End of Year Thoughts: December 31, 2107

Sometimes a person feels conflicted. Tell someone you disagree with them and you create ill-will. Don’t and you imply agreement. That is a bipolar paradigm that doesn’t bode well. Many of our leaders, news sources, and wealthy contributors are feeding this polarization, the reason is anybody’s guess. It certainly isn’t aimed toward the common good.

Is there another form of interaction? I hope so. To that end, I’ll mention a few things that bother me these days. I will do so without, I hope, denigrating or insulting those who don’t agree with me. These are my feeling only. I don’t intend for them to change your mind. I only hope that, if I disagree with you, you might leave with a better understanding of why.

Here goes.

I worry about discourse that divides us. Simply adding the phrase “I know some thoughtful and reasonable people disagree with me, but this is how I feel” could certainly “make the medicine go down” a bit easier. Please take that as a prelude.

I worry about (and this is certainly not a new phenomenon) the use of the press to destroy an individual’s character.) Moreover (and this is new), I worry about the use of social media to spread the hate. It bothers me to see how little most people understand about politics—how few people see that it is not the art of the perfect, but, as Ben Franklin said, “the art of the possible.” It is messy and can’t be evaluated by the criteria of perfection.

I worry about the use of personal destruction in politics. When a woman who has devoted her life to public service and protecting the least of those among us is subjected to upwards of $200 Million in investigations, invectives, innuendoes, and false news, only for legitimate investigators to say, in the end, “We find no criminal fault with this woman” is amazing, in my opinion. Mistakes? Yes. Ill-considered comments? Yes. Poor speaking skills? Yes. Deserving of bitter hatred? You decide. In my opinion, she should be our president. Feel free to have your own. Ad hominem attacks will not change my mind, and, assuming they wouldn’t yours either, I’ll leave it at that.

I am a veteran of the United States Navy. I carried a rifle for a year in Vietnam. Later, I was offered the chance to return and serve on river boats. I lacked both the patriotism and the personal courage to accept. But, and I have friends on both sides of the political spectrum, I will never vote for a political party that attacked the character of a brother-shipmate who did drive Fast-Boats in Vietnam and was awarded multiple Purple Hearts. Sorry, just can’t do it. You vote your conscious as well. I don’t condemn individuals. That isn’t my job in life. I only condemn party leaders that would promote such injustice toward someone who served this country with bravery.

I worry that war brings too many profits to too many powerful institutions.

I worry about our worship of guns and the belief that they solve problems. I don't want your guns confiscated. I just want you to shut up about them. I've almost been killed by firearms several times in my life, mostly by careless friends, and once by a neighbor who liked to take his out and wave it around to show how harmless it (i.e. his gun) was when he he'd had few drinks. 

I worry about what I see as a lowering of noble standards. I never thought I would live in a country that would nominate a person for high office who was captured on film mocking a disabled person. Just my reaction. You are welcome to yours.

I worry about the economy. While it is true that the stock market has risen consistently for the last nine years, and has continued with a bump in 2017, there is a physical concept called gravity that enjoys a kinship with financial concepts. I worry that the present bump resulted from the anticipation by corporations that, soon, they wouldn’t even have to pretend to pay federal taxes, and could operate in the regulation-free world that saw rivers catching fire and toxic chemicals buried next to residential areas, or deposited in our waters. Those are not policies that imply a good future for us. Gravity will come into play, I fear, and there will be, in my opinion, great wailing and gnashing of teeth. Timing the market is hard.

I worry about our hatred of taxes. It is allowing our infrastructure to crumble and abetting the end of retail business. I fear future neighborhoods will simply become areas filled with “storage containers” for isolated and unconnected individuals.

I worry that entire "Christian" religious groups have abandoned the teachings of the Galilean, who promised mansions “in Heaven” in contrast to the teachings of the “Prosperity Gospel” adherents with their customized planes and multiple mansions here on Earth. I further worry that these groups are guided by homophobia, fear of science, and by choices that could best be reduced by sex-education, birth-control, and increased responsibility placed on the male-half of the equation, all of which are eschewed at present by the same religious groups.

I further believe, as did the founders of the country, by no means perfect men, but wiser than some, that religion is a personal matter best controlled by the heart and not by the government. Theocracies haven't worked historically, nor at the present in the Middle East and Africa.

I will believe, until reviewable and falsifiable evidence indicates to the contrary, that trust in science is more efficacious than trust in mythology. Science eliminated smallpox and polio from our lexicon of fears. Consequently, a vice-president who denies science scares me to my bones.

I believe, on evidence I have examined by the most educated among us, that homo sapiens are destroying our planet’s ability to sustain us and that distrust of science will hasten the apocalypse. I’ll make it through, but I worry for friends with children and grandchildren

I’ll stop. Believe as you will. My only feelings toward you are that you live long and prosper. May we all be guided by our consciences and not by false promises made to excite our embedded prejudices. That may be our greatest challenge for the future.

Happy New Year.

Growing Up Southern: December 30, 2017

Men would gather up in my father’s grocery store around mid-morning each day and talk. It was after the morning rush and during “salesman time.” They would sit on empty nail kegs or stand around a pot-bellied stove and let the conversation drift as it might. I can still see them, on a quiet morning, as one of the group would strike a match on the stove, light a cigarette, take a long draw, and, with the exhale, begin a tale of some sort.

They would talk about the Great Depression and how bad times had been. They had survived it, obviating any need for lies or exaggerations. They talked about the lessons gained from living through hard times and how lucky their kids would be.

They talked about the Second World War. All had lived through it and some had actively served. Those who hadn’t remembered rationing, KIA notices, and their communal hatred of Adolph Hitler. Shared disasters, particularly on a world-wide scale, can have a communalizing effect.

They talked about farming, which most had done at one time in their life. Although they sometimes talked of it with a degree of nostalgia, it was obvious from their current occupations that it had not achieved a degree of fondness that would draw them into a career. Land-rich people and dirt-poor people farmed. It was time that America moved on to other dreams

They talked at times on the topic of women, although not often and then maybe in terms of one who, in the jargon of a former Navy man, had “dragged her anchor.” The moral learned from these conversations dwelt generally upon the topic of what a treasure was a virtuous and faithful wife. There were few lapses into the unseemly. My mother was behind a door leading into our kitchen. She knew, by the drop of volume in the conversation, when the subject had changed to her sex. The men knew she knew, avoided the unseemly, and concentrated on the exemplary.

They talked about prices of things and how they grew faster than salaries. The wartime economy had been good for those who stayed behind, but there was a scarcity of things to buy, so the supply and demand curve was pushing prices higher, although they didn’t express it in those terms. It was just something "the government" hadn't done anything about.

