I recently ran across a balding fellow, probably in his early forties, wearing a grey too-snug tee-shirt that read “Every Day Is a Good Day.” Of course, I get the subtext: life is miraculous on the cosmic impersonal plane – the nighttime sky, as Hamlet put it, a “brave o’erhanging firmament, [a] majestical roof fretted with golden fire,” not to mention down below “the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.” We should be thankful for the chain of events that gave rise to a consciousness that allows us to appreciate and contemplate these wonders around us. The subtext of the subtext is that this wonderfulness is the handiwork of a benevolent deity. Every day is a good day because it’s a colorful shard in the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of a creator god’s abracadabra.
But, as we all know, a day’s goodness or badness depends on an individual’s experience during that 24-hour period. For example, at Chico Feo I just heard a horrific account of a traffic fatality that happened on Folly Beach last night. A car crammed with six drunks doing 65 in a 25-zone barreled into a golf cart driven, as the story was told to me, by a woman who had just gotten married that very day on the island.[1]
So, I might suggest, that the tee shirt’s message be edited: “For me, every day is a good day” instead.
And print this on the back.
A little Madness in the Spring Is wholesome even for the King, But God be with the Clown — Who ponders this tremendous scene — This whole Experiment of Green — As if it were his own!
Emily Dickinson
[1] The fellow who related the story said she was in her bridal gown.
Poverty is not all that terrible if you’re in college. After all, most students live in dormitories, and for my first two years of undergraduate school, the dorms I lived in were officially known as “The Tenements,” the oldest dorms on campus, picturesque but Spartan. And when I say Spartan, I mean tres austère – no air-conditioning in the summer; hand-searing radiators in the winter; merely two telephones in the hall, one for on campus communication, the other a pay phone you had to feed quarters during long distance calls. And perhaps the worst indignity of all, there were no stalls around the three toilets lined up in the flashback-inducing black-and-white diamond-tiled bathroom. Whenever nature called, the residents of Tenement 9 shielded themselves with open newspapers to create a modicum of privacy. No one, conversed, i.e., no one shot the shit while shitting.
OMG! TMI!
Even though I couldn’t afford it, I moved off-campus my junior year, and after a couple of nightmare rentals in the fall and winter of my senior year, my housemate Warren Moise, along with a host of other impoverished students, moved into the once genteel abode of 1830 Greene Street conveniently located on campus.[1] I’m fairly certain than none of us owned an automobile. SLED paid a visit our first week, and half the residents were carted off to jail for simple possession. Luckily, Warren, Jim, and I were off when police came a calling.
1830 Greene Street
Interestingly enough – and least for me – I had lunch with my Greene-Street housemate Warren Thursday and then encountered another Greene-Street housemate that afternoon when I was signing copies of my novel Today, Oh Boy in Summerville.[2] I hadn’t seen Jim Huff or his wife Jane in this century – in fact, not since the late 80s or early 90s. Jim had been lease-signer of 1830 Greene and therefore collected our $20 rent each month (there were eight of us) and utility money and money to buy kerosine for the enormous furnace that consumed fuel as rapidly as RJ McCarthy downed his 24-ounce cans of “the Bull,” aka Schlitz Malt Liquor. Every room except for the kitchen and the two bathrooms was utilized as a bedroom, including the living room and the conservatory where I slept, only assessable through Mr. McCarthy’s room.
Hail, affordable housing; farewell, privacy.
Jim Huff circa 1975
Here’s a list Jim compiled of the house’s residents, including girlfriends who spent multiple nights.
At the signing in Summerville, Jim gave me some photographs he had taken back in the day, which I so much appreciate. They demonstrate quite eloquently that whatever I may have gained in monetary wealth, I have equaled in girth, but lost in hair.
Anyway, it was great seeing Warren, Jim, and Jane, though I must admit that the photos have engendered a wee bit of melancholy.
[1] If you’re in the mood for some Night of the Hunternoir, click HERE and read about a couple of harrowing experiences we suffered before moving to Greene Street.
One of the entries in the epic catalog of my character flaws is a lotus-eater-grade tendency towards lassitude, which I’ve written about HERE.
However, in the last two weeks I’ve been on the go-go-go, on a tear – touring Mexico City, hosting family and friends, signing books, reading from Today, Oh Boy at its book launch, attending the reading of an original play in a private home, and dancing to the music of the Krushtones.[1]
Mexico City
Caroline had booked the trip before we discovered that T,OB‘s publication date was to be 31 March, the day before our departure. Buxton Books scheduled the launch for 11 April, so the trip didn’t interfere with promotion.[2] On the other hand, ex-pat son Ned booked a flight to Charleston that arrived on 4 April, three days before my scheduled return, so I came back a day early while Caroline and Brooks stayed on in Mexico City, which is 2000 miles higher than Denver, the Mile High City. Hey, but none of us suffered any altitude sickness, so praise Huitzilopochtli!
We traveled with Celeste Joye and her husband Tom Foster and their daughter Juliette. The short-term rental they had booked was a falsely promoted malodorous, sofa-stained apartment without hot water. The rental is located the floor below at kick-boxing studio where a cousin of Cujo barked ferociously.
Not succumbing to the languor that would have me holding my nose (literally) and staying there all week, Celeste and Caroline scouted out new digs, called and cancelled, and we ended up staying at the swank Camino Real, which boasts a 007 early-60s vibe.
When I travel, my above-mentioned lassitude demands that I engage in only two tourist activities a day, one mid-morning and one after lunch; however, Celeste, Tom, and Caroline were go-getters, and the days and nights were filled with sight-seeing which featured a guided tour of Aztec ruins and a guided tour of Museo Nacional Antropologia.[3]
We also ate a various top tier restaurants, had drinks at Tenampa, a mariachi bar, and saw the Ballet Folklórico perform in a beautiful performing arts center.
But, as Andrew Marvell was wont to point out, all good things must end.[4]
Hosting my Family
Last week was the first time that my two sons had been home at the same time since 2018 – Harrison, his wife Taryn, her mother Susan, and grand-toddler Julian rented a house on Folly, and Ned and his love Ina came all the way from Nuremberg and stayed with his at 516 East Huron.
Also, I had the pleasure of having lunch with a childhood friend John Walton whose mother and my mother were best friends growing up and always.
But dammit, but that too had to end with Harrison and crew flying out Wednesday and Ned and Ina Friday.
I’ve already gone on enough about the launch. The curious can access the reading HEREif they have “world enough and time.”
Seeing Is Believing
The indefatigable Eugene Platt and his wife Judith hosted a soiree of sorts in which a cast of seven or so readers performed his play-in-progress Seeing Is Believing. Based on the account in the Gospel of John, the play is set post-resurrection and consists largely of Andrew and Thomas walking to a “safe house’ where Jesus appears and puts a screeching halt to Thomas’s skepticism.
If I were Eugene, I’d produce it as a film instead of trying to get it produced as a play. Staging a fifteen-minute walk would be challenging, but you could really do some interesting things on film.
I bet some religious-minded film student at SCAD would find it interesting.
The Krushtones
What can I but enumerate old themes? I love me some Krushtones, who play at the Sand Dollar around 15 April every year. I couldn’t believe how fresh and practiced they sounded.
If you’re interested in learning more about this killer cover band and the Sand Dollar Social Club, click HERE.
THE END
Sometimes, Mr. Marvell, endings aren’t all bad. For example, I’ve finished writing the first draft of this blog post, and my dear readers have finished reading it and can get going on something more productive, because, as you have pointed out so eloquently:
[. . .] all before us lie/ Deserts of vast eternity.
So, carpe diem, y’all. Hubba-hubba-hubba, swish-boom-ba-ba-ba-ba-Barbara Ann.
[2] After zooming to number 570 on Amazon’s Young Adult and Teen Historical Fiction category, it’s now dropped into the 900s. C’mon people. I’m a senior citizen on a fixed income!
[3] I’ve been told my Spanish accent isn’t terrific. BTW, I’ve never been much for guided tours, but I must admit you learn a helluva lot more.
[4] E.g., “The grave’s a fine and private place/ But none, I think, do there embrace.”
I’ve written on Hoodoo previously that I don’t blame young people for holding golden-agers, i.e., senior-citizens, i.e., their elders, i.e., old farts in contempt as we shuffle along taking tiny steps, fumbling for our checkbooks while striking up conversations with grocery store clerks, or poke along doing 45 in passing lanes, oblivious to the hustle and bustle of Late Empire capitalism.
Even I-and-I, a forgetful 70-year-old, have been known to disparage my fellow geriatrics when their egocentricity (or declining faculties) don’t take in account the needs of others. No doubt I get on young people’s nerves myself, an overly dressed gadfly Oscar Wilde wannabe nodding my head and droning on about myself on barstools and in dentist offices.
Yet here I am in my twilight the author of a little ol’ bagatelle of a YA novel written on a 12th-grade-plus reading level, and I’m shamelessly promoting it as if it’s the great American novel. Three newspaper articles have appeared that focus on my late life productivity[1], and I’ve also appeared on midday local television program talking about me, me, me, not exactly a fascinating subject.
Ultimately, it’s much ado about not much.
Yet it does give me something to do and to dread.
My sons and their significant others are coming to the book launch[2] (Harrison and Taryn from Chevy Chase, Ned and Ina from Nuremburg), Old and new friends will be there. Eugene Platt, who has recently published his collected poems Weaned on War will introduce me, an honor for sure. I see the launch as a sort of funeral I get to enjoy before I die.
However, I do want to set it down here that I’m a little ashamed of myself for all this hullabaloo. There’s something a little tawdry about it, a little needy.
Rather, I should
like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult
or better yet, as the young people say STFU.
Cheers!
[1] I’m also, to use a polite term, a digital collagist.
[2]Buxton Books, 120 King Street, 11 April 2023 6 PM rsvp@buxtonbooks.com
In the early Sixties, South Carolina state law mandated that children in both the third and eighth grades receive instruction in the state’s history. As randomness would have it, my first tour of the annals of the Palmetto State coincided with the centennial celebration of “The War Between the States.” Lessons about “Caw-Caw the Indian boy” competed with classroom drills in which we swiftly assumed fetal positions beneath our tiny desks. (Charleston with its Polaris submarine base offered an inviting target for those Cuban Missiles). Also, on the domestic side, in the background, we could detect a soft growl of discontent rising in the throats of what my family politely called colored people, who, as the ad populum argument went, were being stirred up by “outside agitators.”
Times, you might say, were a-changing.
Not in the teaching of South Carolina history. Preserved in our textbook, time-honored “statements of fact” explained that the vast majority of slaves were well-treated, that unfair tariffs had sparked the Civil War, that the Ku Klux Klan had provided a public service during the dark days of Reconstruction, that Pitchfork Ben Tillman was a man of courage, that the textile industry promised a potential economic stimulus that might propel the state back into its former glorious position as the cultural vanguard of the nation . . .
When I first started teaching high school in the Mid-Eighties, I still encountered traces of these old arguments, particularly concerning the paternalism of slavery and the predominance of tariffs as the cause of the War. To counter the latter argument, I found copies of Declarations of Causes of Seceding States and highlighted in blue all of the sentences that referred to slavery. Believe me, the unhighlighted patches were about as prevalent as peanuts in Hershey bars. However, back in the day, I, too, believed what I had read. As an eight-year-old, I applauded the Klan of yore, those white-clad knights who had cleansed my native state of nefarious scalawags, carpetbaggers, and, yes, Negroes.
Flashforward a half century. The descendants of Pitchfork Ben have again taken to the streets eager to “retake their country” from Woke radical Democrat communist fascists.
Screeching in ALLCAPS, Trump, as he likes to refer to himself, predicts that he will be arrested this week:
“THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE & FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK. PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!
WE JUST CAN’T ALLOW THIS ANYMORE,” he wrote. “THEY’RE KILLING OUR NATION AS WE SIT BACK & WATCH. WE MUST SAVE AMERICA! PROTEST, PROTEST, PROTEST!!!”
Meanwhile, the right wingers who run state schoolboards are co-opting Joseph Stalin’s tactics by rewriting US textbooks and removing books from the library. FromThe New Yorker.
In late January, at Greenland Pines Elementary, kids attended a party for an annual event called Celebrate Literacy Week, Florida! There was an escape room and food trucks. Brian Covey, an entrepreneur in his late thirties, came to pick up his daughter, who’s in second grade, and his son, who’s in fifth. His kids looked confused. “Did you hear what happened at school today?” his daughter asked. “They took all the books out of the classrooms.” Covey asked which books. “All the books,” she said. Covey’s son had been reading “Measuring Up,” a coming-of-age story about an immigrant to the United States from Taiwan. Students who read from a list of pre-selected books, including this one, were rewarded with an ice-cream party. “They even took that book,” Covey said.
In Manatee County a group that calls itself Community Patriots Manatee is reaching out to “WOKE BUSTERS” calling out to “Warriors” that it needs “Digital, Investigative, and Boots on the Ground.”[1]
What do these disaffected MAGA screechers and rightwing school boards have in common besides a contempt of the Other? They’re reactionaries, of course. They seek the status quo ante of the past, the good old days when the government stayed out of their lives (those glorious days before Interstate highways and VA hospitals).
Of course, the irony of their Orwellian neo-newspeak is lost on them. “Patriots”= those who tried to violently disrupt the legitimate election of the President of the United States. MAGA “Christians” call for violence to eradicate their enemies.
Chance are that their children – and the children of Woke Floridians for that matter – won’t be able to check 1984 out of their school libraries.
And as far as teaching history goes, schools may very well revert to the indoctrination I suffered when I studied South Carolina history way back then. It’s just a different type of indoctrination than the Anti-Woke indoctrination they so fear.
Anyway, I think I’ll forgo my V-8 this morning and have a bloody mary instead.
*1] I don’t know if it’s by design or ignorance, but they have adopted Trump’s penchant for randomly capitalizing common nouns.
[2] BTW, in my last two years of teaching, I taught 1984 to 9th graders. Here’s a link to a teaching guide I created for teachers tackling the novel.
A dozen years ago when I chaired Porter-Gaud’s English Department, I received a parental email so shrill it made a banshee keen sound like Barry White love talking.
One of my colleagues in the New Testament unit in 8th grade English had assigned the Gospel of Thomas, a compilation of “Jesus sayings” declared heretical by the early Church Fathers Origen and Hippolytus of Rome. Here’s an example:
His disciples said: On what day will you be revealed to us, and on what day shall we see you? Jesus said: When you unclothe yourselves and are not ashamed, and take your garments and lay them beneath your feet like the little children (and) trample on them, then [you will see] the Son of the Living One, and you will not be afraid.
Gospel of Thomas Saying 37
Anyway, this email (which I long ago deleted) seemed to have originated from the windblown sands of ancient deserts, the Land of Thou Shall Not, the land where graven images are taboo, where Jezebels are stoned to death. The email actually contained this suggestion: “(see Origen).”[1]
* * *
On the Monday morning after my confirmation c. 1964, Bishop Gray Temple administered to me my first communion in the church pictured above, and my fellow communicates and I breakfasted afterwards with the Bishop and my parish priest Steve Skardon at the (unfortunately named but elegant) Squirrel Inn in Summerville, South Carolina. The ritual had seemed (sort of) holy to me, and at breakfast the men wearing the collars were not in the least bit patronizing. They were literally gentle men. Afterwards, Father Skardon dropped me off to school. He respected my father, who was not a gentle man, who saw the world much differently than Father Skardon, but my father respected Steve as well. In fact, the last time I saw Father Skardon was at a wedding in Florence in 1977, and the first thing he asked me was how my father was doing.
He and Gray Temple possessed a quiet confidence. The sins of the flesh that they knew we would commit in the next few years did not terrify them. The Gospel Of Thomas did not enrage them. They understood Thomas was an alternative text that shared roots with the canonical gospels in that long process from word of mouth into writing. They understood that Yahweh-Nazarene-Ghost did not literally oversee translations from Aramaic to Greek nor guided the hands of scribes throughout the centuries to insure no deviation of the texts. They possessed imaginations. They had embraced the Enlightenment and understood that myths can convey the most profound truths. In other words, they understood that the Bible was not literally true. If asked if Augustus Caesar ever decreed that you had to travel back to your hometown to be counted in a census, they would have said no, that was an invention to establish Jesus in the line of David, etc.
And, I suspect, they realized that despite their canonizations, Origen and Hippolytus of Rome, were, not to put too fine a point on it, fanatical to the point of insanity, and that it would not be such a good idea to have their millennium-old decrees dictating 21st Century curricula.
***
Steve Skardon
Not long after my first communion, I witnessed a remarkable act of courage, Father Skardon preaching integration to a seething segregationist congregation.
Although I stupidly held my father’s bigoted viewpoint at the time, this man standing before a hostile audience pronouncing what was heresy to them made a profound impression on me. I am ashamed now to admit that I didn’t like what he was saying – that Blacks deserved the same social and political rights that whites possessed – but his demeanor as he calmly faced those angry parishioners profoundly affected me: Summerville’s own Atticus Finch.
Having a half-Baptist family, I felt much more comfortable at St. Paul’s than at Summerville Baptist, where the carpets were blood red and the smell antiseptic. St. Paul’s offered the redolent pleasures of candle scent; Chanel No. 5; and the occasional exhalation of last night’s Makers Mark, the somewhat sweet but unpleasant odor of sin. Our Church League Basketball team had the words “Episcopal Fifths.” on our jerseys. Father Skardon did not seem to mind.
Those harsh life-negating deserts of origin/Origen seemed thousands of years and thousands of miles distant. The liturgy and accompanying rituals were life affirming. The sermons tolerant, forgiving. The cerebral cortex (logical discourse) rather than the brain stem (babbling in tongues, etc.) held precedence.
After all, we lived in a semi-tropical climate.
[1] Origen, a 3rd Century Christian scholar, is the poster Eunuch for taking Biblical texts too literally, e.g., “there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of God.” Or, to put it another way, “if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee.” To cut to the chase, both his left and right testicles offended him, so he castrated himself or had a friend castrate him. Origen had condemned the Gospel of Thomas, as heresy hence the suggestion to consult his writings.
Darkness has Crept in at Midnight by James Christopher Hills
The Alex Murdaugh murder conviction saddens me, not because I think he’s innocent, but because I didn’t want it to be true, didn’t want to believe that the Sophoclean shit show the prosecution posited could be real, that a father could premeditatively gun down his son, splattering his brains, then utilizie a different weapon to gun down the mother of that son, shooting her five times, the final shot to the head.
[Cue Kurtz: the horror, the horror.]
I was chatting with a stranger at the bar at Chico Feo yesterday afternoon about the trial and about the ubiquity of surveillance. I mentioned that Siri, Apple’s arbitress[1] of data, sang like – if not a canary – like a soulless automaton out of Orwell, providing law enforcement with information about how many steps Alex had taken, how fast he was walking before and after the event. The black box of his Suburban also ratted him out, digitally informing SLED that his SUV had hit seventy on the bumpy dirt road on his way to the house of his Alzheimer’s ridden Mama in the dark of a night as black as any in Southern gothic literature.
It out Faulkners Faulkner.
The stranger had his own story about super-surveillance. I didn’t know this, but there are magnetic (for lack of a better word) homing devices that you can affix to someone’s car and track its movements just like they did in the Bond movie Goldfinger.
He had purchased several and affixed one to his then girlfriend’s car because he correctly feared that she was cheating on him. On the last day of their relationship, he drove to where her car was parked, discovered her as she was leaving an apartment complex, and thanked her for showing him what kind of person she really was.
Happily, no shots were fired. Even, at least in his telling, the recrimination was mild-mannered.
Anyway, in this case, even if his girlfriend didn’t possess a cellphone and drove an early model computerless automobile, she still would have been busted.
Let’s face it, Big Brother’s corporate siblings, his little brothers, our cell phones, automobiles, etc. are watching us, and we pay them to. Could the knowledge our every move is monitored move us to emend our sinful ways. After all, if we don’t slaughter our families, cheat on our lovers, or binge watch Monkees videos, we have nothing to worry about.
[1] Even though I consider myself “woke,” I like the sound of feminine suffixes, and, on another topic, realize that the personality that is Siri is not an employee but merely a voice strung together with ones and zeroes.
You Do Hoodoo 