Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in plumbbobline's LiveJournal:

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Saturday, May 19th, 2012
6:46 pm	St. Marys The first thing my father did when he returned from war in the south pacific was make a garden in the back yard of our rented duplex. He spaded up a large plot of ground and planted corn. I remember digging a hole to hide in while he worked the ground. My fantasy was to cover the hole with boards so no one could see me. My next memory is of Dad catching me picking up a cigarette mother had left burning in an ash tray. He started to spank me, but mother stopped him. I was not spanked again. The house had its bathroom upstairs. When it was divided, a cubby hole was framed just big enough for a toilet in the bedroom used by me and my sister Joyce. We took our baths in a washtub on the kitchen linoleum in cold weather and on the back porch when it was warm enough. I got the second bath in scummy water. My third memory of my father is him making me a kite that spring. He made a cross of horse weeds and ran string around the edges, then pasted newspaper on it. Underneath he made a loop of string and tied the line onto its middle. The rag bag provided a long tail. He had to add several tail sections before it stopped spinning in the wind. He did this the week I was recovering from chicken pox and was still itching like crazy. We lived there in Tin Can hollow long enough that I went out with a bag over my head for Halloween. My Dad's cousin, Earl Brammer, would tease me even up into college over the incident where I went up to him and said “I betcha don't know who I are.” Benny lived in the last house on the left going down hollow, across from Uncle Edgar and Aunt Betty Hess. Grandmother's Brother and a passel of his kids lived a block from us on a side street parallel to ours. Later, his son Bob, the town carpenter, built a house a block away on the main hollow stree, next to his brother Bud. After the Arnold Brown side street the hollow curved sharply to the left, before ending just past Brammers'. At the curve, in a little ramshakle house, lived a great aunt, or maybe great great one, whose name I've forgot. Her unmarried daughter, Rose Frye, and Rose's sons Hallie and Tony lived with her in the early years. I was warned away from playing with my cousins, but that didn't stop me. Years later we visited them near Lorraine, Ohio, and they took me on a joy ride at night in a “borrowed” car, along a stretch of the Ohio Turnpike not yet open. My spring there was the one before I was to start grade school. It was customary for an older student to take upcoming ones to class before school ended. Arnold Brown's daughter (???), a fifth grader, took a liking to me and took me to her class on the appointed day. Only a year or two later she died in a car with a boy and another couple hit by a train in Sistersville. I still lived in the hollow when I began first grade. Across the street from the Frye house was a steep, dirt road that ran straight up the hill. It was seldom if ever used except as a short cut by students who lived on top. One sport of those kids was to throw rocks at me as I walked to school. So my mother told me to go the long way around, a block up the hollow, right up the hill between the cemeteries, and right two and a half blocks to the school. On that route, Johhny Kyle and a few of his friends would fight with me. My mother reported this to the principal and he called all of us into the office. He passed around a large wooden paddle and told us if we fought any more he would use the paddle on all of us. I was frightened half to death, though I now realize his wisdom in preventing them from picking on me even more because I told on them. In third grade I got my first printed book—actually a children's magazine a classmate gave me because I expressed an interest in it and she didn't want it any more. But by then we lived on Morgan Avenue, against the hill and next to Uncle John Fox's (married to one of grandmother's sisters) daughters, and three houses down from his farm—across from which Grandad moved his house the Refinery gave him when they needed him moved off the property to build a truck fueling depot. The move, achieved with a tractor pulling the house on poles for rollers, with the help of my Dad, uncles and their cousins. (Comment on this)
9:19 am	Family memories Jeremiah's posting about yahtzee in a smoky room at my mother's triggered a few memories I'll try to write down. I remember many years earlier, in the same smoky kitchen, staying up late (hoping I wouldn't be noticed) watching my parents and either Uncle Jude and Aunt Nan, or great Uncle George Hess and Aunt Stella, playing a card game they called "setback." In it you bid and lost points if you didn't make your bid. Points were : high (Ace), low (deuce), (big) joker, (little) joker, Jack, Jick (same color suit as the jack) and game (either the ten of trump or total point cards won by a team). Late one night, Stella, who seldom bid, said in her dead pan voice "Shoot the moon." This meant she was sure her team could get all 10 points, and if successful gave 21 points, which automatically won the game, which went to that number of points. I don't recall how old I was then, but young enough this adult world was a mystery I had, as yet, no judgment about. My world then was mostly family, with a few nearby neighbors, and one neighbor from when we moved to Tin Can Hollow when Dad wrote from the navy that he would be back home soon because the war was over and he had a job at the oil refinery. That neighbor, Mrs. Simonton, took me in when I was three or 4, fed me cookies and pies, and paid loving attention to me: something my mother was incapable of doing. Mother had a baby, little