SNOWBOUND IN PALMDALE, CALIFORNIA

Courtyard with reflections from breakfast room

Ah, sunny Southern California on Thanksgiving Day — three inches of snow already on the ground and predictions of the large flakes to continue all day! Daughter Elizabeth, who lives a few miles away, calls to tell us we shouldn't drive her Jeep to her home as the vehicle has no snow tires. She's sending out a rescue team of grandson Troy Jr. early so we can join the family for Thanksgiving dinner.

I haven't seen such large flakes since the year I lived in northern Maine, and the sight from my upstairs window is lovely — but hazardous. Friend Darrell Bourque wrote that I should remember Chekhov who said happy people aren't disconcerted by weather, and perhaps I'll get another book of poetry from the experience. However, family gatherings don't provide extended space for writing pursuits.

I can envision fields of orange poppies in the desert 'come spring' as snow and rainfall in winter provide needed water for blooms such as that tourists came, in large crowds, to see in this desert locale last spring. Right now, Joshua trees must be celebrating the weather. A few years ago when we visited Palmdale, they had almost perished from a severe drought. My grandson Joel photographed one for a poetry book about trees that I was working on.

Pool side in snow

By nature, I'm a desert person, yet, contradictorily, live in Louisiana Teche country in the winter (25 ft. elevation) and on a mountain plateau in Tennessee (2,000 ft.) in spring and summer. Such are the contradictions of human nature, but I suppose that I'm just peripatetic and would live in an RV if I were a bit younger.

The rescue team is due any moment, but above are a few photos of snow in southern California taken from our motel windows. Happy warm Thanksgiving to readers, relatives, and dear friends in all locales and weather. Most of us are blessed despite the weather!

FAMILY BUSINESS

Today, I read a definition of family that resonated with me, and I was happy to discover that there weren’t any phony, sentimental aspects to the definition. “Family means no one gets left behind,” the short phrase read. I am sitting here looking out at a statue of St. Francis standing on the patio, tending his family of birds and squirrels, and I say, “Yes, family means no one gets left behind,” even God’s creatures that play around the base of the oak in my backyard, and especially under such guardians as St. Francis of Assisi.

I’m waiting for a good friend to return from a visit with her "blood" family that owns a company together – a visit in which she attended a meeting and was humiliated, shunned, and lied about – in short, got “left behind” and became the victim of a takeover of her position in a vengeful series of acts that I’ve heretofore read about only in novels. As the sitcoms say, “a whole lot of lying was going on.” Perhaps I can use the material in a future book for it has all the components of the kind of dysfunction in contemporary novels, but  I prefer writing contemplative poetry! The accounts of that meeting included enough primitive emotion to convince me of several things, the most tantamount being that this is the way wars start – from the ground up, from the family out, and most especially when they’re involved in what is termed a “family takeover.”

My friend is a very intelligent person with good critical abilities, is a writer and scientist, financial officer, and has the respect of her friends and colleagues wherever she has lived because she is passionate about the work she undertakes. She is noted for getting to the truth of messy situations and acting as an ombudsman for organizations in trouble. She also gets along well with those with whom she works in a volunteer capacity, and I’m shaking my head this morning at the audacity of this group of people who “dissed” her and who call themselves family. Perhaps family is the place you go when no one else will take you in, to paraphrase Robert Frost, but in my friend’s case, everyone else takes her in except these relatives. To further expand on this group of clannish hypocrites, they’re among those who advocate family values in the political arena. However, the word "love" is never mentioned in their conversations, and I've been privy to those conversations for almost 35 years now.

“Family means no one gets left behind” – but in the case of my friend, she was left behind, booted out of a position that she had held for over a decade simply because someone else wanted her job. She is, at the moment, trying to get an early flight out of the toxic family atmosphere. As Scott Peck advocates in his People of the Lie, there are occasions when a person who meets up with evil in her family feels immediate repulsion and should run like heck in the other direction. It seems that because my friend stood up and spoke the truth about family operations, because she wanted to perform the job she had been elected to do, she was nailed. She has gradually been edged out of a position in a behind-the-scenes coup, by control seeking, power and money advocates who call themselves Christians and some of whom belong to the Christian right.

One of the criticisms leveled at my friend was that she thought she was smarter than they were, which, to me, denotes one of the seven deadly sins: Envy. Then there’s Pride, Greed, Sloth… to name a few more that were committed by this scheming group. If these people are religious and believe in the so-called final Judgment and personal accountability, it appears otherwise --their Bible thumping seems just a way to make a loud noise. And if all this sounds appalling, sadly it is a true story about a post-modern family.

I’ve preached many times about the love of power and money corrupting otherwise good people who decide to take a wrong turn. I think my friend’s so-called family should read Matthew 23: 13-28, where Christ denounces the Pharisees and scribes who “clean the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of greed …so on the outside you look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness…”

Christ had no problem expressing his anger about greed and hypocrisy. He was passionate about truth and could be quite contradictory in that he preached truth, peace… and, oh yes, justice, in the same breath. Not to mention that he never left one honest person behind, regardless...

I look out at St. Francis and await my friend’s arrival. According to a clipping on my fridge, St. Francis would tell her, “Be at peace. Do not look forward in fear to the changes of life; rather look to them with full hope as they arise. God, whose very own you are, will deliver you from out of them. He has kept you hitherto, and He will lead you safely through all things…” He might have added that evildoers gradually unravel and destroy themselves.

