June 16, 2016

QUITTING TIME?

I have been thinking about quitting.

I've quit many things in my life: jobs, towns, people, friends, marriages, chewing tobacco (twice), pipe smoking, North Carolina, going home for Christmas, Sunday dinners with my grandparents, the grating buzz and gossip of extended family. There were others too. Some were painful, some were exhilarating, some were necessary, some were for the right reasons, some not, some carefully considered, others impulsive, some were more destructive than others, some surprised people, some hurt people, some brought tears, others relief, some were good things, some not so good, some terrible, some untroublingly dead, others unkillable, some for unforgettable reasons, others for unrememberable reasons, some nothing but whimsy without any reason at all. I have tried to quit trying but that never lasts. It would be like quitting quitting.

The most puzzling thing I ever quit was playing the guitar I loved to play.

Gibson LGO
I bought my first guitar when I was in high school in 1963. It was a little mahogany Gibson LGO I played until it literally fell to pieces many years later. I carried the unplayable pieces around for years after that, eventually ending up with nothing but the tuners until I threw them out too. I have owned and played some sort of guitar since 1963. Some cheap, some not. I finally ended up with the guitar of my dreams - a Martin D-28 - in the 1980s. I played it nearly every day right up until the day we left New Mexico in June 2003 to move to Texas. We arrived in Austin two days later and I have never played it since.

I've tried to figure out why. No luck. I even tried figuring it out in therapy. Still no luck. I suspect it is related to the fact that when I returned to New Mexico in 1993 I felt at home (New Mexico always has felt that way) and having quit more than one "home" (usually for better, sometimes for worse), I never intended to do it again. But my wife had the chance to go to school in Texas and I thought it was a chance she deserved. I was not happy to leave New Mexico, but I said yes for what I still think were the best of reasons. She deserved it. It seemed like a simple enough choice. I don't regret it.

But somehow I violated something so deeply embedded in my subconscious that I cannot dig it out, hold it up to the light and examine it, something hidden in a dark so dark there can never be enough light to see it. Perhaps I gave up my guitar to punish myself. Perhaps it was an expression of a profound sense of loss I could not express any other way. All I know is that quitting was a decision I did not consciously make and seem unlikely ever to understand.

Neil Young playing Hank Williams' D-28.
The guitar rests unstrung in its case in my office. I clean it from time to time, take pleasure in the marks left on the fretboard by my fingers when I used to play, hold it the way I used to hold it, remember playing, even hear it in my mind, but I am not tempted to play again. Still I keep it and have no plans to sell it or give it away. Do I keep it as a reminder that some things are beyond understanding? Or because there is a chance (or is it a hope?) that some day I will restring it, tune it, strum it, pick it, refriend it, let it talk to me in an old familiar language I can comprehend, and finally understand what happened? If so it will be the only friend I ever quit and gave a second chance.

Lately I have been thinking about quitting something else important: my writing. For a man who has shaped his identity and made his way with words - if not always his living - in one way or another for his entire adult life, it is a big decision.

I do not want it to follow my guitar playing into the silent dark. Right now that is all I know.

Word Machine


 

May 10, 2016

GHOST FLIGHT

A mourning dove hit the front window in full flight. This is the mark it made.

April 15, 2016

LIFE, LOVE, DEATH, MEMORY: FOR MY DEAD NIECE WHO DESERVES MORE THAN THIS

"I said I came into this world not wanted and I will go out not wanted." 
                               Ruth Howerton-Luck, January 26, 2016.


My niece Ruth Ann Howerton-Luck died April 2, 2016, nearly two years after being diagnosed with colon cancer that had metastasized to her liver. It kept metastasizing until it was everywhere from her lungs to her brain and ovaries. She tried to stop it and lived as long as she could through the pain and the nausea, the surgeries and chemo. On Jan. 30 she told me, "I will be gone in two or three months [because] my cancer is a rapid growing kind. I want to fight a little longer so Ryan and the girls have a mom." She fought. She was valiant and courageous, but no matter what she did, the cancer seemed to do one thing more, or two, or ten. It is what cancer does. She was a long time dying, and then she was a short time dying, and then she was dead. In that same Jan. 30 conversation she said, "I am not going to hospice. I mean it may look like a grand way to die but it really isn't." She had experience caring for the dying. On April 2 she died at home a few days after leaving hospital care. Her children were there, her brother, nieces and nephews, her stepmother. Her husband was there too.

