The Old Man

I have seen his face, somewhere behind my reflection.
I hear his whispers in the dark, driving me from rest.
I have suffered his blows upon the good in me.
I have grappled with him, viciously assaulted him, but he will not be subdued.

I am unable to sever myself from him;
he is welded to me and I am torn from his constant abrasion.

Born with me, he is my burden; I have carried him all of my days.
Panting, gnashing, gnawing, murmuring; he writhes inside of me.
He is a sickness within me, requiring constant nursing.

He is the old man, a mortal coil encumbering my every action.
Shackled together he, my constant companion, slows my pace.

Oh! To press my thumbs into his eyes on a dark, rain-soaked field;
to drive my fingers into his throat; to squeeze the life from him;
to release him from his chains, would be the end of me as well.

So, I will continue to bear him, and his cur-like nature, throughout the remainder of my years.

Maybe he will quiet himself as we walk into the ages.

God of War

To break from her corrupt gaze is to live a life of peace and to harvest the fruit of life.

Sublime is her call; deceit pours like syrup from her full mouth.

I have followed her with multitudes of other young men, beating our chests, and pining for her hot soft skin.

Her touch is a haunting, and a horror in the night.

Her bosom is the grave.

Salvation

Summer, 08’

The chipmunk, panting rapidly, had narrowly escaped the jaws of the canines that were in his pursuit; he paused, in horror, at their backsides as they dug for his home under the porch.
His black and white camouflage did little to hide him from my daughters ‘pet acquiring’ eyes that had watched the scene unfold; the shocked little pest was soon wriggling in her delicate hand.
As the rodent sank his tiny teeth into her finger she thought "Dad has callused man hands, surly he can hold this little varmint better than I can!" and with victory in her eyes she carried the now vicious ball of fur into the house.

My daughter was born at the perfect moment in my life; she entered this world when it began to darken for me. I was twenty-one when she arrived, and in no way, was I prepared to raise her; I was wound up with immaturity, depression, and grief.

Her months in the womb were difficult, resulting in numerous, journeys to the hospital.
Her birth, long labored, was finalized by an emergency cesarean section.
My soul turned and tears came as I held her tiny body and listened to her delicate voice.
The glow of her life warmed my heart and planted my feet in the ground.

She was marked with hemangianoma’s on her nose and hip. The pediatrician assured us that these were common and would fade.
At four months of age she began having seizures that caused her breathing to halt; my family medical history mandated an EEG as well as a CAT Scan.

An "un-definable mass" was found in her brain.

The doctor assigned to us insisted that she should be administered anti-seizure medication as well as be connected to an alarm while sleeping.

Terms like, Rage and Anger, do little to describe the feelings I was filled with. "Why, in the name of God, does my child have to be afflicted with the plague that is destroying my family? Is it not enough that all of the other facets of this life are damaged, can’t one be free of marring?"

I knew what the medications prescribed would do to her; I had experienced their mental and physical effects on my brothers.

I refused to administer the toxin to my daughter.

Chance counsel from a family physician offered the idea that the "un-definable mass" could be a hemangianoma and would fade with the others.
I threw away the paper prescription, but taped the sensors of the respiratory monitor to her every night.

The marks on her body slowly faded as well as her seizures and the nightly alarms.

During this period of her life, my brothers were dying as well as my relationship with her mother. I yearned for escape from turmoil and pressure, but her hold was tight upon me; her spirit was reaching through me like the roots of a great tree to water.
She was the glimmer of hope in me; she was the quantity that eased and quieted the shaking that could bring me to the ground.

Looking back, I can see that I was in a similar situation as the chipmunk in this chapter; I was in great danger of demise, my home was being destroyed, I was exposed, and unprepared for the world.

But, fortunately, grace shined upon me; I was rescued and uplifted by the delicate, loving hand of my daughter.

"Make Do."

The Great Depression pushed the young men of my home town away; some went to the Civilian Conservation Corps and a great many (including my uncles) retreated to the local river camps.

The people in town called the men who went to water "River Rats" and I guess you could say that their behavior mimicked that furry creature; industriously they worked to gather refuse for shelter, took advantage of the bounty nature provided, and in this way survived until fortune carried them home.

From the woods and farm field dumps they gathered material to construct their small shacks and shanties.

Some built floating barges that carried them through other river towns, looking for work while sustaining themselves on fish, turtle, beaver, and musk rat.

