AT PLAY AMONG THE FLOWERS

native rhododendron

It is the time of year for the second run of flower openings. First, daffodil, forsythia, crocus. Rhododendron are popping open now,the cucumber trees in  full flower, the bluets in full flower, the heart-shaped leaves of the wild violets pull their stems tight reaching for the sun. The rhododendron are covered in clusters of a pink found only in flowers. Mountain laurel will bloom next month. Irises are beginning to bloom. Yellow Dutch iris are opening, the purple ones yet to open. I've transplanted a dozen small clusters of purple Dutch iris from a place where they were spreading out into a tire track where a pickup goes to drive through the gate to the suburban donkey meadow. The irises needed trimming back. I'm taking them to Carpenter's summer cabin where I plant them strategically to inhibit erosion. Somebody you find in the yellow pages under landscaping was hired to direct rainwater away from the house's foundation. He fixed it so the rainwater could only flow directly to the foundation. I've been doing damage control ever since. After a few years of being knocked off my track by what he did, I'm seeing what can be done for damage control. He put treated 6x6s around the parking area to make it into a pond during a big rain. He put a drain in the parking area that doesn't work like new after a few years. Water runs over the 6x6 rail creating ruts from water flow in the same place every time. I planted the Dutch iris clusters to slow down the flow of water downhill from the parking space runoff at the lowest point in the rail. 

new dutch iris bed and rhododendron

Already, I've put in a large area of purple Dutch iris that spreads wildly and some yellow Dutch iris that spreads just as fast. Irises, daylilies and at least a dozen Joe Pyes, more come up every year. I've found a couple of small mountain laurel for digging up to transplant. Thought I'd do it later in the day to give them the night to adjust to their new spaces before a day drenched in sun with torn roots in new soil, though the same soil, moved no more than thirty feet. I'll look after them with water daily to keep what they have left for roots supplying water to the leaves above. I get their core roots, but the root tips with the root hairs feeling their ways through the soil are largely lopped off. I keep them watered good, without drowning them, to give new root tips a chance to develop and begin their explorations through the topsoil. The ground is what I call glorified beach sand. My feeling is that corn was grown there for so many years, plus DDT, year after year, the soil was depleted. I remember plowing old man Tom Pruitt's garden. The soil was gray. The garden was in the same place since the house was built, around 1908. It would only grow things that grow in poor soil. He would hoe a trench for the seeds and sprinkle fertilizer along the rows with the seeds. This land the Carpenter's house is on has been let grow up into woods for eighty or more years. The spot the house was built on was naturally bare with a grove of mountain laurel beside it, telling me the laurel will take the transplant well. Mountain laurel blooms profusely in the sun. The big flower bed will keep them happy with light. I've planted only flowers that return every year and like full sun. Our winters are not cold enough anymore to keep tulips without digging up the bulbs, wintering them in the freezer and replanting them. Other people do tulips. 

flowering cucumber tree

Initially, I was thinking the vertical leaves of the Dutch irises would hold the autumn leaves in place, accumulate them, a leaf trap. It worked out. Rain and winter dissolved the leaves into the ground, topsoil, nutrients for the roots, a new layer every fall. Seeds are caught too. Small saplings rise up throughout the bed. They're beautiful too. I let them grow among the flowers until they grow three or four feet above the others, still easy to eliminate with long-handled loppers. I'm not growing just pretty flowers. I like to let the flora that grows naturally here mix in with the mostly irises. The irises will have their way. I like to keep it green. The Joe Pyes grow up to ten and twelve feet, saplings the next level in height, then a bed of dutch iris spikes sticking straight up, the flowers a purple only seen in flowers. I placed the iris clusters in a sort of diagonal line to deflect water away from the house, to slow it down and  hold some of it. I made a long berm of leaves and dirt to deflect the river of water flowing down the tire trails from the higher level with the old cemetery. Alas, my berm deflecting the water away from the house can only lead the water to the pond that collects in the parking area. It flows over the barrier during rains, and now has begun to make trenches. I planted the irises to slow the water flow, spread it out, collect and hold some of it. Another slope, the other side of some downhill steps, I planted with fifteen fern clusters last fall. They're all coming up but one. They will spend this year adjusting to the new soil and next year will flourish and start spreading.  

