Blogger

Fast Dancin’

/ cigarman501 / 1 Comment

“Dance like there ain’t no tomorrow, son.” I’m near seventy, how old does someone have to be to call me son. I’m old…he’s damn old. I also thought, if there is to be no tomorrow, I plan to be doing something other than dancing.

The old man was dancin’…dancing around a bonfire that should have been warming a cool, fall evening. Instead, the roaring orange and yellow flames were adding to the oppressive heat we have been experiencing this last week of September. As I watched the embers dancing in the smoke, I worried about the red flag burning alerts that were being ignored. We haven’t had any appreciable rain in the area for six weeks and my little piece of heaven is suffering.

As I watched a hand-rolled cigarette being passed, I realized “red flags” might not be the worst law being broken. This group certainly was not suffering…unless it is from a hangover tomorrow.

The heat didn’t seem to slow the old man. He was a member of the overalls over tie-dyed crowd…a crowd I’ve only begun to embrace in my later years. I was always the “more” conservative guy in amongst the hippy types until I reassessed and from too many years in education, “monitored and adjusted.” I’ve found the tie-dyed crowd to be infinitely more caring and loving…and accepting. Seems to be the “old fart” hippy types are just more fun. I now consider myself a “middle of the road” human.

Wiry and bent, he wore faded and patched “Oshkosh By Gosh” bib overalls over a tie-dyed tee shirt in pink and green. Jerry Garcia’s bushy hair peaked out around the bib. He wore leather brogans and a leather western style hat which failed to cover his own Jerry Garcia-like hair. Tuffs like white cotton balls peaked out from under a floppy brim.

He had skin like tanned shoe leather, ancient and cut with crevasses rather than wrinkles. His face narrow, his nose hawk-like. His smile lit up his entire face and showed irregular teeth. It pulled tight over his cheek showing a lump from a “chaw of tobacky.” I never saw him take it out…and I never saw him spit. I doubt he has to worry about tapeworms.

Earlier in the day, he had been holding court on organic, sustainable farming. He regaled us on many subjects. I paid rapt attention when he enthusiastically informed us, “Chicken and bunny shit makes for the sweetest tomatoes.” Inquiring minds want to know. I saw the old POW bracelet when he pointed at someone and silently wondered what had happened to the similar one, I used to wear. Mine had been a Navy flier lost over Laos in 1967. I quit wearing it when my skin began to react to it…but not until he came home.

My new friend had bushy salt and pepper eyebrows. Like mine, uncontrollable and wild when left to grow. His eyebrows had been left to grow for a while. I found them distracting as we shared a bit of conversation and a sip or five of white liquor. The unaged spirit of this past summer’s corn bounty exploded in my stomach causing my perspiration to perspire. The old boy looked at me and smiled, “Smooth ain’t it?” I nodded as my eyes watered.

He had a bit of a snake-oil salesman’s delivery as he tried to convince me, “It’s organic and natural. Consumed in moderation, medicinal. Consumed in excess…well, what don’t kill ya makes ya stronger.” He laughed at himself and slapped me on the shoulder before going back to dancin’ with a group of little girls who called him Pappi Tom.

I watched him as he allowed his internal child to run wild. Janis’s voice, tinny from the speakers of an ancient boom box, lamented her lack of a Mercedes, a color TV, and a night on the town.

I’m lamenting my tight assed self. I watched the old man fast dancin’ with anyone nearby and realized what I’ve always known, “I have issues about turnin’ loose.” I don’t have an internal child and I want one. I needed to join the group that was passing the odd-smelling cigarette around. I’ve never been able to quit worrying about who might be watching.

Dancin’, religion…getting undressed in the light of day. Yeah, I am one tight assed forker of mortar. There is a quote by Howard Phillips Lovecraft, “Almost nobody dances sober unless they happen to be insane.” My new friend is not suffering from sobriety, and I feel the need to join him.

Don Miller is a retired teacher and coach who writes to pass the time he no longer has. His writer’s page may be accessed at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM.

How Did We Survive?