LEAVING OUR FAMILY AT ST. MARY’S

One of the major experiences I’ll miss when I return to Louisiana for the winter is my life as an Associate with the Anglican Sisters of St. Mary’s Convent, Sewanee, Tennessee. Yesterday, Victoria Sullivan and I celebrated an anniversary of four years as Associates with the Sisters. We received a lovely bouquet of dahlias grown in the Convent’s garden and two cards with handwritten sentiments recognizing our service with the Community. Sister Miriam had also gotten up at 2 a.m. to bake apple raisin bread for the occasion, a bread that she jokingly referred to as "extremely pregnant" because it had risen to a mid-section height unparalleled in her baking career. Lots of unpublishable remarks followed this reference, and the anniversary was one of those light and laughter celebrations characteristic of the Sisters’ “family events.”

During the 80’s when I attended self-improvement seminars about how to live and work as a contributing person in society, participants were told that there are three things people need to do in their daily lives -- invite others to join them in contributing to community life, make promises to the community, and acknowledge people’s efforts when they've made contributions. The Sisters of St. Mary do those three things. They invite people to become Associates and work with them, requiring each person who joins with them in worship and service to promise to live by a daily Rule. And they support and acknowledge the Associates for their work.

The Big Plus for Associates is that they join an authentic family –a family that remembers birthdays, anniversaries, the names of the Associates’ offspring and grand offspring and one that offers open discussion of problems and ongoing spiritual direction. The family of Sisters listens well, rather than pronouncing personal judgments and criticism; and they provide prayerful, unconditional love. It’s an honor for Associates to be able to worship and pray at four services every day of the week in this small gray stone chapel perched on a bluff of the Cumberland Plateau.

We share the Eucharist and breakfasts on Tuesday and Sunday mornings every week and are sometimes invited, as we have been this week, to share Sunday lunch with the Sisters in a refectory overlooking the Cumberland Valley. The Sisters love to laugh and often praise Victoria for her special ability to tell stories or make wry remarks that incite laughter. In her anniversary card, Vickie received special acknowledgement for her gift of laughter, for her wisdom, and for the time she gives to Convent projects;e.g., the Board of Directors of the Convent.

I often serve at St.Mary’s altar and preach at least once a month while we’re sojourning on The Mountain and feel at home serving as a retired deacon from another Episcopal Diocese on this small, modest altar and sharing the Gospel with a congregation of 30-40 active members.  I've also been involved in fundraising efforts on behalf of the Convent's work and for maintenance of their mother house and received acknowledgement of those efforts.

In short, we’re included and respected as members of an organization that is a well-functioning servant leader organization, one that doesn't just pay lip service to so-called “religious” ideals but provides Associates a family that is honest with, and upholds, all of its members, unlike many of the dysfunctional families in American society that tout togetherness but practice phony baloney, acts of sniping and unkindness to members of the family into which they're born.   

The idea of developing an Associates order can probably be attributed to a Sister of an early St. Mary's order named Mother Mary Maude who, in 1934, wrote the prophetic words quoted in Ten Decades of Praise by Sister Mary Hilary:

“It has been said that this age is ripe for a new manifestation in the monastic tradition…One wonders in what way it will come. Perhaps in lay organizations, pledged to the ascetic ideal, yet living and mingling in the world. If ever the world needed the salt of distinctively Christian lives it needs it now. Such lives must be based on theological virtues, built up on the moral virtues, pledged to simple and frugal living, detached from worldly standards, fired with a passion for social justice, and sustained by a dynamic energy drawn from sacramental grace and nourished by a systematic prayer life…”

The Sisters of St. Mary in the southern province are the “inheritors” of an order established by four Sisters, known as the Martyrs of Memphis or Constance and her Companions who died nursing victims of a yellow fever epidemic in Memphis, Tennessee in 1878. The Sewanee order also established an order of St. Mary in the Philippines, and a tiny Sister named Mary Zita was called to the convent at Sewanee after the Sisters made a mission to Sagada.

We’re fortunate to have found this authentic family in one of the world’s “thin places,” a community dedicated to "providing the salt of distinctively Christian lives,” devoted to holy work and to caring for people who may not have experienced unconditional love and acceptance by their birth families. I might mention that members of the Sisters’ family include three cats and three dogs who scurry through the halls and sometimes join us at the Eucharist.

We'll miss our wonderful Convent family, but their e-mails, letters, phone calls, and prayers always follow us to Cajun country. It's exhilarating to enjoy a relationship with the Sisters that St. Paul described in I Corinthians 13, verses 1-13.  I invite you to re-read it.

SOME CHATTER ABOUT CLABBER

Grandpa Paul – Clabber enthusiast & 
grandchildren not so fond of the drink

Yesterday morning after preaching a Pentecost sermon at St. Mary’s, the Episcopal Convent here on the bluff at Sewanee, Tennessee, I went into the refectory to breakfast with the congregants and Sisters and got into a conversation with Henry Hamman, publisher of Plateau Press. Henry had begun searching for his wife Kathy because he said that he had to get home and build a fence around his tomato plants – the ubiquitous deer on the Cumberland Plateau had been sniffing around his garden. I immediately went into a déjà vu about homegrown products; namely, the tomatoes that my Grandfather Paul used to grow in his backyard at Franklinton, Louisiana (the town where I was born)… and the memory lengthened into one about supper feasts in the “country.”

