The Creeps (Dirty Windows)

I guess with recent writings about the sublime (and now the creeps), I must be mentally preparing to teach an honors freshman comp course focused on the gothic. Anyway, here's the creeps idea.

One morning recently I was exercising in our "sun room." The day outside was nice, in spite of the bad panes in the double doors that lead to the patio. I was jumping up and down or running in place or some such sweaty nonsense when I found myself looking at the second window down from the top in the left-hand door.

A face. A strange-looking face was there on the pane. I could see where the tip of the nose pressed against the glass. The lips and chin were visible. The creepy part of the image was the part that looked like whiskers growing out on each side of the mouth. The appearance first suggested that a whiskered man had pressed a wet face up against our window to look in.

A shiver ran up and down my spine.

But the creepiest part--at least momentarily--came when I went over to the window to inspect the image more closely. I discovered that the impression was on the inside of the glass, not the outside!

We have decided that, given this is not in the highest window, our boy must've made the impression. He's not whiskered yet, but he used to like to make faces at the window, pressing his features up against the glass, sometimes blowing his cheeks out for a very funny look. So maybe this was something he did a long time ago, and because almost all the double panes in the door have developed this sort of milky flaw we, for one thing, didn't notice this image and, for another, it stayed there because we don't clean those windows, always thinking that we'll replace those doors soon. (Of course, we've been thinking that for several years now.)

Then again, I would think that if this were my son, some of his features should be recognizable. They're not. The look of whiskers could be--and probably is--the result of little streaks of saliva that shot from the corners of his mouth when he puffed his cheeks out. The whiskers don't have to be on the original maker of the image. But it seems as if the rather prominent cleft in his chin ought to be visible.

Anyway, for a few moments it was a creepy discovery.

It reminded me of something that took place at the house where we used to live in Asheville. Standing on the front stoop facing the door, you would find to your left a part of the front of the house and some neglected flower beds beneath the picture window. To your right was a wall with a window looking into a bedroom/office. The line of sight from this window also took in the room's door and, if the door was open, the hall bathroom and mirror.

One Sunday morning, I stepped out the front door to get the newspaper. I happened to look down at the stoop and noticed there a single print of a left shoe. It was narrow with a heel and wet from the grass. My impression was that it was the print of a woman. And it was angled toward the window looking into the bedroom/office. While the face in our door pane here in Jonesborough might be that of our son performing for us or a friend outside on the patio, I'm certain in regards to the footprint in Asheville that somebody that morning stood--right foot on the ground, left up on the stoop--and looked in our window. For what purpose and for how long, I don't know, but nobody was around when I went out to get the paper. And no other prints were on the stoop, so this was definitely somebody who didn't continue onto the stoop to ring the doorbell.

The hall bathroom visible from that window was mine, and I can almost picture myself turning from the mirror where I was shaving or fixing my hair, turning with that sense that I was being watched, and seeing a face in the window looking back at me and then quickly withdrawing. Or not.

It still gives me the creeps

The Singing Greats

Yesterday morning, as Mom finished getting ready for church, I sat at her piano, tinkering with variations on "Wayfaring Stranger." As we made our slow way to the car, she told me that her mother, the woman I knew as Mama Reeves, said that her father--my grandmother's father--used to sing that song. The man was named Noah Barnett, one of my maternal great-grandfathers.

Mom also told me that her father's father, Malley Reeves, was also known as a singer. The story is told that he would be working in the fields when somebody would pass and say, "Malley, we need you to come sing over at Such-and-Such Church." So this other of my maternal great-grandfathers would stop work and wash up and go sing.

I like knowing this about these great-grandfathers of mine, men I never knew, both of them dead even before my mom was born in 1931.

And so I sing in church--"Come, Thou Fount" yesterday morning--like Malley Reeves did years and years ago. I like thinking about that. I also like thinking about Noah Barnett singing "Wayfaring Stranger" within earshot of his daughter, and I feel a connection across time and space in the same way that I've come to feel in the saying of the Lord's Prayer or the Apostles' Creed a connection to people worshiping more than 1,000 years ago or during their own Sunday morning worship times--just a few hours before or after mine--in Glasgow or Buenos Aires or Missoula or Singapore.