They talked about hunting and fishing in season. They talked of legendary hunting dogs, those with almost unnatural gifts for treeing, trailing, or pointing. They talked of famous fishing lakes where a man scarcely had time “to bait his hook.” They talked of taking their sons on their first fishing or hunting trip. They talked of good shots with a gun and bad ones. They talked of illegal kills that had to be sneaked out of the woods under the watchful eye of the game warden. They would even kid and joke on occasion. Those stories remained some of their favorites.

They talked of politics, but not in inflammatory terms. A president like Ike played too much golf. Truman was, to some, much too fond of the African-American segment of the population. Almost to a man, each could recite a report, usually at least third-hand, about some southern hero who had effected revenge, in some fashion, for the integration of the military. FDR, on the other hand, was a minor god. They never mentioned the name of Herbert Hoover.

They talked of religion in the most general terms. They were, to a man, proponents of the advice offered in the Gospel of Matthew: “And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.” Religion was a personal experience, best carried in the heart and proven in your actions, not your speech.

But, they talked of, and never tired of laughing about, the time the so-called “sorriest man in two counties" stopped by to join in the banter. They had asked what he was doing, for he had held many jobs. He surprised them by answering “tried preaching,” and then launched into a mini-sermon about the joy of spreading the gospel, saving souls and tending the flock within the small country church where he had preached for a time.

When asked, though, why had left such fulfilling work, he had answered, “Because the sons-of-bitches wouldn’t pay me.”

They talked of jolly moments like that, and many others. Some things they talked about were more productive than others, to be sure.

But they talked. To me that was important. May we never cease doing that.

Similar but not actual scene.

Morning Thoughts: December 29, 2017

I knew this fellow once. His name was Ralph, and he was of a melancholy nature. We were in the Navy. Neither of us particularly wanted to be. But we were stationed in Monterey, California on temporary duty whether it pleased us or not. He was from Berkeley and had a car, so we spent weekends in the bay area, or exploring Highway One. I enjoyed his company a good bit.

He looked like one of those dark Italian actors, say a young Andy Garcia. He had a girlfriend in Berkeley who seemed to love him dearly. She was beautiful, resembling a petite Joan Baez with hints of freckles about her nose. She was attending UC Berkeley. He had a master’s degree from there.

That wasn’t unusual in those days: enlisted men with college degrees or even advanced degrees. Unless one was rich, sickly, prone to criminal behavior, or all three, you had to serve your country somewhere. A stint in the Navy seemed to offer a safer berth than a platoon leader in Vietnam. Ralph had enlisted and was waiting his time in Monterey, making the best of it, as we all were. I was in my “lost and wandering” phase, glad for any show of friendship. Ralph was a good shipmate and a fine companion. He was generous and kind, never passing up a hitchhiker, of whom there were many along the coast in those days.

He was also slowly going insane.

The world sort of did that to a person in those days. He explained his viewpoint as follows. “You see, when you are born, they give you a bucket. From than day forward, you have to carry it with you at all times. As you go through life, they fill it with shit. It never goes away and the bucket never gets full, just heavier. Finished school? Here’s a spoonful. No jobs? Here’s another. A nice little war? Have one on us. It goes on and on. And we carry our buckets without complaint.”

I didn’t agree, at least  not fully. Nonetheless, in those days it made a little sense. To me, it was a cautionary tale. To Ralph, it was as true and inevitable as the sun going down each evening over Monterey Bay.

During successive trips to Berkeley, I watched Ralph’s girlfriend trying her best to free him from his demons. Nothing worked. I was only an observer, but would have given up everything to sail into a Pacific sunset with someone like her. Ralph looked through her and saw nothing but the walls of his self-made prison beyond. It was my first introduction to mental illness.

He got worse. We would take walks through Cannery Row, then a deserted avenue of empty buildings covered with every imaginable material. We would sit on the curb in front of the very building that had housed the “Pacific Biological Laboratories,” once operated by Ed Ricketts, John Steinbeck’s friend and inspiration for the character “Doc” in Cannery Row.

Contemplating Cannery Row only strengthened Ralph’s belief in the fickle cruelties of life. “This place once roared with life,” he said. Thousands of people lived or worked here, each— whether whore, boss, worker, or bum—carrying his own bucket, with it getting heavier each day.”

His moods became tiresome to me and debilitating to himself. Our excursions became rare, then stopped. We changed barracks and I saw him less and less.

My orders came for security duty in, of all places, the I-Corps area of Vietnam. That occupied my thoughts until one day I received a phone call in the graphics lab where I was temporarily assigned. I assumed it was some directive, maybe news that a horrible mistake had been made and that I would stay in Monterey for my entire enlistment, or maybe spend it at a small base in Key West.

Instead, I heard a voice that I recognized immediately. Yes, It was Ralph, sounding happier than I had heard him in ages. After mutual recognitions, I asked where he was. The answer shocked, but didn’t surprise me.

I’m in the ‘nut-ward’ at Treasure Island,” he said. “It’s great.”

“What did you do to get there?” I asked with some haste when I saw my supervisor giving me “the look” for taking a personal phone call on government time.”

“It was easy,” he said. “I just gave my bucket of shit to the Navy and said I didn’t want to carry it anymore.” I heard agitated voices and he was gone.

I never heard from him again. A lot of water has flowed back and forth through the Golden Gate since then, and many of life's tides have risen and fallen. Life has gone on. I have survived, but I still think of Ralph from time to time.

Happier days in front of "Doc's Lab"

Growing Up Southern: December 28, 2017

It wasn’t that Miss Thorton didn’t trust 13-year-old boys. Well, actually it was because Miss Thorton didn’t trust 13-year-old boys. She’d seen enough of them in her day. It had been, after all, nearly 20 years since that promising day that she had stood with the roll of paper in her hand proclaiming her a graduate of our state teacher’s college.

So much promise, promise that would be soiled by years of disappointments, rejections, bypasses, and dreams unfulfilled. Unmarried, unrecognized, un-promoted, and uninspired, she found herself relegated to “teaching” Study Hall. Gone were the dreams of filling young minds with the glories of poetry and great novels. There was little chance now, it seemed, that she would be remembered as anyone’s inspiration, only as the one who could spot two students passing notes in the farthest corner of her kingdom, and, it was rumored, could spot the smell of a “Corn Nut” from a hundred feet away.

There was only one reward for her assignment. That reward was the provision of ample time to reflect upon the perfidious nature of young boys, those vile, scheming, lascivious creature who comprised half of her care. Oh, they were base and evil. “See,” she would think to herself, “how sweetly the young girls attend their maidenly duties and prepare themselves for life.” The thought that she had once sat in this very room in such preparation and that her efforts failed, epically, never entered her mind.

