipy, had a way of talking about people I had to train out of self when I went on to live in the world. It truly is an unbecoming trait. Having purged self of such talk, it sounds awkward and odd when I hear someone talking down about others. I expect she got it from her mother. It's a kind of smugness about self from a higher station than others. Ego. I learned after growing up, my mother didn't like her at all. She probably rued her mother-in-law's influence on the kid. The last time I saw mother, I said once in conversation my grandmother "was the most important person in my life." I don't know what she made of it. She didn't volunteer an opinion, nor did I ask. It was something I realized after living in the mountains most of my adult life, grandmother's influence on who I am is extensive. She was philosophically minded, which she passed to me and I appreciate. She taught me practical, everyday life morality. Church and home morality amounted to, no, don't, and you-better-not. No explanation of why, just punishment. The preacher sez. Grandmother taught me the why behind moral behavior. She was a great teacher for a lonely kid whose destiny was to go into the wilderness in search of the way of the spirit. 

Her family had moved to Kansas about forty years before she was born. She had several brothers and sisters grown and gone before she was born, and she had a younger sister, Aunt Ciller. Two of her brothers were fiddlers and one of them is said to have traded horses with Sitting Bull. She was the one to tell me, so I trust it. Her parents went to Kansas from eastern Kentucky, Pulaski County. They grew up in mountain culture, carried it with them in their home. I can tell, because their girl grew up a hillbilly. I visited some fourth cousins in Perry, Kansas, where she lived before getting married and moving to the city. Perry was always home. I was told very cautiously by one of the cousins that nobody liked her. It was ok. I assured him I anticipated it. None of her kids liked her, either. They only tolerated her. Evidently, she was a mean mother, ill-natured with a wicked tongue. I told them my experience with her was grandmother. She knew I wasn't getting any training at home, and I believe she took it upon herself to train this child, teach it a thing or two, like no rubber-necking in church and how to take care of birds, including chickens. Taught me how to transplant an iris, day lily, anything, and it live. She taught me appreciation for the plant world. We worked puzzles together. I listened to Grand Ole Opry with her. 

When my role is called up yonder, she's the first one I want to meet. I want to say to her, "I finally got it." Meaning, I finally got the music she liked, old-time fiddle & banjo music and the Carter Family. I watched Kate Smith with grandmother, who was shaped something like Kate Smith. We both loved to hear her sing, When the moon comes over the mountain. I loved the song as much as grandmother did. Watched Lawrence Welk with her on her seven inch tv and thought it wonderful, him with his exotic foreign accent and accordion, guests that sang so good. And the kid discovered rock n roll. There was the time the kid was nutty over Teresa Brewer's new song, Jambalaya, or something like that. I showed grandmother a picture of Teresa Brewer. She said, "Her face looks like a cat's ass." I didn't agree, but never saw the picture again without seeing a cat's ass. She let me see Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show on her tiny tv. It was better than nothing. I could get up close, wouldn't be in her way. The kid was deeply grateful she let me watch Elvis on her tv. I've wondered who she is now, have we met? I've never felt it. She may have chosen to be one of her great-grandkids I've never met, or not. I've enjoyed this visit with grandmother, remembering her so closely. I thank the rain shower for bringing her.  

photos by tj worthington

*

A SELF-CREATED DESTINY

larry rivers

Questioning the destiny of being a reader in a world of nonreaders, like everyone in my extended family and nearly everyone I know, I wonder where I got it and why it stuck. I can remember being read to by mommy at bedtime. Daddy came home from the war and that was the end of mommy reading to baby in fourth year. With him in the house, mommy shut down and baby shut down. A raging ego was in the house demanding all attention for himself, how it stayed until I was able to get away and find my own life. First rule for self: never need to be center of attention. In the last years of high school, I moved to the garage where I found my peace and could read. I listened to jazz and mother complained that the noise coming from my room sounded like a night club. Rock n roll was new in my teens. Parents, hating the music I listened to, told me, Elvis won't last. Frank Sinatra and Glenn Miller will last. Glenn Miller is music. Whatever. Out from under their control, I rented an apartment and read just about all the time I was not working. Didn't know what I should be reading, so I read books from paperback racks that looked like I might like them, best-sellers of the time. Then, one day I walked into a bookstore, feeling like I was in a world foreign to any I'd ever experienced. The memory of it is kind of ghostly. I remember the light in the place. I found Allen Ginsburg's Howl and Other Poems, a turning point. 