ferns at home

The landscaper who knows nothing about water dug a big trench and put boulders in it to catch water from the roof. The trench is perfectly placed for water dripping off the roof during a sprinkle. But when it rains, the water runs two and three feet beyond the boulder trench and has made its own trench. I wanted to put dutch iris along the new trench to slow the water and redirect some of it. It concerns me about the water beating the leaves to the ground during a rain. Thought I'd pick up some of the smaller rocks from the boulder trench and place them along the parallel trench to slow and redirect the flow of water from the parking zone and roof, thinking in time the Dutch iris will seed the new trench and grow some iris from seed strong enough to withstand the water flow from above. The boulder trench collects leaves and silt. I'm thinking the best thing for it is to let it fill up with silt and leaves and make a flower bed of it, more Dutch irises. Or a fern bed. Ferns and the iris are hardy and love this soil. The boulder trench is nothing but ugly. It's completely in the wrong place. It is in a good place to water a flower bed gently and have runoff below. Making lemonade of lemons. I had two banks covered in daffodils. The landscaper buried them all. I never think of him by name. To me, he's the one who knows nothing about water. I'm over the shock of his travesty by now. This spring I'm there every day doing something. I've seen by now the damage his landscaping has done, a good time to start damage control. Change a place from a lawn canyon to a flower bed that will send seeds downhill every year, ultimately to make a big flowerbed along the edge of the woods. I'm looking to make the place lush with flowering greenery that needs no mowing or any kind of care but trimming saplings and snipping a few things that take up from time to time. 

oak leaves opening

*

A DEAD BATTERY AND HILLBILLY PREACHING

joel shapiro

The car is driving me wild. Dead battery again. I'm thinking I've found the source of the drain on the battery. I have thought it was the gps plugged into the lighter hole. But it was there for a long time not draining the battery. A few days ago I pulled a fuse thinking it might help the door latch that was locked up to operate; the door locks and interior lights work on this one fuse. The door latch started working again after the temperature rose above freezing. The battery was fine. I put the fuse back into its slot when the door latch started working. Dead battery. Whatever is draining the battery, I suspect, is in the realm of that one fuse. I can get along without interior lights and without door locks. The door locks annoy me anyway. The doors lock automatically when I take the transmission out of Park. I don't like that. If I need out of the car in a hurry, I don't want to be fooling around trying to get it unlocked first. I carry a small flashlight in a pocket. Around here, there is no need to lock a car, unless it's near Christmas and the car is full of boxes and bags in a parking lot at night. There is an old country saying that locks keep an honest man honest. They don't stop thieves with intent. I never keep anything in my car to tempt somebody walking by. When I leave camera in car, I bury it under papers, trash, a jacket, a hat. I pulled the fuse again today, this time to stay out, at least long enough to see if the battery will keep a charge without it. First thing I checked this morning was the water level in the battery. It was fine. Tomorrow morning, neighbor Allen will drive over and let me jump my car from his battery. Come to think of it, that won't work. He's borrowed an old Studebaker pickup from a friend for hauling in some firewood. His car is not here. So much for that. The Studebaker battery is probably a 6 volt, and mine is 12. I'll figure something out. The battery can't get any deader. Late afternoon, my friends Lucas and Judy will be arriving for a few days. Their car's battery will accord with mine.  

joel shapiro

If all my neighbors were country people, I could stop any car driving by. My neighbors are city people, Republican exurbanites. They don't like to be bothered. And I don't like to bother them. I'll work it out. The county changed after 1980 when the farms went away. The old people who kept their farms died out and the heirs divided the farm into lots, making subdivisions and a lot of money. Some sold the farms to Christmas tree growers. Much as I regretted the Bush-Cheney economy, it put a stop to suburbanites getting away from the enwords. They watch so much tv they think the enwords are lurking in every shadow to rob and kill them. They can't sell their houses in the city to pay for their mountain houses, and they can't sell a mountain house. Several of them have gone back to the city. It's rough on the contractors and carpenters and the town merchants who had begun to count on people coming in here from Away. They stopped coming and the town is now languishing, just short of plywood on the windows. It's not mine to wish it was one way or another. It's mine to go on about my life and let the world around me change as it will. It's mine to do, because that's how things are. I like it or don't like it is neither here nor there. What matters is that I have peace in my heart. I don't have a great deal of time left and am glad of it. My house is one of the last original houses in Air Bellows. Allen, my next door neighbor, lives in a little old farm house he's restored. Old man Tom Pruitt's house has been let go down since he died. The owner won't sell it and won't fix it up. It was twenty-four years ago he died. The house has been empty ever since with a poacher staying in it during hunting season until he stopped hunting. He hunted anywhere he pleased, on anybody's land, on Parkway land. The law knew about him, but never caught up with him. The beautiful old house, built a year or two after 1900, made of oak, now looks like a haunted house and is past restoration. 