/ cigarman501 / 3 Comments

 

My downstairs air conditioner is out…specifically the air handler.  I felt it when I came downstairs first thing this morning.  For some reason, air-conditioned air at seventy-one degrees feels different than non-air-conditioned air at the same temperature.  Am I crazy? Oh yes but not because of that last statement.  I knew immediately something was amiss.

I am anxiously awaiting my rescue from the remnants of the lingering summer.  It’s not too bad…yet.  We are well shaded but I’m expecting temps in the mid-nineties by week’s end…it could be bad by Friday if my problem hasn’t been rectified by then…it could be bad tonight as inside temperatures approach a balmy seventy-five.  I don’t sleep well above seventy-two…who am I kidding?  I don’t sleep well.

I should warn you; I sweat in Biblical proportions.  Noah’s forty days and nights look like a clearing off shower.

My predicament once again has me scurrying down a pig trail that leads to those thrilling days of yesteryear.  How did we survive in the days when air-conditioning was not the norm?

I know.  You get used to what you get used to and I have become acclimated to air-conditioned air.  There was a time….

I remember an unairconditioned school building.  We never called off school because of extreme temperatures, hot or cold…but I forget we were built of sterner stuff.  As first graders, we walked ten miles to and from school, uphill in both directions, wind, rain, snow or asteroid strike be damned.

A brick building with wide and high windows.  Ceilings twenty-five feet high if they were an inch, not really but twelve at least…may be.  Unscreened, high and wide windows, I  remember the panic caused by red wasps visiting our eighth-grade history class and trying to take notes around the droplets of perspiration dripping onto my notebook.

During those wonderful years of junior high school, one young lady decided shucking her underwear might help with heat transfer…in the middle of class.   Much in the same way my wife can change clothes using her tee-shirt as her dressing room, this girl squirmed out of her slip.  Our teacher, a somewhat flustered Mister Gunter cautioned us that we should reframe from removing foundation garments due to the heat.  Somehow, we survived with most of our clothing on.

Church Sundays were the same…except for the removing of our underwear.  Tall windows open to catch whatever breeze was available.  No screens and plenty of wasps visiting, dispensing their own version of hellfire and brimstone.

Handheld funeral fans causing us to sweat more with the effort needed to keep the hot and humid air moving.  Sweat soaked dress shirts ruined when the varnish on the pews stuck to them.  I survived even if my shirts didn’t.

At home, it was ceiling box fans and window fans, sitting on the front porch until the bedroom had cooled sufficiently enough for the sandman to visit…sleeping on the front porch when it was miserably hot.  Hmm…decisions, decisions.  Sweat yourself to sleep in the bedroom from Dante’s Inferno or risk getting sucked dry by mosquitos.  I believe I’ll just lay here with a window fan installed backwards in the window at the foot off my bed.  I actually slept that way…with my head at the foot of my bed with chicken wire covering the backside of the fan so I didn’t accidentally stick a body part in it.  Somehow, we did survive…body parts and all.

I know we spent our awake time outdoors.  No matter how hot it was outside, it was cooler than inside.  A lot of the time was spent in my grandmother’s garden, playing cowboys and Indians in and around the barn or recreating World War Two in the woods or on the clay bank behind my house.  For some reason, it didn’t seem as hot then.

It’s persimmon season despite the heat and I remember running barefoot under the persimmon tree in my grandmother’s backyard.  Rotting persimmons caking on the bottom of my feet, oozing between my toes, sticking to the brown, dusty, dry dirt.  Hearing, “You chaps clean your feet before you come into this house!”  Heading to the stream that ran through the pasture trying to pry the mud off our feet.  Getting distracted with the crawfish and minnows…forgetting it was time to do my chores.  “Go out there and pick me a keen hickory!  I’m gonna switch them legs.”  No physical marks remain and eventually my feet came clean.

When my bride and I first moved to our little piece of heaven in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, we had no air conditioning and were surprised at the low ceilings our little farmhouse had…until winter hit, and we understood.  It gets cold in them thar hills.  The original owners were required to feed five fireplaces to heat their home.  Low ceilings make for a warmer house.

