The Girl in the Flowerbed

For Halloween, the beginning of a story about this creepy ornamental statue in the yard across the side street.

She awoke in the flowerbed without wondering how she came to be there. Her unblinking eyes saw in a moment—when a moment before they had seen nothing—a neighborhood at night. Without moving her head and still without blinking, she glanced left and right.

The tulips that surrounded her might have been red in the light of day, but beneath streetlamps and stars their tightly closed petals were purple-gray. Beyond them, lining both sides of the flat gray street, sat single-story houses of colorless brick, some with faces clearly visible, others away from the false light and darker.

At the same time her eyes saw, her naked knees and shins and the tops of her bare feet felt the cool black dirt where she sat with her legs folded beneath her. She felt the light breeze in her hair and in the small feathers of her wings, felt it ruffle the silk chiffon chemise she wore and play along the smooth skin of her thighs. She felt it drawn inside her and with it the aromas of mown grass, rich dirt and the pale tulips. And with these, other, unnatural odors—of things burning that were not meant to burn.

She listened to the buzz of the streetlamp above her and the wild, muted fluttering of velvet wings against it; to hums of varying pitches and varying volumes from all along the street; a muffled voice from one house, thin music from another; a dog's bark, an answer farther away; a sudden, small, violent thrashing beneath a line of low pines. She listened until she had listened it all into the background.

Then she stood up and walked into the shadows without blinking or brushing the dirt from her knees. . . .

242.2

The World We Live In

242.2

U$A

The bigge$t i$$ue in the 2008 pre$idential election? Thi$ i$ important!


243.4

Freedom, Love & Forgiveness

I received an interesting call today. I think the man's name was Rick Hathaway, and I think he said he was pastor of a church somewhere. His call came from the 910 area code, which is somewhere down in the southeastern area of North Carolina. I should have asked more questions, but I was somewhat taken aback by the question he asked me.

He's writing a Christian book of some sort, and he asked my permission to use a portion of the lyric I wrote for my song "Freedom, Love & Forgiveness." The song was recorded ten years ago by a fellow named Thom Shumate and released on an album called Promise of Love. (The project was produced by my good friend Mark, "nbta" here in blogland.) "Freedom, Love & Forgiveness" was released as a single. Although I don't know how well the song performed nationally, it was, I believe, the second most popular song on Nashville's Christian radio station that year.

Anyway, Mr. Hathaway said that he had talked to Thom Shumate sometime recently to get his permission to adapt the lyric for his book. Thom said he didn't write the song and sent the fellow looking for me. He read a passage from the book in which he expands the first verse of the song into prose and uses it as a lead-in to a discussion of his father and the spiritual freedom God gives us. It thought it was good, and I told him it was okay to use the lyric that way.

This isn't the first time the song has been used in such a way. I seem to remember that a pastor friend of mine incorporated the words into one of his fine sermons a couple of years ago. That was good too.


Lyric: http://faculty.etsu.edu/codym/song_freedomloveandforgiveness.htm
Song: http://faculty.etsu.edu/codym/song_freedom_love_and_forgiveness_TS.mp3
Performed by Thom Shumate with Ashley Cleveland; copyright 1996 Questar/Mission Records


243.4

Islam & America (Rewind 200 Years)

I'm working on an essay--a short one, 7-8 pages--to present at a conference next weekend in New Orleans. I've been there once before, 1996 or 1997, but I'm guessing that I didn't see any parts of the city ultimately destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I've stood at "ground zero" in New York City, some years after a different kind of catastrophe struck, and I could see the difference in the city, feel it, from earlier times when I'd visited and actually traveled to the top of one of the WTC towers. I'm wondering if--and how--I'll see New Orleans differently. Hopefully, I'll find some time to move around and see what I haven't seen before--and write about it.

As I said, the purpose of the trip is to attend a literary conference sponsored by the Charles Brockden Brown Society. Brown's work was the subject of my dissertation and my first book, and so I'm fairly involved with this sponsoring organization--heck, I'm a charter member! For those who don't know--and why would you?--Brown (1771-1810) was an important writer in the early years of the American republic. He grew up in Philadelphia and, as a boy, must have felt the buzz in the city as the Declaration of Independence was read aloud in its streets. As a young man, he would have been aware of Philadelphia as the capital of a new nation, a democratic experiment on a scale never before attempted. Certainly he must have felt the city shake beneath the steps of Benjamin Franklin, who was at home there, beneath the steps of visitors such as George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and others who were part of the fledgling government. It's really something to think about!