dan flavin

I couldn't make out what any of it was about, but the language was familiar, the language I used instead of convoluted Nineteenth Century poetry as remote to an American teenager as Bible times. Emily Dickenson, Longfellow, even Walt Whitman said nothing to me, though Allen Ginsburg spoke my own thoughts in my own language. Eventually, I came to laugh at Ginsburg as an American poet, and later, when that arrogance subsided, came to appreciate him again, this time with some understanding. Saw him perform once in Birmhingham, Alabama, at Birmingham Southern. I wanted to transfer there, drawn to the Deep South mystique. The South has had a mystique for me from as far back as I can recollect. I don't mean the politics. The politics in the South is as dumb as everywhere else. I sometimes think about being born in some unforeseen place next lifetime. Where would I like? All places have a dark side balancing the light side. The only place on earth that has a mystique for me in later years like the South had in the early years is a Tibetan community of northeastern India. As with the attraction to the South, it's so romantic a notion it bears questioning extensively before committing. It could be fun acquiring a taste for Tibetan tea that makes Westerners gag. As for next lifetime, I'd rather leave it to karma and see what turns up. If karma chose this last go-round, I needed some serious grounding at the start. If I chose it, I lost confidence in making a rational decision for self. 

By now, having at least become acquainted with the soul, innermost self, I'm beginning to have maybe a keyhole peek into soul, itself?, myself?. Exploring the threads of destiny running through the life from first understandings, seeing them weave into patterns, reading the patterns as clearly as in a book by Chris Hedges, I see the tracks like deer trails in the forest leading to the present moment. The first twenty-three years kept the kid tied up in knots within, the kind of knots it takes a magician untie. Out of the Navy, I'd fulfilled all the you-gottas I was born into. It was a Friday. On Monday, I started school. It just worked out that way. A moment in the flow that told me, in retrospect, I was on the right track. At the moment, the weekend was the chop on the chopping block that freed self to start the healing process of untying the knots for the rest of the life, half a continent away from other people making my decisions. I became so jealous of living by my own decisions, I got the name of being remote. The process of untying interior knots became my purpose, the only purpose I completely committed to. I wanted mental/emotional health, wanted to read, to learn. There has never been a day I've missed anything that went before the chopping block weekend, but my hillbilly grandmother. 

I don't mean I deny all that went before, I just don't dwell there but to attempt to understand the kid that constructed a shell around self, a fence, to keep out anti-rational influence. I'm glad I was in school during the transition years. It gave ground to stand on while I simultaneously did my wild-thang, drank more liquor than in all the years since. Worked in a bookstore, the ideal. Thought I'd stay with it after school, the corporate bookstores shut down the small bookstores, nothing left to do but find something to do. Came to a place I realized I don't make good decisions for self. One Tuesday afternoon at lunch, it came to me I've gone nowhere by my own decision making. Decided to let chance have it. Chance could only be better at making decisions than my sorry ego. It was like turning on the ignition. Day after day, I just allowed whatever was happening to be, became aware of consciousness in apparent chance, going by events during the day. Came to a place I wanted to step out of my life for an unknown number of days, to think about things, assess, restart. By chance I learned about Meher Baba's Center, between Myrtle Beach Hilton and North Myrtle Beach, between highway 17 and the beach, 500 acres of virgin forest with the path of the King's Highway running through it. A year later, by chance, I jumped on an opportunity to caretake a farm in the Blue Ridge year round. At the time, I thought of it as therapy. Turned out it was good medicine.  