In the summer we never ventured onto the second floor, it was just too hot.  For seven years we survived with the help of the hemlocks, poplars and black walnuts surrounding the house along with ceiling and window fans.   Late nights sitting on the front porch waiting for the bedroom to cool down.  Just talking and rocking or swinging, holding hands, the smell of a cigar mixing with the forest smells and citronella.  Good times.  Maybe we did more than survive.

My guess is we will survive this little blip on our radar.  Still, I hope it is a short little blip.

The image is of Robert Hays sweating it out as Ted Striker in Airplane! (1980)

Further musings may be found at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM

Distant Origins

/ cigarman501 / 7 Comments

“It’s Earth Day. I wonder if we can plant more trees than people for a change?”
― Stanley Victor Paskavich

And a pig trail beckoned to me, and I followed it right down Alice’s rabbit hole.  Hello Mad Hatter.

I just watched a rerun of Star Trek Voyager and found myself sitting quietly…pondering.  I like that word…pondering.  Sounds as if I might be intelligent…many times I’ve proven differently.

The episode triggering my pondering was” Distant Origin” about a lizard resembling alien race, the Voth, and a scientist who believes his species originated from a distant planet.  Long story short, he involves a crew member of Voyager in his attempt to prove his origins theory and ends up standing trial for heresy, accused by his religious elders…led by the menacing, Minister Odala.  Shades of Fred Phelps, Sr. (See Below)

This most respected scientist is forced to recant his findings to save Voyager from being destroyed and the crew and himself put into prison.  A choice between truth or evil masquerading as truth.  That is where my pig trail became a rabbit hole.  The scientist chooses evil masquerading as the truth to save his new friend, loses his position and is forced into a job equivalent of counting paper clips.

As the program closes, his partner in crime, the Voyager character Chakotay, gives the scientist, Gegen, an Earth globe as a gift before he transports up and Voyager leaves. All is well in the Delta Quadrant except for the Voth who don’t know, save the scientist, they are really descendants of dinosaurs from Planet Earth.  Nice yarn…sounded familiar.

The episode is an allegory and drew heavily from the relationship between Galileo Galilee of telescope fame, the Catholic Church in general and Pope Urban VIII specifically.  The story leading to Galileo’s trial for heresy before The Inquisition is much more involved than the Star Trek episode or for me to write about.  Is that applause I hear?

In the condensed version, Galileo made the mistake of agreeing with Copernicus that the Earth orbited the Sun rather than the Church’s belief of an Earth-centered universe…everything in the universe orbiting the earth.

Galileo further complicated his life by publishing his studies in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, a work which poked fun at the Pope as it laid out Galileo’s findings using a protagonist named “Simplicio”, which connotes simpleton in Italian.  Unjustly, some folks drew the conclusion Simplicio might be a metaphor for Pope Urban VIII.  Unintended consequences? One person drawing the conclusion was Pope Urban himself.

Again, long story short, Galileo was put on trial before The Inquisition for voicing opinions contrary to the Holy Scriptures and forced to recant under threat of excommunication although he was never formally charged. According to popular legend, after recanting his theory that the Earth moved around the Sun, Galileo allegedly muttered the rebellious phrase “And yet it moves.”

He spent the rest of his life under virtual house arrest which was better than being slowly roasted at a stake like a Boston butt.  He was still quite prolific with his writings and despite being banned, published many scientific works. Galileo is considered the father of classical physics.

I’m a bit of a “quare” duck for myriads of reasons but a couple of the more benign ones are that I hold degrees in both history and science education and at one time considered the ministry as a calling.  Boy, I fell off that wagon.  Between having to learn Greek and an overzealous youth minister who told me my mother would survive ALS if she believed hard enough, I turned to a life of cussin’, women and drink…well up to a point.  I still cuss too much and honestly; it was more drink than women.