Tin and canvas roofs sheltered them from the rain and snow that fell. Tar paper, battened boards, and rough hewn logs blocked the wind.
Deadfall wood, burning in the oil drum stoves, provided the heat that warmed them and cooked their meals that were gathered from the river and it's banks.

The workday commenced before the sky began to glow through the trees; they waded through the river checking traps and trout lines. As the sun drew the wind to the east, rifles report echoed through the bottoms; squirrels, raccoons, deer, and birds were harvested.
Fishing with poles and traps continued through the day as well as the gathering of spring water, dandelion greens, wild onion, chicory, berries, persimmons, pawpaws, roots, and nuts.

Excess was traded and sometimes sold in the town square for sundries that could not be acquired naturally.

They were looked upon with jest and scorn for their rudimentary ways of living, but they were indebted to nothing except their basic human needs.
Hunger and the need for shelter was satiated by will and the knowledge of what our earth provides, free of charge.

My uncles "Made Do" and survived to thrive. They passed on their knowledge of the creeks and rivers to all that would listen.

I’ll end this by sharing their advice;

"If it’s tough out there, Make Do."

Ghost in the Machine

A Dream in Winter, 96’

The great northern forest was hushed by dense, falling snow.

The snow, as a fog, seemed to separate me from the innumerable, tall, dark, pines that faded into the white distance.
Solitarily, in pairs, and in groups, a great many owls fluttered and glided over me in silence; passing through the fog and into the distance, gradually filling the lower branches of the ghostly pines as far as I could see.
The owls shook the snow from their feathers as they preened, without notice of me.
I knew that one of them was my father. And I knew that he was home, without memory of horror, and without pain.


From the depths, dreams are delivered;
shifting and tumbling through the mire, gaining speed as pressures subside,they make their way to the surface.

Contours flash, surfaces glow, and substance is revealed as their journey nears the light of consciousness.

Images of objects and places, unknowingly stored in the recesses of the mind, are selected, assembled, pieced together, encrypted for the recipient, and jettisoned from fathoms below.

These messages, written in the language of the soul, are communicated and in darkness they take shape in a myriad of forms:

secret, as the whispering breath of a lover to the ear, warm, sweet, and sublime;
horrid, thrown before one, howling, gnashing, and biting like an animal caged;
welcomed, like a nudge to the ribs from a childhood friend.

These flickering moments are artfully crafted to expose the workings of the heart; unveiling condition, reaction, and intent.

The aged majority are from a familiar library and the necessity of their delivery is understood.

But some, a rare few, speak from other volumes and are parcels, not of my own.

A Well Remembered, George Gadd

My daughter was seven years of age when she wrote to me the following note;

Some things should never be forgotten.

My father, George Gadd, was born into a dirt poor family on October 1st, 1939.

His father was a veteran of The Great War. As a child, his mother had sailed the Atlantic Ocean from Portugal to Hawaii.
His parents courted while on the island, were married, and soon sailed to The States.
They moved into a board and batten shack in "Bucktown" on the south end of town.

Alcohol was my grandfathers remedy for the troubles that ruled that era and his hands channeled frustration upon his family.

George was twelve when he was turned out upon the streets. His mother had fallen to a cancer and his father to another woman with other children.

George delivered groceries throughout the town and for a time lodged with an older brother; the brothers wife would skim the greater part of George’s pay and lock him from the home during weekend revelries.
George began to hide a portion of his weekly pay and eventually purchased an old car that would serve as his home until he graduated high school.

Upon graduating from high school he married and began Tool and Die trade school.
He and his wife began to fill their lives with children, but the full family he had hoped for would slip through his fingers as disease and death stole them away.

He labored with mind, muscle, sweat, and tears. Prayers poured from his soul, and still, life faded.
He held closely to five of his children as they passed from this world and left behind a loving father who groaned in great agony.

He pounded his days away from dark of morning to dark of night to cover his family responsibilities and never failed to extend himself to others, where needed; he paid for the education of employees that wanted to improve themselves, posted bail for their youthful mistakes, and counseled them on the definition of father and husband.

We were grievously insulted when we learned of his imminent death.

My remaining brother and I were at his home helping him with plumbing the bathroom.
He departed for the hardware store, a place he had been to many, many times before.
He returned hours later and secluded himself in the living room, holding his head, swaying in his chair, and weeping.