I digress.

My paper is what I intended to focus on--my as-yet-unwritten paper, I should say. While I was working on one of Brown's main literary ventures--The Literary Magazine, and American Register (1803-1807)--I was struck by the number of articles about such places as Persia, Egypt and Arabia, what we today would call the "Muslim world"; although, like the Christian world--and maybe even more so--the Muslim world is everywhere. So, my paper will attempt to analyze Brown's "take" on Islam two hundred years ago.

Those who study the circum-Atlantic world of the early American republic know that the conflict between the United States and Islam didn't begin with the Iranian hostage crisis that led to the downfall of the Carter administration in the late 1970s. But who in Happy-Days-white-bread-Cold-War America really gave a thought to Muslims before that? John Adams did. Thomas Jefferson did. But somewhere after the Barbary Wars of the late 18th century, the Muslim world seems to have dropped below American radar. Perhaps it was whitewashed--and thus hidden--by European (and American) colonial enterprises; perhaps it was perceived as too barbarous for consideration.

As background for the essay, I've been reading Robert J. Allison's The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776-1815. Allison claims early on that America's "encounter with the Muslim world actually began before there was a United States and almost before Europeans became aware that America existed":

When the Christian kingdoms of Castille and Aragon conquered the Muslim kingdom of Granada in 1492, their most Christian majesties Isabella and Ferdinand had extra capital to pay for Columbus's voyage to the Orient. But however important this voyage would be to our history, Ferdinand and Isabella hoped that by securing a new route to the Indies, they would find a new source of revenue to pay for their continuing holy war against the Muslims they had driven into Morocco and Algiers.

Islam was very much on the American mind of the 1780s, 1790s and the first decade of the 1800s, and events that took place seem eerily familiar. Three strangers obviously from the Middle East arrived in Virginia in 1785, making Governor Patrick Henry uneasy at the thought they were Algerine (Muslim) spies. The three-person "cell" was soon deported, even though the strangers turned out to be Jewish. Sailors from US ships were taken prisoner by Barbary pirates from the North African states of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, taken prisoner (hostage) and held for years, and Federalists charged President Jefferson with weakness for being unable, for a long time, to negotiate their release.

These troubles were largely over by the time Brown was producing the Literary Magazine, but the Muslim world was still on his mind. The paper I'm writing will describe and analyze the picture Islam one American man of letters presented to his readers.

"Stephen Decatur's Conflict with the Algerine at Tripoli", during the boarding of a Tripolitan gunboat on 3 August 1804.

http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/kn10000/kn10949c.htm

Top image: http://teachpol.tcnj.edu/amer_pol_hist/thumbnail102.html

243.6

Red-White-and-Blue Meanies

". . . the land of the free
"and the home of the mean."

In his 1920 essay entitled "The Sahara of the Bozart," H. L. Mencken wrote the following about the state of politics in Virginia in the decades since the Civil War:

Politics in Virginia are cheap, ignorant, parochial, idiotic; there is scarcely a man in office above the rank of a professional job-seeker; the political doctrine that prevails is made up of the bumpkinry of the Middle West--Bryanism, Prohibition, vice crusading, all that sort of filthy claptrap; the administration of the law is turned over to professors of Puritanism and espionage; a Washington or Jefferson, dumped there by some act of God, would be denounced as a scoundrel and jailed overnight.

Little has changed since 1920--in Virginia, in the South, in the United States of America. Politics is mean business. I know that's not news. But while I didn't have to listen to the political mudslinging that tainted the Adams/Jefferson election in 1800, or many that came after, I certainly catch a lot of the crap currently passing under the guise of "campaigning." Today's races for office tap into the meanness that seems to be becoming a bigger and bigger part of our national culture. For example, most of the humorous birthday cards I see these days are mean--especially if the card's "target" is getting older. Television shows are mean, their humor often based on making fun of somebody, their drama based on being excluded or "voted off." Politicians and their political support systems will do and say anything, seemingly, in order to get hold of an office and keep it.

