LifeStory Magazine (print) has a new issue out.

Send $3 and an SASE for the current issue, no. 97.

Address The LifeStory Institute, 3591 Letter Rock Rd.,

Manhattan, KS 66502 USA.  And thank you for your interest!

       

                                         

                                                                                                              

 

 

 

 

 

Good morning!

Posted 1040 CST Tu., 080508

 

Born to Journal?

 

     I started my Journal more than forty-four years ago.  I wish I had started it the day I was born.  I did write from an early age but to my great regret all those things are lost.   I was a weird little kid and I actually remember being in my room on a hot summer afternoon like this one is going to be and writing all kinds of stuff.  Letters to utter strangers asking for their autograph, just to take one example.  I actually wrote a penny postcard to the King of England, saying Dear King, Please put your autograph here.  And I left him a space at the bottom of the card but I never heard from the man. 

     Yes, man.  This would be about 1948 or so before Elizabeth became Queen.  This would be King George VI, I think. 

Anyway, I never heard from the guy. 

 

     Another example of writing from those days.  I got linked up with some kind of a pen pal thing probably from an ad in  a comic book—I loved comics and had a huge stack of them that if I had them now I could sell and retire with the money from them—and had a pen pal, Ken somebody, in England for awhile.  I think I may have had one in Germany too, or maybe even France.  In those days it wasn’t all that great to be terribly friendly with the Germans.  Of course I didn't make copies of those letters nor did I keep their replies.

 

     Of course Memory is the great journal.  Memory doesn’t always serve well but if you chip away at it you do get more material and possibly it’s as reliable as it needs to get.  I don’t like being mechanistic but next time you recycle a computer and think about all the stuff on the hard drive that you might want to save, think of your own mind and its memory as a hard drive…that you might want to save. 

 

     What’s worth saving and what isn’t?  We can’t save everything but we can save a surprising amount what with CDs and all that.  With a stack of CDs no higher than the stack of pancakes you and I used to eat for breakfast before we thought of diet in any other context than What’s for supper, Mom? we could probably record a good many of the memories we have somewhere lurking in our mind for the first twenty years or so of our life.  Don’t you think?  I agree with myself on this one. 

 

    “If you remember it, it must be important.”  Remember that one?  And it’s more famous corollary, “If it was important, you’d remember it.”  I don’t believe either of those.  I remember tons of stuff that is insignificant even to a significance-hungry guy like me.  When I was in the first grade down in Indiana I was asked to read aloud from a Dick and Jane Take a Picnic story.  (They could have taken a hike for all I cared, but that’s what we read in school in those days.)  In the reading of the list of things Dick and Jane were taking along on their picnic, cake, pie, cookies—I looked up at the class and said, “Boy, they sure eat a lot of sweets, don’t they?” and then I went on reading.

 

     Now that’s not significant.  But I remember it. 

 

     As to things that were important that I forgot, I’m sure there were some but…well, I forgot.  And if I’d have written them down, I wouldn’t have, would I now? ###

 

 

 

From the Ancient Journal,

 

Mon., July 19, 1999                     

            The guy coming at me at the border headquarters was one of those guys with reddish blond hair and tanned skin that made him look like he’d been nuked; everything about him kind of glowed.  He wasn’t smiling.  Oh-oh, I thought.

            Where you from? he asked, peering in.

            Manhattan, Kansas, I said.

            Are you US citizens?

            Yes, sir. 

            What you been doing in Canada?

            Visiting friends, looking at the Rockies.

            All the time he was checking us out.  His blue eyes were busy.  He stood up.  He made a little gesture with his hand.  Okay, he said.  Bye.  He was already walking away.  Come on in.

            I rolled up the window and drove on.  Man, they could be a little politer, I said.  They could smile and say hello. 

            They have hundreds of people a day, June said.

            I don’t care.  It doesn’t hurt to smile  a hundred times a day, does it? ###

 

Posted 0830 CST Sat.., 0802088

 

The only reason I applied for  a job teaching at Stevens Point  (now the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point) in 1966 was because I remembered that my therapist Bob Menninger had once told me he was CO of a German POW camp in Marshfield, Wisconsin, during the War.  Somewhere in there in those four years I was his patient he happened to mention there was a college in the nearby town of Stevens Point. 

 

Later, we were living in Mexico and the writing I had gone down there to do was going badly.  So here we were marooned in the remote town of Tlaxcala where  I had no access to a library to get addresses to colleges to write to for a job.  And of course there was back then no Internet.  But I needed a teaching job.  So I wrote to Stevens Point; and I wrote to a college in Saint Louis, or just outside, that Patsy had attended for a year or so, Lindenwood College.  (Which she always called Lindenwood College for Proper Females.)  Both of these colleges were, I figured, substandard enough that they might hire a bare MA like me. 

 

I wrote to them.  I heard back immediately from Stevens Point.  We bussed to Mexico City, got on a plane, and went there for an interview.   It was August and school wasn’t in session.  A couple of professors in the English Department started showing me around, this is the faculty lounge, there’s the paymaster’s office, and here’s the men’s room.  I took one of them aside and asked him if he thought I had a crack at the job.  “Oh, sure,” he said.  “Will you take it?” 

 

I took it.  That’s the way it was in 1966.  It was that easy to get a job.  They started the semester with jobs still open.  But four years later—and four more years of the war in Vietnam and consequently many men going to graduate school to avoid the draft—four years later, the situation had reversed: they had few job openings and numerous applicants. 

 

Incidentally, Dr. Menninger told me once the hardest thing about being the CO of a POW camp was that so many of the neighbors around the camp were of German ancestry.  It wasn’t uncommon to find them on Sunday slipping a pie or a cake under the fence to the German boys, some of whom were kin from the old country.###

 

Me Speakee French, Much Bien.

 

Glenna told me the other day that French Table had started up again at KSU.  So I went up there yesterday after I saw Dr. Wall.  I got a tray with a little food on it, found the room just off the cafeteria, and went in.  One guy was sitting there studying.