When I visited my grandparents during summers of the 40’s, the supper table often contained simple fare of thick slabs of Big Boy tomatoes, sliced cucumbers that I helped my grandfather pick, butterbeans left from lunch and warmed up, fried cornbread, and clabber. My grandfather’s supper consisted of only a tall green glass filled with clabber and crumbled cornbread, a concoction he drank throughout the summer.

At the age of nine, my appetite centered more on the vegetables than the strange concoction Grandfather Paul drank because I thought that clabber was a medicinal food he endured as a remedy for his condition of Bright’s Disease. Years later, I tasted clabber and agreed with the moniker it acquired through the Ulster Scots in the Appalachians – that of “bonny clabber.”

Clabber is simply curdled milk, or unpasteurized milk that has been allowed to turn sour at a specific temperature -- room temperature. As the milk curdles it develops into yogurt-like consistency. In this age of pasteurized milk regulations, the drink isn’t too popular anymore, and the pasteurization process kills the bacteria necessary for it to sour. The closest we can get to a clabbered drink is buttermilk. I’m told that if you heat clabber a little, the curds in it separate and become cheese.

Some farmers use clabber to feed their chickens as it provides calcium and protein for the chickens – the farmers claim that if chickens are fed this concoction, their meat is softer and they become better layers.

I have no idea where my grandfather got his raw milk because he didn’t own cows, but Washington Parish abounds in dairy farms, and he may have obtained milk from the owner of a cow that grazed on an open lot on 10^th Avenue in Franklinton, one that I skirted on the way to visit my Aunt Kathryn who lived about a block away from the cow. I’d get off the sidewalk and wade through weeds to avoid the harmless cow who kept her head lowered and had no interest in a frightened, nine-year old girl. My mother had a phobia about cows and passed on the fright to me, along with fear of lightning, tramps, and a host of other senseless anxieties. A contradiction to this phobia was my liking for the verse in Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verse about the “friendly cow, all red and white/I love with all my heart…”

A few decades ago, perhaps a thousand dairy farms abounded in Washington Parish, and I understand that today there are less than two hundred; however, the three parishes of Tangipahoa, St. Helena and Washington parishes have the largest concentration of dairy farms in Louisiana. I don’t know how much of the milk is used for curdling purposes, but in many rural areas, people still enjoy their milk soured to the stage of a firm curd. Remember the old nursery rhyme, “Little Miss Muffet /sat on her tuffet/ eating her curds and whey?”

I recently read an article highlighting Russel Creel, who owns a dairy farm five miles east of Franklinton. Creel received the title of “Dairyman of the Year” from the LSU Dairy Science Club (once known as the Cow and Cream Club!), and I bet he knows how to make a good bowl of clabber since he has been in the dairy industry for over forty years.

By the way, clabber can be eaten with brown sugar, nutmeg, or molasses. However, my grandfather was a purist and ate it unsweetened, flavoring it only with fried cornbread (no sugar added). A Greenlaw, of Scots lineage, Grandfather Paul thought it was “bonny clabber.”

BANNER BOOK COVERS

Most grandparents are inordinately proud of their grandchildren, and I’m no exception. A few days ago when I posted a blog about Margaret Simon’s exceptional new YA book, Blessen, I felt a twinge of pride because my grandson, Martin Romero, designed the cover for Border Press, the independent press that publishes some of my books.

Martin has a degree in Landscape Architecture from Louisiana State University School of Design in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and has always had a penchant for art and design, beginning at the age of nine when he drew a perfect picture of his shoe while riding in a van to California with his Godmother Vickie and me. Later, he scheduled art classes at the Episcopal School of Acadiana, but decided against enrolling in Art at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas because he knew he had to earn a living! He pleased all of his family by completing the five-year curriculum in Landscape Design at LSU, sans debt, as he had a scholarship and worked eight-hour shifts, at times, in the evenings and nights while he attended college.

While at LSU, Martin illustrated a story I had written for him about a red, double-decker British bus marooned in a field near Opelousas, Louisiana.  The book was entitled The Cajun Express, and following graduation, he began designing book covers for Border Press in his leisure time, after working all day as a landscape architect in Madisonville, Louisiana. His efforts, from the beginning, have shown his eye for color and design, and the back covers of the books he designs are as interesting as the front ones, including small details rendered from front cover motifs.

Martin’s biggest job right now is as father of a little dynamo, one-year old Alexander Charles, whose greatest accomplishment is that of throwing his arms into the air to signify a touchdown for LSU, a video of which is on Facebook. Martin’s wife, Kristin, who has a job in advertising, also does consummate design work, so the family has a penchant for artistic renderings.

Here are a few of the book covers Martin has executed during the past ten years. Vickie Sullivan usually suggests components to be included in the design, and many of them are copies of wonderful paintings done by my brother, Paul, so the operation is a “family operation.” I just thought it was time to recognize those who do the “faces” of my books, as well as other titles in the Border Press collection. Merci and another c'est magnifique for Border Press’s eye-catching covers!

All of Martin's covers can be seen at the Border Press website. Border Press offers fiction, non-fiction, poetry, memoirs, essays, young adult and children's books. 