resources, and knew nobody in St. Marys except my dad's family. The only one of them she respected was my grandfather. All of Dad's brothers except the youngest, Cub, were in service overseas. Jude, next in age to my father, was flying tailgunner out of England and was shot down over Germany, went on a death march with a broken leg, and ended up in Stailag 19. Wallace was on a PT boat. Edgar was in the infantry in Europe. Cub (John) I remember being woke up for school by Grandmother with a cup of cold water when he wouldn't get out of bed. Later, when I was in school, Dad and Jullian worked at Quaker State, Wallace got training after service and traveled the country wiring military airplanes. We visited him in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Then he went to Orlando, Florida and later Alaska. he died when I was in perhaps ninth grade from a heart condition resulting from Typhoid fever when a child. Mother met Dad when she came to nurse him in his illness. He was the best loved by everyone--a real charmer. Edgar was jobless with three young children for quite a while. He was an abusive parent. His oldest, Barry, has been in prison since he went to Reform School as a youth. Cub was all state in three sports and went to West Virginia Tech, where he played football and became a high school coach. He married a local Montgomery girl and had three kids. He died in 1960 when his car wrecked into a gasoline truck when he was driving back from officiating a basketball game. My aunt Patricia was born a few months after me. She had downes syndrome and lived at home till Grandmother died, then went to an institution. Grandad and all his sons except Dad were alcoholics. I remember various brothers drunk and fighting in my grandparents' front yard on Saturday night. I was close to Uncle Jude's son Gary, the oldest grandchild, a year older than me. I spent a lot of time at his house (with him on night shift asleep in the bedroom) and at Grandmother's. My mother was depressed, always criticizing. I would also visit the Simontons, our former neighbors until my parents could afford to rent a house with facilities. In eighth and ninth grades I spent my evenings sitting pins at the bowling alley, which was part of the theater complex. My last two years of high school I was projectionist six days a week and spent free time hanging out in a workshop behind the theater with the youngest son, Alex Illar, who was in his twenties. For the last three years of high school I also was close to a mother and son, Gene Streitenberger. He was into electronics. I was always welcome in their home. As a high school friend reminded me at our fiftieth reunion, I was always working a lot. He subbed for me in my lawn mowing business when my family went on vacation in DC. I also had paper routes, worked at a peach orchard two summers. I was financially self sufficient from 6th grade on, bought my lunches, clothes, etc. (Comment on this)
Sunday, September 11th, 2011
9:50 am	9/11 I have a half dozen things which belonged to my father: a shoe last, his hardhat with a OCAW sticker, my grandfather's pocket watch and pocket knife, and a silk tie which I don't remember seeing Dad wear. The tie has a flag and the motto “Remember Pearl Harbor.” I remember December 7, 1951 only because my dad mentioned to Mother at the dinner table, “It's been ten years.” I don't recall seeing any mention of that fact in the Marietta Times we read six days a week, or in Sunday's Parkersburg News. Today, September 11, 2011, there is little else other than 9/11 in the newspapers I read. Even the comics are full of it. What is the difference between these two events, sixty years apart, where our nation was attacked on its own soil? In 1941 we were attacked by another nation. We went to war with that nation and its allies, we won the war, and went on with our lives. In 2001, we were attacked by a small group of radicals. We went to war with two nations which had nothing to do, as nations, with the attack, and the radicals won the war. Their strategy was the same as that of Ronald Reagan: let the enemy bankrupt themselves in a cold war with no defined national boundaries by sinking so large an amount in building a military against that which hasn't a military solution. Reagan's strategy caused the Soviet empire to collapse. Bin Laden's strategy has bankrupted America, and caused an internal political stalemate unwinnable by either side. Since 9/11, the US military budget has doubled; it now exceeds the combined defense budgets of the rest of the world. On top of that economic drain, “homeland security” budgets have become enormous and bureaucracies have bred and multiplied. Then there are the secret budgets of the CIA and other intelligence agencies. The result? Ten years ago we had a budget surplus. Today, deficits are dragging us down. Our fear of an external threat posed by a handful of terrorists led us to ignore internal threats which led to the Depression of 2008. Think like Bin Laden for a moment. What would you do if you seriously intended large scale harm to the US? How easy it would be to: 1. Set up an export corporation in a non Arab country shipping hundreds of containers of goods to America's ports and put a lethal biological agent in a few of those containers going to the major ports in America. The containers could be trucked anywhere. We don't inspect containers of tennis shoes or other imports. Piece of cake. 2. Place a luggage bomb on an airline headed for the US from a nation which doesn't pay much attention to what goes into its luggage. Truth is, Al Qaeda doesn't need to do anything else. It has us pouring money down a rat hole attempting military solutions to a non military problem. Maslow said, “if your only tool is a hammer, every problem is a nail.” Ironic, that the CIA helped form Al Qaeda to fight the Soviet Union when they were occupying Afghanistan. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 12th, 2011