            Is this French Table? I asked him.

            It's supposed to be.  He was a kid, maybe 23 or so, a little plump, blond. 

            I sat down and removed the lid from my styrofoam cup of coffee.

            Parlez-vous francais? he said.

            Surprised, I mumbled something like, Eh bien, un peu.  J'essaye. 

            And we were off, parlant francais.    He has lived in Besancon and in Belgium, a year in each place, and he spoke volubly and, so far as I knew, well.  I jabbered away too, and I think some of what I said made sense, even if it was your basic Me-Tarzan, you-Jane kind of stuff.  I even understood some of what he said.  And I learned the word for chain saw, though now I've forgotten it and I've misplaced my notes.  (All my dictionaries are so old the word isn't in them: the chainsaw wasn't invented then.)

            We talked for about an hour.  His name is Brian.  No one else came.  I'm going back next week.  I was exhilarated at speaking French well enough to be understood.  When he departed at one for a class  I ate my food and left quickly, delighted with myself and the hour I'd spent "speaking French."  I had overcome an obstacle, the one of being afraid that I'd be thought a boob.  Maybe I was thought a boob by Brian, but it didn't matter, or as we say in French, ca n’est fait rien, or something like that. 

 

Cats for sale!

The sky hangs low on us like a heavy gray blanket.  I feel suffocated.  Everything is sticky.  The wooden arms of the Morris chair are so sticky I didn’t want to put my hands on them.  Same thing with the steering wheel of the Pearl. 

The cats are all giving birth.  Boston Blackie has emitted four tiny babies, one gray, one black and two white.  Or is it two black and one white?  And then Alice—Alice that we thought had lost her babies—has four too, various mottled colors.  So suddenly the cat population is once again approaching 20.  Several of the new babies have the six-toed defect like Hemingway’s cats down in Key West do that isn’t really a defect, it just makes them that much cuter.  “Maybe we could sell them on E-Bay,” June said, and I told her she ought to try it.  What are we going to do with twenty cats? ###

 

 

CLOSED, or the fate of the old.  

(from my Journal in July, 2005.)

I stood in line like the half dozen others to wait my turn at the postal counter.  The young woman—well, 40ish, hair graying at the temples—who waited on me said they didn’t have any Marian Andersons left.  “Oh,” I said, disappointed.  She showed me some of the others.  She pushed Walt Disney characters at me.  “No,” I said. “I’m not a cartoon person.  Writers and artists.”  She brought out some Robert Penn Warren, which I took five sheets of.  I don’t think she knew who he was.  “He wrote a famous novel.  ‘All the King’s Men.’  It was made into a movie.”  She looked utterly blank but slightly interested.  She went away somewhere and came back with some Marian Andersons.  “I thought we had sold them out, but some new ones must’ve come in.”  She counted out five sheets.  I examined them.  “It’s a good likeness,” I said.   “I heard her sing here in Manhattan when I was a boy.” “Really,” the clerk said, her voice sounding fairly genuinely impressed.  There were a few people still waiting behind me.  But I pushed on.  “The DAR—Daughters of the American Revolution—wouldn’t let her sing in Constitution Hall, so..." here I choked a little, and then went on "...Eleanor Roosevelt invited her to sing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, which she did, to the thousands who came.” 

 

“Oh,” the clerk said, looking past me.  Maybe with her hidden hand she was pressing a button.  I knew I hadn’t much time.  “Eleanor Roosevelt was FDR’s—the President’s—wife.  The DAR was lily-white.  No people of color allowed.”  The clerk nodded,  her hands folded now on the counter in front of her.  “When she sang here in Manhattan in 1948, they wouldn’t let her stay at the Wareham Hotel.”  The clerk nodded.  I was pulling away.  She was reaching for something.  “She was the greatest contralto of her time,” I said, a parting shot.  “She was a singer,” the clerk said.  “That’s all I know.”  She slipped a little brass sign in front of her.  CLOSED.  

###

 

Who's on first base?  I forget. 

 

People as old as me don't go around talking about how it seems like just yesterday, we think it really was just yesterday.  My latest is I can't remember whether I've brushed my teeth or not. I actually--no joke--I actually have to check the brush to see if it's wet. My whole life is like that. I know I've eaten because the dishes are dirty. I know I've read the morning paper because it's in pieces on the living room floor. I know I'm cold because the fire in the fireplace is out. I know my wife and I have made love because--well, never mind.

 

     Actually my wife and I have redefined making love in a rather sweet way. We call it holding hands, and it's especially passionate when we're doing it just for fun rather than when we're helping each other across the street.

 

What's the world coming to? Well, I can't remember. What world? But I met a guy the other day whose memory is actually worse than mine.

 

"What's your name?" I asked him.

He stared at me for a long time. "Boy, you sure ask the hard questions," he said. "Start me off with something easier."

"Okay," I said. "What's my name?"

"Don't you know?" he asked.

     He may have forgotten his own name, but he hadn't forgotten how to be a wise guy.

 

     There are so many famous people in California that no one bothers to introduce themselves. If you have to introduce yourself, you belong in Nevada or Arizona. Everybody just goes around shaking hands and kissing, or both, and saying how nice it is to meet.

    

     But California freeways are easier to negotiate than those of Wichita or any other big city, and the reason is, someone told me, everybody in California is from somewhere else and they have compassion on you with your foreign, out-of-state license plates: they remember what it was like.

 

     So if you have to change lanes, they let you in.###

 

 

 

Cat Therapy

 

We have two new white kittens that the coal black mom paraded out just last week.  We had noticed the mom’s pregnancy of course but when she lightened up and we saw no litter of kittens we assumed that they were either stillborn or that they were born but the neighboring tomcat had killed them. 

 

We had no idea they were alive but there they were, eyes open, walking along on their own like they knew everything there was to know about the world.

 

This was written ten years ago but it applies today. 

