The Crossroads

The legend lives on from the blues men on down of the big choice they call the ole crossroads.

The crossroads, it is told, is where a man's mortal soul can be sold for a life of good fortune.

Somewhere out there in the delta, in the sweltering heat of Mississippi where the cotton grew high and the ancient blues twangers sang their mournful 12-bar tunes about how hard life is and how much much harder it could be when the love of a woman is tasted but then gets lost somewhere between trouble and tragedy, and the tragedy is turned into song. . . out there where Miss'ippi mud is blacker than New'Awlins coffee, and the blues pangs clangin' off them ole guitar strings is thicker and stronger than bad whisky. . .

that ole crossroads where they say the devil would hang around waitin' for the blues man to come walkin' along, desperate for some kind of simple twist of fate that would set his heartstrings and his sixstrings into a new direction, where he could catch a ride to Memphis or NewYawk and sing them blues into the big microphone and get satisfaction for his pain, get some monetary compensation for sharing his pain with the world, to the tune of . . .Crossroads

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd60nI4sa9A

As I was a-growin' up down there in Miss'ippi, snotty-nosed clueless white kid in the suburbs of Jackson, late 1950's, my daddy might have driven right over them very crossroads, out there in the piney woods backwoods near where Robert Johnson and Pop Staples had cranked out their doleful blues tunes. My daddy might have clunked over them crossroads in the old Ford station wagon as he was driving the backroads doing forestry work, but if he did I never knew it.

Wasn't 'til later that I found out about them blues, encountered them blues for myself while tasting for my own young self the sorts of pain that this life can deal out.

Years later, when I was wandering in the college scene in the late '60s, I got a little turned around and confused and encountered the blues, found myself romanticizing some pain that was in my head and a little too caught up in the mary jane and the avoidance of the pain, but still managed somehow to gain a degree, for what its worth, in political science or English or some useless crossroads thereof.

I say useless, but not really.

It's good to learn to read and write, and to research etc blahblahblah. Now I'm working on a fourth novel, like a thousand and one other boomer fools.

But As I was sayin', One thing led to another and then after college I was in Florida for awhile, selling insurance and then advertising with many a night misspent in topless bars and what not, followed by a few nights in Pasco county jail and the night I got out of jail I saw a movie that had been made in the mountains of North Carolina and so I, still running from my troubles, went up there, landed in Asheville, been there ever since, not in Asheville but in the great green state of North Carolina.

North Carolina Is My Home

After a few more false starts and dead ends I finally found, by the grace of God, salvation and the love of my life, from whose womb birth was given that brought forth our three children and this wonderful life, which is, as it turned out, so richly lived, even without all the money that I coulda shoulda woulda made had I made better choices.

Now after 35 years of building houses and other structures I suddenly found myself turning a corner toward the big 65 when I found myself not yet ready to throw in the towel and just settle into the social security dole which supposedly I have contributed to all these years and therefore earned, so I went and got myself a job at Lowe's home center, which is at the crossroads between two great industries of this country--retail and construction--not a bad place to be in America.

Now at this late stage, looking back on it all, it seems I've been, like many boomers, and like many so-called millennials will be by the time they get to be my age, underemployed. Hey, I've been underemployed all my life, but that has turned out to be no big deal.

It's been a good ride, thanks be to God.

And the big 65, which I'll turn here in about three weeks, is really nothing special--no magic number, so I'll keep paying my dues--which is to say, working-- for a few more years because this life is, as the Beatles said on Abbey Road. . . the bread you make is equal to the bread . . . you take.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVYjQScC1DY

Or something like that.

And so my advice to all you millennials and gen-Xers out there who are over-educated, underpaid and underemployed is this:

Find a job, any job, and just stay busy working, learning, progressing toward your destiny. Don't wait for .gov or Bernie or anybody else to bail you out because this world really does not work that way.

Get busy, stay busy, work every day you can, and your destiny will find you by the time you're my age and you will find that . . .

Life is good. Make the best of it. Don't wait for a handout and don't blame anyone else for your troubles.

But you can sing the blues if it helps you to deal with the pain. And you may find yourselves, along the way, at a crossroads or two, but don't sell your soul.



Glass half-Full

Old Sun

Old sun came up again today.

just thinkin:

worked hard all your life

little deductions week after week

all those years

do-dropping deductions into invisible

somewhere account

social security in the sky

stealthy NewDeal squirrels

stored and hoard

funds

that Lyndon extended.



lived through the sixties twice

I heard the drummer say, laughing

and don't trust anyone under thirty

then one day you have bright morning

in America

no go to work

what it all about Alfie

the croupier wheels

roulette deals.

65!

ain't no jive

now what

say what?

401k and IRA

but me wear no fancy pants jeans no mo

an ne'er been to belfast

never lived life in the fast lane

til now

now that I'm too slow

to know

how it all happened.

