Robin Williams (or Another Richard Cory)

What was it like to be you, Robin Williams?
Were the unrelenting crashes of ideas,
Like the rising surf to a man tied to the beach,
And being drowned by the voices that eventually consume him?

Were you wracked by the ceaseless pains of labor,
The thoughts full in your distended belly,
Each pressing to be first, each fighting to be first to the light,
Each demanding to be first down the birthing canal of your mind’s eye, born fully formed?

Did your body and spirit cave to the pressures
Of being not a person, not an identity, but a conduit
Of pure expression, pure thought, pure word, pure chaos?
Were you eaten whole by them, your soul the last gift you could offer the ravening horde?

Was it lonely never being alone from your thoughts,
Never being separated from your gift, your curse,
Never having respite from the demons of creativity,
Never being able to fully love, because your love was shredded and fed in bits to those demons?

Do you find heaven a more peaceful place,
Lying in repose, tanning in the unbearable light of God’s being,
Touched with the blessed gift of one thought at a time?
I hope so.

Time of Our Lives

 

The times we live in seem to be dominated by confusion, hatred, and mayhem, while the world seems more than content to push things along rather than step back from the brink.  Three commercial airliners in five months will never see radar again (one still missing reasons unknown, one shot down by a civil war, one possibly a victim of weather). The Middle East has never been a more desperate region. Afghanis die as readily by the same hands that killed them before the US invaded and freed their land. In Iraq monsters that were held at bay by the monster the US removed are set free to wreak their own monstrosities. Gaza is once again a land of rubble and blood, and Egypt, Syria, and Lybia smolder and blaze and rot in varying degrees. Eastern Europe plays out in microcosm in the Russian sponsored breakdown of the Ukraine. And the US is not to be outdone as Republicans and Democrats argue about what is the best way to turn our backs on babies at the borders. Politicians corrupt the honored labels of liberal and conservative into the new "spic", "kike", and "nigger". Guns have become the default expression of the disenfranchised as school children in classrooms become the target of choice, and only a year ago a young African American high school student in Valdosta, Georgia, was beaten beyond recognition, stuffed dead in a hole, and the “incident” ruled a self-inflicted accident as if it were the punch line to the oldest of racist jokes.

In less than 120 years, the world has been mobilized in cars and then planes, moved from hand calculations to slide rule to tablet, carry voice and social connections in the palm of the hand, and enjoy never before available educational opportunities. Since the dawn of man, people have fought and struggled for the higher ground, for a better life. Shouldn’t the better life be here? Shouldn’t we be able to care for ourselves, to feed each other, to put a roof over everyone’s head?

Apparently not. We the sheep in order to form a more perfect union turn a deaf ear and a mute tongue to be blind followers of the purveyors of power who need only scream epithets and sling labels that stick all too easily with the paste of ignorance in order to get us to ignore the man behind the curtain in favor of the Great and Powerful Oz. The most action that we as a nation seem able to accomplish is to point fingers back and forth, to blame that person for our woes and that party for our discomforts, to fear beyond reason that we will only be allowed to fire one bullet at a time rather than the fifty rounds per second we deserve.  Meanwhile fear, starvation, and revolution are more alive than ever out our back door, in the third world, and beyond.

I have long since given up reading the newspapers. Since 9-11 I have stopped watching CNN and all cable news. I can no longer listen for any length of time to news on NPR. My hands are over my ears with my eyes shut. I have to cruise news stories on my own, melt them down using the alchemy of atomic and genetic similarity shared by mankind to distill the vapors for what might be the truth. But it is a world where people retain power by preaching hatred (a pastime older than Genesis and still we know no better, we eat it up, our piggy-persons belly up to the trough for our daily slop of lies because that is what works for us). What good is truth in small hands? How can I stand up and say to the Ukraine that ethnic Russians can still be Ukrainians? How can I turn to those same ethnic Russians and say that blood and country are interchangeable, if you can’t understand that then leave your home and go home? How can I stare down a nation and say, “They are just children. They are the future of the world. If we treat them as garbage, as undesirables, what position does that put the future in?” How can I stand on the mount and shout to the land of my father’s fathers and say, “Stop! For God’s sake Stop! You live in the cradle of religion, and you behave in the least God-like way imaginable!”

