|
Click here for Next Section |
A Country RagHoller Notes
|
By James Brooks
|
|
This, it strikes me, as I grope for the alarm, is the show business
version of immortality. You're never dead so long as somebody is alive
to listen to your records, even when they're on CDs. Some starry-eyed
kid in Iowa once stayed in baby sitting with his girl friend while the
big folks went out to party, but never had near as much fun as the kids
at home did, listening to Guy Lumbago playing his theme song from atop
the Edgewater Beach Hotel all the way to Chicago, the kids long ago
unconscious, the big kids snuggling on the couch and discovering that it
feels really good to no longer have the curse of virginity over your
heads. I grope for the alarm again. It is 9 minutes later. It is a snooze alarm, and I have been snoozing, but it comes to me now that it has been a long time since I groped for anything other than the alarm in my snoozes. The ghastly realization comes to me that it is I who is keeping Guy Lumbago and the Loyal Canadians remembered in my memories. It is I who had a better time at home than the big folks did down at the Moose Lodge. Speaking of groping, a cat is trying to move the curtain aside. It is Reece, the recycled orange kitty found last January at the recycling center, who has never figured out how to go around the curtain, but must go through it. Speaking of shock! As I open the window he is frozen by more than the wintery blast that walks right in and sits right down. I open an eye to whiteness. It has snowed an inch during the night. Reece is paralyzed, but I push him out onto the 2x10 ledge I made for the cats to replace the window sill. They can make decisions just as well out there. I push his tail aside and slam down the window.
The next thing I hear as I turn my head from sleeping on my good ear, is
a truck backing up over me. Nope. It's the snooze alarm going off again,
and this time it's a middle-aged canned Frank Sinatra crooning that
Chicago is his kind of town. Of course he never got closer than Las
Vegas, especially not in the winters that drove me to Tennessee. "Chicago is long jumper cables,Problem is I can't sleep any more. There is an orange kitty belly splayed over my window as Reece is reaching for the top, thinking that it will get my attention better than a polite pat on the glass and he's right. Another cold blast as he comes in quicker than he went out, giving me a weather kitty indication of wind velocity. I pet him. The weather kitty says it is cold. It run my hand over his back and there is now enough snow to make a snowball. The weather kitty says light snowfall, tapering to flurries at dawn. Okay, now I have the weather kitty forecast. It's time to get up. Surprisingly, it is warm enough to get to the bathroom without dressing. Next destination, the kitchen with cat tails erected in delight ahead of me, swishing the cobwebs of sleep away from breakfast. Here the thermometer tells me 68 F. Not bad.
|
The cats are used to being ignored as I play with the wood stove on a
first priority basis these days. A month of continuous burning has
reduced a truckload of red oak and ash to the need to call the wood man
again. The fire box sleeps still after its roaring night under the
covers of ash, a couple red eyes of embers winking at me, but no mercy.
I scrape them aside and pile the ash over the grate, poking the stuff
through the slots with a wooden paint stirrer, the best tool I've found
for the job. Behind the stove a pile of fireplace tools that people have
given me lie in a hump. The stick and a small coal shovel are all the
tools I need to move the fire around, , remove the grate, scrape the
ashes into the box, and then outside, wearing only PJs and Dutch plastic
garden shoes to toss the gray stain out onto the fresh snow in the
driveway. A square box of ashes invariably makes a circular stain on the
snow. My physicist friend Ignacy could probably discourse upon this as
being some kind of effect named after a Polish mathematician.
My dwindling wood pile has once again duped me with windless days into
not weighting the tarp down, and the cold front that brought the snow
first blew off the tarp, so the snow could cover the wood. But it's too
cold to soak in, if I just get out here before it melts with a broom.
