Chicago

I say

America moved, I say, back in the day.

She just came bustin' out from the East.

She came rolling in on wheels, gliding through ship-tossed spray.

She was blowing past some old dearth, yearning some new feast.

We heard her skimming' o'er Erie, Michigan, and along the deep blue sky,

plucking plunder low, grabbing gusto high.

And when the dust had settled,

after Illinois mud had dried,

when ore'd been changed to metal,

while papa sweated and mama cried,

the new was born; the old had died.

Where dreamers come and workers go,

't'was there arose:

Chicago.


Born of rivers and the Lake,

she was cast in iron, forged in steel,

bolted fast as rails n' timbers quake,

careening then on some big steely Wheel

making here a whippersnappin' deal,

and there a factory, a pump, a field,

o'er swamp and stump and prairie

tending farm and flock and dairy

in blood and sweat and rust

through boom and blust and bust.

They carved out block, laid brick and stone;

our groundwork for America Midwest they honed

with blade and trowel and and pick and shovel.

They swung hammers through dust as thick as trouble.

They dug a canal there that changed

the whole dam world; they arranged

to have goods shipped in, and products go.

Reminds me of Sandburg, and Michelangelo.

Many a man put meat on the table;

many a woman toiled, skillful and able.

Thousands of sites got developed, selected,

while many a factory got planned and erected.

Many a Chicagoan had a good run,

caught lots of ball games, had a whole lotta fun,

while working, playing, praying and such

with friends and families, keeping in touch.

In all that we do, the plans we make,

there's forever more going down than we think is at stake.

When people wear out, they sit around and play cards.

When widgets wear out, we pile them in scrap yards.

If we're lucky, or resourceful, or blessed,

we'll end up with a little something at the end of our test,

a hole in the wall, or a piece of the pie,

maybe a nice little place, by n' by.

While Democrats convened in Chicago in '68,

antiwar protesters got stopped at the gate.

Mayor Daley sent his men out to poke 'em in the slammer.

'T'was Chicago style justice: no sickle, just hammer.

Today in downtown, Chicago Mayor Daley's name is all over the place,

though about those radical protesters you'll find not a trace.

So what does that tell ya about Chicago, or America, today?

We're like the Cubs' in the Series; that's all that I'll say.

Glass half-Full

The Possum

Nowadays, survival involves knowing how to handle modern inventions, like money and machines, electrons and data and car-washes and stuff like that.

But In prehistoric times, stayin' alive meant something totally different. It probably meant that somebody in your tribe was pretty deadly with a bow and arrow, or a big stick, or some such implement for killing animals so you could eat them. Hunters hunted, gatherers gathered, and life goes on.

Survival for cave men wasn't as easy as it is now.

We know a little bit about this from seeing cave-man paintings that archeologists have discovered and brought forth into the great legacy of human experience and expression. If you've ever seen-- in an encyclopedia, or a masters thesis or a coffee-table book-- a picture of a cave-man painting, maybe you noticed it probably involves killing an animal, like a mastodon, or a saber-tooth tiger or maybe, a possum.

Some things never change. Men still have, with their impressive array of implements, the power of life and death over most critters; this lowly slow marsupial is no exception to the rule of ultimate human mastery.

I thought about this when I encountered a possum this morning. He was suddenly displayed for me to see easily and up close, like a museum painting, or sculpture. But this was in no gallery. It was on a sidewalk where I just happened to be wandering, this summery Saturday morning along a shady avenue in Gainesville, Georgia.

He was not alive.

At first, I couldn't tell if it was a possum. It just seemed like a classic critter image, like . . .

like a cave painting. The sight of it connected in my brain with some Neanderthal artwork that I had seen somewhere.

Maybe it was the teeth that ripped this cave-art association right out of my neuronic imagery file. Those bared fangs just leaped into my primeval intuition, like a prehistoric reflex suddenly recovered.

And then, my mental odyssey back to the here and now was punctuated with a momentary stop in the 1950's, when I remembered vividly a bared-teeth image from Old Yeller, a movie about a very lovable dog that went mad with rabies and had to be taken down by his master's father. I remember so clearly seeing Old Yeller's teeth, bared so ferociously, so unexpectedly, by the onslaught of rabies.

Had this been a rabid possum? He looked like one.

Probably not. But he sure looked crazy with those teeth displayed like fangs.

Why hadn't someone, a city sanitation worker or someone like that, scooped this critter up after his untimely demise?

Maybe they left him for cave-art.

But that would be unlikely. Gainesville is a very civilized, lovely, genteel southern city, with magnolias and shady boulevards and classic old houses, and monuments to old soldiers.

