Glory Days

I was never a Bruce Springsteen fan. However, I continue to find the song “Glory Days” to be very relevant in a number of ways to a number of people, including myself.

For example, there’s the mysterious fairy-tale writer who keeps telling the same story over and over and over and over and….is very entertaining because, for some reason unknown to me, said writer actually believes in the credibility of his/her writing. Go figure.

Then there’s this guy I know. Don’t know him very well, but he entered my life as the product of decisions made by another member of my family. He’s a bit older than me, sports one helluva mullet-looking hairdo, and is so stuck in the past, and in such denial about it, that it’s actually funny.

In a very sad sort of way.

For example, he loves to drop names of “famous” people he hung out with back in the day, while simultaneously ragging on people who drop names. Hello? (Hey, guess what? I met Bob Barker in 1978. Aren’t you impressed? I know you are. Heh.) Evidently he was, and perhaps still is, a talented technician. He worked for about 20 years as a technician, says he was pulling in a six figure income, which is hard to do as a technician in these parts. The northeast corridor, we are NOT.  The problem: those glory days weren’t spent being a technician, they were spent in a commune, being an “artist”, basking in the glow of a very famous, now deceased, artist whose name he loves to drop while waxing poetic about how obnoxious name-droppers are.

Funny story: way back in the 90s there was a weekly summer concert series around here, every Wednesday at noon. Hubby and I both worked downtown and would meet at the park for lunch and whatever entertainment happened to show up. Sometimes it was great: Matt Kendrick. (If you’re from around here and know anything about the local jazz scene, then you know Matt.) Other times, well, not so much. One Wednesday we got a student from the local arts college. It was surreal, kinda beatnik. He would strum non-chords on an un-tuned guitar while reciting poetry that went something like this: “I am an art-TIST. I go to professional art SCHOOL. I am totally COOL, because I’m an art-TIST.” It was hilarious, great satire.

But I digress.

So, back to the future, here’s this guy, with a family, living on unemployment because the Lord says he’s really an artist, not a technician, going around saying stuff like “I’m so stoked about the gig tonight”. I’m telling you, Bob Barker NEVER said that! I had a chance to observe him practicing his art, and while I can’t work in his preferred medium, I can recognize talent. Or lack thereof, if you get my drift. And he gets a lot of sympathy from a lot of people because his talent isn’t recognized, dare I say, perhaps because it isn’t there? The problem is that there is no sympathy from the one person he’s really looking for sympathy from: dear old dad.

I sit back and observe this ongoing drama, and drama it most certainly is, and I wonder: if you’re a good technician, and you believe that God made you what you are, might it perhaps be true that God made you to be a GREAT TECHNICIAN? Just a thought.

But, what do I know? I’m just a frustrated artist who used to be a great technician, who is now neither one. Who is now, essentially, not much of anything. If Obamacare were fully implemented, I’d probably be on the short list for “end of life counseling” because hey, let’s face it, I’m not a contributing member of society. (In other words, I’m not contributing to the country’s revenue. That’s not 100% accurate because I am a tax-paying citizen, just not paying my fair share right now. Or is that, “I’m not doing my patriotic duty”? I forget what the proper verbiage is these days, and it’s always changing so who cares, right?)

As some character in one of my favorite movies EVER (If You Could See What I Hear) said: Well, who really gives a DAMN? (That was his way of saying “Wassup?”)

I wish I could say that the answer to that question is: me. I give a damn. I want to, I really do. For all its annoying politics, boring meetings, long hours, trying to do the impossible and sometimes succeeding, but mostly not, I miss being a technician. I was good. I was efficient. I could explain technical issues in non-technical terms to people who needed to hear technical issues explained in non-technical terms.  But, like the “late to the party pony”, my tack just got too heavy and now I’m a swayback pony, mostly good for being a companion pony to some other pony who needs a companion.