It is now April 14 and no plans have been announced for a funeral or a memorial service and her family and friends cannot understand why. When news of her death was posted hundreds of people responded. People loved her, knew her, intimately followed her pain-wracked struggle, were sad for her, hopeful for her, awed by her. Now they want to share their love for her, bid her farewell, gather around their memories of her. We need to hear each other say things about her, weep together; her two daughters and her son need to say what they must and hear what they should about their mother. When? Where? Her husband spoke vaguely of "something in a few months." He has said nothing else. We don't even know what happened to her remains.

Meanwhile people talk, they text, we compare notes and messages Ruth left behind about her cancer and the misery heaped on top of the pain of her disease in the final months of her life gather into a stormy cloud. She needed for all of us to know what was happening besides cancer and made sure we did, but begged people to do nothing, say nothing, no matter how much we knew, fearing things would become worse for her and her son. We honored her request. Some of us wish we hadn't. Now that time has passed. She is dead and we are becoming impatient. The cloud is rolling and when the storm breaks it is likely to be ugly.

Ruth Ann Howerton was born in Greensboro, NC, to a teen-aged mother who already had one child by the time my brother married her. Her father was my brother John. He was a teen-ager too. It was an inauspicious beginning that grew worse as time passed. Ruth's brother was born a year or so later. Ruth's parents were hardly parents to their children at all. It is a tired old tale. They were children themselves, etc. It is an excuse. Sometimes my brother, his wife and children stayed with my parents in a house never meant for that many people because they had no money. It was crowded, noisy, always aswirl with people (mostly relatives of one sort or another. My grandmother lived next door). Sometimes they had their own place. Sometimes they left the children home alone for hours or days at a time while they went out to do the things childless teen-agers do. Their small children were left to fend for themselves and tend to each other the best they could. Their house - when they had one - smelled of dirty diapers and cigarette smoke. It was a shitty way to live and it couldn't last. They couldn't last. The life they were living caught up with them. My brother ended up in prison for something involving a carload of marijuana and an undercover cop. His wife found her own way and she didn't want her children along for the trip. Ruth and her brother were lost in the shuffle and seemed doomed to a life in foster care. Then, because my father insisted on it ("Nobody else is going to raise my grandchildren!"), they ended up with my parents. It was official. Signed, sealed and delivered. Abandoned children taken in to be raised by their grandparents.

The day that happened Ruth started looking for love. Abandoned children do that. She found it from time to time but it didn't last. She loved my mother (Ruth's Memaw, the only real mother she ever had) and was loved in return. She loved her children and they loved her. We loved her from near and far. She was not unloved and she was not unwanted. But she wanted more than that, she was greedy for it. She wanted more love closer to home. And she didn't believe she was receiving it. In the end, her fear of love lost seemed worse than her fear of dying. It was sad to watch.

Now, after the life she lived and the death she lived, the love she had and the love she craved, she deserves more than this. Soon.

 "I can't believe my life has come to this."
 Ruth Howerton-Luck, January 30, 2016

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NOTE: Since this piece was posted sketchy plans for a memorial service in Greensboro, NC, on May 14 have been posted. No further details have been announced.

April 11, 2016

ON INSUFFICIENCY


Insufficiency. The feeling has been with me since I was a child and felt I could not do enough to be sure my mother loved me. Love was not unconditional. Being was not enough. Love took lots of doing. And even all that doing never felt like enough.

I recently received at questionnaire at my doctor's office. It was supposed to measure my sense of well-being, at least that is what they said. Lots of questions, multiple choice answers. "Have you considered suicide?" When? Never? Sometimes? Today? Yesterday? The day before that? No matter how many choices they give, how do you answer a question like that? All of the above? None of the above? How about: "None of your fucking business." Circle one.

Next question:

"Do you feel you cannot do enough?" The possible answers ranged from "Never" to '"Sometimes" to "Always." A disturbing question, but the answer to this one was easy: Always. Let's make that, ALWAYS!

Enough never happens to me. I wouldn't know how it feels.

How much is enough? People say, "Enough is enough" or "Enough already." But no matter what, there is more to be done. More work, more love, more parent, more child, more husband, more marriage, more success, more words, more books, more of everything. Do more chores! More and still more. No matter what you do. Do more.

In exchange you will what? Pay me more? Love me more (or love me at all)? Be more married? More and more and more.

No matter what I will continue to feel that I have not done enough. Never. I learned it at my mother's knee.

April 8, 2016

HEART HURT: A DEATH IN THE FAMILY

My niece Ruth died a few days ago

When my mother saw something particularly sad or bad - especially if it involved animals or children - she would say, "It just makes my heart hurt." There was a particular crimped and crumpled edge of sadness in her voice when her heart hurt. She could make you feel it even if you didn't particularly want to. It was a powerful thing to hear, but eventually so many things made her heart hurt that it lost its power.

