Growing Up Southern: July 31, 2017

I was sickly as a youth. They were forever forcing needles into my arm or noxious liquids down my throat. Illness never was a pastime for me. As a result, I can count my serious illnesses as an adult—ones you would miss work for—fairly easily.

Now, hangovers from too much fun, muscles strained from kicking at dogs, fatigue from obsessive jogging, malnutrition from smart-mouthing a wife, and other self-induced idiocies don’t count, do they? Okay.

Let’s see, I had severe cold upon checking aboard the USS Hunley in the winter of 1968. I had the flu somewhere around 1989. I mean I really had the flu. Knocked me out for over a week. It was not a case we see so often when someone has a bad cold and elevates it to flu status. I had the real thing. Trust me.

Speaking of colds, you seldom hear about them anymore. We euphemistically call them “sinus infections now.” Why? I’m not sure, but I suspect it is so we can demand antibiotics. They have no effect on a virus, as we know. As we should know anyway. There is the placebo effect, and prescribing them gets you out of the doctor’s hair. So, there.

I think I read somewhere that each case of the common cold results from a separate virus. Once we have had a specific one, we become immune to it. If that is true, I had so many as a youth that I think I used them all up. That one I mentioned in 1968 was the last.

Other than the flu once, I did pass two kidney stones. The first instance took me to the emergency room a year or so ago, whereupon a couple of drips of morphine made me as unconcerned as a politician doing dirty work. The second? Well, it occurred a few weeks ago. I recognized the symptoms that time and used profanity combined with a gritting of teeth to see me through. All in all, the morphine was better, profanity cheaper.

Why am I telling you all this? It’s because a I have knee giving me fits and it really pisses me off. That seems to be a common response when one isn’t used to, and doesn’t enjoy, being incapacitated. Anyway. I decided to employ my normal treatment for pain: just working through it. This included profanity, stretching, walking, and picking peas, a chore that requires a good deal of stretching and bending.

That made it worse. I guess I’ll have to let someone look at it. I always remember the words of our beloved country doctor, though. “Those boys in Little Rock like to cut on you.” I think I may tell them that I’m “a screamer” and friend to scads of lawyers. Then they might want to think twice about it.

Oh well, I am lucky for 50 years of good health. I reckon a little attention won’t hurt.

Sailing To Oblivium: July 30, 2017

Yesterday I took my friend Arturo to the annual Antique Military Vehicle exhibition at the MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History in Little Rock, Arkansas. I wasn’t sure that a young man would enjoy it, but turns out he had a ball. Here’s a photo of him and jeep restorer David Hopkins talking about the intricate details of the vehicle.

I liked to have not gotten him away. It took a promise of lunch at the newly restored La Hacienda to do the trick.

There was a great crowd at the exhibit, due in part, I’m sure to the relatively mild weather, “mild” certainly a deserving descriptor for the 29^th day of July in central Arkansas. The exhibitors are always a friendly group, eager to tell about their hobby.

The high point of the day came when a tall and energetic man approached me and asked where I got my hat. It designates me as both a Navy and Vietnam vet. I told  him, and then we talked. Turns out he was in the Navy during World War Two. I felt an honor beyond simple honor. I wasn’t sure that would ever have the chance to converse directly with another vet from that war. They are disappearing fast.  Had he been one of the younger ones, he would be past 90 now. I didn’t ask.

They were great ones, those men and women. I won’t say “the greatest,” for I think greatness is as greatness does. But they were sure extraordinary. They sacrificed, as they say, their present for our future. That’s sure a trait that America could benefit again from.

Anyway, we talked—shipmate to shipmate. Age never destroys that relationship.

A new shipmate - still a great one

Growing Up Southern: July 29, 2017

I learned about true love in the third grade. I’m talking absolute, undying, ephemeral, unspoiled, transcendent love. I guess I was eight or so.

The object of my awakening was a little older, early twenties I guess. She taught our class, and was named “Miss Roundtree.” Her father was some sort of state politician, but that meant nothing to us. Oh, I had rivals for her affection, no doubt, but that just made me work harder for it. I’m sure she noticed the way I went back over the blackboard an extra time when I was the “erasure monitor.” Diligence is important to a woman.

She had to notice when I put an extra flourish in writing my name, demonstrating a flair for good penmanship. I’m sure she knew that I was the only one who didn’t torment Linda Sue Castleberry.

She even remarked on how my life’s ambitions changed with the subject her teaching.

As we learned to read, I knew I would be a writer when I grew up, and told her so. When we studied nature, I announced my plans to become a doctor. When we moved to math, I was proud to announce plans for a career in engineering. I wasn’t sure what engineering was, but when she told us about a friend of hers who was good in math and became an engineer, that was good enough. I’m sure I would have announced plans for roofing houses had she mentioned it favorably.

But it was science, namely astronomy, that captured me. She had a special affection for it and passed that to me. She made the night skies a place of wonder and amazement. Hooked, I was.

I got off to a rough start in my obsession when I gave a report to the class about a planet that could be “seen with the naked eye.” I pronounced it to rhyme with “snaked” and the other kids laughed at me. Miss Roundtree just smiled. She knew a genius when she saw one.

Undeterred, I began counting the days when I could enter college and become an astronomer. That meant quit counting the days until I could quit school and join the Navy. Life choices can prove difficult. But then, the Navy had, itself, supplanted lighting out for Texas to become a cowboy. Plans change.

Anyway, Miss Roundtree soon had me standing out in the back yard of our house, amidst the South Arkansas mosquitoes and other bugs, staring into the night sky to find a constellation or planet. My mother thought I was crazy. I ignored her. What did she know about love, anyway?

A treat arranged by Miss Roundtree provided both the highlight and the ultimate downfall of my astronomical plans. She arranged for the class members to visit the home of a man in our city who had a telescope.

A real telescope. He had set it up in his back yard and we were allowed a brief look at a marvelous view of the moon. Oh, the wonder and fascination. What a splendiferous lifetime of study and discovery lay ahead. I began to dream of moving to a larger city when I was grown, a city where people would value my achievements. Look out world, here comes Jimmie!

It all crashed the next day with Miss Roundtree’s opening question.

“How many saw the moon through the telescope at my boyfriend’s house last night?”

Her boyfriend? She hadn’t said nothing about no stinking boyfriend. I didn’t even raise my hand. Those jilted in love often behave that way, retreating into themselves so to speak. I felt betrayed, fooled, led on. I had learned all those names of planets and constellations to please a woman who loved someone else.