Lucky for me, I do have a companion pony. Actually, I have several companion ponies, but only one that lives in my pasture. (NO, no THAT kind of companion pony in someone else’s pasture…shame on you!) This week my pony learned that the workload at his barn is drying up, and some of the ponies have been sold, and unless something changes, he might be headed to the stockyard for auction as well.

So, where do we got from here? Can a swayback pony be rehabilitated? After you’ve been a dressage pony for 20 years, very precise, very controlled, able to change course at the tiniest signal from my rider, can I learn to be a western pony and sort of lope around? Sounds easy, but old habits are hard to break. Is it hard to teach a smart pony dumb tricks? Beats me, I’ve never tried it until now. But, if I take my observations of mullet-guy and apply them to myself, then it is more than likely true that God made me to be a technician too, not an artist. And if I could adapt to change before, than isn’t it possible that I can adapt again? I have to believe that if it weren’t possible, then the time and money I’m spending on retraining myself from dressage to western is a wasted effort.

I do know this: I don’t wanna grow a mullet and sit around musing about the good old days, before I was a technician myself, wishing I could go back and re-capture something I never really had to begin with: real talent. Skill, yes. Talent, not so much. I don’t want to be a mediocre artist who complains because my talent is not recognized. Who recognizes mediocre anyway?

But, oh how I miss being a mediocre artist as well as being a great technician.

And so, here I am, sporting my mullet and musing over the glory days that really weren’t so glorious after all.

Here’s to talent….two pieces that I played, with mediocrity, in recital–played here with genius:

Sigh.

What does it mean when you want to be, NEED to be, just mediocre at something? At ANYTHING?

summers of my dreams

If you’ve been reading here recently, I made reference to this song and said i *might* explain what it means to me. After thinking about it, I decided that it was a project worth doing. So, here goes……a real life fairy tale.

Back in the days when I was young and innocent, I was blessed to have four grandmothers. On mom’s side, there was my Grandma Ruth, my great-grandma Lena Pearl, and my great-great-grandma Horton. Then on dad’s side there was my step-grandma Irene. Amazingly enough, I lost my last remaining grandma, great-grandma Lena Pearl, in 2004,  shortly after she celebrated her 100th birthday. She died peacefully, in her sleep,  just as she wished.

From about the age of seven, I would spend a week each summer with Grandma Ruth and Grandpa Clayton, then another week with great-Grandma Lena Pearl and great-grandpa David Ed. Then around Labor Day we would head to step-grandma’s VERY rustic cabin in eastern Virginia, on the banks of Saluda creek, which empties into the Rappahannock River. For any of you who were educated in Virginia during the late 60′s or early 70′s then you should recognize the Rappahannock as one of the four tidal rivers that enter into the Chesapeake Bay, as described in our 4th grade Virginia History and Geaography textbook, which I still have. A cookie to anyone who can name the other three….ok, I have no cookies. They are the Potomac, the York, and the James. (One thing I do remember learning in 4th grade from the teacher with green hair.)

In the shade of this old tree in the summer of my dreams
By the tall grass by the wild rose where the trees dance as the wind blows
As the days go oh so slowly as the sun shines oh so holy
On the good and gracious green in the summer of my dreams

Great-grandma Pearl lived in the Blue Ridge mountains, very close to the NC/VA state line. Her original home place is now a part of I-77 Southbound. She lived in a two-story farmhouse with a creek running behind it. On the other side of the creek was the general store that great-grandpa Ed ran up until the early 70′s. When he finally closed the place down, gas was selling for $0.33 / gallon, and if you know where to find the remains of the store, you might still be able to see the remains of those gas pumps. The store sold everything from food to farm implements, clothes, shoes, candy…everything a little girl could ever want. The counter had on old, push button cash register, a large jar of pickles, pickled eggs, pickled pigs feet. There was a chest cooler with soda pop. My favorite was Dr. Pepper, to be consumed with a bag of salted peanuts that was poured into the bottle before drinking commenced. There was a pot-bellied stove in the center of the store, and a bench on the front porch where the old farmers would gather on a warm summer afternoon and discuss the weather, their crops and cattle, and life and death in their small community.