 

Sat., June 20, 1998

          Is oo all wost? June said.  Is oo looking for your milky momma?  She held the little white kitty up and nuzzled its furry face with her lips.  Is oo?  Is oo?  She put the kitty down and it darted away.  Another took its place.  And how about you, you little nuzzlie nuzzlie? June said with mock sternness, kissing its bewildered face.

          I watched through the kitchen window.  June was sitting on an upturned five gallon bucket in front of the garden shed where the cats have been moved to from the shop, where they were underfoot and also, where they could accidentally run out under a car and get flattened.  June sat there for a good fifteen minutes and played with the kitties nearly every morning and evening too. ###

 

 

 

Summering twenty-three years ago…

 

 

Fri., July 26, 1985 -

            I guess I hate writing for the old, old reason: the moment of truth.  When I'm writing, I'm constantly reminded of my limitations. 

            But then why did I write a fair amount in the sixties and early seventies? 

            Well, no matter right now.  The important thing right now is to write, to act, and not to ratiocinate.  I've done enough ratiocinating for now. 

            But do I have anything to say?

            The cat is on the mat.

            The gray cat was on the mat when I arrived at the front door, but when it saw me, it quickly rose and darted away.  I saw my chance.  I grabbed the mat and ran with it.

-

            Rip is a cute kid.  Today when I picked him up at Tin Man, his head was encircled with a purple bandanna.  Somehow--is it his stance, or his scrawniness?  I don't know--but somehow, he reminds me of Pinocchio.  He has an unusually deep voice, also very cute, and an adult earnestness.  Then he has a gallery of facial expressions, a wry grin, a smoldering rage--quite a saucy lad.

            Now Ben is getting quite handsome--tanned and freckled and always stylish.  He seems to grow an inch a day.

            And how I miss Danny and Leslie!

-

            I wrote, but I didn't get going.  Getting the juice flowing is not going to be easy.  Nothing ever is. 

 

Tues., July 30, 1985 -

            This morning on the way to Tin Man Rip said, "It would be sort of nice if we just went on living," or something very close to that.  I can't recall the exact words.  I told him, "We do in a way.  Look:  I'll die and you'll live on, yet you're very much like me in a number of ways."  He appeared to soak it up.  I'm nearly 50, and still not used to the idea of dying. 

-

            Ben has "bent" a bone in his arm.  It's not broken, the doctor says, but he still will have a cast on it for 3 weeks.  Poor Ben!  The prospect of not going swimming for 3 weeks appalls him.  "Why couldn't it have happened after school started?" he asked.  The only structured activity he's had since summer school has been out has been swimming every afternoon at the City Pool.  If he can't do that...?  Of course, for 10 of those days--August 9th to 18th--he'll be with us on vacation, traveling, so really he's just going to miss 14 swimming days...not much easier to take.  He's been so abrasive lately, anyway.  "Fuck you!" is his answer to everything.

            -

            A quick thunderstorm came through in the middle of the night.  That's what woke me.  A rumble of thunder, a flash of lightning, alot of wind and a few fat drops of rain--now silence, the crickets and frogs, and me scratching on this paper, louder than you might think.

-

            I talked to Dan on Sunday.  He sounds so grown up.  I'm beginning to think that's what is illusory about teenagers: they look and sound adult.  But they are far from it.  Dan apparently has given no thought to what he's going to do this fall--return to school or what.

 

 

 

posted 0720 CST 072208

 

 

This must have happened about 1981 or 1982; here I am remembering it for my Journal in 1999.

We were standing on the steps of Mom and Dad's new living quarters that I made by remodeling his old medical office.

I was getting ready to leave. One of the kids was pulling on my hand. He wanted to get to the ice cream place we said we’d go. It was probably Benny, I can still see him, pulling insistently, saying, Daddy, Daddy! Let’s go.

Dad laughed and shook his head in the funny way he had when he laughed about some idiosyncracy or inconsistency or just plain goofy thing about life--and he found a lot of life like that. Go on, get him an ice cream, Dad laughed. And then he turned to Benny, Pull Benny, pull your Daddy! And he laughed again.

And Benny grinned, pulling even harder.

As I was led away, Dad said suddenly, as an aside, perhaps only to himself at first, It’s the happiest time of your life.

What? I said.

It was mine, he said.

What was?

When you kids were little. He said it and then he was gone, back inside, and Ben was pulling still, still playing out the joke, tugging on my arm like a dog pulling on a rag. Come on, Daddy! Come on! You said!

I got in the car with Benny. June and Rip were coming now, June carrying a sack, Rip holding his frisbee at his side like a soldier. I was still thinking about what Dad had said. The happiest time of life: "when you kids were little."

And we had always thought he was so caught up in his work. But it was us. Us kids.

Dad died a year after this. He hung himself. He had Parkinson's and was becoming incapacitated. He hated being dependent on others.###

 

Family Happiness twenty-one years ago. 

 

Wed., Jan. 7, 1987

 

We went down to KCI to get Lara today. We drove the green van. It runs just fine, but the gas gauge is a bit off, unluckily for us, so that when it says almost E it really means E. And so it was that about 5 miles from the airport in heavy traffic we ran out of gasoline. There was a shoulder to pull off the road onto. We did that and set the hazard lights to blinking. We locked up the truck and started walking down the highway. June wanted to hitch-hike but I was leery of it. I guess I'm getting old and unadventurous. Some guy stopped anyway and for a few minutes I wondered if he was some sort of kinky murderer, but he turned out to be a nice guy in no hurry to get to the airport. So he picked us up and took us right to our terminal and then went on to his own. Needless to say, we were very grateful.

