Growing Up Southern: January 9, 2018

Was thinking about how much fun a teenager like me used to have on fifty cents. Four bits. Two quarters. Half a dollar. Fiddy cents. Half a Shekel. Oh marvelous coin! To some, still a symbol of America’s greatness.

It brings to mind the great day of my youth when the latest Elvis Presley single would come to the music store in our town. Sainted Mother and I would have been saving for weeks. The news would spread that He had just issued a ditty called Don’t Be Cruel, and we would head to town. For the one coin you could get a 45-rpm version, the kind with the big hole in the middle. We would be in “tall cotton” for a week or more.

You could take a girl to the best movie in town for two quarters. Of course, that didn’t include Cokes, popcorn, or Bon-Bons if she had a sweet tooth. A boy needed two more “halvers” for that.

Later, fifty cents would buy you two gallons of gas, or a whole evening of “dragging Main,” or hanging out at the “Wagon Wheel.”

For the wicked, the same amount or so would buy you three or four packages of cigarettes so you could look cool in front of the other kids. Oh, and the coins were great for flipping. (Quarters just never measured up). And you could even clasp one in your eye and pretend to be a German prince.

Some kids would spend months banging on the edges of a coin with a spoon, They said you could make a ring of one if you did it long enough. I never saw a completed one, though. Attention spans had already started to wither. These days, they give kids expensive drugs to help them concentrate. A fifty-cent piece and a spoon would work just fine, every bit as well as molasses and a feather.

They quit making them—fifty-cent pieces— somewhere along the line. Why? I don’t know. I always found them useful and it felt reassuring to carry one in your pocket. Their disappearance, as I remember it, coincided with the decision to quit making quarters out of silver. As far as I was concerned, both decisions amounted to “currency-debasement” and ushered in a whole era of instability in our lives.

Now, the only memory of this most wondrous coin resides in the name of a music rapper who calls himself “50 Cent.”

I still keep a couple around though, to remind me of those days that we use as an example of when America was great. I like the coin better than the symbol. If you think about it:

Fifty cents was less than a woman earned for filling a man’s dollar-an-hour job back then.

If you weren’t white, fifty cents only bought you a balcony seat at the movies, assuming the theater had a balcony.

Some families ate on little more than fifty cents a week.

There were kids my age who had never held a fifty-cent piece in their hand.

Oh, but if you found a buddy who also had a fifty-cent piece, you could buy (or get someone to buy for you) a six-pack of beer.

Hey, let’s do make America great again.

Morning Thoughts: January 8, 2018

It’s raining this morning. I stood in it for a few moments feeling the sun rise. It’s not a spring rain by any stretch. It’s still chilly outside. But it was soft, and welcoming, a pleasant friend after the bone-chilling days and nights we have had. It made me remember a girl I once knew whose hair would make an almost audible sound while springing into curls from a sudden shower, and I smiled.

Then it made me remember sitting next to a young wife with long straight hair, on the porch of our first home, drinking wine, and watching puddles form in the street, and I counted the years.

It’s important to notice and appreciate moments and places, no matter when or where. Life has a tendency to change those for us, laughing with glee at our puny plans. We adapt to the new plans, or they will watch us wither.

Once, I thought I had it made. I had worked my way though college and was living in one of America’s most exciting cities at one of its most exciting times. I had lots of friends, good and true ones, I thought. I earned enough to do as I pleased. Blessings, not rain, poured on me.

A year later I was sitting on a bunker in the middle of the night, feeling the monsoon slowly soaking every square inch of my body. Those friends? They couldn’t force themselves to abide one who participated in an evil and unjust war. I couldn’t really blame them, but I had made my choices and they had made theirs. They still sat in warm circles playing music and … whatever. I sat cold, wet, and friendless, alone on the other side of the world from anyone who still did love me. So much for planning our lives.

It all turned out fine. But I stood outside at daybreak today, while the rain talked to me about it all. I had read a piece in Sunday’s paper about the best and most exciting places in the world to visit this year. We won’t be seeing any of them. Once again, we have made our choices. There are more fulfilling things than having, or even pretending to have, fun, in life. Life can narrow your field of vision, and one fares better after accepting it.

There will be soft rains, though. There will be days when a person in your care suddenly remembers something you thought had died in their memory long ago. There will be, if we’re lucky, the first sight of a young corn plant peaking from the soaked earth. There will be the warming sight of a small herd of deer drifting into our pasture at sundown because they know it is a safe place. There will be the feel of a soft hand clutching yours in the night, the first sound of the geese in late winter, the smell of freshly plowed earth in the spring, and the first taste of food grown by your own hands. And there will be songs to learn and books to read. None of these things require a tour of Tuscany. We will tend those in our care and be observant to life. Isn't that enough?

