EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

BELIEFS

My parents had their own view towards religion. They claimed it and defended it when pressed, but in popular parlance, “took it with a grain of salt.”

One, Sainted Mother, grew up in a strict Baptist environment. Father attended a rural Methodist church but back in those days there wasn’t a lot of difference.

As I say, they supported religion but didn’t let it dominate their existence. They dragged us to church each Sunday morning and, on rare occasion, Sunday night. They didn't go in revivals and other extracurricular activities. They ran our little grocery store six days a week.

They were honest and caring to those in need, but this evolved more from the cultural surroundings than from the religious banter of a Sunday morning. In fact, of the few types of people on earth my mother despised, one of the most prominent was what she called “religious fanatics.”

These days, that would apply to most evangelicals and they would not be offended, if fact would be pleased, with what they felt was an honorific.

Religious fanatic.

That included about anyone who brought up the subject in ordinary conversation without being prompted.

That included those who would “stick their nose into someone else’s business.”

That included those who denied their children the fun of—because the Devil lurked there—going to a swimming pool or movie theater.

That included people who funded a church while their children went hungry.

Were my parents perfect? No, far from it. They would never have countenanced an African American as president and would probably have gone to voting for the dark side of America.

The lure of bigotry was a failure, one that was supported by their religion.

They weren’t averse to corporal and abusive punishment.

The appeal of physical abuse was a failure, one that was supported by their religion.

On the other hand, they never failed to provide help and comfort to the least of those among us.

The appeal of kindness was a blessing, not one universally supported by their religion.

EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 ALMIGHTY WILL

One reads many strange things these days about how people view the will of their particular god.

Some condone sending a 12-year-old girl into full-term pregnancy, perhaps to die giving birth to a rapist’s child, because their god views all babies as precious. More precious than the mother? It would seem so.

Some say that the murder of children, as in the annihilation of all of Jericho’s inhabitants, was intended as a blessing to the children as they would see paradise, guaranteed.

Adults avowed the same for the children marched in lines to clear minefields in the Iran-Iraq wars. They even threw in some virgins to await the boy-children in Paradise.

The Spaniards, it is said, guaranteed the salvation of babies of native South American peoples by bashing the babies' heads against walls.

The death and suffering of children seems to be a favorite method of showing kindness.

Now we also read that a god directed a bullet, fired by a madman, away from a favored leader and into, instead, an innocent bystander. Anything, it is avowed, is permitted for a good photo-op.

Tsunamis and tornadoes, likewise, spare the chosen.

All in all, it seems that a member of the Almighty Club is granted the most extreme methodology in the execution of any chosen chore.

Followers are not at any liberty to question this process. In the words of a character from a popular TV series, “His ways ain’t our ways.”

All alone in a dark place, though, we might wish that some almighty might be more like Mr. Rogers and less like Charles Manson. After all, an end achieved by a blessing would be as worthy as an end achieved by a bullet.

Gratitude

I had this red bicycle once, and I hated it. Yeah, it’s hard to believe I know.

It happened this way.

I was maybe six or seven, and Christmas was due in a few months. I desperately wanted a bike, come that wonderful day. My dad was a poor grocer. Well, he wasn’t exactly poor, like the families of my friends were poor, but he wasn’t wealthy, like the families of my classmates were wealthy. Besides, he had two other kids, and spending all his Christmas money on one of them didn’t seem fair. Besides, I was far from the favorite child.

In a quandary I suppose, he and my Sainted Mother came up with an idea. I guess it was mutual. I wasn’t in on the conversation.

But here was the deal. There was a cotton gin over near Grider Field, our local airport in Pine Bluff. I guess my dad knew the owner since he and SM had sharecropped a spot a few miles from the airport before they walked into an opportunity to buy the store.

Anyway, Daddy worked out a deal with the owner of the gin. I think maybe his name, the owner, was Chambliss. Maybe not. It was cotton-picking time, so the gin was operating full time. Daddy would leave the store after the last truckload of pickers had passed, then go to the gin. He’d put in a few hours and come home for a little sleep before the trucks hauling the pickers to the field came by early in the morning.

That’s how he made enough money to buy me that little red bicycle.

Can you imagine, Dear Reader, the joy with which I met that objet de désir on Christmas morning? It sparkled and cried, “Ride me. Ride me.” I just looked on it and wept.

Of course, I had no idea how to ride it. Daddy fixed that later in the day by holding me until I started and fell maybe 30 times before I decided that riding beat falling and sped out of sight. It was a love affair of cosmic proportions.

Then it all went to hell.

I guess the reader knows by now that my father was a good, good man, one of the best I ever knew. History never quite canonized him like it did Sainted Mother, but he was a fine American, an honest man, and a good provider.

He had this annoying habit, though, one he picked up from a stern old German, who picked it up from a stern old German, who picked it up from … you get the picture.

In the South we call it “throwing it up to you.” I don’t remember when I first heard it. I imagine I was with the Hester twins, Robert and Bobby Joe, and I must have laid the little red bicycle too irreverently against the porch of the store. That’s the first time I heard it.

“Be careful with that damned bicycle. I worked nights at the cotton gin to buy that for you.”

