ROUND TRIP TO WHITEHEAD

shadow from the past

Laid down to take a nap at 6, woke a few minutes after 12 to the plaintive cry of a cat outside the door. I believed Caterpillar was in the house when I closed the door, but I've shut her out all night before. This is her home. She knows safe places under the house a dog can't get to. She can curl up and be warm at home. It's just my preference that she be in the house while I'm sleeping. Dogs come around by surprise. I want her in the house when dogs are present. The cry of the cat outside the door alarmed me. It sounded so forlorn like it was crying. My immediate thought on waking was I'd shut Caterpillar out and she was hurt, though really didn't believe it. She has a hidden bed in another room she sleeps in mostly now. She has several beds around the house. She moves around to the different ones. I learned early she does not like the same old catfood every day. I buy her a variety every time in the can, and each bag of dry food is different. She'd rather be having mouse or bird sushi. At age 17 she doesn't jump onto chairs anymore. I will lift her when she wants to nap on my reading chair, and lift her again to let her down. From the bed, I stepped into my slip-on shoes, hurried to the door, turned on the outside light and opened the door. No cat. It did not sound like a dream. Yet, I've never heard Caterpillar cry so mournfully. I was thinking she must be hurt. Or it could be another cat. Maybe the cat ran when I turned on the light. My dreams over the last few years are odd. I will meet someone in a dream, reach out to shake hands and wake up with my arm extended and hand ready for a shake. I've dreamed cat Tar Baby was standing on my chest watching me wake and when I wake, cat's not there. One morning I dreamed I was lying in the bed gazing out the window. I woke seeing the same scene with blinds closed. 

found art

Thought I might get up and read, but it was too cold. I'd have to put on a sweater and even then it would be too cold. Even turning on the heat, it would take too long to get warm enough to be comfortable slouched down reading. I threw on a sweatshirt and turned on the laptop. A good time to write to you after a 6 hour restful sleep. I wasn't sleepy when I laid down, just thought I'd take a nap between scenes. The day's project was to mix an orange to satisfaction and slather it onto prepared white surface with palette knife. I'd thought about it so much, I knew step-by-step what to do. I took a piece of scrap plywood I'd found someplace years ago 26x12 inches. Glued and screwed two strips of wood to the back to hold the plywood's tendency to warp over time. Turned it over and glued a rectangle of cardboard to it. I'd cut the cardboard from a box 20x6 inches, and placed it where it felt right for the feeling I was looking for to accompany the fire orange. This is a hot orange. I wanted to juxtapose a cold, geometric line with the hot color. Balance. It is minimalist. I slathered the orange paint on it with the palette knife to make an abstraction with the marks of the palette knife. I did not want the markings to look like I was trying to do pretty aesthetic sweeps of the blade or make a repeating pattern. I wanted to spread it over the white, to cover the surface, making it a point to let each swipe of the palette knife function to cover the white and thicken the thin places, only. Slapping the paint on is an abstract expressionist approach. For my own personal exercise in what I like, I like the principles of both. I feel like minimalism is abstraction without the personalized texture. Abstraction, soft edges, gave evidence a machine did not do this. Acoustic. A minimalist object looks like it probably was made by machine, had to be. Electric. Yin and yang. 

anthropocene tracks

About the time I was wondering where to put it to let it dry, thinking all the red in it will take at least a month to dry. The phone rang. Melvin wanted me to meet him in Whitehead with a check for him that came to my address in the mail at one, for work he did last week for Carpenters. He needed to be in town to get it cashed and get electric bill paid before two to prevent cutoff. He wanted me to meet him to save him the 20 minute round trip from hwy 18 to here. I did not want to go to town today. This was not going to town, just driving down the mountain and back up. Thought I'd take the camera along. We were to meet at the old Whitehead store, a Sunoco station before that. I was a little early and sat listening to NPR news product and looking around at familiar scenes, scenes so familiar I didn't see anything interesting in them to photograph. I saw the shadow of an old light fixture on the pavement, picked up the camera thinking I could get the picture I wanted without leaving the car, and left the car. Photographed the shadow and discovered details in the building I felt were interesting. Found some chance markings in the pavement made by tire, and several bottle caps melted into asphalt. I'd guess these were ones opened on the way to the car and cap dropped on the ground. On a summer day of sun all day long the pavement is soft, a car rolls over the cap and pushes its circular blade down into the asphalt and there it stays. A moment in time frozen into rock like dinosaur tracks. The graffiti of chance. The closer I looked, the more subjects I found. It came to mind to get some pics here for the facebook group called Rambling Revolution. It's about showing pictures from around where we live. Everybody lives in different places. What is familiar unto boring to us is fresh, exotic and new to somebody in another part of the country or world.  