I am just one voice, and these times make me feel so small. I am infinitesimal next to powers I do not understand, in the face of atrocities that I understand all too well. There is no word, no spell, no magic phrase I can utter to get the world to stop spinning its wheels, to stop the engine of self-absorption and corruption from devouring humanity. I can only take a breath, focus, and try to believe that if enough small people can come together, a large difference can be made.

UNENDING CONVERSATION

UNENDING CONVERSATION

In the mind of a young man, a thought like a burning bush flares and a dialog between God and boy that explores the universe begins:

young man: God, how big is infinity?

God: Young man, how many numbers are there to count with?

young man: An infinite number of counting numbers, God.

God: Good. Using those numbers, how many negative numbers can you count?

young man: There are just as many, Lord. I would use all my counting numbers to count the negative numbers.

God smiles and the boy’s mind lights with a rainbow glow. Such a smart boy, the Lord of Hosts thinks.

God: Young man, do you know what a fraction is?

young man: I do, God. We have had them in math already. I made a C+ in fractions. Sometimes they can be tricky.

God: I know, I made them that way, but there are no tricks here. How many fractions are between 0 and 1?

young man (concentrating a little harder now): An infinite amount I think. If I count backwards starting at 1/1 and keep working down, there is one counting number for every number on the bottom of the fraction.

God (impressed by the lad’s application of logic): Exactly! So if those fractions live between 0 and 1, and that is the first “gap” between our counting numbers, how many other gaps are there to be filled with fractions?

young man (sweat now breaking upon his brow trying to work this out): An infinite number of gaps?

God (more pleased than ever): Just so. There are infinite gaps between the counting numbers. How many fractions fit in each gap?

young man (smiling as he gets a handle on this): There are an infinite number of fractions in each of the infinite gaps between the infinite number of counting numbers!

God (grinning ear to infinite ear): And if you include negative fractions, and the gaps between the negative numbers?

young man (suddenly feeling more annoyed than excited): There are an infinite amount of gaps between the infinite number of negative numbers with an infinite number of negative fractions filling each of those gaps to add to the infinite number of counting number gaps each filled with an infinite number of fractions. But how does this tell me how large infinity is?!?

God (grinning): Sssshhhh, I am not finished yet.

I’ve Got the Music in Me

My body swayed to the music only slightly more stiffly than the arm of a metronome. My feet and fingertips tapped so badly out-of-time that even my broken wrist watch could make no sense of it. Rhythm is not something I was born with, nor is it something that visits me any closer than two shuffles and slide step away. My lack of rhythm and even my difficulty in carrying a tune does not change the fact that I love music.

Saturday my wife and I (thanks to an invitation from our neighbors, Lenny and Deanna) spent the afternoon at Blues Under the Bridge in Colorado Spring. Overhead the thunder of cars traveling down Colorado Avenue went unheard. Behind the bandstand rumbling BNSF trains would elicit only cheers from the crowd. On the bandstand blues band after blues band plied their trade to our delight. There were slide steel guitars, acoustic guitars, drums, basses, and one talented band lead alternated among an acoustic guitar, an accordion, and a banjo. I loved it all.

The sound was like catching a familiar scent or feeling a familiar texture. It brought to mind that everyone has a journey with music in life. For some the path is straight with few variations (no pun intended), for some it winds wide afield straying to ever more new and interesting ground. For me the journey is winding and self-referential.

My first recollection of music is of my father singing songs from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas to his children. Then it was listening to him play a variety of music centered on but not limited to classical. My father gave me Simon and Garfunkel, and as I type that I can hear in my head Scarborough Fair, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Sounds of Silence, and Mrs. Robinson. He played the Carpenters frequently, and I did not realize how much I loved that music until years later when I heard that anorexia had claimed Karen Carpenter and I cried. There was even an album recorded by my father’s Central American cousin entitled With Love from Lydia. Whatever happened to that?

