The Graveyard Thing

So as I was lying there in bed last night I was thinking of Pedricktown stories. Why I need to go back and revisit the years of my youth escapes me.  However every single time I read a post on the Pedricktown Facebook page memories come flooding back.

Most of my stories that were coming to mind that night were tied to Ruby’s packing house and/or the Baptist church.  I will leave the packing house stories for later.  Those tales are earthier and deal with teens trying to sort out their place in the world. They are beer, sex and pot stories involving a bunch of teenage boys, southern crackers and very  big black men mostly all overseen by grizzled old men with names like Whitey. 

Because I spent so much time at the Baptist church there are a number of tales tied to that place that have a humorous bent.  Hell I have a number of stories involving the mental gymnastics I went through each time a visiting pastor would make an altar call.  By the way I am a Lutheran with Buddhist leanings now.  We don’t do altar calls.

The following tale does not tie to VBS or BYF or any of the other Baptist acronyms I remember all so well.  It is more a me versus the monolith that the Baptist Church was in Pedricktown kind of tale.  It is a tale of the church building as part of the places of my youth as opposed to the church community as part of my social world story.

When I was about six or seven I had learned to ride a two wheeler bike.  For me this was a major accomplishment.  As any of you who knew me as a kid will remember coordination was not my strong suit.  I think I was the last kid my age in P-City to not need training wheels. On a sunny day my shadow was a trip and fall hazard.  I digress. 

Well any how I had learned to ride a bike and my father had consented to the purchase for me of a sting ray bike from W.T. Grants in Pennsville. It was purple metal flake, had high handle bars and a banana seat.  I rode it everywhere.

Well as fate would have it on one particularly sunny afternoon in summer there in Oldmans Township one of my ne’er do well cousins was in town.  My Aunt had dropped both he and a bike off at my grandmother’s house.  During those years my grandmother did a great deal of child care for all of us cousins when our parents had obligations to attend to. This was old America, the one where extended families reached into every aspect of your life.

With two bikes and time to kill we went riding together about town. In P-City there are only so many places to go. You could ride down to the bridge and was for fish or corpses.  I think I remember two jumpers from the Delaware Memorial Bridge being snagged by fisherman off that old bridge over the 18 years of my youth.  You could ride up Railroad Avenue north to the train tracks, boring.  You could ride south down Railroad Avenue past the school and to the edge of the fields, even more boring. Eventually the ultimate magnet of our childhood called us.  Off we went to the Baptist cemetery down at the far end of West Mill Road.  

For some reason that place held an inexorable pull on us.  The attraction was so strong you could almost see the waves of magnetism in the air.

There was a ritual to the visits there.  First we would walk over to our Grandfather Asher’s headstone.  He had died before either of us had been born.  He had been a veteran of San Juan Hill in the Spanish American war so there was always a flag and a metal star that held it on his grave.  Our Grandmother’s name was also carved on that headstone and she wasn’t dead yet.  It just said 1893-      .  Behind that headstone was our uncle’s grave. From the best we could tell our uncle had died in what I believe was a motorcycleaccident. I never got the whole story.  People kind of mumbled when it came to talking about his passing.  

After that grave visit we would wander around looking for open graves.  An open grave was a double dog dare kind of thing.  Invariably we would threaten to push each other in.  The terrifying push actually happened once or twice but that was when we were there with a group of cousins. I can remember screaming and crying until one of those sick bastards actually gave me a hand and pulled me out. Of course we were looking for the ghoulish and the macabre.  We were always thinking we might see something like a casket next to the open hole that might be visible.  Yeah I know it sounds sick but we are talking about being a kid here and more specifically being a boy.  Really we are talking about pulling the wings of flies, frying ants with magnifying glasses and the whole Stephen King Stand by Me kind of behavior that boys do.

On one particular sunny afternoon the whole double dog dare thing came into effect and led to a bad result well at least for me.  Could this story be going anywhere else, I mean really did you think it was going to be warm and fuzzy? Nayh.  Boys, graveyards and time to kill, I mean what could go wrong? 