Personally, I think this vile atmosphere has been fostered, if not actively promoted, by our political leaders and commentators. If the "best" of us can only respond to those who challenge them or oppose them with character attacks, they set a bad example. The step from meanness to lawlessness is apparently a short and easy one to take. Witness all the scandals that "rock" Washington and then pass out of memory as soon as the next ugly behavior is brought to light. Witness a talk show host calling an individual with a terrible disease a "faker." Witness all candidates not hoping to serve but going for power. Witness . . .

the Tennessee senatorial race between Bob Corker and Harold Ford, Jr. I know the political affiliation of each, but their beliefs, their takes on real issues, were lost deep in mud long ago. Their parties and ideologies have taken a back seat to their character attacks and counterattacks. I can't remember the last time that either of them "approved" a "message" that focused on his own campaign and his own understanding of the country and the world. For all the good these ads do those of us who are trying to make decisions not dictated by party bias, Corker and Ford might as well step into the ring and beat each other bloody. Like pro wrestling matches, their campaigns compete on the basis of the show and who's really "selling" his moves, who's really "selling" suffering due to the meanness of the other.

What happens to our national stability and security when politics devolves into entertainment? And these ads must be entertaining somebody. I shudder to imagine the person who actually decides her vote based on who best smears the mud on his opponent.

And their parties are getting into this race as well. The Republicans ran an anti-Ford ad that I believe is the worst I've ever seen. This piece of "campaigning" is so ugly and manipulative even Corker has asked that it be pulled from circulation. Given the character of the race, however, who's to say that Corker didn't secretly "approve" the ad in order to look like the good guy when he demanded that it be pulled? (I put nothing past any politician these days.) But if that were the case, it would certainly suggest that the Republican party as a whole doesn't mind being associated with such meanness. (The Democrats have put out ads about Corker as well, but theirs haven't stooped quite so low.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWkrwENN5CQ

What is wrong with our culture--besides meanness and the resulting deterioration of morals--that would suggest to anybody or any party that such an ad was a good idea?

Time was when I believed that nothing could threaten the existence of the United States, that the country could always rise above political squabbles for office. Given the current state of affairs in our politics and culture, I'm no longer so sure of that belief.

One more idea from Mencken's essay: "Free inquiry is blocked by the idiotic certainties of ignorant men."

243.4

Fiesta!

It's difficult to believe that more than 23 years have passed since I wrote and recorded "Fiesta."

Lyric:http://faculty.etsu.edu/codym/song_fiesta.htm
Song: http://faculty.etsu.edu/codym/song_Fiesta.wma



245.6

Jerry's Birthday

If you know cars, you know that this one is a '55 Thunderbird. I really don't know cars at all and just found this one by googling 1955, a good year for cars, I guess.

Certainly a good year for my family. My older brother Jerry was born on 23 October 1955. Happy birthday, Jerry! He was conceived in Utah, I'm guessing, and born in Asheville, I think. He lived with Mom and Dad in Missouri for a time too, if I'm not mistaken. (I wasn't around yet, you see.) He lived with them in Sumter, South Carolina, where I joined the family, and in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he started school. Most of his schooling took place at Walnut School and Marshall High School. Although he was officially a member of the first graduating class of Madison High School, he never actually sat in a classroom there as a student. He graduated from North Carolina State University with a degree Agri-Business (or something like that) and has worked in that field (no pun intended) ever since.

Here's some stuff about 1955:

• OCTOBER 1st: Honeymooners begins a long run with Jackie Gleason
• OCTOBER 3rd: Captain Kangaroo begins on CBS
• By 1955 Elvis had recorded 5 songs and gained some popularity in the South
• Marilyn Monroe releases The Seven Year Itch
• Blue jeans, rock & roll and comic books become increasingly popular
• April 12, 1955. The Salk vaccine against polio is introduced
• 1955 sees dramatic increases in the sales of home appliances, new homes, and televisions; RCA SELLS 20,000 COLOR TV SETS -- most all are 21" models
• Foreign aid to South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos is begun by the United States
• Feb. 26, 1955. U.S. stockpile of atomic bombs reaches 4,000; the U.S.S.R is estimated to have 1,000
• What Things Cost in 1955:
  Car: $1,950
  Gasoline: 29 cents/gal
  House: $17,500
  Bread: 18 cents/loaf
  Milk: 92 cents/gal
  Postage Stamp: 3 cents
• Stock Market: 488
  Average Annual Salary: $5,000
  Minimum Wage: 75 cents per hour

248

My 45

The single was released on 22 April 1983 by Zoo York Records. It had "Fiesta" in English on one side and "Fiesta" in Spanish on the other. The translation was done by a friend who taught Spanish, but it might have been too much "school" Spanish. Only God and real Spanish speakers know what sorts of things the translated lyric said!