He had spent the previous hours in confusion trying to find his way home.

A tumor was found in his brain that night and he began the end of his journey with death.

During his final years he would experience every malady his children had experienced; surgery, medication, radiation, chemotherapy, infection, weakness, confusion, dementia, spinal meningitis, and finally death.

He parceled out what remained of his life, day after day; he gave his all, all of the time. He spoke with compassion, helped where he could with weakened hands, and offered a selfless love to all that would accept.

In the Fall of his last year, my wife and I drove to visit him at his home, arriving late, we found a note, "Took George to the hospital."
He had awakened from a nap in great pain, believing he had been shot in the head. He was lost in extreme pain and could not be comforted.

By his screams, I found him in the emergency room of the hospital. " My feet are on fire!! Fix my head!! Help me!! Oh, God help me!!" The doctors would not administer any pain medication for fear of masking symptoms of neurological problems. Their decision was to ship him to a larger medical center.

The ambulance was filled with his screams.

Magnetic images showed fluid on his brain and a spinal tap confirmed spinal meningitis.

Mercifully he fell into unconsciousness and into a coma, never to utter coherent words again.

I spent the following weeks at the hospital. On December 16th my mother called for my support in removing my dad from the machines that were keeping him alive.

I agreed to let him go.

He slipped away quietly one labored breath at a time on December 19th.

For years I removed family memories from thought. After living through their suffering, their absence became a respite from the turmoil.

I am finally able to remember them and choose to do so. Like prospects in a pan, the horror is washing away in waves and the gold in them is shinning through.

My father was an amazing soul. From birth, mountains of chaos were shoveled upon him. He was battered continuously, had futures torn, was physically afflicted, but always, without a single curse on his lips, chose the high ground.

In this state he lives on;

A well remembered, George Gadd

Among the Living

I observe the Canadian geese on the river behind our house.
Some of them are without mates, through predation, age, or disease. The ones without walk among the others, calling while shaking their heads, continually searching the distance for the return of those they are bound to. Their days are without end and their voices are withered by want of those lost.

I have been among the missing.

26 January 98
04:30

I left her standing on the cold wood floor of our living room. Her arms were crossed, trying to hold in the anger, pain, and hopelessness. My daughter was sleeping in her room upstairs. The remains of what I once was had been packed into boxes and slid into the far away corners of the attic.

There was no guarantee of my return.

I slowly closed the door and stepped into the cold dark of morning to bring an end to my path.

We met when I was thirteen and she was fifteen; years later, we bound ourselves, one to the other. Unknowingly she had also bound herself to a heart that was marred from darkness.
Below the surface, of what she had known me to be, was damage that I could not repair myself.
I was saturated with depression; like fresh tar, it had crept from the earth into my shoes, onto my back, around my heart, and into my mind.
With all of the love within her she tried to wash it from me, but it would not go away. With tears and words she called to me, but was answered by echoes.

My experiences with death and dying were treated like obstructions on a path; I dodged them, crawled over them, and put them behind me, out of sight and mind.
I refused to give time or space to these incidents and did everything I could to physically separate myself from the perceived weakness of my family members and the horror that surrounded them.
I had little compassion for my siblings that were ill. Their illness drew attention to my family and validated the fact that we were weak and dying.

Compassion was the channel that could have drained the building waters of grief and darkness, but I was selfish and turned my face from the immediate pain.

I managed, poorly, to contain the darkness for years; the memories pressed and manifested themselves in destructive activities. Desperately I built the retention walls higher and deeper, effectively occluding myself from the love and compassion around me, I prepared no thoughts for the morrow and laughed when friends spoke of planning a future.
I did not expect to live long. Every headache or eye twitch made me question and discern; when will the seizures come, am I harboring the disease, is the sickness growing in my brain, pushing cells and synapses, making it’s nest, setting it’s defenses against chemotherapy, radiation, and scalpels?
I expected, daily, an early end to this life. I believed, I would be reunited with my family long before I reached maturity.

But, there was a quantity that would eventually ruin my wall and allow those deep dark waters to overwhelm me.
In the fabric of my body it was quietly working; from conception it ticked and whirred, suppressing the illness that had surrounded me and taken my loved ones, one by one.
There it sat, functioning properly, culling cells that could grow radically and form cancerous tumors. Permeating my flesh, it was keeping me alive.