CHAPTER II OF LIVING ON THE MOUNTAIN, WRITING ABOUT THE DESERT

Burnet, TX, roadside park

This is the second blog about a childhood memory of traveling to California, “to gypsy forever” in my father’s words. The first blog included pictures of postcards my mother collected on the famous odyssey West. In addition to these blogs, a short story and poems will be included in my forthcoming book, Postcards From Diddy Wah Diddy. Today, I am including two additional postcards from my mother’s collection for this blog. The Texas scenes are photographs on cards entitled “Blue Sky postcards” and show the area near Buchanan Dam where we camped out on our trip to California. Both cards feature a light blue Texas sky in the background.

A few years ago I also wrote a novel about the famous trip to Diddy Wah Diddy, one in which I was the narrator who, as an adult, leased an old blue Ford coupe and sat in my driveway in the car to evoke memories of the odyssey my family made in 1946. In this fictional account, I take the sky blue Ford on the road to Texas, attempting to find the place that my family camped out en route to California.

Here’s an excerpt from the novel that I finally decided not to publish. It begins with my drive into Texas:

“Driving had been easy; the coupe, a shiny blue top spinning through the Texas landscape, unwound toward its destination of Lake Buchanan. West of Austin, I accelerated the Ford, climbing to the Edwards Plateau, a place of rocky limestone hills covered by oak, juniper, and mesquite savannahs. My mother, Sarah Nell, had loved the homes constructed of native white rock and ‘everything spaced so far apart, while we waited for something to appear over the next hill,’ she had said. Deer crossing signs were posted everywhere, and goats, hooves poised on the trunks of mesquites, grazed on their leaflets.

“When I turned onto Highway 29 and glimpsed the green highway sign advertising Burnet, something loosened in me, and I felt Sarah Nell, Jacob, Suzanna, and Jake Jr. above me, chanting ‘Atta’ girl, come on now, you’re close, you can find it.’ I stopped to gas up several times, and the car skimmed along, drawn toward one of the most ancient geological regions in the world where outcroppings of granite guarded the secret, whatever it was, that had accelerated my family’s disintegration.

Long Horn Cavern, TX State Park, Burnet, TX

“In Burnet, I stopped at a grocery for directions to Burnet County Park, the place I tabbed as the site of the ’46 campout.

‘You want to go to Black Rock Park,’ advised an elderly woman with an overdone permanent. ‘It’s probably the oldest park and nearer to what you’re looking for. Ain’t no rock buildings like you talking about there now though,’ she added. ‘May have been at one time. How old you say you was when you come here?’

‘Eleven – over sixty years ago.’

‘Lordee, things been changed around since then.’ She looked at my silver hair, although her weatherbeaten face out-aged mine by ten years, if a day. ‘Could be Burnit County Park, up toward the dam. You’ll just have to do some looking.’

“I drove along Highway 29, eighteen miles west of Burnet to Buchanan Dam and located Black Rock Park above a boat ramp. It was an almost-deserted park with concrete picnic tables scattered about on sloping ground dotted with small water oaks, a place that didn’t fit the expanse of campground in my memory. Elevation above Lake Buchanan seemed low. I remembered a tall bluff away from which Sarah Nell had steered Jake Jr. daily in ’46. No bluff, no rock buildings housing bathrooms and showers, no telephone that had connected Sarah to civilization and Grandfather Ellis Paul in Louisiana. To me, the park was an abysmal failure, one that looked hospitable to daytime users but provided no set-up for full-time camping. I circled the park twice, feeling deep disappointment. ‘Don’t give up,’ my dead siblings and parents chided me. ‘Try the County Park.’

“The Ford coupe showed its mettle after I turned on Farm Road 2341 and climbed the hills around the dam, soaring along at fifty miles per hour. The sight of the ubiquitous prickly pear cacti strengthened my resolve – those plants had been the bane of one year old Jake Jr.’s daily tramps. Also, the elevation felt more like the high ground on which we had pitched camp. Everywhere, walls of orange pink rock loomed, a backdrop for the post oaks and cedars I had remembered as part of the ’46 landscape.

“Crossing a stone bridge, I rounded a curve and saw a sign on the left-hand side of the highway that made my heart race: Burnet County Park. However, it was even smaller than Black Rock, a cramped park with boat launch and a few tables at the edge of the lake. Glancing at my watch, I realized it was 6 p.m., and I hadn’t eaten all day. I began to feel that I was on a hopeless chase, searching for a memory that had either moved or never been quite like I envisioned. ‘Don’t go back,’ my family remonstrated. ‘There are more parks.’ Actually, there were two more: Inks Lake and Longhorn Cavern Park. An image of a rock building on a postcard labeled ‘Longhorn Cavern State Park’ flashed in my mind. Returning to Highway 29, I turned off on Park Road 4, veering into the entrance at Inks Lake first, only to find the gates shut against drive-throughs, a warning that reminded me I needed to find lodging for the night. However, I zoomed along Park Road 4 until I reached Longhorn Caverns State Park.

“The park was set among cacti and yucca, and I glimpsed a white rock administration building exactly like the picture on the old postcard Sarah Nell had kept in the bottom of her red leather purse. As I drove around the circle, I discovered a rustic water/observation tower and braked to a full stop, realizing that I had arrived on CCC encampment ground. I sat down at a limestone picnic table in a cluster of post oaks and began to cry. The place felt overpoweringly familiar; the reasons for Jacob bringing the family there felt right – the park was perhaps something he had helped build during his life with the CCC. The old administration building resembled a Gothic fortress, surrounded by a palisade wall made of native limestone and crystal formations taken from the caverns.

