I Have No Home In This World Anymore

Over the past couple of days I have been enjoying being engaged with the Facebook group from my old hometown. It’s fun to remember the buildings, the people and the places of the years that I spent growing up. It wasn’t heaven, but it was a place where I was part of a whole cloth.  I belonged whether I wanted to belong or not.

However, in September of my 18th year I headed out to Michigan to follow my desire for college education.  I think when I left my little farm town I fully anticipated that I would return home at the end of my studies. For all my braggadocio about wanting to go out into the world I was still nervous and cautious. I figured the fallback for me would be to go home and find some work there. I think most of the people I knew thought I would end up back in Jersey.

Things and events dictated otherwise. Most of the work where I grew up was tied to factory or farm. I was scrawny and weak and myopic. None of these traits are really suitable for the kind of work available in my hometown and it’s in environs.  There really wan’t much for a college educated liberal arts type. Plus, I had too much history defining who I could and couldn’t be in that place. Once I left it was pretty much for good whether I knew it or not.

I have lived in the Midwest for 43 of the last 45 years.  I did try and go home for about 2 years.  It really wasn’t an apt fit for me.  Bit by bit, month by month and year by year my home had shifted.  Over time I had become rooted in the snow and the four seasons of the north country.

I think we Americans are basically a restless bunch. For the most part pretty much everyone I’ve ever known has wanted move, has wanted to travel, has wanted to go somewhere. Some of us have abject wanderlust. Some just have a small itch for change of scenery now and then. At the most the Jersey shore is no more that 65 miles from where you are in the Garden State.  Sometimes that drive is enough. 

It was good to have a very defined home when I was young but I still have that desire to go traveling further. I think I used up all the home Michigan has to offer me.  In eight months I am going to be on the go again.

Still no matter where I go the dust of Pedricktown, NJ will be part of the aromas of my memory.  Memories of the smell of the reeds and plants along the causeway leaving town going north will come back to me with the coming of summer. The sounds of a small town will probably be some of the last things I remember.  Remembering  one man whistling and singing as he pumped gas and cleaned car windshields will forever echo in my mind.

Home is a fragile construct.  I was lucky.

On The Day Trump Nixed His Staff from the Correspondents Dinner

Tuesday, April 23, 2019

Sitting here I am at the dinning room table. Good beautiful light outside now  but it is the tail end of what has been a cloudy chilly day.  Have been running through my list of all time favorites songs to play.  Funny that, almost all of the tunes are songs of loss and hoped for, but most likely failed redemption.  This was the stuff I was listening to in my early teens and through college.  

Mission in the Rain by Jerry Garcia is a prime example.  A loser adrift Garcia's worn voice sells it. Well then there's Bert Jansch’s Needle of Death, not much there in the way of redemption there, eh?  Mostly I listened to ballads.  It is amazing I made it to adulthood listening to Ralph McTell’s Streets of London.

Back in those years I was an optimistic secular humanist.  Yeah, let us break that down.  What is an optimist? Well one perspective is that you are a person who is hopeful and confident about the future.  If you get a little more rarefied, it is a philosophy wherein you believe that this world is the best of all possible worlds or that good must ultimately prevail over evil. Yeah, this kind of dovetails with the secular humanist definition.  Secular humanism  is a belief that humanity is capable of morality and self-fulfillment without belief in God.

Ah optimism, ah youth, to recapture one or the other, wouldn’t that be something? As the years have passed I have lost faith in so very much of humanity.  I have become convinced that with the accumulation of possessions and wealth that we lose our capacity to be generous. With each step up the rung of winning we lose sight of those they have not reached the same level. Humans become possessive, protective, aggressive and instransigent.

It does not mean that I am going to quit trying to do justice.  It does not mean that I am going to abandon my hope that without God we can be moral.  I mean my hope in listening to those songs was that somehow, somewhere, some way there was going to be redemption.  What I feel now is that it is harder each day to fight the growing ugliness and hatred I see, a palpable dark knife wound that is forming a chasm between people.

I didn’t mean to end up here tonight.  What was really on mind was loss and loneliness. But our world has become so polluted with hatred and anger we cannot easily find our way to reflect on individual pain, on love, on loss. My heart is sick and broken.  The hearts of people I love are sick and broken. The road here has been so fast, not so wide, but oh so very fast.  

Why is it that the good all just seems to come undone?  Why is it that we cannot find a commanilty to lift out of this foul mess that is sucking us in? Was I wrong to believe that humanity could move forward without the threat of hellish punishment or the promise of crowns of gold and jewels and robes of purest white? 

I keep coming back to the definition of optimism. No matter how worn my heart feels I believe we can make it better.  

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.