The farmhouse had a porch that wrapped around two sides, with a porch swing at the corner. There was a root cellar under the side porch. She also had an enclosed back porch with a spring house. Cold water was always available, dipped by a dried gourd that hung above the spring. There were usually fresh vegetables from the garden in the spring house water sink, cooling for dinner. Grandma had a freezer on the back porch that usually contained frozen meats, processed from animals they raised themselves. She had two milk cows that were faithfully milked morning and evening, with any surplus milk placed in a milk can and then placed in another spring fed cooler in the front yard, where the milk truck would pick it up and return the empty milk cans the next day.

Grandma’s garden was across the creek, behind the store. She tried to teach me how to recognize the vegetables from their greenery. Once, after spending a day picking green beans, we went back to the garden where grandma Pearl showed me rows of plants and asked me what they were. Pushing the green leaves back and finding nothing that looked like anything edible, I replied, “I don’t know what it is, but it sure has been picked clean!” It was potatoes. Hey, I was seven, remember?

Grandma Horton would usually come for a visit. She would spend time traveling from one child’s home to another, staying a few days at each one. She was almost blind, wore dark glasses and dressed like Grandma Walton, complete with apron. She called me “Bernice”.

We used to play in the creek, chasing fish and crawdads, and if we were lucky enough to catch anything we would take our captives from the creek and place them in the milk can cooler where we could observe them up close.

There was a cherry tree that grew at the riverbank. We would eat cherries until our tummies ached.

By the banks of this old stream in the summer of my dreams
By the deep pool where the fish wait for the old fool with the wrong bait
There’s a field of purple clover there’s a small cloud passing over
And the rain comes washing clean on the summer of my dreams

One of my cousins would come down to visit whenever I was there. He was maybe three or four years older than me, and I had a terrible crush on him. He used to push me on the porch swing. Grandma had pots of flowers covering her front and side porches. It was beautiful.

Grandma Pearl’s house was not built with indoor plumbing. By the time I came along they had built a single bathroom that took up the back of the side porch. The door to the bathroom was in the kitchen, a bit awkward. She kept a small bottle of turpentine, closed with a cork stopper, that was used to cure any major injury that came up: bee stings, poison oak, mosquito bites. She had a wringer washing  machine. I was helping her do laundry one day and as I fed the clothes into the wringer, my fingers were caught between the rollers and my hand went through the wringer, all the way up to my elbow. Scared Grandma Pearl half to death.

I was there when Pearl and Ed got their first telephone, a party line. Grandpa would NOT answer the phone. Period. There was this one day when Grandma needed to call someone and two other ladies had the line tied up, so to speak. One of them kept saying that she needed to get off the phone and check the beans she’d left cooking on the stove. After about an hour of this, Grandma Pearl picked up the phone, listened in for a second, and said “Lady, them beans is burned by now!” She got the line freed up to make her call.

See the raindrops on the grass now just like diamonds lying there
By the old road where I pass now there’s a twilight in the air
And as the sun sets down before me I see my true love waiting for me
Standing by the back porch screen in the summer of my dreams

Staying with Grandma Ruth was different. My grandpa Clayton also ran a local grocery store, and he was the butcher. In addition, he raised sheep and beef cattle, which also meant he raised corn and alfalfa. I remember the first summer I stayed with them and was expected to WORK on the farm. Grandma took me to Roses and bought me a pair of Levi straight leg jeans, very unfashionable for 1973. Bell bottoms, 20 inches minimum…now THAT was a pair of jeans. She also bought me a sleeveless t-shirt and sturdy shoes, sent me out on the farm with my uncle and his farm hands to bail and put up hay. Grandma would supervise, her main job was to look for and exterminate any snakes that dared show up in the hay field or barn.