Recess brought no relief. Even multiple scoots down the “slicky-slide” failed to remove the cloud of bitter disappointment. I ignored a smile from Penny Purdue, one of the prettiest girls in class. My mood was that sour. The sky was even dark and stormy.

To hell with astronomy. Falsely let to its lure, I would show that uncaring woman. She had dashed my plans for fame as a renowned scientist. She would rue the day she had deceived me.

Thus sulking, I heard someone call my name. Don Puckett, a sixth-grader, and the best athlete in school, was yelling that his team needed a right fielder. Me? A third-grader? Hot damn! I had new hope for life.

Anyway, there was always the Navy, or maybe the New York Yankees.

Life goes on.

Growing Up Southern: July 29, 2017

No wonder that the South has produced so many fine writers. It also produces fine talkers, like my sainted mother.

She expressed herself with a fluidity of thought and lucidity, laced with colorful metaphors, similes, and analogies, that a Faulkner or a Fitzgerald would have been envious.

For example, she didn’t threaten simply to punish my many transgressions, she promised she would cut a persimmon switch (or worse still, make me cut it) and “wear you out.” Unlike modern politicians, she was not prone to idle threats.

Some of her style of speaking came from the region.

A person didn’t sit with pride or arrogance. They sat there “like Garrett on snuff.”

Something didn’t operate efficiently, it, ran “like a Singer sewing machine.”

A person wasn’t dimwitted, their brain rolled around in their head “like a BB in a barn.”

Someone wasn't driving fast, they were "sacking air."

Faced with an unpleasant task, I just had to “back my ears and do it.” (If you don’t understand, ask a “horse-person”).

Someone didn’t prove annoying, they made one’s a** “crave applesauce.” I ran into a variant of this when I married a girl from Lonoke, Arkansas where “applesauce” was traded for “a dip of snuff.” Same message, regional variation.

Other sayings were unique, as far as I can tell. When I appeared in an unusually disheveled or unprepared manner, she would tell me “you look like someone who was called for and couldn’t come, and when they got there they wadn’t needed.” Now that is someone looking bad.

Sometimes, language seemed home-grown. Running a grocery store along with her husband, she had a chance to connect buying habits with social behavior. When a wealthy person came through, they weren’t simply rich, “they didn’t ask the price of nothin’.” People with poor buying habits didn’t choose poorly, “they didn’t buy one thing they really needed.”

A favorite expression, one that I use a lot, reportedly originated with her father, whom I never met. A high-spirited man, from all accounts, he once vowed, in a huff, to go and tell a neighbor “how the hog ate the cabbage.” Reaching the front door, however, he turned and announced that he’d better not, because, as he put it, “I’ve got my cows in his pasture right now.” You just can’t express things better than that.

Oh, I think about that dear woman a lot, my bother. Standing not much over five feet tall, she could make grown men tremble, fearing an onslaught of her precise and colorful language. I also think about our language skill, and where we are headed with them. People with her language skills are disappearing.

 John Steinbeck, in Travels With Charlie, expressed a fear that technology would erase the variations in dialect among regions of America. I worry, as well, about our skills in basic communication. You only have to listen to young folks these days, and a frightening percentage of adults, insert the word “like” three or four times into one sentence, for no reason that adds meaning or emphasis, to see the danger facing our language skills.

More aggravating still is the replacement of any descriptor of a superlative situation with the single, over-used, exasperating, maddening, annoying, infuriating, irritating, galling, sophomoric, and vapid word “awesome.” It grates.

After all, American English used so endearingly by Wordsworth, Emerson, Twain, Hurston Ellison, Baldwin, Whitman, Cather, and others—this excellent, magnificent, wonderful, marvelous, supreme, consummate, outstanding, remarkable, fine, choice, first-rate, first-class, premier, prime, unsurpassed, unequaled, unparalleled, unrivaled, preeminent language of ours—should not be debased and violated by the lazy and speech-deprived.

It just makes my ass crave applesauce.

A marvelous gift

Sailing to Oblivium: July 27, 2017

Life takes funny turns. It found me, in May of 1966 living at 1016 Masonic Street in San Francisco, a block from Haight and two from Ashbury. Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t go there. I landed there, fleeing an Arkansas governed by Orval Faubus, and hoping to catch sight, by some miracle, of what at the time I thought was a great love of my life. It was a girl who had left me standing alone on Fayetteville’s Leveritt Street, and married a SF native.

Hope springs eternal, as they say, in a young heart. I had nothing else to do, and the apartment on Masonic just happened to be available. I had no idea at the time who the hippies were, but I would soon learn.

A miracle did happen. Armed with my college degree and a draft card stating I was “1A,” (better known to my fellow Americans as “canon-fodder”), I managed to land a job with a company in the Mission District. I rode the Haight-Sunset bus to and fro each day and lived a happy life until the Draft Board found me.

Gosh, what things I saw. Masonic dead-ended at the panhandle of Golden Gate Park, across the street from where Ken Kesey and his Band of Merry Pranksters parked that summer and danced the days and nights away for a spell.

There was the local who went out on his balcony overlooking Haight each morning and played “Reveille” on a beat-up trumpet.”

Sometimes, the “Grateful Dead” would hang out on a porch stoop.

It was fun to see the kids begging money, attired in clothing that cost $200 or more.

I thought about this the other night when the family and I watched a documentary on PBS about the Haight-Ashbury. It concentrated on 1967, the so-called “Summer of Love.”

For my memories of 1966, the show left out some things. One was the sight of a Bank of California branch a half block west of Ashbury on the south side of Haight. From opening to closing, a line branch from its door all the way around the block. They were cashing those checks from home so they could keep sneering at me for having a job.

Still, it was exhilarating, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. There was something childlike and fascinating about the experiment.

Then one morning I found myself at the Southeast corner of Haight and Masonic waiting for a bus, not to take me to work but to the Oakland Induction Center. I remember waiting there with an elderly Chinese man and watching the fog gallop down Haight toward us. (No “little cat feet” crap in “The City”). It thundered that morning, and it doesn’t thunder in San Francisco as a rule.

I’ve thought about that many times. In his book, A Generation of Sociopaths. How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America, Bruce Cannon Gibney says my generation supported the Vietnam War but didn’t support serving in the military. I guess I represented the opposite view. I despised the war, but served when my country asked. And it has never forgiven me. Such is love.