The luster wore off our love affair more each time I heard reference to working at the cotton gin nights to buy me the bicycle. At first, I just hated the cotton gin. Then the hate began to spread like a covering fog over the little red bicycle. I’m afraid that it eventually spread to bicycles in general. I still don’t care for them.

The sad thing was that Sainted Mother even, once or twice, threw it up for transgressions unrelated to the bicycle. “Now think about how hard your daddy worked at night over to the cotton gin to buy you a nice Christmas present.” It didn’t cost her Sainthood, but it did place a couple of notations on her heavenly “Hard Card.”

I tried to learn, but things learned from a stern old German prove hard to overcome. Still, I do cringe whenever I hear myself say something so odious as, “Think about all the nights I’ve come home off the road near midnight from being out making us a living?”

Fortunately, the object of my “stern old Germanisms” pays no more attention to what I say than a cat being scolded for resting on a kitchen table.

If you'll tell me what he said,
 I'll try to remember how I reacted.
It's doubtful, though.

Fact, fiction, of both ... you decide.

My Casper the Friendly Ghost Summer

By Jimmie von Tungeln

            What a summer. One hesitates to speak of it with any degree of levity whatsoever as it began with a family tragedy of deep proportions. A cousin, one of those people who traveled through life beloved by all who know him, a smiling sort who never raised a voice or started an argument, died in a freak automobile accident. He was hitchhiking from Pine Bluff, Arkansas to his home near Rison and caught a ride in a delivery truck, one those with open doors on either side. The truck veered of the pavement, hit a bridge embankment, and threw the lad into the air. He landed badly and died instantly. He was still in his teens, and his name was nearly the same as mine save for the middle names. Even they rhymed. 

            After the mourning, the funeral, the remembrances, and other traumas that death introduces into the mind and imagination of a 12-year old, the affair would have drifted into family folklore for me except for one fact, a fact that followed me like a lost puppy. Our names were so similar.

           Aside from that, I lived away from town and had little contact with those in the city during the summer. Our name was an odd one but well-known one around both city and countryside.

            Now I didn’t connect these facts when the brief account of the tragedy appeared in The Pine Bluff Commercial. A sense of it came to me a week later at my father’s grocery store south of city. It was before daylight and the whole family had turned out to accommodate the first truckload of cotton choppers for the summer. There was a thick fog that morning that wrapped the store in an eerie glow and gave it a gloomy aura as if it had been set down gently in place by the fairy people. At least that was what I was thinking as I returned from carrying out a load of trash.

Just as I reached the building, the truck pulled up. It was what we call in the south a “bob truck” that had been fitted with benches and a canvas top. It would scour the countryside of a morning and collect anyone wishing to chop cotton for a day and then deliver them home in the evening. It would stop at our store early so the hands could purchase something to eat for dinner (some of ya’ll call it lunch) and again on the way home so they could purchase something for supper that night and breakfast the next morning. It served those who led a hard life with few breaks.

But back to my story. It would happen that, as I reached the store, the first one to disembark from that vessel of despair was a man who lived a few miles down the road and was known locally as “Happy Bill.” He was considered “incompetent,” as my father would say but maintained a fair reputation as a cotton chopper and a better one as a picker. His name derived from his demeanor and, as far as I know, neither an evil nor covetous thought ever issued from his joyous soul. We rarely saw him other than during his brief work ventures. This morning he hopped from the truck with his customary good nature and stood peering through the fog looking for the front door of the store.

Instead, he saw me.

I won’t attempt to describe in full the events of the next few minutes. I will only mention that Bill sprang fully erect back into the truck without even bending his knees. He uttered a cry that I am quite sure had never been heard on his continent, followed by a stream of gibberish totally unintelligible to me but, apparently understood by his fellow travelers as eyes, white with fear, began to appear from within the truck’s enclosure. It took my father and the driver of the truck nearly 30 minutes to straighten out the misunderstanding, to the displeasure of several waiting cotton growers.

Happy Bill never came to our store again after that.

The second related experience occurred the next Saturday. I was enjoying the weekly matinee at the old Saenger Theater and had made my way to the concession stand. As I approached, I recognized a girl from school, paying the cashier for a box of popcorn and a soda. She was an extremely cute one, and I was arranging my best smile as a weapon of disarmament when she turned around and saw me. I saw her soft blue eyes, but what I heard was the sound of a cup of “Cocola” hitting the floor followed by the plop of the popcorn box. I looked and saw liquid spreading from the cup and popcorn kernels bouncing against my shoes. When I looked up, her blue eyes had turned a color more like that of a wet army blanket.

“You!” She said.

As a result of this mortifying experience, I finally understood the opportunities afforded by this confusion. In short, I began, and I am ashamed to admit this these many years thereafter, to have a little fun with it. I would purposefully sneak in behind classmates spied at baseball games or at parks, and be waiting plaintively until they turned. A little talcum powder was found to heighten the impact, as were a couple of smears of my sister’s eye-shadow.

I particularly enjoyed the time I caught, Benny “Belcher” Bohanon waiting outside the Boys Club early one foggy morning. I approached him from an alley and when he turned, I asked in a vapory voice, “Do you remember the time you greased my eyeglasses with your filthy fingers during math class?”

