IT IS REMARKABLE: DAY 224

  I remember watching my dad and my uncles roll their own cigarettes. It had all the elements of a sacred, righteous ritual. Cigarette papers came in a thin little pack, peeling off like cards off the top of the deck while tobacco came in a cotton fabric pouch with a draw string at the top. I could take a page to describe the process; simultaneously manipulating the paper and the pouch, applying the tobacco much like planting seeds in a furrow, then the lick and the stick. 
My mother relentlessly disallowed staring at people. Still I couldn’t help myself and cigarette rolling would equate to spectator sport with modern day Olympic gymnastics. With some foreshadowing I could have scored them on a scale of ten. One would, at least I did, watch the thing unfold intently. If anything unexpected or poorly done were to occur, I noticed. My dad was good, better than most but then he was ambidextrous. 
The part I was most attentive to was the pouch transfer. Once the paper had been positioned and the tobacco loaded, you would lift the open pouch to your face, take the pull string in your teeth and close the pouch with a sure and steady pull. At the same time you must kept the half rolled cigarette balanced with two fingers and thumb of the other hand. The closed pouch would slip into a pocket somewhere and the free hand would be available then to complete the ritual. To me, the pouch transfer was crucial to the overall performance, much like getting height in an aerial summersault or sticking a landing in gymnastics. 
I fixated on people smoking. For some reason I looked down on cigarettes as low class. It might be done very well but there was nothing elite about it. But pipes were different. My Grandpa Roy smoked pipe and his ritual seemed equally sacred and righteous. It took a long time for his pipe to be made ready and it carried as much imagery as lick and stick. He would tap the bowl agains his palm, removing ash left from the last smoke, then with more force agains the heel of his shoe. It would be time to unfold the smallest blade of his pocket knife and begin scraping ash away from the inside of the briar wood bowl. The science of briar wood pipes is interesting even if the ultimate result disappears in the wind. 
He could scrape the inside of his pipe until you might think he was trying to whittle it away but the wood is so tight grained, so hard; very slowly, he got all of the burned in tobacco ash out, making the reloaded smoke burn cool to the taste. Then the knife went back in his pocket and the tobacco can came out, a small, flask like tin with a hinged lid. Holding the pipe in his funnel shaped hand he tapped tobacco down into the bowl. Any stray shreds of tobacco were handily ushered into the bowl and tamped down by his thumb on the same hand. He thumb-tamped and rotated the bowl with long practiced skill. 
Lighting up was predictably slow with long, deep draws. When he pulled, the flame of his match was drawn down into the bowl, only to flare up when he exhaled. Once lit, he shook the match so slowly it was more like waving a flag. That old man, pipe clenched in his teeth, waved a burning match around with his right as if it were High Mass in some exotic Pagan religion. He could draw on that instrument for a full minute with no sign of effort, no sign of smoke. Then with a wisp of blue smoke at the bowl, more of that same blue smoke found its way out between his lips and washed up over his face. An “Amen” would have seemed appropriate.
When I was ten, maybe eleven; a friend and I went on a week long, maybe ten days of smoking cigarettes we had stolen from our dads. Jerry questioned how long we could keep stealing cigarettes without being caught and we had to rethink the adventure. It was a no-brainer for me. No matter how grown up it might make me feel, it made every part of my body revolt. He went on to smoke the rest of his life; cancer got him several years ago, don’t know the details but it doesn’t change anything. My last smoke was in 1950 and I expect that data point will not change. But I still watch people suck on those long, white, filtered, pre rolled in a flip-top box cigarettes and make smoke come out their nose. It is remarkable but so are dogs that eat their own poop.