 

When Lara arrived we called a service station and arranged to have a truck pick us up to take us to our van and gas us up. While we waited for the guy with his truck we complained about how hungry we were. I asked Lara, who of course had just gotten off the plane,  if she had anything to eat, half facetiously, but then thinking perhaps she might have some crackers or apple. She reached in her bags and pulled out some of her mother's Mandarin chicken, a lemon pie, and god knows what. I think she even had a coke in there. The chicken was cold, and I didn't want any lemon pie, but she and June devoured it. June found a Tootsie Pop in her purse and I sucked on that. Perhaps women's purses are a good thing after all. You can't carry a lemon pie, much less Mandarin chicken, in your wallet.

 

After we got the truck gassed up, and I had tipped the nice kid who drove us to the truck and poured the gas in, we went on down the highway. We decided to go home the back way, so we took 92 and went to Platte City, Leavenworth--where we stopped and ate in earnest, barbecued pork sandwiches and I had a nice helping of slaw, too. But the food was bland, the barbecue canned, and we were sorry we stopped there. But it was fun driving along the road looking at real things instead of turnpike billboards, at details of architecture on farmhouses, at goofy signs, beautiful valleys, and the strange and wonderful things you see when you get off the beaten track.

 

June and I gurgled and gurgled about putting together a book on Kansas curiosa, or any Kansas thing--Kansas fences, Kansas abandoned farm buildings, Kansas junkyards...you name it. We could write and illustrate, with photos and drawings, articles, perhaps sell them to a newspaper, then collect them into a book. It's possible, certainly.

 

We got home just before dark. Fine. I am getting old and I like to get home before dark.

 

I just tried to break up a fight between Rip and Ben. Rip punched Ben in the nose and it started bleeding. Ben cried and came running downstairs. Rip ran into his room and hid under a blanket. Now Rip is sitting at the kitchen table writing "I will not hit my brother" five times, and Ben has retired to his bedroom upstairs. I should have had him, Ben,  write “I will not smother my brother" a few times, for that was what he was doing when Rip punched him in the nose--twice.

 

Brotherly love--I remember it well. ###

 

A moment, I'm sorry to say,

from my life seventeen years ago.

 

(July, 1991) The other day about 8 in the morning I was coming out of the MiniMart across from Grandma's and some guy was standing by his car puking again and again. In the morning silence you could hear the unmistakable sound of splattering puke on pavement from a hundred feet away. The guy puked three or four volleys and didn't look up. Maybe he had been drinking all night, I didn't know. Maybe he was ill and needed help. But I didn't want to go over to him, I might get whatever he had. I felt a little guilty about that, but also a little concerned, so I walked away slowly but  looked over my shoulder to see if he was okay. Finally he took a drink of something and got in his car, which he had been puking by, and drove away.

How gross. No one would clean it up, it would just cook away in the heat of the sun. You can't tell me this is a civilized country. ###

 

Posted 0730 CST USA 071708

 

Just in case I miss my old day job.

 

From my Journal some twenty-two years ago,

when I was a housepainter by day.

 

Thu., Oct. 23, 1986

     The painter was still getting his tools together to start work when she came into the room. She was a chunky, meaty woman in a sweatsuit, somewhere around 60 or 65, with an odd expression on her face. Along with her odd stare and her fat little body, she had the air of someone propelled around by her fat, independent of her mind. "Are you going to paint the other side of that door?" she said to the painter, and pointed to the closet door in the room in which they were standing. The door was standing open. The room side had been primed, but the closet side was still the gold color of the room before he had started work.

    

     The painter shook his head. "I wasn't going to," he said tentatively.
"I could."

 

     "Why don't you," she said, walking over to it. "And the jamb inside, too. Then that will be taken care of."

 

     The painter nodded agreeably. "I'll add that to the project, then. Fine."

 

     She went away and he started to work sanding the area on the back of the door. When he had finished sanding it and it was ready for primer, he heard her footsteps on the hardwood floor again.

     "Hi," he said.

     "Did you mean to charge me for painting the other side of that door?"

     "Well, yes, it would be an addition. I mean, the room has to stop somewhere, and normally, it stops right here," and he touched the doorstop dividing the jamb. "This side is closet, this side is bedroom. Normally, "he added lamely, as if special circumstances might exist here. But she didn't hear him.

 

     "Well stop," she said abruptly.

      "I've already sanded it. I won't charge you for that."

 

     "Just stop," she said, and walked out. ###

 

 

Posted 0845 CST USA 071608

 

This earth is mine!

 

At six exactly (the digital clock’s red numbers said) I slipped on shorts and drew my coffee from the brewer and went out on the northeast deck to look into the morning.  Immediately I saw two—no, three—large deer in the orchard.  A big doe and two yearlings.  “Hey, you guys,” I yelled.  “Get!”  They all looked up.  One loped off a few feet but the other two lowered their heads and went back to grazing.

 

“Ten thousand acres of grass and you come to my yard, why, why?”  I yelled.  I stomped my foot.  I clapped my hand on the rail of the deck, trying to sound like a rifle shot.  These deer were insolent and fearless.  Seemingly they did not realize that I held sole title to this land.  I went back into the house to get my shoes on and I came outside again and started for the orchard only to see the last of the three lazily leap my four foot high fence, their white tails flagging at full mast.  ###

 

 

Posted this very morning, 0830 CST USA 071508

 

Exploding a moment 

 

One of the frequent complaints of writers, new and old, is the feeling that they have nothing to say.  Many who have been writing  for years get up in the morning and go through a brief ritual before starting in writing that gets them going.  I make coffee and pour a steaming hot cup and on beautiful mornings like this I’ll stand on my deck and stare into the woods for a few minutes.  Then I pad upstairs and sit down here at the computer.   I urge writers to develop a little routine.  It’s simply 1-2-3 psychology.  You do one, that’s easy, then you do two, and that’s easy, and so won’t three come automatically and just as easily?  Usually, yes. 

 

But there are times when it won’t.  You may be depressed at your efforts, you may be anxious and blocking…any number of things. 

 

So sit down and cast your mind backward to a point twenty, thirty, or even fifty years earlier.  Today is July 13, 2006.  I choose to go back in time at this moment to July 13, 1956.  I come down to 6:15 am, and I’m aboard the USNS GENERAL LEROY ELTINGE, probably steaming east to Korea in the Indian Ocean.  I take that moment and explode it like a diagram on a page. 