3:33 pm	Chinese Restaurant Occasionally, when I have business in a nearby town, I time my trip so I can have lunch at my favorite Chinese restaurant. I guess I'm a creature of habit, because I always sit in the same place and order the same thing. But yesterday there was a bunch of roofers at my customary table, and a nearby table was filled with another group, so I sat at one of the three tables to the right of the door, beside the buffet table. Perhaps because my routine was off I decided to not order my usual meal, pork with garlic sauce; instead I asked for bean curd with garlic sauce. This restaurant is a very welcoming place--one thing I like about it. The men at my usual table were dark-skinned with caucasian features. I would guess mediterranean or middle eastern. The other large group were of Hispanic origin. Another group of Hispanics came in and sat down at a table between the two original groups. While I was waiting for my order a grandmother and grandchild came in, sat at one of the remaining tables on the left of the restaurant, and began getting food from the buffet. The grandmother kept fussing at the little girl "Only take one of that. You can always come back for more." The remaining tables on my side of the room soon filled up. When the grandmother made her second round of the buffet, she leaned toward me and whispered "We should have sat on your side of the room!" as she glanced at the dark skinned men on her side. By the time I understood what she meant she was already back at her table. I've been going to this restaurant for a couple of years and this is the first instance of racism I saw there. Many times I've seen old country folk in their bib overalls chat with the young man who runs the register like he was a lifetime family friend. I guess I was due for a reminder that all isn't just ducky in South Carolina. (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 12th, 2011
8:27 am	Oil Refinery Town Childhood I'm looking online at a post card of Quaker State Oil Refinery in the foreground, the town of St. Marys, WV in middle ground, and in the background the Ohio River bridge and the adjacent Ohio hills. Atop the highest hill are two tall trees. When I was a boy only one was left and we called it “one tree point.” My father said in his youth it was three tree point. The card is postmarked 1940 and was published by Phillips Drug Store. The refinery was built in either 1916 or 1913, depending on which source you believe. Somewhere I have a picture of around three dozen men in rough work garb who were the refinery's first employees. Among them my grandfather, John Michael Hess (born 1895) and some Pryors, who were cousins of my grandmother. Grandad was the company's first hire. The last time I visited St. Marys, 2009, for my fiftieth high school reunion, I went into a restaurant for breakfast and recognized Cricket Pryor, who was my dad's cousin and about his age. Dad was born in 1917. He worked at the refinery fresh out of high school, worked construction and other jobs for a few years, then went back to the refinery when he got out of the Navy in 1945 and retired from there in 1979, eight years before the plant was closed. It is now a superfund site. I grew up in a house at the edge of town. Our back yard ended with a wooded mountain. Half a block down the street my uncle, John Fox, and aunt Artie, grandmother's sister, had a small farm in a hollow which split the shoulder behind the house from another shoulder of the main ridge. A creek ran down beside the right hand shoulder, which was the farm's pasture. In grade school I played in the run, which we called such wet weather creeks, and picked wild strawberries from its banks. The creek was boxed in sides and bottom with concrete when it entered town and fenced off on both sides . There were two houses on the ridge side of the creek, then an electric substation, then the oil refinery. A tall fence surrounded the refinery, but we learned when we explored the creek, we could get past that fence by following the creek underground as it passed the main part of the refinery until it opened up on top before leaving the grounds. We also found a spot in the fence where we could get under. So the refinery became our playground. We climbed the tanks, walked on empty 55 gallon drums as we set them rolling on their sides, found hiding places under buildings, inside boxcars, in foundation bushes surrounding the office building. On the far side of the refinery was a Marble King factory which made marbles, play dishes, molded glass animals and blown glass wares. Outside the building were barrels of reject marbles plenty good to shoot in slingshots. Our next door neighbor was a glass blower there. In the middle of one night when I was in my early teens, my father shook me awake and said the town was being evacuated. The marble factory was on fire and sparks big as towels were flying over the refinery. We watched it from across the river. The refinery was unscathed. Several years later I was shingling a roof in Huntington, West Virginia, one hot spring day. A woman next door was sunbathing in her yard with a radio loud enough for me to hear. On the news they announced there was an explosion at Quaker State Refinery. I rushed to a pay phone and learned my dad was not one of the ones killed. But a guy I knew was dead. Many of my classmates went to work for Quaker State straight out of high school and planned to retire from there as their fathers did. But they only got twenty some years before the company sold the plant and left them unemployed in their forties, a bad age to look for work. (Comment on this)