On that warm summer vacation day my cousin had the bright idea that it would be a good idea to challenge me to ride out bikes as fast as we could around the grave yard.  Cool beans, there could be blood involved.  Round and round we went dodging granite markers trying not to split our heads open.  Now as to the sacrilegious and disrespectful quality of this race among the monuments to finality, those hard cold markers of mortality I guess I have always believed the dead were dead and they really didn’t mind.  I mean given the number of people who have occupied this earth before us is there anywhere where you aren’t walking over a spot where one of predecessors is now in repose?

It is at this point I must note that to my cousin the thrill of maintaining bodily integrity was not enough.  He upped the ante. As boys clearly we had to do something to up the thrill. It is here where the clothes start to come off.

As the next phase of the grand prix among the dead we continued the ride shirtless.  We did this for a couple of laps but this was still not enough to satisfy the thrill factor.  The following phase of this championship double dog dare ride was just a number of laps in just jockey shorts and sneakers.  Given how scrawny we were I cannot image this being an aesthetically pleasurable sight to be observed.

Still a tighty whitey ride was not enough for my nefarious cousin and I being the sheep that I was agreed.  Did I mention that I believe the graveyard sat at was still a five point intersection?  It was a main intersection of the town. Traffic was going by but we didn’t notice and/or care.  When you are seven or eight you are the entire world. Nobody else exists.

Finally there we were riding around the graveyard buck naked.  Well almost I still had on my black horn rim glasses and my sneakers.  We had only done a couple of laps when the church secretary came running out screaming at us.  For the life of me I don’t remember her name.  I do remember her stone white hair and I think she and the hairy thunderer image of God I held at that time had been in second grade together; She seemed really old and I am sure my cousin and my behavior added a few years to her aging process.  Normally she was slow and steady.  She was a rock upon which the church functioned. However on that day she was really pissed off and came out running screaming at us with a fury I could not have imaged.

I believe there were words used like “you filthy dirty boys” and “I have already called your parents”.  “God will punish you heathen little demons” might have been said but hey I have heard that so many times when I was hanging around with my cousins growing up it is hard to distinguish one incident of damnable behavior from another.

Quickly we grabbed our clothes and beat feet way from the church.  We pedaled our little but now clothed bodies away from that church and east down West Mill Street as fast as we could.  We flew.  My cousin turned in at my Grandmother’s house which was about halfway down the street between the church any my house. He wasn’t sweating.  He knew his mother would a. either not care or b. would never find out about it.  Me, I was in full flop sweat, heart racing, and boy parts in my chest mode.

I had good reason to be.  By the time I got to about where the Titus’s then lived I could see my mother standing on the porch and did she look pissed.  For all of those who ran afoul of her in first grade, image that look x10.  My memory is of being dragged off my bike and being read the riot act.  One phrase I remember to this day is “What were you thinking, would you take a bath in public?”  Out of context it sounds insane doesn’t it?  But at 7 years old it shook me to my core.  

As I was dragged to my room by my collar I heard the words that no child in his right mind ever wanted to hear. “ You will stay in your room and when your father gets home he will deal will this.”  “You will be getting the belt”. Yeah you can pretty much suss out how this ended.  I couldn’t sit for a day or two.  No it wasn’t child abuse it was just mid-1960s parenting. 

Did I learn anything from this?  Yeah the church secretary watches the graveyard.  Also lots of cars go by the intersection of Straughn Mill road mid-afternoon.  I probably should have learned that being naked in a public place does not end well.  As you all know that lesson did not stick.

The Mint Julep Glasses.

On my first trip to the Kentucky Derby I went with my friends John and Bob.  This was Bob’s idea.  I had no idea what I was in for.   

When I told people I was going, about seven people asked for commerative glasses of the race. I said that I would surely get them. Note, I had only seen the Derby on television.  It all looked so gentile.  It all looked so elegantly southern.   