It went well until the day we had to register for school. I don’t remember whether I planned it that way or not, but Miss Womble was alone in the room studying a list as I walked up to place my name among those thirsting for another year of knowledge. Not wishing to afford a student the dignity of immediate attention, she continued for read for another full minute. Then she looked up.

The color drained from her face like gasoline falling from the bulb of one of those old overhead dispensers. I’ll swear the temperature in the room dropped a degree or two. She opened her mouth to speak, but her dentures failed to respond to the crisis and merely stayed in place, obviously not wishing to participate in this horror.

I gave her my most winsome smile.

“I thought you were …,” she said. “I thought you had been ….”  Finally, “I thought you were dead.”

I knew better, but something came over me—one of those wild, youthful impulses that tramples one’s better judgment like a raging bull on the streets of Pamplona. “I am, I said,” then I paused for effect. “I only came back to haunt you.”

Up until that point, it was my worst mistake of my life. After the parent calling, the threats, the exhortation, the promise of a front row seat in Hell, and the writing 100 times of “I will not dishonor the dead, I will respect my teachers, and I will not try to be cute,” I was exonerated. At least I graduated from my seat among the penitentiary-bound, to a more elevated one among those with simply no apparent redeeming qualities.

I feel quite sure the experience prevented me from ever going to medical school.

At any rate, I have assiduously attempted to honor the deceased to my utmost ability since that sad episode. I have also treated my teachers as gods and goddesses. Sad to say, thought, I do fall prey to trying to act cute from time to time.

Even at my age.

Boo!

Sunday Break

Another short story, this one as close to reality as an aged mind could manage.

A Bag of Marshmallows

By Jimmie von Tungeln

            This is hardly a southern morality tale. It has no nubile farmer’s daughter. It has no beloved dog. It has no eccentric relative. It doesn’t mention a snake. Even once. But it circles around the seven deadly sins, all of them: envy, gluttony, pride, lust, greed, sloth, and even anger, like atoms around an electron. Or in this case, a marshmallow.

            Yes. I once loved marshmallow like the Savior loves a sinner. Because of them, I

-        Silently cursed those kids who could afford a ten-cent bag while I was stuck with nickel one,

-        Ate more than my share at any opportunity,

-        Boasted that I could eat more of them than any kid at Lakeside Elementary,

-        Dreamed of immersing myself in a soft, yielding, embracing pile of them,

-        Stole one or more of them at ever opportunity, and

-        Once pushed my little brother to the ground because he wouldn’t give me one of his after I had devoured all of mine.

This gave rise to my great plot and subsequent adventure. I was eight years old, a fact that placed me at school all day without the attendant good sense to control my impulses. These were more innocent and peaceful times, so when a kid reached the third grade and was sentenced to schooling for an entire day, the taking of lunch presented a veritable plethora of choices.

            One could bring lunch in a brown paper bag and enjoy it with others in a designated lunchroom, a choice generally reserved for the poor and the untrustworthy. One could take a quarter and walk four blocks north to the Pine Bluff High School campus and dine there at the cafeteria. One could walk the same distance due west on 15^th Street until one reached a diner called “The Little Chef” and have a hamburger or chili dog with drink for the same amount. One could walk one block farther and dine at a corner drug store lunch bar, expensive but classy.

            The rich kids, most of whom lived within walking distance, dined at home. They included some of the prettiest girls in town.

            Being an adventurous sort, and when I wasn’t on probation and sentenced to the lunchroom with a bologna sandwich, I opted for the western sites. I think it was because I silently dreamed that someday, when I had been particularly mistreated, I would just continue walking until I reached California where I would become a rich movie star. More likely it was because if I skipped a drink with a meal, I could purchase a five-cent bag of marshmallows at the drug store.

            Neither drugs for the dope fiend or solitude for the poet had a greater pull on one than the thought of a bag of marshmallows for desert.

            Therein sprang the plot.

            You see, they didn’t just sell nickel bags at the drug store. They sold ten-cent bags and these were tempting. But the piece de resistance, the Treasure of South Cherry Street, the Holy of Holies, was a 25-cent bag of marshmallows the size of a small pillow. They hung from clips on tall display stand like talisman on a totem pole. By the time I began concocting my plan, the image of those bags had invaded my mind until I thought of little else but the day I would buy one and devour its entire contents.

            But how? I only received a quarter a day for lunch, tightly tied with a knot in a lady’s handkerchief and placed in my left pocket each morning by my mother, one who knew too well that to advance a boy of my age funds for more than a day’s food was to telegraph an open invitation to Satan to make room for another soul.

            No, I would have to operate within the perimeters set for me. I had to skip the normal meal. It was that simple. Besides, a meal of marshmallows had to be at least as healthy, probably more so, than a chili dog. Tastier too. Yeah, that was it: a good plan made more sound by the reasoning.

            So one late autumn day found me walking west along 15^th Street with a jaunty air as if the world existed solely for my pleasure. My left hand clutched a quarter. (I always untied it while I was walking to lunch to avoid teasing.) As I passed the diner, I could feel the eyes upon me for I hardly ever opted for the drug store. I whistled and concentrated on a repair shop across the street. I turned casually south on Cherry and slid into the drug store sideways. Phase One was successful.