Nevertheless, I encountered the possum in an unlikely place-- where a private front yard sidewalk joined the city sidewalk. The fanged critter was directly in front of this grand ole home, which is now an attorney's office.

So, obviously, this possum's once-smelly inclusion at the edge of such a serene domicile is not some Neanderthal statement. Probably just the City's oversight. I mean, who wants to mess with a dead old possum in the summertime? This sidewalk relic has apparently survived its stinky phase, to become an artful representation of classic southern culture.

Or maybe its a warning to the other critters: Watch out Pogo; the humans are takin' over!

We have met the enemy and he is us.

Well shut my mouth, it's probably a southern thing, this odd juxtaposition of images, the dead possum and the old someplace. You'd have to be there.

Southerners never cease to amaze me, even though I am one of them.

Now here's a joke to end with: Why did the possum cross the road?

To meet his Maker.

Smoke

The Apple Moment

Who knows how many lifetimes ago the Appalachian mountains laid this little stream down between these two ridges.

This afternoon in bright spring sunshine, flowing waters roll softly over mica-laden silt. Here and there the ripples leap over smooth stones, gushing as they go.

It's just a small stream here, but clear, cold water has trickled along this valley's lowest path for centuries.

The creek is not a wild one now; it's been domesticated. Lawn grass, now vibrant with spring greening, extends through the surrounding slopes down to the water's edge. But the peaceful waters still render it, for visitors and passersby, a welcome respite from nearby human habitations. Overhead, the maples, locust trees and shrubs are sprouting leaves. Spring is here at last.

A cluster of two-story apartment buildings adjoin the stream. A street winds pragmatically through the well-planned site. Beside the shady street, which is reasonably quiet most of the time, a wooden landscaped ledge displays low juniper foliage.

I am walking through dappled sunshine below the ledge, which is about four feet high. There between two junipers next to the timbered ledge I see an apple on the ground. It's very red atop the brown bark mulch. Somebody has dropped this apple.

So I pick it up. I am the maintenance man here. Whose is it? Its a store-bought apple. Maybe I'll return it to its owner, or maybe I'll just take a bite of it. But no! There's a big rotten spot on it.

On second thought, because the bad spot occupies about half the apple, I will not eat it, I'm not hungry in mid-afternoon, and surely nobody else wants this apple either. That's probably why its here on the ground by the road.

What shall I do with it?

I will throw this apple. What the heck. This is the first real spring day here in the Blue Ridge. I'll just go crazy like a March hare and throw it and let it smash. Spring practice.

Where shall I throw it?

There's the stream over there, gurgling through the shade and the spotty sunshine about thirty yards away. Maybe some baby trouts would enjoy this apple if it smashes in their watery domain.

I look at the stream. In an instant, my eyes settle on a specific spot in the stream, where water is gurgling over rounded stones. I raise my arm and cock it back like the center-fielder that I was many and many year ago in little league back in the day, and I hurl the apple over at the stream.

It strikes the water with a splash, exactly where I was looking on the water's surface. How did I do that?

I haven't thrown anything in a coon's age. I have not been practicing this. I'm 62. I wasn't even aiming. I was just. . . throwing an unplanned apple on a day in May.

Doesn't everybody throw an apple, or something, in the spring time just to, just for the sake of . . .

It wasn't my mind that did this. It was a sudden, impetuous act, with no purpose. I didn't even think about it. My arm and my brain managed, intuitively, to retrieve some ancient muscular memory from baseball or from skipping stones or . . . it landed exactly where my eyes were focused.

To what do I attribute such intuitive finesse? Is it evolution that preserved within me this unprecedented, unplanned mastery? Hurling a found object across a trajectory in such an arc of indeterminate accuracy that it splashed exactly where my eyes had imagined it would?

Am a genius? Maybe an idiot savant?

Well, no. And I don't think such a wondrous accomplishment as this is attributable to mere evolution.

My belief is: I know there is a God; God did it. Surely I myself could not have pulled off such a thing. God conceived and formed my DNA and my bones and my muscles that cling to those bones, and my neurons that connect up to my brain that commands my arm and coordinates its movements with my eyes, and my depth perception and a hastily-improvised assessment of the appropriate arc of the purposeless apple projectile and the weight of the apple with air resistance and sunshine and springtime and suddenly for no reason whatsoever there it is splashing in the millennial stream.

Surely God hath done this thing with the apple!

But why did I do such a crazy deed as hurling an apple at a creek when I was supposed to be doing my maintenance man job?

A few hours later, I'm thinking maybe my exuberant toss happened because I was jubilant, having just heard Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue on the radio, or having just realized that it was was a springtime day such as this 350 years ago when Isaac Newton noticed that an apple dropped from a tree and the rest is history and history is being made as we speak.

