Windows into Grandpa: Part 1

Age had left him to shuffle his feet as he walked across the floor in the duplex he built, the one in which he lived for half of his life. His words were hard for me to understand. It might have been because I was used to hearing Midwestern voices, his the New Orleans accent was too unfamiliar, another language that I strained to hear correctly. But it was really his advanced years, so many years that I, as a child, could not comprehend: So many years that even his wife, official records or any other family member could not be sure how many years it had been. So many years that I was constantly anxious to watch each step, each breath, afraid that he might die at any moment. I was as afraid to lose him as I was afraid that, as a mere child, I was not yet been equipped with the emotional and social tools to deal with such an event if it should happen in front of me. I was afraid of what I would do without him.

Our Grandpa did not always shuffle. As a younger man, and even into late middle age, he was a lean, tall, dark-skinned man with distinctive and strong features in his face and toned muscles that were apparent even under his well-dressed self. And a walk that needed no swagger because it was strong, true and belonged to a man whose beauty struck every set of eyes that were lain upon him. He had the respect of people to whom he gave love, care, and a benign fear of God.

I was afraid of grandpa, not because of what he might do, not afraid of any anger or wrath. As a young child, such a man was a strange sight to me. He seemed bigger than life, and the people who knew him, including my mom and the man who she married, treated him so. But as I grew older, I did not discover the secret to why this reverence persisted. I don't quite know how to explain it , except to tell you a few things that mother would often say about what it was like growing up with him.

Her mother, our Grandma, was a yeller and a spanker. She was larger than life in her own right, big enough to match with Grandpa, maybe his emotional opposite: a woman to fear because of the whippin' you might get if you stepped out of line.

Grandpa never yelled. He never spanked. Mom would say, as many whippins' and harsh words as she got from her mother, she feared nothing more than the possibility that she might disappoint her father. The wince of pain and the lingering fulfilled promise of, “I'll give ya a whippin' so bad, you won't be able to sit down for a week,” from her mom was nothing compared to the deep, dark, empty pang in her heart from letting her father down—a heart to be repaired, soon enough, by the his love and adoration.

Grandpa was a man of few words. Except on Sunday morning. Grandpa was a preacher, pastor of the Second Bright Morning Star Baptist Church in New Orleans, Louisiana.

It seemed like the rest of the week, he read his Bible. Wise eyes peered through large, thick glasses with heavy plastic frames. Quiet in a sea of darting grandchildren and dueling televisions, he sat with the leather-bound Bible, turning the white thin pages with his long, black fingers and thick, ivoried workman's fingernails. I could not imagine when or how this sagacious discipline was cultivated, nor how the dry words of his King James, which I knew well from my days in Baptist Sunday school, could be translated into the rocking sermon that brought the congregation to its feet, caused women to weep and played on well into the afternoon, even on the hottest of Louisiana summer days.

Long, hot summer Sunday mornings. Sermons too long for a small child who had, by a strange happening of fate's logistics, grew up in a sedate, Swedish Baptist church that had services that ended on the hour, leaving just enough time to linger in the foyer with fellow congregants and get home to take the roast out of the oven before it burned.

Grandpa's sermons: too foreign coming from this creature in whose image I was made, Grandpa talking words, like music, that I could not believe were supposed to come out of a human. Sounds so rich and deep, like the most complicated jazz baritone. Too complicated for that small child to decipher.

Grandpa was old, not just in the eyes of a child who could not imagine being “so old.” The years of hard work at a cement factory made use of his long, strong arms, but also consumed his joints and left him with black lung disease. Years of upkeep on the rental properties he owned, the hauling, pounding, digging and mending did as well.

Rock and roll is a powerful thing.  Most people don't know why.  I am not sure, either, but it has more to do with the black church than any of us will admit.  Grandpa was not a fan of rock and roll.  He was not a fan of dancing.  He did not follow Little Richard, Elvis, Bobby Darin or the Beatles.  He did not want to. He did not have to.