Friday, March 11th, 2011
9:12 am	Good Pay, Good Benefits? Thank a Union Good Pay, Good Benefits? Thank a Union Less than fifteen percent of American workers belong to unions. So why should we care about the anti-union movement? It is simple. Unions have a ripple effect, keeping all employers from going back to the good old days when the miner's mule was more valuable than the miner, when workers labored fourteen hour days for barely enough to keep alive. My dad worked in an oil refinery. He was a Republican. In 1951, when I was ten, the refinery workers organized a union and went on a six month strike for their right to collectively bargain. During the strike we lived on dried eggs, powdered milk and what Dad could garden. Before Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, my father made minimum wage and got no benefits. I had one new pair of shoes each year and never had more than two pairs of pants. We lived in a drafty house with no bathroom. I packed my lunch to school because we couldn't afford the daily quarter for school lunches. We never went to a dentist and only went to the doctor when our life was in danger. We couldn't afford movies or vacations. We drove a beat-up old car. My mother canned bushels of berries, corn, tomatoes, etc. when they were in season. The washing machine was a second-hand wringer type and sat in a kitchen corner when it wasn't in use. A box of saltine crackers was our idea of a treat. There were no store bought sodas, chips, fruit. We got meat on Sundays. The year I graduated from high school, my parents were able to buy their own house. They'd bought a new car the year before. They no longer had to put nickles in the church collection plate. They actually purchased me a suit for the newspaper picture when I received a full college scholarship. There are “right to work” laws in a dozen states with several more on that bandwagon. This is one way to quell the power of unions. Right now, we hardly notice unions unless they do something outrageous. But we will certainly notice them when they are gone. It is human nature for any business to make the greatest profit it can at the expense of workers or anyone else who gets in its way. Government rules get in business' way, and so it tries to elect people who will do away with them. So government cannot be counted on as a safety net. Government can and does change. The individual employee is powerless to oppose the whim of an employer. Only by bargaining collectively can the worker—that is the most of us—protect her or his interests. That is why we should care about unions. Without them, we will be next. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 9th, 2011
9:43 am	Waiting for Asparagus Lettuce and peas seeds are in the ground and have had a soaking rain. Lettuce and row marking radishes are up. It is past time to plant potatoes, but in seven years I haven't had a good crop because potatoes need water and we're in a severe drought. I do have three dozen broccoli plants transplanted this week from their starter container into assorted pots. About half are inside the sun room and go out and in daily. The rest are outside behind two old windows leaning against a block wall. These look healthier. The plum trees are in full bloom and the peach trees have started blooming. Hollyhocks are up and leafed out. The thornless blackberries have little mouse ear leaves showing. The overwintered lettuce is beginning to grow again. The first of the winter greens has bolted. Rape's yellow blooms wave above turnip, mustard, kale and collard greens from which we're getting all we care to eat. Every day I rummage around fall's dried plants looking for the first asparagus shoots. I need to mow its long row so they're easier to spot. Guess I'll do that this morning before more precious rain comes. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 8th, 2011
11:34 am	water wick I have two tomato plants in the sunroom, one of which plants is over four feet tall and contains over forty tomatoes. When I started them last October I planted them in large pots sitting upon five gallon pails of water, with water wicks running from the pails thru holes in the pots and circling the soil midway deep. When the tallest plant got over three feet tall it started wilting at the top if I didn't add a little water each day. The smaller plant needed no watering other than what the wick delivered--until yesterday. When its top wilted down I checked in the pail and the wick had rotted off. So today I trimmed the plant back, removed it from the pot and re-wicked it, with two wicks this time. I think if I'd put two wicks in with the larger plant it wouldn't have wilted down once it got tall. These tomatoes are hybrid, cherry-sized ones developed for indoor use. The seeds were about 50 cents each. They've been growing for three years now. Each spring I take cuttings, root them and plant them outdoors. In the fall I root cuttings to pot inside. (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 6th, 2010
2:11 pm	Mother's Day In the spirit in which it was intended, I wish all a happy mother's day Mother's Day Proclamation - 1870 by Julia Ward Howe Arise then...women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts! Whether your baptism be of water or of tears! Say firmly: "We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies, Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, For caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, Will be too tender of those of another country To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs." From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice." Blood does not wipe out dishonor, Nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil At the summons of war, Let women now leave all that may be left of home For a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means Whereby the great human family can live in peace... Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, But of God - In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask That a general congress of women without limit of nationality, May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient And the earliest period consistent with its objects, To promote the alliance of the different nationalities, The amicable settlement of international questions, The great and general interests of peace. (Comment on this)