After a long day of working the fields, we would peel off our sticky jeans, throw on a bathing suit and head for the lake for some cooling off and water-skiing. My uncle taught me to ski, and he always had his farm hand buddies with us. I remember falling once, hard, and the impact yanked my bathing suit top right off. It was a good thing that I had decided to wear a life jacket instead of a ski belt (can you even BUY a ski belt anymore?) Otherwise I would have been forever dead of embarrassment. Sometimes it would rain in the afternoon and we’d all jump in the water to “keep from getting wet”.  I also wished that one of my uncle’s farmhands would notice me, but I was maybe thirteen and they were much older, like sixteen or seventeen.

In the shade of this old tree in the summer of my dreams
By the tall grass by the wild rose where the trees dance as the beans grow
As the days go oh so slowly as the sun shines oh so holy
On the good and gracious green on the summer of my dreams

When I listen to the words now, I remember not only the long past: the cherry tree, the creek, the gardens and green fields, the summer lightning and refreshing rain, but also the more recent loveliness of summers spent on the New River with my parents, and my then-boyfriend/now-hubby, walking the dirt road down to the river, getting caught in afternoon thunder storms. I remember my dad, sitting on the dock at his sister’s lake house, a cane fishing pole in his hand, whistling  poorly and watching the sun go down.

As the days go oh so slowly as the sun shines oh so holy
On the good and gracious green on the summer of my dreams

And my step-grandmother Irene? That’s a whole other story.

a fable….because someone dared me

[cue dramatic music]

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away……no, wait. That one’s taken.

Hmmmmmmm.

[cue something else]

In the time before time, there were three civilizations separated by a great ocean. One civilization was make up of tree-dwelling people, another of cave-dwellers, and the third civilization lived in a great city.

In each of those civilizations there were dreamers who wondered if they were the only people who existed, or if maybe there might just be more people like them living somewhere across the ocean. Never did they dream that there might be people NOT like them,or, if there were, that they would ever meet and be able to adapt to each other’s cultures. But it was nice to think about…

One day a tree-dwelling princess who was known for her dreamy ways, took some leaves from her tree, wrote a message in her language on one of them, asking, “Is anyone out there?”. She then fashioned a boat out of the remaining leaves, placed the message inside, and set the boat adrift at the ocean’s edge.

Meanwhile, another princess from the city was thinking about the same great question, “Is anyone out there?” She would walk to the ocean’s edge and search the coastline. She would gaze toward the horizon. But she never saw anything except the empty water. So she went back to her city home, wrote out the same message, placed it inside a bottle, which was a container for holding liquids that someone in her city had created, and took it back to the ocean’s edge. She placed it into the water, wondering what would happen. Amazingly enough, it floated away.

You can guess what the cave-dwelling princess did.

She stayed in her cave, hiding. She was afraid of the ocean, and although she wondered the same question as the other two, she never really asked it.

One day the city princess walked down to the water’s edge. She expected to find what she always found: nothing. But, this was a special day, for when she looked at the waves breaking on the shoreline, she saw a small green package bobbing on the waves. She waded into the water and picked up the tree princess’ leaf boat. Looking inside, she found the message: “Is anyone out there?” Her heart raced, for she could read and understand this message even though she did not recognize the material it was written on, as there were no trees in the city. She rushed back to her home, scribble the answer on a piece of paper (another nifty thing that someone in the city had invented), placed it in another bottle, rushed back to the water and dropped it in. Her answer was (you guessed it): YES!

Across the water, the tree princess was at the water’s edge dreaming her dreamy dreams, when she saw a very strange thing: it was the first bottle the city princess had sent into the great ocean. Since she had never seen a bottle before, she was perplexed by it. She picked it out of the water, rolled it between her hands, feeling its smooth surface. She peered inside the bottle and was again surprised to find: paper. She turned the bottle upside down and shook it vigorously until the paper fell out of the bottle and landed at her feet. She gingerly picked it up, unrolled it, and saw HER message, written by someone else: “Is anyone out there?” She went back to her tree, wrote the answer on another leaf, built another boat, took it back to the ocean and set it adrift. Her answer: “Hell YES!”

As the world turned and the seasons changed, the currents of the ocean became apparent to these two amazing women, and they began to correspond across the waters, teaching each other about their tree and city ways.

Meanwhile, back in the cave…..things were getting very boring, as cave life is known to be for anyone who has actually lived in a cave. The cave princess’ fear of the ocean eventually outweighed her boring cave life. She summoned up her tiny bit of courage and set out for the water’s edge. As she walked on the shore, she constantly looked down at her feet, making sure she didn’t step on any dangerous sea creatures that might have washed up. There were no sea creatures; but there was a BOTTLE. What on the ocean was this thing? She picked it up and, like the tree princess before her, examined it and discovered a message inside. She was shocked to see that she could read the words. However, she had intercepted a message from city princess to tree princess. She could indeed read the words, but she did not understand the message. She took the bottle back to her cave, picked up a soft rock that left black marks on the paper when she rubbed it across the surface, and wrote a message of her own. It said, “HUH????” She put the message back into the bottle, went back to the shore, put the bottle back in the ocean, and waited.

Eventually she received two messages, one arriving in a bottle and the other arriving in a leaf boat. They both read: “Who the heck are YOU?”

So she entered the conversation across the water.

And THAT was how pollution was invented….no, wait.

[cue dramatic music again]

And THAT was how Pocahontas, CoCo Chanel, and I wound up in a hot tub in the mountains and not eating the traveling chicken because it was the WRONG chicken.

one last thing to say

A few posts back I mentioned something about shutting down this blog.

I”m thinking that it’s time.

I met the man who wrote and is singing this song…met him twice, actually, and he is a wonderful writer and speaker. His name is James Tealy.

The video, coincidentally enough, was produced by the youth department of the church my mom and step-dad attend.

Wubby, Little Girl, and all my other “children”, this is for you.

impromptu travels, parts 1 and 2

Well, May was just too much fun.

Part 1: not  much fun. So, back on the 6th I had to go for some routine blood work, and a strange thing happened. Actually, strange things have been happening for a while now. I’ve been having sudden episodes of hypo tension…rapid drop in blood pressure. We’ve been trying to figure out what the problem was, but couldn’t find anything obvious. Sooooo, there I am, in the Outpatient clinic at the local hospital getting routine blood work done. Unfortunately, my veins didn’t feel like cooperating. No big deal, happens every now and then and they just try again. We’re discussing this, the nurses and I, and I feel it coming….the BP drop. I remember telling the nurses I didn’t feel well, at all. I remember someone saying they needed a BP monitor, NOW, and I remember them checking it: 60/30, pulse rate 50-something. A wheelchair appeared out of nowhere, and I was hauled down the hall to ER where things started happening very fast. IV: not going the first time, and I still have the knot in my arm to prove it. Second IV: much better. Nurse calling Hubby and telling him he might want to high-tail it down the road to Lexington. Several very nice ER gentlemen helping me w/ IVs, blood samples, morphine for some chest pain that decided to show up in the middle of all this. (Why anyone would deliberately take morphine is a complete mystery to me….it felt AWFUL.)

Things started to calm down a bit, a really nice CNA helped me get out of my soaked clothes and into a dry gown, complete w/ rear end hanging out. Sigh. My family history with respect to cardiac problems is less than stellar, resulting in a 24 hours stay in cardiac ICU. People should not be allowed to have that much fun all at once. Chest x-ray (still in ER); cardiac sonogram (some nice respiratory therapy volunteer came in during the sonogram and asked me what was on the TV!), a very nice doctor that explained vasovagal syncope and the fact that I probably shouldn’t be on a diuretic for high blood pressure, and since I just finished an Anatomy and Physiology class, I understood what he was saying. Another very nice cardiologist came by and explained the same thing about the syncope and the BP medication. The two of them agreed to change the BP med, and keep me overnight.

Cardiac ICU is NOT  a place where you get any rest. I remember my dad saying that very thing every time he was in there, which was more times than I’d like to count. The next morning I had a cardiac CT scan, complete with contrast die that makes a hot flash feel like a spring breeze. No coronary issues. So they sent me home, wearing a heart monitor for 48 hours, just to make sure nothing was going on that they missed.

Long story short: I’m fine, I just shouldn’t have been on HCTZ (I can spell that word out if you’d like to be impressed, but that would just be showing off!) So far I don’t show any signs of inheriting any of my dad’s cardiac problems, which is a relief to know.

I also learned just how much hell my dad went through every time he was hospitalized. And my respect for his ability to remain positive in the midst of  each escalating crisis grew ten-fold. He was always in good spirits, at least when we were there to visit. He loved to chat w/ the nurses and doctors who cared for him throughout his illness, and even went so far as to construct a stained glass piece of a broken and reassembled heart to give to his cardiologist, the man he called the “heart mender.”

Part 2: Last Sunday Hubby and I ran away from home for the day to Oak Island. For the unenlightened, Oak Island is probably the least developed of North Carolina’s coastal islands. It runs east to west, and sits south west of Wilmington, between Bald Head Island and Holden Beach, the next island to the south. There’s nothing much there except houses, a few condos, a U.S. Coast Guard station, the Oak Island lighthouse, Fort Caswell (a Southern Baptist retreat), 2 piers and one golf course. Maybe a couple of cheesy motels, and local restaurants. No fancy hotels, no 5-star restaurants (although there are a few very good local ones), no amusement parks. In other words, nothing but beach. We left home at 6 AM, gassed up the car, stopped about halfway there, in Laurinburg, and were on the island at 10. We drove up to Caswell, then back down to 59th Street  North, turned left and drove the 2 blocks to ocean front, parked the car, and hit the beach. It was the most crowded day we’ve ever seen on Oak Island, and we’ve been going there since 1993. And it was wonderful! Warm water, plenty of sand, calm surf….heaven. The SPF 30 didn’t quite do the trick, and we didn’t take an umbrella, so there was some sunburn to contend with, small price to pay as far as I’m concerned. Lunch came from the Food Lion back up the 2 blocks from ocean front. Hubby napped, I read a book. We left at 4 PM and were home at 8. Something we will definitely do again. Soon.

So, last weekend I’m sitting on the beach at Oak Island, a place my dad dearly loved, and thinking about everything he went through, all while watching a man surf fishing, just like daddy used to do, not really catching anything, or caring that nothing was biting (except for sea skates), and wishing he was there to share the day with me. And I suppose he was. The tears were there, at least a few, and I felt better knowing that, in some small way, he was there with me.

For Daddy:

I see you everywhere.

You are in Southport, on the waterfront–watching the fishermen on the pier, the boats coming in and going out; walking the pier, checking everyone’s catch, and finding someone you  knew thirty years ago.

You are walking the beach at low tide, looking for sand dollars in the surf, and finding “sand quarters.” You pick up driftwood.

You are fishing at sunset–one of the kids in your lap. When nothing is biting, you reel in the line and hold my son until he falls asleep in your arms.

You are chatting with the waitress at Edna’s (now Beana’s, but the food is just as good), teasing her about the check: “You can keep that!”, you say.

You are salty, unshaven, the tops of your feet sunburned and peeling. You bury them in the sand.

You are Daddy, and you are here.

I remember REALLY listening to this song one summer at Oak Island. It meant a lot to me then. It means so much more to me now, for many reasons. Maybe I’ll explain them eventually. But, for now, just listening to the words and being comforted by them, rather than pained, is enough: