Wed., Nov. 7, 1990 "I see those Dillon boys are here." "The whole gang, it looks like," June said. We had just pulled up and parked in front of a new house out in Candlewood, ready to hang some paper for D&R Construction. A guy from Blueville Nursery was unrolling chunks of topsoil with grass growing in it already and laying then out on the dirt in front of the house. "Just like hanging paper," I said to June. "Only you don't have to worry about the seams popping.” Inside was a whirlwind of activity. Three men from Bob's Plumbing were going from room to room and laying out fixtures to be installed. Ivan Kosar and Buns were in the living room working at a miter saw and discussing something about the fireplace trim. Don Krubel was talking to somebody I didn't know, yelling to be heard over the general din. Mick the electrician was quietly screwing on coverplates that we'd be taking off shortly in order to paper around. Jim Dillon was varnishing a door, and his son, Guy, was bent over a bucket of paint mixing something. "Oh, here he is. Here they are," Jim said. "Here's June and her driver." "Hi, fellers," I said, and June smiled and said hello all around. We set up our paste table in the kitchen, or I did, while June went off with Ivan to talk about where to start papering. I went back to the truck several times bringing in tools and a couple of heavy bundles of wallpaper. When June got back I was all set up, glue mixed and ready to go. "Which paper and how long a piece?" June pawed through the rolls, took one and handed it to me. "This one, full length. I don't know how long that is, 96 I suppose." "I'll go measure." I picked up a tape from the tool box. "Master bathroom?" "Yes. But let me show you. It's a little different back there." We went back to the master bathroom and she showed me where the first piece was going and I measured. On the way back we passed Jim Dillon and I pretended to stick my fingers on the door he was varnishing. "This wet?" "You're gonna be wet," Jim said. To June, he said, "You letting him carry a tape and everything?" June laughed. "Listen, Jimbo, I not only have learned how to carry this tape." I pulled on the tip and let it snap back. "I've learned how to read it, too." "Well, you've come a long way, baby, haven't you?" In the kitchen June and I rolled out some of the paper and she pointed to a spot an inch above a sheaf of wheat where I was to make the top cut. I rolled out a full length strip and cut in, grabbed my roller full of paste and rolled it around all over the back of the paper, then booked it neatly. ### posted November 1, 2010 Knowledge comes but wisdom lingers One of my earliest memories is of being told, or perhaps reading on a wall in school or somewhere, that knowledge is power. Now I think about it my father said that. “Knowledge is power.” Of course it’s an old adage (does anyone know a young adage?) and not original with my father at all. But the more I think about it, my hearing of it, I think, yes, Dad told me that. And I believe he meant well, he just wanted me to study hard in school; but I took it way, way too much to heart. I did everything I could from then on to pile up the knowledge. It became, in fact, almost the meaning of my life, my identity: I was the answer man, I was the guy who knew, I was the person they turned to whenever something was to be asked. “Ask Charley, he knows everything,” was said more than once to someone else in front of me, and I merrily and (appreciatively) laughed. I did know about everything. Except that I didn’t catch the irony in their voice. I didn’t hear the second part of the two-edged message: Charley is a smart-ass or, more kindly, Charley has given too much of himself over to the mere accretion of knowledge. I didn't get that, then. So. Back to Dad there in about 1948 telling me that knowledge is power. Many years later, about the time I collapsed mentally and had to be hospitalized (1962), I seem to remember my dad saying, musing perhaps to himself, really, as he often did in the morning just before leaving for work, looking out the window and into the big pine trees there--he said this, the second part of this particular lesson: "Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers." Oh, my. So knowledge wasn’t an end in itself! Knowing that the highest freshwater lake in the world, Lake Titicaca (height 11,141 feet), wasn’t going to get me into heaven after all. But it was many years before I made significant progress in putting the two sayings together into something that actually helped me understand my life and my place in the world. And that’s what I’m thinking this morning. posted november 2, 2010 Memory Serves Winter is coming. It may be a mild one, maybe too mild; or it could be severe. Who knows? What I do know is that I cannot--not anymore--do much to prepare for it. I can’t seek