Recently I was shopping around on Ebay, and entered my name, thinking that I would see if any copies of my book on Charles Brockden Brown were for sale. I was floored when this 23-year-old record showed up. I bought it for $2.99 + S&H (which was more than $2.99). Since then, I've seen it on Ebay lots of times, most recently for almost $20 from a record shop in England.

Who's been holding on to these things for so long? And WHY?!?


246.4

TGIF

I realize that I had the first two days of the week "off," but, man, am I glad it's Friday! Fall break was Monday and Tuesday, but all that really meant to me was that I didn't have to be in class on Monday. I spent both days in the office, writing three 1,000-word entries for the Student's Companion of American Literary Characters. Actually, I got two of them finished by Tuesday evening and then didn't finish the third until today.

I got up around 5:30, as usual. Fed the cat. "Danced my dance," as the old Virginian William Byrd II used to write in his journal; more than likely he was referring to some sort of calisthenics. Dropped Raleigh off at school. Grabbed a bit of McDonald's for breakfast. Went to the office. Finished the final piece for the SCALC. Went to Barberitos for my Friday fish burrito. Returned to the office. Did a bit of this and that there until Raleigh got out of school. Came home and shaved and showered. Drove to Marshall, North Carolina. Attended Landon Davis's visitation (6:00) and funeral (7:00). Went back to my mother-in-law's for some family time. Drove back across the mountain.

At the visitation, I saw Terry Davis, who was Landon's cousin. Terry was in the White Water Band, the high school rock group I played with my freshman through junior years. He still plays every weekend, sounds like. In fact, he and Kirk McWilliams, WWB's drummer, still play together. Kirk drives all the way up from Atlanta every weekend. I wonder what I might have been able to accomplish with that kind of commitment. Maybe I'll write some more about the White Water Band soon. It was an interesting high school experience.

Right now I'm going to bed, and I'm going to sleep until I wake up . . . sort of. I have to set a 6:30 alarm, but it's not for me.


244

Zora Neale Hurston

I like my Thursday night Literature of the South class. The group is a mix of undergraduates (11 of them, I think) and graduates (5). Except for a couple of undergraduates who sleep, both of them sitting at the opposite ends of the same table, the class seems interested and responsive.

This week's class went well, so well, in fact, that we didn't get to cover all the material we had to work with. My favorite passage of the night was from a short essay by African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston, author of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston doesn't identify with the racial propaganda contrived to support Jim Crow laws in the first half of the 20th-century South, but she does recognize cultural differences, as in the following:

. . . when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen, follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai [spear] above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something, give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat smoking calmly.

"Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.

Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

Read the entire essay--again, it's quite short (two pages in our textbook):

http://beatl.barnard.columbia.edu/wsharpe/citylit/colored_me.htm
Picture: www.barnard.columbia.edu/sfonline/hurston/



245.6

Images from the Weekend

This is the road in front of the house where I grew up in North Carolina. It's not the same road that was there, however. Country highways back in the '60s and '70s tended not to have turning lanes. Actually, this is a major road--US Highway 25-70. In a sense, it's two major roads. Highway 25, "Dixie Highway," runs from Brunswick, Georgia, to Cincinnati, Ohio. Many on the Reeves side of my family used to travel it regularly before I-75 came to be. Highway 70 runs from eastern North Carolina to somewhere in the middle of Arizona. I lived beside it in Walnut; I lived beside it in Nashville. I think about the hollows--the "hollers"--of Madison County, North Carolina, and the kids I knew growing up in them, and I wonder if the differences in my life weren't somehow influenced by seeing something of the larger world passing back and forth along this highway.


This is the same mountain, from a slightly different angle. A more beloved angle. This is from the porch of the house where I grew up, and I can't imagine the number of times that I've sat in the porch swing, in one of the rockers or on the concrete front steps and looked at this view. I've looked at it in all seasons and at all times of day. I've seen it on many a blue October day like the one in the picture. I've seen it backlit by the lightning of a summer storm. I've seen it disappear in the approach of a winter snow, a spring rain. And I've stood on the top of that highest peak and tried to see my house from there. The trees surrounded me, and I don't remember seeing anything. But the view from the porch I'll always love--unless somebody levels off that top and builds a house up there, which is probably bound to happen one of these days.


