IN MY OPINION, BUT GRACIOUSLY

alexander calder

 

It's early Monday morning, first light. An appointment to repair a brake line in the car that has a rusted hole in it. The fluid in the left front brake holds enough to operate brakes enough to stop when necessary. I carry a quart of brake fluid for this purpose. The line broke Thursday. No problem staying at home. The appointment is for ten o'clock. I have an affliction that makes me worry about getting up on time when I have a morning appointment. I can't get to sleep the night before. The alarm system on the clock radio is so complex I've never attempted to figure it out. Went to sleep early last night to insure I'd get up early. Often when I lie down too early, I'll be awake all night. I turn the radio on down low and let it play while sleeping. I hear BBC news that is mostly African in the night, Nigeria and Kenya, the British colonies. The volume is down to where I can only hear what they're saying by listening closely. Mostly, it's just white noise. I use it when mind is racing. The white noise acts as a scrambling device for mind's ongoing activity, thoughts quit attempting to compete with BBC, mind shuts down and here comes sleep. I'm reminded of a quotation I wrote down from a utube interview with artist, Agnes Martin. She said, I don't have any ideas of my own, and I don't believe anybody else's. That leaves me with clear mind. I say, thank you, BBC, for clear mind. I've come to get used to hearing news from Africa. Like news from everyplace else, it's about killing. This bunch killed that bunch. And that bunch killed this bunch. African killing is up close, in your face with machetes and machine guns mounted on the beds of Nissan pickups, operated by hyper-stoned pre-teen boys. It's a totally different attitude toward life and death from mine. American news comes from a different attitude toward life and death from mine, as well.

 

 

alexander calder

 

That's a presumptuous saying, implying I know what my attitude toward life and death is. I ask self what I mean and get no answer. Even implying I know what their attitude is toward life and death. It's just different. Maybe the difference can help me to define my own. Like it takes darkness to define light and the other way around. Duality. Warlord mentality is medieval. Kings and castles of old Europe were warlords. China before unification was six provinces ruled by warlords. It looks like Africa is attempting to bridge the gap between the medieval and the post-modern world in a few decades. It's six decades after the civil rights laws in USA, and American racism has not diminished the least little bit. It went underground. Nothing like a black president to surface the racist submarine. American racism is out in the open where it can be dealt with out in the open. The black people are hunkering down, keeping a low profile, flying below the radar, staying out of white man's cross-hairs the best they know how. Many are not successful. Here, concerning my attitude toward life, racism never made sense to me. I came up in a racist family in a racist white baptist culture where racism was a natural law, like gravity. I learned in the Navy and from then on that regarding black people with the same respect as white people makes me a nigger-lover. Oh well. I'd rather be a nigger-lover than have a white robe in my closet for special occasions. I can't help but think the shrinking globe of our time has something to do with the clash of cultures going on all over the globe. Also, the USA has its tentacles in every country on earth, and the world is turning against us for it. Even Germany is now insulted by American arrogance. My attitude toward life does not want to dominate any country. It doesn't want to dominate anybody. I asked my friend Pat, who goes to Costa Rica for a month every year, how Costa Rica can exist without a military to protect itself at least somewhat from USA. She said Costa Rica has nothing USA wants; no oil, no minerals, no gold. They have nothing to fear.

 

alexander calder

 

One bit of sound counsel came to me from daddy in childhood. Because he barely made it through school after the sixth grade, he told me, your education is one thing nobody can take away from you. Last week I was asked why a man would want to take philosophy courses in college, you can't do nothin with it. A volcano of wind exhaled from my lungs, "For your life!" It can be very important in your life. I know a guy majored in philosophy at Chapel Hill working as a welder. He also has a fairly even temperament because he's a thinker, even reads books. He's not jumping up and down inside, waiting for the chance to fight somebody that looked at him wrong. Nor does he carry a "nine" in the back of his pants in case somebody who wants to kill him turns up. I can't help but feel like one's attitude toward life is a basic driving force. I've used my adult life to improve my own. Early on I had a fairly sour attitude toward life. Therefore, what I gave out was sour and what I got in return was sour, reinforcing what I believed about the world around me, a projection of myself. As my attitude toward life changed, the world around me changed, the people around me changed. My attitude toward life includes compassion and kindness in these years; therefore, I have plenty to draw from when needed. I've honed it down to what I call the gospel in a fortune cookie: Love God and treat others right. My next art object will have these words on it. My personal interpretation of others includes non-human others; the four-legged, the winged, the six-legged, the no-leggeds. When I treat others right, including donkeys, others tend to treat me right. I've "trained" the donkeys not to kick me by their own will, not by fear. I treat them right; they treat me right.