Once inside, I relaxed. Assuming a practiced nonchalance, I eased to the candy area and took what seemed like an hour, but could only have been a few seconds, to peruse the candy offerings as if I had the prerogatives of a Rockefeller.

Quite without warning, synapses tuned by billions of years of evolution registered a danger warning. An adult appeared, staring down upon me as if I were the least of creatures crawling upon the earth. “May I help you?” it said.

“Just want some marshmallows,” I said. “I have money.” I retrieved the largest prize on the totem pole. I stood without moving, feeling its weight against my chest, and waiting for the apparition to disappear.

“Having a party at school?” it said.

Now I was in a jam. Lying, my mother had warned me more than once, was a terrible sin, one of the worst. She petrified me telling about its deadly consequences and those of similar vile habits. A liar who allowed the allurements of sin to rule his actions was destined for a cruel fate, even blindness, or a partial state thereof. I pondered. I felt sweat forming on my brow. The potential consequences of my actions swirled about me like debris around a funnel cloud. My heart began to pump furiously at the thought of continuing this sinful escapade: regrets, nightmares, pimples, full or partial blindness…

The spectacles upon the bridge of my nose bear mute testimony to my next act.

“Yessir,” I said. “I’m supposed to bring the marshmallows.”

Surprised that I could still see, I stood patiently while it patted my head and moved to help another customer. I paid my quarter like a gambler paying his debt, executed an “about face” and left the drug store, Phase Two completed.

            I felt that a young dandy walking down Cherry Street snacking on a knee-high bag of marshmallows must have been a remarkable sight, even in a city as large as Pine Bluff. I assumed a swagger as I slowly tasted the first fat victim from the bag. I allowed the flavor to roam my mouth like a frightened pony circling a corral. The process took an entire block.

            On the next block, I crammed pair after pair into my mouth at once, just for the fun of it. As I chewed, I turned back to the east, deciding to flaunt my wealth by returning through one of the richest neighborhoods in town.

            Four more victims, now I was the Cyclops tasting the crew of Ulysses. I let out a soft roar and devoured another pair. I continued east, passing the homes of any number of pretty girls who must have been watching from their lunch with amazement. When I finished the crew, I slowly devoured the captain, grinning all the while.

            Then I released my inner gymnast and began pitching the soft white balls into the air and catching them in my mouth. Another block passed in this manner. I missed the fifth and it rolled into the gutter by the sidewalk. I didn’t bother to pick it up, for I had plenty. Besides, I was beginning to feel a little odd.

            Lest what follows strike the reader only as burlesque, allow me to produce empirical statistics that should be recorded in some vast reservoir of knowledge somewhere on the planet to serve as an object lesson to the logic-challenged.

            Statistic One: The difference between wanting another marshmallow and beginning to think you have had all you want is approximately four marshmallows.

            Statistic Two: The difference between thinking you have had all the marshmallows you want and not really wishing to eat anymore is approximately three marshmallows.

            Statistic Three: The difference between not really wishing to eat any more marshmallows and vomiting a white stream of projectile foam into a fence in an alley behind a house is two marshmallows.

            Statistic Four: The length of time an eight-year old boy must sit with his head in his hand lurching with drive heaves from eating too many marshmallows is somewhere between ten and 15 minutes.

            No cars came through the alley as I suffered alone. The only thing that passed in front of me was my life, and my regrets. I hadn’t apologized to my sister for reading her diary. I hadn’t looked after my little brother properly. (There was this matter of the “dirt sandwich.”) I hadn’t asked Nell Phillips to be my girlfriend. Hell, I hadn’t even made out a will.

            When I had quit retching, I folded top of the bag of marshmallows—it still appeared, somehow, to be full—and slowly gained my feet. I used alleys to escape the prying eyes of the fancy homes and found my way at last back to 15^th street where I placed the remainder of the bag of marshmallows in the hollow of a tree, although I knew I wouldn’t return for them. Back at school, I avoided classmates as I eased into the classroom and began the worst afternoon of my life.

            This was more than 65 years ago and I have never willingly eaten a marshmallow since. In fact, I become nauseated to this day at the very thought of one. While contemplating this account of the incident, I happened to be in my hometown and with my business in the city completed, I drove the route from the old elementary school, now closed and boarded after yielding to one of those mega-campuses wherein they incarcerate students for eight hours a day to prevent episodes such as mine. I also passed the corner where the drug store stood.

            The neighborhood is no longer affluent. Nell Phillip’s home has disappeared, all that remains is a slab that looks too small for a real house. Cheap “For Rent” signs struck the cadence as I drove along. Parked cars had destroyed all the lawns. I slowed when I came to the corner where stood the tree in which I had stored the remnants of my unholy adventure. All that remained was a withered stump, the remainder having fallen, as have so many of our dreams, to age and reality.

My Redacted Life: Chapter One (Cont. 6)

 It had only been two days since I left the Navy, and now I was home, almost, that is. I left the urban area of my hometown and descended into the Bayou Bartholomew wetlands, crossing the bayou itself. In 1958, four feet of water had covered the road ahead, the entire area suffering a major flood.

Today, a large Walmart and attendant development sits in the floodplain, awaiting its turn.