Glass Chimera

Sing, not fling, nor sling

I hear America flinging:

Fling, fling, fling;

sling, sling, sling,

Fling it high, sling it low.

Sling it muddly just for show.



Mud, mud, sling up some mud.

Fling it with a thud.

Sling it like a scud.

Fling it left, sling it right,

sling it 'til you fight.

It aint right; it's a muddy blight.

Maybe I'll take flight,

but where to go? Mexico?

Don't know.



See Jane go, see Dick go:

Go, Jane, go to your MSNB show;

Go, Dick, go to your Fox hole row.

Toe that party line.

Tote that picket sign.

Tow that barge; tote that bale.

Drag it 'til we fail.

Yell and scream and shout

'til the buzzards come winging out.

Rant 'til buzzwords turn their trend,

their fuzzy butts toward our bitter end.



Wait.



I hear Jesus' people singing.

Sing, sing, sing;

Let our praises ring,

bringing in God's created thing.

Fill us, Lord, while we sing.

We need not fling, need not sling.

We just sing; let our praises ring,

'til your kingdom you do bring.

Selah.

Jackson Mississippi 1962

In 1954, I was three years old. In that year, my parents moved from Louisiana to Jackson Mississippi. Our family of four, soon to be six souls, stayed in Jackson until I was in the sixth grade, 1962. Then we moved back to Louisiana.

All around us at that time the world was changing big time. I was, of course, clueless, being just a kid. Living in a humble, GI-bill enabled suburb, l and my whitey neighborhood playmates were quite insulated from the maelstrom of civil rights-fueled social change that was gathering momentum in Jackson and in the whole state of Mississippi and the South, and later the North.

I was in a Catholic school; it was nice enough, and I had some good friends there. Although the US Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, had established a legal path toward school desegregation in 1954, I never saw a black classmate until I was in junior high school in Baton Rouge a few years later.

My first impressions of black folk in Jackson came mostly through our maid, Aleen. She was a very nice lady. Many an afternoon, my sister and I would accompany my mother as she drove Aleen home from her day-job at our home. Aleen's home was what we would politely call the "other side of town," although it wasn't really in town, but seemed to me to be out in the country somewhere nearby. The vivid image in my child's mind was of a dirt road lined by houses that I later learned are called "shotgun shacks."

In 2011, Dreamworks released a movie about what was developing in Jackson at that time. You've probably seen it: The Help. It is an excellent film, based on the novel by Kathryn Stockett and it absolutely confirms all my juvenile impressions and memories of Jackson in the 1950s. But of course, as I said before, being a kid I had no idea of what was really going on behind all that docile southern comfort status quo.

Recently, I have decided to write a fictional historiography about growing up in the South during that time, and about how being a born-n-bred southerner interfaced with what the rest of our country was becoming. This novel, my fourth, is tentatively named King of Soul. (Preview: I am not "the King.") The book being written follows the novel Smoke, which I have just published.
I do a lot of historical research. Learning about history is what propels me as a writer. I turn the research into fiction that, I feel represents a certain time period or zeitgeist. Finally I am doing one now on the actual time and place of my growing up.
My daughter Katie, who nobly attempts to be my editor, tells me that my protagonist's depth suffers in the midst of all my fictionalized history. She is of course correct in this critique. Certainly I will learn the lesson of satisfactory protagonist development in this next project, instead of obsessing with making the history itself the main character.

To begin research I have picked up several books at the Belk library, Appalachian State University, here in Boone NC where I live, where Pat and I have raised our three grown young'uns. This researching will be my modus operandi. Before King of Soul is finished in a few years, I probably will have consulted with a hundred or more sources from that library, as well as our local Watauga County library.

The Kindle, and Wikipedia, and real historians posting online, and so forth are also major components of my publishing projects.

To get into the King of Soul, I am reading, among other things, Michael Vinson Williams' opus of history research, Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr, and also A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC, by Cheryl Lynn Greenberg.

So, by doing, I am finally getting the back-story of what was really going on while I was growing up in Jackson Mississippi in the 1950s and Baton Rouge Louisiana in the 1960s.

I graduated from high school in 1969. What does that tell ya? Should be a fascinating period to reflect upon.

All of this to say: at the present moment I am here to share with you three of the most interesting historical facts I have learned in preparation to writing the fictional historiography.