By the summer of ’67, I was stationed in Monterey, California and rode the bus up numerous times to The City to visit friends.

Things had changed. Every bus disgorged a group of wild-eyed newcomers. Some, it seemed, were still in their early teens. The streets were filthy. Stores had changed. The fun was forced. The very air seemed to tell the cleansing fog to “begone.” The “Haight-Ashbury,” as it had existed, was doomed.

I guess social experiments turn out that way. There exits excitement, adventure, and a sense of majesty in the beginning. This draws the infectious and the despoilers. Then, the experiment that had existed is doomed, toppled by the gravity of its own success. I only hope we aren’t seeing that in our country today.

Just trying to fit in—a lifetime habit.

Growing Up Southern: July 24, 2017

Playgrounds? We didn’t need no stickin’ playgrounds. Not when we had my daddy’s barn to play in and on. It could keep you busy for a day, easy.

It was a combination thing. It served as a chicken roost and a cow pen and a place to store hay. The ridgeline was just high enough to play “dare you to jump.” Later, when I was grown, it usually housed a cow and calf, and served as a “repair shop” for my brother and his gang. Cartographers would have labeled it a “multi-purpose structure.”

One spot on the roof was ideal for hiding with a slingshot and firing away at unsuspecting birds. Once, I even got close enough to make one change his flight pattern, but mostly we were harmless.

There was a pig pen attached to it and sometimes baby pigs to play with, assuming their momma wasn’t around. We had a young colt born there, once. I can still remember Daddy waking me up one fall morning to “come see what came last night.” All I could see were legs, legs that looked six-feet long, attached to a tiny body. Her mom let us pet her, pleased with the attention and proud of her accomplishment.

It sure was a simpler life then. We would have marveled at all the wasted space of a soccer field, or the trappings of a “ready-roll” sports complex. When we wanted our own baseball field, we cut some small sweetgum trees and made a backstop with some burlap bags daddy gave us. It worked pretty well, at times.

Of course, we never had enough players for teams, so used a system called “workup.” As long as you made hits, you could stay with the batters. Make an out, and you had to start in the outfield and work your way up to batting again as the other kids made outs. There were no winners and losers, just players trying to advance in life as well as they could.

I suppose pals made as a child are pals forever. Mine were, but they are all gone. Some moved to distant places, sometimes where their race received better treatment than in the American South. I missed them but was happy for them. Some went into the military, returning not as boys, but as men, men who no longer played games. Some have died, one after a tragic life of car wrecks, pain killers and alcohol. I heard he had died one morning a few years ago, but it was too late to make the funeral. I’m not sure I would have gone anyway.

Most likely, I’d have preferred to remember him, not in a coffin, but perched on my daddy’s barn watching Jim Fletcher annoy some baby pigs.

 

Fun was where you found it back then.

Growing Up Southern: Pride

They used to hit our grocery store as a crowd, twice a day in season. First it was cotton choppers, later cotton pickers.

These were pre-mechanization days. Both operations were done by hand, by workers hired by the day. It would be hard for us to understand the level of the day-to-day existence led by these folks. I got a sense of it an early age, though.

There were men who owned flat-bed trucks outfitted with sideboards and tarpaulin covers and benches, much like a homemade version of a military deuce-and-a-half. They would pick up hands and transport them to a farmer’s field for some agreed-upon price. Those they picked up ranged in age from early teenagers to the ambulatory elderly.

On the way, they would stop at our store, shortly after daylight to purchase something for “dinner” and, shortly after dark, something for supper and breakfast, if they could afford both. When the crowd hit, the whole family turned out. Daddy would be behind the meat counter slicing bologna or whatever. Mother was the cashier. My sister had a spot in canned goods and produce. I had a Hershey’s chocolate box containing change to accommodate the sale of candy.

My mother always bragged that I could count change before I could read.

I didn’t get much business in the morning. If it had been a good day chopping or picking, though, I sometimes did a brisk business in the afternoon.

The thing I remember though, and I’ll never forget it for some reason, was an item I sold that wasn’t candy at all, and I only sold it on Saturdays.

It was tiny bottle of a cheap liquid labelled “Ben Hur Perfume.”

I valued my job, although it cut into sleep or play time. I felt that, even in dealing with the poorest of the poor—those the Galilean called “the least of those among us”— I was able, on occasion, to bring some small amount of joy in the form of a sweet reward for hard work, or a brief moment of pride and dignity to an otherwise unrelenting life.

A customer?

Some called it “World War Two.” Some, “The Second World War.” Even after Korea and Vietnam, many just called it “The War.” At least the old timers did.

When I was a kid, the veterans of that war were still young, many of them younger than I was when I went to war. We, as kids, had no idea what they had been through. We just heard others talk about someone being “a veteran” as if it sufficed to say that set them apart from the rest of society.

Sometimes they were off-screen. You might hear, “Mizzes Browning had two boys, but that oldest boy of hers got killed in the war.” I also had classmates who lived in a blended family with a stepfather because their own father hadn’t returned from the ordeal.

For others, you wouldn’t have ever guessed that their daddy was a veteran had not a certificate hanging on the wall proudly announced the fact. It wasn’t always pleasant. One young friend's family lived in a rent-house owned by my daddy, not a very high-class place at all. Despite the proof of his service to our country displayed in their living room, the man had few admirable qualities, being prone to drink, and in constant search of a job.

The last time I saw the man, he had been driving a soft drink truck and had apparently made a stop at a sleazy bar on the East side of town and had stayed for a “pick-me-up,” or two. He had driven his delivery truck into a ditch and was proudly hoisting a beer as we drove by. Another playmate’s father suffered a similar fate. After he was found dead in a ditch, my friend only had a plastic model of a B-17 Bomber, the kind his daddy had served on, to remember him by.

They didn’t talk much about the war’s impact on the young men returning from it back in those days. After all, most of them came home, readjusted, and got on with their lives. Why worry about the ones who didn't adjust?

They grew older, those young men. Some didn’t talk much about the war. Others couldn’t talk enough about it. It just depended on the individual. Regimental units held reunions until the men who lived through Pearl Harbor, Normandy, the bombing of Germany, or bloody Tarawa grew too old to travel. The last one I knew personally died this year. It's hard to believe.

They call them “The Greatest Generation” now. They did, in fact sacrifice their future for their children’s future. I’m afraid that, in many ways, we have sacrificed the future of coming generations for our comfort and benefits.

