The Eighth of January

“The Eighth of January” is an old fiddle tune. It’s the first substantial tune of any kind I ever picked out by ear. I was 14 and had been playing the banjo a few months. I stumbled upon the first 5 notes or so purely by accident, happened to recognize the melody, and was off to the races. “The Eighth of January” is the tune “The Battle of New Orleans” is set to. (I’m not sure, but I think the original tune, “Eighth of January”, actually commemorates the battle.) The fiddle tune is just played much faster.

Looking back on it, the banjo was another of the strange twists my life has taken. It was an odd choice for a city boy whose first 15 years were spent in a house almost devoid of music. (Sadly, this was true both literally and figuratively.) My absentee father had long since exposed me to music and I was fooling around with playing by the time I was 10. Playing music, though, wasn’t “just something we did” in my mother’s household. The banjo-blame lies squarely with Dad’s younger brother, who was an accomplished banjoist and took the time to point me in the right direction. Dad was also a culprit. He bought me a banjo. Additionally, I’d been to my first Bluegrass festival that summer and seen the great Bill Monroe on one his “on” occasions. I’d been to a few rock concerts prior to that, but rock-n-roll is largely devoid of the virtuosity and power that is commonplace in Bluegrass. Monroe’s show had a profound affect on me and still ranks among the very best I’ve ever seen in any musical genre.

Digging deeper, I believe a desire to please my father was instrumental in my taking up the banjo. He didn’t push me that way, but I knew it would meet with his approval, and approval was something I was desperate for at 14. Additionally, it provided me the opportunity to become “good at something”, and I was desperate for that too. I frequently practiced as much as eight hours a day the first couple of years I was learning to play. That was when my obsessive-compulsive tendency first reared its head. It’s also when I realized the secret to most anything worth doing in life is putting in the time to become good at it. A desire to excel at music was one of the things I used to justify my leaving my mother’s house and moving 400 miles away to live with my father when I was 15. The banjo shaped my future in both dramatic and subtle ways.

Better Lucky Than Good (part four)

Note: See parts one, two, and three This is the final post in the series.

Luck smiled upon my step-mother. She was a late bloomer, but once the wheels turned for her, they did so in a big way. Her’s is a “right place at the right time” kind of story.

Step-mom grew up a dirt poor hillbilly in East Tennessee. Her father abandoned her family around the time she was born. Her mother did the best she could.

On the day she graduated high school step-mom moved from the country to Chattanooga, Tennessee. She’s always had balls. She’s blessed with what I’d guess is average intelligence. She was also blessed with beauty. Nice features, pretty straight white teeth, and a nice rack all came with the package. I suspect my father knew he was in the market for some of her the first time he saw her.

The two were married and produced a couple of healthy beautiful boys in short order. My dad was working as a sports editor for one of the papers in Chattanooga. When the government shut the paper down for unfair trade practices Dad’s story book second marriage met reality.

Post Chattanooga Post, Dad worked in various guises around town. He couldn’t get on with one of the other papers though, so he finally took a job across the state at the Memphis Press-Scimitar. That was around ‘72. The next couple of years were hard, in as much as both Dad and Step-mom hated Memphis.

They adjusted though, and while my half-brothers were still in grade school, Dad and one of his and Step-mom’s good-time buddies talked step-mom into going into the real estate business in Desoto County, Mississippi. That was 1979 and as luck would have it, Desoto County was just beginning to boom at the time. (White flight out of Memphis.) After a tough few years, which anybody whose ever worked in real estate can relate to, she turned the corner.

By the end of the ’80s she was earning in excess of $100,000 dollars every year. I have no idea what she makes now, but they live like royalty. I worked for her for a minute in the late 90s and she had closings everyday. Usually more than one.

Step-mom has no special gifts that would have predicted her success in the cut throat real estate business. She’s not especially bright, but I’ve never met a realtor who was. She’s not charismatic or even moderately charming. What she is is doggedly determined, very energetic, extremely motivated by money, and utterly unencumbered by any sort of scruples. She came that way from the factory. It didn’t hurt being in the right place at the right time to get in on the ground floor of one of the biggest urban migrations in the US. The gods grinned at her and she smiled right back.

Better Lucky Than Good (part three)

Note: See parts one and two

Luck played a huge part in my maternal grandmother’s mother’s life. Most of it was bad. Who knows how things might have panned out for her had she gotten a different set of breaks? What actually happened to her is interesting and instructive, especially to those who profess to make their own luck.