Arriving the night before the race and after parking the car for some exorbitant sum on somebody’s lawn, what I saw was something akin to Fellini’s Satyricon.  There was drunkenness, dope smoking and half naked people everywhere. They seemed to be contained in a cordoned off section of town near the Downs.  Vaguely I remember we were looking for a guy name Tom.  We found him standing on top of a US Mail box wearing nothing but tighty whities and holding a sparkler in each hand screaming some bizarre rant. 

Well, anyway fast forward, because it is all a blur, to the infield the next day.  At that time, we discovered that the infield gets hot.  We also discovered that the commerative glasses came with mint juleps in them.  Hey, I bought one and it was mostly ice, a splash of bourbon, some sugar and a sprig of mint. I figured with pacing I could down seven of these in the course of 12 hours.  Oh, I was so much younger then…. 

Whenever I could tear myself away from the infield’s show us your boobfest and the guy who was so drunk he was drowning in his Styrofoam beer cooler, I would buy another mint julep.  By the end of the day the mint julep vendor ran out of ice.  By the end of the day the vendor ran out of mint.  By the end of the day they ran out of water.  The last two commerative glasses I bought were just water glass sized containers of pure bourbon.  By the time the race was over I did not really comprehend where I was. 

After the last race it took a bit to rally and leave the racetrack.  Funny thing though, once you got out of the zoo of the infield, they were selling the glasses sans alcohol for about half the price of a mint julep.  Oh, the hangover I could have avoided.

Jason Isbell

As I listen to Jason Isbell, I realize what it is about his music that make what he signs so meaningful to me. In his songs there are consistent themes.  These include how to be a decent person in a world that seems insane and how to come to terms with a personal past that is not necessarily the nicest or cleanest.  Overlaid atop these repeating themes are the concepts he carries from his upbringing that are hard wired into his psyche, I.e., old time religion and the value of family.

Having been raised in a very large family, Mom was one of twelve and I had tons of cousins, I have the family component hardwired into my soul.  Having answered an altar call at 10 and having been immersed in the waters of baptism I get the old time religion business.  I come from a church that won’t delete my membership because I now attend a church that while Christian doesn’t believe in full immersion. And yeah I have a little history, not like Jason’s, but real none the less.  I have done wrong and I have hurt people. And finally I live in a country drifting toward a racist form of fascism.

And I am a white man living in a white man’s world. When he talks about wishing he wasn’t one of the people who ignored the racist jokes of his “friends” and I so totally get that.  I told those jokes once and now I cringe at them.

The bottom line here is that I hope Jason continues to struggle with these things.  I am struggling with these things and I need his voice to communicate what I am feeling. I hope his success does not dilute his feelings.  I hope that he continues to walk crossing between tortured and self aware all while pushing a honest progressive vision of self.

I hope that he never loses the romance in his words.  If We Were Vampires and Hudson Commodore are just two of his heart wrenching but wonderful batches of lyrics that define the meaning of a full heart. Yeah I like Jason Isbell and he seems for all the world to be the real deal.

The Inner Track

Saxophone is playing in a trilling descent. Chimes jingle so softly, as if the slightest of breezes has arisen moving the thin metal against metal without a human hand involved. Somewhere in the background a very muted electric bass plays a soft bottom end. A trifling riff off an electric piano floats in and out of the soundscape. 

A large green candle burns. Me, I always opted for the bulky candles, the two- or three-inch round cylinders kind.  Big candles will not tip over easily on top of my poverty bookcase. Four cinder blocks and two of the cheapest pine boards hold an avocado plant, the candle, an acrylic cube called the rainbow box because of the tinted triangles of color inside. 

Aside the bookshelves sits a small squat table with a Marantz 30-watt tube amplifier and a Phillips turntable, wires stretch out to a decent pair of speakers. On the poverty bookshelves are also about 200 long playing records; classic jazz and jam bands-the music of heads and hipsters. A cheap green carpet covers most of the linoleum flower. As my candle burns, as the amplifier gives off its blue light and as the turntable spins round the jazz music moves the room from the mundane into a haven. How simple and yet so complicated a moment. 