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DECIPHERING DESTINY

karl horst hodicke

Looking back at how and why I came to where I am, living in solitude in Blue Ridge Mountains, specifically the central Blue Ridge, it looks like divine destiny from forty years after. Yet, at the time, I only knew place as rural. It felt more like stepping into the unknown than some high sounding word like destiny, like I know what destiny means. Bob Dylan defined destiny as, briefly, what one already knows about oneself. Whatever that means. I feel like it gives me something to go by, a place to start looking. From my own point of view it was arbitrary as spinning a quarter on a tabletop and betting on which side turns up. I knew woods were plentiful and the people were old-timey. Purpose, manual labor on a farm as caretaker, somebody who had never cut down a tree or driven a tractor. I learned fast. Every fall I had to cut firewood for four houses through the winter. That's a lot of wood. I only cut dead trees, of which there are plenty. We seldom think about trees growing old and dying, but they do. Fallen tree trunks lie everywhere in the forest in varied phases of decay. Some will stand for decades before they fall. I have actually witnessed two locust trees fall over. Each one I just happened to glance at movement that caught my eye in the near distance and it turned out to be a locust tree on its way down. I say, "actually," for it being so rare a thing to see, like witnessing a deer give birth, which I've seen once.

karl horst hodicke

The top of the list of the unforeseen is that I choose to stay here unto my last day. To have been told any time during the first ten years that I'd be here for life, I'd have felt like it was a prison sentence. Right away, it felt like home, familiar in ways I could not make out why. The first familiar was everyone talked like my grandmother Worthington, who grew up in Kansas. I wrote it off to a universally American rural accent. That was as far as I could get making out how it was familiar. The people I met along the way were natured like my grandmother, philosophically minded. I don't mean philosophical like resignation, but thought about questions they had, worked things out reasonably and morally in their minds. My friend Justin is a good example of the old-time mountain way of thinking. He has a conundrum, he goes fishing, works it out in his mind. Last year he had such a conundrum he asked Crystal to allow him to be off to himself a couple of days. He slept in his sleeping bag in the deer blind, stayed to himself, went fishing. By the third day, decision made, he was fresh and ready to go, the burden that had grown onto his back fallen away. Justin's practical sense of morality blows my mind the times I've seen it in action. In this I see him carrying the heart of the mountain way of life as it's fading fast by generations. It was not intimidated into him by church, but worked out in practical everyday life with a philosophical mind. I've seen the same reasoning in the people gone now of the old culture, Jr Maxwell in particular. They had active philosophical minds. I don't mean they read Kant and Heidegger. Their reading amounted to the Bible, philosophy from front to back. 

karl horst hodicke

I got my philosophical-minded ways from grandmother. By the time of my parents' generation, the Bible was reduced to a book of rules you dare not question. My generation of people brought up by religionists value questioning. Many of us questioned our ways out of religion. I reached a place where I saw religion is fake, though was unable to see beyond religion, a projection of the human mind, associating religion with God. I had to let go of God. Soon after, I found that God indeed is, but not much like I got from religion, besides verses the preacher never interpreted to my satisfaction, like, God is love. In the church I came up in, God hated an awful lot and was the Supreme Judge. Of course, the white people were God's chosen, specifically American with English names. For many years I disliked my name because it was too much like a name on an office door. I had a problem with that until one day I realized my name does not make me, I make my name. My name means who I am. To some it means an arrogant asshole, to some it means a jackass whisperer, to some somewhat likable, to some a friend. The name appears to be destined for an office door, but not necessarily. I never had an inner need for my name on a door. What I wanted for myself, without knowing it, was to be where I am now. In childhood, my grandmother was my comfort. Also, with extensive woods nearby, the canopy of trees were my other comfort. With her and in the woods were the places I could be who I am.