Monday, March 15th, 2010
9:58 am	41 is a good age, and young Happy birthday, Jay. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010
2:03 pm	Econ. 101 Some basic assumptions of the US economic model: 1. Speed of production is the most important factor, outweighing quality of work, pain, physical damage to the worker, safety of workers and consumers. 2. Highest volume of food at lowest cost outweighs quality and safety of food, sustainability, preservation of soil and other natural resources such as water, oil, air quality. 3. Low costs trump local employment. Garlic from China, vegetables from Mexico at low cost are better for the nation than employment of American workers. 4. It is perfectly ok to purchase things at low cost from foreign countries regardless of the human damage, child labor, massive pollution, etc. involved in producing those goods and the use of non-renewable resources to deliver them. 5. Non-tangible costs are not considered in the production of goods and services. 6. Infinite economic growth is possible in a world with finite resources. 7. Quality of life is measured solely by volume of consumption. 8. Media advertising can sell people substitutes for what they really need, and can create an artificial need where none exists. (I need deep and enduring friendship, but a 60 inch plasma television and a smartphone will make me happy.) 9. Spiritual needs, as everything else, can be met with an economic product. 10. If you have plenty you are a good person; if you don't, you aren't. 11. People have no right to anything they can't afford. 12. Corporations have the rights of a person but much fewer responsibilities. (For example, they cannot be sent to prison for breaking laws.) 13. People will act in their perceived economic best interest even if their moral values are contradicted. (Comment on this)
Thursday, December 10th, 2009
3:43 pm	wild strawberries Wild Strawberries Up the run past grandmother's house, where it crossed her sister Artie's farm, between steep hillside pasture to the right and creekside right-of-way fenced tight against creek, then farm road; right above where creek was walled in concrete, fenced away from town kids, and ran through the oil refinery--I used to eat the sweetest wild strawberries from its banks. Each tiny fruit packed as much flavor as big farm grown ones do now, fresh out of my food drier, shrunk to wild sized. It was grandfather's house too, uncle John Fox's farm, too. When his boar hog got loose I, the handiest kid, had to chase it down dirt streets till it found a mud puddle in some alley, had to tug its ear till it got cool enough to come along back to the farm, where Artie let it back in its pen, because Uncle John was cutting Democratic hair in the alley behind the blacksmith shop, where Kramer Sellers built a movie theater the year before tv came to town. The run (it only flowed in rainy weather) was door to our playground, open gate thru refinery fence, inside which we played guerrilla war with grown-ups, hid under buildings, behind enormous storage tanks, snuck up winding steel stairs to their tops and spied on our bellies the enemy below. We knew the insides of box cars, coal cars, the paper room, the bush shelter beside the chemistry lab, truck loading docks, canning plant, the long tunnel where our creek was boxed all around and ran pitch black beneath cat cracking still, filter house, tool room and out beside the marble factory next door, down to the river. The river, where great Uncle George gardened an acre, ran a trout line in his jon boat, often spent the night in an eight foot box on stilts when he didn't want to go home to Aunt Stella. We feasted on tomatoes, muskmelons, roast corn. One day he took us down to the water, showed us bear tracks in the soft mud. Another, I saw a buck deer crash in and out plate glass walls of the Ford showroom after he shot it raiding his corn, chased it on my bike as it staggered across three downtown blocks and then swam the river. The river, where we paddled with old boards boats we "borrowed" because they were unlocked, sailed them upriver with refrigerator carton cardboard, then floated back down skinny dipping behind. Where riverboats pushed half-mile chains of barges, so long they had to let the current float them around bends, where a few side wheelers still worked, and a couple of new prop boats, but stern wheelers were queen. At night they were lit up like carnivals. We would creep out behind them and ride one of the humps their paddles made, surfing along so long as we caught the hump just right; sometimes the third hump, the second hump if we were real daring, and, just once, because we heard older kids had done it, the first hump. If your boat slid forward off it the paddle wheel got you. Uncle John's pasture was a woods the last time I looked, its trees big around as my waist. They're tearing down the refinery my dad retired from. A four lane highway clefts the town. I went up the street where a childhood friend's home topped the hill and found a dead end, the highway paving where his house once stood. I saw that friend at our fiftieth reunion. He looked like his grandad. I looked like mine, only older. He died eight years my junior. Oh, yes, the river. It's still there, much broader with the new locks, ponding up creek bottoms once fields I picked beans in for five bucks a ten hour day. The old bridge is cut off at the island, once farm, now bird sanctuary. The new bridge shines downriver, so high the riverboats (all propped ones, now) look like bathtub toys looking down. Across it, Dean's fruit stand is replaced by a gas station, all straight lines and clean concrete. The woman at the IGA tells me Dean is dead. (Comment on this)