The Sunday morning sermon was not the fare of the 17-year-old "Me Generation" teeny-bopper, on the first slope of adolescence, first taste of love's desire, barely off her parents' good-girl leash.  My not-so-vague notions of what whipped girls into a frenzy moments before and after Ed Sullivan introduced the Beatles "I Wanna Hold Your Hand;" or the swiveling hips of Elvis that the camera was only allowed to leave to the imagination of the television audience, pale in comparison to the rocked emotions of a dozen women wearing white in the front pews each Sunday whose lives had already lived bigger sparks of excitement, toil, tears and care than the Sullivan girls would ever feel, even into their old age. 

Sunday morning was not teeny-bopper tame.  Against a backdrop of furniture dressed in Jesus' royal red velvet, behind the pulpit, before the choir, with sunlight streaming in the east windows, Grandpa would rise, dressed in a the sharpest of suits draped over his lean and angular frame.

The sermon—the whole spectacle was hell-defying. It had to be. I did not know at the time, how much even there, in that church, in that neighborhood where if felt comfortable to be black, and at the same time, uncomfortable to be not black enough—that the people who toiled in that sea of humidity, heat and racial strife where profoundly aware of all of this at every moment. The songs, the preaching had to be potent enough to at least hint at some well of salvation and freedom from the present day, heart-hardened Pharaoh.

If Grandpa could defy hell and the apartheid under which his reign dwelt, it would be no problem to move the emotion of more than a few women, no problem to make them “fall out” in their pew, or save them, if for no longer than they could sit in their Sunday best for those few hours each week.

These were attentions that Grandpa would mostly ignore, but Grandma—she would not.

It is said that jazz is that thing that came to birth when European instruments got into the hands of the African diaspora.  It lead to the blues.  It lead to rock and roll.  It lead to a Godawful fear about what was going to happen to the piano and horn lessons that were given to the nice children of middle America: a Godawful fear that this dark music would make their children forget their fear of God.  So it is with the King James Bible.  European instrument of Protestant politics, corrupted in the hands of the Diaspora, what would it sound like?

In the hands of grandpa, King James did not sound as the King intended.  He sat in quiet, most afternoons, with the Bible on his lab, gently turning the onion skin pages, thumbing through the Exodus, the temples, the acceptance of Ruth, prophet after prophet, angle's visit after angel's visit, a birth, life and death, rise from the dead, redemption, sweet redemption.  

[Leave comments here or at http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/window-into-grandpa-part-1/] 

I Just Know He's My Brother

even branches, by Julia Klatt Singer
 
They are running tethered together
One blind, one sighted
Stride by stride, two men, moving as one.
Like the way birds fly, wing tip to wing
tip, they move as though they share
not only the same air, but the same thought.
Flowers bloom–whole fields of them–
Frogs croak in chorus.  Even branches
Know to sway, in much the same way
as the one above or below them.
What I wouldn’t give tonight to know
What wind, what song, what yearning
what kind world, what beginning, what
abandon I belong to.

**********************************

The scene is the field behind the church.  A comfortable Summer evening, church picnic with lots of games, lots of hot dish, cold salads and things off the grill.  Little games for the little kids.  Big games for the big kids.  Impromptu games for those who think they are bigger than that or cannot decide whether they are a big kid or a little kid, or wishing they could be both, even if they are neither.

I get pelted with a water balloon from a precocious Lisa Dahl.  I intend to retaliate, as I believe is her intention.  I am faster and a better aim and pelt her twice in the middle of the back with balloons that do not burst, much like the utopia of the distraction of a picnic from the fire and brimstone that is easily recalled inside the church walls.

Games.  We are obligated to the gunny sack race, the spoon and water relay, lawn darts.

Pastor prays before we eat.  Little children, fidgety men, and a couple of the gossipy ladies peak during the invocation.  I know what mother brought to the pot luck and promise to try the dishes others shared.

That year, my brother Michael is 20.  I am five years older.  We hover moments before the three-legged race, not with much intention, me reluctant to participate, but am vulnerable to the faint persuasions. I am not sure how much Michael wants to play, but I am guessing he wants to more than I do, wants to with more interest than his big brother, but as they begin to make the pairs, soon our legs are lashed together, standing at the start line.

