Splitting Hairs

 

Finally after too many weeks, I had time today to get a hair cut. It is not one of favorite things to do; it used to be, but not anymore. For a man with straight hair combed to the right (and yes I had to check that as I wrote this, my perspective of my hair comes from visits to the mirror which always leaves me turned around), I don’t need a salon to wash and rinse, style and set, massage tight shoulders, or even a latte while being primped by professionals. I just want my hair cut. Too many places are around that offer too many options; I am a man of simple needs.

As a little guy in Orangeburg, my mom took me and my brothers to Mr. Boyds Barber Shop. It was a small shop at the old Orangeburg Mall with two chairs equipped with leather strops; hair strewn warped linoleum floor, big mirrors, and the smell of talc. I remember going there from when I was little, and Mr. Boyd would slap down a board across the arm rests to raise me to cuttin’ height, slip the bib around me, and start cutting, talking all the while.

When I went away to Clemson for college, I found several barbers within easy walking distance of campus. I quickly learned on my only visit to Clint’s to tell the barber that I am not ROTC before he starts in with the clippers. It did not take me long to settle on Charles and Al’s as my regular barbers. They were happy men with sure scissors. They were also only two doors down from my favorite bar, and the meeting place for the Outta Control Track Club.

On my own; adult male at large, I moved to Colorado and engaged in a long and at times desperate search for a proper barber. After seven years, I stumbled upon Tom’s. Tom will always be the barber by which all other barbers are measured by for me. He was a round, congenial Hispanic man in his late sixties with thick graying hair and an infectious smile. I don’t think there was ever a time that I didn't go into Tom’s and find the visitor chairs populated by a few old men jawing among themselves and with Tom. They weren't waiting for haircuts, they were just there to gab and play checkers. Walking into Tom’s past the striped barber’s pole was like stepping not back into time, but outside of it, away from the world into a nexus of manly peace. As he cut my hair over the years, he talked, Tom loved to talk. I learned he was a divorced man whose girlfriend was his ex-wife – he said things worked better that way. He talked of the blizzard of ’62, of his first wife dying from an asthma attack, of how when he was a young man, he and his brother brought a cousin across the border and up to Colorado where they hid him in a barn. The capper was that this jolly man was also a motorcycle enthusiast who rode with great pride and as often as possible a blue Harley. Seeing Tom, I felt as if I was being groomed by history in thirty minute increments. He passed fifteen years ago, and I am sure he is missed by more people than just me.

In Tom’s wake, I have found no one. I tried a barber downtown but he was soulless and worked by appointment. Most other shops I try are operated by immigrant women who cut hair with acceptable skill, but the atmosphere is more foreign to me than their accents. My hair has now become a whore for sale to the cheapest bidder - $12 at Fantastic Sams, $15 at Cost Cutters, $8 at the shop I went to today (ten minutes start to finish by a stoic and somewhat rough Korean woman).

When I think of barber shops, I think of Floyd’s on the old Andy Griffith Show. It was not a caricature or an ideal, it was how barber shops were. I grew up with one version or another of it, following the form well into my adulthood until the trail went cold. How do I share this with my grandson? How do I even convey to him that at one time manhood began not with football, sports cars, or the latest Nikes, but with a kindly man placing a board with grey chipped paint across the armrests of his chair to trim your hair and tell you a story?

Humid Beings

 

The Colorado Springs night sits cold and quiet, attended by the moon and stars. Snow patches glow softly, muted reflection of lights both heavenly and man made. The frigid air that is dry to the touch, cracks skin and chaps lips. That arid quality is a constant through the seasons here, and something that drive my thoughts back to humid life in my native South Carolina.

I eschew the hallowed "dry heat" of the West. Its status shilled by snake oil salesmen marketing this starkly beautiful, rugged, and parched land. The dry breezes, the dry heat, and the dry cold are all odorless and impersonal, leaving seasons incomplete, lacking some essential element of their personalities.

Seasons are distinct in the South because of humidity. In the winter she seeps through layers of protection; transfiguring simple cold to something more personal assuming residence in our joints. In spring she moistens the new life that honors her with vibrant colors. In the summer she carries the heat deep into the shade, into every crevice of the day. In the autumn she is like some transformative Hindu goddess, easing the natural compost of life into reincarnation for spring rebirth.