“I walked around in the heavy summer heat, the air alive with whirring insects in the oak savannahs. I realized the lake was nowhere near the site when I climbed the circular steel staircase of the tower and looked out windows cut in the heavy stone and couldn’t see water. Only the dam appeared in the distance. Longhorn Cavern State Park hadn’t been the first stop of the Diddy Wah Diddy trek. But why did I feel so linked to the place? A slight movement in the clump of yucca spooked me; I felt as though I was being watched and that something sinister had occurred here, sinister enough to cause my family to flee from the area. As close and hot as the Texas summer air was, I shivered. ‘Don’t give up,’ the family choristers urged me again, but when a truck pulled into the circular drive, I got into the Ford and sped off, giving up the search…”

Needless to say, I never found the campsite, just as I never published the part memoir/part fiction novel, but lately I entertain ideas of returning one last time…

LIVING ON THE MOUNTAIN, WRITING ABOUT THE DESERT

Post card of saguaro in desert

For the past several weeks, I have been putting together a book of poetry and three short stories entitled Postcards from Diddy Wah Diddy. The book features several poems and a short story about my experiences as a child crossing the desert with my family in an old Ford coupe headed for California, or “Diddy Wah Diddy,” the name my father labeled the state because he thought of it as a paradise. The cover of the book will showcase several postcards of the desert that were published on linen paper, and which my mother collected along the way through the lonely stretches of sun and sand in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California.

On that trip I learned to love the desert and when my youngest daughter, Elizabeth, moved to California, I made annual pilgrimages to Palmdale and Lancaster, California for twenty years to recapture the desert experience.

Among my collection of books is an odd-shaped volume entitled Plants of Sun and Sand by Sanford Stevens, published in 1939, a book that I cherish for its descriptions of desert plants and the drawings by Gerry Peirce. I discovered that a paperback edition of this volume remains in print, but I prefer my wood-covered copy with its short descriptions about the desert growth of Arizona. The drawings were created by Peirce in his studio twelve miles out in the foothills near Tucson, and in Stevens’ introduction, he describes Peirce as spending his working days there “in undisturbed contact with the desert life and landscape.”

My favorite drawing is that of the Cottonwood, which belongs to the same family as the aspen and poplar trees. Stevens describes it as the handsomest of all trees growing along riverbeds in the desert where, in the Spring, it puts out leaves wider than they are long. I love to hear the wind rustling in these large leaves and enjoyed hearing the soft rustle while stopped for baths behind upended cots on the side of the highway in our travels to Diddy Wah Diddy and, later, in Mexico where they also abound.

One of the stories in Postcards from Diddy Wah Diddy, which I entitled “Going to Diddy Wah Diddy,” recounts some of my childhood impressions of the desert:

“Joshua trees, the tallest of the yuccas, appeared on the landscape. They were almost human looking, like old men, their arms extended, grumbling to one another about the hot sun. Now and then I’d see a lake with small islands, the hot air making waves on the water. Of course, the lakes were only mirages, shimmering with a strange light on the desert’s dusty face, and I accepted this mystery as another part of the desert’s mysterious changeableness.

Post card of Twenty-Nine Palms, California

“Jacob turned north at Desert Center, taking us near the Granite Mountains and through seas of dull yellow sand. A lilac haze hung over the sand, sometimes turning to pink. The desert’s immensity awed me more than it affected anyone else in the blue coupe, except Jacob. His black eyes darted off the thin-ribboned highway, absorbing the yucca plant, Spanish dagger plants, and the strangely-lit mirages…”

I spend a lot of time lately, shuffling through the postcards and remembering the great adventure to California which actually preceded the breakdown of our family unity. The two postcards featured in this blog are from my mother’s collection of 56 postcards she bought in drugstores (as they were called then) in small western towns along the way to Diddy Wah Diddy. 

Perhaps I'll do a second blog about this odyssey and publish more of the wonderful postcards, many of which are paintings. 

TOTEM POLES

I’ve placed photographs of my brother Paul’s yard on my blogs in the past – scenes of his beautiful garden, benches, and lattices he has built to create a lush California scene that deserves to decorate a postcard. Yesterday, his wife, Lori, sent me a photograph of the latest addition to his yard that she and Paul saw and bought on a walk through the neighborhood in northern California – a totem pole. I’ve included the photograph of it but have no idea what this particular totem symbolizes. I do know that totem poles are often representative of kinship groups and aren’t objects of worship.

In the particular coastal area where Paul lives, totem poles are more common than in southern California and are the products of local descendants of aborigines. The carving culture has actually moved down from British Columbia and Washington to this area along the northern coast. Although the totem poles once represented clan lineage and legends, today, they are mostly artistic representations.

Some of them have been used in aboriginal cultures to represent shamanic powers, but I don’t think Paul’s carving belongs in that category. During the 18th century, Christian missionaries denounced totem poles as objects of heathen worship and tried to destroy them. In some places, notably in Canada and the Southwest, totem poles have been labeled as “junk art,” a naming that demeans native cultures and the skillful carvers within those cultures.