Saturday, November 28th, 2009
10:12 am	Mark Twain on the subject... The War Prayer by Mark Twain It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fulttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory with stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way. Sunday morning came -- next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams -- visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation: God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest, Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword! Then came the "long" prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory -- An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher's side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, "Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord and God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!" The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside -- which the startled minister did -- and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said: "I come from the Throne -- bearing a message from Almighty God!" The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. "He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import -- that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of -- excpet he pause and think. "God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two -- one uttered, and the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this -- keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon your neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain on your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse on some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it. "You have heard your servant's prayer -- the uttered part of it. I am commissioned by God to put into words the other part of it -- that part which the pastor -- and also you in your hearts -- fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard the words 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory -- must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen! "Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth into battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimmage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen. (After a pause.) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits." … It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
12:27 pm	Holiday reflections What would Christ do if he were in human flesh and walked into a mall on Black Friday? According to American Research Group, in 2007 Americans spent an average of $907 on Christmas gifts. That is more than the per capita income of 14 nations, according to World Bank statistics. World Bank shows the following per capita incomes: Afghanistan $760, Ethiopia $868, Sierra Leone $766, Mozambique $897, Niger $684, Liberia $388, Burundi $383, Congo $328. These numbers are comparable to ones published by International Monetary Fund and the CIA. Last year, 2008, we cut our Christmas spending in half, to $431 per person. Still more than per capita income in the four poorest nations. We Quakers historically did not celebrate Christmas with gifts or feasts. I urge my friends this year to focus our gifts on charities such as Heifer Project which give the world's poor tools to improve their lot, and to food and medical relief efforts helping those most in need. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
12:59 pm	A poem by and account of Stephen Spender An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum By Stephen Spender Far far from gusty waves these children’s faces. Like rootless weeds, the hair torn around their pallor. The tall girl with her weighed-down head. The paper- seeming boy, with rat’s eyes. The stunted, unlucky heir Of twisted bones, reciting a father’s gnarled disease, His lesson from his desk. At back of the dim class One unnoted, sweet and young. His eyes live in a dream, Of squirrel’s game, in the tree room, other than this. On sour cream walls, donations. Shakespeare’s head, Cloudless at dawn, civilized dome riding all cities. Belled, flowery, Tyrolese valley. Open-handed map Awarding the world its world. And yet, for these Children, these windows, not this world, are world, Where all their future’s painted with a fog, A narrow street sealed in with a lead sky, Far far from rivers, capes, and stars of words. Surely, Shakespeare is wicked, and the map a bad example With ships and sun and love tempting them to steal— For lives that slyly turn in their cramped holes From fog to endless night? On their slag heap, these children Wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel With mended glass, like bottle bits on stones. All of their time and space are foggy slum. So blot their maps with slums as big as doom. Unless, governor, teacher, inspector, visitor, This map becomes their window and these windows That shut upon their lives like catacombs, Break O break open ’till they break the town And show the children green fields and make their world Run azure on gold sands, and let their tongues Run naked into books, the white and green leaves open History is theirs whose language is the sun. The few times I've tried to teach poetry I've used Spender's essay "How to Make a Poem," which takes us thru a poem from first to last draft. When I was a graduate teaching assistant at Marshall University in 1963-64, Spender was featured at a convocation and the English department had to host a reception for him. All the faculty abhorred his politics and gathered in one corner of the room while Spender and I had a nice conversation in the opposite corner. As I recall he was very tall and extremely shy. (Comment on this)