ah-choo

I thought I'd mosey home, take my time and see what I can find on the way to make a five-image picture of scenes in Whitehead. I wanted to get pictures of a field of goldenrod in full flower where the pavement ends before the turn up the mountain on gravel road. I parked, walked up the road a ways looking at the meadow of goldenrod flowers assessing how I wanted to photograph it. I held camera up arms length with monitor turned downward so I could see like a periscope. That worked the best. At eye level, it was a line of the yellow flowers, green below and the green trees above. I needed to get the camera up high to get any sense of the field. Next stop was Air Bellows to get some pictures of a stack of rocks the man who lives there keeps growing and changing. He has been doing this for years. Sometimes a storm knocks them down when a tree limb falls on them. Sometimes somebody will knock them down. Turns out stacked rocks freak some people out. They claim it has to do with religion and the devil, but I suspect they get it from horror movies about devil-worship kinds of nonsense. The people freaked by stacked rocks tend to be of a generation that saw those movies in childhood, possibly parents went to church and watched horror movies until they fused in the kids' minds. There was a time I put rocks from the road on top of fence posts, something to do. It freaked out a lot of people. Somebody left a note under one of the rocks, "Are you a devil-worshiper?" I'm not going to look at any of those movies to see if there is anything to my hypothesis, but I already know it has something to do with television. It has been several years since I've seen evidence of that way of thinking. Possibly horror movie trends have got weary of the devil and now use trons.  

air bellows rock formation

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A TOAST TO THE MEMORY OF JR MAXWELL

jr maxwell's gravestone

November One, my thirty-seventh anniversary in the mountains, and fourth anniversary of the passing of friend Jr Maxwell. On this day, Melia Edwards, Jr's cousin, and I get together to visit the grave, have a sip of some liquor and pour a sip on his grave. She said that earlier in the day she had looked out the window and saw a rainbow above the hill the cemetery is on. She felt it important, significant, having to do with Jr on his day. As I turned off the road into the driveway toward the cemetery, I saw a dozen or more buzzards take to the air, flapping and whirling above me on their way into the sky. I am not one to see a buzzard a bad omen. I take a buzzard symbolic of wisdom. Jr remains in my memory the wise man I have found out here in the world, not sheltered by a cardboard box on a sidewalk in Calcutta nor sitting cross-legged in an abandoned Hindu temple. It took three to four years of sitting with him every evening over a drink of good liquor listening to him tell his life in two-hour chapters. As I came to know him better, very early on I had a glimmer of a suspicion that Jr had a great deal of wisdom in him. I paid attention and in the last two or three years of knowing him, sitting at the table with our drams for two hours an evening, I sat and listened the very same as at the feet of the Master. I can't say he became my spiritual master, but I could see very clearly he was given to me by the Master, by God, to learn from, and ultimately to serve as one would serve the Master.

 

hh the dalai lama

 

 

As he went into his time of infirmity in his mid 80s, into his feeble period unto unable to care for himself, even feed himself, I felt I was given this opportunity to care for him as I would the Master himself, God in human form. It's not like I had Jr held up so high as to be a Messiah. Not at all. Not anywhere near. I saw him a soul in God's grace unlike others I have known. He stayed away from church, had little to no respect for preachers. One of his favorite sayings was, Tighter'n a preacher's dick in a calf's ass. He told of a time when he was a boy, probably twelve or before, at the Whitehead Store, he and one or two other boys were standing out front talking, horsing around. A preacher who lived up Spicer Mtn Road stopped by on his horse. He had nothing good to say to the boys, but to give them lectures on their ways. Jr picked up a chestnut burr and, without preacher seeing him, he lifted the horse's tail and placed the burr under the tail on a very tender part of the horse's skin. When he slapped down on the horse's tail up close to the rump, the horse took off running and kicking, the preacher couldn't control it. The horse ran past the turn up Spicer Mtn Road and took the preacher for the ride of his life. Knowing Jr and knowing a few of the men who were boys in Jr's childhood, I can see them rolling on the ground, their stomachs hurting from the laughter.

