May 27, 2000

     I was thinking a few weeks ago about heaven, what it might be like, feeling pretty sure the descriptions of heaven I've heard wouldn't be heaven for me.  So maybe, I thought, it might be different for everyone - maybe the best day of your life over and over again, though even that might not seem heavenly after a couple million years.  I didn't figure heaven out, but it set me wondering what I'd call the best day of my life or even if there has been such a thing.  And since I'm still among the glad living the best may be yet to come, but truth is there was a day, still clear in my mind after about 27 years.
     It was 1973, I think, but could have been a year earlier or even one later.  Don't remember the month, but I hope it was October.  The Pedernales Falls State Park was open, but nobody knew about it.  No paved roads, only one or two graveled trails.  No facilities.  No people.  5500 acres of wild hills and river and small streams of water fathered by springs coming out of hillsides.  I'd hiked it enough to know where most of the springs were, so could navigate it without carrying a canteen.  I wanted to camp there overnight with my family, but nobody except Becky was interested, so the two of us went out there and spent an afternoon and night and morning alone.  If it was '73, she was seven years old and that seems about right.  I would've been 35.
     Either the afternoon before the night, or the morning after the night, we hiked down a narrow watercourse to a place called Arrowhead Falls.  They closed it off pretty soon after opening the park because too many visitors were ruining the ecosystem.  But that was later.  When we went there ours were the only footprints.  There is a waterfall you can't see, because it is underneath a rock face.  You can hear it, inside the rock, and water bubbles up into a pool.
     I was standing out in front of the pool of water and Becky climbed up one side of the rock face and walked across it.  She said, "Look, Daddy.  I'm a little mountain goat."
     Wonderful day, wonderful daughter, treasured memory.

POLITICS

   I've lived 73 years. I've worked, I've raised great kids. I'm an introverted old guy who likes books and trees and long hikes in the hills. I've never wanted to lead and am not inclined to follow. All I've ever really wanted was home and family and a business of my own so that I wasn't forced into that following thing. I achieved those goals.
   I have a question.
   What in hell is wrong with the American people?
   Where did all of the current barking, yapping, lying, absurd hatred come from? All you have to do to find it is go to a news web site and click on a story about our president, then read the comments that follow. TRY to read them, anyway, because many, many of the posters can't spell or write a coherent sentence. But the hatred, the menace, the snarl come at you like a hungry wolf.
   And the urban myths. Holy baloney. I have received the most blatant lies, exaggerations and outright fictions imaginable about Barack Obama. No sane person would believe a word of them, and yet. And yet, here they come with a gossipy hiss. "Passssss this on". The sender is always outraged that "Obummer" has gotten away with it for so long. Again I ask, what in hell is wrong with the American people?
   Most of my life I've avoided political stereotypes. I've given my votes to candidates I thought best without regard to party affiliation. I understand that there are elected Democrats who should not be doing the people's business. But dear God! The salvos of bile, the trainloads of lies, the twisting of words and motives coming out of the Republican/Tea Party bloc boggles my mind.
   What boggles my mind even more is that apparently a lot of Americans BELIEVE it and can't wait to act on it in the voting booth. Make "Obummer" a one-term president and all will be well again. Facts don't seem to matter. Truth has no place in the argument.
   I have not been happy with some of the issues the president has addressed. I think he has been wrong about some things, but I know he has been right about a lot of things. And I know he would have accomplished a lot more if there'd only been a modicum of cooperation from the other side of the aisle. More than that, I know he is a good and decent man who wants what is best for this country and its people. He has never deserved the nastiness, the put-downs, the caricatures foisted on him by wackos unfit to tie the man's shoes. And by egomaniacs eager to get past him to their own personal glory and significance.
   Many Americans will, I think, vote against themselves this fall without realizing it. Believing lies and putting into power people who will then turn on them. Power-hungry beasts who will take away from the people of this country whatever hopes they carry.
   I get a Social Security check every month. It is not an ENTITLEMENT. It is the end result of paying into the system for fifty years. I have Medicare. It is not an entitlement. It is part of that system I have paid into for all those decades and continue to pay into even now. If not for Social Security and Medicare I am not sure how I would continue living an independent life.
   Democrats gave those blessings to me. FDR and LBJ. And now the GOP/TP wants to take it away because THAT party blew our savings on wars we never should have fought. Of course, they want to blame "Obummer" for that as well.
   Okay, I'll stop. Nobody is going to read these words, but it felt good to put them down. My America now lives by the golden rule. Whoever has the gold makes the rules. I don't like that worth a damn.

