I don’t remember anything about him, my grandfather, either.  I have only the words of my parents, and since mom rarely talks about her father, my only real knowledge comes from a story my father tells.

“He loved that house.  It was on the corner of a big farm, and the owner had worked out an arrangement with your Grandpaw where he could live in the house and help farm the land.”  I nod.  I understand sharecropping, half a step from slavery but an honest way for a man to earn a meager living in hard times.  The Depression made callused hands a badge of honor, feed-sack clothes a sign that you were living better than you might.

“Eventually, of course, he got too old and sick to work.”  My father pauses, remembering.  “He was afraid that he would have to move his family, and he didn’t have any place to go.  He went to the landowner and asked him about it.  He was a good man, though, and he told your Grandpaw that after so many years of hard work, he had nothing to worry about.  ‘Y’all can stay in that house as long as I live,’ he said.

“It was sometime after you were born,” looking at me, “you must have been about three or four — the owner died.  His son inherited the property, and he had big plans for it.  Pretty soon your Grandpaw found out he couldn’t live there any more.

“We had the old van by then, so we drove up there to help them move.  The whole time we were there, hauling furniture out the door and driving it to the new place, your Grandpaw just sat in his chair and rocked.  He never lifted a finger to help us, never said a word, just rocked.  When nothing was left but his chair, he stood up, walked out to the van, and buckled up.

“At the new place we unloaded his chair first.  He found a place for it in the living room, and he sat down and started rocking.  We unloaded everything in the van without a word or a bit of help from him.

“He never did recover from losing the old house.  It was just a few months later that he died, and he spent most of it rocking in his chair.”  Mom has been silent this whole time, thinking about a man I know I met, a man who must have held me in his arms, but whom I cannot remember.  I know the house they moved to.  It was a run-down turn-of-the-century house purchased by my cousin, and I remember looking up into an elderly male face against a backdrop of tattered ceiling.  I do not know if that was my grandfather; it may have been.

The only clear memory I have regarding my grandfather takes place after his death — how long after, I can’t say.  I was sitting on the back porch steps, crying, because my young mind (how young?  4?  6?) had realized my few memories of my grandfather would be lost to me by adulthood.  I buried my head in my arms, sobbing. 

I was right:  the memory of that realization is burned into my mind, but the memory of my mother’s father is only a shadow… perhaps less.That must have been my first glimmer of understanding about death.  All of my grandparents are gone, now, and I don’t fully understand it yet.

* For those interested in the Depression, you’ll be doing yourselves a favor to stop by exit78.com and look at Mike Goad’s “Eyes of the Great Depression” series.  My favorite is #004.

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language. — Henry David Thoreau

Our late-honeymoon trip to Pigeon Forge was quite memorable.  The theme of the trip, apparently, was “apples.”

We stayed in a cabin called “Apple Blossom” by the rental company.  Ironically, I didn’t notice any apple blossoms anywhere in the decor… but with apple doorknobs, quilts, knickknacks, and a gigantic apple statue scattered in and around the cabin, I think it may have earned at least half of its name.

Then one morning we discovered a whole cluster of shops and restaurants named Apple this-or-that… the Apple Barn, the Applewood Farmhouse, and so forth.  The Farmhouse served what might be the best breakfast in Sevier County, where the primary (and almost the only) source of income is the tourist trade.  While seemingly nine out of ten restaurants seemed to have either “Pancake” or “Flapjack” (or, occasionally, both) in the name, the Applewood Farmhouse was a breath of fresh, appley air.

The first thing we noticed is that, in comparison to our cabin’s decor, the restaurant’s interior was virtually apple-free.

The second thing we noticed was the huge basket of apple fritters plunked down in front of us by the waitress.

What is a fritter, anyway?  Whatever it is, these were GOOD.

The third thing we noticed was that the complimentary juice wasn’t orange juice.  Rather, it was a blend of pineapple, lemon, orange, and… you guessed it… apple.  It was also quite tasty.

The fourth and final thing we noticed was the amazingly good food served up for breakfast — some of which didn’t actually contain fruit.

We really must go back.

More details in later posts, probably.

Happy New Year.  I’ll get back to my regular blogging activities now that my schedule has returned to the routine.  Oh, and photos will arrive in good time (we didn’t take many, but the good ones are all on old-fashioned film which hasn’t been developed yet).

Us.

I was standing in front of about eighty people, though I was not facing them, and I was wearing a rented suit, black, with white shirt and teal tie, and I was almost the guest of honor. 