My brother Chris contributed greatly to broadening my musical taste by his purchases of albums by Bruce Springsteen, Thin Lizzy, Barry Manilow, and the obtuse and satirical Steely Dan. He gave me courage to buy Rush’s 2112 which paid homage to Ayn Rand’s Anthem, and to stray over to Kiss not in spite of Beth but because of it.

College further deepened and broadened the channel music which was dredging through my life. I banded together with some local runners at Clemson to form the Outta Control Track Club and when we weren’t running we listening to Springsteen it seems. If we had an anthem at all, it would have been Rosalita, which we would often celebrate after a night of beer at the Study Hall Bar by singing it loudly, off key, and playing lead guitar on outstretched legs in the street. Clemson also made me aware of Southern Rock. No one played anything other than Lynard Skynard for the first week in the dorms (double points every time you played Freebird). After that, the music was wide open but during that first week, it was church, it was sacred. My love of Southern rock found me listening to 48 Special, The Almond Brothers, Marshall Tucker, Molly Hatchet, and more (I actually don’t think I missed a live performance of Molly Hatchet in South Carolina during the four and a half years I spent working on a four year degree).

The end of my freshman year witnessed the birth of MTV. I was mesmerized, MTV’s whole first decade was much more about the music than the schtick. Visual was added to the music and words that helped extend rather than limit the imagination. The vision of the artist could be seen and not just interpreted. I can still see the images from Peter Gabriel’s Sledge Hammer in their claymation glory.

Time has a way of fast forwarding through all things and fads. Technology which began its landslide in the early twentieth century with the car, the plane, the radio, and television didn’t and hasn’t slowed down, in fact its speed has increased to the point that we not only take it for granted, we feel each new advance is late in coming. The internet has forced MTV to become a gimmicky caricature of itself. My albums and eight tracks were swallowed by cassette tape then CD’s. In turn my CD’s have been swallowed by Itunes, cell phones, Ipods, and mp3 players (but when I peak around the corner I am more than a little self-satisfied to see vinyl making a fringe comeback).

This onslaught that has claimed and given rise to new and different media, new and alternative forms of music, became a clamber so vast I could not take it all in. I collapsed upon myself musically. I stopped listening to the radio save NPR, I retreated to my father and delved into classical. I marveled at the symphonic depths of Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Bach, Litz, Bartok, Vivaldi, Verdi, and so many more. I reconnected with Gilbert and Sullivan, and I have explored my new found love of Choral music (for why simply listen to Carmina Burana, Missa Papae, or O’Regan’s Threshold of the Night).

One’s roots are often where someone goes to ground, either to feel safe, or find themselves, or simply seeking something to share, to start a conversation with. This last was the case when I started singing Gilbert and Sullivan to our youngest daughter, Louise. When I came into Jean-Marie’s life, Haley and Michael were already too old to sit still for my singing, but at nearly nine Louise was still young enough that I could tell her of my childhood. I did this through singing songs from the Pirates of Penzance, HMS Pinafore, and the Mikado, and explaining their humor and brilliance to her. I let her know the high comedy of bellowing out the lines “NO SOUND AT ALL, WE NEVER SPEAK A WORD, A FLY’S FOOT FALL WOULD BE DISTINCTLY HEARD!” In doing so, I could tell her my father would sing this to me, my father gave this to me, now I give it to you. It is a joy to pass on the smiles of my past that are the basis for all the smiles since, and I took this opportunity when I had it with not only Louise, but with my grandson Russell as well. It is a gift to them that ends up being as much of a gift to me.

Fleeing from the wild expanse of contemporary music was not the safe haven I thought I was fleeing to, it turned out to be a broad and fertile landscape that even now I have only tasted portions of. My retreat taught me that there is no retreat in music, there is only exploration, discovery, and self-discovery. I can once again listen to the radio, and I find I like today’s pop music, some of its hip-hop/rap, for sure its new R&B. I am again adding to my catalog, which is to say I continue to add to my history and myself.