joel shapiro

Yesterday, riding with Melvin on the way home from watching tv football at Justin's, we passed Laurel Glenn church, where I went regularly fourteen years and left twenty-three years ago. They locked the door and turned off the electricity twenty years ago. It was one of the beautiful mountain churches of an architecture so simple it had Japanese style. No steeple, no cross, a plain white wooden building with a silver tin roof. It had an outhouse among the trees out back. Seeing it go by in the foggy night, white in the darkness, I felt again my fondness for the building itself and what I know went on inside. I stopped one day to look in the windows. Everything was lined up like when it was living, covered in a film of dust. I loved that place in a deep heart-felt way. Much love energy flowed inside those walls and beautiful hillbilly singing. Originally, it was the church in the Glade Valley region the black farmers of the area went to. It was the black people, the Choates, who built the church in the 1920s. Their cemetery was the other side of what was then a dirt road. The door faced the cemetery, south, where it could be seen from the pulpit at the opposite wall. In the 1950s, white Regular Baptists bought it after the black population thinned out so much they had to shut the church door. Most white kids leave here after school. All black kids leave, with rare exceptions, the exceptions that prove the rule. And some kill themselves. The white people changed the door to a wall facing east where they put their own cemetery the other side of another dirt road. They built a pulpit area on the opposite wall and covered the old walls with wood paneling. The floors were pine with so many knots I sometimes thought of it as the night sky with stars. It never failed to amuse me when I thought about the little church with the most vehemently racist man I've ever known preaching in what used to be a nigger church. 

joel shapiro

In the old Regular Baptist way, the preacher was just a man like everybody else. No collection plate. He worked, had his own ways, beliefs, temperament. He did not have to be educated, not even able to read. The old-time preaching way works best with the least education. It's a matter of opening up to be "a vessel" for the Holy Spirit to flow through, a voice for the spirit to talk with. I found in all the different preachers I heard that education past sixth or seventh grade inhibited the freedom to open up and allow the spirit. Millard Pruitt, the preacher, grew up in old-man Tom's house up Waterfall road. He was Tom's youngest brother. I felt like they were each other's favorite brother. They were the last two to die out. Millard was a man braced against everything and everybody. He'd make me think of William Blake's line, Damn braces, bless relaxes. He was all about condemning, punishment, overseeing with the most judgmental eye I've known. And an ego that was outta sight. He had a loving heart, told me hundreds of stories from his life, stories of the people that lived in Air Bellows, Whitehead, the county. He was adamantine in every part of his mind, unyielding. It even embarrassed his wife how much he hated niggers. It bothered me for quite awhile until one day I realized I am not here to change him. I appreciated him as an intelligent man in many ways, a brilliant mind in a Sixteenth Century theology that goes back to medieval and perhaps neolithic. Would not entertain any notion that the earth was round. The Bible says it has four corners. I had never known anyone like Millard. I found him fascinating all the years I knew him. I respected his theology as John Milton's. I wasn't there to judge, but to learn what the old-time religion was like, to see what was there for my own spiritual path. He gave me the best education I could ask for. In the pulpit, Millard had a facility for receiving the spirit that made other preachers jealous. When the spirit o'ertook him, only love flowed on his voice. The only subject I ever heard him preach was love. This was my evidence that what was coming through had no part of his mind in it. It was such beautiful preaching I never allowed myself to make a tape of it. It was too spontaneous for the moment, for the moment only. 

joel shapiro

*

GREAT SPECIAL EFFECTS

alice neel

 