The real guest of honor would come walking up the aisle any second. 

To my right, on either side of a fieldstone wall, were high windows, floor to ceiling, overlooking a patch of woods still bearing some of its autumn glory. 

To my left were two families waiting to be joined together. 

The pianist played beautifully but subtly, letting the moment happen without interfering. 

I tried to remember that breathing slowly and evenly reduced the chance of fainting.  I tried to remember to avoid the deer-in-headlights expression that I could feel just beneath the surface.  I tried not to remember that the wedding I was attending was mine. 

Ours. 

The pianist paused, the church fell silent, and then, with the first few notes of Vivaldi’s “La primavera” just beginning to ascend to the high ceiling, she appeared.

I forgot how to breathe.  My heart forgot how to beat… I could feel it stop, hesitate, shiver with excitement, and finally — just in time — step back into its now-hastened rhythm. 

I don’t know whether my gasp was audible.  I do know that to feel air swelling my lungs, to feel my heart pounding in my chest, and to see my bride proceeding up the aisle were the sweetest yet most terrifying sensations I have ever experienced.

She was perfect.

I nearly had tears spilling from my eyes even before she came close enough to see them.  When she stood not-quite-arm’s-length in front of me and I repeated my vows, I could barely see her.  How I kept raw emotion from spilling down my cheeks, I’ll never know.  And when her voice broke during her vows, there was barely a dry cheek in the building, although we — still — managed to contain our own tears, somehow.

We did cry, later.

(She is still perfect.) 

Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself… — Ephesians 5:33

Good things come...

Patience is not a virtue I often witness in people these days.  Our instant-gratification culture has eliminated the need for patience in so many ways that we rarely practice it at all; combine our impatience with our increasing selfishness and the results can be devastating.

In my college classes we sometimes discussed a method of studying the ability to delay gratification.  A child would be placed in a room, sitting at a table.  On the table were a handful of M&Ms.  The child was told by the researcher that he would be left alone for several minutes, and if the M&Ms were still on the table when the researcher returned, the child would be rewarded with more.  If the child grabbed the M&Ms while the researcher was gone, there would be no reward. 

Once the researcher left the room, hidden cameras recorded the child’s actions.  Some children were grabbers; some were waiters. 

Most of the students I teach, I feel certain, would be grabbers. 

So. 

I must have been about ten years old when my grandmother waved me over to the easy chair where she had lately spent all of her time. 

“Take this,” she whispered.  I had to strain to hear her, but I knew that she was speaking as loudly as she could.  She handed me a twenty-dollar bill with one shaking hand.  “This is for your graduation.”  She looked at me.  I was obviously confused.  “I won’t be able to see you graduate,” she explained, leaning back and closing her eyes. 

When I got home, I put the bill in the top drawer of the chest in my bedroom… the same drawer where I kept bicentennial quarters, the occasional Canadian coin that a distracted shopkeeper might give in change, and my favorite pirate ring. 

I didn’t touch it again for three years. 

When I was thirteen, I came home from school one day to find that my mother had locked herself in the bedroom.  Dad was in the kitchen, sipping coffee — rare for a man who almost never drinks it.  He placed his mug on the table with the patient care he uses for every action.  “Your grandmother passed away today,” he said, making direct eye contact. 

I think my mouth fell open at the blunt statement.  After a moment, I found my voice.  “Which one?” I asked. 

“Your mother’s mother.”  He cleared his throat.  “We’ll be going up there tomorrow night for visitation.” 

That was all that needed to be said.  He returned to his coffee, and I went back to my room.  I opened the top drawer of my chest and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill — the one my grandmother had given me years before.  I sat on my bed, looking at the bill, for several minutes before returning it to the drawer. 

When I was eighteen, I graduated from high school.  On graduation night, after I got home, I pulled out the twenty-dollar bill and put it with the checks, gift cards, and other gifts of congratulations my relatives had sent.  After eight years of waiting, my grandmother’s gift had finally fulfilled its purpose.

We shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it. — Abraham Lincoln

Sweet.

…crazy birthday, dear Aylad, crazy birthday to me.

This is, without a doubt, the most insane birthday I’ve ever had.  It is also the most special.

My beautiful, thoughtful, loving wife remembered that several weeks ago I was complaining that I wanted to play Guitar Hero II, but couldn’t afford the guitar controller… so this morning, as soon as breakfast was finished, she couldn’t wait any longer to give me a suspiciously guitar-shaped package and a game-case-sized gift bag.