 

I am a Yeoman Second Class, the guy in charge of the Military Department office.  I had a couple of helpers, another Second Class yeoman and a striker for yeoman.  We had a Turkish lad of uncertain rank assisting us in other ways.  Among other things, young Yusuf, who seemed to want to stand at attention in the corner of the compartment when we had no specific orders for him, washed our clothes for us.  Often when we took off a sweat t-shirt, he’d be standing there helping us and he would run immediately to a bucket of water and begin scrubbing it. 

 

You see how this works.  You move away from writing to remembering.  You’re not trying to say anything.  You’re just trying to remember, the first job of the personal historian. 

 

Now memories from that time are coming so fast and furious I can hardly keep up, even when I type at my top speed, sometimes 100 words a minute or more. 

 

How we’d give Yusuf a few cigarets a day and he’d be so doglike and grateful, how he had a tag tied to his shirt that identified him as working for us, how he wore it as proudly as if it were a general’s stars…how meaningless the various reports I caused to be made were, how I lost the 3,000 page passenger manifest labeled GIZLI, Turkish for SECRET, and never found them, and everyone miraculously forgot about them, my CO, when I told him, looking stunned for just a brief moment until he shrugged and said, “Oh, hell, it’s only the Turkish Army,” and never mentioned it again. 

 

How easily these things come when we don’t try hard to write “well,” whatever that may mean!  I stop and make a list of half a dozen or a dozen more ancillary memories of the voyage to and from Korea, the Turks, the crew, the other members of the Military Department, the nightly movies that sometimes we were so bored we’d run backwards after running it straight.  ###

 

 

Posted 0930 071408

 

Giants in the Earth, sort of

 

This was 34 years ago, 1974.

I got out in the field with the old John Deere 55, set the header and began combining. The wheat was swept into the header by the paddle wheel and disappeared into the bowels of the great machine. Inside me the cameras began to roll on every movie I’d ever seen about The Land. Had I not been so busy watching all the belts and pulleys and paddles and spools and blades I might have been overcome with emotion. I was a direct participant in the great American breadbasket’s harvest. My heart beat with the beat of the huge motor going behind me.

Behind me. I was ten or fifteen feet into the field now and I looked around to see the wheat come out the spout.

But there was no wheat coming out. I drove on another ten or so feet, steady she goes, and still no wheat. Another ten feet, nothing. I threw the machine into neutral, set the brake, and got down onto the ground. Nothing untoward that I could see. June was standing at the edge of the field, June smiling brightly, her arms clasped in her best “My hero” gesture. But seeing my dismay, her smile disappeared. “There’s no wheat coming out of the spout,” I shouted over the roar of the motor. June looked up, nodded. “I’m going to try it again.”

I clambered back up, released the brake, slipped it into second gear and once again began combining. June walked along beside. She was pointing to something. “What?” I yelled. But I couldn’t hear her reply. I stopped, and got down again.

“There’s lots of wheat coming out down there,” she said, pointing to the very bottom of the machine.

“What the hell,” I said. “It’s not supposed to do that!” I crawled up again and shut the machine down. I didn’t know what to do. I looked through the pages of the ancient greasy manual in the tool box, printed in 1950. I climbed all over the giant thing--it’s called a combine because it’s really a combining of a bunch of different machines that were used in harvesting. Nothing seemed loose or flopping. I had been working on the machine reconditioning it for six weeks. Now the wheat was ready. The sun stood high in the sky, and the wheat was a beautiful bright gold. “That’s good looking wheat,” Henry Daniels, my neighbor, had said a few days before, emitting a wolf whistle.

Only one neighbor farmed with John Deere equipment, Ted Anderson. I drove over to Ted's place. He was offloading wheat from his much newer combine into a huge truck. He listened to my description and agreed to come have a look. He followed me over in his truck. Together we walked out to the machine standing in the field. “I never heard of anything like this,” he said. I got on, started it up and drove slowly along while Ted looked underneath.

I stopped and got off. “Shut it down,” he said. Back I went and turned off the motor. Everything slowed to a halt. In the silence of the noon day Ted walked slowly around and around the great machine. Then he stopped and went over to a huge drive belt. “That’s on the wrong side,” he said. “Wrong side of the pulley.” I looked. “Well, I wouldn’t know,” I said. “That’s the way it fit. I just figured…” By then Ted had adroitly grasped the belt and maneuvered it to the other side of the pulley. “Now try that,” he said.

I got back on, started up the brute, and began moving slowly through the field. Within seconds wheat started spewing in a thick stream out of the tall green spout. I turned around and caught Ted’s eye. He was smiling and so was June, who had come back outside to watch. I waved and shouted my thanks. I didn’t want to stop now. The wheat was pouring out. I was getting into my Giants in the Earth mode again, chugging down the field, harvesting wheat for the nation’s bread.

Later June told me that Ted said something dryly about how the idea was to harvest the wheat, not plant it.

And so it was. ###

 

 

 

Posted this beautiful Sunday morning, 0630 071308

from my Journal ten years ago...

 

The Man who knew too much?

 

At Dillon’s at the postal counter I bought some stamps to mail the stuff I had with me.  The young girl pushed across the counter a couple of 20 cent stamps that I glued onto the two postcards I had to mail.  Virginia Apgar, I said.  Her picture was on the stamps.  Do you know who she was?  Ever heard of her?

 

            The girl smiled faintly and went on processing my packages.  I suppose she was used to the elderly talking to her like this.

            When you were born, I went on, not when I was born because Virginia Apgar was after my time--when you were born you were evaluated by the pediatrician as to how well you were doing compared to other children, and that was done a certain way and you were given an Apgar score.

 

            The girl smiled and nodded.  No doubt it made her day to receive that information.  I waved and went off. 