Waiting at the bank drive-thru today, I was looking at the meadow across the road from the bank, about an acre between the post office and the house on the corner. The meadow was alive with Queen Anne's lace, the flower. Did not take camera, so I sat there and memorized the meadow, and now it's back in my head alongside an auditory memory, Neil Young singing, Look at Mother Nature on the run in the nineteen seventies. Mother Nature, by the twenty teens, couldn't run fast enough. International corporations that (who?) answer to no one have declared genocide---that's Christian for jihad---on Mother Nature. This new century we're in, depicted in sci-fi as futuristic, unimaginably advanced, is looking like the trend is going the other way, deconstruction of the renascence of the Twentieth Century. It was called the Reformation after the Renaissance, and the Dark Ages after the Classical Age. The present reformation was begun by the Reagan Revolution, which really was a revolution. It turned our direction away from the Progress of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, to dismantling, step by step, the social advances of the time, erasing Roosevelt's existence. Lord, how the John Birch Society hated Roosevelt. It would have been all right if only white people benefitted from the social advances of the 1930s and 40s. But somebody black benefitted. Unacceptable. The Reagan Revoution is characterized by the systematic deconstruction of every social program that benefitted black people, first, then went after any benefit to working class white people. The falsehood of trickle-down was used by way of propaganda to justify it; war on the poor is how it worked out.  

 

alice neel

 

I've been remembering a Hollywood movie of the mid-90s, Independence Day, with Jeff Goldblum and other familiar faces, the blockbuster of its week in the lights. It concerned several space ships, each fifteen miles diameter, here to scoop up the earth's surface for its minerals. They zap big cities about the same as with an H-bomb. They want to kill every living thing and take the crust we live on. I'd remembered this much about it, and recognized at the time, in its first weeks in theaters, its emphasis on what the international corporations were doing to the crust of the earth under our feet, corporations "too big to fail," too big to defeat, like the alien space ships. I ordered it from netflix and saw it two evenings ago with friends, Lucas and Judy, visiting from Georgia, their cabin across the road among the trees. Just a few minutes into it, I was ashamed I'd recommended it. By the time it was over, I saw my credibility for movie suggestions take a nose-dive, crash and burn. Again. Remembering the time I suggested they see Ernest Goes To Camp. After Independence Day, I suppose I have no credibility left. It was cheesy. It was Hunt For Red October cheesy. The president flying a fighter jet shooting down alien fighter jets, the mad scientist in Area 51 killed by the tentacled alien he kept alive to study. It was Charlie Chan and early Jane Fonda movies cheesy. It was a children's film with adult actors playing children. Befitting the cheesiest of movies, Jeff Goldblum's character is named David, emphasized several times, Hey, DAVID. His name was spoken as through a megaphone until the last dim-witted one in the audience got it. Oh yeah, David and Goliath, little man, big space ships. Duh. David is the guy everybody in the office was bored with for reminding them to put their empty soft drink cans in the recycling receptacle instead of dropping them on the office floor like they do by habit. He was also a mathematical genius who figured out how to defeat all the big spaceships at once before they destroyed our heroes the camera was watching.

 

alice neel

 

The movie started with hearing REM on the radio, It's the end of the world as we know it. I got the feeling it was telling me this could be a fairly cool movie, opening with REM. It wasn't long before I realized that was a false reading. It just happened to be REM singing that song. The Bee Gees would have been more suited to the movie. REM gave false hope. The wave of the movie's rhythm went from corny to really corny. The genius's eureka formula that defeated the impregnable amounted to a glorified third grade science project. The drama wasn't even gripping. It brought to mind a movie I made the mistake of seeing with Jon Voight, Anaconda. It was so blatantly corny that when Anaconda struck, I laughed. It was too ridiculous to regard in any way but hilarious. Independence Day was not quite as bad as Anaconda, but they are in the same bottom league. David saved the world by slinging the stone, planting a virus, and killing Goliath with one rock, and taking down the whole fleet of evil space ships with one virus. David had to fly a jet into the computer system of one of the devil ships, assisted by Will Smith piloting his jet. Responsible white man with genius mind and responsible black man with genius skills save the world, the white president and first lady, too. The story involved the white house, military planning spaces, hundreds of televisions with graphs on them, a general standing around looking authoritative. Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum, each had a love interest that gave them hope when there was no other to be found. Goldblum's white girlfriend wanted with a Protestant zeal to be hyper-successful, advisor to the president. Goldblum had to outdo her important role by saving the earth and humanity with it.