karl horst hodicke

My relationships with adults amounted to obedience. With grandmother, it mattered that I was a sentient being who thought about things and wanted to learn. In the woods, I felt the closeness of the world of nature. I knew the renewing quality of a canopy of trees. I learned after about thirty years in the mountains that my grandmother's parents moved to Kansas from Pulaski County, Kentucky, southeastern Kentucky, explaining her accent and her philosophical mind. Even before realizing she was a transplanted hillbilly, I had referred to these mountains as grandmother's arms. The woods, the trees, I need like a bird needs feathers. This is my destiny, the place my parachute landed me, in a little empty house on a back road, a place I can walk among trees all day long and never be far from home. In my early years, people from Away would want me to drive a couple hours to someplace to go hiking in the mountains. I only went once out of curiosity and found the same as I have here someplace else. Never felt the need to go hiking. I step out the door, cross the road and I'm on a path in the woods beside a mountain stream. I've walked all over the woods of Air Bellows and some beyond with the dog of my life, Sadie. She came to me already named or I would have called her Louise. So she was Sadie Louise. My destiny turned out to be the places of my childhood I felt safe, the places I felt were real in an unreal world. How I found the place that is just right for who I am by a seeming throw of the die is beyond my ability to see.

karl horst hodicke

*

BORED BY WHITE PRIDE

max ernst

Saw a thing on facebook promising this could change the way I think. I couldn't click on it. It looked like something like a hugging contest. Something unexpectedly sweet. I couldn't go there, whatever it was. The intro that it's about changing the way I think did it for me. Not that I reject having the way I think changed. I'm always open to adjusting, fine tuning my thinking. I already know my thinking is based in illusion, mixing details, facts, trends, beliefs I'm unaware of, connecting the dots in my head into a skyscraper of cards. Every card a bit of misinformation, inaccurate details, images arranged into a construction composed by my own attitude toward life. What does some person on facebook who never heard of me know about my thinking? The presumption that I think a certain way is what turned me off. How does that person know I don't already think the way he's making a case for? And what if I don't? I'm half tempted go take a look at what it has to say, but refuse to. It brings to mind somebody saying a sentimental act of common decency restored their faith in humanity. Every time I hear it, I think, but cannot say, If that's all it took to restore your faith in humanity, it must not have taken much to lose it. The American madness to change other people's thinking is totally out of bounds in my way of seeing plain decency. The church I grew up in tried to convince me it was my duty to browbeat everyone I know about changing their way of thinking to the only way, the right way, the way the preacher at the church thought. I wouldn't want to lay that on anybody, God as Fear and Punishment. I had to shed that mind. It took fifteen years by school education and self-education by reading and paying attention to the people I know.  

max ernst

Since childhood, I've wanted through the course of my life to know people from different backgrounds, social circumstances, from the poor to the rich, from religious to non-religious, from pastoral people, who live by supposed-to, to ex-convicts and foreigners, Yankees too. I've been fascinated by the varieties of humanity since as far back as I can remember, always interested in people of different cultures, different nationalities, different races, different languages. I even like knowing cops. I believe our Sparta town police, now, are honorable people. It hadn't always been that way. My best friend through grade school was American-Mexican. He was as American as I was, but he was Mexican. My mother worked sometimes in a TG&Y store as accountant. We'd go pick her up after work. A Mexican girl in high school worked there, Juanita. I loved Juanita. I still love the name. She knew that Mitchell was my friend. I loved the Mexican in her. That she was Catholic fascinated me too. I was like a l dog following her around listening to her talk. I asked her once to say something in Spanish. She asked what I wanted her to say. I couldn't think of anything and we laughed. I had Mexican friends all the way through school. I didn't care that it made me suspect to the other white kids. The Mexicans were far more interesting to me than the white Baptist kids. I also did not like the way they were shut out by the white kids. I extended myself to them, wanting to know them, appreciating them as themselves, liking them especially for being different from the suffocating pride of whiteness. White arrogance toward people I knew to be valid human beings made me ashamed of my white privilege. 