Humidity in the South is synonymous with the land’s context and inseparable from its holiness and hospitality. Humidity is protector, companion, and lover. Her presence is a shield thwarting an onslaught of Yankee immigrants, Northerners who believe our air oppressive and somehow worse than the polluted humidity of their great cities. Their stifling confines are too real and definable, while our moist and fecund world is of mythological and romantic proportions.

She greets us in the morning as we step from our homes, imbuing the air with the day's scents of decay and growth, of grass and pine, of pluff mud and swamps. She lazes about the day slowing our motions and greedy fervors, settling us into a more languidly paced life. She settles in the night as we retreat to the regulated comforts of our homes; waiting just outside, prepared to accompany us when the new day begins.

Humidity is a special intimacy that we are sanctified by each day. She draws us in with warm embrace, clinging with sensual desire, caressing the body with eddies of damp heat which flush the skin with pleasure, and curls and kinks the hair as if we were coursing with the raging hormones of youth. Moving within her constancy stirs some primal part of our brains, recalling the amniotic womb that sheltered us when we were nameless, infinitely dependent, and at our most vulnerable.

Humidity is the continuum of which all things are inexplicably bound in the South. She is a palpable ether, subtext, and lead character to the people that “speak right,” remember manners, and savor the counterpoint of ice cold sweet tea to the hot heavy air of a summer’s day. She is an anthem to my spirit, and a persistent siren call for me to return to my roots.

Radio Days

Smaller than a tissue box, it sat on the nightstand between our beds. It was hard green plastic with a black face and cardboard back. The dial glowed in the dark with soft, warm light. It held the interest of two boys who should have been asleep but were captured by voices broadcast from near and far on the AM band.

My brother and I connected through the radio to both the broader world in the night beyond our bedroom walls and to each other through its magic. We listened to sports, music, radio drama, and talk radio from local WDIX in Orangeburg to far flung WLS in Chicago, the dial was open territory and all was fair game.

We would listen to the incomprehensible hockey games of the Fort Wayne Komets on WOWO and the Philadelphia Flyers on some long forgotten station out of Philly. What did we Southern boys know of games played on ice? We became die-hard Braves fans as Milo Hamilton and Ernie Johnson guided us through many losing seasons. Still we were thrilled by Hammerin' Hank Aaron, Ralph “the Roadrunner” Garr, and Knucksie Phil Nekro. We would even dial into Philly games because we could never get enough baseball. Our basketball thirst was satisfied not by any pro team, but by the heroic efforts of Mike Dunleavy and John Roach who played for the Gamecocks under the near mythical Frank McGuire on WIS in Columbia.

I’m not sure of Chris, but talk radio really drew me in. When I was young there were such characters that roamed the airways. I remember Larry King before he was tainted by television. I listened to one host that instructed me to go outside beneath a full moon with outstretched empty wallet, turn around three times uttering "Filler Up" with each spin. Another distant regional personality continually claimed that Montana did not exist, because whenever he passed over it in travels it was night and therefore never any proof of the pilots assertions "We are now flying over Montana." I checked an rechecked maps, it certainly seemed like Montana was there to me, but how could I know?

It was the onslaught of the TV era when we were hooked on night time radio, but CBS radio still put together its weekly CBS Radio mystery theater, hosted by the wonderful voice of the venerable E.G. Marshall and produced by Hyman Brown. They performed adaptations of classics like Poe's The Black Cat, The Hand by Guy de Maupassant, and The Monkey’s Paw by W. W. Jacobs, as well as their own original radio plays. My brother and I were chilled and delighted by each broadcast. I loved these so much; my friend Jim Albergotti and I produced our own hilarious shows (at least to us!) recorded on cassette tapes.

Chris and I also would listen to music, not a lot but some. It was far from our main fare. For some reason the only song I can remember hearing from that blessed box in those days was Windmills of my Mind. Curious.

There were nights upon nights that Chris and I made these nocturnal excursions while never leaving our beds. Flights of imagination piloted by voices deep and resonating that would take us to the very edge of our dreams each night. I clung to my nighttime radio habit many years beyond when my brother and I got our own bedrooms.