For more info: 

2Cellos – Benedictus

Jeff Buckley – Hallelujah

Buckwheat Zydeco - Hey Good Lookin'

Vinit, Vidit, Vicit

Words come haltingly, searching for their proper order. A friend of mine separated by years and the distance across the globe passed in May. I don’t know how he died, if it was from age, disease, accident, or violence. He was Kenyan, so it could easily have been any of those. His name was Julius Ogaro and we went to college together at Clemson University back in the early 1980’s.
You might be inclined to rule out age as a cause of death, but when I knew Julius, he did not even know his own age. I remember seeing a blurb about him in Runner’s World magazine about his track and field accomplishments at a junior college in New Mexico he attended prior to his matriculation to Clemson. That article said that he was thirty-five years old at the time, but who knew, he could have been seventy by now. I just know that I miss him and he is dead.
Memory is a funny thing; it is like a glass of ice water. Older memories, the more ephemeral ones comprise the water in the glass. More recent memories, more firm in detail are like the cubes floating and intermingled in the glass. No order, simply whole in their individuality. As remembrances fade, they run in rivulets of condensation on smooth glass that cannot retain, cannot keep. The ice eventually melts, memories soften and merge. My memories of Julius are melted ice,
When did I meet Julius? I don’t know exactly. He seems someone I knew all along. He was a major character in my collegiate life so full of personalities and characters. However we met, we met through running. Running was the transfiguring activity in my life that seemed destined to be one of shyness.
I was an overweight youth (now I am an overweight adult). Because my father led me to running through his love for running, I was able to use that as the fulcrum to lever the weight that kept me in self-imposed docility. Through running, instead of stepping out of my shell, I stepped into a self-surety and into a community that dragged me along in a riptide of shared endorphins. Running showed me that there was something I could call my own, and in showing me that I found other things that had been there all along that I could claim and be proud of.
Julius was a scholarship athlete on the cross country and track and field teams at Clemson, so when we met it was because we were both runners. Julius in appearance seemed all legs that moved in fluid strides, and those strides carried a smile that he gave easily and whole heartedly.
His presence was felt in cross country where in 1981 he was the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) Cross Country champion. In 1980 he was the ACC Most Valuable Track Performer in large part for his winning of the 5000 meter run, 10000 meter run, and 3000 meter steeple chase at the ACC Track Championship Meet that year. During his two year career with Clemson, he set the school’s steeple chase record and held the school’s second fastest 10000 meter time.
Statistics are impersonal and define the denuded skeleton of accomplishments, but they don’t tell the story. There are stories here in his stats and in his time at Clemson that make me smile, but more importantly add dimension to the man.
When he won his ACC cross country title, there was a Dutchman on the team by the name of Hans Koeleman. Hans was an intense competitor and athlete. If memory serves (and there is some doubt in that as a generalization), Hans was the Dutch national champion in the steeple chase. On that day of the cross country championships in 1980, Hans and Julius shared the lead. Hans turned to Julius as they glided effortlessly and without challenge over grass that was a pristine green asking Julius if he wanted to tie, if he wanted to be co-champions. Julius kept pace but said nothing, Hans took this as assent. I don’t know if Julius heard Hans or not, but with a hundred meters to go he put on the afterburners and beat Hans to the tape. I also don’t know how Hans felt then, but I do know that Hans has been the staunchest supporter of Julius being inducted into Clemson’s Hall of Fame (which he was just recently named to) over the long years since college ended for the both of them.
My favorite story of Julius as a track athlete involved a spring break trip for the track team to Florida. Julius was out of shape and didn’t care. He had his own joi de vivre that nothing could penetrate. He spent the first part of his time in Florida playing in pick up games of soccer, a sport hat he loved. He once told me of a talented Nigerian friend of his who played for Clemson soccer that “he could kill you with his feet.” This was said in an awe toned high praise.
When the meet got close, he trained like a man possessed. Still being Julius, he did go AWOL in the team van the night before the meet in search of “Kentucky Chicken.” Come the meet, the out-of-shape, last-minute-trained Kenyan nearly won the 10000 meter race had he not miscounted laps and stopped one lap early. If he hadn’t stopped and had to pick up the pace again, he would have accomplished the impossible instead of just the improbable.