Totem carvers often use animals to denote special powers of the individual owning them. In my young adult book, Martin Finds His Totem, Martin, the hero, who has Cajun and Chitimacha lineage, sets out to find his totem and discovers that a hawk is the bird that will represent his special healing powers. The passage in which he discovers his totem:

“Through the drizzle, I glimpsed a long-winged hawk, with an equally long tail and gray back and head, soaring just above the ground around the lake, its wings held back in a V. Then I heard a squealing noise and knew that the hawk had flown close to the ground to overtake a field mouse by surprise. The hawk dropped out of my vision, but when it soared above a tree, I heard it make a sharp whistling sound like “kee-kee.” I was fascinated at the sight of him and decided not to leave my tent or to give up my search for a totem. Could the hawk be the animal I looked for? My dad called this bird, with its disk-shaped face like an owl, a harrier, and I knew the hawk had keener hearing than other hawks. What a powerful totem he would make if he was mine. But how would I know?…”

Martin makes this choice of a hawk for his totem because he’s told by a shaman that every young man needs a dream animal to protect him.  In actuality, many carvers of animal totems that decorate poles feel that the bears, birds, and other animals represent protection for the carvers.

I’ve written Paul's wife, asking her to identify the carvings on the new totem pole and to tell me what they symbolize.  I hope that his new object of yard art isn't one of the totems that shows symbols of quarrels and murders about which Native Americans prefer to keep silent --the topmost figure is rather ominous-looking!

A PAINTING SENT BY BROTHER…

With a little frame showing. Whoops!

Nothing brightens my day more than the arrival of a photograph of one of my brother’s paintings. The most recent painting is one of the northern California coast–the magnificent rocks and water executed in varying shades of blue. Something about the one blue color gives me a feeling of peace, and I hope to put it on the cover of a new book of poetry I’m writing this year, which, at this date, only has seven poems in the collection.

Another of Paul’s recent paintings features more rocks and sea and a small coast town on an island in the forefront of the painting. Although Paul’s eyes are failing, he seems to be able to render tiny houses and trees well, and I think he must strain mightily to execute his art at the age of almost-eighty. Many of his paintings are abstract ones I’ve used for my chapbooks, and his art often appears on the covers of novels I’ve published.

Paul began painting and drawing when he created his first story about a bear that my father introduced at bedtime called “Jimmy Bear,” and he was encouraged by my mother who painted pictures of gnomes, fairyland creatures, forest scenes featuring huge frogs and dwarfs holding paintbrushes. When Paul moved to northern California nearly twenty years ago, he began painting again in earnest–no lessons, no art school–just the paintings that reflect memories of Louisiana, gardens and flowers, seascapes, landscapes, and brilliant abstract renderings. His garden and yard also reflect his artistry and are paradisiacal scenes.

I am withholding most of the pictures because they may appear on chapbooks of poetry, but will include the blue one that lifted my mood when I received it. Also, the scene inspired a poem:

A PAINTING SENT BY BROTHER

Is it barometric pressure
or days catching up

with the oppressive rain
simmering on heavy leaves,

when the last drop of ego
has evaporated into a scentless past,

and the oak makes deep shade
outside my window and within me.

I’m given a memory of elegance
piercing sea fog,

and in the blues of his art,
ghost ships sail away

on a tempestuous day,
a tempestuous sea.

Atop cradling waves of silver-tipped blue
my brother captures me with his visions,

a child once, and returned,
painting a long transport…

this ocean voyage
on which our history ripples.

A STORY ABOUT A SON OF THE STREETS

At least five years ago, in the middle of the night, my youngest brother, Michael, left a state facility in Louisiana where he worked as “kitchen help” and disappeared into an area near Lake Ponchartrain. When authorities called me to say that they suspected he had been murdered and thrown into Lake Ponchartrain, I told them to check the dates of his last bank withdrawals as he had often talked of going out West. Michael suffered from addiction to alcohol and bi-polar disease. He had been given usufructuary rights to the family home in Franklinton, Louisiana where he had lived on a disability income for at least twenty years, minus stays in hospitals and treatment centers that occurred several times a year. He had been counseled, assisted by family, friends, and the Roman Catholic Church in Franklinton, Louisiana. By the time he entered the last state facility, he had allowed his home to deteriorate, even after I had repainted and refurbished it countless times. He had begun cooking on a charcoal barbecue pit inside the house, had turned off the water supply, scorned help from family and friends, and was finally found wandering on the highway in a delusional state and sent to the state facility.

From the time Mike left the state facility and became a “street person” in San Diego, California until his death in Chicago in 2009 (news of which reached me last month), he remained alcoholic, unmedicated (at his behest) and had become a part of the sixty-six percent of those homeless people in the U.S. who are substance users and/or have mental health problems. He died in St. Joseph’s Hospital in Chicago of pulmonary problems, listed on his death certificate as “natural causes,” and some nameless person or hospital buried him in an Illinois cemetery.

Michael had been a victim of his own desire for isolation, living a marginal life in a world I cannot even envision, turning his back on his sister, his close friends in Franklinton, and his cousins who lived in the same town with him, frequently fed him, gave him money, and helped place him in hospitals. He had an income of $900 monthly, a Medicaid card, a home, a car which a friend and I gave him, clothes that I bought for him, and frequent visitors from the Roman Catholic church that stood on the lot behind his home. He had access to Social Service workers who visited him when he agreed to be on medication that he never took very long.