out dead trees or dead limbs off living trees in the woods anymore. I can’t saw them up, load them on the wagon and stack the chunks on the deck by the door. I can’t repaint those two windows on the west that need it. I can’t replace that bit of rotten siding at the other end of the house. All this, and more, I’ll have to hire done if it’s to be done at all. I can’t dig the holes for those four new fruit trees (two cherry, two pear) I’ve ordered for the orchard. They have to go in this fall, so they’ll be rooted in and ready to take off in the spring. I can’t be the one to do that. And if anybody’s going to powerwash the decks and re-stain them, it’ll have to be anybody but me. I just can’t do that much, physically, anymore. I’ve got the skill, but I don’t have the stamina. But I have the memory, the memories, of years of doing all those things, and much, much more. More than I wanted, really. I didn’ t know how much I loved it, the swing and sway of my body and the pleasant heft of, say, a bundle of shingles or a bag of Portland cement. But now I’m nostalgic for them: the joy of climbing up a ladder propped against the house on a fall day, removing a storm window, gently walking it down the ladder, then back up, up, and scraping and sanding the window sash and smoothly brushing on a new coat of paint. That, I learn now, was a joy. And I did, really, like it: I do remember it that way now, mostly, as a pleasure, the leisure of working outside on a crisp fall afternoon. And that, I’m sure, is right. That memory should serve even while my body doesn’t serve anymore. posted Oct 28, 2010 Sherman White, who was black. I met Dan in his office. He sat in a chair looking rumpled and tweedy and happy. Young Richard was there too, his assistant, and Richard stood and talked with us until Dan and I went across the street to eat at Howie’s. We ate at a table up front in the window and sunshine. “Howie’s used to be the old Wareham Coffee Shop,” I said to Dan. Then I remembered, but did not tell, the story of how one time when I was in junior high school and I came here to eat my lunch--I always came downtown to eat my lunch rather than eat at the school cafeteria, and my dad gave me $2.50 a week, or maybe my mom doled it out, to eat: fifty cents a day. With fifty cents I could buy a hamburger (I don’t think cheeseburgers had been invented then), a mound of golden french fries and a big glass of milk. And that’s what I bought every single day. I think that came to forty- five cents, actually, and I had a nickel left over for a candy bar (Butterfinger or Milky Way, usually) or--the pinball machine out in the lobby by the phone booths. (Yes, I know, the bells and clanging annoyed the people talking on the phones, but each booth had a door that was somewhat sound resistant.) Anyway, the day I remembered this morning with Dan was the day that I came to lunch there and, as usual, it was crammed with people. There were booths along the wall, all full. There were tables at the front, just as there are now, and each table had at least four people and sometimes five at them. There were two or three horseshoe counters and a booth with tables along the wall. There were probably a hundred or more people in the place. And all the lunch places were crowded. People who worked downtown mostly ate downtown, and people went downtown to shop--and school kids like me, too. And farmers. And of course travelers and the hotel guests, they most of all. So I had to wait. Seats opened up here and there. One opened up at one of the horseshoes and I was summoned by the counter lady--I can’t remember her name, but I can see her in my mind’s eye, she worked there all her life, and when she retired she was a wizened little red (dyed) haired lady who walked downtown every day from wherever it was that she had lived for no doubt a thousand years. She sat me down at a stool. I ordered. The two guys next to me finished up and that stool became vacant. Instantly two men were placed next to me. I looked up--and up. The guy on my left was a tall black man. I knew right away who he was and I’m sure I stared. It was Sherman White. He was an all-American basketball player, a black man, who played for Long Island University, at that time one of the reigning great basketball teams in America, in town to play another of the great teams of the time, K-State. I don’t know how I even ate I was so thrilled. I certainly didn’t notice my food. I just stared, probably chewing and maybe even drooling a little (not really) and listened to this great man talk to his team-mate. This is what I remember, now, sixty years later. It’s still there in my head! Maybe Sherman White is still alive, coaching or retired, or something. Maybe I’ll google him. What a thing it was to sit next to him! I was afraid, and probably would have thought it too brash and or rude, to ask him for an autograph. I should have. ### posted 10 am, October 25, 2010 Standing in the need of prayer. Each day I have about a hundred things more to do than I can possibly get done. As I look at the list of them (in my mind or sometimes, God help me, even on paper) I am paralyzed with the feeling that I can’t possibly get them all done--and yet I must. There’s no prioritizing: I have to do it all, and at once! So what do I do? I ask to do one thing at a time. Okay, fine. Granted. Go do the one thing. But, I whine, which one thing? And so I dither. Shall I pick the one next right thing that is bothering me the most? And what do I mean by the most? For the longest time? The one that will cost me the most money if I don’t do it immediately if not sooner? How do I decide what the next right thing is? What if I accidentally do the next to the next instead? But then when I shrug and just do one, picked almost at random, there is a great sense of relief. For awhile. And then back comes the steamroller and lays me flat once more with the knowledge that I have all these things I must do right now! Now I do know, occasionally, when I can allow myself to see, that things have a way of working out. Doing one right thing often if not always has a way of being, in effect, several right things. Maybe many right things. Just do it, Charley, I think. And then I feel so tiny, so powerless over everything. Please, I peep, just let me do this one little tiny old thing. And I’ll be quiet. And so I do it. And for awhile, I am quiet inside. I am, for awhile, at peace. ### October 19, 2010 I read in The New York Times a review by one Dwight Garner (“Books of the Times”) of a memoir by Roland Barthes. Roland was a philosopher, literary critic and theorist. He died in 1980, having been run over by a laundry truck. Maybe this memoir of his beloved mother is worth reading, but so little of the writer’s work appears in the review we just cannot tell. As reviewed--and I don’t think this is the reviewer’s intention--the review makes the book seem so utterly self-indulgent as to be laughable. So far as I am concerned the review, which really is fairly typical of book reviews in most of our “better” newspapers and magazines and even journals, is a study in how not to review a book. Over the years I’ve reviewed a few hundred books. I never liked writing reviews. I didn’t like the idea of trashing a book. If it was junk to me, I never finished it, and I just set it aside. And since my reviewing was mostly freelance--I didn’t have an actual assignment--I just didn’t do it. It wasn’t interesting so to me it wasn’t worth reviewing. But I was trained in school and by my colleagues’ examples to review or critically evaluate--not to present a book or write a sales pitch, a mere jacket blurb, for it. That was considered high schooley, the lazy man’s way, and not at all sophisticated--nor what sophisticated people would want. In the 1960s, when the whole world was turned upside down--mostly for its own good, in my view--the great Steward Brand and some others developed a book-like periodical called The Whole Earth Review. Mostly it in short articles about new things and new ideas--and new books or old ones worth looking at again. Often a review wouldn’t be much more than a presentation or what some reviewers of that day and this one might call, with lips curled in contempt, “an appreciation.” Well, at 72 I no longer know--nor much care--what sophisticated people want. And so I tend to focus primarily in a review on what you might call, “showing the book.” There will be long quotes from the book, reproduction of its cover and some of the graphics in the book if there are any. I’ll probably have my opinion in there too, but mostly it will be embedded in the text of the review and the fact that I selected the book for review. It would have to be a book I found interesting and that I think the readers will find interesting or it wouldn’t appear at all. My hunch is that most of the readers of LifeStory, being writers in their own communities, have been asked to review books from time to time. Maybe they did, maybe they declined. I can only say that I hope that anyone out there, contemplating reviewing a book they like and think important for others to know about, do not decline because they feel they cannot follow the format of publications like The New York Times.From the Ancient Journal... Th., Aug. 2, 2001 I've been writing in this Journal now for nearly 40 years, close to two-thirds of my whole life, and nearly all my adult life. I must believe that recording my experience has some value. Certainly it does for me. It functions a lot like religion does for a devout person. I pray here, I confess here, I praise here, even worship at a kind of shrine to introspection and man in the face of the Infinite--I guess. When I publish this Journal, and by that I mean simply one way or another, make it available to others, I do so because I think it has real value to them. I publish it for my kids, some of it, because I think if they can review some of my experience they can understand their own better. This is not, absolutely is not, a matter of saying I'm old and wise and I know stuff they need to know. Had my father or mother kept a journal I would certainly read it, probably more than once. I would want to protect it and pass it down to my children and grandchildren. I would value it because, no matter how it was written, it would be in some sense a repository of my ancestral experience. I take it as fundamental and more or less settled law that this written experience is valuable. If my parents had left a list (say) of their favorite wise sayings, the value would be limited but it would still have some value because it was something that they claim they tried to live by. Even a list of their favorite jokes would have some value for a similar reason. Even their laundry list, to stretch things a bit and nail down the principle, would have some value. At the other extreme, let's say that my mother had written a narrative autobiography, or that my father had. This could be of great value: it could be like living their life but watching it with my own eyes. There is the argument, perhaps increasingly made--I don't have the knowledge of the research into this subject that must surely be out there somewhere in cyberspace--the argument made more and more that much if not all of what we learn in life, everything we are born with and everything we assimilate (whatever that may mean) in our lifetime, is passed biologically, chemically, genetically, to succeeding generations. But even then we are left with the question, Do we just sit back and wait for the genes to add our experience on? Or do we move forth in all possible ways, writing and art and science and all, to do pass what we've lived for onto the next generation? I think it's obvious we have to do that. And anyway, how will we know what we're passing on? Are we just to be a vessel in which something is dumped, let set for awhile, and then dumped into another? Am I making any sense? Good morning! It's Saturday, March 27! This is from my Narrative Journal this morning-- I was hardly career oriented. Or that is to say, I had my own agenda so far as “career” was concerned. Paul Goodman’s complaint, that we “had no sense of career” was correct. We didn’t, we Hippies: we had a sense of life, not as a career, but as a whole thing--family, friends, children, associates, the spiritual life…everything. We had no sense of ourselves as essentially teachers or preachers or lecturers in sociology or poets. We were people who happened to do these things, perhaps, but mostly we were people. We made the mistake of thinking of ourselves not as an occupation but as whole human beings. We wanted to be happy and whole, not successful. And this has had, for me, and for many others, economic consequences as well as social ones. ### I am 72. God, 72. 72! I can’t believe it. I don’t believe it. It’s not true. I’m not even 27. I’m 7. I’m 7 and it’s 1944 and I’m down in Indiana sitting on Gramps’ lap while he hums and calls out one of his made up poems. We’re sitting by the fire and Gramps has a long piece of hickory in his hands and he’s using a thick shard from a Mason jar to shave it into an ax handle. It’s cold and the fire is chock full of wood but at night he puts in a chunk of anthracite coal. We have some ration stamps for it, I think, we must, and we have some money, probably more than most since Dad is a major in the Army overseas. One of the advantages of the mind, or is it an advantage, is its ability to swing back and forth in time. There really is no time in the mind. It’s all just there in one big place, like the spare room you chuck everything into that you don’t know what to do with and you can't bear to throw away. Writing about it seems to help. Maybe it makes it so that, in some sense, you can get rid of it. Or the act of writing gives it some meaning, puts it in perspective. There it is back there, 1944, and I am now living this morning at it is January 27, 2010. Thursday, April 1, 2010 "I caught this morning morning's minion..." In 1951 we went as a family to New York. I was just a kid of 13 with my brother and little sister and my mom and dad. Dad was attending some medical meeting. We stayed at the New Yorker, one of the big hotels right downtown. Probably that’s where the convention was. One day Dad and Kuhrman and I went somewhere on the subway while Mom and Kathy stayed back at the hotel. Maybe we went to the zoo in the Bronx or something. I seem to remember going there and seeing two enormous polar bears standing on their hind legs and clowning around for the crowd. ( Yes, that’s the kind of thing we thought was great back then.) Anyway, on the subway it was crowded, so crowded that the three of us took the last available seats. It was late on a hot summer afternoon. There was no air conditioning. Looking around we could see all the white and Negro faces, tired, on their way home from work most of them probably. We were packed in like sardines in a can. The next stop nobody got off. A heavy black lady carrying a shopping bag wearily boarded. She shuffled around looking for a seat. My sweet father, being the gentleman he was, got up from his seat so she could take it. Everyone in the car stared at him. He even made a little gesture to the lady with his open hand to show her the seat, as an usher in a theater might. She looked at him sharply. Dad smiled at her and again made the fluttering gesture with his hand toward the seat. But she turned away and walked slowly to the other end of the car, probably twenty-five feet away, put down her bag, took hold of one of the hand straps above, and stared at him. Everyone stared at my poor dad, who had meant well. He did not take his seat again. We careened noisily along under the New York streets to the next screeching stop, where a skinny kid in a black t-shirt came on, saw the vacant seat, and darted for it. He sat down, and looked around triumphantly. Warm Memories on a Dark Day: from my Journal this morning, 0830, September 21, 2009 It's good to be back online, proving once again that indiscretion is the better part of valor. It's the very last day of summer, but it looks like the tenth day of fall. It is cool and it is raining. Thunder rumbles on as it has for the past four hours. The Dining Porch Deck is layered with the fallen leaves from the walnut above it, stuck there and spattered by the incessant rain. The light is shiny on it, the wet shiny wood, the leaves stuck to the boards, the open area of the deck lined with June’Jungle of potted plants. The light on it from the CFL above is yellow. I come back inside into the dark rooms, the dark stairs coming up here to my hideout, the feeling that though it’s Monday morning the day hasn’t begun, and the day may never begin. All is cavernous, beautifully dreary, dark and old and unborn. At eight o’clock you almost need a flashlight to make your way outside. The thick gray clouds blanket us, the trees are dark and dripping with rain, thunder rolls around the earth, all things alive are hidden away, waiting. Yesterday I stood up in church and said I had come to believe in God. (There was a stony silence, though several people came up to me afterwards and expressed relief if not pleasure.) And this morning I am covered with a Job-like coating of poison ivy zits. The itching so far is mild, though pervasive. I suppose I got the poison from the brief walk I took late Saturday. I went through the orchard to Bad Pond and up along the east side of Middle Earth back into the end of the path into Oak Bends. There’s a nice potential campsite back there in the shade of the chinkapin oaks that looks across Hide-out Creek to the Beeyard. I remember a guy I knew in high school, Riley I think was his last name, yeah, maybe “Jim Riley,” a guy who worked at Golden Krust bakery daytime and nights at the little gas station on the west end of town on the Fort Riley road. He said he was a “flounderer in the flour,” and I thought that quite witty. The conversations I used to have with Ruth somebody, a girl a few years older than me who worked the ticket office at the Co-Ed Theater, about people being “squares, circles, or blanks.” That was my sociology theory, and I thought myself very clever to have come up with it. But I was more sociopath than sociologist. I came up with the idea, such as it was, from conversations with other disaffected high school kids. I learned almost nothing in class, not because there was nothing there to learn but because I just wouldn’t. If high school classes had consisted of going out and sitting in your car and smoking cigarets and talking endlessly about Life, then I wouldn’t have done that, which is of course what I did do. No, if I'd been ordered to do that, I would have run away from it, dropped out and gone to some school and taken classes in geometry and English and biology. It dawns on me now on this cool and delicious dark morning that my crazy life has not been so crazy after all. First Draft--and maybe the last. Tues., Mar. 30, 2010 Last night I misplaced my wallet. I was pretty sure I’d come into the house with it in my back pocket (there is an odd feeling I have if it isn’t in my right rear pants pocket, kind of like the feeling an amputee might have about his missing arm or leg) but now I had to get going to a meeting, already late, and I couldn’t find it. So I went on without it, much rattled. Just ten days ago I lost my hearing aids and I haven’t found them yet. Again, I’m pretty sure it’s a matter of misplacing rather than actually losing--I’d taken them out of my ears and put them in the little pocket of my jacket that’s inside one of the big pockets, a pretty hard place for something to fall out of--so I feel very frustrated because I think maybe I’m trying to trip myself up. First the hearing aids, and now the wallet. What is God trying to tell me? Slow down, Charley? Relax? Accept? What? Dammit, dammit, dammit was all I could think of as I drove to town. But later, June phoned me to say she had found it on the floor of the bedroom by the chair where I often toss my clothes. Blessed June. I was flooded with love for her. Later on, on the way home, I thought about creeping into the bedroom where she’d be lying asleep and kissing her feet. I’m going to have one last shot at finding my hearing aids. The trail is cold, but not undiscoverable, and I’m just sure that the aids are probably out here somewhere. It’s just unlikely that both of them fell out of my pocket. I probably put them someplace, absent mindedly, on a shelf by something else, a different pocket…I don’t know. It’s worth another look before I go out and purchase for a huge price a new pair. (Though I do need a new pair, and have known it for several months; it’s just that right now isn’t exactly the best time to buy anything that expensive.) on., 052410 Eating and other disorders. At Woodrow Wilson School I ate in the cafeteria with the rest of the country kids because we didn’t go home to dinner. I think we had to eat there, or bring our own lunch. I was okay with that most of the time. We stood in line to get our food served to us by old ladies who worked in the kitchen, older, that is, than we were, and some were fat and old like a lot of our mothers or grandmothers were; and once we’d gotten our food we took a seat in order of the next one vacant at whichever of the four long tables was filling up. When a table filled, they could start in eating. Only then. And you had to eat everything on your plate, and everything that was cooked, a portion of was put on your plate. This included stewed tomatoes. I didn’t like tomatoes. I didn’t like tomatoes whether they were raw, fricasseed, flambeed, boiled or baked or broasted or toasted. I especially hated stewed tomatoes. There’s an old tavern joke that I think of when I think of stewed tomatoes. This guy went into a crowded bar and in a loud voice proposed to the bartender that he give him a free drink. Well, what’ll you do for your free drink? the bartender wanted to know. The guy looked around and pointed to a brass spittoon in the corner. I’ll drink the contents of that spittoon over there if you’ll give me a free drink. Okay, go to it, the bartender said. Immediately the man went to the corner, picked up the spittoon, put it to his mouth and began gulping the contents down. Watching this, half the customers at the bar began to leave, several made terrible faces and the bartender himself was about to retch. Stop, the bartender called to him. Stop! I’ll give you your drink. But the guy kept on, only looked at him, gulping it down until he finally lowered the thing from his lips, wiped them, put it back in the corner and came to the bar. People shrank from him. The bartender put out the man’s drink, keeping it at arm’s length. Why, he asked, didn’t you quit? I was just kidding! I didn’t think you’d really do it. Well, I didn’t think I would drink it all, either, the man said in a strained voice. But I had to because I got hold of a lo-o-o-ng strand. Back to Woodrow Wilson School Cafeteria, circa 1948. Had I known that joke then, that’s what I would have thought of when I had to eat an overgenerous helping of stewed tomatoes. I’d take a small bite. It was mushy, canned stuff, at that. I’d seen the “cooks” at recess in there, opening huge cans of this stuff and slopping it into a kettle to heat it up. I think they may have added some stale white bread. In fact, now I think about it, those were the strands that really, literally, made me retch. I’d get hold of a long piece of breadcrust soaked in the tomatoey goo, and it’d start sliding down my gullet like a snake. Some of the other kids liked the stuff and had no problem. But my problem was their problem because no one could leave the table until we’d all eaten everything on our plate. Sometimes you could sweep it onto the plate of someone who liked it or just slither it to the floor; but you usually could not do that because the teachers were watching us for just such an attempt. I’d be the last one. All the kids would be glaring. The teacher would stand directly behind me. Eat your tomatoes, Charles. They’re good for you. And that’s half the story of my life: to do what I have to do without puking. |
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