FEEL THE KEY TURN: DAY 222

  Imagine tumbling knees and elbows, down a long staircase, end over end, and just when you think you’ve reached the end it gets a boost and the down-bound, gravity driven ride keeps on going. But then you wake up or your mom calls you to breakfast, the tumbling goes away and the illusion goes with it. Between Covid and red neck politics, I get the tumbling feeling. Yesterday, the President argued at a rally, “We’ve won the war with the virus. . .” but Johns Hopkins University reported over a thousand fatalities for the preceding day and 86,000 plus, new confirmed cases; it’s not like you don’t know who to believe.  
If only my mom would call me down to breakfast, I’m ready for a new story.  In a dream last night; I don’t usually dream in detail, I was in a crowd, too close, too many people, no Personal Protective Equipment, no distancing. It was surreal. I thought of death by firing squad. In that action, up to a dozen marksmen take aim and fire but only some have live rounds. The others fire blanks so that nobody knows for sure, who fired the fatal shot. It leaves some wiggle room for a squeamish shooter. “It probably wasn’t me so I’ll believe it was the other guy and move on.” On the other hand, which shooter fired the lethal bullet doesn’t matter at all to victims or their families. Strange, how people decide who to extend concern and sympathy for when it comes to life and death. Bullets or virus, if it’s not someone we care about, does it matter?
If I let myself, I could give up and just sink in a sea of pandemic and self righteous hypocrisy. But I’ve been to the edge of that rift and there was no relief there either, God is too busy making America great again. Maybe I’m at a stalemate, resolution would be too much to ask for. I am going to time myself out. Maybe if I sit in the corner with my face to the wall, a story from better days will let me off the hook for a while. Pick a year, any year. Try 1970; Western Illinois University. As a Graduate Assistant, I worked in a shared office with five other GA’s. Our work loads were huge, scheduled or on call 24/7, that is the nature of the system. Sometimes my wife and 2 year-old were awake when I got home or when I had to leave. So an opportunity for us to go on a date was both rare and special. In midwinter, the Student Union Board hosted a concert. Singer Judy Collins would perform on the field house stage. 
I would be in the Grad. Asst. office, on my own time, crunching numbers for a research paper. Tickets were included with paid fees up front for undergrad students. They printed four thousand tickets that were either snatched up by students on the first day or sold outright. But my office was in the building, had my own keys. With an opening act scheduled for 7:00, concert goers started coming through the lobby doors after dark. I had been there all day. At a prearranged time I went down to one of the locked back doors, opened it and let my wife in. She was dressed her best with a pint of shrimp fried rice from the Golden Dragon. We talked while I ate, into the opening act. Timing was perfect, with open seating it was time for us to go find our seats. 
It was a turbulent time; Protests against the war in Viet Nam were an everyday thing. Folk music could have been labeled ‘Protest’ music and Judy Collins was on the cutting edge. She was special. We were the same age, both turned 30 within a few weeks of each other. She sang like an angel and it always sounded like she was singing just for me. Long and tall with hair down to her waist and a big, Martin, acoustic guitar, she held us in a trance for two hours with songs like ‘Someday Soon’ and ‘Both Sides Now’. The song I was waiting for came late in the program. ‘Suzanne’, written by Leonard Cohen it begged, it lamented, it gave a voice to doubts and suspicions we all harbored over the war and the bigots who waged it. It questioned everything that we once held sacred; could anything ever be holy again!  
        “. . . Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water . . . he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower . . . But he himself was broken, long before the sky would open . . . Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.” 
What we didn’t know was that she was hopelessly addicted to alcohol, that her personal life was in shambles. The music made her famous but it couldn’t fix the ‘broken’. I’ve never been close enough to fame to even imagine what it's like but I do know ‘broken’. Still her music lifts me up. Fifty years later, Judy has survived her addictions, reinvented herself, made her own peace. Now, all I would hope for is to steal away a few peaceful hours. Given a chance, I can remember, I can close my eyes and feel the key turn in the locked door, give my date a hug. I can mouth the words to every song, share time and space with those I love, even if it’s all in my mind, and I will be good to go in a little while.