My heart does not hurt. The only times it did the doctors suspected a heart attack and put me in the hospital. And I do not speak from the ragged and aching edge of sadness my mother visited more and more frequently as she grew older. But what my mother used to say makes sense to me today. And I can hear her saying it.

My niece Ruth died. It just makes my heart hurt.



April 1, 2016

MY OLD FRIEND HUGH


Hugh Merrill died in late December. We were very close friends for a few years in Atlanta in the early 1970s. We worked together at the Atlanta Journal, drank together, ate a great deal of unhealthy food, smoked some dope (pot made him go to sleep peacefully, hashish changed his personality in frightening ways) but beer was our drug of choice and the Stein Club down on Peachtree Street where the hippies came out to play was where we went to drink and talk the way Southern boys full of beer always do – truth and bullshit in equal measures – and there were lots of us around the table almost every afternoon, actors, musicians, other newspaper people and an alcoholic novelist . One of the actors ended up on Dukes of Hazard and I heard the drunken novelist died a few years later sleeping on the bar at Manuel’s Tavern where he mopped up after hours. Hugh knew about many things, but sports was not one of them.
Once he was hitchhiking in Tuscaloosa, got a ride and then was put out on the side of the road when he didn’t recognize the grinning driver. It was Joe Namath (Joe said, “You really don’t know who I am?” Hugh said no. And Joe put him out right there). Hugh was funny – and charming* too, but not everyone thought so – and did the best impersonation of George Wallace I ever heard, even did it for Wallace). We listened to lots of all kinds of music together and fooled around at the edges of rock and roll – including a scary evening spent onstage with the Jefferson Airplane that damaged my hearing and taught us we never wanted to be rock stars (from up there the crowd was terrifying, pressing, undulant, then there was an altercation with the police, settled when singer Marty Balin stopped the show, stepped to the edge of the stage, leaned down and reminded the police there were lots of us and not so many of them) and Hugh’s seduction of an actual singing star (surprised him so much he called me from her bed at a downtown hotel to tell me where he was, who he was with and how his groupie dreams just came true) – and wrote about it sometimes. He was terrible with money in those days. He probably borrowed a lot a little bit at a time, but I never added it up. I didn’t expect to see it again when I gave it to him. And I didn’t. He came from a famous Alabama family of lawyers, judges, politicians and at least one lieutenant governor; I came from a proper North Carolina family, well known in small, mostly local ways, and a busted marriage that their propriety had a difficult time accepting. I figured propriety had a lot to do with Hugh’s relationship with his family too. Neither of us wanted any part of all that. He preferred music, acting and magic tricks to a career in politics or lawyering; I preferred sin and almost anything else to the Presbyterian propriety I grew up around. We both were looking for something, someone, somewhere. What? Who? Where? We didn’t have a clue or a map or a plan. That didn’t stop us. Besides, we had Atlanta. Hugh’s turned out to be a who and he ended up marrying her and I heard he was devastated when she died, but I wasn’t around for that part. Mine turned out to be a where and I was already gone. By then we had lost touch the way friends like us often do. Completely.

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*How charming was he? One night we were driving north from Atlanta to a bluegrass festival somewhere in Virginia. We decided to drop in on my parents in North Carolina. Seemed like a good idea to a couple of guys who had been driving and drinking ever since they left Atlanta. It was nearly midnight, but the lights were still on in the house, so we stopped. We all chatted out by the car in the driveway about this and that and I figured we would be back on the road pretty soon. Then food came up. Hugh got to talking about sawmill gravy and talked about it so lovingly and longingly that my mother went into the house, fried up some fatback for the gravy, made a pan of biscuits to go with it and sat Hugh down in her kitchen and let him eat his fill. He kept her laughing (he did his George Wallace, too) and she kept him eating. We didn’t leave until sometime near dawn. My mother lived until 2006 and from time to time over all those years would remember that night and ask about Hugh, amazed and disappointed when I told her I’d completely lost touch with him long ago.