She was, after all, better off than the teachers at the “colored” school who taught with hand-me-down textbooks for half her meager salary. And, she reflected, she had never given birth to anything as vile as a boy.

“Boys,” she would think, whose need for punishment was the sine qua non of her life. She operated under the assumption that they—the boys—were permanently and assiduously up to no good. With this as a guide, and with sharp eyes, she had exposed many a pernicious plot. Concomitantly, she had relegated, she didn’t know how many, promising lads to a life of shame-showered repentance.

It was her only joy, as I have intimated.

Her attention on this day focused on two of the worst. They were the worst for two reasons. First, they were sharp and cunning, evil beyond their years. Second, she had been, so far, unable to catch them at anything more deleterious than drawing pictures of jet planes strafing Chinese soldiers. Even then, Mr, Caruthers, the principal, had refused to punish such pernicious behavior to the degree she deemed appropriate. “Probably,” she thought, “he had been guilty of a similar crime, only with Nazis and Japs for targets.”

The day, she fumed when she saw the first of the pair leave his seat and squirm his way to her desk. Reaching her, his beady eyes narrowed, and deceit oozed from them like sewage from a cracked pipe.

“May I go to the library?”

The library? A lifelong drunk couldn’t have asked directions to a temperance hall and sounded anymore incongruous. “For what purpose?”

“Gotta do a paper.” His eyes turned dirty yellow, a sure sign of mendacity.

“Don’t you think you might need to take notes?”

The miscreant looked at his empty hands and his mind made a calculation that would have impressed Isaac Newton. “Yessum,” he said and marched back to his desk, to return a few minutes later, flashing the cover of a “Big Chief.” When he passed the desk of his partner-in-crime, the teacher had detected a sly signal that would have impressed the most adroit Soviet spy.

He was soon off, followed by his evil twin, to engage in whatever bit of mischief they had devised.

Today, though, they weren’t the only ones with a plan. Miss Thornton was harboring her own. She beckoned toward Rita Mae Collingsworth, the richest and most despised girl in class, a tandem that made her a most excellent temporary monitor. “I’ll be right back,” she said after seating the young girl on “The Throne of Temporary Authority,” as the other kids called it.

Miss Thornton entered the library and motioned the Librarian for silence. She then sleazed near, holding up two fingers with a questioning look. The Librarian, a world-class whisperer, said, “In the magazine section.” She added, “I’ll swear, I think those boys have a real interest in geography.” She started to add a laudatory coda, but Miss Thornton had left the scene.

She approached the nook containing magazines with the prowess of an Apache. She stopped before turning into it and strained her ears. Ah, she could hear perfectly.

“Look at this one,” a voice said.

“Gollee,” another voice said, adding, “Do white women’s look like that?”

“Boogie Shannon says they do.”

“None of them look the same. Wonder why?”

“Just the way the lord made them, I reckon.”

“I wonder why they don’t take pictures of white women like this?”

“I guess they let them do it in Africa but nowhere else.”

“Man, that’s something.”

“Gollee. Turn the page.”

That was enough. She sprang. The scene was all she had suspected: two sets of eyes as large as coffee saucers, two faces strained with terror, and an open copy of a National Geographic,

The eyes belonged to Kenny Gardner and me, and the ordeal that lay ahead of us would have made Tomás de Torquemada shake his head in awe and admiration. I believe, to this day, that it’s the reason Kenny never played for the NFL, and I’m not a cultural anthropologist with a Nobel Prize under my belt.

Oh, and Miss Thornton never got married.

Morning Thoughts: December 27, 2017

During my career operating a consulting firm, I rarely had this week off. City officials, bless their hearts, can and do procrastinate. I thought "it" all quit running downhill when I left the military. Guess what. It got worse. I most often worked between Christmas and New Year’s Day completing last minute requests.

Once, 13 years ago, I seemed to have all the tasks completed when the worst family tragedy we ever experienced shattered the holiday season. Going into the details would only cause undue pain, let’s just say it created a lesson from which we can all benefit: Depression (I'll capitalize it herein) is a serious, serious illness and the word should not be tossed around lightly. In fact, the experience caused me to omit such casual usage in my life as:

“Oh, I’m so depressed today. It’s Monday.”

“That movie was so depressing.”

“I’ve just been so depressed since we got back off vacation.”

“Talking to that person just depresses me to no end.”

I may have “the blues," nostalgia, or what Ernest Hemingway called “the black-ass” but, thanks to “whatever gods may be,” I have never, never, ever suffered clinical depression.

Get the picture?” We trivialize an illness that not only destroys individuals, but also can inflict lasting damage on entire families, even institutions.

Depression is a silent and non-visual sickness. We’re just beginning to understand its true horrors for those affected. Being a malady with hard-to-detect symptoms, Depression creates for the medical world a diametrically opposed difficulty. Some, who see a benefit to blaming failure on something other than the results of person choices, claim the illness falsely. This can create cynicism in the minds of others. At the same time some who truly suffer from it hide it from those about them for fear of shame and bigotry. We know that problem existed only when it manifests its last horrifying communication. 

What can we fortunate ones do? I think, first of all, we must recognize that Depression is truly a reality for many people. Then we must educate ourselves to recognize signs, symptoms, and the necessity for treatment. We must learn the do’s and do-nots of personal interaction, and those can be counter-intuitive.

Our charitable instincts, in fact, may be a detriment. I read somewhere that we may have a small genetic trigger, left over from our distant evolutionary kin, that promoted survival on the savannah. It seems this trigger promotes awareness and diverts complacency. When everything seems most safe, the trigger springs and announces that “no, things aren’t safe, better shift into defensive mode.”

While our charitable side may want to say “Everything is going to be okay,” that may not be the best treatment. Again, we must educate our own selves first.

When I was a young child, my Sainted Mother would, periodically place me on the kitchen table lying on my back with my head hanging over the edge. The inability to raise one’s head in this posture was supposed to be an early sign of polio. Today’s young folks can only imagine the horror that this test entailed.

A man named Jonas Salk developed a vaccine that eliminated the need for such terror. Interestingly enough, he never patented it, believing that more children being saved was more important than money, a strange concept for the times in which we presently live.

Today, education is under attack at all levels. Funds that could be used for research are being diverted first to war, which is perhaps the greatest contributor to Depression ever envisaged. Other funds are being diverted to enrich the lives of those who would seem to have little reason to suffer Depression. But what will happen when so many of these realize that “having it all” will never be enough?

We can only dream of a day when another Jonas Salk will find a universal and effective treatment for depression.

Morning Thoughts: December 26, 2017

A week ago today, I named it “Julius Day” after my late father-in-law, Julius Cole. It was a simple thing, remembering a simple man.

