MAIN STREET ON A THURSDAY AFTERNOON

     rock mountain

Attempting to make a left turn onto Main St on a Thursday afternoon has become what Friday alone used to be. I had to wait for the car in front of me, which after waiting until he couldn't wait anymore made a right turn instead of the left turn. My turn at the stopsign and I see an endless line toward the courthouse light. A little bit of extra space between two cars. Zoom-zoom, I jumped in the space. I know better than to attempt a left turn onto Main St on Fri. I need to include Thursdays now. It's hard to believe by imagination alone that it takes as long to make a left turn onto Main St from a side street as it takes to make a left turn onto highway 17 from a side street in Myrtle Beach. It's not nearly the same volume of cars, but it takes as long to wait for a hole in both directions of traffic. The way the lights are set, when the line of cars that come from one of the lights to the next light gets by, then the line of cars from the other light starts its long parade. All there is to do is step on it and go for an opening. But every time I go to Winston-Salem, very seldom, I forgive Sparta all the times I've cussed its traffic. Once when friends were visiting from Atlanta, we were in Sparta and I was driving, griping about the traffic. Judy said, "What traffic?" Thank you for that.



Walking by Kermit's barber shop I saw through the glass door no one in the chair. I had the money in my pocket, no waiting, about-face, in the door and in the chair. Kermit has covered his walls with photographs of Sparta in the old days and people from the old days, newspaper articles, like when Bill Monroe played in Sparta, Del Reeves album cover and poster. I like to look at all the pictures every time I'm in there. People bring him pictures. I've taken him two, one of Jr Maxwell & Cleve Andrews jamming together, and one of them with The Little River Boys band, which included Estel Bedsaul and Paul Joines. He had a picture of Ed Atwood with his banjo, Howard Joines with fiddle and Clif Evans with guitar, when they were maybe in their 30s. Somebody gave him a close up photograph of a coiled rattler. It's spooky looking. Picture taken on the Parkway at Mahogany Rock. Kermit is a bluegrass bass player, country guitar player, and every year at the Hillbilly Show he lip-syncs two songs by George Jones, ol Possum. That's his nickname. His eyes are so close together he looks like a possum to country people. There is always somebody in a rural community nicknamed Possum, which grows up into Poss.



From Kermit's I crossed W Whitehead St on the way to see Chris Davis in her shop on the corner. I don't know that I've ever known what she calls it. She'd emailed me earlier asking if it would be all right to put one of my paintings in the window. I was told by somebody who saw it that it was in the window. I'd driven by twice and never noticed. It was the one of Howard Joines playing his fiddle with the chicken singing into his ear while he plays Chicken Reel. I was happy to see I like it. I never know what it's like to see one of my paintings the first time. It takes quite a long time of not seeing one to the point of forgetting it, then when I see it, it's almost like I'd never seen it. The familiarity is gone from it and I can see it more objectively, from afar. That's how I like best to see one of my paintings, the first time after so long I've forgotten it. It's like somebody else's painting then. I don't know what I would think of them if I hadn't painted them. I think I'd like them, but can't be sure.



Chris had a painting of hers from the past in there, three cows on a large field of white. Stunning, truly stunning. She'd just finished a nice piece of furniture that she'd painted in an extraordinarily beautiful way. Chris has single-handedly restored several downtown spaces. The one she's in now, she's done it up before. Completely changed it for this go-round. She can take a space with four walls, ceiling, floor, windows and doors, and transform it into any kind of look or feeling. She specializes in faux finishes. She can make a wall look like it's ancient or futurist. Chris is no stranger to work. She's the hardest working individual I know. She starts at it early in the morning and goes full speed into the night and starts over next morning. She has the work ethic of the old mountain people. Shes a good artist too. She likes painting black and white cows, the dairy variety.



Before the excursion that ended at Chris's, I left the coffee shop where I'd been visiting with Joe Allen Delp. I've taken to really liking and respecting Joe Allen. He tells some good stories of his experiences in another time when Sparta was the shopping center for the local people, the hardware store across the street from the courthouse. In that time, it was all mountain people here. Now the mountain people are rare in Sparta. Everything has changed. Sparta's center of gravity moved from the stoplight by the courthouse down to the stoplight by Hardee's where the shopping centers and parking lots are now. The downtown part of Sparta has no parking except along the street. Joe Allen is of another time. He's like me in that the times have passed him by. The world we both know is past and gone. Like in the song Angel Band, the setting sun is sinking fast, my race is nearly run. Joe Allen is somewhat harshly judged for his drinking habit in the past. No one has ever wondered why he needed inebriation so much. I think he came close to killing himself with it. He's gentle as a rabbit. Joe Allen is good people.