alexander calder

 

In the column of quotations on the right is one I hold to myself by Meher Baba as a reminder: (I paraphrase) Opinions reside in a superficial layer of the mind, having no affect on the core of personality, wherein resides one's attitude toward life. I have opinions, though I do not regard them truth. The Worthington coat of arms motto: In my opinion, but graciously. It reads like something in my horoscope. This was back when the name was in northern England, before anybody crossed the Atlantic. John Worthington, the original one to cross the water in my line, lost eight kids and his wife during and soon after the crossing. He had an inn in Philadelphia and a cattle ranch outside the city, in the same time Ben Franklin was there. He was a Quaker exiled from England for his faith. He found a second wife and raised several more kids. I didn't know any Worthingtons of the past, not grandfather, greatgrandfather, not even cousins. Of the Worthington third and fourth cousins I've met, I can see "in my opinion, but graciously." I can see it in photographs of distant relatives. It's a firmness in the face like standing on both feet, yet not aggressive. About ten years ago I met a 4th cousin at Ninemile, Tennessee. On sight, he said, "I can see the Worthington in you." I believe it is that attitude he saw in the set of the face, the eyes. I saw it in him too. For my part, but graciously amending in my opinion says I do not take my opinions for natural law. They grow out of my limited experience. I don't have a problem talking with somebody whose opinions are different from mine, though find few able to do the same in turn. It's like the old country sayin, Opinions is like assholes; everbody's got one. An attitude toward life I'm glad I entertain is that everybody has their own way of seeing by way of individual experience. No two can be alike. It's how it's meant to be. It's in the very life force itself. I feel much better about self when I fall in line with understanding we all have our own experience, our own minds, our own selves. The beauty is, like shells on the beach, no two are alike.   

 

alexander calder himself

 

 

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SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE REPUBLICANS

wall

Rain in the night, wet and overcast this morning and now fog creeping in as it does. A propeller plane flying over. Those vertical takeoff planes with 2 large propellers sound like 2 helicopters when they fly over the house. Air Force planes tend to use the mountains for flying practice, or whatever reason. The jets are mostly trainers, and every once in awhile a F-15 or F-16 flies over. Big noise difference between the Fs and the trainers. The Fs make a thunder you can hear all the way to horizon like thunder rumbling across the sky to eventual fade-out. When they pass over, I always think of people on the ground in places like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and all the other places American military might rules, death from the sky, run for cover. Helicopters make me think such thoughts too, the sound that says, Run for it, run for it, run for it.



One time, at lunch with friend Jim Winfield, just picking, I said when a jet flew over, "The sound of freedom." I was thinking ironically, but learned many years ago, don't use irony in America. It goes over everybody's head. Or under it or around it. It goes on by like a blank where a word was meant to go. I've heard it said of Jim, he's so liberal he's conservative. It's true. I was picking at his liberal mind. He shot back, "No it's not!" It got him so fired up, I regretted saying it. It didn't take him long to settle down. It had the effect of making a really loud noise by surprise. I don't know why I had to explain I was speaking ironically. He knows me well enough to know I was playing with language again. Once it was explained, we could talk again.



I have to confess I think myself a liberal, maybe on the verge of radical, in case you don't get it by now. Though I imagine among truly radical people I'd be questioning my reasons for being there. That's Amnesty International kind of serious. I'm not that serious. I'm all with AI, but the few people I've seen involved are way too serious for me. I'm not a radical. There aren't too many liberals going about in the mountains, but there are plenty. Before the mountains, all the people I knew were liberals. Conservatives were hardly worthy of consideration. In the mountains, the major part of my adult life has been around conservatives. They know I'm not one of them politically, but it doesn't matter between us. Everybody has their own politics.