That day, I could see home. It was a large country grocery store, on high ground at a slight curve in the highway. Our house was attached to it. You simply walked through a door at the back of the store into our kitchen.

I drove past the homes of childhood friends, O.D. Walker and Jim Fletcher. I saw what we had one thought was a mountain cliff designed for play and exploration. Now it looked to be just a slight erosion remnant, left by the bayou over thousands of years. Youth magnifies, and life, unfortunately for us all, diminishes.

Slowing, I pulled in beside the store. Cars came and went there all day long, so there wasn’t any reason why anyone would suspect an unusual visitor. But in that strange way that mothers know things, the door to the store opened and she walked out.

Mable Josephine Harris von Tungeln was slight woman, maybe five-foot three. She had been laid aside to die, premature and unfit, after she was born while the doctor treated her mother with, Vick’s Salve of course. He had a bit left over and saved Mabel as well, this from our family historian. Her father had died when she was three, and the only thing she remembered about him was the scene of her oldest brother’s climbing a post and ringing a bell that signified meals or an emergency.

Her mother had raised the two sisters still at home in the most abject poverty one can imagine. A playmate had pushed young Mabel down in the schoolyard when she was in grade school and her classmates had discovered that her “drawers” had been sewn by a hapless mother out of castoff curtains from a local church. She never could forget that, and I’ll always remember how she would break down whenever she heard Dolly Parton sing “My Coat of ManyColors.”

Somehow, she had survived to adulthood. There, if you looked at her you would see frail figure in a simple cotton dress and horn-rimmed glasses, seeming to be weak and helpless in the face of a cruel and challenging world.

Cross her, and you would excite hot bands of steel and find a tigress who didn’t fear a person in the world, even my father. She hated nobody that I remember, but had no use for drunkards (anyone who might or had taken one drink in their lives), fast-talking salesmen, and “religious fanatics.” She liked Elvis and would sneak fifty-cents from the cash register each time a new single came out. She knew professional wrestling was fake, but thought I Love Lucy was real.

We had had two talks in our life about intimacy between people. The first was after a neighborhood 18-year-old had been discovered having an affair with a 52-year-old woman. He had then feigned a suicide attempt to garner sympathy. Mother’s explanation: “I’ve always heard that an old woman can just drive a young man crazy.”

The second was when I had tried to explain how I was in love, I imagined, with someone long forgotten. “Let me tell you something,” she had explained “When I married your daddy, I wasn’t in love, as you say, with him at all. I married him because I knew the von Tungeln men worked, and if I married him, I never would have to go hungry again. Then, after we had sharecropped, butchered hogs to get money to buy this store, and then ran it together, I woke up one morning and realized I worshiped the ground he walked on, and still do. That is what love means for poor people.”

And that’s the woman who now stood on the porch of our family store with her hands on her hips, looking at me.

Don't let that innocent
smile fool you.

Growing Up Southern: March 13, 2018

On June 1, 1947, a tornado tore through our community south of Pine Bluff, Arkansas. It resulted in the death of 34 people, including 21 children.

Our family had gone to Hot Springs that day and missed the actual event. Returning, we found that the home just north of ours was gone—not demolished, but gone—as was the home to the south of us. The storm destroyed 50 homes and damaged 500 others. A prominent farmer, his wife, and two children died when the funnel lifted their home and turned it upside down in Bayou Imbeau a couple of miles from us.

We would find that six teenagers died when the storm demolished a house less than a city block from ours. The news reports graciously called it “a rural youth center.” Actually, it was a vacant home where teenagers gathered of a Sunday afternoon for a friendly craps game.

Our home, attached to our country grocery, suffered only from a large oak tree blown over on the western end of the structure. That night, National Guard troops stood guard in our neighborhood to prevent looting. I’ve told before how my father gave away the contents of our grocery to the victims, ultimately going bankrupt as a result of his goodness.

Today though, I’m thinking of another subject: embedded terror. Although our family didn’t witness the storm, nor was our home destroyed, terror invaded the area like a dreadful germ left by a malicious wanderer. My best childhood friend would tremble and cry whenever a thunderstorm threatened, as would our family dog, Bob. Both had seen the storm and bore witness to its power. The fear of storms proved contagious to us all.

We feared the reoccurrence of another storm like the children of Europe must have feared another war. It was a silent, insidious terror that never left, lurking below the surface of our awareness. So it was, sometime later, when a warning was issued for a storm headed directly at our grade school.

I was in the third grade, in Miss Roundtree’s class. She was hardly past 21 years of age and the heart-throb of every boy in school. We would have faced a tribe of wild Apaches for her, even charged into a Nazi machine gun nest, had she but given the fateful order.

A tornado though? That was something different. Few students remained at the school at that moment. Only the children, of whom I was one, who waited each afternoon, under the guidance of a teacher, for the arrival of the school bus that transported “the country kids” home.

We had been shuffled into the northeast portion of the school building, our elders assuming that any storm would arrive from the southwest, from Texas. We knew how to “duck and cover” in preparation for physical emergences, and were quite ready and willing to do so.