No matter how we may feel about the men we saw grow from proud young victors to feeble survivors, they changed the world for the better. Not many generations can claim that honor.

Note: Facebook friend Annie Marks responded to a challenge to share stories of growing up in the South yesterday. See her memory in the post below. Have your own memory? Send it to me.

Growing up Southern

Shared by Annie Marks:

When I was six some entrepreneurial types bought a peach orchard in Dekalb County Georgia. They knocked down a few trees paved a road, and built six spec houses. My parents bought one. Next door on one side lived Sparky the literal red headed boy next door who would dance with me on Saturday and steal my crayons and break them on Sunday. On the other side lived Linda who was considerably younger than me and followed me everywhere. I loved her and made sure she was included in everything.

You could learn a lot about life living in an orchard. The beauty of the blossoms in springtime was breathtaking. Sitting in a tree one day I saw a twig moving on its own! Turns out it was a very cool bug known for good reason as a "walking stick". Summertime brought the thudding sound of peaches hitting the ground for what seemed to my young mind to be miles. I have never tasted the likes of the homemade peach ice cream (personally hand cranked by Linda and yours truly) or the peach pie that was enjoyed on the picnic tables in the backyards of Gresham Road. But as all life lessons must include, to this beauty there was a dark side. If you have spent any time near an orchard you already know what it is. BEES! In the trees, in the utility shed, lighting on your peach pie, on the ground . You know we went barefoot, right? Aaahhh!! Annie Marks

Growing Up Southern: July 22, 2017

It was simpler being a kid back when I was one. Your choices were clear. You were a Roy Rogers man or a Gene Autry man. Me, I always chose Roy. Don’t ask me why. They both dressed a little over the top, and had a habit of breaking into song when they should have been beating the living tar out of a bad guy or two. They were our heroes nontheless.

Toys were simpler too. You just found a sweet gum sapling about five or six feet long and a piece of leather for the reins and off you went. A good sturdy stick-horse would carry you through many an adventure and gallop you away from any danger. They weren’t as smart as Trigger or Champion, but then we weren’t either.

Of course, you needed a good hideout in the woods to rest during heroic episodes. They were ideal for hiding such precious loot as partial bags of Bull Durham tobacco, Bugler rolling paper, matches, and pilfered bullets in the off-chance that one of us ever got a twenty-two. Franklin R. Alread, who was the oldest of our gang, snuck a magazine full of pictures of naked women into our hideout once, but we “eeewed” him away with it.

We really didn’t care too much for the smoking either. We talked about it more than we engaged in it. Besides, only the bad guys smoked, as a rule. You never saw Gene or Roy doing it.

I’ll tell you one thing we didn’t like for sure. Robert Hester’s brother, Bobby Joe, found a half-full bottle of whiskey on the side of the road once, and I don’t care how much they seemed to enjoy it in the picture shows, we took one sip and threw that bottle of stuff into Bayou Bartholomew. I imagine it is still there.

Of course, girls weren’t allowed in the hideouts. My sister used to sneak up and try to catch us in some mischief, but we could usually hear her coming. We looked and looked for a snake to throw at her when she tried it again, but the little critters must have heard about our plans and, as they say, “lit out for the territories.”

After a hard day of such cowboy heroics, we would head back to our homes, victors all. We would count the number of women we had saved, the number outlaws we had chased from the county, and the bands of Indian renegades we had defeated. We weren’t altogether sure why we wanted to save the women, but if Gene and Roy did it, that was good enough for us. Besides, tomorrow we were going to be pirates and they didn’t give a hoot in hell about nothing. You never saw one of them singing to no woman.

Life blessed us free and easy, in those days. Had someone told us about the future, I’m sure our spokesperson, Benjamin “Boogey” Shannon would have said something along the lines of, “You mean they make those poor little kids sit around and stare at little black things in their hand all day? Where the hell is the fun in that?”

(Have a memory from growing up in the rural South you’d like to share? Send it to me. I’ll bet we would all like to hear it).

Well … there was this
one girl we might have
let into our hideout. But
she was special. 

Sailing To Oblivium: July 21, 2017

There is another memory of growing up in a small country grocery store that I wouldn’t believe had I not seen it. Those were different times, you know, very different times.

Most of the business that supported the store came in the morning, at noon, (“dinner time”) and late afternoon as people got off work. Since families had only one car, if any at all, there was not much traffic at mid-afternoon. After crops were “laid by,” there was even less.

During weather such as we are having lately, the only relief from heat in the store was a large pole fan aimed directly at the counter. It provided a minimum of comfort for both customers and the proprietor, my daddy.

Now here is where it gets a little unbelievable. As I have said before, my parents arose each morning at 5:00 a.m. in order to catch the early traffic. One can imagine how someone may have felt by mid-afternoon. Needless to say, small stores like that didn’t turn enough in sales to allow hiring help. You owned it—you ran it—and you just grabbed a little rest when you could.

I have seen my daddy, back in the old, old days, curl up on the counter of the store, under the fan, and nap briefly at that slow time of day. If a customer did come in, it would wake him and he would be right back on the job. Even had he not awakened, the customer would have probably just put an empty bottle in a rack, grabbed a “cocola,” and left a nickel on the counter.

Those times are long gone, in many respects. For one thing, the traffic never ceases these days on that once quiet highway, a graveled one in my early youth. Now, four lanes of asphalt accommodate a steady stream of drivers going somewhere, to do something, for some reason. They drive at speeds my mother would have described as “sacking air,” so one would imagine their purpose is an important one, but of that I am not certain.

Back toward town a short distance is a Walmart store, located on a site, incidentally, that once housed a stock car track. Any number of supporting businesses are located there now as well. Suffice it to say that a motorist headed South would have no use for a country grocery store these days.

And even if one did exist, the noise of modern life would probably keep the storekeeper from grabbing a nap.

Just remembering …

Sailing To Oblivium July 20, 2017

It was just a little country grocery store but, in some ways, a microcosm of a part of America—more Cannery Row than Peyton Place or Revolutionary Road.

It sat beside a state highway that connected the City of Pine Bluff to lower Arkansas (L.A.) and had maybe a tenth of the traffic that uses that road today. It had enough traffic to support the store, though, and the store made enough money to support a family: ours.

The building could be seen from a mile away, as a motorist crossed Bayou Bartholomew, the longest bayou in the world, to be immortalized later by guitar wizard Steve Davison.