1. From Williams' book on Medgar Evers: When Medgar returned to the USA after soldiering to defending our country and Europe in 1946, he had to "go to the back of the bus."! What kind of a welcome was that for a man who had survived D-Day and World War II in Europe? Mr. Evers went on to do very persistent, determined work in voter registrations in Mississippi in the '50s and '60s, and became a great leader in the civil rights movement before he was shot down in the dark of night by a white supremacist in his own front yard in Jackson in 1963. That was just a few months before they got Kennedy.

2. From Greenburg's book on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC): Through volunteering in the civil rights movement in the South, empathetic activists from other areas of the country learned how it's done. For instance: after working with the blacks down south, Mario Savio took his SNCC experience back to Berkeley, where he lead the Free Speech Movement that soon initiated protest against the Vietnam war. Also, after working with blacks down south, Tom Hayden returned to Michigan and authored, with his SDS comrades, the Port Huron Statement which was the beginning of Students for a Democratic Society.

3.What I am seeing now about the time period is this: As the civil rights movement gathered steam in the mid-'60s, a rift developed between the moderates (such as Medgar Evers, the NAACP, Dr. King, SCLC, John Lewis, Julian Bond, etc.) and the radicals (such as Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, SNCC, Panthers, Malcolm X, etc.) This parting of ways is similar to what happened among the anti-Fascists and also among the anti-Communists in Europe of the 1930s, a subject of my new novel, Smoke. The peaceful v. violent disagreement is also, I believe, indicative of protest movements generally, such as the two biggies: the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. Probably the next revolution, too, whatever becomes of that.

As for me, the kid growing up in the '50s and '60s, well. . . shut my mouth, I'm a child of the South. But I'm a commencin' to write about it. Thank ye for your time.
Glass half-Full

The Economist Illumination

I never really understood much about international finance and economics until this morning, when I read a special, long article in this week's The Economist. In the printed edition, the text begins on page 49; it is entitled The slumps that shaped modern finance.

I've been subscribing to, and reading, that "newspaper" (as their editors call it, while we Americans think of it as a magazine) for several years. But I have always labored to figure out what the hell they are writing about. In surveying many past issues, I have contented myself merely to check out the obituary, which is always on the last page. Then I would thumb through in a backwards, right to left, fashion to glean a little from what's going on in the literary and arts world.

Perhaps my years of reading The Economist with so little comprehension have prepared me, unbeknownst to my cognitive mind, for the light-bulb moment I had this morning while reading their concise, 6-page history of financial crises. Be that as it may, the light of understanding finally shone in my head when I read, on pages 51-52, their explanation of the Panic of 1857.

"I think I understand . . ." Joni Mitchell had sung long ago, "fear is like a wilder land."

Long story short, when investors think they are going to lose a lot of money they are overtaken with Fear, so they go hog-wild. Maybe that means the bulls retreat while the bears gather, but the hogs go crazy destroying the place.

Or, as the '60s radicals use to call them, the "pigs."

But I wouldn't call anybody a pig. Maybe . . . a walrus.

Anyway, here is what's interesting about the Panic of 1857: America was at that time an "emerging nation" that had expanded its explorative and technological frontiers beyond its ability to keep all the accounts straight and well-balanced. Consequently, the Brit financiers panicked, and all the money people around the world followed suit, including us.

Today, the shoe is on the other foot. We Americans are like the well-established powerhouse that the Brits were in the 19th century, while today's "emerging" powers, the so-called BRICs and a few others, are in a position similar position to where we were in 1857, or 1907, or 1937.

Maybe the other shoe is about to drop, maybe not.

If you want to know something about how this plays out historically, I recommend you check it out. If you want to read it online, here it is: http://www.economist.com/

Smoke

The Work

I have worked all my adult life, beginning with that first job, at a Burger Chef, while I was in high school. After flippin' the burgers for awhile, I did the bag boy thing at an A&P, where I moved into the big time of running a cash register.

One high school summer I did an internship in an office at the Louisiana State Capitol.

Then moving on to LSU, I did part-time gigs: selling ladies shoes, dippin' ice cream at a little off-campus storefront from which I got fired for leaving the doors open one night; also, servicing vending machines at the Student Union building in between classes and chairing a committee of the student Union.

As chairman of the student National Speakers committee (a freebie job, but great experience), I introduced Dr. Benjamin Spock and comedian-activist Dick Gregory to our assembled student/faculty audiences. After that, the Young Republicans complained about the lefty speakers with no conservative balance. They wanted somebody to represent their side. I told them that was understandable, but we had, alas, blown the budget on Spock and Gregory. I told them we could go halfsies on paying William Buckley, if they could get him for us, which they did. I always thought that was mighty civil of them; maybe that's why I'm a Republican today.