Sunday, October 25th, 2009
11:53 am	Maggie: one by Elizabeth Bishop "The Moose" (for Grace Bulmer Bowers) From narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea, home of the long tides where the bay leaves the sea twice a day and takest the herrings long rides, where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay coming in, the bay not a home; where, silted red, sometimes the sun sets facing a red sea, and others, veins the flats' lavender, rich mud in burning rivulets; on red, gravelly roads, down rows of sugar maples, past clapboard farmhouses and neat, clapboard churches, bleached, rigid as clamshells, past twin silver birches, through late afternoon a bus journeys west, the windshield flashing pink, pink glancing off of metal, brushing the dented flank of blue, beat-up enamel; down hollows, up rises, and waits, patient, while a lone traveler gives kisses and embraces to seven relatives and a collie supervises. Goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dog. The bus starts. The light grows richer; the fog, shifting, salty, thin, comes closing in. Its cold, round crystals form and slide and settle in the white hens' feathers, in gray glazed cabbages, on the cabbage roses and lupins like apostles; the sweet peas cling to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences; bumblebees creep inside the foxgloves, and evening commences. One stop at Bass River. Then at Economies--- Lower, Middle, Upper; Five Islands, Five Houses, where a woman shakes a tablecloth out after supper. A pale flickering. Gone. The Tantramar marshes and the smell of salt hay. An iron bridge trembles and a loose plank rattles but doesn't give way. On the left, a red light swims through the dark; a ship's port lantern. Two rubber boots show, illuminated, solemn. A dog gives one bark. A woman climbs in with two market bags, brisk, freckled, elderly. "A grand night. Yes, sir, all the way to Boston." She regards us amicably. Moonlight as we enter the New Brunswick woods, hairy, scratchy, splintery; moonlight and mist caught in them like lamb's wool on bushes in a pasture. The passengers lie back. Snores. Some long sighs. A dreamy navigation begins in the night, a gentle, auditory, slow hallucination… In the creakings and noises, an old conversation --not concerning us, but recognizable, somewhere, back in the bus; Grandparents' voices uninterruptedly talking, in Eternity; names being mentioned, things cleared up finally; what he said, what she said, who got pensioned; deaths, deaths and sicknesses; the year he remarried; the year (something) happened. She died in childbirth. That was the son lost when the schooner foundered. He took to drink. Yes. She went to the bed. When Amos began to pray even in the store and finally the family had to put him away. "Yes…" that peculiar affirmative. "Yes…" A sharp, indrawn breath, half groan, half acceptance, that means "Life's like that. We know it (also death)." Talking the way they talked in the old featherbed peacefully, on and on, dim lamplight in the hall, down in the kitchen, the dog tucked in her shawl. Now, it's all right now even to fall asleep just as on all those nights. --Suddenly the bus driver stops with a jolt, turns off his lights. A moose has come out of the impenetrable wood and stands there, looms, rather, in the middle of the road. It approaches; it sniffs at the bus's hot hood. Towering, antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house (or, safe as houses). A man's voice assures us "Perfectly harmless…" Some of the passengers exclaim in whispers, childishly, softly, "Sure are big creatures." "It's awful plain." "Look! It's a she!" Taking her time, she looks the bus over, grand, otherworldly. Why, why do we feel (we all feel) this sweet sensation of joy? "Curious creatures," says our quiet driver, rolling his r's. "Look at that, would you." Then he shifts gears. For a moment longer, by craning backward, the moose can be seen on the moonlit macadam; then there's a dim smell of moose, an acrid smell of gasoline. (Comment on this)
9:59 am	Two translated Andrade poems for Maggie Carlos Drummond Andrade José What now, José? The party’s over, the lights are off, the crowd’s gone, the night’s gone cold, what now, José? what now, you? you without a name, who mocks the others, you who write poetry who love, protest? what now, José? You have no wife, you have no speech you have no affection, you can’t drink, you can’t smoke, you can’t even spit, the night’s gone cold, the day didn’t come, the tram didn’t come, laughter didn’t come utopia didn’t come and everything ended and everything fled and everything rotted what now, José? what now, José? Your sweet words, your instance of fever, your feasting and fasting, your library, your gold mine, your glass suit, your incoherence, your hate—what now? Key in hand you want to open the door, but no door exists; you want to die in the sea, but the sea has dried; you want to go to Minas but Minas is no longer there. José, what now? If you screamed, if you moaned, if you played a Viennese waltz, if you slept, if you tired, if you died… But you don’t die, you’re stubborn, José! Alone in the dark like a wild animal, without tradition, without a naked wall to lean against, without a black horse that flees galloping, you march, José! José, where to? Family Portrait, by