When I said I had two degrees I wasn’t bragging…well, a little but was giving an example of why I get confused sometimes about the religious acceptance of science and historical perspective.  Modern folk might not understand why the Catholic Church held so much power and desired to keep scientific discoveries secret.  It was about maintained power, some of which the Church had lost having battled with Martin Luther’s protestants during the previous century.  Excommunication was and is a powerful deterrent for a Catholic.  Without the sacraments, one can’t get to heaven.  Power over the masses.

Some folks still discount science when it disagrees with the Holy Scriptures.  Considering ninety-seven percent of climatologist believing climate change is real and man fueled, I don’t understand why SOME, I said some, not all, not even most…maybe.  I don’t understand why some Bible believers have a problem with science as it relates to climate change.  I have heard said it doesn’t matter, God won’t allow climate, or anything else, to destroy the Earth.  I have a particularly good friend, and a true man of God tell me that.  Maybe he is correct, but I wager we can destroy all humanity, and the Earth will continue its annual trip around the Sun until the sun expands into a red giant before collapsing into itself as a white dwarf…if you believe Galileo and Copernicus and other astronomers.

I attempt to follow the teachings of Jesus and for some reason don’t have a problem believing that climate change is real, and that man is the primary culprit.  What I have trouble with is believing a pair of Platypus Duckbills trekked from Mt. Ararat in Turkey to Australia, multiplying as they went but we find no Platypus Duckbills anywhere else…alive or fossil remains.  I know.  God works in mysterious ways…so does science but the mysteries of science usually can be explained.

There are many Bible verses commanding good stewardship of our earth, in fact, a moral obligation to preserve and sustain our earth.  One comes quite early in the Bible, Genesis 1:26-31.  I’ll let you look it up.  The KJV version uses the words “dominion over”.  Other translations use the word stewardship.  Dominion does not mean free to use as we wish, dominion means stewardship…to maintain…to control…not to destroy if we so desire.

Many of our leaders, many who profess their religious beliefs quite loudly, or have their minions profess them, seem to be worried that trying to solve the problem of, or even uttering the words, climate change, might slow our economy.  We certainly don’t want to hurt our GDP for something as unimportant as sustaining our planet…or worse having it interfere with their potential candidacy for higher office.  I honestly believe their distant origin might be somewhere south of heaven.

Others believe until the “entire world” gets involved, for instance, the Indians and Chinese, we are pissing up a rope.  Folks…someone’s got to lead and there was a time when the United States led in categories other than bombs dropped, civilians killed and mass murders.  Realizing this is not Biblical, but it should be, “God helps those who help themselves.”

We are not helping ourselves and before I “throw stones”, I admit I am not without the sin of not doing enough…but I am trying…if I could just get rid of that gas-guzzling, carbon dioxide spewing truck.  I can trade it for a horse and wagon.

Well, it is time to bid the Mad Hatter adieu and crawl back out of Alice’s rabbit hole.  It is the day I walk with my best friend.  We usually cure all the world’s ills while we walk or if not, over the cup of coffee we consume at the local coffee shop and art café afterward.  Hmm, that’s the distant origins of my leftist ideas…nope, Hawk still has rightist ideas and that helps balance me.

From above: Fred Waldron Phelps Sr. (November 13, 1929 – March 19, 2014) was an American minister and disbarred attorney who served as pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church and became known for his homophobic views and protests near the funerals of gay people, military veterans, and disaster victims who he believed were killed as a result of God punishing the U.S. for having “bankrupt values” and tolerating homosexuality. From Wikipedia

Don Miller has released a new book under the pen, Lena Christenson.  Dark Tempest and others may be accessed at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM or at Lena’s site https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B07B6BDD19

INDEPENDENCE DAY AND BARBEQUE

/ cigarman501 / 7 Comments

My introduction to BBQ came in the early Fifties during Independence Day celebrations held at my school. As a family, we would load up the car and go to the school for an afternoon of celebrating our independence from Great Britain, fun, games and, most importantly, BBQ. I cannot remember if there were decorations, I am sure there were, but I remember going to the field behind the school and seeing the pole that had been set up for the greased pole climb and a small cage with a greased pig. Hum, greased pig, greased pole, and BBQ sounds like we have a trend going. No, that statement is not true – there was nothing greasy about our BBQ.