Then Miss Roundtree announced a new plan. There was no use going to the trouble of diving under our desks unless the storm was actually upon us. We needed a lookout. A dozen sets of eyes bore into the floor, hoping to burn a hole wide enough to allow an escape from the honor.

It seemed, of a sudden, that everyone, save me, disappeared. “You,” our dream-goddess said, pointing a finger at a spot between my eyes, “Come with me.”

Off we went to the most southwestern classroom in the building. I lacked the height to see through the window, so Miss Roundtree pulled up a chair on which I could stand to watch for the terror, should it appear. My instructions were simple. “When you see a funnel cloud coming, jump down, run fast, and warn us.

Then she left. Before her footsteps faded, I heard it thunder.

I felt an electric charge on the back of my tongue, a sensation with which I would become familiar as I passed through life. Awaiting the unmanageable terror, I think I may have experienced, to some small degree, the fear that must accompany any child heading off today to what should be the most joyous and exciting period of their lives, the carefree wonder of school days. I wonder how many instead, should they hear a sharp and unknown sound, will feel that surge of electricity at the back of their tongues.

Unless you have felt it, in the singular and unwarranted way a seven-year old might feel it, you have no idea what an evil organization the National Rifle Association has become.

Terror requires eternal vigilance. 

Sunrise With Schubert: February 11, 2018

Sometimes, if I try hard, I can remember when I used to hate Mondays. I was lucky in my professional life for having interesting jobs. Some jobs I held before then didn’t particularly differentiate one day of the week from another. I never, as an adult, experienced the dread that some folks have of starting back to work after the weekend.

I hated Mondays when I was in grade school. I do remember that. Weekends were a glorious time then. We only had our little “postage-stamp” corner of the world to play in, but to us it was a vast place of unexplored wilderness, infinite opportunities, and constant joy.

We never, absent rain, storms, or catastrophes, considered spending the weekend indoors. There were hideouts to build, squirrels to hunt, chances to show we were good at sports, and all sorts of mischievous pranks to plan on an unsuspecting adult world.

I don’t know how we would have behaved had we owned operative cell phones. More than likely, we would have turned our attention away from the wondrous world of adventure and toward the tiny screen offering the opportunity for instant and effortless communication. I don’t know.

We had much more freedom to wander around in our seemingly vast world. Kids these days are brought into a seemingly hostile and dangerous world. I have read that it really isn’t more dangerous than in past for middle-class white kids. I have read the opposite. The truth is probably somewhere in between and available if we were to spend the effort in searching for it. But, we learn more each day how the truth is not a trusted ally for many of those among us.

We, back in the day, learned truth the hard way. If you run too fast, you will fall down. If you taunt a bully, he will whip your ass. If you cut down a tree that’s too big, you won’t be able to drag it home and make a basketball goal with it. If you take your bicycle apart, you may not be able to reassemble it. If you climb too high, you may be incapacitated by fear and find it hard to get down. Some kids have more natural talent at specific endeavors than you. Some have your abilities for that same endeavor, but work harder at it. If you compete with either, you will lose. You won’t get a trophy. You will, however, never discover either your own limitations or talents unless you try.

It also teaches one that working at things you aren’t particularly good at can be useful, if working at them makes you smile.

I like to think that when the indispensable understanding of cause and effect is learned from play, it stays with a person longer and is much more efficacious than when learned from a computer game or a talking head on the television. I further think that when play is unregulated and adult-free, it better teaches one to deal with the unfair, random, and unpredictable forces that shape our lives.

Just my opinions, and I’m sticking to them. Feel free to share your own. Doing so in a civilized matter leads to a more harmonious society, don’t you think?

Yay. Yay. Another day!

Growing Up Southern: February 4, 2018

We had a small stock pond on our place when I was growing up. It wasn’t as big as a city block. They dug it to get fill dirt for a Jr. high school. There wasn’t much to it—the pond that is—but square foot for square foot, it furnished about as much enjoyment as any site you could find anywhere.

There were fish in it. Fish galore: bream, sunfish, catfish, and, later, bass. We never fished it out, but oh lord did we try. There were snakes and turtles, as well. We only swam in it once, and that was when no one was watching, My mother told the story about how, when I could barely walk, I had seen some people swimming in a pool, and, I reckon I was impressed because, alerted by our family dog “Bob,” she caught me next morning “just a high-steppin’ toward the pond.”

My Sainted grandmother would laugh and talk about how she had taken me there a little later and showed me how to bait a hook and toss it out. She created a monster, I guess, for she said all I wanted to do thereafter was to go and “pish” some more. I don’t know if kids have that much fun with their grandmothers these days.

There are so many lessons one can learn from a small, postage-stamp, place like that. For one, the cork from a bottle of Garrett Snuff makes an ideal “bobber.” Bouncing it up and down is supposed to attract fish. And something that Della Nathaniel taught me, you must spit on your bait if you want to catch the really good ones. Of course, she dipped snuff, so her spit was much more potent and effective than mine.

She sought, once, to even the playing field by offering me a dip. I tied, but decided I’d rather not catch fish than live through that ordeal again. Bless her heart, she moved to Oakland California later and found equality of sorts, I’m sure. I’ll bet she missed that old pond, though, from time to time.