Julius and I talked a great deal about running. I was eager for the opinions and knowledge of such an immensely talented friend. On the subject of stretching (a holy topic to many runners), Julius told me he did not like to stretch, particularly after an event. He told me, “Teever, when I am done, I am done. I do not want to stretch after the race.” This man with so many national accomplishments to my eyewitness could not come close to touching his toes.
On one of my many training runs with Julius when it was summer and he was my roommate for summer sessions, we were running old logging trails through the woods. He was light and effortless in his tapping steps along the trail, and I was pushing to keep up. I was much more an engine of effort compared to his light steps. He said in the woods to me as we ran, “Teever, you are running so fast, I can barely keep up.”
When we finally got back to campus with barely a mile left to our run and moving side by side, fat raindrops began a sporadic decent from the clouds. Julius who hated rain took off. This man who claimed to have been struggling to keep up with me practically left a trail of molten asphalt for me to follow back to the dorm.
One weekend, I went to Toccoa, Georgia, to run a race that went from the base of a local mountain to the top. Julius did not want to compete but he did come to cheer me on. He did this by driving ahead of me to different points along the hill climb to offer encouragement to me such as, “Teever, run faster! You can beat him! Aieeeee why are you running so slow, Teever!” I was not able to beat that runner I followed so long up the course, but I finished in the top five. Still I wondered in frustration how I could have met Julius’s expectations of me.
To my amazement, this lanky man on stork legs was a “chick magnet” of sorts and enjoyed the company of women. Yet he had an innocence about him that was hard to define and led to some very interesting conversations and experiences in our friendship. Understand, that for much of the time I knew Julius in school I had never been on a date in my life much less kissed a girl. I was certainly no expert for him to turn to.
There was the time I went to Julius’s dorm to meet up with him and go to lunch. He was at his door wide eyed and told me he had been to a friend’s room and they were watching a movie (a porn flick) called “Doctor Feel Good.” He asked me in dazed earnestness “Teever, how could he put his mouth there? He does not even know where she has been!” How do you answer that?
Once this man who I knew had known women intimately had asked a co-ed out on a date. He was panicked. He fretted to me. In the end he begged off the date in his extreme anxiety. He had known the private company of women, yet he had never been on a date.
I can still picture the dorms where Julius and I were roommates but no longer know what they were called, their name lost to the sweating glass and melting ice of time. What I do remember was the end of one of the two summer sessions. It was exam time, and I was stressed with the classes I was taking (I believe they were Calculus III and Physics II). It was a large chunk to bite off for the condensed heated summer session of work. I had an exam the next day, and Julius received a call in the dorm room from a family member or friend, I can’t recall. What I do remember is that it was long distance, and he was speaking loudly in Swahili to be heard over whatever vastness was between his phone and his caller’s.
I could not take it. I was tense, unnerved, and now deprived of sleep by a phone conversation in tongues. I picked up my blanket and my pillow and made for the closet. I didn’t know what else to do, I was tired and anxious.
Shutting the door I laid down, bundling myself on the cool industrial tile and laying my head to rest on the pillow. I lay there angry in a disoriented search for sleep when I heard Julius finally hang up the phone. I wouldn’t get up though, I was committed to my exam induced insanity. This is what ensued:
Julius knocks on the closet door and says, “Teever, what are you doing in there?”
“Leave me alone, Julius! I’m trying to sleep!”
“Teever, get out of there.”
“No, Julius! Leave me alone!”
Silence for a few moments, then, knocking. “Teever, get out of there.”
“Julius, leave me alone. I have to sleep!”
“But Teever….”
This went on for some time, but I can no longer remember the resolution. It is, however, something hilarious to me in its remembrance.
There are more stories of my friend, Julius, but those I will save and remember as I mourn. I don’t know if I will share them ever or simply absorb them and lose them in the slack of age. For now they are what I have of him, all I have left of my friend.
Julius, I will miss you. Not just because we have shared time together, but because you were unique, caring, and childlike in many ways. Goodbye, Julius. Even in the eddy filled current of my fluid and diluted memories, I will never forget your smile, the way you said my name, and the image of you trying to touch your out-of-reach toes.