*

KERMIT THE BARBER

          kermit pickin at the hillbilly show 2011

          kermit a-layin it to it

     kermit jamming with joe irwin

                    kermit lip-syncs george jones

     kermit playing bass with the rise and shine band

This afternoon I walked by Kermit's barber shop to go see my friend Chris Davis's shop on the corner across from Farmer's Hardware where Northwestern Bank used to be many years ago. Chris had a shop in there before the last business that was in there, Ike Forrester's accounting office. She never fails to have a beautiful and imaginative shop. Kermit was standing looking at the paper, no one in the shop but him. The money was in my pocket, needed a haircut, didn't want to do it at home, hadn't seen Kermit in awhile, no waiting. I turned around in front of the Alleghany museum and went back to Kermit's, in the door, and in the chair. It's like hitting the red light green at the intersection there at the courthouse, approaching it from 18 South, Whitehead St. Going right on through it green happens maybe, at most, once a year. Since I've had the radio show, the store, and knew Jr so well, by now Kermit knows me well enough to talk with me. Before I entered his music world, we didn't know each other and neither Kermit nor I are any good at talking with people we don't know. 

Kermit played bass with Jr Maxwell's band The Green Mountain Boys for awhile. He's played bluegrass bass for a lot of years. He's played at the Jubilee with the Rise and Shine Band so many years he's probably never thought about how many. He has been putting photographs on his walls of musicians from the past and Sparta from the past, until his 2 walls are covered. They are interesting historically and for memory to look at. Kermit is one of the ones in the community smart enough to stay out of politics and ideas of position. He is a musician on weekends and cuts hair during the week. There have been quite a lot of barber musicians in the mountains. Basil Landreth, a barber here for a number of years played guitar and had jams in the barber shop. BF Shelton, a barber in I think Corbin, Kentucky, not far from Cumberland Gap, played banjo and sang a couple of songs at the Bristol Sessions in 1927. Darling Cora and Oh Molly Dear are his two songs that turn up in anthologies of mountain music from early recordings. I've learned to appreciate eastern Kentucky banjo pickin. It's a sound all their own. They don't sound alike, but they have a sound in common. 

Kermit and I like to talk about Jr, bring up a memory of him. We both had a great deal of respect for Jr. I like to talk with people who were in Jr's life. Bring him back a little bit by remembering him. I told Kermit a quotation I'd written down that Jr said 3 years ago, "Well, shit a damn monkey." Kermit fell out laughing. He said, "That's an original. I've never heard that one before." I'm suddenly laughing at myself for hesitating to write that, anticipating an assault by the politically correct police. Today in the coffee shop I was assaulted for saying Shit Happens. I thought, What is this? Church? I'm not on tv. No mothers with toddlers were nearby. It's not like I opened the door to hell with curses. I'm getting pretty tired of the political correctness. I like to say something anti-PC from time to time to keep their indignation alert. I didn't even think of editing shit happens. Maybe it would be more politically correct to say, "Helms happens." It's cute, makes PC people laugh, but I'm not going to. That's another I-can't-believe-this-is-Sparta, the rage for political correctness. If refusal to obey makes me a cranky old turd, that's what I am. 

I was glad to get my head shorn today. Glad to visit with Kermit today. Kermit is good people. Going from the PC Ward to Kermits was like going home, going to see Kermit who is of these mountains full-blooded. It was like driving down my road coming home after driving on an interstate. Kermit knows everybody I know, so when I visit with Kermit, I feel like I'm in touch with everybody I know here of these mountains. Sitting in the barber chair talking about some local musicians from the past, like Huston Caudill and some others, brought my feet back to the ground. Kermit is in the Hillbilly Show every year. He lip-syncs two George Jones songs each time. The audience loves him. He plays guitar with country music and bass with bluegrass. I like getting my hair cut by a bluegrass musician. In the Central Blue Ridge gives it a certain mythic quality. Makes it a little bit more than just getting a haircut. 

*  

FIRST SNOW OF MARCH

mountain laurel


More snow today. It's not quite dark yet. 27degrees. Slight wind. Snow blowing all afternoon since around 11. A few hours ago I estimated it at 3 inches going by the track the tires made. By now it's 4 or 4.5. The snow is letting up now that it has met its forecast quota. All is white again. White as snow. It will be a shock when we get back to the world of color. Now it's white and the gray of tree trunks and limbs. Makes me think of Zurich, Switzerland, in the snow. Zurich is all gray. All the city is gray. A lot of old European cities are gray. Pablo Neruda of Chile wrote a poem of being in a gray German city in snow, looking out the window he saw the big white dancing horses run around in a circle for exercise. The whole scene black and white. The horses rumps reminded him of oranges from home, the colorful world of Latin America, the memories he needs to cheer him up in a world where everything is dull European gray.