He was a farmer, see, although he didn’t want to be. Returning from service with the 79^th Infantry during the war and with the First Division afterwards, he had sent practically every penny of his pay home for over two years. Like most surviving veterans, he had dreams.

He wanted to buy a service station, sell gas, fix cars, and talk to the customers. He had finished, he thought, with farming, having been at it, before the Army called, since he was nine years old. A nice, regular, simple job beckoned.

Arriving home by train, he walked five miles to the family’s homeplace to learn that his family had used the money he had sent home to buy farmland.

So, he farmed. To make life more interesting, he began, somewhere along the line, to raise cattle as well. He had also dreamed, as a child, of becoming a cowboy. It was as close as he would ever get. A wife came into his life. Then a daughter. Then, ultimately, Alzheimer’s disease. Finally, nothing but memories of this kind and gentle man, who would talk of times when “… you just wanted to live one more second. You would say to yourself, ‘Just let me live one more second.”

He never liked the winter. He would never cut a pine or cedar tree because he loved spots of green during the dismal season. But he was an optimist. As the first pangs of bitter cold hit, he would, invariably, say, “It’ll be spring before you know it.”

On a chilly and windy day last week, we were at the farm, and I walked to the mailbox. There, among the last-minute Christmas ads, was the first annual plant and seed catalog. I looked at it and my eyes filled with tears as I looked over a landscape where Julius and I had spent so many hours on so many projects.

“It’ll be spring before you know it,” I said to a long row of pine trees. 

Thoughts on Christmas Day: December 25, 2017

I’m sure Christmas Day leaves mixed memories within some who are my age. They may not recall each one with the joy most of us attach to this "most wonderful time of the year.”

Their thoughts may drift back to the unhappy or uncomfortable. Who can truly know another's heart? How much to we know about what others have lived through in life?

It would begin days before the holidays, these specious events. Back in my time, we exchanged gifts in class. I’m not sure they do that anymore. We did, though. Our target price was 50 cents per gift. We had two “Five and Dimes” in my hometown, Kresses and Newberrys. Four-bits could buy a nice present at either.

This was a time in which many white men with families worked for less than 30 dollars per week where I grew up. Women worked for half that. African-Americans worked for whatever they could get.

Fifty cents could purchase a loaf of bread, a quart of milk, and enough bologna for several days. For a treat, you could buy a soft drink for a nickel. How some families scraped together the half-dollar for a present at their kid’s school remains a mystery. Many didn’t. A friend had her name drawn one year by the poorest girl in class, resulting in a gift consisting of a five-cent card of “Bobby Pins.”

Yes, this was in the days before individual cell phones. It was a time in which musically talented kids of limited means would “practice” the piano at home with a six-inch wide roll of paper with a piano keyboard printed on it and which could be taped to the kitchen table. It was a time when poor kids would carefully fold the wax paper and grocery sack that had held their lunch—for reuse, unless a bully tore them up.

Back to Christmas: Perhaps a more forgetful ordeal for some was the annual post-holiday ritual of reciting what you received for Christmas. Mine was an unusual grade school. Of course, it was all-white. Additionally, it served the richest kids in town alongside the poorest from out in the county. What could possibly create discomfort about Christmas?

It was like this. The recitation of gifts received always met the same pattern.

The richest level spoke of hunting rifles, pianos, and such.

The next, bicycles and swing-sets.

Next: everyday clothes, practical but embarrassing.

Near the bottom: candy and nuts, which the whole family shared.

At the bottom: “Daddy is looking for a job, so we put Christmas off.”

Then there was the young girl who fled the class in tears once, rather than reveal her family’s shame.

I don’t mention all this in order to “bring us down” on Christmas Day. Quite the contrary, I’m motivated by the many posts on social media of acts of kindness and charity these days toward those who struggle and mourn. We should be proud of the numbers of Americans who share the good fortune so graciously with others. Although some politicians boast of governing with Ayn Rand's "philosophy of selfishness," charity clings below our national psyche like roots in a storm.

Goodness and mercy are traits that are sown into the soil of America, right alongside the seeds of our shortcomings. We can till and reap which harvest we choose to nurture. Despite how it appears these days, I’m optimistic that we will choose that which is most nutritious for the “better angels of our nature.”

And with that, peace and good will.

Blessed are those who show mercy.

Morning Thoughts: December 24, 2017

Not that I consider it any of Franklin Graham’s business, but I tend to say “Happy Holidays,” unless speaking a specific person. Here’s why.

Years ago, believe it or not. I exhibited the characteristics of a fitness freak. Yep. It wasn’t unusual for me to run eight to ten miles a day and attend morning exercise classes at the old Downtown YMCA at Sixth and Broadway in Little Rock, Arkansas.

There was a Businessmen’s Club there and its members formed a close-knit camaraderie, as males will do. Back in the day, men could even swim together in the nude or take in the sun buck-naked at noon on a little rooftop nook hidden from view. That all changed when they began to accept women members. The impacts of the change didn’t occur swiftly, but that’s fodder for some funny stories at another time.

Anyway. There was a member among us from a prominent Jewish family in Little Rock. I’ll call him Eli Frank, as I know he would be embarrassed to be identified for simply being a good person. And he was. My only criticism of him involved the reason we seldom jogged together. He knew two speeds—a trait that he involved in every aspect of his life. Those speeds were, “full,” and “a little more than full.” As I say, it marked his personal makeup and made him a success in his field, although a solitary jogger.

In addition to being friends at the “Y,” we occasionally had contacts through our respective businesses. We were, therefore, more than casual acquaintances.

There was another man associated with our YMCA at the time. He cleaned the dressing rooms. I really can’t remember his name, “Paul” maybe. Everyone just knew him as “Pappa Wa Chickee.”

You see, his experience in some war or other had left its impact. Although he was capable of performing limited tasks and living alone, he spent a great deal of his time, as Patrick Clancy the singer described it, “living among the Little People.” He was harmless and they let him stay at the YMCA.

His most frequent utterance was, yes, “Poppa Wa Chickee,” whether responding to a taunt, requesting you to move so he could clean, or threatening to “chisel the ‘C’ off the building’s cornerstone,” hence the nickname.

His appearance was what you might expect: unkempt, overweight, often unshaven, and smelly. I’m proud to say that I don’t ever recall having taunted him, but I would have been among the few. He was one of those best described in the Gospel of Matthew as “the least of those among us,” and thus fodder for being looked down upon and mistreated by the over-privileged.

Did I feel, in the least, proud that I tried to treat him with respect? Hardly, that was simply a minimum standard, as I saw it. That hit home with a punch one year, after I found that Eli Frank had picked the poor man up and taken him home with him for Thanksgiving dinner with Eli and his family.