Gigging

Last night, the 18th, I did something I haven't done in a good while--I played a gig. This took place on the patio at the Link Hills Country Club in Greeneville. Just for fun, here's my set list for the two-set performance.

1

O Danny Boy (solo flute)

Somebody, Somewhere

I'm a Believer

The Way It Is

Good Ole Boys Like Me

Dizzy from the Distance

Blondie Goes Latin

Tuesday's Gone

Brandy

The Jaws of Modern Romance

No Surrender

Wayfaring Stranger (flute & vocal)

Pride (In the Name of Love)

Where the Streets Have No Name

Get Together

2

Jamboree

The Sound of Silence

Ready for the Storm

Put a Little Love in Your Heart

Best I've Ever Seen

Thunder & Lightning

Let My Love Open the Door

Peaceful, Easy Feeling

Radar Love

Genesis Road

None But the Lonely Heart

Pretty Amazing Grace

Homecoming

Empty Islands

That last song is one that I wrote back in the 1980s, but only a handful of people have ever heard it. I think it's a powerful piece of work--intense and personal. When I played it last night at the end of "the show" only my wife and a friend remained, as the last of the patio dinner crowd had departed after "Pretty Amazing Grace."

From Sublime to Weird!

. . . weird & cool!

Y'all gotta check out this rendition of "Sweet Home, Alabama." Follow the link, read the description and click on the picture!

http://www.tothepointnews.com/content/view/3114/85/

The Sublime

Sublime—a: lofty, grand, or exalted in thought, expression, or manner b: of outstanding spiritual, intellectual, or moral worth c: tending to inspire awe usually because of elevated quality (as of beauty, nobility, or grandeur) or transcendent excellence

The word "sublime" was also used slightly differently in literary circles in England (and Europe) during the 18th and 19th centuries. To the description above was added a notion of terrible or fearsome. So, something was sublime if it was both beautiful and dangerous. For example, the Alps were considered sublime because they were at once beautiful and picturesque mountains and dangerous—a place of landslides and avalanches, a place of getting lost or falling to one's death or freezing. You get the idea.

This evening I went walking in the park at dusk, and by the time I was finished with a couple of laps, night was nearly upon me.

A storm dropping heavy rain had passed through only half an hour before, but the western sky opened up just for the last moments of the setting sun. Birds of many kinds were singing in the trees all around the park or grabbing snacks out of the grass or drinking from newly formed pools. Water trickled and gurgled in the grass and dripped from the trees. For a time in the second half of my first lap, a cool drizzle danced on these storm pools and the frog pond. In the distance, the mountains to the south—toward North Carolina—were wreathed in mist.

As I began my second lap, the green in the trees began to grow black with shadows. The sun was down, and the light of day was fading fast. The songs of the birds slowly faded as the singers went to roost. The bellowing of the bullfrogs in the marshy rim of the pond took over.

Johnson City hummed beyond the dog run, beyond the trees to the east. The occasional car or truck passed the upper and lower entrances to the park, but none turned in at the gates.

I was alone in the park.

So, the birds grew quiet, the bullfrogs haunted the pond and darkness fell, lending a sublime quality to the place where I walked.

Admittedly, I have a vivid imagination. I could easily imagine how the beautiful evening could turn dangerous. As I walked through the section bordering the pond, a section in which the sides of the trail seem to close in and become almost like a tunnel, images came to mind of highwaymen and wild beasts. I could picture myself as I might appear to some watcher in the woods, be it human or inhuman. Creepy stuff! I could feel the hairs on arms and legs and the back of my neck responding, the goose flesh. My imagination is quite convincing at times.

Then again, we constantly hear on the news of all sorts of violence befalling people who put themselves in potentially dangerous situations, such as walking alone in a park at night.

I'm safe at home now and ready for bed and sweet dreams.

It's Here!

This isn't it exactly, but you get the idea.


(I'm obviously pleased by simple things!)

Back to the WWB

I finally got some old pictures of the White Water Band scanned so that you can see how little we've changed.

Front (l-r):
Terry (guitar)
"Mike"

Back (l-r):
Kirk (drums)
Harlon (bass)
Bruce (keyboards)
Jobie (light & sound)
Jim (guitar)

This is from our Sunday gathering.

