PRIVILEGED LIVING

     air bellows gap road



I was just now reading what I'd written yesterday on fundamentalism. It carried me through those early phases of the life in my mind, the sentences triggering memories. It concluded with hearing the birds all day and the katydids and tree frogs after dark. Finishing that sentence, I felt overwhelmed by privilege. I've lived my life in poverty, my greatest ambition being to stay out of prison. That's something to pay attention to in America. The legal system gets a sadistic kick out of putting people in prison with long sentences. I don't think it's right, but I can't change it, so I walk the line. The legal system also knows what American prison is like. It's like throwing people to the gladiators. That's the dark side. So I do my best to keep on the sunny side of life, even though it's not always daylight. The sunny side doesn't mean I can't be saddened that American boys like me just out of high school, dumb as a rock, can't find a job, got no experience, and military is the American male right of passage. Go to Afghanistan, WoW, gonna kick some ass. Boom. Your legs are blown off. VA hospital. Home with mom and dad taking care of you the rest of their lives, them keeping themselves in poverty paying for an expensive insurance policy to keep you when they're gone. Then, of course, you have to take the insurance corporation to court because they refuse to pay unless you sue for it. That kind of intimidation is part of the plan.

Back to the privilege of hearing birds and insects. I feel privileged because none of the above has happened to me. I feel privileged that I live outside the maelstrom that civilization has become. In the words of an Alternate Roots song that Willard sang Friday night, A Million Miles From The City. Even though the interstate runs nearby and and it's a straight line to the city, a crooked line to another city, cities in all directions, it's the same as a million miles to the city, because I don't even like to cross the county line anymore. I love where I am so much and don't have a great deal of time left, I'm jealous of time here on this spot on Waterfall Road. And Caterpillar is the last of my lifetime of pets. I want to be here with her all the time. Every day is precious. I'm privileged to have learned through the course of my adult life to communicate with the "dumb" animals, dumb only in that they can't speak verbally. It is a privilege to be able to know an individual cat or dog as the "person" within, not just something you feed and clean up after. I like their uncluttered minds. I feel privileged for my experience in the community of the mountain people, privileged to be received as a naturalized citizen.

Another problem I had with Kansas was its scant and boring history. Cowtowns, Jesse James and killing Indians. A Kansas historian would go apeshit reading that summation and call me retarded. He'd be right. They didn't teach Kansas history in any school I went to. I don't think there are many states that teach the state's history in the public school. It's one of those subjects that is automatically dismissed like art history. So we memorize names of generals and dates of wars to pass the history test. I liked about South Carolina and North Carolina that they had histories. They were Southern states, the Confederacy where my heart pulled me ever since third grade when I read a child's biography of Robert E Lee. It woke up something in me that must have been sleeping inside. The South had a mystique for me that grew with time until it was time to bale out of Kansas. Where to? The South. It was like coming home living in South Carolina. In high school I liked Duane Eddy's song, Mason Dixon Lion. The South I fell in love with was not the South as it is, but an idea, a fantasy, a place where I felt one with its history that I knew nothing about except losing the Civil War.

I feel privileged to have lived in and to be living in the world of mountain music. WPAQ AM radio that Ralph Epperson started in 1948, the radio station in the next county, Surry, that only plays mountain music is as important to my way of understanding mountain music as the Bristol Sessions. I understand WPAQ is online now. My mechanic keeps the radio playing in his shop all day with WPAQ playing. His AM reception was not very good; he had to keep the radio in the window for listenable reception. He plays the station online now with excellent reception. It is only on the air during the daylight hours. Sometimes it is playing gospel, sometimes preaching, sometimes people talking, and mountain music from mostly the Central Blue Ridge. They still play the Carter Family, Emory Arthur, the Blue Sky Boys, Roy Acuff and current mountain music like the Slate Mountain Ramblers, Whitetop Mountain Band, Alternate Roots, Crooked Road Ramblers, Rock Mountain Ramblers, Ralph Stanley and all the rest of them. When a band self-produces a cd, they send one to the station. WPAQ's library of mountain music is extensive. Ralph Epperson used to tape live shows on Saturday mornings at the theater in MtAiry and gave all his tapes to the NC folklife center. What a treasure those tapes are for the future of Appalachian folklife studies.