VOICES

   Last night I couldn't sleep and began to think about people and events in my life, and I wandered back nearly sixty years to my high school buddy, Joe. Joe died in a headon collision when he was seventeen years old. Headed back to the naval base in San Diego after a trip home for Christmas. He stopped by the radio station to say so long, then later that night I pulled the AP newswire and read his name in a story that broke my heart.
   I still have his face stored somewhere in my head. How he looked, how he soared over a pole vault bar, how he sounded when he talked. All of it, still with me. Most of all, how he sounded when he talked. I can hear it exactly. If he walked in the room right now and said something I would recognize his voice.
   I thought of all the people who've touched my life. Family, friends, enemies, TV news anchors; many of them still around, some of them gone on to wherever it is we go. Every single one of them left their voice with me.
   My brain, without my consent or participation, has somehow catalogued all those voices, matched them with faces and stored the whole shebang. Your brain does it, too. Don't you think that's wonderful? I do.

A rejection from The New Yorker

I think this is a pretty good poem. They obviously don't agree. I wonder how many rejections that makes in my long life.

 

    What I Would Say

She asked me what I'd do
if she smoked cigarettes.
I said I wasn't
sure.
But had she lived,
and if she loved me
still
and if she asked
again
I would say
I'll carry matches.

LETTER FROM 1948

   They stand before their fireplace, logs cut in summer from the eastern woods and split in measured lengths burning hot behind the clasp of hands, the offered backs of trousers.
   There is humor, always humor, even when the crops come up wrong, when rain neglects the sandy land. Words like grass burrs stuck in old socks fall softly to the wood of the floor—springy wood unevenly sawed twenty years before. It holds the words and it holds the walk toward the door, toward feeding time and milking time and time to slop the hogs.
   Oh, the oaks at the gate, the porch that catches wind no matter how the summer heats. The red dirt and the brick chimney boys hide behind at night, the well and the bucket you raise the water in. The burn of shadows, secret joys in the bottom lands you know are there. Know feeling, know laughing, know running, are.


Spicewood, May, 2003

THE SEEDLING GROWN

The flowered bush beside my door
has climbed a dozen summers and
grown tall. I stood beneath it just
this morning, in its shadow watched
the bees harvest its powdered gold,
the fall of petals reaching for my face
like children and old friends who loved
me yet, inviting me to stay.
The pull of earth, cool morning wind
too new, too full of promise, honeybees
and winking dew. And me turned gray
under a dozen summers while I trimmed
its shooting branch and damped its
drying root. They passed by me like
hummingbirds, too fast to catch,
almost too fast to see til here I stand
with only words and an empty hand.
Perhaps a little more—
the sweet white flowers at my feet
and the bush beside my door.

Spicewood 6/15/09

Bullies and Barbed Wire

   A death in my family last week sent me on a 500 mile road trip. Ceremonies ended just a hop and skip from my old elementary school, so I drove past it, remembering kids and teachers and events. It was a big part of my young life.
   Losing my cousin and spending a couple of days with family I don't often see had me in a nostalgic mood which only intensified as I drove along the road past the school.
   Something occurred there many decades ago that I've never forgotten and often wish I could go back and change. Since I can't do that, maybe the next best thing is to think of it as hard-earned experience and write a little about it.
   If you have a child who is bullied, who lives under threat, I have some advice for you. I know it is good advice, and here is how I know:
   I was a very young six my first day of school in that little brick building. Skinny and clueless. Almost all my life so far had been spent on a farm among adoring family. I was pretty smart. My mother had taught me the alphabet using nickel match boxes. Lots of color and big letters. And I could add and subtract. Feats that had gotten me applause on the farm.
   The teacher asked a lot of questions, to all of which I knew the answers. So, of course, my hand was up a lot, probably waving in the air for attention. Nobody applauded and the teacher got tired of me and finally just ignored my hand and called on other kids. At lunch time a little pile of muscle in the second row told me that after lunch he intended kicking my butt for showing off.
   I'll call him Blackie. He is probably a retired east coast mob boss by now. My defense was that I didn't know I was showing off. He didn't care. Things had to be put right.
   I lived less than a quarter mile from the school and walked home for lunch. Afterward I tried to convince my mother I had a stomach ache. She didn't buy it and sent me out the door. I could see a pack of boys in the road running back and forth around a central figure. Blackie.
   I did not want to fight. Innate cowardice? Possibly. More likely a lifetime of admonitions about turning the other cheek and being a good boy.
   At a bend in the road, I slipped through a barbed wire fence into an empty field and circled around to the schoolyard from another direction.
   Class resumed.
   Never, from that moment, during the many years we spent as classmates, did Blackie ever repeat the threat. In fact, we became friends of a sort. But I knew better than to raise my hand much, and I kept my head down.
   Here's the advice: Do not counsel your child to avoid confrontation. Do not tell them to turn the other cheek. Urge them to walk right up the middle of the road and fight. Getting hit does not hurt that much. Whether the fight is won or lost does not matter. Not at all. Confronting the threat is what matters. Confronting the threat instead of sliding through the fence will make all the difference. They'll keep on raising their hand and not caring much if someone doesn't like it.