I don't do much blogging these days ... but was reminded, today, that I used to. Just once in a while, though. A friend sent me a copy of this old one I (unnecessarily, of course) offered up some 2+ years ago. I gave it a read again. Thought it wasn't so bad. So I'll throw it into the mix and give it a breath of fresh air this morning. It's just a bunch of words, finally. But they're all true and, as such, matter. Somehow.

I sit around a lot. This is a situation that can't exactly be helped but, aside from blisters on my butt, sitting just BEGS for thinking too much. Today I got to thinking about that unnecessarily short-in-letters but long-on-pit-stops word: LOVE. At the moment it would be awfully handy to have someone I love (and who hopefully loved me back) on the premises, but it got me thinking even deeper. I was reflecting on my family members, past and present, whose forays into that cataclysmic adventure called 'love' got me into these socks and eyeglasses that I'm wearing. So to speak, as time progressed they did, anyway. What an amazing bunch! No wonder the waters, as I perceive them, are muddy. Yet interesting as Hell!

- My maternal grandparents were an interesting start. My Grandmother, who died long before I was born, is said to have contracted some ghastly thing while trudging through a flood to free the horses that were trapped in the barn and sure to drown. Her life ended in 1929, details unknown (aside from toxic water and such). Her husband, my Grandpa, was a lazy oaf I've been told. All I knew of him was that he was EXTREMELY casual to be around when I was a kid. In a crowded parking lot and he had to pee? Well, what else to do but unashamedly take care of it right there in front of half the population? Pretty crude vernacular on that one, too (but, I came to learn, people who urinate without an ounce of modesty rarely watch their language). He married his second wife - who I knew as my "real" Grandmother - soon after the first wife died. My living Grandma was some 15 years his junior, facially deformed, basically the scourge of the mountain where they lived. A rape victim left with a bastard child, totally uneducated, impossible to be understood by most [I never once, though, had trouble with her speech ~ I didn't know for the longest time that there was anything unusual about what was called a "hare lip" or that it was particularly odd that a person had absolutely no roof in their mouth and no teeth]. But my Grandpa was happy to marry her/make an "honest woman" out of her (he also needed someone to help him raise his four motherless children at the time, too, make no mistake). May I also say that that woman, Miss Opal, was the most genuinely kind and real human I've ever met. 15 kids and a husband who never worked a day in his life never dimmed the light within her.
Note: the first Grandmother, we detectives found out later, died in a sanitorium. No horses or West Virginia heroism after all. And the hospital wasn't the sort of place where one went to get over tuberculosis or something. But we never said anything. The legend sounded much more digestable.

- Then there's my Dad's parents. Couldn't be more different than the other ones! My Grandfather there, who died in 1939, was a well-bred slave "owner" from Kentucky - of course he didn't own them anymore, but his family thought they still did. At about 45 years old he met this roaring 20's Flapper gal - wild, willful, drop-dead gorgeous and, yes, half his age AND from a family of salt-of-the-Earth coal miners. The stories were just too juicy for words on that marriage. Grandpa, who had easily married both out of his class and had the gall to do it with a wildcat who chased him with hot irons and threw hammers at him regularly, drank A WHOLE LOT. It finally killed him. Livers enlarged to the size of the county you live in usually do that. Grandma wasn't finished yet, though. As time passed and raising two children alone got on her nerves she flipped the coin and took up with the delivery boy who was app. 20 years HER junior, just to balance things out in reverse. That marriage lasted long enough for me to remember. A match made in Heaven indeed. One Thanksgiving the extended family had gathered at Grandma Bernice's house and, being quite a good cook, it was a feast. While serving, she set places for us all with much goodness and light but when she got to her husband's chair she politely placed his plate of food onto the floor next to his chair. I believe there was a comment regarding "all the dogs should eat together" or something equally cordial. Lucky for him he divorced her finally and went on to a much more sensible coupling but, and I have to say it, my Grandma was a dear to me and my brother. We loved her endlessly and I mean it. That could have changed, though, had she fed us on the floor and/or chased us with activated appliances. She didn't. She loved us, after all.

So, anyway, as I sat and thought about it, maybe it is just less complicated and better that I have no one to help me up and down the steps or listen to me whine about my sore rear end. Perhaps Tina Turner was right! What's Love Got To Do With It? And then I remembered all that I had learned from these rather odd assemblages of emotions, tantrums, catfights and unrelenting passion (no matter what the source of it was to begin with or ended up to be). Love has EVERYTHING to do with it. Now, granted, it wouldn't make my body parts any more co-operative or my stairs more mountable. But it surely would, and I know it, make the days a whole lot more interesting were I in love in my house. And, from the perspective of rescued horses, freed slaves, The Charleston (and prohibition), what some might call the 'Boo Radley' of Elizabeth, West Virginia and even that (nice, albeit too tolerant) guy who was really nothing like a dog at all I learned that, even on its worst day, love is as permanent, in some ways, and essential as anything we can ever touch. And, I think, it's why we live.

Either that or it kills us *sigh*. But, and I know this for 100% certain, better killed by love or lightning than to just drift off without a few memorable gunshots. Or is that a few unforgettable heartbeats? Whatever it is, it sure seems like a decidedly peculiar (and perfect) bliss to me.

*Yowza! That was too long. Sorry 'bout that. But, I reckon, no one said you had to read all of it. As mentioned: I've got time a-plenty to type up crap like this...

posted by Gatsby722 at Oct 12 06, 10:51 PM

Was sitting around this weekend (in 100° heat and with a load of hot restlessness far exceeding the thermometer's reading). So I workshopped a few short scribblings I'd made shortly ago, to pass the time. As always happens, it GREW considerably, those sentences. Into this *thing*. It ain't great which gives it some power, I guess, and even a little bit of gumption.  And I know, for myself, that writing, any writing, doesn't really need read to be valid. But I thought I'd toss it up here, anyway.

 

The sunrise was cut in the middle by pilings
of rocks and of magic. And of lightning and grace.
Ah, such wizardry, really ... a world washed with whipstalls.
The words in rough heaps that explained all the questions.
The questions unanswered (despite all the words), the monoliths standing there,
Prompting more. Telling less.
The mountains were fireworks, grounded by tunnels.
The tunnels were endless, buried 'neath stone.
It was all so worthwhile, willful and right.
Then? My mountains were dreams boldly solid. And large.
And the peaks were as high as I placed them, and waited.
But now? As I look there? My mountains are not ...

The twilight was sliced in its center by shadows
Of clocks and of scrapbooks. And of benchmarks and wile.

Ah, such traveling, truly ... a map marked with March hares.
The mantra's faint noises that sound like jazz midnights.
The jazz bending wildly (despite being quiet), the saxophone resting there,
Pearl buttons. Cheap wood.
The mountains are smoky, all whiskey and Bird.
The birds flying elsewhere, going down fast.
It is morning and moonfire. Worthy and tight.
There? My mountains were riffs near a bayou. With echoes.
And the tempo was right with the skyline, so jagged!
But here? Where it's silent? My mountains are not ...

     Shocking! I was sitting here thinking about that movie I saw on TV as a teenager called "Brian's Song" - it was about two football players who, against all odds, became excellent friends. All based on a true story (of Brian Piccolo and Gale Sayers, one white and the other black). It was a great story for its time, really. Not just the aspirations it had toward respectfully probing racial schisms but also because it addressed courage under fire and, most importantly, solid and real friendship(s). I read the book (titled "I Am Third") at the time. Can hardly remember it now ~ and can't remember Gale Sayers explaining where he was third to WHAT (but I'm sure he said so somewhere in the text). That movie played almost forty years ago! Can you imagine? James Caan and Billy Dee Williams, now old farts on TV shows occasionally. That's the shocking part, to me. "Forty years ago" still, and always will, seem like an awful long time for me to be remembering stuff.  It's very unsettling, more than less. Anyway, I decided to make up my own "I Am Third". Two reasons: 1.) because I've thought I was *third* for a very long time now, and, 2.) forty years from now, it won't matter what I write today to any living thing, so my introspection seems harmless [*sigh*].

 

     First is the *truth*. I am old (like a velociraptor I'm old, or so I feel sometimes) so I have had more than plenty of time to see what the word "truth" is to most people. It's their version of it, usually. It's an interpretation of it as per what is hoped it means, often. It's the "truth" that makes the most convenient sense in their usability of it, almost always. This is all human nature. Nothing so new or terribly wrong with it (although that sort of "truthing" gets risky, in my estimation). I've risen above nothing, but have powerlessly accepted one major thing: in all those descriptions of truth, all those attachments to truth, all that *human control issue* nonsense, there is only one truth for any ONE thing. That's it! We can call it whatever we want, we can color it however we choose. It's still just that one fundamental truth and half the time we don't even know what it is before we start doctoring it! So, for me, the most important thing in life is to dig through the man-made layers and find what the truth is at the core of it. And I give it the benefit of the doubt always. I look for it without expecting myself to like it. Or for it to accommodate me in any way whatsoever. In fact, I don't even ever expect to find it (but intend to keep looking, anyway).

     Second is *fairness*.  The word fairness is another tricky thing. The first way we feel it is the way we felt it when we were 9, I suspect - "But ... it's not FAIR that I have both arithmetic and science homework in the same night...." That's not an issue of fairness at all, in my opinion. It's just one of those things that suck as all the factors in a day slide down the hill in the wrong order. And as adults we feel/do it much the same. "It's not fair that I have to pay this much sales tax on already aggressively overpriced merchandise," etc. Fairness is a catchall word for too many things. Are you really being "fair" when you let the person ahead of you get the parking space that he deserves and got to first? Or are you patting yourself on the back like an agile monkey for not doing what you considered doing at first: hitting the gas and stealing that coveted parking space because you needed it more than some irksome stranger did? Taking your turn and acting in a civilized way should not be considered "fairness." It's called being trained right. In my definition of it, fairness is not much of an "action" word, incidentally. It's about knowing that each one of us was a wee baby once, with big dreams. Each of us had scraped knees, broken hearts, terrifying moments, frightfully embarrassing missteps AND nothing we've ever felt, not now or then or this time next year, is (in itself as a concept) "new." Or individually patented by our summarily put-upon selves. So, then, I think that the fairness to which I aspire is knowing that the best expectation there is to be had is that it isn't about the crap, pain, unfortunate events or pissed-off wildebeests that come rolling down the mountain. It's about knowing that we're all pretty much on common ground as the avalanche happens. That some people duck and dodge more skillfully than others is luck. True fairness across-the-board comes in realizing we're all avoiding the same stuff (and simply hiding behind variously sized bushes as we do it).

 

     And third, then, is me. On my endless search of "truth" - a 'thing' that I've already given the power to NOT be what I'm looking for. Finding it will be enough, I suppose - no need to steal its thunder by expecting too much. And, no, I'll never find it, anyway. I'll always believe it's there, nearer than it ever could be (that's what they call faith, I guess ... with all of its head-spinning labels and uniforms). But I'll quietly assume I'll never be in the scary position of knowing the ultimate truths. And my search will be a fair one, too. I won't judge the know-it-alls and zealots out there who profess to have it all figured out. They NEED that "parking space" a lot more than the likes of me does. Ask me forty years from now, though? I may have an entirely different conviction about the matter. It is, after all, just the human condition ...