The ones I call my friends, like Jr Maxwell, Tom Pruitt, Millard Pruitt and a some more, were dead set Republican, born Republican, died Republican. Millard was the very subject of a song Groucho Marx sang in his movie, I think it's Horse Feathers, Whatever It Is I'm Against It. It can be found on YouTube. It is a riotously funny jib-jab at the block-headed American male mind. Not all, by any means, just the block-headed ones, and we all know who they are in our lives. I felt I understood where they were coming from. They were pre-Reagan Republicans. Their daddies were Republicans. I don't know for certain, but I have a feeling mountain Democrats were descendants of Confederate sympathizers and Republicans of Yankee sympathizers. I don't know that, but it looks that way from where I see. Except when I remember Jr's grandpa was snuffed with the homeguard just before the end of the war by a Yankee sniper while watering his horse at Bledsoe Creek, just below the Bypass turnoff in front of Blevins.



My grandfather, Tom Worthington, was the grandson of a Confederate soldier who survived the war, born at Ninemile, east Tennessee, about 60 mi north of Chatanooga, in the Cumberland plateau. His parents moved to Kansas when he was a child. My grandmother's people left Pulaski County, Kentucky, southeastern part of the state, also in the Cumberland plateau, just before the end of the War of Yankee Aggression, about 30 years before she was born. Kansas being a new Yankee state, greatgrandpa I take it was getting the hell out of Dodge. He might have done some favors for Yankees that got him condemned by his neighbors. I have no idea. My grandmother often talked about how she cancelled her husband's vote. I suppose it was her trump card. She was not a woman to be taken lightly. Everyone who knew her knew that.



My parachute landed me in the midst of really conservative Republicans. It served as evidence God's hand was in the deal. His way of saying, You need to learn something, pay attention. It wasn't long before I was saying, Some of my best friends are Republicans. There were times I churned in the mind over their political ignorance, until the evening I drove home from a visit with Millard in the time of the Reagan junta. I was boiling all the way down the road. Until the gravel road winding its way up the mountain. I recall the curve the truck was in when I got it. I'm having a fit over opinions. What are opinions? Answer: Nothing. Nothing at all. Not even air that's useful for breathing. Opinions are useful for nothing. Because their very essence is nothing. Good old saying about opinions, They're like assholes: everbody's got one.



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HILLBILLY

ninemile, tenn, worthington mtn in distance

An email today from a heretofore unknown relative, Diane. Her mother was a Worthington and she does genealogy, found me by the blog, and would like me to help her fill in the information about my sisters and others. She goes back to Jesse Carroll of Ninemile too. She found his grave, which is evidently not so easy to find. My great grandmother was Dora Hale of Ninemile. Diane's great grandmother was a Hale from Blout. I must remember to ask her if she got a picture of Jesse Carroll's gravestone. I'd like to see it.


This coming year I might have the transportation and the time and maybe even the money to make a 3 or 4 day visit to Bledsoe County, Tennessee, visit Pikeville, look up some people who might be kin. Cousin Wendell Walker of Ninemile told me there are no more Worthingtons left in the county by name. There are several descendants of Worthington women in the county. An outdoor bluegrass place that puts on shows through the summer of regional music is across the highway from what was Worthington land until recently. The picture above was taken at Wendell's farm, what he said was the old Sam Worthington plantation. I didn't see much difference between what he called a plantation and what we call a farm. Land with cows and chickens on it.


The time I visited Wendell, he took me across the highway to the bluegrass place, since they were making music that night. I listened to several bands. I was interested to hear the difference between the sound of this part of Tennessee in relation to what I know of the Central BlueRidge. There is a difference, but I'd have a hard time naming it. Perhaps I could say in this part of Tennessee, the part of the world where Lester Flatt came from and Charlie Louvin, they have what sounds to my ear like a more casual style. Musicians around here lay it to it, but there, they have a little bit more laid back sound. Not a whole lot, just enough for an ear that knows one region well to hear another region the first time. There is a difference, though slight.