GIVE OR TAKE A YEAR: DAY 219

  Eddie Briscoe was a 2nd grader in 1988, a little black boy at Sanford Ladd Elementary School in Kansas City, Missouri. I was his gym teacher. That job was a port in the storm, not the job I wanted but at the time I was glad to have it. He was his teacher’s pet, first in line when they came downstairs to the gym. I met them at the landing, Eddie on the first step. School rules required the class to stand in line quietly, no talking, eyes on the teacher. She announced that she was turning them over to me but that her rules were still to be observed. In that short pause, standing next to Eddie, he would reach up and touch me on the forearm with his index finger like E.T. in the movie, softly stroking the fine, blond hair. 
Eddie was always well dressed, clean and well mannered. Students at Ladd came from every kind of home environment, from the best to the worst. With no way of knowing, I presumed that he had a stable, nurturing place to go home to. On our little transitions to and from the stairway landing we often exchanged little bits of cordial banter. He was my favorite as well, the only name and face I remember from a year and a half at Sanford Ladd. Give or take a year, he would be 39 now. 
One day I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. His face lit up with a big-eyed, toothy grin; whatever his hesitation it wasn’t that he didn’t know. “A pimp. . .” he replied, and his grin expanded even more. I wasn’t ready for that but I followed up, “Why is that?” Again, he had to decide if he should take me into his confidence; “Man . . . they drive Cadillacs and have all the women.” I got more than I asked for. Eddie Briscoe was his teacher’s pet, proper in every way but he was also a child of the black culture and they grow up fast. We are the products of our environment, are we not? My presumption about his out of school experience was just a wishful parallel to my white experience. 
I have no idea where he is now or the course his life has taken. Certainly his adult role models were nothing like mine when I was 7 years old. Likewise, I was not born into the ‘School to Prison’ pipeline where children, black boys in particular are systematically funneled into the legal system as perpetrators rather than officers/administrators. But I know how it works now and my White badge of privilege is as much a burden as it is a franchise. I will not expand on that cultural breach now but I can not pass a police car or pick up merchandise in a store without being reminded. The cards are stacked in my favor. Any time the odds favor you, they are by definition against someone else. The playing field has never, not ever been level; not even close.
In 1995 I taught science at Northdale Academy, the alternative high school for East Baton Rouge Parish in Louisiana. Mostly African American, our 220 students were all in legal jeopardy with social workers or parole officers assigned and court hearings coming up on the calendar. I went there believing my previous experience with urban, street savvy kids would serve me well. Not only was I wrong about that, I was from the North. My chances of surviving that endeavor were slim and none. 
My students liked me, that was clear all along. But communicating required an interpreter. I neither talked the talk nor walked the walk. I was too white, from another planet. We spent too much time wrestling for control or them trying to teach me attitude and posture, how to appear strong, a sophisticated feat of intimidation without challenging another’s integrity. But I had no direct experience with street culture. What was second nature to them was absolutely foreign to me. At midyear I resigned. The kids were angry, they thought I had given up on them. “Your job was safe" they said, ". . . you weren’t going to lose it.” I tried to explain, “It’s not about a pay check, it’s about being good at what you do.” I had failed with them, again and again. Their academic progress was at a standstill. The question was, how long do you keep failing before you let it go and move on? They didn’t like it but they were big enough to accept my values, even if they were not shared. On the street in Baton Rouge, if you're not going to be fired, keep dancing the dance, take the money and don't worry. 
We made peace on their terms. They affirmed, “You are a good guy, we respect you.” They were sorry we didn’t connect sooner. I encouraged them, “. . . don’t give up on yourself.” It takes being in the right place at the right time and I had missed out on one or the other. That was my parting message. A month later I was teaching Physical Science in a suburban, white, Dutch Reform community in West Michigan. My students all showed the respect and cooperation that their parents required of them. It was a job I could do and I got the job done.We made good fit and I stayed there until I retired, six years later. 
In those six years I exploited White privilege, we all did. Success was the norm, struggle was just a word in a book somewhere. My Northdale students had been unforgiving with their brand of ‘Street Justice’. Every violation required a swift, appropriate consequence. Our campus was officially designated as a neutral ground. There would be no violence, of any kind there. If someone had an ass-kicking coming there would be a negotiation as to when and where. Nobody looks the other way and lets it go. That kind of ruthless justice did not exist in suburban Michigan where rules were guide lines and consequence depended on who you were. My white, Dutch Reform students wouldn’t last an hour on Choctaw Drive in North Baton Rouge. 