I saw this sign in Mars Hill when I was on my way home Sunday. I named the photo "Stupid Sign." Is it advertising for a sporting goods store? No. Is it an advertisement for taxidermy? No. Is it the hardware store where the sign stands on the edge of the lot? No. It's a political campaign sign for Mike Gahagan, a longtime area highway patrolman who's currently the challenger in the county sheriff's race! I'm sure that the Larry-the-Cable-Guy slogan and the deer rising Godzilla-like from behind the "Gahagan Mountains" will sell big in Madison County.



Leaves.















Shadow.





245.6

Fragments of a Poem

October nights of wind and rain pull leaves
away from branches where since spring they've clung
to life. . . .


October nights of wind and rain pull souls
like leaves away from branches where since spring,
since they can remember, they've clung to life. . . .


The rest remain, awaiting their turn to
let go and fly into the night, into
the swirl of wind and rain in October. . . .

A little over a week ago, my brother-in-law and I stood at the graveside of our wives' grandmother and talked about how now that we're the age we are, we're going to be finding ourselves more and more at gravesides. As if in fulfillment of prophecy, another passing took place in the small hours of 17 October, and a day or two from now we'll go through the ceremony again in memory of our wives' stepfather Landon Davis.

Walnut School Reunion

This is Walnut School, which I attended from 1st grade through the 8th. It was the same school from which my mother and father graduated in 1949. In fact, my mother and I had the same first grade teacher (still living, by the way). It was also where, in the 7th grade (1971), I met the girl I would marry 18 years later.

Most of the structure in the picture is gone now, burned down by vandals in 1998. All that remains is the smaller section to the left. The rest was gutted by the fire and afterwards torn down. The school grounds have now become the Walnut Community Center grounds. Extending from the main structure's left side to just short of the double doors is an open air pavilion with a stage, a home now for community events such as rummage sales and the school reunion.

The Walnut School Reunion is for anybody who ever attended the school, but the focus tends to be on those who graduated from there when it was a high school. Four students graduated in the first class (academic year 1923-1924), and for some 22 years after that students graduated after the completion of eleventh grade. A twelfth grade was added for the graduating class of 1946-1947. My uncle Mack was part of that class, and I'm sure he and the 11 who graduated with him were thrilled to have the extra year. The last graduating class at Walnut High School walked across the stage at the end of the 1961-1962 academic year.

On Saturday the 14th of October, 2006, I took my mother to this year's reunion. The air was colder than normal for this time of year, and the wind was kicking up a bit. But the sky was blue, and a goodly group of folks turned out for the occasion, one coming from as far away as Arizona. Mom went most of the way with her walker, and then I rolled her into the pavilion in a wheel chair she sometimes uses in such situations. Then I went back to the car, rolled down the windows and sat reading.

But I found it hard not to listen. I couldn't help thinking how the murmur of voices in the pavilion echoed the voices of the children and young adults these people had been in years long gone. They talked and laughed in open air that was in the same geographic space where their voices had rung the wood and plaster of the old hallways and classrooms and gymnasium. Accompanied by prerecorded tracks, a man from the class of 1958-1959, in school at Walnut the year I was born ('58), sang three songs: one about Jacob "rasslin' with the angel"; one about loving "old people"; and something patriotic. (I sang at this event last year and didn't touch on any of these topics!) Then the event MC got up to begin recognizing those present from the different graduating classes.

The earliest class with a graduating member present was 1932-1933. Lo and behold, I knew the name--Tressalee Ramsey, my 5th and 6th grade teacher! She's 93 now (and still driving, they say). I had to go speak with her, so I locked up the car and joined the crowd. When I got an opportunity, I sat down beside her. She looked at me and smiled, but I could tell that she didn't recognize me. How could she? But when I introduced myself, the recognition was immediate, and she took my hand and squeezed it. She told me that she'd recently run across a story that I'd written for her class years ago and that she'd been meaning to drop it by Mom's house. I told her that I'd thought of that story not too long ago (and mentioned it in my post from 14 September 2006). "It's a good story," she said.

Walnut School was a good story too.