Sometimes, when I was older, and the Hester boys lived close by the pond, we’d start out on Friday after school and fish until Saturday afternoon. Then the mothers who lived nearby would come over with the “fixin’s” and fry our catch for the whole neighborhood.

I still recall the day my dad and I went out one Sunday morning and cut a nice gum tree that we dragged into the pond for a fish refuge. I think the hooks I lost therein outnumbered the fish I caught from it, but since Sunday was his only day off, it most wonderful that we spent the time doing it.

Today, the average teenager has a cell phone that probably cost more than my father paid for that little spot where the pond was. I’ll match memories with any of them, though.

Ever notice how things
get less fun as they
get more elaborate?

Growing Up Southern: August 24, 2017

 It seems to me that a grown man, say one reaching voting age, is a miracle. I know I escaped “death by stupidity” many times. For my more adventurous friends, it was even worse.

Maybe it isn’t such a bad thing that kids sit around these days staring into a hand-held device or talking into it. At least, the boys are not drag-racing, daring one another to climb to the highest branch of the tallest oak tree around, or wading into bayous looking for snakes. And the girls are not accepting rides from a stranger who looks like the loser in a Charles Manson look-alike contest.

Oh, I know grown men aren’t immune to the “hold my beer and watch this” type of challenging the Grim Reaper. And women still marry boyfriends who have beaten them senseless in the past. Choosing poorly is the Great American Pastime. Just look around.

But for the total abandonment of any sense of mortality, you have to hand it to young boys of past generations. They’ve even been known to tie themselves to young bulls to prove their manhood.

Yes, I said, “tie themselves to young bulls.” It’s not a “tale told by an idiot.” No, if fact it was told to me by my late father-in-law. It’s a tale told about ordinary young boys afflicted with the common masculine syndrome of temporary idiocy. In other words, typical young boys of the Arkansas Delta.

Seems Julius—that was my father-in-law’s name—and some young friends grew bored, sometime maybe in the 1930s. It was during the Great Depression after all and paid entertainment was practically unheard of in the rural farmlands of our state. The Internet says that less than one percent of children could afford cell phones back then, so that must be true. Boredom ruled.

I suppose it was after crops were “laid by” or the miscreants would have been busy chopping cotton. I don’t think there was an “app” that located free farm labor back then.

What to do? The declaration, “I’m bored,” spoken by a young boy is probably second in destructive force only to “I dare you.” These boys were fairly eaten up with boredom, as they say. So, they attacked the delima with their deepest level of concentration, a depth only measurable by electron microscope. We can almost hear the collective "Hmmm." Well, most families had a few cows. This led to calves. That led to young bulls, and that led to the image of cowboys riding grown ones. Now wasn’t that something?

One must understand the workings of an adolescent male mind to comprehend what follows. For that mind, there is no concept extant that involves linear thinking. There is simply a lightening-like flash in the brain that says “do.” A better angel called “reason” is shunted aside like a Gideon Bible at a beer-bust. The mental journey from cowboys riding bulls to let’s ride a calf was shorter than a reach across a small table.

Turns out, though, that riding a young bull wasn’t that easy. Each lad tried. Each lad failed. Each lad’s mind began to ease away from the effort to a less demanding way to entertain one’s self. Of course, one lad didn’t see it that way.

You know him, he’s the kid when we were growing up who would make a stink bomb out of  a ballpoint pen and a match and set it off in Study Hall.

Yeah, he’s the very one.

“I’ll ride the son-of-a-bitch. Find me some rope.” That’s all it took. Danger is no problem for a young boy if he is not the one about to face it. Within minutes, they had the largest of the young bulls fastened in a pen, the daredevil astride him with legs tied beneath the creature’s belly.

I can’t do justice to the telling of what happened next, and my father-in-law is no longer with us to do the job. Let’s just say the episode ended with a calf pen nearly destroyed, a young daredevil covered in cuts and bruises, a defiant young bull, and a band of accomplices, having finally removed the ropes and set their friend upright, lighting out for their respective territories.

Don’t worry. History had not finished with them. They’re the generation that crossed the Rhine River into Nazi Germany in March 1945. Maybe it takes a little idiocy to create heroism.

The Great Story-Teller
Front row center

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.

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

Reconciliation: 21

“School’s out,” I thought. “Three months of cowboy hideouts, baseball, and fighting pirates along Bayou Bartholomew.” It is the longest one in the world and passed within a half-mile of our little rural world. It was a magic world of fishes, snakes, turtles, abandoned treasures, and assorted dangers—paradise for a group of boys with no responsibilities for three whole months.

Then my mother told me I had to accompany my sister to Vacation Bible School.

Aaargh!

After fruitless arguments, I loaded into the family car as my pals all filed down a little dirt road called “King’s Road” after its lone inhabitant, an elderly black man with a sour disposition and a bad dog. Once safely past that, though, we followed it to a vast forest where we had once discovered a whiskey still. They were headed for our favorite hideout with a partial bag of Bull Durham tobacco, a book of papers, and some matches that Bobby Joe Hester had filched from his mother. In short, the promise of a fine day.

They were headed to have fun in the glorious splendifery of youthful boyhood. I was headed for the worst ten years of my life: two weeks locked in an unheated church suffering the indignity of having the chance of a righteous life pounded into my head, one so hard that it has been a wonderment of efficacy for eons.