We are told to take our marks.  We are commanded to get set. We are ordered to GO.

Michael and I start out awkwardly.  Stumbling.  Lost stride.  This is not going to work.  We are not the same athlete. We are not the same person.  We are not going to win.  We are last.

All my siblings: I love them.  We are four very distinct people carrying different virtues of our forebears, different personalities, different qualities that people know from knowing our parents. We each look like one of our parents but all have different noses and very different ways of making it through the world.

Neither of my two sisters are there, far enough away to not have to navigate the prospect of a three-legged race we would rather not run.   Before the race starts, I have no idea of how Michael and I will navigate, have no idea of where we will be when someone says “GO!” whether I will be in the race or comfortably on the sidelines, glad to let someone else have the fun, glad to be by myself.  I don’t understand how Michael and I were roped into the race, roped together, in that space. I did not need to know.

I also don’t understand how or why or see the moment when we suddenly broke into the most synchronized stride–running almost as if we were the same person, not just children of the same womb and sire.

We pass the other runners, outpace them by enough so that at the finish line, they have full views of our backs.

I can’t explain the feeling, that sudden burst of speed, whether it was his speed or mine, whether we began to hear the same drummer–what stride we fell into.  I don’t know what to say; I don’t know why.  I just know he’s my brother.

[Leave comments at http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2012/05/18/i-just-know-hes-my-brother/]

Don’t Tell Me Where You’ve Been, Wanderlust Train

wanderlust love

for the train

that will wander with more lust

than i will ever be able to keep up with

and longer than i can stand to wait

for its return

from further away than i can imagine.

but its horn is a siren

that will turn my head

every time it passes my open window

even on the coldest night;

my ears will perk

in the silent frost and my

neck strains to bring them closer

to phantom sound.

and the distant click-clack

click-clack, an echo

endures from your last visit

a long row of memory

laden with other people's cargo

your burden

now mine.

i tell myself

the whistle blares for me

and not some other wanderer

whose lust could never be as strong

as the love that waits on the crystal breeze

that circles around my bed posts

through my body

and fills the empty space

that sleeps beside me.

Not a Woman with Hoodie Wandering without ID

I received a voice mail the other day that ended with, “Thank you for being a champion for human rights.”  I didn’t know that anything had been won.  It doesn’t even appear that we are in the first division or even in the playoffs.  I don’t see the championship.

For a brief half century, we enjoyed a period in our country’s history where, even against a cultural backdrop of resistance, we thought of the constitution as something to affirm, expand and ensure civil rights and liberties.  Today, that respect for rights, through constitutional measures, the law, or cultural attitudes seems to show up for corporations more often than for most of us.

I am not surprised that there is enough steam to put a statement in our state’s constitution that says we are against men marrying men and women marrying women.  The constitution is supposed to be a document that makes statements about who we are as a people and what rights we have as citizens.  With all the ungodly things that happen today in the context of legal marriages, we somehow have decided to bring up measures related to legal marriage against the population that has not even had the chance to screw it up like the straight population.

I am not surprised that, even though our country has a four-and-a-half century history of terror legislators feel the need to enact laws that will protect the “rights” of George Zimmerman and anyone who wants to enforce the lingering and pervasive terror against which we have little other protection: certainly not from police culture.

I am not surprised that men who do not even have or acknowledge sexual partners and do not have anything to do with a woman’s reproductive health are trying to decide what women should do or have access to with regard to their bodies.  I am not surprised that more men, especially conservative men, are not standing up to say that they do not want the government in the private, sexual parts of their wives–places that they believed were to be exclusively known by them as a right of marriage–and not equally uncomfortable with the government doing the same things with their daughters.

I am also not surprised that there is an effort afoot to prevent hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans from legitimately exercising their basic voting rights, and will quite pointedly hurt voting access to the populations elderly, students, and people who move with greater frequency than other populations (eg. the poor, racial minorities, women fleeing abusers, and anyone else who regularly flees oppression or the difficult situations imposed on them by the social and economic dysfunction protected by current "rights" campaigns), in order to prevent a mostly non-existent fraud that is less effective, more costly and less efficient than most legal, legitimate means to influence elections and get votes for the candidate you want.  I guess this right TO vote, a right for which many have died and were tortured and for which many still fight needs to be curbed by the arbitrary possession of a state ID.  It seems we don’t need to poll tax or poll “test” or land-ownership requirement to pre-determine the outcome of elections.