We can only imagine how the Galilean must have smiled.

A few days after learning that, I dropped into a downtown store to buy greeting cards for the season. That’s when I first, as a result of thinking what a good person this Jewish club-mate of mine was, opted for “Happy Holidays.”

So:

Bill O’Reilly,

Franklin Graham,

Sean Hannity,

Donald Trump:

“Poppa Wa Chickee.” (Translation: “Bite me”).

Oh, and to everyone else: Happy Holidays.

The fitness club is gone, but
the "C" still in the cornerstone.

Morning Thoughts: December 23, 2017

“Blessed are ye that weep now, for you shall laugh.” That’s how Luke told it. “Blessed are those that mourn, for they shall be comforted,” is how Matthew reported it.

Both were, of course, telling of the words of the Galilean at the Sermon on the Mount, one of the most respected writings, historically, ever recorded. Mahatma Gandhi claimed it as a favorite work, but berated Christians for their lack of observance. The Sermon was a foundation of the now much-reviled Social Gospel, so comforting to those who mourned during the Jim Crow era of our country. Its teachings have fallen much into disuse in this age of “doers,” and “takers.” As Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. observed, there has been no proposal to place the Beatitudes on a statehouse lawn.

Those who espouse the so-called “Prosperity Gospel,” find the Beatitudes an embarrassment and consign them to the ash heap of history along with the entire sermon. They use the ubiquitous “out-of-context” defense by which we discard any Biblical teachings that contract our long-held beliefs or imprinted biases.

Anyway, one couldn’t help but recall this particular Beatitude during a week when three-quarters of our country mourned. What did they mourn? They mourned what they saw as the successful attack by a minority upon the poor and others of the “least of those among us.” Their counterpoints viewed their success as what they termed a Biblical prophecy, although exactly which one remains a mystery.

This dialectic frames the condition of our country now, it seems. Dissension ferments a bitter fruit within us, because finding common ground with those who trust in such diametrically opposed viewpoints is difficult, if not impossible. A divide, as great philosophically as the Grand Canyon is geologically, renders finding common goals difficult. What, we wonder, will happen to those standing on the side of the chasm that turns out to be the wrong side of history?

A holy heart residing within is the belief of a person with deeply embedded beliefs, implanted by nurture. A troubled soul can confront one who thirsts for knowledge. So we stand, tongues lashing and fingers pointing across the divide, each side hoping for history’s absolution.

Maybe the answer would involve what we currently refer to as a paradigm shift. As with the squirmy concept of what some people call the “axial age,” i.e, we find ourselves in a situation where the old paradigm is ending and the new paradigm isn’t ready yet.

We can only hope that cool heads and reasoned communication prevail in its formation.

Morning Thoughts: December 22, 2017

 It seems to me that, more and more, we’re doing it wrong, not only doing it wrong, but doing it dead wrong, and from the top down. I'm talking about achieving harmony. We’re never going to come back together as a nation until we fundamentally change our direction, or unless another country attacks us “Pearl Harbor” style. Oh, I guess the entire planet could be invaded by aliens. I doubt it. What would they want with us?

What happened was, I spent the early hours this morning reading about the psychology of racism. First, let me say that, having grown up rural Arkansas, I was raised to be as prejudiced against African-Americans as a person could be. For Jewish people, not so much. We knew a few, but not many. Catholics were fine, except they were all going to Hell of course. That’s back when they were called “Roman" Catholics, or “Catlicks.”

Yes, so-called “in-group bias” was imprinted within me as strongly as “follow Momma” is within a duckling. I have worked my whole life to overcome it, and hope that, in the final tally, it might be said that I was somewhat successful.

White people raised in the Jim Crow South will never overcome prejudice completely. Like any mythology-based belief, it is strong and lasting. That’s why I cringe when I hear one say, “I’m not prejudiced at all against blacks.” (Just a few years ago it was “coloreds”). Give me, anytime, the person who says, “I am prejudiced, but I work hard every day not to be.”

Where are we now? Each day, we are fed, at the highest levels of leadership and government, a diet of divisiveness with a hearty helping of hatred for anyone not in our group. That’s a stiff barrier to cross. Is there a solution? Perhaps.

Recently I read, for the first time, about the (apparently) famous “Robbers Cave Experiment” back in 1954. A large group of white teenage boys from a homogeneous background were involved in staged “camp” experiment in Oklahoma. They were divided into two groups, the Eagles and the Rattlers. They were then made to compete in games for scarce resources, i.e. trophies and rewards for the winning team but not for the losers. In a scenario straight from William Golding's Lord of the Flies, (published that same year, coincidentally) the groups established both cultural norms and enmity with one another. Fights and vandalism between camps soon appeared.

In the second phase, the two groups participated in achieving common goals, like pulling a stuck truck from the mud with the same rope previously used for “tug-of-war.”  After a few such exercises, guess what happened. Yep, the enmity disappeared, to be replaced by inter-group friendships. Harmony ruled the remainder of the experiment.

See a short documentary here.

I’m not sure the experiment would pass muster in this hyper-sensitive age, but it got my attention. Perhaps we could choose leaders that might take notice and act accordingly. That would be a good second step. The first would be to change ourselves.                                                                                                                                                                               

Look familiar?

Morning Thoughts: December 21, 2017

If you want to have your hair follicles itch, read commentaries on The Beatitudes. Writers differ, immensely, almost universally. I even read a Catholic Bishop’s statement this morning that “Today, we can’t take the Beatitudes and examine them individually.” Hmm. How else would we, I wonder?

Actually, the pattern that emerges reminds one of the village character, limited in intelligence but, reportedly, a master at hitting “bulls’ eyes” painted on barns dead center with bow and arrow. Since his work appeared at night and unobserved, an inquisitive stranger followed the challenge to “hide and watch.”

Oh yes, seems the fellow was shooing his arrow into the barn first and then drawing the target around it. There are numerous paths to both seeming enlightenment and seeming perfection. Some paths more misleading, even more deceptive, than others.

In like fashion, writers on the Beatitudes tend to draw conclusions around their own particular religious or moral belief structure. Yes. Even Donald Trump could translate “blessed are the poor” to mean, “Hey, ain’t it great that I have so much and so many have do little?” Or, leaning the way of Matthew, he could ascribe “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” to mean, “Great. We’re not giving those who suffer for their genetic makeup any relief under my watch.” Franklin Graham and others would surely back him up.

Hardly a Biblical scholar, or even a pious writer, I’ve done a fair layman’s job at studying the New Testament version of the Ten Commandments: the eight Beatitudes issued by writers from the mouth of the Galilean during The Sermon on the Mount. I guess I favor Matthew’s version for poetry, but Luke’s for verisimilitude, as Matthew had time for finessing, but Luke wrote his first.