Iranian Cartoonist Anjomrooz Sepideh

I can't offer a definitive interpretation of the cartoon, but I can try to explain the impression I receive from it.

The hand is positioned like that of God's in Michelangelo's painting Creation of Adam that adorns the ceiling of the Vatican's Cistine Chapel. This hand, however, doesn't seem godlike somehow, doesn't seem to have a lot of strength in it. But strength or not, it is certainly intended to represent a Christian version, or vision, of God.

The other feature in the drawing seems to be the bird of peace, a bird holding an olive branch in its beak. Both bird and branch, however, seem made of barbed wire. We think of the uses that material serves, chief of which is containing something by force, keeping it by threat of pain in pasture or prison. It's the bird of peace, but it's made out of violent stuff.

So, one way this pictorial commentary might be "read" is that, from the point of view of an Iranian artist, the Christian world—i.e., the USA—is playing God and ironically trying to offer (or dictate) peace through war. The original painting's hand of Adam, rather listlessly reaching to God in response, is absent here, suggesting that the barbed wire peace being offered is neither requested nor accepted.

The picture came from http://cagle.msnbc.com/, where there's an amazing collection of editorial cartoons on all sorts of national and international topics.


243.6

In these days of war and protests against war, of negative political campaigns and mean-spirited entertainment, of contentious faculty meetings and charges of political indoctrination in the classroom, of friends letting down friends and busy isolated lives, a coworker spread this video around the Department of English. I think it's pretty wonderful.

I tried to picture myself encountering this man--these people--in the Johnson City Mall, and I wondered how I would respond. I hope I wouldn't be like the security guards. What I'd really like is to be the kid in the blue t-shirt who comes flying into the arms of his friend.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr3x_RRJdd4

I'm off to North Carolina for the weekend. If I get a chance on Saturday, I'll blog a bit from the Madison County Public Library.

Hugs all around!


247

Cotton Fields & Saturday's Pig

Here in eastern Tennessee, we don't see sights like this one. Eastern North Carolina is a different story. Almost any direction taken out of Ahoskie, cotton fields are a common sight. Despite the balls of white, the cotton plant isn't a pretty one--not to me anyway. And I can never see it without thinking of the horrible history of American slavery to which it's so closely linked. I've worked tobacco in my younger days (as little as I could get away with, which was, actually quite little). As I recall, tobacco requires one stoop for a good worker, one stoop when the plant stalk is cut near the base. The picture here shows how low to the ground the cotton plant grows. Imagine the extended and endless stooping required to pick a day's worth of plants clean of their yield. Imagine that from dawn till dusk during all those days when the fields were ready to harvest. Just imagine.

Not for vegetarians! This is Saturday's pig--one of them, at least--mentioned in an earlier posting. It's on the cooker, and the meat is being pulled or picked--I don't know which term is correct at this point. The meat goes into the silver tray seen here and then is drenched with the "sauce" in the pint jar.

The picker, the pig cooker extraordinaire, is Uncle Adolph--my uncle-in-law, actually--aka Uncle Sweet Pea. He's a great man, and knowing him has kept my family from missing my father-in-law (his brother) as much as we might have these past sixteen years.

One thing (in two parts) I've always been curious about regarding Adolph but never asked him. First, how did his parents, eastern North Carolina farm folk, come to name him "Adolph"? Second, since he was a boy in the late 1930s and early 1940s, I wonder if his name put him through difficult times with peers and community folk during WWII. I'll have to ask him someday.

Ahoskie, North Carolina

The Weekend in Brief (not in briefs)
On Thursday the 5th I went home immediately after my evening class, met my sister-in-law at the house and headed for Raleigh, North Carolina. In Raleigh by 1:00 a.m., I dropped Sister off with my brother-in-law and met my cousin JP, with whom I stayed the night. We talked and laughed as we always do and watched the early morning repeat of The Colbert Report; then he pointed me to the spare room, where I was soon sound asleep.