Sadly as is the way of progress, shows went away, regional personalities gave way to syndicated ones, and airwaves became too crowded for my radio to reach out beyond the boundaries of South Carolina. I miss all those programs. I miss the endless variety that haunted random and magical points on the dial, and I miss Chris in his bed and I in mine listening to the static tinged world so vast beyond our walls.

Dennis

 

It is a different world
Without you, Dennis.
Leaving us to wander in the wake of why

It is somehow wrong
That the sun still rises, the earth
Still turns relentlessly night to day to night

You were so strong
A lanky smile beneath
Your shock of thick perfect hair

Your daily toils
Honest and of the earth
In gardens that bent to your tending

Your humor irreverent
Enduring beyond your health
A salve to others, a shield to youself

The memory of how you
Turning your wasting into
A gaunt pale grace to ever be a legacy of how to live

We go on trying as you run and poise in eternity
To cling to your shadow, your earthly taunt and remain
Catching nothing in our futile grip, missing you then missing you

Pre-Cancer Man

(Spoiler Alert! I wrote this after I had my first colonoscopy two and half weeks ago. At the time, I knew the doctor was able to partially remove a polyp and it was likely pre-cancerous. I now have the results back confirming its pre-cancerous nature but did not contain any malignancy. The remainder of the polyp will be removed some time around my birthday – oh joy! So I am fine, but tinged by this to be more careful in terms of my health and quite thankful to Jean-Marie who insisted I get the colonoscopy in the first place)

Cancer has become a dark shadow that crosses all our paths in one way or another. I have lost my dear friend Dennis to lung cancer, there is my friend Ian who struggled indomitably and successfully through rectal cancer, my friend Jim who lived longer than the odds allowed with melanoma, my father who had prostate cancer that could not save him from the degradations of Alzheimer’s, my beloved brother-in-law Matt who survived Burkitt’s lymphoma, my mother-in-law who had several different types of cancer that wasted this dominant woman, and their are others. We all have our lists. It is a disease that holds no regard for anyone and respects no boundaries. Now is the time for my personal scare.

Just a few days ago, I underwent my door prize for turning fifty – a colonoscopy. I had no expectations going into the procedure; my digestive acumen and cast iron stomach were (at least to me) things of legend. The new anesthesia is miraculous, I was out one moment and alert the next, no time for groggy, no place for incoherence. In recovery my wife and I sat and were greeted by the a nurse who said words we all make fun of but are never thrilled to actually hear, “I have good news and bad news.” She said that the preliminary results were that the polyp (four times larger than the average) which was found and biopsied was likely pre-cancerous. Because it was a flat multi-lobed polyp they were only able to take half of it at this time without risk of compromising the bowel. The rest will be removed later.

Still while the phrase “pre” was absorbed readily, the term “cancer” hung like the big elephant piñata in the room, ungainly swaying back and forth, the sudden ugly and unwanted center of attention. Questions were asked and answered, the gist of which is that the biopsy results will be back in seven to ten business days, and the results will determine when I go back for another scope to remove the remainder of the polyp which is taking up too much room in my life right now. There is the slimmest possibility that surgery would be required but the chance is so remote and not worth my attention until the report is in.

The benefit of the prefix ‘pre’ is that there is far greater breathing room than afforded with it than without it. But the damage is done and the baggage has been placed at my feet. There will not be a doctor’s visit no matter the reason without the echo of that word in the primal recesses of my brain. I cannot remove it from my sweet, sweet wife’s thoughts and vocabulary.

In one instant of time I have become the pre-cancer man. An internal label given by me to a mental image of Dr. Jekyll hoping there will never be a Mr. Hyde, or a rising hominid hoping not to devolve into some destructive ancestor, but I have never done well at worrying about myself, I am much more wired to worry and care for others. It is difficult for me to see beyond the practical implications of the results I have been handed and will be handed. I will adjust my diet; I will drink less whiskey (and this is said with a truly heavy heart) and enjoy more water, I will take care of myself with this too close brush with fate, and that will be that. I cannot, however, not worry about the effect that word has or may have on my wife, family, and loved ones.

Cancer (even the insinuation of cancer) is a pebble that makes large unending waves once it is carelessly tossed into life’s pool. The concentric waves reflect and return to me from my wife and children, from my friends and siblings, setting up a silent and persistent echo in my head. So I present the warning and wake-up call I have received to all I know. I encourage you (as Katie Couric did a dozen years back – only without the video tape) to stay vigil, listen to doctors, and undergo whatever preventative screenings they recommend. It keeps the waves as small as possible.

