I NEVER DREAMED I WOULD

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Had to go to town today to get a prescription filled. Of course, it had to be faxed about and no return fax had yet come after an hour. I hear that so frequently it's hard to keep a straight face when told. Just another weird aspect of living in this world. We learn when we're children not to get mad or worked up over such. It's like shooting the ocean. I just work here. Management works for the corporate boss. Corporation headquarters are in Milwaukee. You're welcome to call. Like all such inconveniences in our everyday lives, we pass them off as nothing. Just another learning experience: don't expect, ever. Now I have to drive to town tomorrow, after calling first to see if the fax came back. Maybe I will. Maybe I won't. You can't do this without doing this other thing first, but before you do that, there is this over here that you have to sign and send off and wait for the return at the whim of people that don't care. We're living Kafka at the same time we're living Orwell. We're playing The Trial and The Castle in Animal Farm. All pigs are created equal. The first 42 years of my life, 1984 was in the future. Now it's 28 years in the past. It's curious to see a date so distant in the past that was unimaginably far away in the future when I was 7. I remember in the 6th grade finding it unimaginable I'd live to see the year 2000. That year too has passed through the present in the hourglass between the future and the past.

Waiting for the prescription, between turning in the canisters and picking up the new ones, I went to the coffee shop to see who was there and to swill down some warm brew. Looking forward to one of Selma's scones was my motivation to make the trip to town less utilitarian. The Cubans coming to this county are offering us some wonderful food in nice restaurants that are affordable. A lot of people are snooty toward the Cubans coming to the county, but I'm reminded of that quotation I see on facebook sometimes about disliking something you don't know anything about being a good example of ignorance. That's not near the exact words; it's memory of my interpretation of its meaning. I can't turn my back on good people just because their family heritage is a Spanish speaking country. Lord have mercy. My heritage is exiled English Quaker, a man of constant sorrow, and hillbillies from there on. A couple of generations in the city didn't eliminate any of the hillbilly, and that's a good thing. When I discovered mountain culture, I discovered the home of my soul. So somebody else is a kid growing up, suddenly you have to leave with mommy and go to America where they talk another language and you're a stranger, don't know any English, you're supposed to be in school and you don't know what any of it is about. You do the best you can, the momentum makes you conscientious, you do well and people accuse you of living on drug money when what you're doing is getting out of south Florida for a better place to live.

I never dreamed I would become somebody who frequents a coffee shop. I'm reminded of my grandfather in Kansas City going to Tony's bar, showing off his four year old grandson sitting on a stool at the bar next to grandpa. Tony's was grandpa's hangout. I have that experience now in a coffee shop. I go in, sit down, whoever is there is whoever is there. I never imagine who might be there. I like to go in and see who's there. It's always friendly company. I've seen a few that were not, but only in subtle ways they didn't think showed. A cluster of four, Joe, Tim, Bob and Guy were actively engaged in conversation. I gave them the nod of recognition, sat down and told Selma I need a scone. I never dreamed I would one day walk into a coffee shop and need a scone. The deal is, I never had such high hopes for myself. It had never occurred to me before Selma's coffee shop that I could enjoy having my fill of Kenyan coffee and a freshly in-house made scone with people I enjoy talking with. I did like a kid skipping rope with a kid at each end twirling two ropes at once, listening to what they were talking about, subjects we often talk about in new forms, feeling the rhythm of the 4-way active conversation, eventually fell into the rhythm and jumped in with whatever I felt worth saying. Every one of these guys I enjoy listening to and talking with, individually and in group. They're good people and I don't mean pious good. Selma is a good one to jump in and join the conversation. It's lively. I never dreamed I would see a scene such as this could take place in Sparta. It's like something out of a foreign movie. And sometimes I need subtitles.