CHINOOK'S FOR LUNCH: DAY 215

  With what seems like a premature, overreaction, I find myself forsaking t-shirts and short pants in favor of sweat shirts and winter weight trousers. I know what month it is and where I am but I’m like the batter who steps out of the box, making the pitcher wait. The high, tight fastball (cold weather) is more than I want to deal with right now. We have an overcast sky with a sharp edge on the 40 degree breeze. This must be one of those unanticipated modulations that accompany old age. I don’t handle cold weather like I used to. I still like the message it sends and I would reset my thermostat but the damn thing is on autopilot. Sneeze, shiver, runny nose; I never had that reaction when I was just 70.
What I would really like is to revisit a story that is nothing but good. In 2009 I volunteered the whole summer season at Kenai Fjords National Park, Seward, Alaska. Assigned to the Interpretation Division, my job was to work at Exit Glacier’s Visitors Center and to lead guided hikes on its associated trails, telling the Park’s story. 
Late in the season, with schools open, we still had visitors but the numbers had dropped off. On a day off, I was invited to lunch with Jeff Mow, the Park Superintendent. We went to Chinook’s, a great restaurant on the harbor. Our table was at the window, looking out over all the boats in their slips. It was ‘His’ table. The Kenai Fjords family was relatively small and he knew everybody by name, even the volunteers. When the circumstance called for formality, everyone got proper but day to day, we were all on a first name basis. More than anything else, he wanted me to know how much he personally appreciated volunteers in general and me in the moment. He had done graduate study at the University of Michigan and we swapped stories of Ann Arbor. Then he told me the following story. 
Two years earlier during the filming of a Ken Burns documentary, ‘The National Parks’ he had brought the then Senators, John McCain and Hillary Clinton to Chinook’s for lunch. They sat where we were, at ‘His’ table: I sat where John McCain had been seated. It seems the angst and rivalry between competing politicians ended when the cameras turned away and they were great friends, comfortable in close company and equally prone to teasing and spontaneous laughter. Jeff shared with them the Park’s story, the same story I shared every day. 
As the story telling went around the table, Senator Clinton first prompted, then challenged her cohort to recite Robert Service’s, ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee.’ After some coaxing, John McCain, sitting in the same spot I then occupied, he began: “There are strange things done in the midnight sun, by the men who moil for gold: The Arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold . . .” The work is an epic poem. It goes on and on, verse after verse to a distant conclusion: “. . . The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, but the queerest they ever did see, was the night on the marge of Lake LeBarge, I cremated Sam McGee.”
That was just the beginning, the backstory followed. As most people know, McCain spent five years as a POW in Hanoi, North Viet Nam. He was the son of an American Admiral and had refused to accept special treatment which drew reprisals including long periods of solitary confinement. His only means of contact with anybody was secretly tapping on a radiator pipe. The subtle metallic ping traveled through walls to other radiators in other cells. Another prisoner heard his pinging and responded in Morse Code. Over several years they communicated in secret. The other prisoner taught the maverick McCain the poem, in Morse Code. It took years. Whenever one of them wanted to study, they studied. It was one of several strategies that helped McCain prevail over his captor’s ruthless torture. Thirty five years later, with no preparation, he would recite the poem flawlessly for Jeff Mow and Hillary Clinton at Chinook’s, on the harbor in Seward, Alaska. 
At the end of each season, Jeff Mow took each volunteer who had spent the whole summer, to lunch. I wasn’t any more special than other volunteers but he made you feel as if you were. The next year he took the job as Park Superintendent at Glacier National Park in Montana where he still serves in that capacity. On paper, this is a good story but good stories are a dime a dozen. This one is remarkable, the way it came together and then unfolded across thousands of miles, it was profound. Unless you were there, you lose decades of oral tradition and shared experiences, you miss the route it took to find me. If you weren’t there you lose the linkage from person to person, from the right table and the right chair, with the only source that could bring you into that loop, that day at Chinook’s, on the harbor in Seward, Alaska.

A NEW FACE: DAY 212

  Recently, my disillusion with humankind has been renewed. It makes me wish I had a different band wagon to jump onto. Still, I’m not going to flipflop in a flash of insight like Saul on the road to Damascus. I suppose I’ve been hanging onto a thread of Hope. Unlike Faith, it abides without any promises. Still, Hope does come with motivation and purpose, to keep on keeping on.

On the other hand, the arc of history has a long, flat trajectory. Trying to glean historical meaning from this turbulent moment is like unraveling the history of Economics from only the coins in your pocket. It may be what you notice first but if all you have to write with are periods and comas, where is the story? What disarms me now is likely nothing more than the minuscule, random flicker of a long burning candle. A single, human lifespan may seem enough but history requires many generations to gage its own arc. 