After my fathers death I volunteered for genetic testing and a few weeks later held in my hands the business size envelope that would be the ruin of my expected demise.
I tested negative for Li-Fraumeni Syndrome. In my genetic code, Gene P-53 was not mutated.

Gene P-53 is important in multicellular organisms where it regulates the cell cycle and thus functions as a tumor suppresser that is involved in preventing cancer. As such, P-53 has been described as "the guardian of the genome," "the guardian angel gene," and the "master watchman," referring to its role in conserving stability by preventing genome mutation.

Elvis left the building.

The train I had packed so dearly for passage on, departed with all aboard but me.
I was suddenly separated from my birth family. I was not marked as they were and therefor not accepted.
A chasm formed between us because I was found unworthy.

The waters I had contained breached my wall and carried me towards the chasm. My baggage was strewn and there was hell to pay.
I could no longer hold the deafening memories as they bore down upon me.

The memories perforated may days, interrupting my work, and raged at night through the quiet.
I could not suppress them with alcohol or counselors. The promises of the good in life could not tame them.
The more I attempted to befriend them, the stronger they became.
I could not swim their currents.
In despair I succumbed to their tides and drifted further from my wife and daughter.

I dove for the deep in search of silence and peace.

I sought my physical destruction.
If death would not come for me, I would search for him. On my terms.

When I walked out on my wife and daughter I engaged death through the military and life as a soldier. I volunteered, trained, and prayed for war, but death was elusive.

Through the daily challenges of preparing for war I eventually found the surface of my life; after distancing myself from the physical haunts and connections of my history I was afforded the opportunity to heal.
In a way I was born again, and as a castaway coming to rest on a pebble strewn shore that is washed with clear water and bright sunshine, I was able to stand with a clear mind.

Through it all the love of my life followed me and continually held my daughter to me; as the din of the pain slowly subsided I heard her impassioned calls and began my return.

Being alive has been difficult to accept, but I have come to terms with my history and I am now enjoying my life and all that it holds. I owe a great debt to my wife and daughter for holding tightly to me through the darkness. I continue to miss my siblings and my father very much and hopefully, in some way, I can honor them for the strength that I gained from walking next to them.

Maybe the best way to thank them is to span the void between us by living a long life filled with the fortunes they were not afforded.

I am fortunate, thankful, and once again, among the living.

Earn your keep

I have spent too many days scraping to acquire.

Out of a sense of loss and privation I have scrounged and coveted.

I have requested quarter, but given none.

I have reaped the harvests of others only to transport them to strangers.

My actions of hoarding and heaping have been perpetuated when I have looked to my stores and found them empty.

My life has been a market; I have lacked value and sold myself short, day after day.

My hands are my most valuable tools, but unfortunately they have been as sieves and whatever monetary gain I have attempted to grasp has blistered my hands and covered my feet like grime.

I am worn from want. I can no longer live negatively.

I have never experienced monetary excess, but my years of clawing for it have racked me with experience, character, talent, love, and blessings; I don’t have room for these intangible items anymore. My bank is full of this form of wealth and it is time to pay out.


I will divulge.
I will bless.
I will pardon.
I will accept.
I will value.
I will rest.

And maybe, in this manner, earn my keep.

Into Night

The sun set ablaze the fog and dust that settled above the brown cornfields as it mingled with the crisp air in the autumn sky.
We were bathed in the odors of wood smoke and harvest and surrounded by the golden light of September.
The cool winds of the day buffeted us as we were bounced around in the back of the old green truck, rambling and grumbling down the tar coated gravel roads.
Earlier we had fought for ownership of the trucks wheel well housings; we all knew that they afforded the best view and offered the bed rail to hold on to. The smaller of us normally found ourselves sitting with our backs to the cab where the fine particles of dirt, churned by the wind, would sting our faces.

The feeling of defeat was not lasting.

As the glowing colors of evening turned to a dark starry night, the temperature dropped and bastions of fog silently assembled from field to road in efforts to reclaim their taken ground.
Danny and Carrie held positions of windswept sentry and we younger and smaller huddled for warmth behind them, covering our cold, aching ears.
Hurtling into the night.

You don’t always have the opportunity to choose the souls that journey with you through this life.
There is no guarantee of the person’s quality, or that all of you will endure and arrive at the same end.

We are all fragments of the same stone; separated, sorted, and faceted. Each, ground and polished over time to different degrees. Tumbling like gems on dark velvet, turning and resting, for a time, as light and color are captured and reflected.