I hear people say, “I’ll be happy once I move to (wherever)." I worry that many will only face disappointment. Then I hear my late father-in-law, on the bitterest day of the year, saying “It’ll be spring before you know it,” and I think to myself, “He was almost always happy, I think.”

In addition to our lives, I worry that all Americans face some dreadfully unforeseen changes soon. I may be wrong, but signs alarm me. We have a powerful coalition that seems bent on changing the most basic character of our lands, our country, and our society. Why? I don’t know. I’m not even sure those in the coalition know, or would agree upon the motivation.

It goes beyond political differences. It appears, in all respects, to be a coalition based on hate, greed, the illogical, and a strong dose of nihilism, much of that resulting from a religion that abhors the concept of a “social gospel,” and favors either a gospel of greed or an apocalypse based on mythological prophecy.

That will bring change to us all. Those who end up with everything will be faced with having to see if “all is enough.” Those who end up with nothing will, for the first time in their lives, be forced to understand that decisions bear consequences. Those who find themselves on the wrong side of history will simply lie.

I will be hysterically happy if I’m wrong. But, as for me and my family, we’ll just live once more to see our earth, “… breeding lilacs out of a dead land.”

Or maybe just corn.

Morning Thoughts: January 7, 2018

I guess there at some things in everyone’s life they wish they had taken advantage of once. One of mine had to do with hitchhiking. No, it wasn’t the time I was picked up by three cowboys in Wyoming and invited to go with them to Montana to work on a ranch.

Nah, it wasn’t that exciting. This happened when I was hitchhiking to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, from Fayetteville, to see a college girlfriend who had invited me up for the weekend. It was during the height of what we now call “The Folk Music Revival.”

Someone had let me out in a little crossroads called Goshen, Arkansas. I think it’s a bigger crossroads now, I don’t know. I lost both the girlfriend and the urge to hitchhike about the same time.

I’m standing there when a thin little man comes across the road to pick up his mail. He looked like he could have easily been the father of Popeye the Sailor Man. We chatted. Somehow the topic turned to music and he said that he was a folk-singer and banjo-player. My ears pricked up at this revelation. He further stated that he had entertained many a college student in his home.

Allow a digression. In those days, there was a wonderful woman, Mary Celestia Parler, who taught a course in folk music back in Fayetteville. As part of the course, each student had to find an original folk singer or artist and file a report on them. Her view was that, “if you throw a quarter anywhere out in those hills, you’ll hit a dozen of them.”

As a result, folk singers and musicians were sort of the Boston Mountain versions of rock stars.

Back to the side of the road. This cat, (oops, flashback) uh, dude, uh, man pointed to his house, wrote his name and pone number down, and invited me to come and hear him play sometime. I can’t for the life of me remember his name. I’ll call him “Mr. Capps.”

Of course, I took him up on the offer. A friend had a car, co we rounded up a couple of more aficionados, stoked up on whatever we could afford, and “set-sail” for Goshen of a Saturday night.

Well, this fellow could play the banjo. Further, he played it “clawhammer” style, or perhaps it’s sophisticated cousin, “frailing” style. Don’t quite remember. What I do remember is that the first thing he played was “Bluebells of Scotland,” a popular but not well-known ditty. But on that ancient banjo in the hands of that sparse little man, it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard. Hear a vocal version here.

Mr. Capps become a good friend and frequent guest at our impromptu “hootenannies.” It wasn’t far to Goshen from Fayetteville. Someone would fetch him and we would play until he got tired, which was usually long after the rest of us got tired. He could always revive us, though, with “Bluebells.”

It all ended not badly, but sadly. Mr. Capps began to imbibe a bit as the gatherings progressed, and, as gateway sins can do, his transgressions escalated. After a few unsolicited and unwanted “touchings” on some of the females of our group, he became uninvited and forgotten, by most anyway.

I saw him later at a little event put on by some group. My girlfriend and her friend were on the program. They sang Woody Guthrie’s “I’ve Been Doing Some Hard Traveling,” which was odd in that neither of them, in their matching sweaters and short plaid skirts, possessed any internal knowledge of hard traveling of any sort, save perhaps a long walk to a particular class from their sorority house.

Backstage, though, Mr. Capps professed to remember me and asked why he didn’t see us anymore. I told him we had been too busy studying. I waited for a lightening bolt. When it didn’t come, I asked him to do Bluebells of Scotland for me, which he did.

I never saw him again.