I don't listen to the station much because I get no reception at the house and occasional reception in the eastern half of the county by car. And always forget it's online. When I want to hear mountain music, I put on a cd. Whatever I put on of mountain music takes over my focus. Earlier I put on some music by Kevin Fore (banjo) and Kirk Sutphin (fiddle). From the first notes I was fixed, couldn't do anything but listen. In the time of the AM stations in the mountains, each one played to its own county, the county lines about as far as reception goes, except for odd things like I've heard Sparta's AM station could be picked up in N Wilkesboro. I'm privileged that I was able to dj a weekly radio show on WCOK AM, Sparta, Saturday mornings, The Backwoods Beat Music Hour for seven years. Theme song was a solo bluegrass banjo playing Billy In The Lowground with a background fiddle drone. I feel tremendous privilege that I had the opportunity to play mountain music to mountain people in my home county, the county next to WPAQ. I love that. I don't know how many listeners I had, maybe a few hundred, maybe less, maybe more. I never talked up the radio show, because it was for people who love mountain music, not for people who say it all sounds like the same song over and over. I figured the people who wanted to hear it would find it. It didn't matter how many. I'd have been as happy with 3 as with 300. It was for people who love the music, not for numbers.

One of the greatest privileges of all, the one where I started noticing the feeling of privilege, and feel privilege every week that I simply know about the Friday night music at Willard Gayheart's gallery and frame shop, the Front Porch. For a couple years seldom more than 20 people in the audience, usually between 12 and 15. We were the ones who went every week we could make it. By now we all know each other. Now that it is a Crooked Road Venue attendance has doubled and tripled ever since. It's between 40 and 60 now. Minnie the cat can't give up her seat if she wants it back. Before, she could jump to the floor and walk around during the music looking at the people, sizing up the crowd, this her home, walking among the legs, then find a new place to curl up. It's not like that any more. When she gets up, somebody sits down. The first privilege is just knowing about it. Then many rings of privilege out from that; knowing the people I've come to know there, having Scott, Willard, Edwin, Dori, Jill, Steve for my friends, people I have heart feeling with, people I respect way high up, every one of them. Basically, it's looking like my entire life in the mountains has been one of feeling privilege, the privilege of living in a really beautiful culture almost nobody outside it knows about. Living among the mountain people as my own is the privilege I value perhaps most.


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DON'T WORRY BE HAPPY

jackson pollock in everyday life


My mind continues to look at the time when my spiritual life was activated. It was just like they say in the Primitive Baptist church, that I was chosen. It wasn't because I was somebody special or had intelligence or was without stupid behavior. A confused working class kid who felt like an outsider from kindergarten on. I'd only known a couple of kids my age before going off to school, and them just a time or two. I didn't know there were so many. Maybe about 20. I shit my pants first day of school because I was too shy to say in front of all these strangers, the teacher a stranger too, I needed to go really bad. Didn't know where the toilet was even if I wanted to spring from the room and run for it. Walked home, a mile, with pants squushy and smelly, crying all the way. By the time I made it home after a half hour or more of continuous walking, more than I'd ever walked in one never-ending long haul, made it home the kind of mess only a mother could handle.



That's how I started out in this world, and later after high school I started out on my own in the world again, every bit as unsuccessfully. Major stupid decision after major stupid decision, no idea about anything but you gotta have a job to pay for a place to live and a car of some affordable sort, insurance, groceries, phew. That's quite a lot for a beginner. Had a pretty good job selling shoes and even was able to become fairly good at it after a year or so. Just like in my teen years, I wanted a quiet life without drama, but the guys I worked with wanted me to run the roads with them on weekends, get into stupid situations, and what they call peer pressure took me off my own track, which I wasn't even sure was a track or that my own had any validity. Everybody else telling me what I ought to do convinced me they knew better than I did, so I left off advising myself, because I didn't know anything. I followed advice and direction from people I assessed knew more than I did and got myself into some shit I'd have never done in my own way of thinking. I wanted to join the world, see what it is the preacher talked so much against. He made "the world" a taboo, giving it a mystique that made me want to jump in and see what it had to offer, have some pleasures for a change.


Started going to dance joints, drinking beer, the BIG NO-NO, got the lecture of my life after coming home a few months after 18th birthday having tucked away 3 beers. It put a smile on my face, nothing more than that. Had to be sat down at the kitchen table and told for an hour I'm going to be an alcoholic, the whole time bored out of my mind, thinking, No, I'm not. It's not that big a deal. Then next day all hell broke loose when daddy came home from work after fuming all day. A rather definitive confrontation followed, during which I decided, I'm outta here. For the next month set out to find an affordable apartment, figure out ways to get around, like by bus, then when all the ducks were in a row announced I was out the door, nicely. I didn't want any more nonsense. Just let me go and let me be. I didn't know anything about where I was going, but trusted I could figure out something. Theretofore, prayer had only let me down, so I didn't indulge in it any more. Confidence in church was dead.