Since I discovered my Ninemile connection, and my grandmother's people came from the same Cumberland Plateau just north of Ninemile across the Kentucky line in Pulaski County, I've sought music from both regions. Have found a fair amount from that part of Tennessee that is good. But I've not been able to find any music in Pulaski County, Kentucky, though I know there are people in that county making music. It's southeastern Kentucky. There are people there making music. When I was in Somerset I went to the Chamber of Commerce welcome center. I had to explain to the man what I meant by old-time music. He said there's no music in the county. He asked somebody else. There's no music in the county.


I've emailed places in Somerset asking, and never get an answer. After I was home, I realized I should have asked the raving crazy man sitting on a kitchen chair in the town square, which is a traffic circle, on the edge of the traffic hollering at people who drove by. If I had stopped and asked him, he could have taken me straight to some music. I could see this old boy lived very poor, had that trailer in a holler look. He was still a hillbilly and proud of it. I almost wanted to drive back to Somerset and see him. But it's a long ways. I know there is music in Pulaski County, Kentucky. I think Roy Lee Centers came from a neighboring county.


I feel something like a continual longing to get back to Ninemile, spend some time, walk on the ground, feel the land underfoot my ancestors worked in their time. I looked over some of the land that was initially Big Spring Bill's land, daddy to Jesse Carroll. In my mind's eye I saw him working a plow behind two horses. I saw the big spring that was on his land. It was a beautiful pool with big natural rock formation walls, tree roots, and the water was littered with trash, old tires and stuff. I wanted to bring a canoe and spend a day cleaning the place up. Naturally, the first thing that came to mind was this is how people new to Alleghany see things, they want to clean it up. I let that thought drop immediately. Not my business. Clear water like it was in the old days, it was a beautiful place. Probably known for its beauty, the big spring.


Half my life, now, I've lived in these mountains on Waterfall Road. I've studied the culture, not as an anthropologist, but as the world my parachute landed me in. I fell in love with the county and everyone in it the day I exhausted finding everything that was wrong with the place. When I saw that I'd found everything that's wrong with the place, then I thought, let's look at what's right with the place. I didn't even have to look. I already knew. Tears welled up and my heart fell in love at that moment with the mountain people.


This moment occurred several years before I learned I have these mountains in my blood, through Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky. When I learned I have the mountains in my blood, it was one of the great days of my life, one of the very few great days. In my Charleston years, if I'd learned I had hillbilly blood, I'd have gone for a transfusion. But I didn't know what it meant in them days. I didn't know then that hillbilly meant as fine a people as you'll find anywhere on the earth. That's Appalachia's best kept secret.

MEN OF CONSTANT SORROW

In May of 2006 I was talking with my mother in Wichita KS on the phone. For some reason I don't remember, I was curious to know where my grandfather Worthington's family went to Perry KS from. Perry is a small town due west of Kansas City about an hour's drive, on the Kaw River, which ran close to where we lived in KC. When I was a kid in KC it was a long ways to Perry, though now KC has spread so much it's looking like KC could swallow up Perry in the near future if cities keep on growing like they have in the recent past.

I asked where grandfather Worthington's people came from. She said all she knew was Tennessee, someplace in Tennessee. That piqued my interest, as Tennessee is next door to where I live now, the place I call the home of my soul. I got in touch with first cousin, Charles Weldon, in KC and asked what he knew. He put me in touch with the Worthington family genealogist in Texas, Betty Worthington Lester. She sent me an email of 35+ pages of genealogy starting with the first one to come to the New World, Robert, from Northern England where he and his wife Alice were exiled to Ireland over something to do with being a Quaker. I found that particularly interesting, because I've felt a kinship with Quakers ever since I first learned about them, while never living in a place where Quakers had a meeting house as far as I knew. I've heard there is one in Winston-Salem, but I'm not driving to Winston for church or anything else.