Great Grandmama was married to a poor Georgia farm boy who’d decided to seek his fortune in town. They met at the Georgia State Sanatorium in Milledgville around 1900. At that time it was the largest employer in Georgia. She’d gone there to study nursing but somehow wound up as the operator for the facilities primitive phone system. Great Granddaddy worked in the laundry.

After they were married Great Grandmama’s relatively prosperous father set the young couple up with their own laundry business in Palatka, Florida. I have no idea of the potential of such a business. I would imagine with a little luck and a lot of hard work, it would have thrived and provided a comfortable, maybe even prosperous life for the couple. That, however, wasn’t meant to be.

Great Granddaddy developed some sort of respiratory condition from inhaling the fumes of the chemicals used in the cleaning processes. It must have been serious. On the advice of a doctor, the couple sold the business, pulled up stake, and moved to a section of land they’d bought sight unseen in Wilmer, Alabama. The plan was to return to farming and country life.

Even though they owned their own rich farmland, the challenges of farming proved to great. After a few years the couple and their three daughters began a series of moves around Mobile County. Great Granddaddy worked a variety of jobs. To say the least, times were hard.

Then, after a few years, luck smiled on the family. Great Granddaddy took a job as foreman of a large citrus plantation in Theodore. The job came with a nice house to live in, and that was a first for my grandmother. She remembers having plenty to eat, and that included all the fruit — oranges, satsumas, tangerines, etc. — that they cared to consume. She began to feel a part of the student body at Theodore School. Life was good. By far the best she’d ever had it.

Then, in the summer of her eleventh year, a powerful hurricane struck the South Alabama coast. It totally destroyed the plantation where they lived, and with it their livelihood. The family had no choice but to return to their abandoned farm in Wilmer. That December my grandmother turned 12. Three months later her mother gave birth her sixth daughter. Two weeks later Great Grandmama died from pneumonia. Cold, malnutrition, and lack of medical attention were all factors in her demise. The stars in their courses were against her her entire adult life. Who can overcome such as that?

Joy of Dogs (part two)

You haven’t lived until you’ve waded through a stinking lake of basset hound piss in the middle of the night. I lived through it once. Now the memory motivates me to bound out of bed before the first whimper clears the big dog’s throat.

Last night close to three nature called my 80 pound, eight year old basset. I was sort of pissed because I’ve been having trouble sleeping, and that leaves me short tempered. Still, I pulled myself from the trap and lumbered down the hall to let her out. Naturally she fooled around out there for the better part of half an hour. I’d just dozed off on the sofa in the dog room when her huge bark brought me back.

So I let her in and returned to bed. Before I could even pull the covers up, she started whimpering again. It was starting to thunder, and she and Number Two, a mongrel terrier type, are both terrified of bad weather compliments of Hurricane Frederick. So I stormed down the hall and popped her big ole ass with the sports page. The terrier took cover, but the basset didn’t flinch. I threatened to kill her, she stared me down, then I headed back to bed.

Before I could even get my door shut good she was rumbling down the hall. I know when I’m beat, so I opened my door and let her in. I climbed back in bed and on cue, the terrier started screaming. I called him, but he wouldn’t come. He was still fretting about my spanking his sister. So I got back up, went down the hall, picked him up and set him right back down. That reset him and he bolted for the safety of my room.

A few minutes later, as the storm abated, the dogs settled down. A few hours later, now, I feel like I’ve been up partying for a couple of days. Help.

Joy of Dogs (part one)

We have a house and yard full of dogs. Number Three came in August, a rescue like numbers One and Two. Now I know that three is one too many for me. I also now know that it’s way too late for me to do anything about it.

Crap collects at quite a clip when there are three dogs contributing to the collection. For some reason my dogs like dumping right off the patio. That way, when I’m sitting on the sun deck, the stench is overpowering. So I police the yard for poop several times a week. I transfer the turds to the very back of the yard in hopes the dogs will take the hint and start shitting back there. The project has been going on for about a month. So far, though, they aren’t going for it.

Anyway, I did the poop patrol a few days ago. Then, a few minutes later as I sat in my chair trying to enjoy a Sudoku and some DirecTV, I kept smelling dog shit. Instinctively I checked my slippers, even though I wear a special pair of dog shit shoes when on poop patrol. Next I suspected one of the beasts was farting. I ruled that out pretty quick. I can differentiate between dog shit and dog gas. After about 30 minutes the stink was really irritating me. Then, on the back of one of the legs of my jeans, I found the culprit. I still don’t know how it got there, but there was dog shit all over my pants!