But how I wish I had borrowed a recorder and made one more trip to the land of Goshen. Who knows? By now I may have been able to warm someone’s heart with that simple little song, from that simple little man, in that simple little place, in those much more simple times.

I think about that sometimes when I see these million-dollar extravaganzas on TV.

Growing Up Southern: January 6, 2018

There are things that we detest as adults because of childhood experiences, even though others love that very thing. I know. Believe me.

For example, I know someone from a wealthy family in a small town whose father made his children work a garden each year so folks could see that even kids born to comfort knew how to work. As adult, this individual wouldn’t have lifted a spade or planted a seed for anything in the world.

With me, it is wood. I mentioned before that my father sold fire-wood in addition to operating, along with my sainted mother, a small country grocery store. I may have made it sound like I enjoyed the loading of wood, along with driving around delivering and unloading it. It wasn’t too bad. I had much rather have been enjoying a game of “work-up” with my pals, but, since I had no choice in the matter, I made the best of it.

It wasn’t the hauling of firewood to poor folks that turned me away from the experience. It was just the opposite.

Once a year, you see, at Christmas time, my father would purchase loads of what we called “fireplace wood,” i.e. split logs suitable for use in rich folks’ fireplaces. All that had to be done was to load it, deliver it, unload it and stack it in a picturesque fashion for retrieval by some doctor, lawyer, banker, or, in one instance, the Chief Justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court whose daughter was among the most beautiful and adored girls of her class. Believe me. I know.

I would be during Christmas break as a pre-teen that my life would change. As I say, the wood was already split and cut to size. Daddy had a group of men, among them Amos Fletcher, Roedock Tiggins, and John Nathaniel who worked on occasion for him. John was slightly disabled as the result of an untimely glance at a young girl walking down Highway 15 while he was operating a saw, but they were all good men who tolerated me when in their presence while, I’m sure, bemoaning, in private, the fact that we occupied the planet simultaneously.

Anyway. The wood is loaded. The truck is ready. The hired-hands are in place. Things are in place for delivery of the wood to the wealthiest families in Pine Bluff. Where, you might ask, did I fit in? There were strong, grown men ready, willing, and able to do the job. I’m sure they would have found my help more of a nuisance than a benefit. My father trusted them implicitly.

It was simple, you see. None of them could read. Further, strange “colored” men talking to white people whom they didn’t know in those days was fraught with potential dangers. That’s where I came in.

It was my job to act as a 1950s version of a GPS system, and minor jefe. I was to find the addresses of our rich patrons, arrange the unloading, help with the unloading, and arrange an inspection when the work was all done. This I did while hoping to whatever gods might be that the patrons’ daughters, who were my classmates in another life, didn’t come out to take the air and ask me how I was enjoying the Christmas break.

Often, they did.

I think back about it and realize that I learned a lesson from all this. That lesson was that one should never be ashamed to be found in the presence or company of honest men who work for a living against greater odds than I could ever imagine. It is a lesson that I hope has molded my life for the better. It certainly is a lesson that taught me the benefits of my race, sex, upbringing, and social status, none of which I did a thing to deserve but which gave me a huge step up in life. I can only hope that somehow it helped me to understand that folks are “… not to be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Yes, it was a lesson well worth the learning.

I still don’t care to own a fireplace, though.

All things considered, I would have rather
been practicing climbing, or torturing
farm animals with pals Boogie Shannon
and Jim Fletcher, son of Amos.

Growing Up Southern: January 5, 2018

My father augmented the income from our little country grocery in several ways. One that involved me was the sale of firewood. I’ve thought about that many a time during this spell of cold weather.

Mostly, it involved slab wood, which is the outer portions left over at the sawmill when they square the logs. I don’t know whether he paid anything for it or not. If he did, it wasn’t much, for the slabs were generally considered waste. He hired men to pick the wood up at the mill and haul it to a vacant lot beside our store. There he had a hand-made saw rig that would cut the slabs into pieces for burning in stoves. They were maybe a little over a foot long. I never knew exactly.

Sometimes, in the slow part of the afternoon, he would saw the wood himself. He rigged a monster bell on the side of the store from which he could hear the phone ring. This was back in time when the phone would ring until someone answered it or the caller became gave up. There was no answering machine to interrupt after two rings. He would saw until the phone rang or a customer showed up. Things were different back then.

When business was brisk, though, as cold weather approached, teamwork kicked in. One man would hand over a slab, one would saw it, and one would pitch the pieces into a pile. That’s where I came in.

He would sell the wood to folks who still heated their homes, and cooked, with wood-burning stoves. They were not the richest folks around by any stretch of the imagination. He sold it by the “rounded” pickup truck load. As a teenager, I delivered it. It was one of my early introductions to real poverty. Sometimes I would arrive, in frigid weather, to meet shabbily-dressed children waiting to rush the first pieces into their homes.