Each one of us is comprised of what the other is missing; possessing for the other a memory of what we once were and the knowledge of what we can be; searching for purchase and acceptance, like so many keys for so many locks.

Where are you?

What do you need from me?

I will reach for you,

as we pass in the night.

Coyote

10 April 2008, 21:32
The team of coyotes padded South off of the blacktop road and down into the wet grass of the ditch bottom.
Pausing, they glanced over their shoulders, through the drizzle and into the dark of where they came.
The wet shadows of the night covered them as they continued on their fog entrenched path. Leaving only silence and an image seared upon the mind and soul.

Every one has a path to tread through this life; mine was marked before I was born.

My father had a dream years before my birth. The dream was filled with dark and dread. From the dark, an image of a boy formed and was given the name Lamech. A second boy appeared from the gloom and was named Amalek. I am the second boy born to may father after that dream and am named Amalek

"The Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation."

At an early age I found this scripture while sitting on a pew in the local Pentecostal cult that we were members of.
I knew about the dream and had the name so I took what was written to heart and wished I hadn't been born.

Amalek: Warlike; Dweller in the valley.

I was immersed in that religion for eighteen years. Spiritually I tried to reconcile my dark birth by repenting, speaking in tongues, praying, memorizing my bible, and separating myself from the things of this world. I tried to be "In the world, but not of the world." as the pastor said I should be.
But, I still never measured up to all of the 'saints' around me. I knew I could never be as close to God as all of the white haired elders who spoke in the tongues of angels.
After all, I was born to be rubbed out and never brought to mind again by the chosen people of God.
During these years my brothers and sisters fell around me. But, I survived, waiting for God to fall upon me with 'all, consuming fire.'

When my father was dying he recounted the dream and the dread that it was filled with. He was impressed with the accuracy of the dream; out of the dark, dread, and death that had stalked his family he had been given two sons that would continue. Two healthy sons who don't carry the mutated gene that killed his other children.

My father left this world and with him went many of the difficult life situations that had kept my heart and mind alive. The era of emergency, critical decisions, camaraderie, and adrenalin was over. My soul was empty; I was a cavernous well-shaft that had been propped and braced with rotting timbers and fissured stone. My heart was a vacuum and as it strained to pull the ceiling down I began to follow a dark trail of self destruction. I sought the occupation of a warrior. I chose to meet God on my terms.


It is insanity, but so often necessary to close the doors on so many memories; good and bad are sickly laced with an ache that radiates out of my skin. It is a fragmented life, a partial being, an incomplete person that needs to clip out, tear off, and utterly remove portions of his life to take further steps to continue a path in life.
I have robbed other people in my life by being so incomplete….
Who reached into my soul and hollowed me, who scraped the insides of me and left the cavernous well of empty…….
Did a God do this? "Ask anything of Me, I will give it….." What you want, I will give, I will make it so…..Ask anything of me, I will grant it….." "….. Guide my feet, take me, Guide my feet……"

I chose the hard ways, the tough and the bitter. I volunteered for the arduous, the dark, the wet, and the dirty. I pressed the veil that separates this world from the next.
I pressured that old God to meet me, but he pushed back and obscured my fields of fire.
I cursed him and sharpened my knives.
I authored my operation order and he let me run my reconnaissance behind enemy lines.
I prepared the field of battle and he sowed it with poppy's.
I was born again, hard. Hardened by my enemy.

I chose a path that in my mind was far different from the one I had been taught to walk, far removed from the way that I was raised.

I searched for destruction, but found healing.

My years as a soldier repaired my heart and mind. I educated and strengthened myself, I buried the parts of me that were dead, and I gained innumerable brothers in arms.

I have met my God and have accepted my name.
I have accepted who I am and what I was formed to be.

Looking over the years, I can see where I have been and I can see how seamlessly my path had been directed.
I have become what I was born to be; I am a living promise to a father, a human article of war, and I have walked in the valley, in the shadows of death.

My path continues. The waters are sweet, the grass is plentiful, and I fear no evil.

Resonance

I am absolutely unable to deny that there is a substance that fills the voids in this world with unseen tethers.

An element, ancient, that continues to reach beyond years, and time.

Vibrations that permeate mass, the peripheral of sight, and the infiniteness of silence.

Without question, I am not the first to witness the inescapable artifices of this quantity.

This essence has been filtered and manipulated into the God’s of primitive men and worshipped for what it once was.
I cannot relinquish the understanding that it is much, much more than saviors, prophets, saints, and angels.

It reaches through me to draw and connect the particles of this existence.
Yearning for the good in things, the good as embers that seem to have been cast from the fire.

It resonates, whispers, pushes to pull, shines, and guides.

I am bound to it, and I am as much a part of it as I am the earth, the sky, the stars, and the void that holds them.

It is undeniable.

It is.

Currency

For a price, people have the ability to live long beyond the time that they shed their mortal coil.

The only legal tender accepted is influence.

I have been fortunate to live a life that has been filled with people of character who poured out this currency like water on open ground.

They were tinted with the hardships of their lives, not the typical issues of bills and schedules, but the kind of experiences that leave calluses on the heart. The Great War and Depression, blood soaked feet on foreign soil, abuse, death, and scraping a meager living out of barren dirt had tempered them; they were wise souls who wanted joy and found it only in small increments.

For years I handled my memories of them like one would photographs taken towards the sun; I accepted them as significant, but poorly manipulated, and stuffed them into the bottom of a box.

As I age I find myself pulling them from their slumber. I look through the grainy surface, tattered corners, and haze to remember and search for what was captured in time and why. Some are still obscured and difficult to look at, but many are like Saturday morning sunshine that beams through a large window, illuminates the dust in the air, and warms the floor.

When we moved to Martinsville we lived in an old bungalow behind Waltz's Liquor Store on Josephine Street. My dad purchased the home which was built by the father of our neighbor, Mr. Cooper. The house was entirely too small for a family of seven. Danny, Joe, and Lameck slept in the front bedroom. My oldest sister Carrie and I slept in a small room off of the original dinning room. Dad and Mom slept in the original living room. Entertainment was in the original dinning room and meals were held around a metal table in the tiny kitchen that was illuminated by the blazing glow of a single light bulb. The searing light was occasionally extinguished by an errant drop of rain water from the leak above.

The Coopers lived next to us and Mr. Cooper built the stone house that they lived in. Geodes (called Nigger Heads in the local dialect), wind chimes, pieces of foundry glass, and empty ham cans lined the window sills and side walks. A ‘glow in the dark’ werewolf poster hung above a freezer in their galley kitchen hall and dogs playing poker in a frame above their fireplace kept them company. Their home wasn't built with indoor rest room facilities and every morning you could see them, across the fence, making their way to the bath house for their morning duties.

The Coopers were a weathered old couple. Mr. Cooper (Luther) was a giant of a man who wore bib overalls, white T-shirts, worn work boots, and a graying, burr haircut. He had few remaining teeth and his lips that were always full of tobacco seldom parted but to mumble, spit, or roar "Bears Ass!" which was the expression that he used to begin or end conversations. He also shared this phrase with the larger world on a concrete plaque that was mortared into the top of his chimney.

Luther employed himself with his own concrete business making blocks, benches, bird baths, and the occasional grave stone. Many times he rescued me when my foot was trapped in the piles of block I was told not to climb. "Agh, Bears Ass!"

Mr. Cooper gave me my first taste of beer. He kept his small, brown bottles of Pabst in a crate on his front porch next to used ham cans filled with water for his large brindled dog named Brinson. "Mr. Cooper, what are you drinking?" "Beer. You want some?" "Sure!"

On my birthdays Mr. Cooper would pull big silver dollars from the chest pockets of his overalls and give me one for a gift. The weight of those thick coins in my small hands was empowering.

Mrs. Cooper (Lola) was short, stout, and spunky. She wore polyester slacks, sleeveless plaid shirts, curly unkempt hair, and black, horn rimmed glasses that were never in their correct place on the bridge of her too small nose. Her hands were scarred, callused, and always felt warm on the back of my neck or on my hands when she held them. She spoke with a high pitched nasally voice that was always broken with plenty of laughter. Lola mowed the yard and kept many flowers in her shade covered yard.

Next to the liquor store across the street she also raised a large garden every year. "Drunkards" urinating in her garden were a constant problem for her and she chastised them often. After buying beer for their trips home the "Drunkards" would step into the alley next to Waltz's and relieve themselves on her garden. The issues of errant urination ended one summer night with a loud blast and lots of screaming. Lola had loaded a shotgun with rock salt and emptied it into an unfortunate urinator. The sheriff arrived on the scene and simply told Mrs. cooper "You can't be shootin' people Mrs. Cooper."

We eventually moved from the home on Josephine Street and years later I was told that Luther had been moved into a nursing home. When I received the news I took my fiancé to meet Mrs. Cooper and to my great sadness Lola could not tie a memory to my face or my memories and apologized for the matter.

The Coopers and their shade covered stone house are no longer on Josephine street. Waltz's liquor store is named after the new owner, and the bungalow's wood siding that my father restored is covered in vinyl, but, the people, their words, their images, and my experiences with them glimmer and shine in the recesses of my heart. I believe those hardened souls managed in some way to polish me as well. I am thankful that they honored me by entrusting their memory to me.

They, in a great way, influenced me.

I will continue to write their receipts.

They will continue to live on.

Going Home

I had a dream some time ago.

I was sleeping in our cabin on the White River or Wapi-Hanne, as the Lenape once called it.

In the dream I heard scraping below the window where I was sleeping. I looked out into the shadows made by the moon and observed a small herd of deer making their way through the side yard. This seemed common enough, so I laid down again to sleep. Whispering and hushed voices woke me a second time. I looked out again for the deer and found that they had shifted into the Miami that inhabited these banks long ago. I found myself outside with them. They moved in the halting and direct movements like the White Tail, were curious of me, and humored by me as well. They murmured among themselves while trying to figure what I was and eventually faded into the darkness and I awoke.

What are we made of?

Before conception we are essentially the negative space between charged particles and chains of DNA. Upon conception we begin to gain mass from our mothers blood, that has gained nutrients from the substances she has consumed. If our mother is famished we will draw from her fat, muscle, and bone.

I was conceived in southern Indiana and while in utero my mother subsisted on the venison and vegetation that that region of the earth produced.

So, I can say with certainty, that I came from the earth.

I have always been drawn to the musty smells of the woods and the rain. Choruses of frogs and cicadas beckon me into the night.

The cottonwood seeds floating on shade covered creeks rejuvenate my soul. The loam and stone under the ferns calls me home.

Life rises and falls like waves on the sea. The earth throws forth life to draw it back in season, over and over again.

The core of me is earth. For generations I have ran with the deer, I have floated on the wind, I have rained down upon the earth, I have slept among the stones, and I have sprouted in the sunshine of spring.

I consider myself fortunate to know without doubt, where I come from.

I know without doubt that the core of me will eventually return to the earth and those ancient paths.

And at some point, in some manner,

I will return.

Last Breath

The day my sister died I was a senior in high school.

The day before my sister died I was called out of class by a phone call from my brother Joe. "Carrie is at Riverview Hospital and I am going to pick you up at school in a few minutes."

I wasn't shocked by those words, I was accustomed to emergency trips to the hospital. I was familiar with dangerous medical procedures. Emotionally difficult revelations had become common occurrences in my life. At a early age, three or four, I became aware that that one of my sisters had died not long after I was born and that one other had died before I was born.

In the fall of my eighth year, on the day after my brother Joe celebrated his eighteenth birthday, I awoke to an empty house and the information that my brother Joe had been rushed to the hospital after experiencing a seizure. That day the diagnosis was that Joe had a mass in the right frontal lobe of his brain, but it was operable. Joe continued to receive operations, chemotherapy, and radiation in that region of his brain until his death at the age of twenty nine.

The summer after Joes first seizure, my brother Danny, who was twenty, fell to the floor in our family dinning room with a seizure.
He was found to have brain cancer as well. He would sustain extremely heavy doses of drug cocktails and prescriptions until surgical technology advanced enough to allow operations on the cancer that had nested in his brain. Danny would succumb to death three months short of his thirtieth birthday.

The summer of my tenth year my uncle William smuggled a revolver into the hospital where he was to receive treatment for shingles.
He had suffered for years with diabetes and organ transplants.
Uncle Bill met death with his own hands that night.

The winter of my thirteenth year my Grandmother was lowered into the ground.