To make a long story shorter, that was several days ago, and I’m still smelling dog shit when I sit in my chair, and I really like sitting in my chair! I’ve been over it with a fine tooth comb. I’ve moved it to see if there was fecal matter beneath. I’ve sniffed the damn thing from top to bottom. Nothing. Then, just when I’ve put the whole terrible episode behind me, the shit smell looms into my nostrils yet again. Shit!

Better Lucky Than Good (part two)

Note: See Part One

My father likes to say “better lucky than good”. His family has good genes. They didn’t earn them. It just worked out like that. They are lucky. His parents were dirt poor folks from rural Alabama. Neither one got more than eight years worth of education. They were smart enough, however, to move away from the country and to Mobile. Mobile isn’t a step up from most places, but from Butler County, Alabama, it is by almost any measure. They were always poor, especially by today’s standards, but life in Mobile afforded them a degree of comfort and opportunity they’d never have known out in the woods.

Either Granddaddy or Grandmama must have been pretty damn smart. All three of their kids were successful and wiped the dust of Alabama from their shoes long ago. My father was the oldest child. He managed to parlay a flair for the written word and the ability and audacity to bullshit into a successful journalism career. He wasn’t pulitzer material, but he did manage to start two families, stick with the latter one, and spend roughly 50% more than he ever earned.

The youngest, a girl, married an ambitious Mobile boy and they blasted off for New England straight out of college. Their only child excelled at both business and information technology at the University of Georgia, formed his own company with a group of guys right out of college, and is seriously considering retirement. He’s in his early 30s. My aunt jettisoned her first husband, who was certainly successful, for a much younger multi-millionaire and now “summers” in France and New England when she’s not toughing it out in Vancouver, their primary residence.

The middle child was cursed with diabetes. He lived with it practically his entire life. Out of high school, where he didn’t excel, it cost him several jobs because of insulin shock incidents. As a result my grandparents somehow scraped up the money to send him to college where he blossomed, finishing second in his class, then first in his med school class. He had successful research and administrative careers at med schools in Mississippi and Texas before his drinking caught up with him. He was doing pretty good after his seventh trip through rehab but he slipped. They probably would have kept him on anyway, but when he had a confederate uniform tailored and started reporting for work in it, they had to let him go. In essence, his luck ran out.

Had my father and his siblings been less lucky, and thus less intelligent, they’d have probably lived their lives out right here in Mobile working for the city, the university, or maybe the ragged Mobile Press Register. They were also fortunate that their working lives coincided with better economic times for the country. As blessed as they were and are, whether they could start with essentially nothing in today’s climate and still thrive is highly suspect.

Hank Williams and Uncle Homer

The summer of 1976 found me preparing to enter high school and the ninth grade. Actually, I wasn’t preparing for it. It was just inevitable. I was probably nervous but I really don’t remember.

About the time my Babe Ruth baseball season ended my paternal grandmother’s Aunt Marion died. I didn’t know Aunt Marion. I lived in Mobile and she, like most of my father’s people, lived in Butler County, Alabama. My father came down from Memphis to take my grandmother to the funeral and I ended up going along.

There’s only one way to describe Butler County, and that’s rural. I’d been through there a few times over my 14 years, but never enough to forge anything remotely resembling a relationship. I wouldn’t have recognized any of my relatives from up there had I passed them on the street. Still wouldn’t. Such is the world I live in.

Only a couple of things stand out from that visit over 30 years ago. After the funeral, we went to visit “Uncle Homer”. He was one of my recently-departed grandfather’s older brothers and the physical resemblance to Granddaddy was striking. His wife let us in and chatted with Dad and Grandmama for a time. The old man never so much as acknowledged our presence. “Uncle Homer” was engrossed in a professional wrestling match he was watching on a portable black and white television. He spit tobacco juice in a coffee can. Part of me thinks he was playing a fiddle, but I’m not certain about that. From time-to-time he would roar with laughter at the antics of the fake wrestlers. He never looked at me. It was surreal. It may also have been alcoholism, Alzheimer’s, or dementia, but I hadn’t been introduced to those yet.

Later we went over to visit one of Dad’s cousins. He had a modern house and a bunch of hotrods all over the yard. While Dad and Grandmama visited with the adults, I adjourned to the bedroom of one of the kids who was about my age. We were both interested in music and swapped a few licks on his acoustic guitar. Peter Frampton was all the rage that summer, but my cousin had never heard of him! He’d never heard of any of the bands I was into. It’s entirely possible he’d never heard of rock-n-roll. For him, Hank Williams was still the one and only, even though he’d been dead since 1953!

You’d have had to have been there I guess.