Outside the leaded paned windows are the cold wind and slight snow that falls in late February here. The old windows are useless shields against the north wind. The old steam radiator also does not do much to deflect the brunt of the chill away from the space. It is either off or on, there is no middle ground. Still the life I live contained within these six planes, roof, floor and four walls, is special. So simple yes but so very complicated. 

[Today, I am sitting at a white Formica table using a white plastic chair. I have Bluetooth headphones on playing this music that is now forty years old. The music separates me from the reality of this cold coffee shop on this cold February day. It seems that the world has changed, and that room is clearly and permanently locked away from reality but will always exist in my mind.  

The room of candlelight and jazz might have disappeared yesterday when I talked to the man who oversees the building where the corporeal room once was.  He manages the place right now. He gently told me the room was ripped out during a renovation and is now part of a larger room, a laundry. Or maybe it is events conspiring to show me that I lost the battle to keep that part of my spirit alive. One false step and away it went.] 

Richard Brautigan wrote a book called “In Watermelon Sugar”. The only thing I remember about it is a line that goes, “...my deeds are done, and done again, as all my deeds are done, in watermelon sugar.” The line, the lyric without a song, takes me to a space of youth when the greatest of treats was a sweet ripe watermelon. There was a time when the mere scent of watermelon could set my sense a tingle. If only I have lived my life with the joy and delight of anticipating and then tasting a dark green watermelon, and it only the joy of that scent had been able to keep my joy of living alive, I would be a human being in full. 

I am sorry for the person I am. I am sorry for not being the person I should have been. 

Soft jazz plays on taking me back to the space where I would sit at my student desk and watch the candle burn. I would have to flip the record at some point, but I would watch the candle flicker in the cool breeze seeping in through the window. The shadows of the avocado plant would dance upon the wall. Lost in that shadow world I would pull my jacket a little tighter and just be. Time to close that space perhaps forever and be the person I wanted to be but never became. And the candle burns out. The track ends with the skrit, skrrit sound of the needle on the inner track. I take my headphones off and walk into today’s light.

Loss

One foot in front of another, this is how we address life al the good and the bad. We must move to live. We must knowingly and gently accept that what comes will come.  Oh we can fight and struggle to achieve but in the end to what purpose.? Walking forward we must take on the moments of each day with neither love nor hatred, just awareness and acceptance.

Today my mind is in an odd space.  I am completely tired and fed up with the political world in which I live.  As to my day to day life, it has become rote to the point of being numbing.  The weather, well what can I do about it?  As a result why talk about it unless it is to offer a historical fact such as stating the sunshine is a relief (it is) or noting it snowed a ton the other day.

Four decades ago I began a series of friendships that have lasted my life. It is hard to explain why these bonds forged at university were/are so strong.  Still, they remain .  Sometimes they bubble up on Facebook with a stray comment. Sometimes an e-mail comes and reminds me of the value of the sender to my life.

Sometimes the friendship ends.  Recently the days have taken some people I love from my orbit.  The sense of loss is real.  The hurt is only moderated by the fact that I can immerse myself in the mundane things of my day to day life.  Knowing that every person who walks this earth, one foot after another, will feel such loss does not ameliorate the pain.  So it goes. 

Loss to an existentialist is both reality and tough.  There is only this moment once.  When we move past it that universe is gone. Staring into the empty spaces of my life created by the passing of friend I feel hurt, I feel confusion, I feel an ache.  So it goes, one foot after another.

Now

One day you look around and you realize this is it. This is where you are. You are not going to get any younger.  You aren’t going to lose all that weight. You are not going to write that book.  You are not going to pick the hot stock. This is as good as it gets.  In fact, the ride only gets bumpier from here. 