My take is that the Galilean, piercingly direct as he was, meant exactly what he said, translated by me as “Chortle away, suckers. My people will be getting their due reward as you began to howl.”

I particularly love “the poor in spirit.” What a wonderfully transcendent thought. Who could be more “poor in spirit” than a young teenager who first realizes the presence of a sexual preference, totally prescribed by nature, that will entail a life of hatred, abandonment, loss of rights, and blind prejudice? Maturity may indeed bring acceptance, but only after a young life has been marred by a bitter and popular bias. The same can be said for a younger child who has passed through the mysterious genetic transformation whereby the ubiquitous female embryo either remains female, or, through a set of genetic folds and modifications becomes male prior to issue. Imagine the weight of being “poor in spirit” when the child discovers that, through a genetic tick, the wrong sex has emerged in the wrong body.

Would we also extend our blessedness to the poor woman made to choose between her children's lives by the evil forces of Nazi fascism, or, later, by the demons of poverty and starvation?

Seems to me, someone once understood. Good for the Galilean.

As for Luke, the Galilean never flinches from his distaste for the love of riches. Consider the false followers who praise his name but love their wealth in far greater intensity. They may dance today and shout their victory but, “They also serve who only stand and wait.” John Milton said that.

"History falls heavy on the head of the wicked." I said that.

For me, and this is just my opinion, (hold on to your own if you’ve thought it through), the Galilean is telling his people to wait, and be good for goodness sake. Suffer your trials and tribulations, and patiently work for the common good, although the wicked about you flourish.

My attorney friends call it “Pro bono publico.” My profession, in a less noble sounding manner, calls it “Reward in Heaven” work. Strive for the good, though it offers scant pay compared to the evil.

Then may we be called blessed, or μακαρία, which term, according to most scholars, means “happy.”

Growing Up Southern

There was a saying back home when I was a kid. If you said So-and-So had “Snakes in his boots,” it meant he lied a lot. I guess now you would say “he has snakes in his Gucci’s.”

I was thinking about this recently while I was reading through The New York Times. A couple of reporters had counted and added up, apparently, all the outright lies our current president has told in his first ten months in office. It turns out, he is the “Whopper King,” and we aren’t talking about cheeseburgers, or anything else you might imagine. We’re talking lies. Wow. The Times counted them up and even unleveled the playing field in his favor when comparing him with his predecessor. The current’s tally didn’t count mere exaggerations. The former’s even included stated intents that didn’t come to pass.

Even so, the tally was 103 in ten months for our sitting president. Many are still being repeated, both by the originator, or by his robotess press secretary. (Snakes in her Christian Louboutin’s)? By comparison, the previous president racked up a total of 18 in eight years, making him a raging amateur in the Annals of Prevarication. Further, unlike The Whopper King, Number 44 didn’t repeat falsehoods once they were disclosed. Joseph Goebbels would have been aghast. He said that’s the way to make falsehoods believed, and he knew what he was talking about.

My sainted mother would have had a thing or two to say about all this. “Somebody has snakes in his boots.” That’s what she would say. She used to say that about an uncle (by marriage) of mine, a man known for lying as well as, during infrequent periods of employment, spending his pay on liquor while his wife and children went without. This was my earliest cognizance that there were those who would turn their backs on the most dependent of those among us for our care and support. I call them “The “Anti-Beatitudes” crowd, and, personally, I don’t agree with their politics, but what the hell?

Anyway, once, this uncle was doing some work hauling slab wood for my father. It required the wearing of boots while in the field and he kept his pair on our back porch at night.

Oh yes. You can guess what I did. Early one morning before “Uncle Sorry-Ass” showed up for work, I initiated a reconnoiter to check out the veracity of this bit of southern prognostication. I was a little shy of four years old, I guess, and already showing a bent for investigative reporting. Sainted Mother caught me, questioned me, and forbade any repetition only a minute or so before the owner showed up for his boots. I had completed my analysis, though, and am sorry to say that the boots in question were unoccupied by any form of reptile, at least that morning.

I was never a strong devotee of mythology thereafter. Further, there are those among us now whom I wouldn’t trust if they told me my name was Jimmie.

Morning Thoughts: December 17, 2017

Writing ability does not always follow genius like a boxcar follows a locomotive engine. It is refreshing when it does occur, as in Charles Darwin’s case. I had avoided reading The Voyage of the Beagle for decades, fearing that the observations might be too scientifically described for me. Welcome to another surprise.

Long an admirer of Darwin for his monumental contribution to our understanding of the Universe, I’m now addicted to his ability as a writer as well. I had previously found On The Origin Of Species and The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex both quite readable. Now I can add “Beagle” to the list. I’ve been listening to an audio version while driving, and even in that format it permits ease of understanding. I can always review particularly interesting passages in free on-line versions.

One passage in particular caught my ear this past week in light of comments made by the candidate of our president’s political party in a U.S. Senate race a week ago. It seems the candidate thought America was “great” during the slavery era.

Yes. You heard right.

Contrast this with a passage from Voyage of the Beagle. Darwin was on the five-year voyage as a companion to Captain Robert FitzRoy, not as the ship’s naturalist as is often, and erroneously, maintained. It seems that captains on British warships were not permitted to interact with the crew on a personal level and often paid someone to accompany them as a companion to counteract the long periods of tedium while at sea. Darwin did engage in almost constant study of the natural world on the cruise, however, and we are all the better for it.

Back to the passage: during a stopover in Rio de Janeiro, Darwin accepted an invitation to travel to an inland estate of a man who had befriended him. Following is a passage from his description of that trip.

"As the moon rose early, we determined to start the same evening for our sleeping-place at the Lagoa Marica. As it was growing dark we passed under one of the massive, bare, and steep hills of granite which are so common in this country. This spot is notorious from having been, for a long time, the residence of some runaway slaves, who, by cultivating a little ground near the top, contrived to eke out a subsistence. At length they were discovered, and a party of soldiers being sent, the whole were seized with the exception of one old woman, who, sooner than again be led into slavery, dashed herself to pieces from the summit of the mountain. In a Roman matron this would have been called the noble love of freedom: in a poor negress it is mere brutal obstinacy."

Perhaps it might enlighten Roy Moore to read Darwin.

Probably not, but we can always hope for redemption.

No, Mr. Moore, no country was truly
great when it practiced slavery. 

Morning Thoughts: December 15, 2017

She was a tiny lady of indeterminate age, her back bent and her fingers gnarled from arthritis. Don’t know how she held a pencil, but she did. Each week, she and others like her sent their work in to local papers like the Lonoke County Democrat. After the marriages and obits, theirs were the most highly valued and loyally read pieces in the weekly news.