            Old people hold conversations with strangers like that.  They are gentle, one-sided reminders that we know something, that we’ve been here a while and that our experience must surely count for something, and so we say so, even as the youth go on processing the mail or sacking the groceries or downloading Netscape. ###

 

 

 

Posted this very morning, 0845 071108

 

This is from my Journal, seven years ago…

           

I am busted!

 

I should have stayed in bed.  Right after writing this I got in the pickup to drive over to the Unitarian Church to help with weeding and pruning.  I figured I'd take a couple of pictures of people working to put in the UU history, and I'd use my pickup--I seem to be the only member of the Fellowship who has one--and I'd load in some of the prunings to bring them back after the service here to the farm for disposal. 

 

            Fine.  On the way there was some wonderful choral music of Bach, I think Bach, on the radio.  I was running a little late.  I zoomed down Pleasant Valley Road and turned onto K-18, observed what a  beautiful early morning it was, pushed down on the accelerator--and then immediately wished I hadn't. 

 

            Coming towards me, lights flashing, was a police car. 

 

            And so I was nailed.  At that moment I remembered that they now have a technology that allows them to clock you even when you're not in their direction. 

 

            “I'm Officer Anderson with the Riley County Police Department,” the young lady said.  She had blonde hair, not bad looking at all, maybe 30 or 35.  Could anyone that pretty really be a cop?  “You were clocked driving 76 in a 55 mile per hour zone.”

 

            “Oh my,” was all I could say. 

            “Why were you driving so fast?”

            “I don't know,” I said.  “Heavy foot.  Good music on the radio.”

            She nodded but didn't smile.  “May I see your driver's license?”

            She took my license and went back to the cruiser, which of course was parked right behind me, lights still flashing.

            I sat there feeling like an idiot.  Hell, I was an idiot. 

 

            Suddenly there was some traffic.  A bicyclist rolled past, leering contemptuously at me, and pedaled on down the road.  A brown sedan--was that somebody from the Fellowship?--slowed and drove past us.  I pretended to be reading the Sunday paper, which was on the seat beside me.  But I didn't want to pretend to be blase just in case the officer was going to let me off with a warning; no, I wanted to look suitably contrite.

 

            She came back, and as she tore off the ticket and explained where and when I could pay it, I glanced at the numbers and saw the addition:  for speeding, $99, court costs, $54, a nice tidy total for the community's coffers of $153. 

 

            “I don't suppose it would help any if I told you I was hurrying to church, would it?  I was going to help with some work on the grounds.” 

            “No,” she said with a crisp smile, “it wouldn't help a bit.”   ###

 

 

 

 

Posted 1045 071008

 

I have another oldie for you this morning--my journal nineteen years ago today. 

 

Tu., July 11, 1989

Funny how associations go: just a minute ago I was sitting here looking blankly at the date and then of being in the navy 34 years ago this summer, stationed in Chicago, undergoing boot training, and going on liberty (I think we had maybe one or two 12-hour liberties while in boot training) to Chicago one weekend with Chuck Burke and Al Deines, riding in on the Elevated Railway with the dusty green seats that would turn our whites green when we sat on them, and walking around in the Loop such obvious greenhorns and some guy in a suit came up to us and asked if he could take our picture. Maybe he said something about how great we sailors looked, or how great we looked in uniform. And we were so naive we said yes, and then he said we could get more pictures taken if we went to his studio, or some such come on,and we actually did go over there and sit for more photos, thinking somehow it would all be free, it was because we were soo navy-looking, or whatever--and then they tried to charge each of us twenty bucks and we refused and they insisted and even tried to collect from our parents (we had given out our names and hometown addresses), and my father and mother both stood up for me on that one, they refused to pay, they threw the agent out of the house or something, but the company persisted for years and years, it seemed, and maybe it was.

Now I can remember Chicago that summer of 1955, the heat, the crowds, my sweaty fear engendered by the navy, my sense that I had made a terrible mistake by joining, the cruelty and crudity of the people who ran the navy, the irreparable damage they did to us--they really did--and yet of course it helped us, too.

 

 

Posted 1030 070808

 

 

Booting Up or Booting Down in 1955

Mon., July 20, 1998

 

            Forty three years ago tomorrow [meaning this day, July 20, 1955] I joined the Navy, I told June.  June made a face: big deal.  We will have to celebrate by taking the day off, I said, not meaning it, just trying to get a rise out of her.  Instead she turned back to the tv and pretended not to hear.

 

            Forty three years!  What a terrible day it was, a milestone of my miseducation!  You learn to minimize your humanity.  Or rather they minimize it for you.  Three months later I was a terrified Seaman Apprentice, grateful to be alive but terrified I’d be noticed and put on report for something awful--breathing, wanting to use the phone to call home, sobbing in my sleep.  I learned how to be a tough guy.  I learned to forget my silly civilian self, the high school kid who spent hours in front of the mirror popping pimples and putting alum on his hair.  Now I had fewer pimples and no hair.  My clothes were too big for me and if they did fit they were unfashionable even by Naval standards:  everything I wore and everything I was could be reduced to one horrid word.  I was a boot.

 

            In Navy parlance a boot is the next to the lowest form of humanity.  The lowest was the recruit.  A boot was a step up, believe it or not, a step up in a world where tiny steps were all you were allowed.  A boot was a someone who wore a uniform that was idenitifiably Navy; a recruit was simply someone who had been shanghaied or shooed into Navy custody to be made into a boot. 