I have fond memories of that time, which include hearing Dr. Spock talking about two Maoist girls who heckled him on some other campus somewhere, and Dick Gregory requesting a bowl of fruit be delivered to his hotel room and then making people laugh at his speech later but then impressing upon them the urgency of our racial problems. Then there was meeting Bill Buckley at the airport, escorting him to his hotel room and watching him tie his skinny tie as he smiled and talked to me like I was one of his New Yawk buddies. Bill had a very winning smile.

After a couple years of English and Political Science and intermittent cannabis distractions, I managed somehow to graduate, in December '73, I hit the trail with my "General Studies" sheepskin from LSU University College. Now this southern boy gravitated over to the epitome of southern exotica, a place called "Florida," where I sold debit life insurance for awhile in a black neighborhood, then moved on over to selling classified advertising for Mr Poynter at the St. Pete Times. But then I lost my license on points, but continued to drive and got nabbed by a highway patrolmen. When I went to court on the infraction, a judge named Rasmussen told me that if people disregarded the law in the way I had done, there would "anarchy in this country, so therefore I sentence you to five days in the county detention center."

"Detention center? What's that?" I asked the judge.

"That's the jail son," he replied.

"When does it start?" I queried.

"Right now," he said.

When I got to the jail, it was an alien environment for this university boy with wing tips, and so I decided to take control of my situation by getting involved in a poker game with these hardened criminals, but then I made the mistake of winning. I say "mistake," because my little stack of quarters or whatnot motivated one of the incarcerated fellows to ask me a for a dollar to get in the game, but I told him No.

So later that night, since he was in the same bunk with me, he punched me out.

I did, however, survive it.

Four days later, I'm out of the Pasco County jail, and I didn't get run over by a train or get drunk or nothin excitin' but I did happen to go to a movie filmed in the Blue Ridge Mountains; it was Where the Lilies Bloom.

The setting in that movie seemed so absolutely beautiful to me that I thought I'd like to just get the hell out of Florida and go to that place depicted in the movie, and so I did, and I've been liven' in these mountains ever since. That was about forty year ago.

After settling in Asheville, a place far more mountainous and wintry than this Louisiana boy had ever known, I got a job selling printing for a printshop. That turned into about five years of good work, but it came in two stints that were punctuated by a detour to Waco Texas in 1978. 'T'was there I got saved.

After meeting Jesus I returned to North Carolina and the print shop for awhile.

Then I drifted into the building trade and spent the lion's share of my working life as a carpenter building houses and a few other structures, including a bridge at Grandfather Mountain that completed the missing link of the Blue Ridge Parkway, which them WPA boys had left hangin' back in the '30s, either cuz they ran out of money, or the War came on, or the jagged mountain was just too craggy for a man to build a bridge on it at that time.

I married Pat; we had three young'uns, now grown. Which brings me now to the main point of this here blog: work. When a man gets a family, he manages somehow to motivated to go out in the wide jungle world and make a livin', by hook or by crook. And this is, I think, a very important part of what makes work for folks and what makes the world go 'round: Family. A greater motivator than ideology or guv'mint.

Last weekend, this mountain boy and my wife, Pat, were in San Francisco, at the upper end of Silicon valley where our son works amongst the high-flyin' v.c.-fueled startups of our day. I spent a lot of time walking through that amazing city, and on the last morning there I found this interesting sight in the Mission district where our son resides.

So I snapped it for you:

I found this really interesting. It's a great work of art, painted lovingly and precisely on the face of a small business, which appears to be a hairstylist's shop, probably a family business, but not run by Papa because it's more likely run by Mama, with Papa working over on Mission Street with his grocery or some such enterprise.

You will notice, on the painting, some great people--true heroes of working people. The heavy hitters among them include: Gandhi, Dr. King, Cesar Chavez. Also identifiable are a few whose legacy and life's work was questionable, tainted with revolutionary violence: Che, Sandino. Sitting Bull is in the very middle. I wrote this song, Sitting Bull's Eyes, about him a long time ago.

The other persons in this mural are worthy of historical consideration. I checked out all those names, which are written beside each face. I cannot remember them all, but perhaps you will visit the Mission in San Francisco someday and see this great work of art for yourself. Or you may recognize them from the photo.

Worth noting in the artwork is an omission: amongst this collection of lefty heavyweights, the two theoreticians Marx and Lenin are not included; nor are the bloody tyrants, Mao and Stalin.

Some of those leaders pictured are not totally honorable in my Christian world-view, but they are obviously heroic in the eyes of the artist, and that says something significant about the perpetual struggle between, in this world, them that have, and them that have not. As for me, I respect them that are willing to work hard for what they do get, such as I, by God's grace, have done.

Smoke