 

alice neel

 

Will Smith had his babe he gave an engagement ring to, Vivica A Fox. They had an uncanny way of finding each other when they needed to. One time, she was in the ruins of zapped LA, dragging her little boy around, son of Will Smith, the actor, running from ruin to ruin looking for her man, and found him walking on the salt flats of Nevada. Oh, there you are, baby. Thought I'd never find you. Often, I felt like the movie was about to break out and reveal its true self, a John Waters film. The cast was familiar from pop movies, though I could only name a few, the ones already named. The general, an actor I've seen a dozen times, the stereotypical general, turned out to be the shortest person in the movie. I started noticing him early in his appearances that he seemed awfully short. He looks like he is at least six feet tall, when he may be no more than five feet. It came to the place for me that every time he was in a scene I was looking at all the other people in relation to him, assessing his actual size. In his  uniform surrounded by short people, he looks like a big man. In the same movie with Jeff Goldblum, basketball player height, the actor playing general, whose name I have never known, looked almost like a midget among the other actors, even with Goldblum when he was sitting down. It seemed somewhat jarring to realize this cliché general I've seen at least a dozen times was so short. These were the kinds of details that occupied my mind for lack of anything else to pay attention to. About an hour into it, Lucas got up and went to bed. Judy and I elected to see it through, laughing at ourselves for wanting to see it through to completion. The greatest laugh of all came when the town drunk, who flew a crop-dusting plane like a cowboy, was seen flying a fighter jet. Major transition. Mister Common Man sacrifices his worthless life that others might live, saves the world by flying his jet into the space ship's vulnerable spot to make it explode. Or something. The film was interesting only as an allegory, and one very poorly realized. I couldn't help but think of Fifties sci-fi movies like This Island Earth or It Came From Outer Space. Independence Day had the same quality, but with great advances in filmmaking behind it. It was a movie that about all anybody can say of it would be, great special effects, like was said of Jessica Lange's King Kong. The substance of a Tom & Jerry cartoon drama. 

 

alice neel herself

 

 

*

 

  

A GATHERING OF FRIENDS

lee krasner, free space, 1975

The last several days worked with a synchronicity that felt heaven sent, a meeting that was supposed to be. My friends Lucas and Judy in Conyers, Georgia, near Atlanta, were here at their weekend place across the road. Lucas and I went to College of Charleston together and have stayed in touch ever since. Another such friend was Ted, who is living in Brooklyn. We knew each other at College of Charleston. I was going to put Ted in at Lucas & Judy's because I don't have room for a guest right now and my spring is dry, meaning no water. I get water in half gallon plastic jugs from their kitchen sink and use rain water collected in buckets for the toilet. It's no problem for me, but I can't ask a guest to live like I do. When Ted first talked about making the trip for a three day visit, we talked about Monday as his arrival date.



Judy and I talk on the phone and she said they were coming up Monday. I mentioned Ted might be arriving Monday. I got Ted's arrival and departure times by email, but not the day. Get a message from Judy they decided to come on Thursday, to give me and Ted time together. I actually thought I'd like all of us to be together instead of me being the focus of attention. Then I get an email from Ted saying he was arriving Thursday. I laughed at the obvious meant-to-be aspect of it. It seemed to me the Divine Hand wanted all of us together for a period of 3 days. Lucas and Ted were slightly apprehensive about that much time together since they hardly knew each other at the college. I knew each of them, but they didn't know each other very well. Both had been to VietNam in the war.



I went into it wary of being knocked out of my groove. I feel like I've had a good rhythm, a groove, a balance for a few years now and I want to keep it, at least the best I can. I decided to roll with the flow, go where the flow goes, keeping my eye on the flow. The flow was there from the start. I got into terrible mental fixes working the maze of Charlotte NC getting to the airport from 77 with not one sign until right upon the airport. Then, the sign was hidden behind shrubbery so you couldn't see it until right up on it, and I have to decide what lane of 3 to get into immediately to turn whichever way I had to go. Those kinds of moments jangle my nerves. I managed to make it to the airport, not by finding my way, but by trial and error, not knowing how to translate the signs. I've not been at the airport in so many years everything has changed drastically. Found a parking place and walked from there.



I went inside the lobby, but would go no further. Cops everywhere. It was like being in a country under military dictatorship. Before I left the car, I put my pocket knife in the ash tray to keep while I was on foot in the airport lobby. I wore a shirt with a collar and no hat, letting my retired cop white crew cut give the pastoral appearance of somebody who obeys. Cops all know on sight I'm not one of them. I didn't want to get patted down and my pocket knife taken away. The pocket knife was given to me by the widow of a friend who died several years ago. I've never lost it and it stays with me as the pocket knife in my pocket whenever I need one. I found him and we found the car after another maze search. Then getting out of the parking lot was another maze without signs. We went around and around, finally finding the way out by trial and error. The only thing systematic we could try was not doing the same thing more than once. Finally it happened.