Old Robert had it rough. His first son Sam came over to Philadelphia by himself and wrote back for the others to come on. Robert left two years later with wife and eight kids. Six of the kids died on the ship, the other two died soon after landing in Salem NJ, 1714. They moved to Philadelphia in 1722. Alice died in 1729 and Robert found a second wife, Mary Burtis, forty years younger, the same year and started a second family. He had a farm outside Philadelphia where he kept cattle, and an inn in town. He was in Philadelphia in the time Ben Franklin started the Philadelphia Gazette and in his Poor Richard period. I believe it could be said with certainty they were acquainted, and probably no more than that. Franklin was a free thinker and I've an idea Grandpa Robert was a hardshell in his religion. He might have thought Franklin "bold." In 1734 he was granted 3,000 acres in a new county cut off from Spotsylvania, what is now Orange County VA, east of Charlottesville.

By the time he ended up in Philadelphia, Grandpa Robert was well acquainted with grief, agonizing grief, his entire family he brought to the new world for a new life all vanished but the one boy who went ahead on his own. I'd guess Robert more than likely blamed himself for the deaths of his younguns, making it a grief he never got over, complicated with survivor's guilt.

Over the next generations Robert's descendants who became my ancestors went from Orange County VA to Botetourt County just north of Roanoke, from there to Oak Ridge TN and on down to Ninemile TN in the Cumberland Plateau, the Sequatchie Valley the Sequatchie River runs through, where "Big Spring" Bill Worthington, my great great great grandfather, had a rather large plantation and most likely some slaves. All of his five boys fought in the War of Yankee Aggression; only one didn't return. Murphy died in a Yankee prison. Every time I hear the song, The Rebel Soldier, I think of him, "Will my soul pass through the Southland?" Jimmy Arnold made that song his own. My great great grandfather Jesse Carroll Worthington is said to have taken his slaves with him into the War, perhaps as cooks, keepers of the horses, just guessing, and all returned.

All of Jesse Carroll's boys left Ninemile and went West. My great grandfather Jim, with his wife Dora Ann Hale of Bledsoe County, Tennessee, took their kids and moved to Perry KS. My grandfather Tom, whose name was passed to me, moved to KC after marriage to be a railroad engineer. Jesse Carroll worked on railroad in Alabama before the War. Railroad was the good paying work of the time like computer work is now. I can't figure whether Jessee Carroll advised his boys to go West, get out of the South, because the South was in a Depression that looked like it would never lift, or if he was so brutal on his boys, they came to hate him and left.

Cousin Wendell Walker of Ninemile told me Jesse Carroll is known to have sired four illegitimate kids and blamed them on his boys. My guess is the boys were individually fed up with him. I know for certain he drank white liquor, just because of who he was, which likely made him all the more difficult. He had no male heirs in Bledsoe County when he died. He probably came home from the war with a lifetime of seething anger called post-traumatic stress disorder. Worst of all, he had three young children just before the War, and when he came home four years later, even the oldest one was too young when he left to have any memory of him.

Jesse Carroll returned to his farm in no telling what condition with wife and kids traumatized by Yankee soldiers pillaging the farm, getting by best they could. There's no telling what she went through. He certainly had to rebuild the farm and get it going, working the kids and more than likely severely rough on them, toughening them to live in this hard world, such that this man their mama waited for turned out to be a stranger to them and I'd guess they never learned to like him. That is totally conjecture, but it rings true with what I know of my immediate family.

Jesse Carroll's boy James, who went to Perry Ks, beat his boy Sam when he was 16 with a chain in the barn. Sam staggered to the road, walked down the road to a railroad track in Perry and set out hoboing by train for the next years figuring out what he was going to do with his life. He never returned to Perry. Sam is the only one of my grandfather's brothers I knew. My grandfather died of pneumonia seven years before I was born.

My dad said to me once, "I was raised with an iron hand and you will be too!" Like it was something to be proud of. I had experience similar to one of jesse Caroll's boys; daddy went off to WW2 when I was two and came back when I was five, a stranger with post-traumatic stress disorder, who took my mother away from me and taught me in a very short time to be afraid of his irrational ways. He never gave me a chance to learn to like him, never showed me anything to like.

I left Wichita as soon after high school as a neurotic kid could get out of there, a kid whose only experience outside the home was school, church, summer jobs and rock & roll. I have to say I'm glad it was five years before the drug scene came along or I'd have dove deep into things like lsd to self-medicate my own post-traumatic stress disorder. I spent my adult life transcending this story, and now toward the end of my life find it fascinating.