Day Follows Night Redux

The sunrise comes as no surprise. “As day follows night” the saying goes and proves its truism each morning. From the eastern horizon the sun threatens, rays lighting it and spreading west. The light in these brief moments of dawn is transfigured crossing the prairie to cast a coral glow on the rise of Rockies. Such a contrast, landlocked mountains painted the color of sea life, bringing together ocean and mountain, ephemeral moments, blink and it is gone. Gaze upon it and drink it into your soul before the sun at the start of its brazen passage whitewashes all with its naked stare, claim this daily miracle for your own while it last.

Mile markers and mountains race by as I head south on the interstate. I long for there to be silhouetted Saguaro about me, frozen arms outstretched in acceptance or submission, but not here, there are only walking stick cacti to see in Colorado. Sad stand-ins for the quintessential quilled plants that inhabit our image-ridden imaginations. Still walking sticks are something, as cacti are succulents of myth and lore in my native South.

As I look over the hood of my car, the blacktop goes by and beneath me. Years on this circuit have imprinted upon me, and I can gaze about freely in the knowledge that my car knows where it is going. Amid the stark, arid beauty of these barren plains that abut the Rockies, people I pass and that pass me seem oblivious with eyes on nowhere and cell phones nestled against their cheeks. How can they not see, how can they not think of God instead of the microcosms of their lives?

At seven thirty in the morning (or the A.M. as might be said in the masterpiece of a movie, Raising Arizona), they are talking on their cell phones. Who is on the other end? Are they talking to other commuters, reaching out for kindred spirits with whom to hide from the braking dawn and its majesty, or someone at home who tugs at their hearts in a life that seems more commute than anything else? I don’t know, but I wonder. I have no one to talk to that early, and wish no one to talk with. They need their sleep or start to their day, and I need to commune with the visions about me to assure myself that I am part of the coming day. I see exits familiar in number and name, and locations marking my progress, a self-congratulatory pat on the back that one meager morning milestone after another is passed, each milestone taking me further along from bed to work.

My mind is a transition as well. I process dreams, think of home, and then accept work and its list of things that cry for my attention. These last thoughts nurse me along the final miles to the office so that the beginning of my work day builds upon the foundation of my thoughts.

Returning home reverses the imagery of going to work. I take the drive to unwind and drink in the surroundings, to numb the thoughts that are best left to my desk and tomorrow. The mountains take on a different quality as I work my way north. The sun having dipped behind them is still lighting the world, and leaves the mountains in relief to such an extent that they appear cut out of cardboard. Layers of mountain shapes shown in two dimensions to the thirsting eye.

I leave the work behind and settle into the home ahead. I plan what to fix for dinner, I scan the mountains and the prairies. I see different faces in adjacent cars doing the same thing as their morning counterparts – talking into phones, ignoring the world, absorbed and self-absorbed.

Home is the boon I unconsciously await all day. It is the gift afforded to me by trial of a fifty mile each way commute. I relinquish home in the morning, knowing I will reclaim it at night. Returning to my wife and our dog, to cook dinner, to relax together and taste each others waters of the day.

It is at the end of this routine that bed waits, that sleep dreams for my return as the price of a new dawn. I know not where the dreams will take me, though I try to be the boatman of it across my private river Styx. I have some say at times how I enter, where I tread, but never the whole of the whole. The true boatman is my subconscious and goes by the name angst. My dreams are the very definition of worlds colliding. They are linear feed and juxtaposition of past and present and mist enshrouded future. I embrace them as such; I groom through them for insight, and take them at face value.

When morning comes, I walk free of the dreams and must rise from the bed trailing a longing glance back to my sleeping wife. I partake in my morning ablutions and return to my car and my commute, the cycle repeating as cycles must. My day is under way and the sunrise comes as no surprise.