The morning of the 6th—rain, rain, rain. Still we went out. J drove my by the church he's now attending and intending to join (Crossroads Fellowship). We had Steak & Shake burgers for brunch, took a little tour of town and then returned to his place to hang out for a couple of hours. When he had to go to the office for an afternoon meeting, I found Highway 64 and headed for Ahoskie, North Carolina. Rain, rain, rain, all along the way. By the time I got to Ahoskie, I was tired and ready to eat. I went to the motel where my family had a couple of rooms, and two of my aunts-in-law were at the front desk, working out rooms of their own. They'd been to the hospital where their mother—the family matriarch—wasn't doing well. It's a large family, so I knew there'd be precious little space at the hospital. I have a mental image of Grandmama that I wanted to preserve, and in order to do so I decided not to go to the hospital. Still hungry, I went to Subway, and on the way back to the motel—in a driving rain—I shaped in my mind the little poem below.

The 7th. I helped take care of my little granddaughter through part of the day, while my older son went to play some golf with his cousins. That afternoon, we got the news that Grandmama had died. (She didn't actually die at night, like the poem suggests.) It was a bittersweet time. Nobody was shocked. She was, after all, 97 years old. We went ahead with our usual Saturday evening festivities, but I could sense an unusually contemplative mood in many of the folks there. We partook of the pig that had been cooking all day.

The 8th. The weather continued gray and wet, although not much actual rain was falling. I got out that morning and went to the track at Hertford County High School (Home of the Bears) and did my walking and running. In the afternoon, the extended reunion gathering took place as scheduled but with the same bittersweet character about it. I spent the late afternoon working on a piece for an encyclopedia and that evening we went to the funeral home for the visitation. (My younger son, having had no experience with this kind of thing in the past, understood the idea but didn't know what this event was called. He referred to it as a "walk-through," which made his mother and me laugh.)

The 9th. Funeral at 11:00, handled surprisingly well by the young Baptist preacher; brief graveside service; another meal for the family—leftovers from the weekend, supplemented by the ladies of Center Grove Baptist Church. By 2:00 or so, we were on our way back to the mountains of east Tennessee. After a long long ride, we returned home at 10:00.

That's the weekend that was. It'll hopefully happen again early next October, as it has been happening for years. Having come into the family by marriage, I tend to go only every other year, but I might break that tendency and go again next time. Grandmama won't be there in person, but she was such a strong presence in her family that she can't help but be in the air of Ahoskie and in the food she taught her daughters and granddaughters to cook, in the laughter that is everywhere in that family and in the unstoppable tears that will be dried by the fabric of her family, a fabric she herself wove out of almost 100 years of life in Ahoskie.

6/21/1909 - 10/7/2006

Nettie
lived a
long life,
ninety-
seven
years before
going
to God.
One stormy
October
night, she left
a bag
of bones
in a
hospital
bed and
lit out
for the
cosmos,
rising clean
through
driving rain.

Come Saturday, There Will Be Pig

Saturday's family reunion will feature--as any family reunion should--great food! I'm thinking specifically of the pig cooked at my uncle-in-law's barn. The beast will go on the cooker before dawn, and by the afternoon we'll be picking for sandwiches--white bread and pork and a sauce made of vinegar and tabasco.

In the mornings, the aunts will make cheese biscuits and chocolate sop--a biscuit with extra sharp cheddar cheese baked inside and a bowl of dark chocolate sauce to dip it in!

What a weekend!

Thomas Wolfe & October

Yesterday I missed a golden opportunity. I was thinking about October, and that thinking eventually led, after I'd already done my post for the day, to Thomas Wolfe, who wrote beautifully about the month. And it just so happened that yesterday, 3 October, was Wolfe's 106th birthday, even though he lived for only 38 years or so. I didn't make the connection of what an appropriate 3 October posting some of Wolfe's October writing might have made.

Wolfe was born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1900. Having grown up in the same area, I feel a connection with this writer of Look Homeward, Angel (1929), and because his writing is often about the area where we both grew up, I'm particularly attracted to it.

Wolfe was a novelist, but his style, the flow of his words and images, was that of a poet. To demonstrate this, John S. Barnes created a book he called A Stone, a Leaf, a Door: Poems by Thomas Wolfe, and published it with Wolfe's publisher Charles Scribner's Sons in 1945, six years after Wolfe's death. Barnes took several passages from Wolfe's writing and broke up the prose into lines of verse. Here are some selected passages from a piece Barnes titled "October":

October had come again,
And that year it was sharp and soon:
Frost was early,
Burning the thick green on the mountain sides
To massed brilliant hues of blazing colors,
Painting the air with sharpness,
Sorrow and delight—
And with October.