Finding the highway was quite another matter. I went the wrong way to 77 and had to go the length of Charlotte to get to the place the highway comes into 77 if I'd turned the right way. It added about 20 minutes to the drive. So what. Scheduling was over. We had good conversation up the highway and then the mountain. It was a good drive. The car was perfectly dependable. It served me well coming back too. I groaned and cussed much of the time until we were out of the city on the way to the mountains. I couldn't believe the traffic on the interstate. Steadily constant. I've not been on the interstate in so many years everything was different. In a city situation like that it feels like I'm in a sailboat getting tossed about by a storm way out at sea.



We made it back to the mountains smooth sailing. The car was a joy to operate. Back at the house, Judy and Lucas had some wine ready. We sat on the deck with wine and talked for a good while, getting reacquainted. All 4 of us were English majors. Judy is originally from Brooklyn, and Ted has lived there longer now than Judy did growing up there. Ted's daughter started at Columbia this year. We had good lively conversation next morning over coffee and in the evening over wine. During the days I took him around to see the landscape and meet people, stop at Selma's for coffee, to meet her and anyone else to come in that I know. I planned nothing, let everything happen as it happens. I wanted to take him Saturday to meet Justin and Crystal. On the way there I told him where we were going, and if they weren't at home, then we're out for a drive in the county's landscape. They were not home, though he was able to meet the baby, Vada, at Crystal's dad's mechanic shop in Glade Valley when I went there to pay him for the new tires I got 2 days before. Diane, Crystal's mother, takes care of the office while Chuck does the mechanic work. Diane had the baby for the day.



We watched McCABE AND MRS MILLER last night, another Altman film. All of us but Ted had seen it when it was new, and not one of us recognized any scene. We all recalled nothing about it, except that we liked it a great deal. It was made about the same time as Nashville. Some of the same actors in both films. For all of us, we'd have been hard pressed to determine that one of those two films could be better than the other. All of us love good films. It was just our good fortune that these were the two films from netflix at this time. The entire visit of my 3 friends for 3 days has been successful in every way possible. A good vibration flowed between all of us. And all four of us were people who appreciate knowing people, person to person, appreciate others for who they are. I never once was knocked off what I call my track, my flow, my rhythm. All the city people slowed way down. We flowed.



*  

RETIRING

lucas

judy



Judy is laughing because she's retired. 2 more days of work next week and she's free to write the book she's been wanting to write, whatever that is. Like for a lot of people, after a long career in the school system, everything changes around you and 30 years later it's not like it was before in hardly any way. The kids are different, the teachers are different, society all around us is different. There comes a time you're in foreign territory without going anywhere. She's been there quite awhile. She has a daughter working on a PhD in molecular biology at Berkeley, happily married to a guy working on his PhD in Chemistry. All of that makes for a mom satisfied that her girl made it through that period of the teens when a kid can go off in any direction. It's fulfilling for a mom to see her fledgling fly on her own.



Judy and Lucas are here from Georgia for the weekend. They'd like to stay longer, but Judy has to be back Tuesday and Wednesday to retire. Lucas would be retiring too, but the "economic downturn" stripped Emory faculty of their retirement. So he has to go on working. And he's at a place, too, where the world has changed under him and he's something akin to a stranger in a strange land. Teaching doesn't convince him any more that he's contributing anything of value to anyone. The school system has changed and the students have changed from year to year. Very little is familiar any more except the tedium of doing something you don't believe in any more. It's hard to let go of believing you're doing any good when you don't connect any more. I knew he'd given up trying when he told me a few years ago, "When I see a kid with a ballcap on backwards, I know he has nothing to say I want to hear." He said it for an example of how far he has allowed himself to separate from the tolerance he used to hold high. He knows what he said has to say about him. He tries not to be a boring old curmudgeon professor, and I know for a certainty he is not, but I believe there are times he'd like to let go and lose interest in the kids. That's his flaw, he can't let go of his interest in the education of the various young people in his classes.