Our Resin Lord

Roadside monument to someone passed
Crucified replica lord hanging amid weeds
Driven into cracked and arid hardpan
Mourned by wilted silk flowers at his feet

Plastic savior, eternally upturned face
To uncaring sky, and unresponsive heaven
Riveted through stigmata to metal frame
Silently suffering the elements, unheard by saints

Mocked by dust devils
Ghosts that come and go in time with gusts
Turning in fleeting dance
Chaotically about weeping silks and foot of the cross

Frozen agony searching, mutely asking
God, why have you forsaken this traveler
Whose life was robbed too soon
On asphalted road between Sodom and Gomorrah

Our Resin Lord
Caught between life and death
Upon the cross on foreign Golgotha
Not even thieves to keep him company

The Evil That Men Do

Long ago in the mists of mythology, Zeus commanded Hephaestus the god of craftsman to fashion the world's first woman out of earth and water. Athena clothed her modesty, Hermes gifted her tongue with speech, and Aphrodite graced her with beauty. Zeus bequeathed to Pandora a beautiful jar along with the task of keeping it safe. Zeus also warned Pandora to never open the jar. Try as she might, Pandora could not deny that other bequest of the gods, curiosity. She opened the jar the merest crack and all the evils of the world were released. Pandora closed the jar as fast as she could but only succeeded in keeping Elpis the Spirit of Hope locked up as all else escaped. Zeus, unlike God with Eve, bore no malice towards Pandora for he expected this.

The evils of the world whether spread by Pandora or brought about by the sins of Adam and Eve, manifest themselves most forcefully in man's penchant to bring about death and destruction casually, and bring about peace only as a compromise to satisfy self-interest. As the year ends, national headlines reported the wounding of three New Jersey police officers in their own precinct house, the five hundredth taking of a life in Chicago this year, and the death of a New Delhi gang rape victim.

2012 has been a year marred by violence around the globe and for Americans dominated by the home grown massacres of innocents. The seven mass shootings in the United States this year account for a quarter of the attacks, wounded, and dead by mass gun slayings in the past twenty-two years. More than the lingering conflicts in the Middle East, the assaults in 2012 have left the nation mourning and vulnerable and asking what can be done.

The senseless slaying of twenty children five and six years of age, and six adults at a school in the now sorrow draped Connecticut town of Newtown seemed the horrifically nameless punctuation of the harm that people can so quickly and seemingly easily be capable of. The authorities continue to probe, and everyone seeks answers to why twenty small coffins now lay beneath the earth, sealed boxes on lives barely begun. We ask if the killer was deranged, we ask if the availability of assault weapons is to blame. The outcry reaches to the top of our nation, and no reasonable reply from any corner is heard.

Elements of the government are responding to calls for tighter gun control, while the NRA raises its craggy visage and calls for better armed schools. The NRA seems to have forgotten the fact that Columbine had armed guards yet Klebold and Harris were not impeded or repelled from their path of destruction. The government focuses on assault rifle access when statistics since 1990 do not support them as the primary merchant of death in these random slaughters.

The NRA pointed out after the Aurora movie theatre shootings that a better armed populace could have stemmed or prevented what transpired, but at no time since 1990 or before have any of the gun owning citizenry jumped into these situations as saviors. Neither gun control advocates nor gun supporters seem to spend much time noting that it is not the career criminal that bring us to our knees, but well armed private gun owners that are making us fear for our children in schools, and malls, and movie theatres.

Career criminals are far more cautious with guns. Guns are part of their stock and trade and are a link back to them every time they use those guns in commission of a crime. Guns also up the ante on any law induced end to their careers. These criminals are interested more in prospering than going on a rampage ending in suicide. Their guns are a tool and not a means to an end.

The ones we least suspect, the quiet ones are the ones that create the greatest grief and fear of the unknown. The wolves that creep among us in their sheep-like skins keep us glancing about furtively. How do we defend against ourselves?

The answer doesn't lie in knee jerk governmental control of a single type of weapon that bears little relation to the problem at hand save to appeal to some element of the voters. The answer doesn't lie with the NRA that makes the ludicrous defense of its position that killers will always find something to kill with. The NRA is mainly concerned with preventing losses to a thirty billion dollar a year industry and appeasing the dwindling majority represented by white male gun owners. I don't know where the answer lies, I just know that time honed myopic entrenchment of dueling false ideals is not the way to go about solving the problem or even stemming the tide.