I never get to spend enough time talking with Joe until today. I like hearing what he has to say on whatever the subject of the moment may be. We tend to survey what we gather from our various news sources and attempt to find a balanced way of seeing whatever it is. I suspect that's the thread that runs through all of us, looking for a balanced point of view. When Bob brought up republicans in Congress, like what's behind what they're doing, I said racism and he said no. We didn't argue. I'm saying when we have black this and that on television and gay this and that on television, all of it sympathetic, it doesn't mean the people not watching those particular shows, the majority, are over racism. Half our white population is racist. It wasn't long ago it was all racist. This is, after all, the South. Racism is not specific to the South. In the western states they hate the Native Americans, their version of the N word. It's only about having an other to hate. It's about egoism, me first, everybody else last. Unfortunately, that's what American individualism has come to in the post-1980 age of Narcissus. I don't think this means it has changed. It's always been like this. Denial is not as easy as it used to be. Television keeps us thinking everybody is prosperous and happy with an explosion on every corner and law enforcement keeping us safe from fill-in-the-blank. This was not what we talked about in the coffee shop today. It's my own digression. Though this is the sort of thing we talk about.

We all wound down at the same time, it seemed like, and all of us went out the door at the same time. It was at least an hour in good company. It is refreshing to be with people who are paying attention to the context of their lives, attempting to understand that which cannot be understood. It doesn't matter if it's about the Marx Brothers or Tibetan Shamanism, I enjoy good conversation between people who can listen as well as talk. This bunch today was a good balance of listeners and talkers. Everyone was heard and everyone felt free to speak. Bob had to go off on a cell phone journey to a corner to talk, the only cell phone interruption. And we didn't even talk about him while he was gone. By this time in my life I have found a good balance of people I know. About half my associations are with mountain people and about half with people here, like me, from other places. I like that I am comfortable flowing freely from one culture to the other. It is two different cultures. The early at least 20 years, maybe 25, I felt like I was on a bridge between the culture I came from and the culture I'm in here in the mountains. I remember a time ten or more years ago when I felt like I'd set foot on land on the mountain side of the bridge. Since then I'm of the culture in my heart as much as anyone born here. Now, it's not a pull this way and that, wavering between the two cultures. Now that I'm in one and committed to it, I find associations with people from off the mountain easier than ever.

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GRANDPA

composition in gray #17

Today is my grandfather Brink's 110th birthday. He didn't quite make it to 100. He got up in his 90s and the frailty that goes with it. He was a greenskeeper at the public golf courses in the Kansas City area. He'd worked a country club once and that was enough. On the public courses the golfers repaired the dimple in the green their ball made when it hit. They didn't do that at the country club. Tore the greens up. On a public course, the golfers would make the effort to pick up the chunk of grass and dirt the club chopped from the ground hitting the ball in the fairway. The golfers at the country club didn't replace them. On the public course, the golfers treated him with respect. At the country club, every one of them believed he was Jim Brink's boss, but Jim Brink didn't see it that way.

He was a country boy who grew up on a farm in what is now Kansas City. His mother lived into her 90s on the farm that the city had grown around a long time before I was born. By the time he grew up, he was in the city and took up working on a golf course. I believe his mother and dad met on the boat from Bremerhaven to New Orleans, possibly in their teens. They probably took a paddle wheel steam boat up the Mississippi and then the Missouri over to Kansas City, a small town that grew incredibly fast around a huge stockyard. Railroad was there. Growing up there was dangerous. Grandpa was in a gang when he was young. Possibly all Germans. Surely his brothers were in the gang too. His brothers and sisters I never warmed up to. They were mean to kids. I was simply scared of them. The boys my age and older were scrappers looking for a fight all the time.

In fact, grandpa's favorite song from back in the 20s was That Ole Gang of Mine. He grew up not many years past the time of Jesse James and that bunch from the Kansas, Missouri border just a little ways south of KC. A gang. Teenage tough guys carrying .45s to gang fights. I expect in grandpa's day and place a gang was necessary for a kid's survival, like in American inner cities today. Jim was the one of the kids who was not so Germanic in temperament and didn't make out like a tough guy. But he was. I didn't know it then. When I was little he'd take me to the bar on 39th St at Wyandotte, I think, somewhere around there, Tony's. Tony was a movie Italian bartender of the period. I was Jim Brink's grandson. All the men in there were friendly to me. It was in the time when neighborhoods had bars the working men went to in the evening for a few beers. I loved going to Tony's with grandpa. Sitting in there with with big dogs.