We'll just hop on our horses

waiting for Roy

Rogers and Dale Evans

to ride into heaven

they still ride horses

don't they?

It's bright up there.



Glass half-Full

Doing the Limbo at 64

I remember back in the 1950s when I was growing up and attending Catholic school. They taught us that there's a place called Limbo, where you go after death if you had never received baptism while living in the world. Although I am a mere Christian now, having been baptized in 1978 by own choice choice at the age of 27, it has been revealed to this protestant that there is indeed a place called Limbo.

But it is not actually a place; rather, it is a time, a time of life.

How do I know this?

I am in Limbo now. I am learning that it is a stage of life through which you pass, before--not after-- death, a kind of a nether time through which the maturing American sojourns, somewhere between ages 64 and 66.

When you turn 64, there are multiple signs that indicate you have arrived in Limbo. The first is, of course, remembering back to 1968 when the Beatles raised the profound question "Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64?"

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x158z5_beatles-when-i-m-sixty-four_music

On one level, the song is profound for the aging adult, insofar as it raises the question of one's life-status or love-condition in relation to one's spouse, or, as they say nowadays, one's "significant other" or lack thereof.

On another level, the question itself--about being needed and fed--is critical for the aging adult, insofar as it raises the question of one's life-status in relation to "the System."

You know the System I'm talking about, the one that--as we thought back in the day--would relegate us all to little ticky-tacky houses where we'd all look just the same.

And once you start seeing the signs that you are approaching--or perhaps have already arrived in-- Limbo, suddenly the omens are all over the place, and very plain to see.

For example, as I happened to tune in, a couple of days ago, to Diane Rehm's show, in which the Grand mistress of inside-the-beltway grapevine NPR confab discussed the big "R" word with Teresa Ghilarducci,

http://thedianerehmshow.org/audio/#/shows/2016-01-07/teresa-ghilarducci-how-to-retire-with-enough-money/111702/@00:00

I learned that the assets so far accumulated by myself and my wife (six years younger than me) are, of course, not nearly enough to "make it through" the Retirement years, which is a special golden or rose-colored-glasses period sometimes called the "rest of our life."

Theoretically, our assets are not enough, especially with, you know, zero interest rates etcetera etcetera.

On the other hand, who the hell knows how much is enough?

Furthermore, this unstable scenario has been further destabilized by myself, yours truly, who recently, and oh-so-irresponsibly, decided to quit my job seven months before reaching the big SIX-FIVE road marker, because it was--as my body was daily communicating to me--wearing me out, after the past 45 years of uninterrupted work, the lion's share of which was spent in construction and maintenance jobs.

There's a reason (as I am discovering) that 65 is the big mile marker, the fork in the road where two paths diverge, as Robert Frost might have called it many and many a year ago.

In my case, I just didn't quite make it that far, stopped short of the finish line with only seven months to go.

In one moment of time I morphed from one Bureau of Labor Statistical category to another. Whereas, I formerly was perhaps categorized as employed but underemployed (being a college grad in a maintenance job), this statistical territory I now inhabit is a never-neverland somewhere between "unemployed" and "dropped-out of the labor force altogether--having given up on looking for another job! "

Limbo!

The real hell of it is I'm still looking for a job, still striving to redeem myself from the stigma of being a labor-force dropout, still busting gut to add another few thousand bucks into that magic pot of IRA and/or 401K gold at the end of the Social Security rainbow.

Did I mention "gold"? Don't even think about it, except all the online doomsayers are saying I need to buy it. But I wouldn't know where to start. I mean, I've lived in the System all my life.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, where I'm filling blanks and checking boxes in online applications, the question becomes: who is going to hire a 64-year-old who just may be one of those off-the-chart non-entitities who has "given up" on gainful employment, when there are multitudes of unemployed or underemployed 22-year-olds out there pounding the keyboard and the pavement looking for work?

Who? I ask you who?

Don't think too hard. That's been my problem all my life--thinking too much, and maybe writing too much too. (And if you believe that, I've got three novels, poised in cyberspace on the website linked below; they're hanging there, suspended in electrons waiting to enhance your historical reading experience.)

So here I leave you with a closing anecdote. It is a dilemma wrapped in an enigma.

6:30 this morning, still dark. I just delivered my wife to her nursing job. I'm at the gas pump of a convenience store. I'm thinking. . .maybe I should go in there and ask for a job. Then I'm looking blankly at the gas pump as the digitals flash, and my eye wanders up to a sign on the gas pump. It says:

"Polar pop any size 69 cents"

And above that message is another little sign, with pictures of "Crown" cigarette packs, and an offer that smokers cannot refuse:

"$3.18 if you buy two."

Do I really want to spend the last six months of my working life. . .

Fuhgedaboudit.



Smoke