She really is perfect.

Her car, unfortunately, is slightly less perfect than it was a few hours ago.  She got rear-ended by a hit-and-run driver on the way to work (she’s fine, and the car isn’t that badly damaged).

When I got to work, I was setting up my classroom for a big standardized test when I heard what sounded like a tornado outside my building.  I called my parents, who live in the area; they hadn’t heard anything about severe weather, so I shrugged it off.

Meanwhile, the building was “shrugging off” half of its rooftop air ducts due to high winds.

Yeah.

Huge pieces of sheet metal now litter the parking lot.  One or two vehicles were damaged, but no one was injured, miraculously.  If it had happened ten minutes later, more students would have been arriving on campus, and there would have been blood.

The damage caused a gas leak… the day got even more interesting.  All eleven hundred students were evacuated to a building designed to accommodate about two hundred fifty individuals.

At this point, I was in high spirits.  The test had been called off, and plans were being made to close the school.  Great way to spend my birthday:  home early, playing Guitar Hero II.

The kids are gone now, and in a minute I’ll be going to a meeting to find out whether I really can leave early.

Wheeeeeeee!!!

(But… referring back to an earlier statement I made… the most important thing about today, by far, is the fact that I’M MARRIED.  This is my first married birthday.  I love you, dear.)

P.S. — YES!  I can leave at noon rather than the usual time of 3:30.  Quite a nice birthday indeed, although my wife will be jealous.

(Photo credit and License)

What a change is here...

The plan went as follows:

1. Rent a new apartment large enough for both of us.
2. While paying the first month’s rent on the new apartment and one last month’s rent on our old, separate ones, gradually move in our belongings.
3. Set up satellite TV and DSL internet at the new apartment.
4. Once enough of my stuff is moved, I begin actually living there while bringing the remainder of my property over at my leisure.
5. Cancel satellite TV and internet at the old apartment.
6. Once her last month ends, move her remaining belongings either to the new apartment or to her parents’ house, which is where she will sleep until our wedding.
7. Get married.
8. Bring her and her luggage to the new apartment and begin a blissful marriage.

This is what is known as a segue:  a smooth transition from one state to another.   Best of all, the wedding was scheduled for November 29, the Saturday after Thanksgiving, so that we’d both have a few days off from work for last-minute details.

Right.

The actual chain of events was more like this:

1. Rent a new apartment large enough for both of us.
2. Spend two months’ rent on all three apartments (hers, mine, and ours).
3. Bring not nearly enough of our stuff to the apartment before I begin living there.
4. Have satellite TV and DSL internet installed, but have absolutely no time to watch TV or set up the internet access for nearly a week, because I’m
5. spending Thanksgiving week working from 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning until after midnight, every day, right up until the night before we
6. get married in a beautiful ceremony with lots of friends and relatives present (more on this in later posts, but it was magnificent).
7. Bring her and her luggage to the new apartment and begin a blissful but very busy marriage.
8. Spend the day after the wedding still trying frantically to empty out my old apartment (again, more on the theme of “why do I own this much stuff” later).

Argh.  The entire week was incredibly stressful, and I nearly fell asleep on the road this morning, and I’ve been saying for about four or five days that I really will get the internet set up today (which is why I haven’t posted in nearly a week), and it hasn’t happened yet… but, you know what?

The wedding was beautiful, my wife (wow) in her wedding gown was absolutely gorgeous (as opposed to merely very, very beautiful, as she is the rest of the time), the catering at the reception was amazing, and this afternoon when I leave school I’ll be going home to the most wonderful and amazing woman in the world.

I am feeling incredibly happy and satisfied right now.

Maybe she’ll make cookies.

Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies. — Aristotle

(Photo is in public domain.)

Great-great-granddad

My great-great-grandfather, by all accounts, didn’t put much stock in photographs.  Too new, too strange.  It was almost indecent, making pictures of people like that.  He’d heard that kings and princes and such had painters to come and make pictures of them, but that was painting, that was different.  It took a while… several days, by his reckoning… and, well, that was for kings.  Like wearing those bright-colored tights — fine for fine folk, but not for him.  These photographs, somehow, were worse.  Too quick.  They didn’t take so long to make, and so people were going around wasting them on regular folks.  That just couldn’t be right, could it?