A strange cast of characters met there each morning, along with the sporadic customers. My father would open before daylight to catch those going to work. He closed late in the afternoon, often putting in 14-hour days during the long days of cotton chopping and picking. We all helped, at various times.

The regular crew would gather around a pot-bellied stove at the rear of the store somewhere around mid-morning, after the traffic slowed. Sol, a master “body man” would quit sanding a car next door and wander over for a bottle of “Sweet Lucy,” i.e. Garrett snuff. Then came Sam the Bread Man. He would fill the rack and settle in for a break. Sam had been a teacher once. He couldn’t feed his family on the wages of a teacher, but he could still quote long sections of William Cullen Bryant’s Thanatopsis. He would if you asked him to.

Various salesmen and retirees made up the rest of the crowd, along with a few souls that were chronically allergic to work. Those included a man named Elmer, who had tried every known type of employment a rural life could offer, even preaching. When asked why he quit that job, he said, “Well, to tell the truth, I liked it. Didn’t have to work too hard. Got to visit all the women whenever I wanted. Felt good about spreading the Gospel. But, to tell the truth, the son of a bitches just wouldn’t pay me.”

That was a sample of the type humor that could break up the place.

My daddy ruled the store. My mother ruled my daddy. So, the crowd behaved, mostly. Since our house connected onto the store, only a screen door stood between our kitchen and the back of the store. Often, my mother would stop her ironing and cock an ear when the voices up front lowered to a low murmur. “They’re telling jokes,” she would say. Usually, she would allow them one or two, but would then start stirring around, making noises to signal that things were getting out of hand, and the boys might better behave.

They would, for they all feared her above anything.

During deer season, they had a special tradition. Daddy would put a big pot of seasoned water on the wood stove and everyone would bring something to put in it. There was little planning involved, so the results varied, but they always declared their deer-meat stew the best ever made, as long as my mother would furnish the corn bread. I can still smell those days if I try.

The store is gone now, “supermarketed” out long ago. None of the crowd is still alive, just a memory of Sol taking his first dip of the day, Sam quoting poetry, or maybe the way a certain man talked when describing a legendary coon dog. There is nothing left at that spot but those memories. Even the old building fell when they widened the highway.

I like to think though, when winter comes and men head for the “deer woods,” that there is some little white building somewhere, maybe high in the Arkansas Ozark mountains, where a bunch of men are seated around a wood stove on empty nail kegs, cooking a stew and telling jokes in a low voice so no one can hear. America would be better off for it.

The old place with Sol's body shop next door.

Sailing To Oblivium July 19, 2017

I’m trying my best not to be an old grouch today. So far I’ve not been successful. Maybe a little Doc Watson music would help. Or Steve Davison. I’ll think about it and try to escape what John Steinbeck called “the blackass.” I still wonder why I’m stuck with it.

It may have to do with the subject of my previous post: the weather.

Nah, I went ahead and braved it yesterday. Worked out fine. Felt like a real man afterwards.

It may have to do with the fact that we are moving away from governing in this country and toward opposing, vilifying, blaming, and destroying.

Nah. Who cares?

It may have to do with the fact that there is this chord position on the guitar that my beloved mentor Mike Benetz insists I use (I call it “Mike’s Misery”) that requires bending the last joint in one finger into a 90-degree angle with the next, and my body is rebelling.

Nah. My body has rebelled against any method of fun I’ve pursued for decade after decade and I’m still erect, … my posture, that is.

I’ve got it, the source of my curmudgeonery! They’re stopping Riverfest in Little Rock. Too bad. For them that likes that sort of thing, it was just the sort of thing they liked.

I hadn’t been in years. Nothing against it mind you. I just don’t like to be around that many people at one time. And I never did care for the play money. Oh, I understand its purpose. I just never cared for it. Mostly though, it was the crowd. I just don’t like that many people, especially on days like today, so you can imagine.

And … the whole thing had gotten a bit over the top for me. It has probably been ten years since a band performed there that I recognized. And the last time I went, purchasing a beverage of choice took close to an hour. And there were thousands of people there of the type who, as they say in the Arkansas Delta, "make my ass want a dip of snuff."

I remember the first time I went to one. I think it was the very first. Our neighbor from across the alley came to the back door and said. “I think they’re having something down on the river.”

“Big deal,” I said.

“I heard they have beer and music.”

“If you’re waiting on me, you’re backing up.”

We drove down, parked on Markham, and walked toward the sound of music. Yep. The “Greasy Greens,” one of the best local bands Little Rock ever produced, were playing. There was beer. And almost everyone from our downtown neighborhood was there. It was like a big block-party. There wasn’t a single pistol in the whole crowd.

The festival grew a lot after that. It really had, in my humble opinion, gotten out of hand. How do you keep something like that under control? Maybe they could just bring the Greasy Greens back down, (I think some of them are still around) park beer trucks along the paths, invite street musicians and other performers in, and let people relax and enjoy themselves like they used to.

The City of Little Rock could just put the whole thing on. It would provide some relief from worries about the news, give some local artists a chance to perform, promote harmony, and give our city manager something to do.

There. I feel better already. Can’t you just feel the smile?

Sailing To Oblivium: July 18, 2017

They call them “the dog days of summer.” I always wondered why. The dogs don’t seem to like them anymore than I do. Interspecies commonality?

Down here in the south, the heat is partnered with the humidity, doubling the misery. A walk to the garden and back makes your shirt wet. Further effort than that can make you curse your parents for birthing you in this location.

On the worst of days, you don’t even see any mad dogs or Englishmen out and about.

The old folks used to describe it in typical earthy phrases like “It’s hotter than hell’s pepper patch.”

A shipmate from Southern Missouri used the analogy of a pregnant prostitute in church, but I would never stoop so low as to repeat it. Those wild and obscene days ended long ago. Sort of.

I just say that it’s hotter than Donald Trump at a “truth or dare” party.

Why do we call them “dog days?” A trip to a favorite website, Wonderopolis, enlightens.

The ancient Romans called the hottest, most humid days of summer “diēs caniculārēs" or “dog days." The name came about because they associated the hottest days of summer with the star Sirius. Sirius was known as the “Dog Star" because it was the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major (Large Dog). Sirius also happens to be the brightest star in the night sky.

Sirius is so bright that the ancient Romans thought it radiated extra heat toward Earth. During the summer, when Sirius rises and sets with the Sun, they thought Sirius added heat to the Sun's heat to cause hotter summer temperatures.