max ernst

In the Navy, my friends were the black guys. I was on an old WW2 destroyer that was sold to Brazil soon after I was released. It could run, and it could ride the waves. It took a 90 degree roll one night and uprighted. I loved how the ship rode the waves. In the very worst times when three-quarters of the crew were out with sea-sickness and and puke was everywhere, I kept on going, thinking to self I'd pay for this ride, and it's paying me. I loved it, walking down a hallway bouncing from wall to wall using upper arms for bumpers, going up steps and stepping down what seemed like three feet to step up to the next step, I didn't like the aroma of puke everywhere, on my clothes too, no avoiding it, but I refused to give in to sea-sickness, because riding the waves was my reason for choosing the Navy to stay out of the Army. I loved riding the ocean. The ship had a dozen or more black guys. I liked them the best and enjoyed social times with them. They were people just like me and the other white guys that called me nigger lover. My closest friend on the ship was Muslim, from Boston. One of the guys on the ship from Texas had a cousin who was going with Joe Tex, then a pop singer on the radio. Going onshore, I always went with my black friends. They were the most fun. The white guys went en masse to the sailor bar to drink as much beer as they could and talk big man talk about pussy. With the black guys I went to jazz clubs. They knew where these places were. Had some great jazz club experiences in Europe along the Mediterranean. My friend, Ameen, played jazz piano on the order of Ahmad Jamal, and jazz vibraphone, vibes. We'd go to a club, enjoy the music by good musicians from all over Europe. During intermission he'd introduce himself to the band, we'd drink with the band and talk. Every time, the piano player asked him to play some tunes. His courtesy was never to play more than two.

max ernst

After being acquainted with a fair variety of people, weary of racial tensions, I committed to a white working class community of mountain people, a real culture. As a white dude, I felt most at home among mountain people. I found my grandmother Worthington in them. From early years in these mountains unto now I feel in the mountains as in grandmother's arms. The attitude was hers, the philosophical mind was hers, the colloquialisms were hers, and the feeling was hers. I didn't learn until I'd been here a quarter century that her parents moved to Kansas from east Kentucky, Pulaski County, not long before she was born. Her older brothers and sisters grew up in Kentucky. She grew up in a mountain home, in Kansas. She married a boy whose parents had just moved to Kansas from Ninemile in eastern Tennessee, Bledsoe County. After living here feeling at home in mountain culture as nowhere else, I learned I've got hillbilly blood, lots of it. It was one of the happiest moments in my life to learn I had hillbilly blood on the Worthington side. Great-great grandpa fought for the Confederacy and survived. One of his brothers didn't make it. I felt closest to grandmother in childhood as to any relative. She was my home base. I had fun telling my sisters in Kansas they had hillbilly blood. Throughout my life, I've regretted the divide between races, religions, nationalities in my country. In the grocery store a couple days ago, a black man I'd never seen before came up behind me in line with two items. I invited him to go ahead of me. He was so surprised he looked suspicious, backing up a step. He declined. I said, Go ahead, I'm in no hurry. He did and spoke his gratitude. Mary at the register said that was nice of me. I said, I can't stand to unload my buggy with somebody behind me who has two items. What's the rush? Then realized it was "nice," unexpected, because he was black. I've done the same for white people and got no notice.  

max ernst himself

*

AT HOME IN THE TREES

 

baja rock

Listening to the sounds of the rain falling on leaves, dripping from the roof. It's a light rain. This is one of many aspects I love of letting trees grow up around the house. I walk to and from the car under a canopy of trees; wild cherry, red oak, white oak, maple, mountain dogwood, white pine, and closer to the ground, big rhododendron, jewelweed, varieties of ferns, wild violets, jack in the pulpits, turk's cap lilies, spring beauties, goose neck, bloodroot, goats beard. Some I have planted, most I let take up of their own accord. I've heard jewelweed is invasive, but I don't care. It has a beautiful orchid-like flower designed specifically for hummingbirds. They're called touch-me-nots for their seed pod that springs open when touched and flings the seeds in all directions. Donkeys love jewelweed. Sometimes I give them each a jewelweed plant for dessert after carrots. Its comic to watch them eat the plant. Every munch pulls it further in like Jabba the Hutt chomping on Princess Leah in his dreams. A crow left a wing feather for me yesterday on the rock walkway half way between door and donkey gate. Donkeys in the meadow attract crows to eat the larvae growing in old donkey droppings. I put sunflower seeds out for crows near the mailbox in a place they can see up the road in both directions. I like having crows around. I like hearing them, seeing them, watching them. My impulse is to want to tame them not to fly away when they see me, but we live in a world of people with guns that use crows for target practice. I want them to maintain their wariness about humans. My crows know I'm their friend. That's good enough to satisfy wanting to know them like I know donkeys. In the morning I throw the seeds over the gravel area at the side of the road and call them with two caws. The donkeys hear it and gather at the gate, knowing carrot time is next.