He didn’t hold with fairs and festivals and the like, either.  Too much like carnival.  Oh, yes, he’d heard stories about carnival.  A visiting preacher had spoken one Sunday morning about the immoral ways of the old country and how every year they had revelry so scandalous that it took forty days to atone for it afterward.

But… well, the cantaloupes had done so well this year, and he couldn’t have eaten them all before they went to rot.  Wastefulness was sinful, so he’d better find someone who could put them to use.  Best place to do that is the fair… and then people got to talking about how large and tasty-looking the cantaloupes were, and the next thing you know, they’d sort of taken him by the elbow and shooed him over to a table where he could set down his cantaloupes and let Mister Somebody-or-other in what looked like a city-bought suit — at least $25, his cousin had said — poke them and thump them and make “aha, mm-hmm” sounds under his breath.

And then they handed him a piece of bright blue ribbon, smiling and clapping him on the back and shaking his hand.  He shoved the ribbon into the back of his belt; perhaps the wife could use it on the new dress she was sewing.

A photographer appeared, tripod over his shoulder.  The small man hustled my twice-great-grandfather over away from the crowd; his young assistant practically shoved the cantaloupes into his arms.  “Hold that,” the photographer called, spreading the legs of his tripod and ducking under the cloth cover.

Well… they were all so determined, and friendly, and it had been a memorable day, and perhaps the grandchildren might want to remember what their grandfather looked like… but he didn’t have to enjoy all the attention.  No, sir.  No need for enjoyment of it, not at all.

They were fine cantaloupes this year, though.

Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, “By jove! I’m being humble,” and almost immediately pride — pride at his own humility — will appear. — C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Memory seed.

My parents’ woods.  Shade, creek, flowers, vines, fences.  These have always been there in my memories.  In the right season, we would go and look for the pink lady’s slipper orchid; at other times, we would simply walk for the sake of walking.  Fifty acres, mostly wooded, spread out beneath our feet, filled with jack-in-the-pulpit, trillium, honeysuckle, and a wealth of other wildflowers.

On one occasion, I remember a man going with us who did not normally go.  I think he was my uncle.  I know that I was too young to know why he was there, since he did not live with us.

The walk was… how long?  I’m not sure, because I’ve forgotten most of it.  The only fragment of that day that has survived was near the end of the hike.  We were walking uphill, approaching the back of my father’s barn.  My uncle was in front of me.  He and my father paused for a moment to talk, and as I squinted up at them against the patches of sun falling through the leaves, my uncle bent and scooped something from the ground.  He turned and extended his hand to me, smiling.  I took what he held and looked down at it, puzzled.

It was round and lumpy.  Half of it shone in the sunlight, smooth and polished like my mother’s table.  The other half was rough, pebbly, and a little softer to the touch.

“It’s an acorn.”  He smiled and handed me two or three more.

He turned to continue walking, and the memory ends.  I remember that later I put the acorns with my toys, and when the caps came off as the acorns dried, I used them as hats or bowls for some of my little figures.

The main thing I know is that every time, every time I touch or hold an acorn… most of the time when I just see an acorn… I think of that man, my uncle, the uncle who died when I was so young that I have only that one memory of him.  The uncle who put acorns in my hand for the first time, who puts in my father’s eyes almost the only tears I’ve ever seen there.

Thank you, Uncle Raymond, for these gifts.

Many of those trees were my friends creatures I had known from nut and acorn; many had voices of their own that are lost for ever now. — Treebeard

Each kindly act is an acorn dropped
In God’s productive soil;
You may not know, yet the tree shall grow
– Ella Wheeler Wilcox 

(Photo Credit and License)

Harri Stojka

Guitars and needles, strings and yarn… the past
returns with chords of music, wool, and wood.
The strands of music weave their way around
his strands of hair. Its hue is like the back
of his guitar, its acorn-chestnut glow
like Grandma’s polished floor, her polished chair.
She knitted in that chair, and he knits tunes
like woolen sweaters in the air or gloves
for children’s fingers. Wrinkles line his face.
They sing of age and cold, as Grandma’s did.
Her chair had armrests polished smooth and dull,
as his chair’s arms must be. She hunched with age
and pain and concentration, as does he.
She would have liked this man, this song, these strands.

About this poem

I don’t know why I felt that I needed to write a poem about this photograph.  Maybe it has something to do with the colors in the photo or the age visible in the guitar player’s face.  I do know that I’m only half-satisfied with the poem as it now stands; I’ll have to revisit it at some point and see what I can do with it.  I’m not sure if iambic pentameter was really the way to go, but it was a fun challenge.