The causation of these attacks are multiple and complex. The picture is composed of social triggers, and psychological predispositions, as-well-as the ready availability of guns. We live in a society not only grown used to, but one that expects immediate gratification through constant contact with the world through the internet, cell phones, and cable/satellite services. The entertainment industry and news agencies constantly try to outdo one another to such an extent that we have become desensitized to the point that only the most violent stimulation can break through our veneer. These things together with the proper personality type and readily available guns has proven to be a lethal combination.

Instead of pandering, the government should take a multi-pronged attacked such as:

• Finding sociological commonalities among the perpetrators of mass shootings
  
• Determining psychological commonalities among the perpetrators of mass shootings
  
• Develop laws that will limit access to guns through third party individuals such as someone buying guns for someone else
  
• Track guns better, perhaps through annual ownership taxes similar to automobiles, the taxes can be used to fund gun violence programs
  
• Better education of people of what may be tell tale signs of contributing factors such as overly morbid behavior and suicidal tendencies

As a native of the South, I and many people I grew up with were raised around guns. We were taught to respect them, how to use them properly. Not to say that we didn’t sometimes have fun with them as well. I can still remember using a shotgun on my first derelict toilet in a ramshackle barn. I realize that guns themselves don’t kill people, there has to be a person holding the gun with a willing finger on the trigger. Finding what makes a person decide to take as many innocents as possible with them when they decide to end their lives, is at least as important as reasonably implemented controls on firearms.

Ghosts of Christmas Past

I am not looking to hear reindeer pawing at my rooftop tomorrow; I am not going to have visions of sugar plums dancing about my cluttered jagged thoughts when I go to bed Christmas Eve. I will be listening to the sound of my wife’s breathing and trying to dream of the tiny miracles of Christmases passed to settle my spirit from a year that has been difficult and at times painful.

I wish my childhood memories were more clear, that I could pick out defining Christmas moments from each year that passed beneath my young feet, but they no longer are, they are blended together. One of the memories unattached to time or age is of a nocturnal exploration of presents beneath the tree. I do not recall if I was joined by any of my siblings (and would not implicate them even if I did) only that on this secret venture I peeked at every present I was receiving that year and it ruined the surprise on Christmas. When I told my mom of this just today on the phone, she told me two things: 1) She didn’t know that I had done that, and 2) She had done the same thing when she was a child. I was surprised and pleased by her admission as it established a new link to have with my mother. I love Mom.

Childhood memories also bless me with mental snapshots of what made Christmases in my youth wonderful. Closing my eyes I can see images of my father in varying degrees of Santa garb, of trees overflowing with gifts for five children who were just lucky to have the parents we did, of fires in the hearth, and of incredible food prepared by my mom for her small army.

Memories are better defined thinking back to my college years. When I was a sophomore, I moved off campus to an apartment that would become known as the “Sex Palace”,the same way a large man is given the nickname “Tiny”. It was there that I erected the first Christmas tree that I would call my own. It was a scrawny pine tree sapling adorned with handmade ornaments, topped with a picture of Cap’n Crunch’s Crunchberry Beast. It was that same Christmas that I returned to Orangeburg for the holidays and got the idea to do a photo series on the season. I made a corrugated cardboard sign bearing a large arrow and the word tree. I then drove to all my friend’s houses and asked them if I could take a picture of them with their families holding my sign pointing it in the direction of the Handal family tree. I wish I had kept those pictures, but somewhere back the line I wrongly decided that the mature thing was to toss those memories in favor of an image of who I should be and what I should carry with me. But nothing can take away from me the memory of the smiling faces on photo stock of the Wilsons, Lovejoys, Barkers, Campbells, Whitakers, Fogles, and others.

Many Christmases have come and gone since then. Not all of them happy, but they produced far more smiles than tears. This upcoming one will be significantly lessened by the recent loss of Dennis (more family than friend) and the sorrow that the love of his life, Marc, will be going through as part of himself is forever gone. This creates a void in the soul of our Christmas that cannot be filled and that we will always carry around.

This is where out of self-preservation I selfishly invoke Christmas magic, and yes I believe in it. I believe in the myriad small miracles that happen at Christmas that bring smiles to our faces and ingrain memories to keep those smiles in reserve for whenever they are most needed.

This has been a year for which only the biggest smile can help, so I look within to my favorite Christmas. It was the Christmas of 1998, and our daughter Haley was pregnant and living at home with us. She was round and seven+ months along. She had been miserable with a winter cold that she could not shake because of the limited medicine that her pregnancy would allow. The house was filled with relatives in for the holidays, and things were buzzing with activity by all of us on the day of our annual Christmas open house.

There was something else going on as well. Since fall, we had been working on turning our sagging detached two car garage into a cottage for Haley and the bundle of joy that would be our grandson in fewer than two months. We did this to provide her with her own life, privacy, and a safety net. By the day of our party, it was structurally complete but as yet undecorated.

My amazing wife who is a force of nature, had her heart set on the house being finished for Haley by the night of the party. This added to the work and stress to the day, but if Jean-Marie thought it could be done, I knew it could be. As Jean-Marie dedicated herself body and soul to the cottage, I was tasked with supporting her and directing the party preparations. At one point, my brother-in-law Matt (one of Jean-Marie’s brothers) took me aside and asked me with an air of frustration if Jean-Marie was aware that in a few hours eighty people would be descending on the house and there was a lot left to do. I simply told him that Jean-Marie would not be doing this and leaving the final party prep to us if she didn’t think it was doable.

A great deal of work in a little bit of time ensued attended by my running interference and supplying manual labor for my spouse. Shortly before the party, things were all in place, and we were showered, dressed, and ready. Before the guests arrived, Jean-Marie and I lit the luminarias leading behind our house to the cottage, and led Haley (with her eyes shut) to her new home. Once inside, we told her to open her eyes. As she did, Christmas for my wife and I collapsed in that one moment to our daughter, her unbelieving look on her face, and the tears of joy streaming from her eyes. Moments like that remind me that almost anything is possible, and the happiness of those I love is the greatest gift I can ever receive.

Tribe of the Cathartic Wasteland

In my short bio on my blog site, in my entreaties to people to read what I post, in my essays, I both allude to and actively skirt the question “Why do I write?” It is easy for me to say that it is something that I have always wanted to do and it is something that I have played around with in various small ways for much of my life, but that is a neat little package wrapped in a truth, but not the truth. Not that you are likely to find the whole truth of it here, though I will try to provide just that. A flitter of nerves in my stomach tells me that on some level just below my conscious thoughts I am afraid of the truth. In my head I hear the condescending rant of Jack Nicholson from A Few Good Men, “You can’t handle the truth!” Perhaps I can’t. Perhaps I am afraid because I feel writing is a religion with any bound writing a bible, and religion requires faith to exist, that finding the truth of it will dispel the act and the gift as surely as the finding irrefutable proof of God will send the Almighty dissipating to the winds in a cloud of logic. I feel I do need to divine it though, and if it has any chance of sticking to me, I must be honest not only to myself but to the reader as well.

There are countless books that describe the process of writing, that help one to write fiction, memoirs, poetry, non-fiction, whatever you wish. I own several of these, but they address the mechanics, the technical, the form and function. The underlying metaphysics of writing are individual and therefore deeply personal, so that no one writer can ever say why all writers write.

My writing life begins with and hinges upon reading. I was born into a family taken by reading. My mother read books that entertained her, probably because her five children were not always as entertaining as she would have liked. My father read primarily for his edification, reading on such diverse topics as history, biology, and philosophy (although science fiction was his guilty pleasure in all that). Between and betwixt the chaos that five active children can raise, all of us were able to find reading that suited us and spoke to us. For most of my formative years, I embraced science fiction which gave me a glimpse of realities just tantalizingly out of reach. My heroes were Asimov, Sturgeon, Niven, and Clark. Family trips to the bookstore or library were mandatory pilgrimages prior to any vacation, the books we were to read as anticipated as the place we would read them.

I found that reading had the affect of allowing me to truly enjoy my classes in spelling, literature, and English. And though I had a perspective spiraling toward the scientific and mathematical (a solitary pursuit when compared to my siblings), I loved learning new words, tasting new phrases, and understanding the structures which comprise good sentences. I was as happy with a writing assignment as I was with a mathematical proof. In retrospect, this is where I wandered far afield from more literate endeavors. Though I loved words, I was attracted by the more stable constructs of science. It was a safer and easier landscape for a boy to explore than the landmine laden frontier of the visceral.

