MISSISSIPPI RAMBLING

I was raised in the Jim Crow south during the era of segregation.   My grandmother and I first lived in Kentucky and then when I was eight we moved to her hometown in the heart of the Mississippi Delta.  I was always considered and outsider: no father, from the north (Kentucky,) not Baptist and on top of that I was small for my age.   When I was nineteen I left Mississippi, joined the Navy and never returned.  

Decades later, when deciding to retire, my wife agreed to move to the small town in western Kentucky where I spent my youngest days, a time that had produced fond memories. 

The south is still covertly segregated.   The people in the south aren’t bad people; they are congenial, thoughtful and resourceful, with strong family ties.   But, their religious bred ignorance so permeates every facet of their life that it made the six years we spent in Kentucky uncomfortable.     Their religious prejudices are as strongly held as the Jim Crow prejudices held during segregation. 

The only good memory I have of Mississippi is the food.   Mississippi home cooking, strongly influenced by the black community, was in a class by itself.   Fried chicken, not breaded but lightly rolled in flour and then fried in bacon grease in a cast iron skillet until the skin was crispy; greens cooked with ham hock – cooked for hours until it surrenders a rich pot liquor – eaten with a dash of Louisiana Hot Sauce; catfish and hush-puppies with white beans; fresh slice, tart, acidy tomatoes with a dollop of mayonnaise, salt and pepper; homemade biscuits and eggs cooked in bacon grease with a side of grits with butter for breakfast; these were common fare and the memories I still carry.

And Oh yes, the music – the Delta Blues

 Black people in that Mississippi Delta town were looked down on, considered inferior in every way, exploited and often brutalized.  The irony is that today the only claim to fame that Mississippi town promotes is as the home of Muddy Waters. 

the Ol'Buzzard

YELLOW DOG GRANNY PLUG UP YOUR EARS.

THE LAST SEASON OF JUSTIFIED - LAMENT

An Ol'Kentucky boy

the Ol'Buzzard

THE TRUE VALUE OF ELDERS

I spent a dozen years teaching and living in Native Alaskan villages; my wife is also Native American – she is a registered member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head Massachusetts.

I admire the respect shown to Elders by all Native tribe members, both young and old.   Elders are held in a special venerated position, and during Potlatch and special ceremonies Elders always feel free to stand up and lecture the tribe or gathering – and everyone listens respectfully to their every word. 

During such time I have often found myself sitting through disjointed ramblings of circular and pointless stories expressing bias and even raciest views; and I admire the people who respect their elders enough to listen attentively.

As I have said before: age does not automatically confer wisdom; it often calcifies past prejudices and results in a rigid view of the world in past tense. 

The aged, however, do have an untapped resource of untold value.   As custodians of living history they have tales on a personal and local level of life and times past: perhaps this is the real history.  

After retiring from the military my wife and I attended college.   One of our class projects was the recording of living history of the western Maine area.   We located subjects between the age of seventy (old to me at that time) and ninety, and recorded their vivid remembrances of youth and early life.

A ninety two year old wood cutter recounted his life during the depression.  Wood cutting at that time was done with whip saws and axes.  He hired six men to harvest the timber, paying them one dollar a day and room and board.   The men lived in his barn.  His wife would prepare rolled oats and maple syrup, harvested from their own trees, for the breakfast meal.    The evening meal was always meat (deer bear or moose) and potatoes that he had grown during the summer.  Oxen were used to drag the timbers to a loading area; and then he would transported the timber to the local mills on a sled pulled by eight oxen. 

A seventy year old woman we recorded told of raising six children while her husband worked in a wood mill.   Along with local history she gave us a number of recipes, including her recipe for biscuits – which we later tried. 

I was raised by my grandmother who was born in 1892.  I am sorry to say that I never questioned her about life in the Mississippi Delta at the turn of the century.  

As a young boy in the 1950’s I would visit with an elderly neighbor in her late nineties.  She would tell me stories about her life in the Delta during the Civil War.   I was young so remember very little of her tales – it is a shame someone didn't record her knowledge for posterity.  

Now, I am in my seventies.   I was raised during a time before television.   Our telephone number was 126 and my great uncle’s number was 6.    If you didn't know a person’s number you could just tell the operator who you were calling and she would ring them.  

Mail was the standard way of communicating over a distance.   Stamps were three cents and postcards were a penny.  It took a week for a letter from my grandmother to reach her daughter in Kentucky and another week for an answer.

My grandmother and I lived on one side of a shotgun house.  They called them shotgun houses because a hallway ran down the center of the house, and you could shoot a shotgun through the front door and it would exit the back door.  Across the hall was an older couple that owned the house.  Most local houses, including ours, were built on brick pillars, because before the levees the Delta would flood every summer.  

 We had three rooms: two bedrooms and a kitchen and a small bath.  There was flowered linoleum on all the floors.  In each room a light was suspended from the ceiling on a cloth covered electrical cord.    A screen porch stretched across the front of the house and at night in the summer my grandmother and the old couple would sit on the porch to escape the heat – I would often fall asleep in the swing.

After the rent, my grandmother and I lived on twenty-five dollars a month.  A loaf of bread was fifteen cents and a quart of milk was a quarter.   I usually had grits for breakfast, sometimes bacon and eggs – the eggs came from my great uncles coop across the street. I qualified for reduced lunches at school.  During the summer my lunch was usually a mayonnaise sandwich – two pieces of Wonder bread with mayonnaise; sometimes a pineapple sandwich – two pieces of bread with mayonnaise and a ring of pineapple; or a tomato sandwich –two pieces of bread with mayonnaise and tomato; or a lettuce sandwich, you guessed it, two pieces of bread with mayonnaise and lettuce (I still love those sandwiches today.)  Supper was usually something simple: sometimes a piece of meat with rice and gravy; greens, tomatoes, beans and okra if they were in season; but almost always rice and gravy, biscuits and gravy or bread and gravy.   

One of my uncles owned an automobile dealership and sold Kaisers and Henry J’s; but he went broke and later moved to New Orleans.   He is the uncle that gave me my first gun when I was twelve years old: a 22 cal. bolt action rifle that I still own. 

  

My grandmother and I didn't have a car, but I had a J.C. Higgins, red and white, twenty-six inch bicycle that I road from second grade to ninth (until I was old enough that I was ashamed to be riding a bicycle to school.)  

Before moving to Mississippi at age eight, we had lived in Kentucky.  I remember the Second World War and star flags in peoples windows.  I remember ration books and tokens used for money.  

My memories of the history, politics or current events of my early years is crap – but I remember the things I experienced growing up in the forties and fifties; that is, of course, considered only nostalgia in the overview of history.

But, perhaps it is not the big things elders remember that is of consequence, but just the everyday life of a different time and place.

Sorry for such a long winded blog entry.

the Ol’Buzzard

A SOUTHERN HISTORY AND A RAINBOW VACUUM CLEANER

The first statement I must make is that my earliest life was influenced by the Old South southern culture.   Anyone not a part of that bygone culture will not understand the Faulkneresk (William Faulkner: A Rose for Emily) mind set of southern men and women that hid family secrets and lived lives of illusion. 

To begin at the beginning my grandmother was born.   Her parents lived in a small Mississippi Delta town.  She was born in 1892; and it is my understanding that her father owned and operated an undertaker and livery service.   He had been a teenage scout during the Civil War and guided Confederate soldiers through the Delta around Union lines.  

My grandmother was married at age fourteen to a man in his early twenties.  Her husband was from Kentucky but was the station master for the Illinois Central Railroad in a nearby Delta town.  I can remember my grandmother telling me how handsome he was riding his horse when he came to court her. 

Within a very few years my grandmother had six children: four girls and two boys.   My mother was the youngest.  

My grandfather was strict, but of all his children my mother was his favorite, and the hardest to control.   From the stories I have heard, my mother reminds me of the young girl Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird.   At eleven she got into her father’s whiskey and took his Lincoln automobile and drove through the cotton fields. She became pregnant as a young teen and, as families did in that day, she was sent away to live with her aunt and uncle in a different town until the baby was born.   About that same time the aunt and uncle ‘adopted a baby.’    I suspicion that their child is my half-sister.  

True to the southern Mississippi mystique, the story does not end there.   My mother’s older sister was engaged to marry a man from Vicksburg.   While her sister was working at a defense plant in Memphis my mother secretly accompanied her sister’s fiancé on a business trip to Savannah, Georgia.   There she became pregnant with me.   Needless to say, this broke up the engagement of her sister.  

So to pick up in the middle: I was born.  My mother abandoned me in the hospital, but my aunt came down from Memphis and retrieved me.  I was passed around for a very short time and ended up with my grandmother, whose husband had just left her for a younger woman.   My grandmother did not like my birth name so she changed it – she also did not like my birth date so she changed that also.

We soon moved to my grandfather’s home town in Kentucky where we lived for eight years: My grandmother possibly thought her husband might return to her - but he never did. 

The story does not end here.   At the age of eight, my grandmother moved me back to her home in the Delta of Mississippi.    Her children were all grown and so she received no alimony, and this was before welfare so we were indigent and lived off the generosity of her oldest daughter who had married well.  My grandmother was well respected in the community (ie. A Rose for Emily) but we had nothing except her pride. 

I grew up believing my grandmother was my mother and that my actual mother and aunts and uncles were my brother and sisters.  It was not until I joined the Navy at age nineteen that I discovered my name was not my name; my birth date was not my birth date; and my sister was my mother and ….   I don’t believe even Faulkner could have put this story together.  

I have absolutely no antipathy toward my mother.  She was a woman that could not be forced into a mold of conformity.   After I was born she decided to enlist in the Navy; but women who had had children were not eligible.   My grandmother’s brother-in-law was governor of the State of Mississippi and my mother imposed on him to use his political connections to bypass the unmarried/childless requirement.  Strings were pulled and she enlisted.   She was in the very first group of Navy Waves to be assigned in a war zone.  She was a hospital corpsman aboard a hospital ship in the Pacific during the Second World War.   One of the men she nursed was Claire Chennault, commander of the Flying Tigers.  They corresponded for a while.   Later she married an architect in Vicksburg, Mississippi.  He had been stationed in Pearl Harbor, at the same time she was assigned; though they had never met.   

Fast forward: I left the South when I was eighteen and did not return for forty years.   I spent twenty-two years in the Navy where I was a drinker, a fighter, a nonconformist and a womanizer – not a very nice person.   The military rank and social structure was abhorrent to me; but I stayed in the Navy because I found I could control my assignments.   When I retired I married a wonderful young woman: we attended college together and then move to Alaska where we taught school in remote Indian and Eskimo villages.  

After leaving Alaska we moved to the small town in Kentucky that I remembered from my childhood (no way would I have ever gone back to Mississippi.)   I really could not say why I felt the need to return to a place in the south, other that I identified it with my roots.   Perhaps this poem written in Kentucky will explain:

SITTING ON THE PORCH ALONE AT MIDNIGHT WITH A BOTTLE OF WHISKEY

Kinsmen from the distant past

Eternal specters faintly moving

Never seen but somehow speaking

Their voices just beyond my reason

Unknown forces drew me back

Can destiny be preordained?

Keeping some appointed meeting

Generations fade but never leaving.

We had saved a little money and were able to pay down on a house.   We owned five acres that was surrounded by two hundred acres of farm land.   No neighbor was visible from our house.  The place had been built in 1864 and was structurally sound and in immaculate shape.   It had been owned by an undertaker and his wife who used it as a party house and retreat.  The rooms were eighteen-by-eighteen with eleven foot ceilings and two huge fieldstone fireplaces.  They had decorated the place in French-whorehouse chic with wall to wall mauve carpets and chandeliers – not exactly our taste but the location was fantastic and the rooms were great.    

Now to the Rainbow vacuum cleaner.   We had a little bit of money left over and because of the carpets decided we should by a quality vacuum cleaner.   We settled on a Rainbow water vac.   The price was almost a thousand dollars back then (1993.)   We felt guilty spending that much on a vacuum cleaner; but the unit was real quality, with stainless steel wands and hard rubber tools.  

That was twenty years ago.  Now we live in a small cabin in Maine and this morning we vacuumed the living room with that same Rainbow vacuum cleaner.  

There is something to be said about quality.

Sometimes you get what you pay for.

the Ol’Buzzard

IF A TREE FALLS AND NO ONE HEARS IT - DID IT FALL?

If a tree falls and no one hears it – did it fall? This is psychobabble from a discipline that really believes that humans matter.


If you lay out a time line of the earth on a football field (100 yards,) human in some form have existed for only the last five inches and Homo sapiens for only a little over an inch.

Even the concept of a time line is a human construct. The universe doesn’t concern itself with time. The universe just is – perhaps. We have invented time to explain our human existence in some lineal context. And, we invent gods in our own image to convince ourselves that we matter and that we are eternal.

The truth is that if we could back up evolution to the very beginning there is no reason to believe that it would evolve in the same manner with the same results. There are too many variables and happenstances that led to our present results; the odds of it happening exactly the same way again would be infinitesimal.

Our petty paltry lives have no meaning. We are here today and gone tomorrow. Old cemeteries are full of the bones of unknowns – people who have no legacy other than linage that will some day be bones with no legacy other than linage – perhaps – and then perhaps not… All our accomplishments are gauged on a human scale – and we are by definition an accident of chaos.

My great-great grandfather lived in western Kentucky among Southern sympathizers. He broke tradition and joined the Union Army dying in Shiloh, leaving one son and a young wife.



One hundred and fifty years later I am the linage of his existence – big deal – and I soon shall soon be gone.

If the human race had improved and had moved to some utopian plane we might divine some purposeful meaning for the dead gone by – or at least an excuse for our existence in a reference to human good. But, we are the same violent, belligerent, destructive, consumer life form, only now with advanced technology and more powerful weapons.

Look at the world: there is no humanity in our race. Religions, political factions, racial prejudice, geographic identity and personal greed drive our human community to constant odds and contention.

In reality it is all for naught. We can not as a life form survive. As much as we deny it, our existence is temporary – brief in time that doesn’t exist.

Are we remarkable in our technology and our art? Yes – at least by our own values. But does it matter? No.

We are here by chance. Yesterday doesn’t exist – or tomorrow. The now – this moment – is all we have. There is no guarantee of a next…

I spent a lifetime in the military and another lifetime since then. I have had a number of near-death experiences. There is no country and no politics and no religion and no philosophy worth dying for. Death is the end. What a waste it would have been.

Do not carry the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or woes and troubles of the moment on your back. They don’t matter in the long run; for tomorrow there will be new dramas and new outrages. You only have this one brief existence, don’t squander it with unfulfilled desires for an existence that does not and can never exist

Take advantage of the accident of life. Look at the colors around you; smell the smells; be aware of the temperature and wind and weather; marvel in the life forms in your ecosystem. Enjoy sex and food and drink and life. Do no harm.



The meaning of life is
There is no meaning of life

The life or Brian



How marvelous,
How wonderful,
I chop wood,
I carry water.

Zen poem



To see the world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour

William Blake



Have a good day

the Ol’Buzzard

Bluerass In My Soul

BLUEGRASS MUSIC



I was raised in eastern Kentucky and bluegrass music is in my blood. I can remember, when I was young, the old men at the courthouse on Saturday night with guitars, fiddles and banjoes singing hill music.


I like classical, some country, most rock and roll; but can’t stand rap – that is until now.


There is a show on FX network called Justified that I look forward to each week – it’s about Harlan County Kentucky, in the western part of the state: but it’s a little bit of Kentucky I can identify with. Each week at the beginning of the episode they play a theme that caught my attention.

I researched it on the net and found Bluegrass Rap by a group called Gangstagrass – and I like it.



I'm including a clip: If you like bluegrass you may like this.

 
 
This one is about West Va. coal mines: same in Kentucky mines.
 
 

 
 
Blue Grass RAP - I'm sold!