 

squirrel run

 

The beings of what we call the natural world, like we're not, like we think we're separate from it, delight me. My grandmother taught me to take care of goldfish, guppies, canaries, parakeets. In childhood time we had "dime stores," like Woolworths, TG&Y, Kress, and so on. They sold parakeets and fish in the late Forties and early Fifties. The times I went in to buy a parakeet, I asked to be the one to catch the bird; the people working in the stores didn't know anything about birds. I knew how to get the one I wanted easily, pick it up with its wings folded at its sides, hold it gently without pressure, but don't let it get away. I did the same with fish. I could easily net the fish I wanted. Guppies gave me my pre-pubescent sex education. Before I came to the mountains I kept two aquariums with lights only. No water filter, none of the colored chunks of coral. Only sand on the bottom with water plants growing in the sand. Each aquarium maintained 23 swordtails. The plants cleaned the bottom and made oxygen. Only added water, never changed it. I netted a mosquito fish male and several hundred mosquito bites in a roadside pond near Georgetown, SC, and put him in with the swordtails. He bred several generations until I had an aquarium of mosquito fish, swordtail crosses. When one of the females had babies, most of them were eaten, though some survived to fill in for old ones dying out. They, too, would be eaten. The mountain home is not a good one for keeping a constant temperature year round. I don't keep indoor plants or fish or birds anymore. Brought a couple of parrots that lived quite awhile here. I called them The Flying Wazos. Made a big cage for them. Plants are growing all around the house, everywhere. I don't need house plants. Birds are everywhere. My windows are loaded with birds. Now with donkeys in the meadow I can see crows out the window too. Caterpillar is not a threat to birds anymore. She just lies still and watches them.    

 

donkey fence

 

I'm partial to my crows. I've learned that crows live in family groups. When you see a small group of crows flying, half dozen, more or less, it's immediate family, mom, dad and the sibs. Crows don't wean their babies. They stay together in a family. When a young crow finds a mate, they start a new family. Several families make a tribe. You see the tribes in late summer and fall gleaning corn fields after harvest. It's quite amazing to drive around a curve, come into view of a huge mown cornfield and see hundreds of crows fly into the sky. I've listened to different friends tell about shooting flocks of crows with a shotgun, shooting the crow standing in the top of a tree on lookout, and another will take its place, shoot it, another takes its place. Laughing telling these tales of target practice, killing nigger chickens. Yep, that's another name they have. I don't call them that. But plenty of my friends do. I don't run with a bad lot, all together, just country people doing what country people have always done, killing everything that's living. I came to the mountains what James Dickey called a rural romantic. I'd just realized God is, and wanted to live rurally in a living world where everything, almost, was growing, had life in it. By then I knew that God was in the leaf and in the raindrop that made it dance. I knew God was in the brick and glass city, too, but in a more inert form. I wanted to live in a world where everything around me was alive. I like having bears and mountain lions, bobcats, copperheads, blacksnakes, watersnakes, coyotes, coons, squirrels, birds, crows. Country crows are different from city crows. I'm surprised in a city when I see crows walking around where people go. When you come into sight of a country crow, it's gone with a call to its relatives: CROW KILLER ALERT. If I let the thought carry me, I can become ashamed easily in the face of the wildlife around me. Everything is mortified of me for being a human. I open the door at night and a possum runs for its life. They can scoot, too.