I have likened human history to a train on an endless track, never going back. People are all born on board but unlike the song, ‘Hotel California’ there is no difference between checking out and leaving and that can happen any time. Passengers on the train interact, watch the scenery go by and find their niche (earn their living) right there in the observation car. Ten thousand years ago, clad in animal skins they were hunter gatherers with stone tools and weapons, tending their campfires with great care. On this end of history’s arc, passengers wear lycra and cotton, carry back packs and suit cases while text messaging and making new friends on FaceBook. At this point so far, I can recall most of my human train ride. Rather than bitch about today’s turbulence or tomorrow’s uncertainty, I would be thankful for the ride. Some days on the train are worth the remembering. 

In 1953, baseball was king. My town wasn’t really a town, no city government, no town square, just a post office, a couple of churches, open fields and scattered houses. Our little league baseball program stopped with 11-12 year-olds, but the next town down the road had a team for 13 & 14. I remember my mom driving me over to City Hall in Grandview, Missouri to sign up. At the time, being from a rival school was no big deal. I was just a new face. I swung an average bat but my arm was strong, with a good glove and soft hands I plugged into a 3rd base/shortstop/Catcher rotation, depending on who was pitching. If I couldn’t get a ride, the 5 mile bike ride was its own reward. 

Under the lights one Saturday night, a big commotion in the parking lot almost stopped the game. Former President, Harry Truman arrived with his Secret Service bodyguard. They sat in folding chairs on top of our dugout. Media reporters came by for a quote and photos. In the dugout, we were so close we could hear them laugh. One of the things I liked about catching was that I sweat a lot, it took some of the itch out of the heavy wool uniform. Changing out of my gear between innings, I got a smile and a nod from the Secret Service bodyguard. We were all too cool to covet their attention but I did return the smile and the nod. The retired President lived in nearby Independence, Missouri but Grandview was his home town when he was a boy.

I turned 14 that summer. In Grandview I made new friends and grew some confidence. Best of all, I got to play baseball. My place in the batting order was usually 7, sometimes 8 but with 17 or 18 players, I never sat the bench. Come August our season played itself out. We won more than we lost, good enough to have great fun and feel good but no place for us in the playoffs.

At my school the coaches started breaking out football equipment and I was not a new face. I would be a 9th grader and I could go out for the team. With no freshman team, I was too small to compete with the big guys but I got to do warm up exercises, run sprints and hold a dummy. At the time, freshman football was about taking your licks and paying your dues. I had two friends who were big, fast and strong enough to get some playing time but at 115 pounds, my job was to jump in the middle of every opportunity, get knocked down, then get back up with a smile.

In school, the 9th grade was better than I thought it would be. We were in the same building as the year before but we had new teachers. Playing baseball in Grandview, they filled out paperwork from my birth certificate and called me by my first name. I liked that. In 9th grade, class lists went by permanent records. From the first day, they called me by my first name, Frank. It took a while for my classmates to make the switch but come Thanksgiving, nobody called me LeRoy. 

From a career in education, I know that adolescence and early teenage years can be like navigating a minefield, still I don’t remember experiencing much social pressure or unrealistic expectations. Academically, I did just enough to get by. Socially, I was never a popular, mainstream character but I always managed to fit in. I am still on this train, still making memories. I love finishing with a great quote. This one comes from Forrest Church, a former Unitarian Minister; “Do what you can; Want what you have; Be who you are.”  

CAN'T BELIEVE A WORD: DAY 209

  From ‘Alice In Wonderland’, the phrase “. . . down the rabbit hole” has become a metaphor for a venture into the unknown. In Wonderland, Alice encountered a bizarre cast of characters, all of them avoiding the Queen of Hearts. Her simple solution for every offense was; “Off with their heads!” I don’t remember any beheadings but the arrogant presumption was consistent with her bloated ego. The active agent in the metaphor is ‘unknown’, no way to know what the queen would do or what the next turn would bring. Regardless of how you go down the rabbit hole, feet first, wanting nothing other than to go back or diving headfirst into the adventure, it is the anxiety of the ‘unknown’ that drives the story.

After seven months of tumbling down the Covid ‘Rabbit Hole’, every day presents its own set of bizarre coincidences. Like with Alice, when it all begins to feel ‘real’, something upsets the cart and the tumbling resumes. The virus alone should be enough to make people take stock, rethink what is important and what can wait. One would remember that a common threat like World War II allowed people to set aside their competing interests and collaborate. But with today’s paranoia we get the opposite. Instead of joining forces the pandemic is adding fuel to the angst between zombie-like political partisans. 