Front (l-r): Harlon, Jim, Jobie

Back (l-r): Terry, Michael

(l-r): Karen (omnipresence), Michael, Ben (sound & lights), Kirk, Terry, Harlon, Jim

Baseball Stuff

I'm not a big baseball fan. I enjoy going to a game now and then, generally for one of two reasons: first, if the son of a friend of mine is playing, I'm interested; second, just for the novelty of a now-and-then experience. Below are a couple of baseball things that crossed my field of vision in the last couple of days.

Here's a wonderful little video one of my White Water Band mates sent out via email yesterday. You'll see a talented athlete performing an amazing stunt and a pretty girl. Best of all, the athlete and the pretty girl are one and the same. So, check out this catch!

The following poem appeared as part of today's Writer's Almanac. It's by Donald Hall, from his book White Apples and the Taste of Stone (2006). The picture it paints is a poignant contrast to that in the video. I see myself in this old outfielder much more readily than anywhere near the ballgirl.

Old Timers' Day

When the tall puffy
figure wearing number
nine starts
late for the fly ball,
laboring forward
like a lame truckhorse
startled by a gartersnake,
—this old fellow
whose body we remember
as sleek and nervous
as a filly's—

and barely catches it
in his glove's
tip, we rise
and applaud weeping:
On a green field
we observe the ruin
of even the bravest
body, as Odysseus
wept to glimpse
among shades the shadow
of Achilles.

The Visitor

I went to North Carolina--only an hour away--on Friday afternoon and came back home yesterday. This morning was spent at church, lunchtime at Chili's and the afternoon in the movie theater.

This is the primary advertising image from the new film The Visitor. This is what I saw today, and I recommend it highly. At some point in the course of the film, I remember thinking, What if making music wasn't part of my life, not as if I'd quit doing it but as I'd never had anything to do with it at all? I know a lot of people live such a life, but I simply couldn't imagine it. (That's not necessarily what the film is about, but enough of that is present to spark the thought in me.) I think I want one of those drums, and I think I'd like to try joining a drum circle.

The Fourth

Happy birthday to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Noel Hudson and Yankee Doodle Dandy.

According to today's Writer's Almanac: on this day in 1826, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died; on this day in 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved into his cabin on Walden Pond outside of Concord, Massachusetts; on this day in 1855, Walt Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass; on this day in 1931, James Joyce married Nora Barnacle at the Kensington Registry Office in London.

Of course, fireworks are everywhere this holiday. We've been hearing them in the distance for several nights now and will probably continue to do so through the long weekend and into next week. Last night, at a few minutes after 11:00, I stepped out on our back patio to see what a group of late-teens-early-twenty-somethings had to offer in their fireworks show back in the cul-de-sac. I stood in the dark and listened to them on the other side of a line of small trees--former Christmas trees, I think, that the former owner(s) of our house had planted. Although the young men had been displaying some light and color in their show as I'd seen it earlier from the window, while I was outside it was just a series of whizzes and bangs and sparks. In between these I heard the popped tops of beer cans and phrases such as "Oh shit, watch out!" I thought it quite obvious that this portion of their show was almost completely out of their control, that they had no idea where each individual rocket was headed when the fuse burned down.

Something to think about: You've heard the phrase "Keep Christ in Christmas" (in opposition to the usage of "Xmas" and to the rampant commercialization that has almost nothing meaningful to do with the birth of Christ). What would a similar phrase or sentiment be for Independence Day? If we try to imagine back to 4 July 1776, how do we compare the spirit of the event that culminated on that date to today's celebration? What will today's celebrations taking place in cities and towns and cul-de-sacs across the nation have to do with the Spirt if '76? What will today's words from Barack Obama or John McCain or George Bush have to do with words said by leaders in Philadelphia 232 years ago? How do my neighborhood boys stand in relation to the young men, many of them not so much older, who signed the Declaration of Independence?

What Is This?

I've always wanted one of these, and I finally decided to spend nearly $20 (including shipping & handling) to get one. It should arrive by the beginning of next week. With the holiday on Friday, I'm hoping it shows up on Saturday.