 

rocks at the base of a maple tree

 

Squirrels used to dash up a tree, run through the canopy to trees the other side of the house. Now, a squirrel will sit in tree fork five or six feet above the ground and watch me go by while nibbling a sunflower seed. Chickadees chirp to me from branches just out of reach. Hey, Ice Cream Man. How you doin, Ice Cream Man. This is how I want to live. This is how I love living. During times when a coon throws the top of the birdfeeder to the ground in the night, I don't wait for it with a shotgun the next night. I just put the lid back on in the morning. It's just a piece of board. No problem. My birdfeeders are communal. Anybody passing through can have a snack at will. Squirrels dine at the feeders, but they don't dominate. Big birds, little birds, all have their moment. The "natural" world I've noticed believes in sharing. Left to themselves, without attempting to prohibit squirrels or night marauders, bluejays get along with the smaller birds, nobody hogs the feeders. I don't leave anything in a squirrel-proof apparatus to get mad about in the morning when I see a coon destroyed it. I put out a day's supply every morning. The squirrels and chipmunks have enough middens of sunflower seeds for several winters. The seeds are for the well-being of my neighbors. Good oil for their joints, their feathers and fur, which they're all vain about as we humans are our hair. This is why I'm never lonely at home. I have friends all around me from wild violets to donkeys outside, cat and facebook inside. There are times I need to be around people, and I do. Get in the car and go. Over years of adhering to my spiritual purpose of being in the mountains, I have trimmed down the people I spend time with to people I care about who care about me. That leaves me quite a large number. Many I seldom see or never see. Facebook helps keep me in touch with friends in Florida, New Mexico, Georgia, California, New York, all over the place, people I can't see. I've surrounded myself with an outdoor aquarium in the place I call the home of my soul.  

 

the view out the front door

 

 

*

      



AN ANGEL UNAWARES

ai weiwei

 

Earlier this evening, my friend Lizz Jones asked me on facebook to list ten of the more significant books of my reading life. Wow, I thought. How do you do that? I looked at her list to get an idea of what she meant. Books that inspire a new way of seeing, such as that. One that radically changed my life was Albert Camus' The Stranger (l'etranger). It took hold of me from page one. It was a story told for me to read. He didn't know who or where I was, so he had to publish it in book form and leave it to chance for me to find it. It woke me up to something within. It told me I was not alone in my thinking. Somebody else in the world sees what I see. He showed me that thinking the way I thought then, half a century ago, was a philosophy with a name, existentialism. He turned me on to other existentialist writers and other French writers. Camus wrote some plays and turned me on to some other contemporary French plays. Less than ten years later I had the opportunity to see Genet's play, The Balcony, in London at the Royal Shakespeare Company, opening night. Not that it was a big deal, just an accident of timing. It was see it that night or not at all. But I still thought it was cool. Camus kicked off my interest in 20th century theater, taught me an interest in reading plays, starting with his, Sartre's and Genet's, and ones Camus wrote about in his essays I found in paperback.

 

 

ai weiwei

 

 

It was a time of my life when the whirlwind of fate was blowing a hurricane all around me and I existed in the still space in the middle. The storm was my mind. I was sucked into the storm and carried away to sea in the US Navy, involuntary servitude for two years. The day before I was to leave on the plane for Norfolk, Virginia, to begin my life behind bars, a high school senior I'd only met once before, and then for a short time, handed me a paperback copy of The Stranger. He suggested I read it on the plane. I don't even remember his name. That was the last I ever saw or heard of him. I've often wondered if he might have come to me, an angel unawares, to hand me something that would wake me up at a time I needed help. I'd made a weak attempt at college and wasn't ready for that level of serious homework. I thought I was going to Kingston Trio Disney World, or something. I couldn't take the big anonymous school. Factory school. I was not prepared in any way for that. Church had less than twenty. Classes at school had less than twenty. All the way along, it was like that, then jump into auditorium classes and classes with professors talking way over my head and the text indecipherable for this average high school student. I never learned the art of homework. It was always a drag for me. I couldn't read with much comprehension and read very slowly, still do. By the time the Navy pulled me out of my life for two years, I understood my key issue was inability to read with comprehension. I spent those two years reading as much as possible. Reading some incredible contemporary French writers, much of it the French Resistance in WW2 against the German occupation. I was in my own interior resistance.