I have no idea who had cooked the pigs, but I do know my Uncle James had donated them and had overseen the night-long festivities and I was too young to know what that might have entailed. All I know is that you could smell those hogs cooking and see the smoke rising out of the soil that covered the pit. The smell was too, too, too… I am at a loss for words, but it was as close to heaven as I want to get without dying.

Besides eating the BBQ there were patriotic stories to be told, games to be played and winners to be awarded. There might have been a softball game before the older boys attempted to climb the greased pole. And then there was the contest to catch a greased pig – a contest in which I once excelled and won. That year it wasn’t much of a chase. As I started toward him to make my grab, the little porker ran right at me and rolled ove4r. What a bummer, I didn’t even get my clothes dirty. It was like a “tag you’re it” scenario. We also ran sack races and three-legged races. For the less mobile athletes, pie-eating or watermelon-seed-spitting contests were enjoyed. After all of that excitement it was finally time to eat.

We sat down to succulent pulled-pork BBQ served with Dutch Fork mustard sauce, hash (not to be confused with Brunswick Stew) served over long grain WHITE rice (not the healthy brown stuff), Cole slaw, white bread and, what I guess, was a pickled “bread and butter style” cauliflower medley on the side.

Yes sir! It was truly heaven-on-a-plate and an argument for why immigration is a good thing. Also, it was a time that you could thank God for having a belt buckle that would allow you to ease the pressure on a BBQ-stuffed stomach. Thinking it couldn’t get any better, I finally reached the age where I was old enough to participate in the festivities associated with the production of hardwood coal – drinking and storytelling.

During my college days, a group of us “summer schoolers” decided that a pulled-pork BBQ party might be in order for those of us not going home for the Independence Day break. Several of us who had experience in this Southern tradition and were tabbed to prepare the feast.

One of my jobs that night was to stir a big iron kettle full of hash. For the uninformed, and you may want to remain that way, hash is all the “lesser” or unrecognizable parts of the pig, coarsely shredded and cooked with potatoes, onions, spices, and cider vinegar until it all falls apart into an unrecognizable hash. I’ll never forget as I stirred the hash that night with a boat oar, I saw something white roll to the top. What the…? As I kept stirring, it turned over and I saw …an eyeball staring back at me! Gulp. As I said earlier, stay misinformed.

After such a hard night of stirring, drinking, and lying, I mean storytelling, it did not take long after dawn for someone to point out the need for breakfast. Several of my fraternity brothers went to Winn Dixie and came back with enough chicken halves to feed us all. Winn Dixie donated them. Those roasted chickens may have been the best breakfast that I have ever eaten. All the great chefs say that tasty food is first about taste and then about presentation. I think they should have added that it is all about the company you are sharing it with. Good friends will even make bad food better.

Hours later the BBQ was finished, and it was time for the decisive moment. I got my plate with the hash and rice, and for the first time ever concerning BBQ I hesitated a bit before my first bite. Remembering that white thing floating in the hash, I had a little moment of contemplation along with a big hunger for that BBQ. It was then that I made the decision that if I had liked hash before I knew there might be an eyeball in it then I could still like it after… and I did! Eyeball and all!

Independence Day is about much more than BBQ, bottle rockets and patriotic music despite being a terrific way to celebrate it…if you remember sacrifices Americans have made to maintain it. From George Washington and his troops at Valley Forge, to the 54th Massachusetts attack on Battery Wagner, Marines at Iwo Jima, the Chosin Reservoir or Que Son, the Freedom Riders, and Civil Rights Marchers, all have made sacrifices, some ultimate, to insure our continued independence. We don’t need to forget that fact and allow it to get lost in mounds of BBQ, especially, this year.

I do not believe we can continue our divisiveness and maintain our independence. We are STILL the greatest country in the world despite the many issues facing us that must be worked out. Maybe if our leaders sat down together with a mound of BBQ compromise might be reached. It is hard to yell at each other with a mouthful of pig.

A portion of this came from Don Miller’s book PATHWAYS, stories from his
youth, which can be purchased at http://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM