RETURN TO THE MOUNTAIN AND CIVILITY ALONG THE WAY

The atmosphere on The Mountain at Sewanee in mid-March is as gray as a London fog. Mist overhangs the wooded area in our backyard, the trees are a wet gray color, and the only green is the lichen growing on our rooftop (again, shades of England). A quick glimpse at the landscape this morning revealed three fat crows sitting on the fence conversing loudly. They sat there a long time, and I think they were discussing civility, a subject I covered in a previous blog. However, the crows had a few thoughts to add to this discourse. I envisioned them saying, “Alas, what some people don’t know is that civility is a virtue, the basic foundation of law and society, even for birds.”

So goes the early morning visions of an aging woman who loves crows–to the chagrin of many people who think that crows are public nuisances–and who also loves civility, the absence of which causes her to attribute this lost art to the birds of the air. Civic virtue has been around for a long time, dating back to ancient Greece when Socrates and Plato declared civility was a matter of political duty. The Ten Commandments contain most of the rules for civility and were delivered to bring about actions that would transform the world so that citizens could live together as respectful, caring people.

For me, civility incorporates good manners, courteous behavior, listening to other people in an attempt to reach agreement, and it includes people working and making contributions to society. Incivility covers a list of rude behaviors like disrespect for elders, public displays of temper, and threats to other citizens. During the 40’s when I was growing up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the principal of my elementary school a woman named Mrs. Peters who had dyed red hair, walked the halls with a wooden paddle under her arm, and taught good manners and the principles of civic virtue. The paddle was a threat to those who bullied, vandalized, sassed teachers, and generally wreaked havoc in the classroom and the schoolyard. Later, I was taught civic virtue in the Girl Scouts, an organization with goals to foster good behavior in women who learned to consider the needs of others and to contribute to the larger community.

Having said all of that, I have to report an incident of civility that happened as we were traveling toward Tennessee a few days ago. We had started out with a new set of tires on my Honda Hybrid–tires reputed to be of good quality and that were balanced before we took to the road–tires that were delivered with the admonition that good tires and proper balancing are a matter of safety. This advice was delivered by the manager of a tire supply and service company in New Iberia. By the time we reached Baton Rouge, my teeth were chattering from vibrations of the car, and as we drove further, they became stronger. I consulted the Honda handbook and found that we were probably traveling on a ride of unbalanced tires. I won’t repeat what I said about the preachy tire provider.

When we reached Meridian, Mississippi, I noticed a tire company on the left hand side of the highway where twenty or so big 18-wheelers were parked. There were no cars around. However, we swerved onto the service road and pulled into the crowded lot. We entered a small business office where brawny truckers stood before the counter and asked if someone could just take a look at the tires. A manager with a Mississippi drawl as thick as my own told us he’d have someone check them out. We were fairly travel-worn and probably looked as though we had been behind the wheel of an eighteen wheeler, and the manager kept us waiting about ten minutes before he directed a worker to check out the Honda. The car was stacked to the ceiling in the back seat and the floor was also filled with boxes of manuscripts and papers, so the front seat was pushed forward until the driver was almost affixed to the steering wheel. The stout man checking the tires couldn’t get behind the steering wheel and came into the office, apologizing for his bulkiness. Vickie went out and steered the Honda into the space designated for replacing and balancing tires, reassuring the worker that we were transporting too much stuff.

Inside the business office, I spied a vending machine with moon pies, a dessert I tasted back in the 50’s and declared inedible, but we scurried around for change to purchase a banana double decker moon pie (a cookie that really is long on sweetness). When I took the first bite, the manager, who was sitting behind the service counter, said, “You need an RC to go with that.” “Yes, I know the formula. Actually, we’re headed for the place where these are made,” I told him. So began a conversation about the Moon Pie Festival in Bellbuckle, Tennessee, about mutual travels, and his upcoming twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Before the conversation ended, I had lapsed into my Franklinton, Louisiana drawl (derived from my Mississippi great-grandparents). When we finally fell silent after twenty minutes of robust conversation, the worker came in and declared that every tire had been balanced improperly wherever we had bought them. We were temporarily dismayed until the manager declared “He says they’re fixed now. You’re ready to roll.” “How much?” Vickie asked. “No charge,” the manager said emphatically. “Have a safe trip.” We thanked him in southern dialect and drove on. The Honda moved along without vibration and when we reached the Tennessee line, it climbed The Mountain smoothly.

Now what would that service cost at most tire businesses, especially a business that didn’t cater to cars? Not “no charge,” that’s for sure. Perhaps the manager was showing respect for my white hair; perhaps he empathized with two women driving out of state who showed up tired and a little doubtful that they’d be helped. The point is that he conversed with us, listened to our problem, tried to provide assistance, submitted to a need above “making a buck,” and made a useful contribution. That was civility in action.

No more rants about civility for me for awhile anyway. And Meridian, Mississippi is on my list of those possessing the virtue of civility.

BROWSING IN THE A&E…

Yesterday, I went into A&E Gallery to purchase one of Paul Schexnayder’s prints and met another New Iberia artist of note who exhibits in, and helps manage, the gallery. I first heard of Kate Ferry in the 90’s when Morris Raphael commissioned her to do illustrations for MARIA, GODDESS OF THE TECHE, a fantasy about a mermaid who lives in the Bayou Teche. A few years later, Kate also illustrated Morris’s TI-NUTE, THE ANGEL OF DEVIL’S POND, a story about one of the numerous nutria that abound in Teche country.  Another Teche country author and photographer, Greg Guirard, commissioned Kate to illustrate THE LAND OF DEAD GIANTS which has as its setting the Atchafalaya Basin.

Kate, a free-lance graphic designer/illustrator, graduated from Mt. Carmel here in New Iberia and completed formal art training at the Art Institute of Houston. She has studied with Elemore Morgan, Sara Parker, and Diana Kan and participated in an Illustrators Workshop in St. Maarten, an island in the Caribbean. When the Acadiana Symphony in Lafayette sponsored a Painted Instrument Project, she was one of 25 artists who painted instruments as part of the Symphony’s 25th anniversary celebration. Inspired by Django Reinhart, a gypsy and jazz guitar artist, Kate painted a guitar in acrylics with beads, fabrics, and leather strips. Kate says the guitars will be auctioned off this spring and are also for sale.

Kate works in watercolor and mixed media and likes to paint on “beat-up pieces of wood.” She has created many carnival masks and faces and has done linoleum block prints of masks/faces, focusing on rough textures and layering of colors. She says she likes to produce work that appears to have been exposed to the elements, similar to advertising and signs on the side of a building or barn. Her “canvas” also extends to painting bowling pins, rocking chairs, and benches.

In 2009, Kate painted the poster for Festival Internationale held in Lafayette each year --three women , representing morning, noon and nighttime activities, play music and dance in the painting. Recently, she has begun “3-D work” with paper-mache’, artistic pieces constructed of paper and other materials. This three-dimensional work will be exhibited at A&E Gallery during the gallery’s first year anniversary celebration on April 11.

I’ve included in this blog Kate’s rendering of “Cat Eyes” which depicts a West African woman wearing a gele head wrap, an example of the type of bold fabric patterns and shapes Kate likes to “play with.” “Cat Eyes” and an article about Kate appeared in the March, 2010 issue of “Face Magazine.”

A&E Gallery is the site of the poetry reading where Darrell Bourque, Bonny McDonald, and I performed on January 29 and has become the meeting place of artists and writers in New Iberia, thanks to the sponsorship of Paul Schexnayder.

Kate Ferry’s work is also exhibited at Entre Nous in Lafayette, but we New Iberians claim her as one of our own artists and as someone to watch in the art world. She is “on her way.”

OR GONE WEATHER?

New Iberia, Louisiana hasn’t been an idyllic place for us to hibernate this winter. However, as I wrote in a previous blog, a person might have to travel to Egypt to find warmth right now. Lately, everywhere I go, people talk about the weather. ‘Used to be that weather was a topic confined to old folks –most of us can remember a scenario that includes aging men sitting on a bench in front of the courthouse making conversation that began with “Think it’s gonna’ rain?” Now, we have radio and television weather reports all day that focus on the latest winter storm, earthquake, tornado…”Can Spring be far behind?”

When I was doing research for my most recent book, THE MAINE EVENT, (which is yet at the printers but coming soon) I came across intriguing weather information that I felt would enhance a conversation between the heroine and her spouse. The information concerned an eccentric psychologist, Wilheim Reich, who was born in Austria and studied under the renowned psychotherapist Sigmund Freud. Reich disagreed with Freud’s methods of psychoanalysis and moved to Rangeley, Maine to pursue research regarding orgone energy. He thought orgone was a massless, omnipresent substance that was closely associated with living energy, and he conducted experiments which he claimed proved his theory that this energy force controlled the universe. He invented special orgone accumulators, devices that he touted could capture and harness energy and affect weather by altering levels of atmospheric orgone. Reich created the orgone box, which he said could act as a cloudbuster, stimulating rainfall. I mentioned the box in my novel, THE MAINE EVENT, in part of a conversation about a Maine storm. I’ll include the excerpt from this novel following this introduction to the orgone theory.

In 1954, Reich was jailed because he defied the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s injunction to cease making the orgone boxes and shipping them across state lines. The FDA then destroyed Reich’s books about orgone, along with research information and devices. Reich died in a federal penitentiary and was buried on the grounds of Orgonon, his estate in Rangeley, Maine.

I guess my interest in the orgone boxes centers more on how to stop rain, snow, storms, rather than on Reich’s interest in stimulating rainfall. By the way, the famous author, J. D. Salinger, who died recently, would sometimes sit in an orgone box as part of his homeopathic health regime. Orgone hasn’t been validated by Science, although research into the subject of orgone therapy was still being done as late as 2007; however, use of orgone equipment is rare.

Here’s the passage regarding orgone excerpted from THE MAINE EVENT:

   “Hope that Reich isn’t experimenting with the weather again,” Jim said.

   “What on earth are you talking about?

   It was obvious Jim wanted to divert me from talking about Birdie’s death. I knew that he suspected I’d go hunting the killer next.

   “Some guy that Jose told me about. Lives in this big place down in southwestern Maine, near Rangeley. He’s an odd duck, an Austrian psychologist who believes there’s an energy force called orgone that controls the universe. He invented a machine for capturing the orgone. Produces storms with the machine.”

   I laughed, at first almost a chuckle, then hysterically, as the vision of a wild-haired scientist manipulating a weather machine surfaced.

   “You make fun of me for being superstitious and expect me to believe a story like that?”

   Annoyed, Jim ignored my laughter and went into the bedroom to change into civvies.

I guess that my skepticism about orgones was reflected in the short conversation about them in THE MAINE EVENT, but there are “believers” in Reich’s theory, and researchers at the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine regard orgone as a type of “putative energy.” Well, it'd be nice if we had a device that could dispel some of the gray days we’ve endured this harsh winter.