As the youngest in a family of five, Michael enjoyed more attention from my parents than any of us, had the same educational opportunities, and at the time he joined the Coast Guard, was a high-strung but sane person, serving in Hawaii most of his tour of duty in the service. He married in Brooklyn, New York and held an electrician job, working on lighthouses, in a civilian capacity with the Coast Guard for a few years before his wife sent him home to my parents, along with a note saying that she couldn’t take care of him. He had developed Crohn’s disease in his late twenties and had undergone an ileostomy that made it necessary for him to wear a bag the rest of his life. He never held a job again. From the time of his surgery until he died, he manifested symptoms of bi-polar disease. When my father died in 1985, I began visiting Mike and an older brother several times a month to make sure they were functional. Unbeknownst to me, Mike had stopped taking his medication.

I never knew when I would receive a call or a letter telling me that I should go to Franklinton and oversee Mike’s hospitalization again. Members of his church and community often called and asked me what I was going to do about this brother who refused to submit to medication, who wanted to live in his own home, and who was an embarrassment and problem to the entire town. One devoted church member, who appeared to be a father figure to Michael, counseled with him, gave him money, invited him to all family gatherings and, finally, when Michael refused medication and lived on alcohol, this friend made the hard decision that he could no longer help Michael. Priests and deacons, including me, talked and pleaded with him and tried to help him live a civilized life. He was incorporated into church services as a lay reader and a member of the Knights of Columbus, but alcoholism and bi-polar disease claimed him, and his willfulness can only be attributed to those two diseases.

The last time I heard from Michael in December, 2008, he had entered a hospital in Chicago and wanted to return to the uninhabitable home in Franklinton that was in such bad condition it had to be “pushed up” by town authorities. Michael stayed in Chicago and died there six months later. A few weeks ago, I learned that he had died when a credit union called me to say that an old account he had never touched contained a few hundred dollars to which he had named me as beneficiary. Social Security had informed them of Mike’s death, and they immediately called me.

This is a sad story that I’m sure is only one case in the annals of street people who suffer from drug addiction and mental disease. Throughout the years, many people, including me, prayed for the transformation of Michael, and I have no idea how this problem of mental illness can be answered. I do know that when Mike was in a hospital, even for short periods, he improved – he was warm, fed, medicated, and could function in a limited way. I also know that laws governing mental illness require only a few short weeks of commitment before the patient is returned to “society,” where he again becomes an anti-social being. Today, the real keepers of those who suffer in this way are law enforcement officers and social workers who have only limited time with them. When legislation emptied the institutions and facilities of people who had problems similar to Mike, victims of those dual diseases became people of the streets who now live intermittently in shelters provided in large cities, or on the street where Mike was often found in a stupor or exhibiting delusional behavior.

The two poems I wrote about Mike recently do nothing to relieve the sadness I feel about his wasted life, and I will probably be haunted with the question, “What could I have done?” for the rest of my life.

MICHAEL II.
Green scrolled borders, silver seals,
the handsome death certificate,
arrived today,
a neat and tasteful document,
true and correct copy
pronouncing the sentence:
end of your madness.
You, whose mind was an empty room
on a deserted street,
and no one at the door,
you are now certified and authentic.

I hope someone greeted you on the other side,’
the document declared a civilized burial
somewhere in Illinois,
without relatives,
just an orphan boy in a wintry forest
lying under the moon,
saying nothing more or less
than the lines typed
on a silver-sealed certificate.

Wild Man, Brother Lost,
who walked away from condemnation,
now a ghost on the dark stairs,
I hope you have walked into first light
where angels welcomed you
as a reawakened Michael the Archangel,
once vexed in body and mind,
by death, now ennobled in soul.

The illustration is a painting by my brother Paul, who lives in northern California. I used it for the cover of my poetry chapbook Counterpoint.

ALEXANDER…

There I was, writing a novel based on the life of my great-grandfather, Lawrence Dade Greenlaw, when the telephone rang and my daughter informed me that it was time for me to travel to Covington, Louisiana to become a great-grandmother. “Hay la bas,” I thought, “I have the distinction of being the only living great-grandparent in the family now!” I arrived about 15 minutes after Alexander Charles Romero made his appearance and was privileged to see his “clean-up” through the glass window of the nursery at St. Tammany Hospital. So far, he has done very little screaming, and I anticipate a placid great-grandson. If he does have an unruffled disposition, he’ll be an anomaly because most of us in this family constellation are “pretty intense,” as one of my close friends says.

Birth is blessing. Birth is gift. Alexander, with his perfectly round head of thick black hair and his sweet fat cheeks, is both blessing and gift. On the right is a photograph of Kristin, the beautiful mother, cuddling Alexander. His parents, grandparents, friends, and great-grandparents surrounded and photographed him at every conceivable angle just after his birth and introduced him to birth love, something he cannot reciprocate right now, but will soon learn to express within the circle of protection and caring he has begun to experience.

Alexander's first day is shown on Facebook in many photos. Without a doubt, you’ll recognize the ascendancy of  French, Spanish, Italian, and Indian ancestries when you view his beautiful coloring and raven-colored hair. As I told both parents, “you helped make a beautiful baby.” Of course, the parent of all Creation gave him perfection, but that multi-mix of bloodlines contributed a lot to his handsome appearance.

As an ordained person, many scriptural passages about children have passed through my mind in the last few days, but I’ve also thought about the passage from The Prophet concerning children, and the one preponderate line reads:

“You may house their bodies but not their souls…you are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth…let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness… for even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.”