I rode the horsey on grandpa's back until I was 6, when I got too big. I hated it when I was too big for grandpa to put me on his shoulders and ride his back. I didn't like that part of growing up. The house grandpa and grandma lived in was on Rainbow Blvd a mile or so from the hospital where my friend Wendy Salinger was born while I was living there with grandpa and grandma. Wendy and I met in Charleston many years later. When daddy went off to war when I was 2, my mother took me by train to KC from SanDiego. We stayed with them a couple years until the war was over. For me, they were idyllic years. 3 yr old in a house with 4 people who love you like crazy and take care of you. My mother's younger sister still in high school was also there, Auntie Marge. Then Uncle Sonny came home from the war and stayed in his room, shell shocked, pinups all around on the walls, the first place I saw the picture of Marilyn Monroe on the red bed. I associate that picture with Uncle Sonny's private hideaway. He just died a year or 2 ago.

Jim Brink's grandbaby got a kick out of standing on the rung of grandpa's chair at the kitchen table while he was having bacon and eggs. Grandpa would give me a piece of bacon and it made my day. Then he'd go to work and be home later for supper. There came a time it was silly for me to stand on the chair rung, I might break it. It didn't work any more. I saw the dog that lived there, Brownie, run over on the road in front of the house. Rainbow was in transition at the time from a road where the ice man delivered ice from a wagon drawn by a horse. Then one day it became too busy a highway for horses and wagons, and dogs. I've heard it said I would sit down in a hole in the yard dug by the dog, with the dog and play like I was reading to it. Possibly telling it the stories my mother read to me before sleep every night. That was something else I hated growing out of. It so happened I grew out of it at the same time the rooster came home from the war and brought the war with him.

I lived with grandparents in the summers during high school years and worked for grandpa on the golf course. We called him Simon Legare. He was rough on us boys, there were 3 and sometimes 4 of us whose job was to weed the greens, him attempting to keep us working instead of talking, which we managed to do all the time anyway. We were a sorry bunch. Not like kids were in his time. We'd never done anything but go to school and play. The way he grew up, kids our ages were doing every kind of work on the farm and were good at it. The 50s, when generation gaps were getting notice, had this white boy with a grandpa and something like a firewall between us, not much got through, because we didn't know how to communicate. We were interested in radically different things and were of radically different ways of thinking. For me it was rock & roll and keeping jokes in circulation. For him, it was work and his relationship with his wife. He was of the generation of people who paid attention to what they were doing.

He wanted to train me to be a greenskeeper so I could work with him and then take his place when he can retired. But that was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but a greenskeeper wasn't it. I didn't want to do anything. I was of that postWW2 time of James Dean, hoods, Elvis, juvenile delinquents, Little Richard, black kids going to white schools, them just as scared as the white kids were, early television, the Abomb, the Hbomb, bomb shelters as status, motorcycle gangs, rumbles, zip guns, bicycle chains. The Fonze is a cartoon. It was a rough time to be a kid. You never knew where it was coming from next, walking home from school, in school, at a movie theater, a football game, basketball game. It was the beginnings of the way it is now in high schools.

When I was 15 we moved to Wichita for a job. A couple weeks before we made the move, I heard on the news a bike gang killed a guy in Wichita and left him in a ditch. I'm thinking: Terrific. Of course, that's the very place I want to go. About as much as I want to go to Baghdad. When we landed in Wichita, it was not far from where they found the dead guy, about a mile. Hooray. Will I live long enough to graduate from high school? Remember, that was the 50s with a lot of white gangs of juvenile delinquents who stole hubcaps and car parts to customize their cars with. Somehow I survived.