Uncertainty went everywhere with me. My self-esteem scuttled across the floors of silent seas. A friend I worked with got us involved with 2 of the meanest women in Wichita, Kansas, at the time, and we both paid dearly for our ignorance over years to come. My self-esteem was such that I let people I assessed smarter than myself, everybody, make my decisions. Surely they knew more than I did about my own good. Living with a harridan, who was the daughter of a harridan, who also was the daughter of a harridan, she'd made an about face after the wedding such that the one I thought I'd married wasn't anywhere to be seen. Fortunately, Navy Reserve active duty abducted and took me out of my life for two years, put me on the ocean, out where you don't see land for weeks, only water to the horizon all the way around. At the time, I hated it, but looking back, it turned out to be a period of time I went into a confused wreck and came out of determined to do something about my ignorance issues. Get rid of the shackles to the harridan first; divorce is legal and, thank the Lord, easy. Ignorance only got me in trouble.



Out of the Navy on a Friday, the following Monday I started at the College of Charleston. The X had told me I could not get into CofC and even if I miraculously did, I'd never make it. Graduated 4 years later. Self-esteem took a giant step. I learned a lot in those years, not only school. It was a new world. Cocktail parties every weekend at somebody's house. I had to learn fast how to talk jibber-jabber that sounds like I know what I'm talking about. Got fairly good at cocktail parties, but never took to them. They were good schooling in social behavior of the middle class. I went into it wanting to climb to the middle class. By the time I left the city to come to the mountains, I didn't want involvement with the middle class any more. I learned by the time I'd finished school I had lost what common sense I had. I wanted to work outdoors at a labor job and see if common sense would come back. Some years of working with Tom Pruitt and going to the church of his brother, Millard Pruitt, the Regular Baptist preacher, my common sense became activated, or what I think of as common sense.



The part I've appreciated all the way along in the mountains was a large part of the reason God set my parachute down in Alleghany County, Whitehead, Air Bellows, Waterfall Road, so I could live in a community of people who were very realistic, pragmatic lovers of God. Whitehead is loaded with them. The rest of the county is too. They go to a lot of different churches, and many don't go to church at all. Before I got my head turned around, I had come to see it that God was a construct of the human mind. Came to find it was the other way around, and that's when I turned up in the mountains. I started out thinking I'd come here for solitude and study. Turned out I needed to make a living, have a job, start knowing people. Plus, the initial solitude was awfully lonesome. In retirement age, I feel more inclined to solitude than ever before. I like to get out and see friends every few days and like every few days to be here by myself all the time. Have found a time of semi-solitude. I like the company of others, esp my friends, too much to lock myself into not having anybody to visit with. Even monasteries are not solitude. I've found a solitude I'm comfortable with that includes people I deeply care about. Like they say, 'Hit don' git no better'n 'at." I have to answer the question, am I happy, Yes. With qualifiers, but enough to say it's all the time. Even in sorrow, I'm happy underneath.



A short time after my store bottomed out, I was going in the library's side door when a woman I know enough to speak with was opening the door from the other side. She said, What are you doing now? I didn't know what to say. It was too much to explain in 3 seconds, so I said, 'Getting some joy back into my life.' I meant it too. All the financial concerns watching the economy tank and the store only able to hang on so far with nearly no business, joy had gone out of my life. I hadn't realized that until I heard myself say I am actively getting it back. Just needed to get out from the mental stress, again. It's coming into view a pattern that my attempts to get involved in the world end after a time of stress overtaking me and putting me down to the ground, unhappy, out of joy. They came back and I don't intend to let them go again. Nothing is more valuable to me than an underlying happiness and joy that catch my mind like a net in a circus when I follow depressive thinking and fall. No worries. The funny part I've found is that God knows us individually better than we know ourselves, understands our motivations and our ways and how they got like they are, and has promised He'd take good care of me. I think I've finally reached a time in the life I can let go and say to God, your will be done, meaning it. It always works out better than my own will. Why did it take so long to get it? Doesn't matter once you've got it.



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