Sometimes and often,
There was warmth by day,
An ancient drowsy light,
A golden warmth and pollenated haze in afternoon,
But over all the earth
There was the premonitory breath of frost,
An exultancy for all the men
Who were returning,
A haunting sorrow
For the buried men,
And for all those who were gone
And would not come again. . . .

October is the richest of the seasons:
The fields are cut,
The granaries are full,
The bins are loaded to the brim with fatness,
And from the cider-press the rich brown oozings
Of the York Imperials run.

The bee bores to the belly of the yellowed grape,
The fly gets old and fat and blue,
He buzzes loud, crawls slow,
Creeps heavily to death
On sill and ceiling,
The sun goes down in blood and pollen
Across the bronzed and mown fields
Of old October.

The corn is shocked:
It sticks out in yellow rows
Upon dried ears,
Fit now for great red barns in Pennsylvania,
And the big stained teeth of crunching horses.
The indolent hooves kick swiftly at the boards,
The barn is sweet with hay and leather,
Wood and apples—
This, and the clean dry crunching of the teeth
Are all:
The sweat, the labor, and the plow
Are over.
The late pears mellow on a sunny shelf;
Smoked hams hang to the warped barn rafters;
The pantry shelves are loaded
With 300 jars of fruit. . . .

Trains cross the continent
In a swirl of dust and thunder,
The leaves fly down the tracks behind them:
The great trains cleave through gulch and gulley,
They rumble with spoked thunder on the bridges
Over the powerful brown wash of mighty rivers,
They toil through hills,
They skirt the rough brown stubble of shorn fields,
They whip past empty stations in the little towns
And their great stride
Pounds its even pulse across America. . . .

Come to us, Father, in the watches of the night,
Come to us as you always came,
Bringing us
The invincible sustenance of your strength,
The limitless treasure of your bounty,
The tremendous structure of your life
That will shape all lost and broken things on earth
Again into a golden patter of exultancy and joy.

Come to us, Father,
While the winds howl in the darkness,
For October has come again
Bringing with it huge prophecies of death and life
And the great cargo of the men who will return.
For we are ruined, lost, and broken
If you do not come,
And our lives, like rotten chips,
Are whirled about us
Onward in darkness
To the sea.

246

October

I was walking alone across campus today just as a change of classes was taking place. Students chattered all around me--groups of three or four all talking at once or listening to one leader among them, pairs having conversations, singles talking away on their cell phones. I have a bad tendency to smirk, either inwardly or openly, at the frivolous things they all go on about. Then I passed a spot where two sidewalks merge into one, and two girls who had been walking along--at least one of whom was talking on her cell phone--came together with a "Whassup?" just behind me. Without turning around, I just walked and listened to them. At first they talked about the usual social stuff--none of which I can remember. One of them spoke to a boy passing by and asked him if he still smelled like peanut butter. I didn't hear all of what she said to the other girl after he had passed with "I'm good," but she had also smelled like peanut butter at some point, maybe when she got up that morning or when she got home last night. I didn't like to think how the two of them came to smell that way. Surely it was completely innocent.

They fell quiet for a moment.

Then, "I can't believe it's October."

"Oh, I love October! It's my favorite month!"

"Me too!"

This was different.

Hey, I said to myself, October is my favorite month! Suddenly I thought about these girls in a new way. This love of a particular month in the year we had in common. Why not other things? My own frivolous talk, for example.

I love lots of things about October—the temperatures, the painfully blue skies, the ever-changing colors in the leaves along the sides of the roads we travel and up the sides of the mountains we see all around us. I like the spirit of October as well. Although I’m far from a farmer, a sense of the celebration of harvest time still seems palpable to me, and the month inspires a contemplative mood. When I was a songwriter, October was always my most productive month. One of my last short stories--"A Poster of Marilyn Monroe"--was both completed and accepted for publication in the same October of 2004.

I also like the fact that mowing season is almost over. And yet, I enjoy mowing in these blue afternoons. The sun is warm, even hot, but the air holds that unmistakable chill. I can reach down and run my fingers through the "leaves of grass" and feel a coolness there that surprises on an afternoon at 80+ degrees.

I hope to write some this month. Of course, I have some writing I have to do at work and some writing I intend to do in this space. But I hope I'll write a story or a poem or a song--or at least work on one of these.

Welcome, October.


PS--The image above is another from the Comcast site.