On the up-side; I woke up still not dead again today. That is the title and hook line from a Willie Nelson song from five or six years ago. I’ve mentioned it before in this journal. Still, the clever word play and its affirmation of life, it is good medicine for this old man. It goes on to complete the rhyme; “. . . the internet said I had passed away.” Watching Willie age over the years, I can only appreciate his sense of living in the moment and a profound understanding that life is short, live now. 

My house is half a mile from the interstate but there is a far reaching gully that funnels road noise all the way up the swale and through my yard. In the dark, with the bedroom window open I can hear the traffic and get a sense of how late it is. On weekends, there is a local motorcycle jockey who waits until the wee-hours to race the highway; must be young and fearless. Certainly not fat old pony tail dudes on Harleys, the sound is unmistakably, crotch-rocket. From the tight pitch, high rpm’s I can extrapolate instinctively; over 100 mph. Every weekend, several runs each night; who they are racing, I don’t know. But it wakes me up and I remember what it felt like to go fast on a motorcycle. Excitement overrides every other brain function and danger only heightens the rush. 

A boyhood friend, we were neighbors as kids, he died of cancer in 2011. At his funeral I noticed an unusual memorial nearby. It was a large, engraved granite slab, mounted on its edge with several identical grave stones arranged in front of it. Checking closer, the slab identified with a local bar and motorcycle club, paying tribute to their lifestyle. Each of the matching granite grave stones were simple with a Harley Davidson logo, a cavileer quote, a name and the span of each life. How they died was not revealed but in every case, they all died young. If I were to revisit Owen’s grave and check the Harley Davidson collection, there might very well be more recent plantings. They cross my mind in the wee hours when the scream of high rpm’s snake up the gully and in my window: and if falling back to sleep is easy it could be Willie’s and my shared observation; “But if I died I wasn’t dead to stay; and I woke up still not dead again today.” 

As I approach the end of each article my nature is to create closure, falling back on something rational, something I think everyone should know. But I resist that temptation today. Most of what I think to be interesting and important would not raise an eyebrow of someone still plotting life’s maze. There was a time I wondered what my grandfather thought, what he believed. But had I asked, one of us would dismiss the other, that his blade had lost its edge or that my shooter was unloaded. But my musical backstory has a long play list and I drink from that well. I pick the song, I listen for as long as it meets my need. I would love to engage with him now, me at 81 and he at 132. We wold disagree on how women and people of color should be treated. But we would find a common ground with the music and the stories there in. “You can’t believe a word that people say, and I woke up still not dead again today.” 

OUTRAGEOUS FICTION: DAY 206

  The piece I wrote yesterday failed the 2nd reading test. It wasn’t bad writing, just more ruminating on the human condition and I’ve about worn that out. But I had a deja vu kind of thing (all over again) yesterday. I had spoken with my daughter in law and that almost always includes a musical play list. In the pandemic I don’t listen to the radio much, if it’s not the virus it’s the president; how is that for a choice. Neither have I programmed my smart phone to be my disc jockey. But she reminded me how good music can lift your spirits and I needed the reminder. So I went to my I-Tunes library and selected a Beth Hart album. That started an unpredictably random sequence of connecting the dots. It leapfrogged from the Beth Hart album to her performance at the 2012 Kennedy Center Awards, honoring Buddy Guy. From there we went ahead to the 2013 Awards, where Buddy Guy performed to honor Carlos Santana. 
I decided to watch the entire Santana tribute. The host was none other than Harry Belafonte, Jamaican born King of Calypso in the 1950’s & 60’s.  His introduction began with a story, an outrageous fiction about the dangers of allowing immigrants into the U.S.A. Belafonte, an immigrant himself, alluded to when his career was struggling in the 60’s, that he needed a break through and sought an invitation to an outdoor concert in New York called Woodstock. But his slot was snatched up by a young guitar phenom from Tijuana, Mexico named Carlos Santana. With an absurd twist of logic, it raised the idea that Latino immigrants were taking jobs away from Caribbean born Americans. The audience went wild with laughter. The humor was so transparent, so absurd; what can I say! 
That was seven years ago. In the meantime, America has made a troubling shift away from a culture of acceptance and inclusion. In its place we have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. The ‘Me First-America First’ agenda has been legitimized by the President, whose character shortfalls personify what I was taught to detest. They may feed the super ego but I don’t want that karma coming back on me. That, I'm told, is what tycoons do. I have nothing good to say about him but my opinion and two dollars can get you a cup of coffee in most places.
Needless to say, the Harry Belafonte humor may have lost its way but the music is timeless. In his second career, Santana has modeled the hero’s mythical journey to perfection. The young warrior sets out to prove himself, he struggles, endures, maybe even prevails. Then comes a conversion, he returns a changed man. What he has to share is his trove of experience rather than the point of his sword. It speaks to the classic hero Santana has become. In comparison, DT can’t compare.
I’m old enough, it takes a while for my flashbacks to unfold. It was 1970, Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Boxer’; a song about struggle and falling down, about the getting up. I liked it straight out the first time. Before it had finished I wanted to hear it again. Yet, the only line I could remember was, “Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” That was enough. I may need someone to point out my errors when it’s me, hearing what I want to hear and disregarding the rest. I’m human and that’s what we do. But I would have it that my errors fall in the Golden Rule’s shadow. We are social creatures after all, we’re all in this together, we need each other. Still, any successful, self serving hypocrite can distort the Golden Rule into an unscrupulous, Me-First scheme. Don’t let me go there. 