Set out for town to go by the dump and drop off some bags of detritus, from there to the Circle L on the far side of town toward Glade Valley for lunch with Jim Winfield. We get together for lunch about once a week and talk for a couple hours. Today, it didn't seem to click so well. It was like we were both somewhere else and weren't really connecting. He's been entertaining some great big questions about himself, the nature of the ego, cosmic questions and I give him plenty of space for that. Sometimes he's half giddy when he's found a new insight. Today he was awfully much in his mind. Usually is, but today more than usual. We talked plenty, nonstop. I doubt there was ever a full minute of silence at the table. We have very different ways of seeing things, and many that are similar. For one thing, we've both become curmudgeon old turds.



Winfield was a little bit downhearted because he got this notion he wanted to go to Chile or Haiti to help the relief effort, both places he knows well, and speaks the language both places. He knows the people. I believe he sees them in his mind's eye all the time, imagining what they're going through, wanting to help out. The bureaucracies that organize the relief won't have him. He's too old. His doctor recommends against going. You're too old. It didn't stop his longing to go. He asked me what I thought was behind his wanting so much to go. I said, it means you care. He accepted that. It felt better to him than what he'd been thinking, that it was an ego thing. I reminded him what he already knew, that he was perfectly suited for one place or the other with a lifetime experience, a natural for help with relief. His compassion pulls him to it. I'd say it's only ego in that everything we do is ego. There's no way around it. But it's an ego that benefits others in a hard time. Not a destructive ego, but a nurturing ego. That's plenty ok for motivation. It's not like it's unseflconscious narcissism streaking a baseball game.



I've known some people along the way who have a really interesting interior life they don't tell about and no one sees. Like Winfield used to keep his butterfly collection under a chair, because he wasn't proud of killing all the butterflies. It eventually found its way to the wall. I really enjoy looking at his collection of African masks and carvings. When he was in Zambia, these artifacts were funneling out of the Congo that was in civil wars in the eastern mountains. He had the good fortune to be there when they were available. He doesn't feel like he's done the right thing, taking them away from their culture, from where they belong, but they'd already been removed and there was no going back.



We sat at the table by the window and watched it snow as we ate. Neither one of us was anxious about it. He has a Suburu all-wheel. My front wheel is the same as 4wheel. With a snow shovel on the floor of the back seat, I can get out of anything I can get into, unless it's down a bank or into a tree. We started before the lunch people came in and were there after the place had cleared out. I enjoy talking with him. One of our greatest differences is the way we see what I'll have to call time. He sees it "linear," in a straight line, from start to finish. I see it a circle that makes a spiral. Like January 1 through December 31. A circle. A cycle. The next year is another circle connected to the one before. 6,000 years of civilization makes a really long slinky. I can't see that there is time outside the human mind. Cycles inside cycles, infinitely.



He mentioned a big Buddha he saw in, I think, Thailand. He said it is customary to rub the Buddha's big toe with a prayer. He said the toe was worn away from all the touching. It brought to mind a bronze statue of a saint I saw in the Vatican, whose front half of his foot had been kissed away over the centuries. The nub was smooth as smooth gets. Then we talked of a story in India that defines a Yuga, an Age, as the time it takes for a bird that migrates back and forth across the Himalayan mountains holding a silk scarf in its beak that touches the mountains as the bird flies over, until the mountains are worn down to plain. Geologists say these Appalachian mountains were once like the Himalayas. Rain, snow, cold and heat wore them down. These mountains seem like they are maybe more than half way toward plain from the Himalayan origin. Possibly a yuga can be calculated from the time these mountains were at their biggest to now and project in future how long until erosion is down to plain. That's a lot of millions of years. Then what's a year? A unit in the human mind.



We watched the snow unconcerned. When it was time to go, he offered to take Nancy Hunt, who worked in the kitchen and is his neighbor, to her house so Roy, who is in Galax, won't have to come by and pick her up. I went on up the road to Kermit's. Thought it might be a fair chance he wouldn't be too busy today. One man in the chair finishing up as I went in. Kermit and I watched it snow and talked. Ernest Joines called and told Kermit the Jubliee is off for tonight. Billy Dancy, who played banjo, was driving a truck down around Boone, said it's terrible. I told Kermit of an incident I saw on the way into town. The road was techous, like the old feller said, meaning it was slicker'n greased owl shit.



4 cars were directly ahead of me approaching town. They were awfully close to one another for this road condition, telling me not one of them was experienced driving on ice. I stayed way back. Way back. About in front of the VFW chicken bbq pit, the car in front hit the brakes. That was it. Went sliding this way and that. The next car hit the brakes. It slid into the front car. The 3rd car hit the 2nd car and they slid around like bumper cars at Myrtle Beach. The one in front of me left the road to stop. I had plenty of time to slow down gradually and stop. Fortunately, no one was behind me. None of the cars was damaged. Slow motion at slow speed. Everyone hit the refresh button drove on. One woman in a Jeep Cherokee pulled into the VFW parking lot to turn around and head back home. The 10 second Youtube moment gave me a clear picture of what was under my tires.