March 8, 2016

THREE LETTERS TO NANCY REAGAN


 The death of Nancy Reagan didn't affect me much one way or the other. But a character in one of my short stories once tried desperately to reach the First Lady. The character is named Hazel DePugh and she is trying to understand what really happens when a girl just says, "No!" Nancy Reagan is no help, which surprises Hazel but shouldn't surprise anyone else:

...she just said no to drugs because Mrs. President Nancy Reagan asked her to. What else could she do? Hazel was raised to respect her elders, salute the flag, stand up for freedom, obey the law, follow the leader, pray for guidance, save herself for marriage, vote Republican, do or die, choose life, and praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. Some of those things didn’t make much sense to an eighth-grader but Hazel got the overall point. So, when (a videotaped) Mrs. President Reagan said, “Just say no,” at the school assembly, Hazel proudly said, “No!” And that was that. A few of Hazel’s friends didn’t say, “No,” some said, “No!” but kept their fingers crossed and didn’t really mean it and some of them lied. Hazel meant it. Cross her heart and hope to die. She wasn’t about to lie to Mrs. President Reagan. She was raised to know better than that.
That was back in middle school, but high school is hard and it is harder without drugs. Mrs. President Reagan didn’t tell Hazel that part, but that’s what she learned when she got there. And she didn’t tell Hazel how her friends would abandon her for the simple reason that nobody in high school likes a goody two-shoes, especially one who might narc them out to Nancy Reagan or their parents or a cop or whatever. At first Hazel didn’t care about any of that, but it didn’t take long for her to become so lonely she sometimes regretted her promise. The days at school were one thing, but the midnight misery of her drug-free, hormone-bathed solitude was worse. Her phone never rang. Her life became so quiet her ears hurt. Her parents didn’t seem to notice. They enjoyed the quiet.
Hazel finally wrote to Mrs. President Reagan and asked for her advice

Dear Mrs. Pres. Reagan,
My name is Hazel DePugh and I just said ‘No!’ to drugs last semester at Judith Sussman Middle School. It was easy to just say no to drugs but that was last year. Now I am in high school and sometimes I think drugs might help, especially like tonight when I am sitting here crying about it. What should I do?
Love ya, Hazel.
 P.S. I am not an ugly person or a retard or anything.

 Nancy Reagan sent her an autographed eight-by-ten glossy photograph of herself dressed in a red suit and signed, “Just say NO! Very Best Wishes, Nancy Reagan.” Hazel bucked up and said “No!” again and again. She was proud of that photograph, even when it turned out Nancy Reagan didn’t really sign it. Her name was part of the picture! Hazel was disappointed but she stuck the picture on the wall and still didn’t try drugs. Nancy Reagan’s eyes were awfully far apart and they always seemed to be watching her.
When high school didn’t get any better, she wrote again:

Dear Mrs. President,
My name is Hazel and I wrote you a while back. Remember? High school is still terrible and I am still very lonely, but don’t worry, I would still say No! if somebody offered me drugs, but they don’t. Nobody ever offers me drugs!!! Do you know how that feels? Sometimes it makes me want to kill myself or get a tattoo. Have you ever seen those tears Mexicans tattoo on their faces? Maybe like that because I am so sad. And I have to do something. Please help me.
Love ya, Hazel.
P.S. I am not a Mexican or anything but sometimes I wish.

She mostly made up the part about killing herself, which was a good thing because all she received this time was an eight-by-ten glossy photo of Mr. and Mrs. President Reagan (she had on another red suit and he had on a cowboy hat, she was smiling, he looked a little confused). “Very Best Wishes, Nancy Reagan and Ronald Reagan.” She was just about to rip the photograph to pieces and quit saying “No!” to drugs when her mother came in and asked her to walk to Fat Sammy’s Mini-Mart and buy a gallon of no-fat milk.
Luckily the milk cooler at Fat Sammy’s Tip-Top Mini-Mart was at the back of the store because that’s where Hazel was when her former friends came in the front door. She heard them laughing, chattering as they bought Slurpies and munchies. Wasn’t that what stoners needed? Slurpies? Munchies? Hazel wanted to need them, too. She really did; she peeked around the shelves and wanted to run to her old friends shouting, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” to drugs and everything else but she knew they would smirk and turn away. “God damn you, Nancy Reagan,” she said under her breath, then ducked and flinched half-expecting God to strike her dead on the spot. He didn’t. So Hazel hid at the back of the store and started thinking about her next letter:

Dear Mrs. President Reagan,
It’s me Hazel. You know that milk cooler in the back down at Fat Sammy’s Mini-Mart? Well here I am hiding out from my ex-friends that I wish were still my friends but they aren't my friends and you know why. So I have a question. If drugs are not the answer, what is?
Love ya, Hazel.
P.S. A picture is not worth one thousand words. Hint. Hint.

She smiled at that last part, waited until her former friends were gone, then jerked something off the shelf at random so Fat Sammy wouldn’t think she was a complete idiot or a shoplifter or something and headed to the front of the store.

Hazel eventually saves herself with banjo music only to be shot dead in a ditch outside of Nashville, TN. It's a ditch Nancy Reagan would not have understood.