Lucas was one of the first people I met when I started at the College in Charleson. The first student I met to talk with, I think his name was Howard Stahl (?) and he listened to jazz, the subject of our talking. First time we talked, he said, "You need to know Lucas Carpenter," the other jazz lover at the school. So I met Lucas and we've been friends ever since. He was accepted at Vanderbilt for graduate school. In his first year he was drafted out of school and had to go do a year in Nam. Like me, he didn't have what it took to dodge the draft, though we wished we did have what it took. Stationed at a base in Auburn, GA, after his "tour," he came close to marrying a waitress at a local diner. Went back to graduate school at Chapel Hill, where he met Judy, who was there in graduate school from Brooklyn, who did undergraduate at Stoneybrook, where Lucas went after Chapel Hill to get his PhD.

After some years of living on Long Island teaching at a college there, Lucas wanted back in the South. Applied for the job with Emory with Oxford College, a small school Emory took over several years before to keep it going. He got the job and was given an office space that had once been the office of his great uncle he neither knew nor knew of, who taught Math. For Lucas, that part of Georgia is the homeplace of his branch of Carpenters, like Ninemile, Tennessee, was for my branch of Worthingtons. I've seen Lucas and Judy all the way along in their married life, and am happy to say they've had a good life together. It's not been always smooth, but they work things out and continue to have one of the more successful marriages of people I've known. When Lucas gets praised for his daughter, Meredith's success in school, he says he raised her by negative example: don't be like your daddy.

When we get together we tend to talk a lot and watch movies. Getting together to run our mouths for a few hours is good entertainment for us. Like we were anticipating going to the Blue Ridge Music Center on the Parkway, but I couldn't find who was playing on their website. I believed I'd heard some ads about Wayne Henderson playing there, but the website said nothing about anybody being there. We decided we'd rather sit on the deck, look at the trees and sky, talk until we have nothing left to say, recent Bob Dylan music playing in the background. We've all 3 been Dylan fans from the time of about his 3rd album when he was getting known beyond NYC. We laughed over news we'd heard on NPR a year or less ago that the world of American Poetry has accepted Bob Dylan as a poet. We laughed saying it's the other way around, Dylan has finally accepted being one of them, the man who gives his poetry readings with an incredible rock band on a big stage with thousands in the audience, absolutely independent of the world of Poetry. We've always been in awe of Dylan as a phenomenon in our lifetime the equal of Shakespeare, Harold Pinter, TS Eliot, the masters whose works never go out of print.

Judy worked her way through graduate school in Chapel Hill playing a guitar and singing "folk songs" ala Joni Mitchell/Joan Baez. She had long straight hair and a Brooklyn accent, authentic for urban folk music, sang well and played in a couple of differernt places around Chapel Hill. When she was done with school, she put her guitar away and never sang again. I asked her once to make a cassette for me of her playing guitar and singing songs she sang then, for fun only. Many years later when Meredith was about 15, I mailed the cassette to her. She didn't even know Judy could play a guitar or sing songs. And Meredith liked what she heard. It was a new dimension of mother in a time in her life when girls have problems with mothers and the other way around. Meredith and Judy, though, were inseparable. They were like each other's best friend all the way along. It's that way now with Meredith in San Francisco. They talk by cell phone every day, email, facebook, like best friends with a few thousand miles between them. For me, it's been a very beautiful relationship to witness all along the way, a mother-daughter relationship that's about friends who respect each other and exercise no efferts to control. Judy is actually in awe of what her daughter has become, the person she has become in her mid twenties, fully herself. Lucas, too, is in awe of her. As am I.

It's a joy for me to see this child,whose parents I'd known for several years before she was born and her all her life, in graduate school at Berkeley. For me to apply at Berkeley would be a waste of postage, trouble, everything. They wouldn't even laugh. Whoever opens the envelopes would take a momentary look and drop it in the trash, wouldn't even remember at the end of the day seeing it. Berkeley wouldn't take me if they had government grants to process the certifiably ignorant. And Meredith's husband, Greg, I feel the same respect for as for her. When not around them I might ask myself how do I talk with somebody working on a PhD in some science region I've never even heard of? Answer comes back, just like I'd talk with somebody who dropped out of high school. Person to person. In person to person, we're all equal. In person to person is true democracy. Meredith and Greg, both, are people I can know person to person easily and have good times. I think of all the generation gaps between us and wonder how we can communicate at all, but we do. Greg married a good cook, too.