An ERA to Remember

There are some dreams from our youth which are so innocent and pure they return at the barest nudge. Spring is finally here and the flowers color a brief and fragrant period before summer brings a survivalist mentality to all things striving to be green and alive. The lawn is awake and mowing is the weekly homage paid, leaving the grass blades neat and even.

As I was walking in the yard after the day’s labor of ritual beautification, the feel of the grass beneath my work shoes brought my memories immediately to a time when I was young and the grass beneath my feet was not of my yard. The feeling of transubstantiation from present to past was as long as a dream, lasting only an instant. I was ten years old again and my tender young feet were in cleats, there was a glove on my left hand, and my head was clouded with visions of being a major league ball player. When I was little, I wanted to be a short stop just like Bert Campaneris of the Oakland A’s. It is such a natural thing for every boy to want to be something most boys could not be.

I was not a very good ball player. I knew that then, and I know that now. I was a little too timid to be a good batter, I was too slow to be an agile base runner, and I was and ever will be cursed with a weak throwing arm, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was the fun of being part of the game. During my brief little league time, I played whatever position I was told to. I was a catcher (ordered not to attempt to throw out a runner because it was hard enough for me to get the ball back to the mound), a short stop, and a second baseman - my arm being so poor, outfield was usually not a consideration. I didn’t care about any of that. I was a member of a team playing the greatest sport I could imagine.

Anyone would admit that baseball is a game of infinite statistics. Those of us that love the sport cling to the statistics, embrace them, marvel at each new nugget mined by the statisticians and reported through the announcers telling us that such-and-such player has a 0.350 batting average against pitchers whose name end in a silent “e” during months with 31 days when playing a Wednesday day game. We can also tell you at least one statistic from what constituted our time spent on the diamond - whether it be high school, college, or (for me) Albergotti Park. In the dugout or on the field I never felt inconsequential or below average, I was simply part of the game.

My thoughts tumble easily back to playing little league and having my father as coach. I don’t think my dad knew that much about the game, but he was willing to give his time always to his children. When providing instruction, his swing and throws were awkward, and though it pains me to admit, this made me embarrassed. I loved him and was proud of him, but I should have realized then what I know now, his awkwardness was a badge of his strength.

On one occasion it was late in the game and our starting pitcher was flagging. I was on the bench anxious to see the field in any capacity. With one out, my father looked to the bench to send in a relief pitcher. He must have seen something in me, because he picked me to go out and take the ball. Me! I had never pitched in a game before and my father (one in constant fear of the cry nepotism) still picked me to go to the mound. I took the ball and accepted my charge.

Needing only two outs, I looked to my catcher. The first batter came to the plate, and through luck more than prowess I struck him out. Confidence swelled up until the second batter entered the box. He was a lefty. Really? Who bats left handed so young? I was shaken. Four pitches later, he was at first and I was having doubts. Batter number three came up and I could swear he was swaggering. Heart in my throat, I went into my wind-up and threw. Contact was made, but it was a grounder to the short stop (someone with a better and more accurate arm than I would ever have) and the inning was over.

My father must have seen something in me, something in my performance on the mound that gave him no hesitation about the position I should play. I never pitched again. But you know what? My statistics to this day showed that I pitched two thirds of an inning, gave up no hits, only one walk, had one strike out, and an earned run average of 0.00. No one can ever take that away.

Mother's Day

We first live inside our mothers
Their womb dark warm security
Their feelings our first taste of pure love
Before there is a heart to beat

The nurturing and love unending
They follow, guide, surround
Amniotic fluid of our external lives
Metaphorical womb we can always return to

Your love defined my love
Your gentleness, my emotional guidepost
Your presence is ever with me
Your life gave me my life and I love you

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.