Her name was Hazel Pall and she died a few years ago. Before she died, though, the paper was sold and her input terminated. What was this marvelous source of news that she and her colleagues provided, that we lost, and that we still miss?

Why, the church news, of course: attendance, visitors, Sunday School lessons, sermon contents, things that contribute to a civilized society. They did it for years, this dedicated bunch of amateur “stringers.” (That’s journalism talk). There wasn’t a person at the Washington Post or New York Times more reliable in meeting deadlines. Their gift to us was a link from the Heart of America to the printed word—a genuine testiment to veracity and honesty long since trampled into the ground by modern “news” sources like Fox, Brietbart, and Drudge.

BigNews bought out the little papers and discontinued the input of Hazel Pall and the others. The new models feature sports news, city council minutes, obituaries, and weddings. The latter doesn’t feature the carefully posed professional engagement and wedding photos of my generation. No. Too often they are cell-phone-photos of an unshaven man in an over-sized cowboy hat and an under-aged girl with tattoos flowing out of her collar and up her neck.

Times have changed. I had one of my eagerly-looked-for lunches with my journalist friend Sonny Rhodes yesterday. We discussed the demise or transformation of the weekly papers. His take was most interesting, as his insights always are. “The readers of church news in local weeklies,” he said, “are often people who live far away and want to keep up with their hometowns, not the folks who are prospects for local advertising.

Thus, money rules. As the president would say, “If it don't make a buck, then you’re out of luck.”

We had an enlightening lunch, Sonny and I. He told me some tales about having to decipher the submittals of the Hazel Palls of the world. He recounted some of the struggles he and his contemporaries had in moving from IBM Selectrics to the computer age. With a little prodding, I’m sure he would have re-told the escapade in which he learned the consequences of accepting a ride in a private plane to see the site of a story he was working on, said flight occurring only an hour after a big lunch at a Chinese restaurant.

We also planned our next "road trip," maybe to northwest Louisiana to see the “Bonnie and Clyde Death Site.” Please don’t ask why. There’s no good answer. Sometimes it is just good to spend time with a friend and see things that have no intrinsic value, but satisfy an “itch to learn.”

You know, it’s fun to have face-to-face talks with a learned friend. It’s also fun to visit places that provide no lasting profit. Yeah, it was also fun reading about who from Colorado visited Donny Ray Albright at Sunday School the past week.

Note: Arkansas' own John Grisham wrote eloquently about small-county newspapers, and the death of their downtowns as well, in one of his better books.

Morning Thoughts: December 12, 2017

While in college, I worked as a janitor and busboy at a popular sorority house on campus. I made ten dollars a week plus meals. I hate to tell my Millennial friends this, but I pretty well got by on that. Those were different times, many years ago in a paradigm far away. Our leaders believed in education back then. Young students don’t believe me when I tell them that tuition was free at the University of Arkansas at the time.

It makes one wonder, doesn’t it, why so many Baby Boomers have become selfish and ultra-conservative in their old age.

Now believe it or not, I didn’t have a lot left over on that compensation package. There were cigarettes and other essentials, you know. I didn’t have any surplus. But, as I say, I got by.

The first year I worked there, a bit before Christmas break, I went to the house-mother for my weekly pay and to assure her that things were “battened down” for the break. To my utter astonishment, she gave me an extra twenty dollars. ???

They paid me, she said, for each week despite the fact that I would be off for the next two.

Twenty dollars! Was I rich, or what? It was the first year ever that I was able to buy Christmas presents for my family.

I always think about that when I get ready to go pay my annual visit to the Reverend Hezekiah Stewart at the Watershed Human and Community Development Agency. He's a lot different from the evangelists you see on TV. He's devoted his life to helping the disadvantaged, the poor in spirit, and those who mourn, not himself. He's no Kenneth Copeland type.

Last year I told him that the first time I ever saw him, he had a basket strapped in front of him strolling around Little Rock’s RiverFest festival seeking money for the poor. He laughed, “You’re going back to the old days now,” he said.

Yes, they seem like old days now, the very old days.

I don't think he has any
mansions or private jets.

Morning Thoughts: December 14, 2017

The Cooper River was cantankerous at best, treacherous at its most awful: a real bitch if you want to know the truth. She flowed out of South Carolina into Charleston Harbor, past Fort Moultrie, then Fort Sumter, and out to sea, ruining many a career along the way.

Our ship, the venerable USS Hunley, AS31, lay some distance upriver in a complicated “Med-moor,” meaning she was anchored ass-end first to a fixed pier with her bow pointing downstream. Haughty and snug, she let the river do its worst. A fixed pier and flexible gangway provided access.

That river rose and fell with the tide. The flood-tide just oozed in, raising the river sometimes nearly ten feet. The ebb tide ran out like a man caught in the wrong house. Pity the inexperienced sailor navigating amongst the games she played. A drop of ten feet in a few hours could create currents that played hell with trying to land a boat.

They kept a fleet of small craft across the pier from the ship. I coxswained the barge assigned to the commander of a submarine squadron. Carl Ferguson coxswained our captain’s gig. Jimmy Huddleston drove a boat for a commodore who was destined to be an admiral until a nuclear sub ran aground on the “bitch-mother” river. He disappeared next morning, and Huddleston had little to do. All in all, it was pretty soft duty for us all.

We moored to floating docks that rose and fell with the tide. They were connected to the pier by gangways that rose and fell as well. That’s what caused all the fun.

It happened like this. My crew and I were returning from taking my Admiral’s wife and some friends to Fort Sumter and dropping them off at the main base. A steward came along with snacks, wine, and beer. On leaving us, the Admiral’s wife had given me the usual wink and requested that I dispose of the leftovers as usual, “according to approved naval protocol.” We felt pretty shipshape when we turned to our berthing spot. 

It was high tide, so no currents bedeviled us.We moored without incident. I put the crew to work and invited Ferguson and Huddleston over to share in some leftover wine. That’s when it happened. I was pouring some wine into a coffee cup when my “boathook” leaned through the hatch and said, “You better come see this.”

I gave him a physically impossible but time-honored Navy response. He said, “No, you better take a look.”

Cursing in three separate languages, I stepped out onto our dock. In the space between our dock and the next, someone was tying up a thirty-three-footer to the fixed concrete pier. Did I mention that it was high-tide? “Jack me off with a bilge-pump and call me a snipe,” I said to the boathook. Then I hailed the guys mooring the boat.

Two seamen and a pasty-looking ensign in full dress regalia came from the boat’s port side and looked at me. “Yes?” the ensign said. I stared for a second or two until he looked down at the officer’s stripe on his coat and then back at me. I saluted and he saluted back in his best imitation of Bull Halsey. “Yes?” he said again.