So what is there to do? I guess you suck it up and you assess where you stand.  Are you a winner or a loser.  Have you created as much as you have destroyed.  What have you killed and what have you saved. Then, and only then, after the accounting is done you have to accept that this is all transient and has no meaning. The only meaning is in the now. 

Whatever we have amassed will be disbursed.  Whatever we have built will decay.  Whatever we have said, be it trivial or on par with the thoughts of Aristotle, well it will fade eventually into nothing.  What we have loved will die. But don’t panic, it is okay.

Acceptance. Equanimity. Compassion. Understanding.  These concepts are the key. All of us exist in a condition of pain. Still, we are charged with living in loving kindness. By letting our pain not play the center role in our life we are freed to make this moment, this breath, better for you and better for me.

We are like the monkey trapped with our hand in the gourd because we won’t let go of the banana inside.  If we let it go, if we let it be, we are freed to act with love and mercy.  The past belongs to the past.  The future is nonexistent. Make this now, this what is reality, better for all.

Let the Music Carry You Away

The past few days I have been listening to Willie Nelson’s “God’s Problem Child”.  I have really enjoyed this package of songs.  For the most part the songs are wistful and longing. This is Willie singing about running out of time and losing friends.  His guitar playing is superb and his voice is so perfect for these longing, almost mournful, ballads.

Over the years I have run hot and cold over Willie.  I have seen him perform live several times.  I think the best time was with the Highwaymen.  I have always appreciated his guitar playing, however his song choice has oft times left me scratching my head.  Willie is an iconoclast and thus I won’t criticize him.  However there are albums that really work, like Stardust, and others that don’t like his covers of Frank Sinatra tunes.

My musical taste was ignited by playground talk when I was in 6th or 7th grade.  I remember people talking about Blood, Sweat and Tears song “Spinning Wheels”, the hit of the day.  (I am talking abaout you Valerie Nixon Caulfield). That night I started to listen to a Philco white and gold plastic radio that someone had put in my bedroom.  Initially, I immersed my self in the pop and soul hits of the day.  God some of the stuff was positively weird and other bits were classic.  The O’Jays, the Hughes Corporation, Tommy James, Peter, Paul and Mary all rang through my head.

One day I discovered my there was a knob that said AM/FM and I flipped it.  The change flipped me.  Suddenly I was listening to the Chambers Brothers singing “Time Has Come Today.”  This was followed up by Fairport Convention and then Muddy Waters and then David Ackles and then the good old Grateful Dead.  One dose of Casey Jones and I was a Deadhead, once and forever.  FM radio in 1968 was transformational.

The music was new, it was fresh and it was constantly evolving.  The bands moved from traditional formats of 2-3 minutes with a repeating chorus to something that was far, far beyond.  I think the first time I listened to “The Other One”, I was totally captivated by the adventurous nature of the musicians exploration of sound.

Once I discovered marijuana and headphones (I was probably 12 years of age), music became my guide through life. Almost any life situation was captured in a lyric.  San Francisco bands were just sooooo out there.  Smoking a joint and listening to something like the Dead’s “Ripple”, well damn did it get any better?

Why have have I gone down this discussion.  Did I want to reemphasize I started using the now legal (sort of) weed 51 years ago?  Nyah.  Did I want to offer a commentary about how moribund over the air radio and Sirius are?  Nyah, just listen and you can figure that out for yourself.

The reason I decided to talk about this is that last night when I was doing the pots and pans post dinner I needed something to listen to.  At that point I came upon Jerry Garcia singing the dated classic “Friend of the Devil” on a solo acoustic guitar.  In about seven minutes I was transported back to a time when music was life for me.  In listening to Mr. Garcia sing that song and noodle around on an his six string with all the talent he could muster, the hope of the late 1960s filled me again.  It lasted for just a moment, but damn it was amazing.  You should try and go there sometime.

Hey don’t take my word that the music is magic.  Give it a listen.

https://youtu.be/fhG_PnM0Vq0