With an armload of wood and the ash box dangling from a finger I make my
way across the fine drift of snow drifted onto the porch, with fresh cat
tracks running across it in disdain. The cats are seriously hungry as I
return and dump the wood in the box. No danger of hitting them, they
have already led me back to the kitchen. Just awhile longer - a large split log at the back, the coals raked in front of it, a narrow split log across the front, several pages of wadded up free newspaper shopper atop the coals, a double handful of twigs atop that just as the paper bursts into brighter orange than my cat, then a narrow piece of split oak from outdoors atop that to keep it going. A length of round wood about 2.5 inches completes the holy triangle of the only way to build a fire that works and it's one more day without having to strike a match - the hallmark of wood stove tending. Now we're in the home stretch as I pour water for coffee, the yin and yang of catdom swirling at my feet, one common and orange, the other elegant in tuxedo black and white with the effete name of Persimmon (found me at Persimmon Ridge Park), I measure out the oatmeal and as soon as the door of the microwave slams, the whir of infra red micro-waves seems to be bombarding the cats as they get very restless and begin making strange noises in their throats, knowing what comes next. It is a half can of Friskies Sea Captain's Choice, a strange choice for creatures who never got within 500 miles of the coast, evenly divided onto two dishes and set before them, Reece on the right, Persimmon on the left. Now I jog, mostly running in place, to the bathroom, hoping my heart rate will climb to the point that it will spare a small drop of blood to the glucometer. And 45 seconds later I am 121 blood sugar - a sedentary day yesterday and three more such ahead before I return to work in the new millennium. As I pour pills and vitamins in my hand and down my throat with grapefruit juice to sustain and regulate my various out-of-whack functions I think about when I was in primary grades and first contemplated the year 2000 and whether I would live to see it, and counted up my age at that time. I would be over 60. I would be old. Hopefully I would be coming in for a soft landing someplace warm when that occurred. Well, two out of three ain't bad for a kid new to prophecy.
|
Graphic above: Holiday lights on John Deere
|
Graphic: Steve Cook of Jonesborough Art Glass Gallery creating glass art (Click left or right on flowers for mini-slideshow)   
 "...Our electoral system. Our government. Our markets. Our private ownership. Our corporations. Our divisions of labor. Our institutional racial and ethnic persecution. Our familial and organizational sexism, misogyny, and homophobia. These imprison us. And everyone knows that pretty much everything is broken. But no one is going to do much about it, not even be outraged much less struggle about it, until they believe two things. (1) That life could be much better. And (2) that we can get from where we are to that much better place if we work hard enough. "No one over eight years old and not in complete denial truly believes in 2001 that our U.S. system is honorable, worthy, or just. Those at the top know the system serves them and have decided that that’s just dandy. Their morals are toast. The rest of us know the system sucks. We try to make do. "Yes, many people intone favorable words about democracy and freedom and don appropriate rhetorical garb to get through the day. But no one really believes the myths, not deep down. Folks don’t enlarge their doubts into full critiques nor adopt associated protest agendas, it is true. But this isn’t because they believe in 'the system.' It is partly for want of time after working, caring for their kids, and sleeping. It is partly because they don’t see any congenial avenue for dissenting. But it is mostly because they doubt that dissent matters. "Without believing in new institutions and an accessible path to attain them, protest seems to them like hopeless whining that leads nowhere. Most folks look away. The bad guys get even worse. "...The big irony about the election, by the way, is that other than the very few rich folk who vote their real interests and care avidly about doing so, the half of the population who actually goes out and votes are not significantly more involved or concerned than the half who don’t vote. In fact, I submit for your consideration that U.S. voters who vote do so largely because to not vote would violate the assumptions and protocols of their communities and their superficially held personal mythologies. Not because they sincerely believe they are exercising an influential democratic responsibility. And I submit that U.S. non-voters who stay home do so for pretty much the same reason. They abide their community’s norm, which is 'why vote given that the candidates are two heads a single corporate party that remorselessly screws me?' " -- Michael Albert, A Cup of Crap, Znet
|
|
Questions? Comments? Email James Brooks.
Comeback of the Bears, a satiric look at East Tennessee by
James Brooks, Jonesborough TN, has been nominated for an American Book
Award and a PEN-Hemingway Award.
"The nominations have the effect of raising the perception of the novel
from a regional novel to one that can be appreciated by a national
audience," Brooks said. "It should greatly help expand distribution of
the book, and for that I am grateful, yet I try to keep it in the
perspective that many are called but few are chosen."
Plans are now underway for a signing tour in early February that will
cover 25 book stores in six states, ranging from Ohio to Arkansas and
across Tennessee. Similar signing tours for the tier of Southern states
from South Carolina to Alabama and the Chicago Metro area are in the
works for March and June.
Since the book was released in October, Brooks has attended 10 signings
and given several readings at book stores in Northeast Tennessee.
Contact:
James Brooks,
114 Malone Hollow Road,
Jonesborough, TN 37659,
423-753-7831,
comeback@usit.net.
|
Note: November voter turnout in the author's hometown, where citizens organized, litigated and elected representatives they felt more congenial and responsive to local interests, was 90 percent.text c. James Brooks, graphics c. Jeannette Harris; January 2001. All rights reserved.
|
Click here for Next Section (Homespun) |