In high school, I blossomed in math, contemplating the concept of infinity with glee, taking in the subtle beauty of Euclidian geometry. Never realizing that amongst the hardened pathways and seemingly solid ground that math and science were built upon, my eye was engaged with their abstracts – a literary-like approach. I also stepped occasionally outside my shell to dip into the warming waters of writing. Two such efforts will always come to mind. The first was a paper we had to write for a DAR contest on the concept of One Nation Under God. I wrote on Satanism and witchcraft in the United States and earned a trip to the office and call to my parents because I was offended that it would not be submitted to the DAR (oh what a rebel I was). The second was a science fiction short story re-telling Genesis for a creative writing class. I still remember cringingly the words I laboriously typed on my father’s old manual Royal typewrite (I am also still proud of it and the grade I received).

Even though I left high school to attend Engineering school at Clemson, and left Clemson to do applied research for the railroads, there were cracks in my self imposed armor that allowed the need and urge to write to slowly seep from me. It predominantly expressed itself through cartooning. In high school, I wrote comic strips for the school telling the ongoing adventures of Super Manager and his able sidekick, Ball Boy. Unknowingly this allowed me a creative release in a life otherwise dominated by athletic endeavors, homework, and fear of girls. In college, I continued to cartoon (and for much of the time to still be scared of girls). I fell in with an incredible cast of friends in a running group we formed calling ourselves the Out-of-Control Track Club or the OCTC. We ran twice a day seven days a week together, and for our weekly beer-based meetings at the bar called “The Study Hall,” I would provide a comic strip of the OCTC in all its eccentric glory. The chinks in my armor only widened once I moved into a professional life as not only would I post the occasional comic outside my office, but would write humorous “articles” (once even an entire “newspaper”) poking fun at myself and co-workers to the delight of all (except those in charge of my professional future, but that is a tale for another time).

All this is to say that eventually amidst the turmoil of adulthood, I found that I wanted to do more than to be funny. I discovered my fingers wanted more than to just draw humorous scenarios in pictures and words. I found that I had been trying to contain that which ultimately I could not contain – the need to express myself in words, black on white. Contrasting shades that miraculously contain meaning, feeling, and texture whose sum went beyond the twenty-six letter alphabet that compose them. I look back and recognize that I have always wanted to write, that there was a hunger that I tried to feed with bare scraps and leavings insufficient to the appetite.

Now as I write more and express myself more, I find myself needing to write more and explore myself more. I find that there is a nature to my desire that is espoused in catharsis and self-definition.

The cathartic aspect of writing for me is self-evident. As I write, I express my opinions, dreams, hopes, and ideas. It is through the written word that I am drawn to put these things forward in an explosive release of scribbling pen and the staccato tapping of fingers on plastic keys. Each time I face the blank page, I yearn to give birth to another feeling or image – not to free myself of it, but to shake it loose of its dusty cage and expose its beauty, horror, or banality, to see if it has the legs to stand on its own.

As I write, I am seeking who I am, what tribe I have been born into. We have all had dreams or fantasies that we are descendants of kings and queens, and few that speculate on their lives before reincarnation claim to have lived as a street sweeper or jester. Writing however is different; lineage is claimed through the authors that most resonate from our reading into our writing. It is not an act of pretension; rather it is a reverent recognition of those that awakened the muse in us. My voice invariably links me to a clan, and this clan is to be found in the pantheon of writers who speak to me the loudest through their works. The ranking gods of my personal Mount Olympus are James Dickey, John Nichols, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Wolfe, and the lordly and damaged Pat Conroy. I do not in the least consider myself to be on a par with these shaman of my tribe. It is because their prose speaks to me and caresses my soul like no other works that I have immersed myself in. Here at fifty I find myself a toddler learning to talk by listening to their words and the dictates of my spirit, as any child learns to speak. And as a child, I refine my accent, my voice through experimentation and mimicry hoping something unique (yet traceable) will result. I do this in hope of growth and in homage of those that have inspired me to writing.

After letting my fingers move of their own accord across the keys and my spirit wander where it will , I do not know if I have shed any light or answered any questions. I only feel that this exploration has run its course for now. That there are no more fossils I wish to exhume from the eroded and exposed walls of the canyon that runs through my soul. I know only what I knew before I began typing, that I write when I can, that I don’t write near enough, and that I will never stop writing now.