Carlos Drummond de Andrade Yes, this family portrait is a little dusty. The father's face doesn't show how much money he earned. The uncles' hands don't reveal the voyages both of them made. The grandmother's smoothed and yellowed; she's forgotten the monarchy. The children, how they've changed. Peter's face is tranquil, that wore the best dreams. And John's no longer a liar. The garden's become fantastic. The flowers are gray badges. And the sand, beneath dead feet, is an ocean of fog. In the semicircle of armchairs a certain movement is noticed. The children are changing places, but noiselessly! it's a picture. Twenty years is a long time. It can form any image. If one face starts to wither, another presents itself, smiling. All these seated strangers, my relations? I don't believe it. They're guests amusing themselves in a rarely-opened parlor. Family features remain lost in the play of bodies. But there's enough to suggest that a body is full of surprises. The frame of this family portrait holds its personages in vain. They're there voluntarily, they'd know how — if need be — to fly. They could refine themselves in the room's chiaroscuro, live inside the furniture or the pockets of old waistcoats. The house has many drawers, papers, long staircases. When matter becomes annoyed, who knows the malice of things? The portrait does not reply, it stares; in my dusty eyes it contemplates itself. The living and dead relations multiply in the glass. I don't distinguish those that went away from those that stay. I only perceive the strange idea of family traveling through the flesh. (trans Elizabeth Bishop) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
10:30 am	The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart Have you ever read a book or seen a movie which moves thru landscape and people you are familiar with, or travels familiar routes in your brain's experience? This novel is full of the geography and history of my past and people. Written by Huntington, West Virginia native M. Glenn Taylor, it explores familiar geography in the south of my home state, and the region's history which I learned, not because it was common knowledge, nor in my eighth grade W.VA History text, but because I became aware that much of history is hidden under rocks slid down from strip mines and in abandoned shacks where hard scrabble families were raised. In the early 1960s I experienced the state's nascent civil rights movement in Huntington and Charleston. From that I became involved with opposition to the Vietnam war. Two friends and I started Appalachian Movement Press to print fliers, handouts and posters for civil rights and anti war groups. Later, in addition, we gathered and published historical pamphlets. Much of this novel's history I learned from that research, often from the mouths of old mine organizers, old Wobblies and non academic historians like Don West. I lived for a while in Logan, West Virginia, and for several months drove to work in the mining town of Van over Blair Mountain, site of the miner's war and where the US military first bombed a civilian population. Trenchmouth Taggart travels the ridges and hollows weaving thru a hundred year history of race, moonshining, mining, snake handling, music and mountaintop removal. Why it even has a scene in Camden Park, where I took my oldest child, Danielle, when she was little. (Comment on this)
Sunday, October 4th, 2009
3:20 pm	Science & Nature Science attempts to reduce to logical rules a reality which William James described as "one great,blooming, buzzing confusion." But nature is too often rushing off in the opposite direction. Take my garden. I, the scientific gardener, decided what variety of watermelons I wanted and cleverly chose the best place to plant them, a spot with the right soil, the best companions, etc. Results? I didn't get a watermelon. But, over in my green peppers, in a spot where I grew melons last year, melon vines appeared in mid-summer and pushed out into peppers, tomatoes, onions--seizing a territory from pieces of several well-planned rows. I must have left a small melon there in late fall, after I had gathered all that were any size. The vines were in the way, but I left them, both out of curiosity and because the ones I planted didn't bear. From them I got two nice melons. I'm eating the smaller, and leaving the larger one until its vine dries out. I just dried some seeds for next year. Science reduced gardening to half a dozen variables: nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, insecticide, herbicide, water. Recently it threw in a few trace elements. But my garden is teeming with life. Every inch of soil has thousands of microorganisms and hundreds of larger creatures which are essential to a sustainable, healthy soil. (And then there are fire ants--whose sole purpose is to keep me from hand weeding.) Gardening, like writing, is a lifelong learning process. In neither do any of us ever know enough. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, September 26th, 2009
9:21 pm	Silent Light It fascinates me how people I like can have such widely different tastes in movies. Some of my favorite comedies--Some Like it Hot, The Gods Must be Crazy, Little Shop of Horrors--equally bore and excite a group of my friends I happen to watch them with. Here's one I wonder how it will go over with you. Silent Night is a Mexican film in German language about a Mennonite love triangle. I either loved it or hated it, I'm not sure which. My comment at the end was "I feel sorry for the cinematographer," because filming this must have gone against her or his every instinct. It did win at Cannes, for what that's worth. I'd love to sit down and watch this with my Mennonite friends! (But I value them too much to try it.) (Comment on this)