TIME WASHES CLEAN: DAY 201

  Rather than run with the news, I want to write about something else. The virus isn’t going away soon like he said it would, the economy isn’t coming back soon like he said it would either. Most people are so entrenched in their political fox holes they might as well be writing their own headlines. I am no different. Anything at all that comes out of the White House is either suspect or summarily dismissed. When you understand that dismal set of circumstances, where we neither trust nor believe our cohorts on anything if their political beliefs run contrary to our own, then times really are hard and it is a sad day. 
I remember a time when, from the neighborhood to the congress, people agreed to disagree and to collaborate in spite of their differences. I read this morning that Pete Buttigieg, former Mayor of South Bend, IN, and early leader in the Democratic Party primaries has written a book: “Trust, America’s Best Chance.” In it he notes; “building that trust, in both American institutions and fellow citizens, is the only way to address the other challenges facing the country.” That approach really resonates with me but then I liked his ideas before he wrote the book. Interestingly, it is the same basic message I got years before, from Jonathan Haidt’s books and subsequent lectures. The principle of qualified expertise is based on transparency and critical review. Political spin that lacks stiff scrutiny is piss in the wind but they sell a lot of it now. Who checks the facts? Without transparency and wide awake oversight, all you make is noise.
Anybody can claim anything. We are witnessing the playground bully principle in action. Rather than raising the bar for expert commentary, the bar is removed altogether. That puts us on the slippery slope to misinformation and emotionally charged name calling. All it does is change the subject away from what they don’t want to talk about. Not long ago the POTUS gave credence to his science source suggesting that bleach could be administered intravenously to cure Covid-19. Which institutions you trust does make a difference and trusting your future to a self appointed pretender is stupid. When the directorship of a federal agency is predicated on loyalty to the President rather than qualified expertise in the field, what you see is what you get. 
Today, all I can do is wait for my absentee ballot to arrive in the mail. But I can take comfort in my music. Storytellers like me, we like music with lyrics, a complete story reduced to a few lines, a beginning a middle and an end.
The Beetles are a good place to start, “. . . and when the broken hearted people, living in the world agree, there will be an answer, let it be.” Then, Carole King came along with: “. . . They’ll hurt you, yes, and desert you, and take your soul if you let them, oh, but don’t you let them.” Elton John touched a nerve end with, “. . . you lived your life like a candle in the wind, never knowing who to cling to when the rain set in.” This is cathartic; I could do this all day. Linda Ronstadt sang, “. . . time washes clean, love’s wounds unseen. That’s what someone told me but I don’t know what it means.” Clapton gave us, “. . . Lately I've been running on faith. What else can a poor boy do?” Don McLean, “. . . do you believe in rock and roll? Can music save your mortal soul? And can you teach me how to dance real slow?”
Once, before grandchildren, my son and daughter in law took me to see James Taylor in concert. It is still a high point in my life, not just for JT but also for who I was with. After what seemed like a long wait, standing, applauding to a darkened stage, calling for an encore, JT slipped out unnoticed from behind a curtain and sat on the corner of the stage with his feet hanging down. It was mid-August-hot but nobody cared. He talked to us and with us, like you would expect between friends. After a long chat, with no introduction, no warning, he did a finger roll on his guitar and eased into the song, “. . . There is a young cowboy, he lives on the range. His horse and his cattle are his only companions. He works in the saddle and he sleeps in the canyons, waiting for summer his pastures to change.”   Yes; I do feel better. 