 

 

 

They were rougher people than we are now. Now, the concern would be for what happened to the preacher. Then, the preacher was on his own. If the horse threw him, all the funnier. But in the time when somebody rode a horse everywhere he went, he knew horse behavior, and it would take more than a horse having a fit to throw him. In a world where everybody rode horses, everybody was thrown by a horse at least once. As long as it didn't draw blood or cause permanent injury, it was all right. Jr bent over laughing at the memory of the moment. I know Whitehead Store, the road, the whole scene, even the attitude of long-faced preachers that would be reminding boys of their wayward behavior. It was not that he was a preacher so much as his attitude. The boys disliked him because he never spoke a civil word to them. Sitting at the table hearing Jr's memories educated me in so many ways I could not articulate them all. It would be the same as asking me to name my five favorite Bob Dylan songs. Impossible. What is my favorite poem by John Berryman? Which of my pets was my favorite? Unanswerable questions. All that I learned from Jr makes a logjam in my head and there's not enough time to pick apart the logs. I do not exaggerate when I say in the last years of his life, including the period of dementia that took his mind away, I took care of him with the same reverence as if he were the Master, himself. I believed by then I was sent to him to learn and to assist him in his solitary last days. I took it as my spiritual role. It was my opportunity to serve the Master by serving "the least of these," the humblest man I ever knew. Not a trace of his humility was for show. Humility was the core of his personality.

 

melia edwards

 

I came to know Melia over the period of time Jr was fading away. We bonded as friends as I did with everyone who cared about him. Melia and I decided to meet at the cemetery November one, have a sip and include Jr. Her mother Edith and her husband Joe joined us the first year. Mother joined us the next year. This year it was Melia and me. We are the ones committed. Others are welcome to join us, but it is important to us that we honor the day every year. It is a time for us to get together and remember Jr, telling memories of him, laughing over him, the way he would want to see us if his spirit might have a chance to see us there. We don't know, but we hope he can see and hear us. The Jr within each of us was present. We stayed in the cemetery talking and laughing as long as we felt like it. We'd had a big wind the night before that threw plastic flowers all over the cemetery. She arrived a few minutes before I did and she was picking some of them up when I arrived. She poked them into the ground beside the tombstone making a row of multi-colored flowers. A bee found them and flew back and forth across them, evidently having a hard time switching circuits from instinct that goes back millions of years to the sudden age of oil where some of the flowers are plastic. We laughed at the bee with an air of pity for its frustration. We don't get the modern age either. It was self-pity we were projecting onto the honeybee, a Monsanto survivor, alone in its illusion having to deal with flowers that are not flowers.

 

 

melia

 

We were standing over a dear one replaced by a block of granite with letters and numbers carved in it. We could not have asked him to stay ten minutes longer in his exhausted body. The time was right for him, we know we can't have him back. We were happy for having him in our lives, and we know he went to the light. We would not call him back for our egoic benefit. We celebrated that he is in the light and his soul is happy as a soul can be. This is what we would want for Jr, and this is what we have. This is what we celebrated. We were both grown up enough to know dying is what we do. Jr predeceased us and that's all we're really sorry about. We celebrate his role in our lives as if he were with us in the present. I almost never visit the graves of people I know who have gone on. I put no importance in a grave except as disposal of the body. I mourn that the bodies are kept mummified in vaults just below the surface. I can't help but feel that decomposition of the body to return literally to the earth where it can nourish tree roots is a cycle worth honoring. I'm recalling a time when our friend Jean was at the table with Jr and me. She was talking about why she'd rather be buried than cremated. I mentioned that I'm going with cremation and ashes dumped on the ground in the woods. I said, "I want to be fertilizer." Jr said, "Y'already are." This is the humor that Melia and I miss when we think of Jr. I will laugh about that one the rest of my life. I laugh every time it comes to mind. We remembered our friend today in laughter, much good laughter, refreshing laughter. Good for the soul. Thank you, Jr.

melia

 

jr Maxwell by tj worthington

 

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