That’s a tall order for new parents but one that bears thinking about, whether you’re parent, grandparent, or great-grandparent. Alexander is a gift wrapped in a profound time --and a joyful time -- when all of us feel not only sappily sentimental but enchanted with the goodness of new life and are thankful.

On the left is a photo of Martin, the father, dressed in his white “haz-mat” delivery outfit, which he wore all day to impress family and bystanders that he was a new father. When someone finally called attention to the fact that he was still wearing the strange outfit, he said, “I didn’t even know I had it on.” I’m not sure about the veracity of that statement, but while he was dressed in this white jumpsuit he certainly presented a “Kodak moment.”

My grandson, Martin, doesn’t like for me to even say the words, “the only great-grandparent left,” because he thinks I may not be around long enough to carry out this role of great-grandmere, but I hope to sojourn here for an extensive spell just to see this little creature soar.

Welcome to the world, Alexander the Great. May your future life be as blessed as the blessing you’ve given us,

“Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift!” (2 Corinthians 9:15).

CAR TALK

My godmother, Dora Greenlaw Peacock, once told me that of all the things that enraged her, machines and inanimate objects were the worst offenders. Although she is now deceased, I agree with her completely. I have difficulty with power-driven can openers, computers, vacuum cleaners, and directions for putting together mechanical models of anything. My knowledge about the mechanics of cars tops the list, especially when they don’t live up to the manufacturer’s hyperbole about their mechanical brilliance… and break down.

Today is the second day I’ve been unable to go to the grocery, to the post office; in general, to make the round of errands necessary to maintain a household. My 2005 model Honda Hybrid Civic, with only 30,000 miles calibrated on the dash, has developed an AC/defogger clanking noise, and mechanics are now experiencing difficulty correcting the problem. So far, the tally on costs, including a new condenser, is at about $1550, and the heavy silence of the telephone indicates that there may be more trouble ahead. In the last year, I’ve had three sets of tires (because something is wrong with the suspension), a rack and pinion job, and, now, the AC has up and died. As a long-time Honda driver, (having owned at least six Hondas, beginning in 1978) I’ve become disillusioned with the much-touted “200,000 or more miles” predictions about Honda reliability. And let me add, that I’m a devout follower of regular oil and filter changes, battery upkeep, and all the maintenance required to keep a NORMAL car running.

Of course, readers can’t do anything about this problem, except to avoid buying one of these little models that are capable of causing blood pressure rises, more-than-average maintenance costs, and to top it all, this Hybrid offers the drivers and passengers a rough ride. This morning, I am sitting here, googling sites with 1941 Ford coupes just to assure myself that people in this country once enjoyed traveling in a reliable automobile, sans computer parts. In 1940 and 1941, Ford Motor Company, produced some enduring and endearing automobiles. I’ve often spoken of making the famous Diddy Wah Diddy trek across the western plains to California in a 1941 Ford coupe that was large enough to house two adults, four children (I was 11 at the time), and a cocker spaniel dog – a Ford that climbed mountains, crossed deserts with just a few saddle bags on its hood to keep the motor cool and which was still in its prime when my father traded it in in 1949 after the box-styled Ford came out, and he wanted to own a fashionable model. I can’t remember my father ever taking the old coupe in for repairs or using the kind of language I used this morning when I was primed to go after groceries and the Honda Hybrid remained in the shop.

My Grandfather Paul Greenlaw sold Ford autos from the days of the Tin Lizzie until 1946 when the deluxe Fords appeared after a hiatus in production during WWII. He employed only two mechanics that I know of, and they weren’t terribly busy most of the time. He bought a 1946 Ford for my grandmother, and she drove it 11 years, trading it off for a Chevrolet, not because her Ford had anything wrong with it, but because she wanted an automatic shift (she was the world’s first class bucking bronco when she used her skills shifting the car) and because Ford had snatched the franchise away from my Grandfather Paul when he became seriously ill. A Chevy was her coup de grace!

I really love cars – I like to keep up with all the new models, attend car shows of classic models, admire those that pass me on the road, and appreciate the fact that my grandfather and Great Uncle Ed were pioneers in the field of transportation. Great Uncle Ed designed and put together one of the first recreation vehicles by placing an improvised camping house on the back of a Ford truck. He called it the “Virgi-Dora” after his wife and my godmother Dora, and they enjoyed many camp-outs, using this contraption to travel to camping grounds in Mississippi where the Greenlaw boys were born.

Last year, in my household, we scaled down to one vehicle, thinking that, in the interests of helping the economy, a 2005 model with only 30,000 miles would prove to be a virtuous scale-down, and by using only one vehicle, we’d contribute to the diminishment of air pollution. I chose the Hybrid in 2005 because I wanted to do my part toward reducing gas consumption. Alas, I made an unwise decision because $4,000 a year on car maintenance is not a way of reducing consumer spending.

Yes, I love cars, but I wish I had shopped more carefully before investing in this last one, which I told my children would be my last car (I am now 76). I've now amended that statement to declare that it will be my last Honda. From the articles I’ve been reading, Ford has really cleaned up its act and is now producing some first rate economy cars. I’d buy a re-conditioned ’41 Ford, but the models I’ve seen on the Net are slightly under $50,000! That sky blue Diddy Wah Diddy ’41 coupe was an enduring machine!

P.S. I just read that the Japanese will cease producing Honda Civics in Japan because they don’t sell well there. I wonder why!