Those old Romans were a real hoot, weren’t they?

When exactly are dog days? The Old Farmer's Almanac lists the traditional timing as being July 3 until August 11. Since any questioning of the efficacy of that revered source would threaten my marriage, we’ll accept it. Thus, we are smack dab in the middle of them.

I do know one thing. Having raised a couple of fine rows of corn in our garden, I decided, post-harvest, to chop down the stalks and feed them to a friend’s cows. Took me about an hour. As I finished, without a dry thread of clothing on me, I couldn’t help but thinking about the book Twelve Years a Slave.

In it, Solomon Northup, a free black man from upstate New York, is abducted and sold into slavery. He tells about being forced to along with other slaves, to cut sugar cane from daylight to dark on a Louisiana plantation. I try but I can’t imagine it.

I just hope that our plan to “make America great again,” doesn’t refer to those dog days of a different type.

I don't know. They seem happy enough.

Sailing To Oblivium: July 17, 2017

As far as I’m concerned, there are enough things causing friction in our lives that we don’t need to produce it knowingly. But some do.

Carl von Clausewitz, whose writings on war have affected the actions of generation after generation of generals, expounded on it in his classic work, On War. “Friction is the only conception which, in a general way, corresponds to that which distinguishes real war from war on paper.”

In other words, it all looks easy in some Chateau miles away from the trenches where men exist, under adverse weather conditions, suffer almost constant bombardment, and operate under standing orders to “report to the front and remain there in service until death, incapacitation, or the end of the war.” They know that a line drawn on paper, marking a direction of attack, doesn’t recognize the fact that, in reality, it leads through two feet of mud.

In other words, amateurs in the business, or people with nefarious motives, can get a lot of others killed. Unexpected changes in the weather, a surprise movement by the enemy, lost supplies, or a lapse of leadership on the ground can add untold friction to the best plans.

Now to our present condition in America. I seem to remember that Clausewitz also warned about creating unnecessary friction on our own part. Consider the habits of the Nazi army in mistreating civilians in captured territory, habits that generated resistance (friction). Napoleon Bonaparte didn’t create the kind of friction that Hitler did. We are told the French basically allowed a captured populace to continue operating as they had, as long as they didn’t cause trouble. Further back in history, we read of a similar practice during the so-called Pax Romana.

Okay. Okay. I’m getting to it.

With both Clausewitz and history on our minds, how the hell do we explain Donald Trump? Avoid friction? Why he arises during the early hours of the morning with one thought in mind, apparently. That is to create as much discord, distrust, and enmity among the American people as possible. Why?

Did he think governing the strongest and most important country in the world would be easy?

Does he think that making people hate him makes him powerful?

Does he think discord is the right way to progress?

Does he, even on the brightest day, imagine there are good, honest, loyal Americans that don’t share his views but who could be valuable allies when treated with understanding and a willingness to compromise?

Does he, as it appears at this point, think that we can “make America great again” by destroying everything that makes America great?

I don’t know. I’m just confused, some would say a lingering condition. I do know, however, that there are people whose political beliefs differ from mine, and that many of those people are good, honest, and loyal Americans. When we sit together in fellowship and good humor, we agree on most things and, I’m certain, could find many bridges with which to cross any gaps that do exist in our beliefs. They are not “losers.”

Nor did a much greater man than Donald Trump could even imagine—I’m talking about Abraham Lincoln—call the people of the South “losers” in April of 1865. He treated them as fellow countrymen and countrywomen. He was a man who understood the negative effects of friction.

Just thinking …

Sailing To Oblivium: July 16, 2017

There’s a passage in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony which goes from dark brooding to sublime sunshine in only a few measures. It took longer and worked just the opposite for me last evening.

The sublime? This one is easy. It was enjoying dinner with one of my favorite couples, Brenda and Troy Galloway down from Bentonville, Arkansas. Yes, that’s where Walmart makes its headquarters, and Troy is Community Development director there. He is also a Brigadier General in the Army National Guard. Brenda serves as the official version of a truly gracious All-American. One of their daughters just graduated from West Point and the other will soon enter her second year at the United States Merchant Marine Academy.

The very model of a modern flawless family? “Pert near,” as we say in South Arkansas. I’ve always been lucky with friends.

As I say, it was a most pleasant evening marred only by the fact that my Brenda couldn’t join us because of caretaking duties. She gets her turn soon when she flies to Texas for a Don Henley concert while I assume the homecare role.

The dismal? Imagine my disappointment when, after such delightful evening, I awoke after midnight experiencing the now-familiar pain and nausea that accompany the passage of a kidney stone.

Yikes!

Four hours later, the pain left as suddenly as it had come. I now have a souvenir to remind me that things can, and do, shift back and forth between the sublime and the dismal, sometimes quite rapidly. The trick is to accept both and just hang the hell on.

And dance whenever,
and wherever, you can.

Sailing to Oblivium: July 15, 2017

Some dreadful things won’t die. Hate keeps them alive, though submerged like some cold-war monster waiting to spring on a new generation.

It happened last week.

A posting on unsocial media announced, as if it were true, that a photo of the late Martin Luther King, Jr. had surfaced. The photo, the poster assured us, provided proof of Dr. King at a “Communist training school.”

I hadn’t seen this photo since the 1960s when I worked in Louisiana one summer. Billboards throughout the more dismal areas of the South dotted highways and byways with photos of Dr. King with a group of people, attending a meeting. That’s all it depicted, a group of people at a meeting.

It could have been a meeting about anything anywhere. It actually took place at the Highlander Center in New Market Center, Tennessee, originally named the Highlander Folk Center. It has been around since 1932, originating to offer adult education classes to the poor, teaching them such subversive and incendiary things as how to read material that would allow them to pass literacy tests often imposed on the downtrodden by Southern states.

By the 1960s, the center had entered the civil rights movement. It offered training to activists who were dedicated to helping the least of those among us exercise the ability to vote.

On can be assured that there was more of the Galilean than of Marx taught there. Taylor Branch, in his multi-volume biography of Dr. King, beginning with Parting the Waters, outlines his relationship with the center in detail for those who would rather learn than hate. There seems to be so few of those around anymore.

In all likelihood, the spread of the falsehood connecting Dr. King with Communism oozed from the mind of then director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, who hated King with a virulence rarely seen in politics, and who missed no opportunity to besmirch his reputation.

The odd thing is that such rubbish as the aforementioned photograph should re-surface after all these years. What, in present-day America, could invigorate this deception and motivate someone to thrust it on an unsuspecting new audience?

I guess we all know the answer to that.

Proudly displayed in America's Southland

Sailing To Oblivium: July 14, 2017

It’s pretty obvious by now that wealth is not a causal factor in having class. Some rich people have it. Take Oprah Winfrey or Jimmy Carter. Some poor people have it. Lincoln and Gandhi come to mind. You just never know.

For example, I knew a man when I was growing up. His name was Ferdinand Thompson and he had class by the trailer-load. People respected him. Men talked business with him as an equal. He had a good job with the railroad in my home town. Everyone spoke well of him. He was a role model. When the FBI came to my neighborhood doing background for my military security clearance, he was the first person with whom they visited.

He told them that, as far as he knew, I was as good as the next person and trustworthy. That was one of the great honors of my life.

He lived in the depths of the Jim Crow South of the 1950s and he was black as the Ace of Spades. I can’t recall ever having seen him wearing anything other than denim overalls. How did he manage this level of respect? Darned if I know. One person living in a six-room frame-house in the Arkansas Delta has class, that’s all. Some people living in a Manhattan high-rise haven’t a shred, that’s all. One thing is for certain. You can’t buy it. That’s for sure. That’s for danged sure.

People judge class by different standards, I suppose. Years ago, where I grew up, a farmer who didn’t keep his fence rows clean was judged not to have it, as did people who talked too much to others about their religious beliefs. School teachers, police officers, and firefighters were generally deemed to have it, although the latter two represented professions closed to a majority of citizens where I lived.

Sometimes appearance played a part. What they called “short-shorts” were a bad sign, as were flattop haircuts, beards, tattoos, fake smiles, and gold caps on your teeth. Judgements tended to start at an early age. One especially bad harbinger of growing up to lack class was a child's habit of speaking without being asked to. As for adults, one who could afford to, but didn’t help a person in need would never “fit the bill,” so to speak. Those were different times.

Back to Ferdinand Thompson: we know he encountered raw prejudice, but not from people who mattered. Maybe it had something to do with his bearing. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that he was respectful to everyone but fawning to nobody. Maybe it was because he was a quiet man, never crude or boastful, who minded his own business and cared for his family. Maybe it was because he spoke well of others and never mistreated or denigrated the least of those among us.

Maybe it was because he was more like the Galilean and less like Franklin Graham.

At any rate, I’ve thought about him many times over the years. I think about him a lot lately.

A former slave, Texarkana, AR
Class personified?

Sailing To Oblivium: July 13, 2017

 Last evening, we watched Rebecca, one of my wife’s favorite films. It has one of the best performances by an off-screen character in movie history.

Life is like that. So many of the people who shape our lives and the future of our country we have never seen, or at least we no longer see them. On the other hand, we see far too much of the people who are currently shaping our futures. We would prefer most of them as off-screen characters, preferably in cartoons.

Back to shaping our future, there is an old economic theory we used to apply to urban economics. We called it ‘location quotient analysis.” In economic terms, location quotient is a way of quantifying how concentrated a particular industry, cluster, occupation, or demographic group is in a region as compared to the nation. It can reveal what makes a particular region “unique” in comparison to the national average. Some used it to estimate potential as well.

What I think about when I drive through the Arkansas Delta is how some thinkers used to apply the location quotient principles to sociological factors, i.e. estimating human potential. It posited how likely a given area was to produce an Abraham Lincoln, an Albert Einstein, a Jonas Salk, a Mozart, or a Robert Johnson.

Of course, the probability of success for any given area depended on a myriad of complex and related characters. It always makes me think, though, as I drive through areas of our country that the modern world continues to neglect. I can’t help but wonder how many people like Harriet Tubman, Isaac Newton, Martin Luther King Jr., Clara Barton, Fredrick Douglass, or Jonas Salk we may squander through our neglect.

Oh well. Let's just build another aircraft carrier.

I freed a thousand slaves. I could have

freed a thousand more if only they knew
they were slaves. - Harriet Tubman

Sailing To Oblivium: July 12, 2017

Sometimes visiting places from where your roots grew is like taking a calming dip in a pool of warm memories. It was for my sister, brother, and me yesterday.

We started out from our home place, a site much altered from our youth. It once contained a small country grocery store with a home attached to it. Our parents bought it and opened for business on January 1, 1940. They reared the three of us there. It disappeared long ago with all the other country stores. To date, no politician is promising to bring them back along with the employment they provided.

Driving south into what is lovingly referred to as “L.A.,” or Lower Arkansas, we passed a site where, in a small shack in 1918, a frail woman was struggling for her life after giving birth, somewhat prematurely, to her eighth child, a girl. The woman was so near death that the doctor laid the infant aside to die, and concentrated on saving the woman with, among another tools, Vick’s Salve, the WD-40 of the medical world at that time. It worked, lucky for us.

The woman was our grandmother and the infant was our mother. This, and much of our family history, was provided by her oldest sister, Hallie Harris Harden, the matriarch of our clan, and a character of great enjoyment until her death at near 100 years of age. I thought of her as we passed a small country church, for I remembered the time I was driving her around and she pointed at it and announced, “There’s where Jesus saved me from going to hell, and your Uncle Carl saved me from being an old maid.” I’m not sure about the timing of the first event but the second occurred when she was 15 years old.

Three years after my mother survived childbirth, her father died. My grandmother was left alone in a harsh rural environment with no means of support, and three young children in hand. Mother never talked much about those awful days except to relate the story of when the local church members acquired new curtains for its windows. My grandmother begged the castoffs from them and made underpants for the girls. My mother never forgot the day she fell on the playground and that embarrassing secret was revealed to a group of cruel schoolchildren. The horrible mask of poverty forms many faces.

Life goes on. Not long after, an older brother married the daughter of a widower whose wife had given birth to 13 children, and then died. The couple carried messages back and forth, and my grandmother ended up marrying the widower and caring for his children that were still at home. The son of one of those children is now Mayor of Mansfield, Arkansas and I see him from time to time. He never fails to say, almost with tears in his eyes, that my grandmother was the only grandmother he ever knew.

We visited the gravesites where our grandparents are buried, near their fathers—one a veteran of the Confederacy and the other of the Union. The unit of the latter saved my hometown, Pine Bluff, from a Rebel assault and the city erected a small monument to it. The obituary of the former stated that he was a “good man who never took part in any of the neighborhood brawls.” Don’t ask.

It was a good day. One final surprise caused me to chuckle. Now first understand, my sister started out in her professional life punching data cards for the state’s electrical utility in the basement of a building in Pine Bluff. She ended it in an office near the top of a high-rise office building in Little Rock running a major department for that same company. She is a serious person, and highly respected as a professional by her former colleagues. She is considered a good person by all, and I doubt she would ever take part in a neighborhood brawl, if they have those where she lives. Did I mention that she is a serious person? We lovingly call her “The General.”

Imagine my amusement when, as we passed over a railroad track near our old neighborhood, she began telling me how she and her girlfriends used to put bags on sticks, walk down those tracks, and pretend they were hoboes. What an image. Times reserved for memories are full of surprises like that.

Overall, the day ended on a happy note to be filed in the “Ps” under “pleasant.”

But … my sister a hobo? That still cracks me up. It really does.

Traveling Companions

Sailing To Oblivion: July 11, 2017

It’s gotten me out of many a jam: “You knew I was sorry when you married me.”

What can she say? It’s true. It’s disarming. She’s nothing left to do but follow the advice of the Galilean to, as I’ve quoted before, “agree with thine adversary quickly.”

It works when you lie.

It works when you deceive.

It works when you are cruel to the less fortunate. Probably, it would even work on more cosmic transgressions.

I’ll bet it would work if one got caught doing damage the foundations of society as we know it.

I’ll bet it would work if one did harm to the least of those of those among us.

I’ll bet it would work if one colluded with a sworn enemy to damage our country.

I'll bet it would work if one bore false witness against one's political opponent.

I’ll bet it would work if one enriched one’s self or one’s family at the expense of our citizens.

I’ll bet it would work if one promised relief to the poor and enriched one’s friends instead.

I’ll bet it would work if one set out to destroy our planet in order to increase corporate profits.

Maybe not. There may be a difference between “You knew I was sorry when you married me,” and “You knew I was sorry when you elected me.”

On the other hand, it just might work, as John Agar used to say when he finally figured out how to destroy the monster spider or whatever. After all, when the damage is spread out over multitudes, we tend to become inured to the dangers that lurk beneath it. Some even vow to love the monster more. As Charlie Chaplin said through the character of Monsieur Verdoux, “Numbers sanctify.”

Just some random thoughts on July 11, 2017.

Just thinking …

Sailing To Oblivium: July 10, 2017

Someone once told me that the ultimate manifestation of true genius in any endeavor is making it look easy. Just watch a Chet Atkins video.

Don’t like music? Try an old film of Brooks Robinson playing third base.

The gift—gift being defined as mind-numbing hours of work or practice applied to natural ability—isn’t always transferable. Take Michael Jordan, for example. His movements in the game of basketball were sublime. When he tried baseball, though, someone described him as “having the grace of a baby deer learning to walk.”

Sadly, that gift of the ultimate can also prove ephemeral. Read what Ernest Hemingway said of F. Scott Fitzgerald:

“His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and be did not know when It was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly anymore because the love of flight was gone and he could, only remember when it had been effortless.”  - From A Moveable Feast

The gift, if we may call it that, can be used for good or bad. There once was Martin Luther King, Jr. Now we have the promoters of the so-called "prosperity gospel" preaching from the same book.

From a more nihilistic standpoint, consider Joe McCarthy, or one of his modern-day counterparts. Using the art to destroy others or an entire country is a frightening proposition. Some politicians, though, have carried it to dizzying heights.

We see it daily in the news. They lie. They deceive. They divide. They brag. They belittle. They insult. They tear down what is good and replace it with what is bad. They leave us frightened and confused with their sheer talent and audacity.

And they make it look so easy.

Write America's finest novel?
No problem. No problem at all.

Sailing To Oblivium: July 9, 2017

 Back in my day, many, if not most, kids like me regarded Sunday mornings as consisting of two hours of torture designed to make you appreciate the rest of the week. It could only get better from there.

Of course, we were giving up things on Sunday morning, things like playing sports, picking guitars, building hideouts, stealing and smoking our father’s cigarettes, telling naughty jokes, tormenting other kids, exploring old barns, pilfering, fishing, climbing trees, and learning about “it,” while hoping someday we might understand why grownups considered “it” so appealing.

In short, our dream activities consisted of a duality: the refreshing aspects of activity and discovery nestled into the warm, soft, welcoming bosom of sin. Church offered none of these, with one exception: the music.

Wow! You find an old-timey bouncing pianist who had perfected the “Baptist-Drag” on an old upright piano, coax her into “At the cross, at the cross where I first saw the light,” and you could get the attention of a bunch of boys right away. We joined right in those joyous times.

The adults appreciated our participation, even though many enlightened ones, such as my sainted mother, knew that when we boys got to the hideout that afternoon, and had lighted up, it would be “At the bar, at the bar where I smoked my first cigar ….”

Hell yes, she knew. She taught it to me.

Our unconscionable lyric-swapping aside, those old hymns, bellowed out in a little white Baptist church, with no air-conditioning, really did the job. It was the only religious ecstasy most of our gang ever experienced.

Fast forward to modern times and what one wag referred to as this “Jesus is my boyfriend” music. Couple that with the fact that modern teenagers sacrifice nothing by attending church on Sunday morn. They wear the same clothes and do the same thing there they would be doing if set free. (Hint: It involves cell phones). Add some rock-and-roll music and a feel-good motivational talk, and you have the modern cult church. It ain’t no big thing to sit through that.

There will be no long, hour-an-a-half sermons about how if a bird flew over Mount Everest once every million years and eventually the shadow of that bird’s wings on the mountain wore it away to nothing, the time involved for all that would be a “drop in the bucket” compared to the eternity in which our little bodies would be burning if we didn't straighten up right away.

Oh hell. Let’s sing that one called “Gladly, The Cross-eyed Bear,” and erase that awful image.

I still wonder how such joyous, beautiful music could grow from such a doctrinal garden. I also wonder about the ability of modern church music to elevate the soul. Comparing the old hymns to the new music is like, as one radio pundit on PBS, said, “comparing a Shakespearian sonnet to a Hallmark greeting card.”

As for me and religion, I don’t care what Pat Robertson, or Franklin Graham, says, I just can’t see Donald Trump singing “I’ll fly away.”

Off-key? Who cares?