One of my favorite customers was a lady of indeterminate age who lived alone in the east side of town, an area inhabited mostly by “railroad workers.” She lived in a small, but well-maintained, shack just across the levee from the Arkansas River. She would meet me and supervise the unloading. She directed me in her best broken English, her long dress, partially covered by an apron, brushing the ground as she walked. I remember that she always clapped her hands and smiled when the last piece fell on the pile.

You would surely forgive me if I stretched the definition of “rounded load” for some customers. And I'm sure that there are still unpaid bills my father never collected for my deliveries. Business sometimes involved more than perpetually-increasing profits back in those days.

I never knew how these folks supported themselves. Under FDR's New Deal, some measures were passed to provide a measure of succor for the poorest of those among us. It couldn’t have been much. While home from college one winter in the late 1960s, I saw a piece in our hometown newspaper about a woman who lived on $300 a year. I’m not sure if it was true or not. If it was, shame on our species.

Probably, the only income for many in those days was from the government. I’m sure that, even then, there were those who considered them, including my “East-side Lady, as “takers,” and resented the taxes paid to assist them. These days, there are those who spend time concocting laws against them from, as Alistair Cook put it, “… a warm place on a full stomach.”

At least back then we didn’t demand that we be allowed to drug test the poor, or even those poor in spirit, as a condition for our Galilean-ordained love.

Thoughts on a career: January 4, 2018

With my youthful demeanor and immature behavior, you’ll find this hard to believe, but on this day 46 years ago, I entered my profession. I had, somehow, landed a job with an urban planning consulting firm straight out of the military. Geez, I had hit the big time. Or so I thought.

The first planning commission I ever attended was in Hope, Arkansas, a fine community in Southwest Arkansas, the birthplace of President Bill Clinton. Last year, I attended a city board meeting in that very room. The furniture was arranged differently, but it was pretty much the same place. Tempus fugit and all that

Back in the day, planning commissioners all looked like me. That is to say they were all old fat white men. Lots of changes have occurred since that meeting in Hope. Along the line, African-American men and white women appeared on planning commissions, not in proportion to the local population, however. These days, African-American women and persons of Hispanic heritage are finding a place.

In one of those mental files I maintain under “interesting but I don’t know why,” I filed the fact that one saw African-American men appear first.

Those were interesting time. It was marking the end of the so-called “Great Society” era. That experience never achieved its lofty goals, to a large degree because too many important individuals and entities found that making war was either more profitable or more politically useful. I keep my thoughts about this in a file called “Tragedies.”

What the Great Society efforts did, in my observation, was to excite, like some charge applied to dormant electrons, a sense of social justice within a significant segment of the population. Leaders who staunchly declared there were no qualified minorities or women to fill upper-level jobs suddenly found some when they learned that the grant they sought required positive affirmative action.

Coupled with the monumentally heroic actions of people like Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Lewis, the governmental emphasis on elevating those who were poor in spirit and who mourned, began, albeit slowly—and against much resistance—to loosen the stranglehold of the Jim Crow era.

Looking at urban plans from that era, one is struck by a sense of optimism, naïve perhaps, that we could wage a war-like crusade against bitter poverty and despair. Moreover, some whose grandparents had been counted as three-fifths human were themselves in positions to achieve, perhaps in their lifetimes, full citizenship.

What we didn’t know was that any action can have an opposite reaction. This emphasis on redressing past inequalities raised the hopes of some and soothed the consciences of others. For some, however, such progress only pushed racial hatred belowground. Like a monster from a 1950s sci-fi movie, it rested in dark, subterranean caverns, waiting for a catalyst, perhaps of nuclear strength, to open a path to the surface.

There was no nuclear-like source, just upheavals, one on top on one another. On April 20, 1971, the United States Supreme Court upheld the use of busing to achieve racial desegregation in schools.

All hell broke loose, accompanied by a great “whooshing” sound as white parents fled cities whose school districts contained a significant black population. Racal composition became a significant element, in some cases the most significant element, in an area’s population growth.

Then a politician coined the term “silent majority,” as a code name for many who would see America return to the 1940s and 1950s, when African-American veterans, many who had been wounded in the service of their country, were denied equal access to the GI Bill. The term resonated with many who had become successful because they did receive full citizenship, but only credited their own hard work.

Next, a presidential hopeful chose to announce his candidacy in the Mississippi City in which three civil rights workers had been murdered for trying to register black voters. Seeing this as a message, the monsters began to slither upward. Recently, the Current Occupant declined to denounce the monsters' worst foot-soldiers, loosening them upon us with increased fury and confidence.