I expect that I will have a valid ID with me this upcoming election, as I expect that I will in several upcoming elections.  I did run out the door without my ID one election day, several years ago.  That was just once.
I expect that I will not start wearing hoodies.  Not my style.  No need to mess up my hair even more than the ill-quaffed doo that I have been urged to groom with more attention.  It is also a nice spring, so I guess I will not need it.

I do not expect that I will ever want to marry a man.  Even though it might help me get better health coverage, make it easier on my mom if something happens to me and someone has to make decisions about my care, maybe make it easier to inherit something in my later years, and I know that, if we made enough money, we would qualify for one of the Bush tax breaks.

I do not expect that I will grow a uterus any time soon, nor to I expect to gain the perspective to be given the primary responsibility that gives me the right to make ultimate decisions about one.

So, why am I writing about these other people?  It is obvious: I look enough like them to know that I am them.  I know enough about history, mine and those who came before me, to make me afraid of all the things that, as a boy, I thought I would not have to suffer because those things that were so awful were exposed and could not possibly continue–because they were so awful.

So, I stood in the Marriage Equity subcaucus at my Senate District convention two Sundays ago.  I comment on the fate of all our Trayvon Martins.  I remember the people who died, mostly in the south, and where tortured just because they wanted to vote.  But I don’t feel like a champion standing up for rights.  I don’t even feel like I  am in the game, hiding from the men with guns who have historically wanted and still today want the excuse to shoot me or take away my “reproductive” capacity.  I breath a sigh when I see those men and realize I do have my “documentation” with me.  I am no where near a place where I will be married.  Just sitting in the stands.

And in the mean time, I don’t care if the Major League pitcher had an affair with a guy when he was a teenager–much less what anyone did or did not do in high school.  It is none of my business what is happening with the insides of a woman I do not love.  Whether you look nice in the photo on your ID will not make you a better citizen or vote right, in my opinion.   And I still know with that of all the things the Bible says about marriage, none of them are part of the (im)moral right’s assertions of how the institution should be defined.

But some people have taken it upon themselves to “care.”  I don’t feel like a champion because they are winning.  One day, maybe it won’t be that way.

(Please comments at: http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/not-a-woman-with-hoodie-wandering-without-id/)

Your Next Love Letter

Last Wednesday, I found a great Smith-Corona portable manual typewriter at Goodwill.  I was shopping for something for a trip to a chess tournament being held in St. Louis. (I can’t remember what I originally was looking for. I know I didn’t find it, whatever it was.)  It is definitely not the case that I need another item in my house. I have not the room. My son is intrigued but ambivalent, exclaiming, “For a while, there, I was thought we were caught in the world of typewriters and wood-burning guitars,” playing off a James Taylor quote he had rattling around in his very smart head. It is quite cool, a Smith-Corona Classic 12. It’s a portable, manual, vintage. It feels great. It is great.


It was almost not great. I tested it out in the store. Plunk, plunk. So many of these machines do not work, like the IBM Selectric I lucked into not long ago. Beautiful machine, but it’s electrical insides are scrambled and it knows not how to behave. This one felt great. Seemed to function great.

That is until I got it home and tried to type a word that had a K in it. The K did not work. Not a tragedy. I spent $7 and maybe I would be motivated to find someone who could repair this gem. The better idea was to try and fix it myself—a dangerous proposition, but it would be a true failing if I did not try.

I took off the metal plate on the bottom and searched the levers and hinges. Aha! The K was disconnected from its series of levers and rods. I figured out the mechanism for the failed connection, and with the help of two screwdrivers, made the reconnection. I could now write words with a K.

I now have a functioning manual typewriter. The typewriter I learned to type on was also a Smith-Corona, one of those gray, Studebaker-like, upright things that my mom had salvaged from the days when she was a student. I think I was seven or eight when I asked mom to teach me how to type. With three other kids, two of them quite small, and an outside-the-house job, She did not have a lot of time. She did the next best thing—or maybe the better thing. She sat me down at the kitchen table with her old Gregg typing manual and let me teach myself.

Years later, when I was in graduate school, I found another typewriter just like it at a yard sale.

I don’t know why I wanted that typewriter. It would be an odd way to reclaim my childhood. Regardless, the purpose it served was much different than was the allure as I passed the sale that early summer evening.

One purpose it served was saving the many recipients of my many letters from having to read my handwriting, which is still pretty illegible. The other purpose was to pound out the lingering adolescent angst that was the impetus or subject of most of the letters.

As you might remember from my first blog post “Stop Him Before He Writes (or at least tries),” I wrote about 380 personal letters one year. Many of them to a few women/girls for whom I felt enough affection to write so often, but never with the boldness to admit or hint, beyond the volume of mail they received, such affections. I would not admit because those affections were truly a transgression of what was supposed to be mere friendship or/and often with society’s color line. 

Plunk.  Thwap.  Slap. It was a wonderful sound and feel to which I worked out so many of my frustrations.  Social-political frustrations. Frustrations of internal and external religious and theological dissonance. Frustrations of what felt a lot like love in the midst of a fading adolescence.

This might be too reveling.  Did you get any of those letters from 25 years ago?

Maybe you were not in my life 25 years ago. Maybe you are not a woman. Maybe your life was safely secluded from such attentions. Maybe you did get a letter—and maybe it was not one tainted with such emotions. Maybe none of that matters. Today, as then, all of the musings may be little more than the exercise in writing it turned out to be.

Maybe none of it matters and maybe it IS nothing more than an old writing exercise—or that is all I will admit to. That and one other thing—something that may be of value to you: being so subtle and guarded with displays of affection has made me very good at figuring out if a man is interested in being your friend or if he has a crush on you. I can tell you how deeply he is into your relationship. I can pick it up, in most cases, pretty easily. Sometimes I can tell without ever meeting him. It is how I knew with certainty, even a year before he asked her out, that a classmate from long ago was interested in my friend A. It is how I knew that even though my friend C was so worried that her latest boyfriend might break up with her, that I was sure he would not, certain; I could feel it, that he knew she was the best that he would ever meet (that she was the best that most people ever meet, even if the context of relationship is not a possibility) and he would not pass on who she was. And I had never met either of them.

I can tell by the smallest kind of attention that a man pays, letters, or anything else, especially something else, because no one writes letters, especially on a typewriter. I only wish that I could be so perceptive in the dynamics of my own life.

I do not plan to write 380 letters in the next year, but somehow, the acquisition of this machine seems to fit for the day. I have urged my son to pound out a few poems on our new piece of functional furniture. What will I write? And what will you think if a piece of mail comes to your door, written on dear Smith-Corona Classic 12?

I beg you not to over-think this one, but in the mean time, I will carry the burden as I worry that no one will ever want a letter from me again.

** Leave comments at: http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/your-next-love-letter/

I Love You: That’s So Funny

Poop, butt and vomit jokes are one of the delights of early childhood. I don’t know how long it takes us to tire of the butt jokes. Maybe as long as it takes to accept those not-so-crude aspects of life: a common daily reality, not so odd, ironic or absurd. I am guessing that doctors Freud, Jung, Erickson and Spock have explanations, something that explains this transition from being comfortable eliminating our waste into our pants to finding the elements of that process the most hilarious idea we can conceive of on the planet.

I recall a day in grade school when every boy in the middle grades was fascinated with a turd soooo big and long it would not flush. Everyone elbowed their way to the door of the stall in the boys’ bathroom for a chance to see the spectacle as one of our teachers tried to encourage and then order all of us back to our classrooms. Urging us out of the bathroom did not, in the least, halt our exclamatory banter, filled with “Holy cows” and “Did you see that?” and eyes as big as the phenomenon we had, prior to that day, never seen.

In time, we tired, outgrew, or just forgot to laugh at unless adorned by some cleaver sophistication.

In a way, we never quite get comfortable with any of that, the body parts and the functions that go with them. There are still ways to make poop, butts and puke funny. It works in some movies for some people on some days: I guess it’s all in the timing—and maybe in not being the ones who have to clean it up: either the physical stuff or the pitiful emotional fallout that accompanies the physical mishap.

While still children, we graduate to the next order of strange and uncomfortable body parts and functions: it’s about sex. We are kids, with no or very warped contexts of this life reality and, thus, still naïve enough not to confuse this caricature of sex with love. We can conveniently not see that sex and love are things that could go together, even if we know too much about them than is healthy for a child.

Sex and love: they are funny.


Bobby and Suzie
Sittin’ in a tree
K-I-S-S-I-N-G…

Or, “Bobby has a girlfriend! Bobby has a girlfriend!” More giggles. More embarrassment. As many denials of “Do not! DO NOT!

When do we grow out of his stage? Hopefully not too soon, because it really is something children have to grow into, spend time uncomfortable with and out of that discomfort, spend an appropriate amount of time growing, establishing their personal space, identity and sense of self the discomfort helps us grow into. The taunts work for comic relief: Little Bobby with “First comes love/then comes marriage/then comes Bobby with a baby carriage is supposed to be an uncomfortable absurdity.

Even as adults, though, we sometimes—and for some, every time– do not avoid being as unripe as Bobby. And maybe that is why it is hard to graduate out of that stage of bad humor that it follows us into the spaces and time of life when it can no longer be a silly absurdity: the places in which we live and have to care in those relationships, with those real people.

Not being that undeveloped person is hard in our “Two and a Half Men” society. Once I got past being offended and realize it is just television, a comedy, it reminded me of some of the Greek classic comedies. So absurd. Silly. Such shallow attitudes on some things that are of ultimate importance: family, sex and love—or the absence of love. Absurd. Silly.

And maybe it would be funny, if only it lasted the two and a half hours it takes to present one of those Greek comedies. But it goes on and on, week after week, day after day, rerun after rerun. And then I realize that it is not just a fiction. It’s more real than we will admit, even though the implicit admission is as plain as the popularity of the show. It is hard to deny when the show’s star repeatedly shows the real consequences of what happens when the plot of the show comes to real life. It is hard to deny when the trail of ruin left by that star shows up large—and we still want to reward him with our attention, money and an even bigger stature than we provided him before.

It leaves us, still as adults, afraid to fall in love or to let anyone know, even the target of our affections. Will people laugh at us? Will our love laugh at us? Is love a joke with which those around us are still way too comfortable? Will our love be so uncomfortable with the love that the realm of the comic will be the comfortable refuge?

If I say, “I love you,” will you say, “Oh, that’s so funny,” and laugh?

And I can laugh, too, make us both comfortable and say, “Just kidding.” Freud, Jung, Erickson and Spock have theories on this, too.  I am not sure I want to know.  Instead, we can turn on the television and learn what love is about.

(Leave comments at http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/i-love-you-thats-so-funny/)

“The Time Has Come,” for a few Firsts

This is a true first for me, in many ways. It is my first attempt at video, recording myself, using my outdated camera, posting a self-made video—and this is the first and only take.
I recorded Pentangle’s “Time Has Come,” my favorite Pentangle song. I have to thank Sherry Ladig who, years ago, introduced me to these “folks,” or at least she was encouraged my affinity with her enthusiastic expertise on these great musicians.

 

You can learn more about Sherry and the band Dunquin, made Sherry Ladig (piano), Don Ladig (her swell husband on flute and whistles) and Kathleen Green (fiddle) at http://www.sherryladig.com/bands/dunquin/.
So, forgive the videography, I’m a newbee. Forgive the missed word or two in the lyrics, and the fumble with the strings. I have few words this week, but this song was sitting, waiting to be played for someone other than the idle books on my book case.
In the mean time, I am working on a couple of pieces, one of which will be showcased in a reading by Givens Foundation Emerging Writer Fellows on April 24^th at Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis, so save the date. Hope to see you there.