SAYETH THE LORD: DAY 198

  About the time I started school, we started monthly outings to south of Nevada, Missouri to check on my surrogate grandparents. Ida, Sally and Forrest Cole were siblings, children of an old farmer-Civil War veteran. The Cole’s raised my dad from when he was a toddler. In my time, Sally and Forrest lived off a dirt, county road in a tiny, no plumbing or electricity, 3 room house at the end of a long two-track. We stayed with them in warm weather. My brother and I slept with pillows on a folded, quilt mat on the floor while our parents slept on folding, canvas army cots. 

Ida had married Hiram Stockdale, an old, bachelor farmer a few miles up the road. A marriage of convenience, neither had ever been married but in their 70’s, they agreed, so to speak, to look after each other. Their’s was an explosive, volatile arrangement as both had short fuses and wicked tempers. She came over in a horse drawn spring wagon to visit and break bread. Sometimes we stopped Sunday morning at the Stockdale place on our way home. In cold weather we stayed there, with two wood stoves and beds for everyone. I remember poking my nose out from under a feather-down comforter to the smell of bacon and the wood stove in the kitchen. As harsh and unforgiving as she was with Hiram, Ida was an affectionate mother hen to my brothers and me. I remember the touch of her gnarled old hands on my head and shoulders, and on my face. 
Time drags and you think you will never grow up but then you do.  Seventy five years have slipped away, a day at a time. But time is cheap and plentiful when it lies in wait, spread out ahead like a magic carpet. One of life’s great ironies, how the body grows old but the child inside is trapped in a timeless place. 
With Covid-19 and all of the world’s other woes, putting the best foot forward can be a challenge. Finding fault with people and how they do their business is too easy, why go there? We are what we are, rational animals that dispute the merits of good and evil. Beyond that; Monkey see, monkey do. I want to believe in the human capacity for balance and good will. Still, I’m afraid that corruption (especially corruption) plus oppression and war, they will be with us until we find a more efficient, more effective way to self destruct. Until then, assuming the end doesn’t come on my watch, I would look for the good in people, try to nurture more and squabble less. I think maybe that’s what the Cole family legacy has left me with; greed is insatiable, don’t feed it. Life is difficult enough.
What can I say about the mental acuity of the voting public? Look who was elected to the highest office in the land; an extreme narcissist, bigot, demagogue with the emotional maturity of a 3 year-old. It bears out the truth of a quote attributed to Abe Lincoln, the one about fooling some of the people, all of the time. In this case, enough people to be elected President. He may very well win again. I understand group dynamics but really. . . If this is what makes Americans extraordinary, then ‘extraordinary’ is not the accolade I thought it was. 
The Cole family was extraordinary. Their legacy has been, and for as long aa I can tell their story, it will be about struggle and never giving up. Life seeks after itself and wherever it takes root, it will find a way. They lived in a barter economy along with their dirt poor neighbors. None of them could come up with the ante to get into the game. As long as government and big business (Banks) sleep together, poor people will be expendable, cannon fodder. The Coles all died penniless and spent with less accumulated than when they began. I think their tenacious struggle was extraordinary. 
The disappearing middle class is shrinking and those left behind blame the next ones below them on the status ladder, the have-nots. The taste of prosperity is losing its salt for working people and still they approve massive tax cuts for the 1%, aiming their anger at the next rung below, not the culprits who rob from the top down with deadly attorneys and ill-gotten gain. I guess it comes natural as fox and mice. It takes a lot of mice to sustain the fox. But fear not sayeth the Lord, there will always be enough mice. They reproduce like poor people. In the end, if you love someone who knows the touch of your gnarled old hands and they love you in return, you did well.