I don’t have to recount what else happened. But I’ve seen it all. My vantage point is from the courthouse square, an area often marked by vacant buildings and concrete slabs where buildings once stood. Retail business owners can’t afford political influence such as the coal industry can exert. I fear that they will disappear, in small-town America, in my lifetime.

And urban plans? They aren’t designed these days, in many cases, for optimism but for something called “branding,” whatever the hell that means. Many are simply drawings of how neighborhoods should look, a result that tells us much more about the personal tastes of the “planners,” than it does about the needs of the people who live within the city, either by choice or the restrictions placed upon them by a present emphasis on greed and selfishness.

Oh, and Hope, Arkansas? It’s managed today by a woman largely considered be one of the best city managers our state has ever produced.

I file that under “well, I’ll swan.”

Needing our love

Thoughts Day Three: January 3, 2018

It’s been cold where I live for the last several days, not Minnesota cold, but Arkansas cold. It’s caused me to think. My eyes teared at times.

We’ve spent the cold weather in a 100-year-old farmhouse, for reasons associated with the care of a dependent mother-in-law. The house, her childhood home for a time, was heated for the first 85 years or so by wood heaters. Insulation didn’t exist, nor did underpinning. Double-paned window rattled as the winter winds, and frost, swept through them. One can only wonder.

For those who might worry about us—yeah, there might be a few—don’t. We had the place insulated and, at least partially, sealed-in years ago. A nephew, now a highly successful business owner, and I installed central heat and air, and, worrier that I am, left a large gas heater in place for emergencies. We’re fine.

But what about those who aren’t? Do we owe them anything? Some of my friends now say we don’t. I respectfully disagree. My beliefs, training, and education have convinced me that America will never be greater than the poorest town in the Arkansas Delta. We can talk about the need for the “takers” to fend for themselves and not depend upon the “doers.” But, I’ve never heard of a cold, shivering, hungry, three-year-old demanding that she or he be allowed to “take.” They’re just cold and hungry.

Abraham Maslow would, I think, tell us that once that child was warm and fed, it might progress, mentally and physically, toward a state of being a “doer.” Until then, it will only dwell upon being safe. Wait a few years, give it a gun, and see what happens. What? Oh yes, I forgot.

Excuse me. I’m listening to this as I write and I had to stop for a moment. It is breathtakingly beautiful, and deserves full attention.

Where was I? Oh, on safety, comfort, and self-reliance. I just thought of one the best quotes I’ve read in the last ten years ago. Many folks, especially the writers of editorials in our statewide newspaper, love to quote H.L. Mencken. He was, at various times, a newspaper reporter, linguist, editor, magazine publisher, gadfly, author of books, and chronicler of American life. Raised in an upper middle-class family, he was also a cruel and cynical racist and anti-Semite who supported Germany’s role in World War One and once wrote a comedy piece about the actual hanging of an African-American man. It is still published, to the delight, I fear, of some Americans.

He could also write just about better than anyone else ever did. His most famous utterances fill pages. His works bear reading for their literary brilliance more that their content, although any one of us can use them, much like the Bible, to harvest much that nourishes our embedded prejudices.

My quote? Oh, it is not by Mencken but about Mencken. Alister Cook, in a preface to a collection of Mencken’s works wrote that, “Everything Mencken wrote was from a warm place and on a full stomach.”

I’ve done much in my life that good people would classify as vile and vituperative. I admit to it and spend a good deal of my time now trying to atone. I think, though, I’ve done some things right. I served my country, unlike the Current Occupant. I obtained two college degrees, one while working two part-time jobs while attending school full time, and one by working a full-time job while attending school part time. I’ve been employed or in school since I was eleven years old. I’ve been married to the same woman for over 44 years. I’ve never served jail time nor overspent my income. I think I can best describe my standing among my peers as “a semi-knowledgeable, but harmless old fool.”

Once, I was verbally chastised for telling a friend that I paid my taxes willingly for I believed, as did Oliver Wendell Holmes, that “they buy us civilization.” Do we lose our civility when we allow ourselves to despise paying them for the common good, or as the Galilean might put it, “to feed our sheep?” I’m, for one, afraid we might. We’ll see.

I entered the professional world with no experience, a general degree from a state-supported institution, and with the much-despised image of a Vietnam Veteran. Truth is, though, I started ten rungs up the ladder from an African-American brother or a white sister, either a Harvard Graduate with impeccable credentials, who might have started at the same time.

I was a white male from Northern-European ancestry, you see, the sociological equivalent of beginning from a warm place on a full stomach.

Taker?

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