 

            More to the point, boots are people who are in Boot Camp.  The exact denotative meaning of the word escapes me, but it must have something to do with the shoes, as they were called, that we wore, the hip-hops, the clodhoppers, the boots with the lace-up front and the metal grommets.    (Grommet is another word the Navy loves and one you get connotations of very quickly, for grommets surround everything: grommets fill the little holes in a canvas bunk that you run the line (not rope, you idiot, line!) through; grommets are the little eyes in shoelace holes; grommets are run through sails to lash them to something or other...grommets were not part of my high school education.)  A boot was what I was for the shortest possible time: three months in Boot Camp in Great Lakes, Illinois.  It was actually known as a Naval Training Center but like everything else in the Navy what you called something indicated your station in life: if you called the floor of your room the floor of the room rather than the deck of your compartment you were automatically stigmatized and labeled a foreigner just off the boat—or ship, actually, since one of the many other distinctions you learn quickly is that a boat is something that is small enough to be hoisted aboard a ship; hence the idea of travelling to the new world in a boat is something you might consider only if you were an adventurer or a latter day Leif Ericson.

 

            Somehow in there in the mystical crenellations of the mind the word boot also lives in the phrase boot in the ass; I cannot say the word boot without its hovering around in such phrases as boot in your ass or to get the boot or to be booted out or off, tied to the word and flapping there like little proud banners on a sailboat (boot?) launched in the bathtub of my brain.  For a boot sailor was always in danger of receiving any sort of boot; as indeed, any sailor was, and latterly, anyone in the Navy right up to the Chief of Naval Operations with all his four or five gleaming stars. ###

 

 

Dry

Posted  0700 070708

 

This is another journal entry from long ago.  We had driven down to Texas to see and hear my son Dan's band play.  Little did we realize we were entering a foreign country. 

 

Sun., Apr. 4, 1993

When we were on our way to Austin lat month somewhere in Texas we stopped for gas and I thought about getting a bottle of wine.

"Yes, do," June said. "By the time we get to Austin all the liquor stores will be closed."

So at the next town we started looking for a liquor store. We found none. "Maybe it's sold in grocery stores," I said.

Then, in some little town, we had a flat tire. We were lucky that it was right by a gas station. And, more luck, there was a liquor store next door. But it turned out to be a convenience store with a corner for liquor. "Where's your wine?"

"Over there," the clerk, a man about my age, pudgy and graying and balding too, told me, pointing.

In a cooler were half a dozen bottles of wine, each of a different kind. There was one bottle of Gallo burgundy. I took it over to the counter.

The clerk and I had a chat about how little selection there was. He said the town had just gone wet last year, "and it may go back to being dry next year." I laughed, and he told me about local politics. "We had prohibition here for one hundred years," he said.

I went back and helped fix the flat and we drove on to Austin. We got a motel room and June and I settled down to have a glass of wine before retiring. The bottle was corked, not screw cap.

 

"Damn," I said, and looked around the room for a corkscrew. I didn't find one. I went down to the desk to ask if they had one. "No," the desk clerk said. "They do have one in the bar."

"I didn't know there was a bar," I said.

 

"Down that hallway on your right."

 

"Thank you."

The bar was just closing. The bartender listened to my request, went away, came back with a cheap, kitchen corkscrew. "You have to bring it right back," he said. "Please, it's our only one."

I smiled and promised to do so. And I did.

I forgot to mention that I'd asked in Dallas at a Burger King where I could find a liquor store, and the young counter girl blushed like I'd asked where I could find a whorehouse. She turned my request over to the manager who curtly told me they could be found only in downtown Dallas, probably fifteen miles away.

What's going on here? I wondered. In a state larger than most countries, with huge cities and towering skyscrapers, some of them with more people in them than many states, there's a shortage of corkscrews, and you can't buy a bottle of wine...

The guy at the liquor store in the little town kept apologizing that he didn't have any of the "hard stuff." I kept saying I only wanted wine. He didn't seem to hear me.

This is, of course, classic Bible Belt mentality. It may be worse in Texas than anywhere in the USA. The association of drinking with immorality and godlessness and its opposite: being dry is saintly--may only exist, anymore
in Texas... on a large scale.

 

Even in Kansas, where Bible thumping replaced the beat of tomtoms more than a hundred and fifty years ago, "temperance" is no longer an institution, it is regarded as a private matter. ###

 

Posted 1100 070408 

 

Old words

 

The neat thing about keeping a journal for years and years is that like a photograph album you can thumb through it at any time and it brings back the moment.  Leslie is now 36 and has a child of her own who peppers her with questions...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My fantastic life

 

Posted 0945 070308     

 

I have a wild imagination. My psychiatrist back in the 60s said I had "bizarre ideation." Fair enough. Sometimes it's called talent, but a wild imagination--especially when you've got that old bizarre ideation in there with it--can be something that blocks you from achieving your goals rather than helps you fulfill them.

Twelve years ago I got an email from my editor at Heinemann that he was accepting my book, For All Time. I was happy but almost immediately I launched into a frenzy of imagination of what I should do next. Here's a little fantasy that came whirling into my busy head that day along with the notification about the book.


When June came home I said, "Say, I have good news. " "Oh? What's that?"
'My agent called today. He thinks Gary's Luck is a hot property." "A hot property? What's that?"
"It is hot as hell, " Rip chimed in, on his way past. Ben was sitting on the couch thumbing through the Newsweek that had just come.
"A hot property means a manuscript that all the publishers want. He's going to put it up for auction. "
Now everybody stopped. "Auction?"
"That's where all the interested publishers get together and bid on it. He thinks it may bring over a million dollars. "
"A million dollars?" June said, turning pale.

This is Walter Mitty stuff, of course. (Remember Walter Mitty, James Thurber's character who daydreamed his way through life?) And it might be harmless enough and even amusing. We all do some of this. But when it persists it can be a barrier to achievement rather than a spur. I think the fact that it took me until August of 2007--twelve more years--to get Gary's Luck into print might suggest that sometimes grandiose fantasies hinder more than they help. They become a substitute for reality rather than an encouragement.

Having this insight after all these years, I can only say to myself, "Duh."

 

Posted 070208 This was my life July 2, 2005

 

This is unedited from my Journal a couple of years ago. When I go back and read stuff I wrote in the Journal I am always interested in the scenes I wrote, the little moments like these from my life, and I find I gloss over the summaries about how I drove to town and got the newspapers and so on.