It was a cousin’s Baptist church, moreover, so no one, save the cousin, knew us. The Tyrant, our name for the one who signed us up, got my sister’s name down correctly. Though we made it abundantly clear that we were brother and sister, she insisted upon listing me as “Jimmie Valentine.”  I am positive she effected the mistake on purpose, based on the several times she called my mother to report my lack of cooperation with “the salvation thing.” Not many years ago, while sorting through a box of family memorabilia, I came across a document verifying that Jimmie Valentine had, indeed, fulfilled his complete sentence, and had been let out on parole from the nightmare known as Vacation Bible Shool. I burned it with great ceremony.

The days consisted of things like drawing pictures of places where the Dark One would find you and claim your soul, i.e. hotbeds of ruination. We were fairly limited in our experience with sin, so we stuck to the normal ones with which we were constantly indoctrinated: swimming pools, movie theaters, skating rinks, anywhere people danced, and that sure-fire center of iniquity, the Methodist Church. I didn’t include smoke-infested hideouts, a sin of omission for which, on the darkest nights, I still fear retribution.

That all wore out quickly, so we practiced our coloring of saintly figures for a couple of days. The girls loved that part, especially when they got to cut out the finished products with which to decorate the sanctuary so the adults would know that The Tyrant was keeping us righteously occupied.

The boys did not fail to notice that none of their colorings made the, no pun intended, final cut. Some things never change, do they?

Then came blessed news.

The Tyrant was bringing a friend to teach us woodworking. Oh joyous day! That night, I began a list of projects that I wished instruction upon:

- A bunker with gun port for our hideout,

- A sawhorse for my saddle, in case I ever got a horse,

- A cage for keeping captured snakes,

- A go-cart with which to fly down the hill at O.D. Walker’s house,

- A box for housing stolen contraband, and

- A boat for crossing the bayou.

Then we learned the truth. We would spend two days making crosses.

What? Why?

The Tyrant answered, “To donate to the poor people at the “nigra” churches in our city.

Didn’t, we wondered, those people suffer enough indignations without religious fervor causing the piling on of more? Some things never change, do they?

The ordeal finally ended. We endured “Boo Hoo” day during which the church pastor gave us a sermon. That’s when, each year, we learned, the girls all “got saved,” some for the fifth or sixth time, and the boys all made mental plans for resuming a productive life.

I found out, upon release, that the tobacco was gone and the smoking of it had been one of life’s most glorious moments, although Nicky Austin did tell me once that the experience had been less than great, not as awful as our experience with chewing tobacco, but not great.

Perry Don Poteet’s daddy had taken everyone to the zoo in Memphis one day. It was an epic catastrophe that would require a Homer or a Tolstoy to do justice in the telling.

Milton Shilling’s cousin, Sally Mae Durant from Hot Springs, had come for a visit and had snuck off to the hideout one day with Benjamin Shannon, the oldest of our little band. We couldn’t imagine why. Girls didn’t smoke, chew, throw baseballs, or use slingshots worth a darn in those days. They wouldn’t even ride stick horses most times, for they said it wrinkled their skirts. What possible thing could they offer a real cowboy?

Let’s just say I missed a lot and may have missed more than I knew. Some things never change, do they?

Ah, Cowboys and Indians on a summer's day

Holiday Giving

Looking back at my grade-school years, I remember that Christmas was probably a happier time for some than for others. The school I attended was what we might call today “socially bi-polar.” Kids from the wealthiest neighborhood in the city attended, as did so-called “bus-kids” who were the country kids of whom some (not all, for I was one) represented families ranging from the poor to the destitute. Of course, we mingled with no African-American kids. That’s not what they called them in those days, and besides, they had their own school, separate but equal. After all, they had excellent teaching materials, the best … forwarded to them after our schools had finished with them, having received new and updated ones.

Anyway. Christmas could be cruel in ways. In class each year, we drew names and exchanged presents. The maximum amount to be spent was fifty cents. It doesn’t sound like much now but back then one could buy a nifty little present at the five-and-dime for that amount. I seem to remember that a loaf of bread cost around fifteen cents then and a pound of baloney ten, so the four-bit max was a struggle for some families. One year, a close friend of mine’s name was drawn by the poorest girl in class. On the “exchange day,” she proudly presented to my friend a five-cent card of bobby pins, wrapped up in colored paper.

After Christmas, there was the “present report.” The richest kids reported receiving expensive toys. My group reported normal toys. The next down the social ladder reported receiving everyday clothes. Next came apples, nuts, and/or candy. The poorest just stared at their hands and prayed to whatever god would listen that they wouldn’t be called on.

The memories stuck with me and fortune gave me a wife who shared my thoughts on holiday gift-giving. Shortly after we were married, she was teaching elementary school for $4,800 a year, and chose, that year, to spend part of her salary to buy one of her students, who had been the recipient of ridicule about her ragged shoes, a new pair quietly delivered during a recess. She said the look on the girl’s face was better than any Christmas present she had ever received.

That’s why, this year, we’ll continue to give to charity instead of to ourselves.

Bless us all.
Remember,
the value is in
the thought.