 

ai weiwei

 

 

Camus was a guide for me in that time, turning me on to writing tuned to my view of the world. This was my own college-prep course, two years of reading inspired by Albert Camus. Also listening to early Bob Dylan in that time. Kennedy, Johnson, Viet Nam, early 60s, civil rights, protests, Communist listening devices in every bush, the importance of dying for your country. H Bombs. A head full of Hi-Ho-America on one side and resistance on the other. My Oppositional Defiance Disorder was young and raw then, unconscious, not self-aware. An American working class dumbass with an ego the size of two football stadiums. Unskilled. Unlettered. Unanything. An ego in a body looking for a job, fantasizing unaffordable car, unaffordable babe, unaffordable pool, Playboy magazines by the stool. It makes my head swim to go back to that time. It's so far away it's like somebody else, something from a movie with a title I forgot. My confusion in that time was enormous, incomprehensible to me now. Incomprehensible to me how I got through it. The Navy snatched me up at the moment I needed rescue. I resisted it like a fish on a hook, but I had to wait out my time. I just now spoke of myself out loud, "What a fool.' That was spontaneous outburst from observation. Some years ago I got up by internet with a friend from that time. It didn't work for me. He was a constant reminder of that time, He liked to talk about that time and the people. It wore on my nerves until I couldn't stand it anymore. I may, at the end of this lifetime, look back over it and exclaim simultaneous with thinking it, What a fool. It's actually about the highest praise I can give this lifetime.

 

ai weiwei

 

 

Better to be a tarot card than a slave to a false god. I'm recalling Jr Maxwell telling of his life, summing himself up a fool. He made a very convincing case for himself a fool. I was seeing him a man of real wisdom and could make a good case for it. He mad a better case for himself a fool. I thought of him as the wise fool. What else could a wise man be in this world but a fool? Though he was calling himself a fool for having more than one of those whirlwinds of confusion in his life, looking at times of making self-defeating decisions. I couldn't stand any more of those times that bring out my own fool. Yet there is something comforting about seeing my own self a fool knowing Jr Maxwell thought himself a fool, too. Starts getting kind of Taoist. There were times, sitting on Jr's cement slab porch in plastic patio chairs, the kind you see stacked in front of the Dollar store, watching the cars and trucks go by on the highway, talking and not taking, being, I wondered if we might have had lifetimes together in the past. Surely we did. We knew each other right away when we met my first year in the mountains.  I wondered if the lifetimes might have been in shamanic cultures and he my teacher. It felt like a spiritual connection. I felt like I was sent to him to learn from him and in return assist him in his vulnerable time to make it possible for him to die in his own bed. It was important to him and important to me for him. In one way, I was doing it "for the least of these," the hopeless and helpless who wanted to die in his bed, not in a nursing home or hospital.

 

ai weiwei

 

 

In another way, I was serving the Master, exactly as the Master himself, the same. The opportunity was that precious to me. That leads me to suspect the shamanic lifetimes, one the other's teacher possibly several times. It may have something to do with why both of us were fools in entirely different ways this lifetime. Id like for Jr to be my older brother next time around, but won't ask for it. I've known so many friends in this lifetime I want to know again. I hope the old belief bears out that we'll meet our loved ones over yonder on the far away shore in the beautiful home of the soul. I want to see my grandmother I listened to Grand Ole Opry with when I was a kid and preferred Elvis and Shake, Rattle and Roll. I want to tell her first thing I finally got it. I came to love the music we listened to, but I didn't yet have an ear for it. I want to see all my dogs and cats there. I want to hold them all. I've been thinking a lot recently about what carries over from lifetime to lifetime. I'm thinking it's more than I'd let myself imagine before. I'm inclined to see it that only the body is different. What does it matter to us to change bodies? We don't see ourselves as others see us. I need a mirror to see my face. I who am seeing out from my eyes is the same I from lifetime to lifetime. It's just that all the parts around the eyes change, the body, experience, place, time, horoscope. I, who see through my eyes, think my thoughts, the same me, the same I, from one life to the next. There is only one thing I can say for certain about what's on the other side, anything I have ever imagined about it is not the case. I was about to say the best thing to do is stop thinking, but that's an unrealistic anti-solution. Just flow with it is all I know to do.       

 

ai weiwei himself

 

 

*

 

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.

 

 

 

 

*