All the way home from town I was super cautious. I'd already had my education for the nature of this snow. It's the kind that insists you never lose traction. Never. The moment you lose traction you're gone. It won't be bad whatever happens at slow speed, but it's not something you want to happen at all. It was a slow drive with no one in front of me and no one behind, snow a couple inches deep and only a few tracks ahead of mine. By the time I turned onto Pine Swamp Road at Whitehead, the snow there was 3 inches. Along Air Bellows Gap Road only one track was ahead. The tires looked like a pickup. It turned off at the bottom of the mountain and I blazed the trail to the top, a time or two coming close to losing traction in the zones of the frozen ruts, but prevented it. My road was virgin snow all the way to the house. I was glad to get the car off the road. But it was a fun adventure. I have learned my car.

KERMIT

Kermit Pruitt 15 jun 09


After almost 20 years of my hair less than half an inch long, I came to a time where I was tired of clipping it myself and tired of going to the barber shop, though Kermit's is a good barber shop to go to. I wanted to stop fooling with it. So I let it grow over several months to see about letting it grow out long enough to make a bob in the back, with the idea that I won't have to fool with it any more. Turns out I was fooling with it just about all the time as it was getting longer. Couldn't keep my fingers out of it, so strange to have hair this long, never had it long before. Had to shampoo during a shower and dry the best possible with a towel, refusing to buy a blow dryer, and it takes hours to dry.


Guys with long hair told me I was in the awkward stage and to be patient, when it gets longer it will lay down. Mine doesn't ever lay down. It's inclination is to stick straight out and grow straight out until it gradually starts to bend downward pulled by gravity. But a hair has to be awfully long to be effected by gravity, especially mine. As it grew past 4 inches I had to keep a hat on all the time or it would just stick out all over. I called it my Sid Vicious didn't die look. He grew old and got white headed. When I don't put a hat on it, the hair sticks straight out all day long. Once I've put a hat on and flattened it down a bit, it will stay down for awhile. I think of black men before the freedom fro putting pomade on their hair and wearing a nylon stocking on their head to keep the hair down all week so they can take the stocking off Friday night for the weekend.


The hair got to the place that the wrong people were looking at me, like old hippies. I started looking more and more like an old hippie. I've never wanted to identify with any one way of thinking/believing/behaving. I want the freedom to think/believe/behave according to my own understanding, not somebody else's that gathers a bunch of people to his/her 'philosophy' because of whatever reasons they have for wanting somebody else to make their decisions. It's too much like living in a nursing home, where other people make your decisions, for me to jump into that circle, or any other.


Kermit Pruitt is a good barber and I like going to Kermit's shop. Kermit has been a bluegrass bass player about all his adult life. He plays bass with the Rise & Shine Band, the Jubilee's house band. He plays acoustic bass and electric bass, acoustic guitar and electric. He can play country, bluegrass, old-time and rockabilly. At the Hillbilly Show in October, year after year, he lip-syncs two George Jones songs. I've seen Kermit impersonate George Jones so many times that when I hear George Jones I see Kermit in my mind. The audience at the Hillbilly Show loves George Jones and everybody thinks an awful lot of Kermit. Put them together and you have an audience of people like me who see Kermit in their minds when they hear George Jones's voice. Kermit does it right too, and everybody sings along. I think George Jones is as beloved among country music listeners as Ralph Stanley is loved by bluegrass listeners. Ol Possum just has it right.


A few years ago at the Hillbilly Show, Joe Irwin was singing a couple of songs by Johnny Cash, actually singing like Johnny, and with his own voice, which happens to be naturally close enough to Cash's he can sing a Johnny Cash song. I tend to think Joe can play Johnny better than Johnny plays himself. At this show, Joe and Lynn Worth were singing as Johnny and June. They did it right, too. Very first lick on his electric guitar, Kermit's pick broke in half. He had to play out the song with half a pick and get used to it right now.


Kermit has a sense of humor that's going all the time, too. He's like Ernest Joines in that way, all the time seeing something funny to laugh over. On the red pickup he drove before his new white one, he kept a tag in the middle of the front bumper with an image of a multi-colored frog. With a name like Kermit, we tend to wonder how tired he must have got with everyone making references to Sesame St. Kermit deals with it by putting a frog tag on his truck, meaning he has a great sense of humor about it. He thinks it's funny too. It's a whole lot better than being named Big Bird.