“I don’t think I would moor that boat there,” I said.

“Sailor,” he said. “What is this?” He pointed at his hat.

“Your cover,” I said.

“And what does it mean?”

“Means you’re a line-officer, sir,” I said.

He thrust a fist in my direction and pointed at a finger with his other hand. “Know what this is?”

“It’s a ring, Sir.”

“Not just a ring,” he said. “This,” he said, jabbing at the object in question, “this is a United States Naval Academy ring. Do you have one?”

“No sir,” I said, thinking that he probably knew the answer, but then, being a “napolis Man,” maybe he didn’t.

“I see,” he said. “Now what is your rank?” Had he not worn that ring, he probably would have known already. It was sewn right onto my uniform. I was still in dress whites and my rank was prominent, along with my ribbons signifying my recent service in Vietnam. “Bosun's Mate third-class,” I said.

“Now don’t you think maybe I know a little more about mooring small craft than you do?”

Now that was a stupid question. It took me more courage than old John Paul himself needed when he smart-mouthed the captain of the Serapis from the deck of the “Bonny-Dick” to kept from bursting out laughing like I could hear Ferguson and Huddleston doing.

“Of courser sir.” I gave him my best “Barnacle Bill the Sailor” salute. “By your leave,” sir,” I said, and stepped back into the cabin. I hear a distinct “Harrumph,” ere I sat and resumed what I had been doing.

We drank our wine. It took us into a warm fellowship wherein we became trusted shipmates, brothers tried and true. We talked of ports-of-call and “West-Pac Widows,” then moved to great assholes we had known. All were officers save one Chief Bosun’t mate whom we had worked for, before his wife killed him. Most of the great officer-assholes, we agreed, were ‘napolis men.”

We even talked some, maybe ten seconds or so, about what an exciting and marvelous career the United States Navy offered. This time we all burst out laughing.

We were warm, safe, and contented, proud descendants of men who had once faced canon-fire in wooden vessels over a mile-deep sea in service to their country. Outside, the tide began going out and we could hear the steel rings of our dock screeching against the anchor-columns as we sank.

We could also hear the Cooper River—that muddy bitch—snickering.

My home away from home.

Morning Thoughts: December 13, 2017

Flipped back and forth last evening between election coverage and a documentary about Nazi invasion of Poland. The latter had some footage I’ve never seen before, and was more than terrifying. What a sore on the soul of humanity is racial hatred. What was particularly unsettling, and I’ve read about his many times before, was the cavalier attitude of the non-Jewish residents of the occupied cities as their neighbors and former friends were dragged from their homes.

I think it was Elie Wiesel who wrote so eloquently about the sin of indifference. It was well-evident in Polish city after Polish city as the Nazis began systematically going about their reign of terror with no protests from the non-victims.

Many stood and watched and others applauded as men, women, and children were beaten down the streets and crowded into ghettos. Some standers-by then took the opportunity to take belongings left behind. As I watched, dots began to connect themselves in my mind.

What kind of species are we? I flipped the channel. There was the smirking image of a man who, just this week, had said that the last time America was great was during slavery. My strongest image from what I have learned of that era, is an account (by Fredrick Law Olmstead I think, in Travels Through the South). The author, whoever it was anyway, recounted watching a slave owner punish a female slave for some infraction or other. She was pregnant, “bigly” pregnant, so her “master” had her dig an indention in the ground to accommodate her swollen belly before he made her lie down to be beaten.

Great? If so, then let’s not make America great like that again. Racism and hatred are no ways to make a country great. The Nazis proved that.

To borrow wording from a much greater American, “It is left for us, the living …” to rise above what may be evolutionary tendencies toward tribalism (now called “nationalism”) and embrace the "better angels of our nature" by embracing our sisters and brothers of all colors and places of origin. We could, I think, achieve greatness by letting love and peace replace bigotry and war.

Why the optimism?

Well, after all, America did become a little greater as recently as yesterday.

Auctioning off what conservative
textbooks call "Guest Workers."

Growing Up Southern: December 12, 2017

Life was simpler, and fun a lot less expensive when I was growing up. If you were thinking of things to do, and there were lots of choices, one of the cheapest and most interesting was to go looking for “are-heads” along the bayou.

What were they? They were remnants of the original inhabitants of this spot of earth we now claim belongs to us. They were, mostly, stone artifacts left over from encampments along bayous or rivers. Yeah, yeah, Yankees and schoolteachers called them “arrowheads,” or more acceptably, “artifacts,” I cling to the old ways when I can.

I don’t know how old they were. We used to say those who made them appeared around 10,000 years ago in what is now the U.S. But, scholars have pushed the date back further and further. I have even heard the figure of 30,000 years. At any rate, they are old.

The makers disappeared from around here nearly two centuries ago. My father-in-law, born in 1923, always told us that he knew, as a kid, an old man, born a slave, who claimed to remember the last Indian family that lived along Baker’s Bayou in Lonoke County, Arkansas. He said the family “just disappeared” one day when the old man was a boy. That would have placed the extermination date around 1850, a guess supported by a state archeologist who visited us one day to help classify and locate the artifacts we had collected over the years.

I like to think the family migrated to better life. My wife thinks the Mother Ship picked them up and took them home. I hope she’s right and, with each day’s news, I scan the night sky more hopefully. Who knows? Perhaps those artifacts were part of a guidance system and that is why we, as a country, have lost our way.

Anyway, farther north but still in the county, where our farm is located, there aren’t any signs of settlements. It is interesting to note, though, that the property is located on what came to be known as the “Trail of Tears.” The name derived from the devastating effects of Andrew Jackson's Indian removal policy, whereby the Cherokee nation was forced to give up its lands east of the Mississippi River and to migrate to an area in present-day Oklahoma. Estimates are that 4,000 Cherokee people died of cold, hunger, and disease on their way to the western lands.

Ah, but America was “great” then according to our current leaders. Besides, the Cherokee people were just savages and not a group that civilized people—like us—could abide.

Or were they?

I read something interesting last evening. It seems that, during all the turmoil between white settlers and the Indian nations, there were countless cases in which immigrants to the new lands, either by flight or capture, spent time living among those “savages.” There are few recorded cases where such individuals later chose willingly to rejoin “civilized society.” By comparison, there are practically no recorded cases where native-Americans, once incarcerated among whites, chose to remain if offered the chance to return to their people.

I don’t hunt “are-heads” any more. I’m too old, too capable of enjoying more expensive pastimes, and have developed a brooding belief that those artifacts best remain where they

are.

Let us not, however, forget the tragic stories of the peoples who made them.

Just Thinking.