I hope you enjoyed it… as always, comments (especially suggestions for improvement) are more than welcome!

The violin and guitar play well by the grace of the player but cannot feel anything themselves. — Thakur Anukulchandra

(Photo Credit and License)

...still warm...

She made cookies.

There are times when cookies are necessary.  They are sugary little emotional painkillers, morphine for the soul.

Most people don’t realize it, but many words in the English language derive from ancient onomatopoeia.  There is a reason why “fuzzy” sounds, well, fuzzy, and why pronouncing “stutter” sounds like you have a bit of a speech impediment.  Likewise, there is a reason why “cookie” has that heartbeat BUHdum rhythm to it.  Cookie.  Cookie.  Cookie, cookie, cookie, pulse getting faster as you smell the chocolate… cookiecookiecookiecookie heralds a touch of brown sugar and cinnamon.

Cookies.

I’d had one of those days that seem to come ever more frequently in late October and early November.  Strange how, when I was a student, I never seemed to notice how painful it could be when we didn’t have a mid-October “fall break” to briefly arrest our long, painful tumble toward Christmas.  As a teacher, I feel it keenly.  I begin sleeping through my alarms, shivering through scalding showers, aching deep in the marrow of bones I didn’t know I had.  My favorite students become my worst nightmares.  My worst nightmares go on strike, unable to meet the ever-more-challenging demand to be more terrifying than waking life.

On this particular day, I had slept through not one but two separate alarms, completely zoned out while sitting on the toilet (resulting in ten minutes of pins-and-needles in my upper thighs), broken an ice scraper attempting to clear my windshield, and nearly been struck by a hypercaffeinated teenager with an incomplete understanding of what “four-way stop” really means.

Then I arrived at school, and my day began.

My students didn’t seem even vaguely interested in either Zeffirelli’s 1968 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet or in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 version – nearly unheard of, since normally the girls in the class (with occasional assistance from a guy or two… you never know) like to argue about which Romeo is hotter.  Instead, they were more concerned with asking whether I knew that Obama is a Muslim and speculating about what “color” he is.

If you can’t tell, I teach in a rural school.

They didn’t seem particularly interested in the research paper I gave them, either.  No point in letting them get the idea that watching films is all we’ll be doing for the rest of the semester.

Lunch would have been a granola bar.  Lunch would have been, had I remembered to bring one to school with me.

Days like that, I normally leave faint smudges of rubber in the parking lot at 3:30 sharp.  Sometimes 3:30 is so sharp, the minute hand on the clock hasn’t worked up the nerve to swing past the 5.  Unfortunately, the meeting scheduled to run from 3:15 to 3:45 promised to curb my enthusiasm.

“3:45,” you understand, is administrator-speak for “4:35.”

On the way home — finally – I got a text message.  “Y r u l8 nd 2 pk up gro.”  After swerving to avoid a pair of joggers who decided to jaywalk while I was fumbling with my phone, I pulled into the nearest gas station to fuel up and dry-swallow some Excedrin while trying to decipher the text.  SMS abbreviations were one of the original Egyptian plagues.  This is a little-known fact, since the sinking of Atlantis destroyed the last remaining ancient cellular towers, and since King James’s translators thought ”rofl” was Hebrew for “locust.”

Close enough.

Because Excedrin always leaves a bad taste in my mouth, causes me to feel jittery, and doesn’t actually kill the headache for at least a half-hour, by the time I arrived home sans “gro” or whatever I was supposed to “pk up,” I was not in the best of moods.  Specifically, I was all set to rant for at least an hour about the degeneration of the English language, the thickheadedness of at least three assistant principals, the ignorance of my students’ parents, and no I didn’t pick up the gro, next time spell it out, dang it.

Then I walked in the front door, took a deep breath to fuel the coming storm, and…

She had made cookies.

All the world’s a cookie jar, and all the men and women merely crumbs. … I happen to be one of the chocolate chips. — Garfield

Un biscuit ça n’a pas de spirit, c’est juste un biscuit. Mais, avant c’était du lait, des oeufs. Et, dans les oeufs, il y a la vie potentielle. — Jean-Claude Van Damme

(Shreds of Truth disclaimer: She doesn’t really use that many abbreviations… but she does make cookies.)

(Photo Credit and License)