I stood in line like the half dozen others to wait my turn at the postal counter. The young woman—well, 40ish, hair graying at the temples—who waited on me said they didn’t have any Marian Andersons left. “Oh,” I said, disappointed. She showed me some of the others. She pushed Walt Disney characters at me. “No,” I said. “I’m not a cartoon person. Writers and artists.” She brought out some Robert Penn Warren, which I took five sheets of. I don’t think she knew who he was. “He wrote a famous novel. ‘All the King’s Men.’ It was made into a movie.” She looked utterly blank but slightly interested. She went away somewhere and came back with some Marian Andersons. “I thought we had sold them out, but some new ones must’ve come in.” She counted out five sheets. I examined them. “It’s a good likeness,” I said. “I heard her sing here in Manhattan when I was a boy.” “Really,” the clerk said, her voice sounding fairly genuinely impressed. There were a few people still waiting behind me. But I pushed on. “The DAR—Daughters of the American Revolution—wouldn’t let her sing in Constitution Hall, so—here I choked a little,and then went on--Eleanor Roosevelt invited her to sing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, which she did, to the thousands who came.”

“Oh,” the clerk said, looking past me. Maybe with her hidden hand she was pressing a button. I knew I hadn’t much time. “Eleanor Roosevelt was FDR’s—the President’s—wife. The DAR was lily-white. No people of color allowed.” The clerk nodded, her hands folded now on the counter in front of her. “When she sang here in Manhattan in 1948, they wouldn’t let her stay at the Wareham Hotel.” The clerk nodded. I was pulling away. She was reaching for something. “She was the greatest contralto of her time,” I said, a parting shot. “She was a singer,” the clerk said. “That’s all I know.” Then she slipped a little brass sign in front of her. CLOSED.

 

Posted 070108

 

One of the things I sometimes do with my Journal before writing a day's entry is that I go back one year (or two or ten or forty) and read the entry for that day. 

 

Today I went back one year exactly.  Here are a few of the one thousand words I wrote in the Journal on the morning of July 1, 2007:

 

Glenn Graham used to speak of the “sooth,” to mean the South.  It was a joke.  Someone had said that, or almost said that, pronounced “south” that way, I mean, and I had been there too and Glenn picked it up and used it jocularly and I laughed too.  I wish I could remember where we heard that pronunciation. 

 

After I read this paragraph  I decided to edit it, expand it, improve it a little bit maybe, and then post it here.  And so I have. Is it any better?  I hope so. 

 

Glenn Graham, the old printer I worked for when I was a boy,  used to pronounce the word South as sooth when he was talking about the region in America. It was a joke.  Someone had said it that one day to Glenn when we were working together, or almost said it like that, and Glenn picked up on it and used it jocularly and I laughed too. The guy who said it was probably a paper or ink salesman who came by regularly.  I wish I could remember.

 

It was Glenn's subtle and indirect way of saying some things about this guy, a little bit about his pretentiousness maybe, but probably most of all making an affectionate reference, and maybe something affectionate too about Southerners in general, how they love the South, their home and their special language, their special way of saying things.   ###

 

Posted 063008

Tomorrow I'll start posting a short narrative every day.  Remember "Manana, manana, manana is soon enough for me?" a pop tune of the 1950s (or was it the 1940s?), a more innocent--and politically incorrect--era than ours today? 

 

Posted 052008

From my journal...

 

 

When I was a kid 15 years old I bought a 1934 Chevy 4-door sedan with running boards a foot wide and big silver headlights on the front fenders and a windowshade on the rear window for $100.  I kept it a year or two and ran it until it dropped.  The motor still ran but the transmission had gone out. 

 

Some friends helped me roll it from my home up on Pine Drive all the way down to South 8th Street to Julian's Auto Wrecking. 

 

Julian took one look and said he'd give me $3 for it.  "But it's got a full tank of gas," I protested.  "Twenty gallons!"  And I pointed to the gas gauge.  Julian smiled and only glanced at the gauge.   He took a stick and poked it down into the tank and looked at that.   

 

 "Okay," he said.  "Seven dollars.  Three for the car and four for the gas." 

 

And I sold it.  That was 1953. ###

 

Posted 051808

 

From my journal...

 

Maybe on the weight thing (I am back at 185 this morning) I ought to declare a victory and quit.  After all, I have lost over 30 pounds from last fall.  Maybe it’s just not in the cards that I’m going to lose more, though before my hernia surgery in January I think I had dropped down to 175.  I am not trying very hard now to lose weight, however, and so of course I’m not.  I would like to get back to being south of 180.  And then maybe I’ll be content with that.  But when I did get down in the 170s, people said I looked frail. 

It’s all so boring.  Don’t I have better things to do with my life than worry about my weight?  A waist is a terrible thing to mind. ###

 

 

Salute, Sailor!

Posted 1105  041008

 

The whole time I was in the Navy I did not salute an officer.  In three and a half years of active duty ashore and at sea I saluted only once.  That was in boot camp and I did not salute an officer but rather an enlisted man, a petty officer.  For some reason I was late going to chow one evening and instead of walking in with my company I went in by myself, in which case the protocol required that I salute and request permission to eat from the guy who was at the door.  And so I did, without incident, and I went inside and ate.  I had been in the Navy maybe six or eight weeks by then. 

 

In the Navy you are required to salute officers as you pass them, with certain exceptions.  If it is indoors and you are uncovered (i.e., Navy for not wearing a hat), you do not salute; if you or the officer are not directly on the same path, you do not salute.  For example, if you are ashore walking down a street, in uniform—and covered of course—and an officer is approaching, if you just happen to duck into a shop entrance to look in the window, you do not salute.  You never salute sitting down indoors or out, so that if you are sitting in a sidewalk café in downtown Athens sipping ouzo and watching the beautiful women walk by, you do not salute.

 

Now veterans and others in the know will wonder what I did when I boarded or left my ship, because each such time any naval