Carrie was twenty nine when she died. She had a husband and three children, one had died late term, after the birth of her first child.
My sister Carrie was my surrogate mother when I was a child. I think my mother had her fill of kids by the time I came toddling around with my giant head. Carrie took upon herself my education in religious extremes at the local, extreme right wing, paramilitary, Pentecostal church.
Unfortunately watching my brothers , on a Sunday morning, ride off in the back of Dad’s pick-up truck on their way to a deer hunt, fishing creek, or tromp through the woods didn’t fare well on my sisters intentions.
When she married into life on a farm she would host the largest family gatherings we had ever experienced and always cooked too much food.
She was kind and could be rude. She normally wore a big smile, but never failed to rain down Hell upon the slightest miss-step.
I loved her. She was always sweet to me.

She entered the hospital on a Friday with flu-like symptoms, these symptoms happened to be the first signs that her immune system was failing.
She had many health problems the previous year and had been treated with many different antibiotics. The treatments had destroyed the normal flora of her bowels. Her body had been dumping toxins into her bloodstream, producing tremendous infection throughout her body.
Numerous antibiotics, many experimental, were pumped into her throughout the day.
Her blood pressure dropped, she retained large amounts of fluid, and her breathing became labored.
While she was semiconcious I stood by her bed as she gasped for breath. "I love you, Carrie."
Her response came between rapid breaths.. "I - love-- you." I was mortified by causing her to strain in responding to me.
She later slipped into unconsiousness and was placed on a ventilator. By Saturday afternoon the decision was made to remove her from life support.
We all stood in the room and listened to the solo performed by the ventilator. The check valves and pneumatics pumped and clicked in unison. The seal in the diaphram fell as my sisters chest rose. Once the nurse shut the system down we listened to my sister wheeze in and watched her chest rise. She would gurgle and her chest would fall.
Eternities passed between the last gurgle and the next wheeze. I knew what would happen, eventually one of these breaths would be her final. The room was sick with waiting and hope and prayer and promise and pain and tears and the next last breath followed by the next last breath, more eternities, and finally she was silent.

My sisters last breath would be the first of many, many, more I would bear witness to.
I now know it is never a good thing to wish for better things, because eventually you will wish your life away. I used to wonder what the world would look like without those thousands of 'last breaths' behind my eyes.

I couldn't say this then or for years afterward, but now, I wouldn't trade those breaths for anything.

Failure to Follow Instructions

During the first week of Special Forces Selection I stood on the gravel inside Camp Mackall with over 300 other candidates. We were to begin the land navigation phase of testing and had just received our issued equipment which included two emergency flares. The cadre of the day stood on the podium in front of us. The podium had been painted black by some soldier from a previous course who had also painted a mural on the front that faced the candidates. The painted scene was a silhouette of some imagined battlefield with the arms of corpses, broken wheels, and barbed wire.
Below the scene, painted in white Gothic letters was a phrase something along the lines of " to the candidate engaged in war who rested and while resting died....")
The cadre briefed us on the task we were about to undertake and what we should do if some unfortunate event should befall us. He proceeded to hold up an emergency flare and spoke " This is an emergency flare. This is for emergencies. A broken leg is considered an emergency. Missing eyes are considered an emergency. Heat casualties are considered emergencies. Being lost is not an emergency. If you become lost, walk to find a improved surface road, upon finding such a road, stay there and we will pick you up. Once again, if you are lost, it is not an emergency."
He proceeded to demonstrate the proper way to employ an emergency flare and followed the demonstration by asking, "Are there any questions?" No one had any questions.

Before we began the navigation testing we candidates were given a time of day when the testing would end, this was called "index time". If you made your final point you were to assemble in formation for accountability (head count) before index time occurred. If you had not made your final point before index time, you were to proceed to the nearest improved surface road and wait for the trucks that would return you to the formation.

Most of us candidates had made our final point on the first night of testing and were relaxing around fires we were allowed to build. Shortly before index time we assembled in the cool darkness of a late hour in our sweat soaked BDUs on the fire road. Shoulder to shoulder we stood talking and recounting our nights trials and tribulations. Hut leaders were counting heads and reporting to the cadre who were walking about in front of the formation. In unison, the beeps and alarms of over 200 watches filled the night air. At the same moment the sky above the woods we were all facing filled with the pop and brightness of emergency flares. The fireworks display continued for the next five to ten minutes. The cadre cussed, shot azimuths to particular flare displays and walked into the woods to locate the poor candidates who failed to follow instructions.
The ranks were reduced considerably that night, for failure to follow instructions.

Dark Summer

This has been a good season for black berries, I managed to collect half a gallon from the tree line in the 'new nature preserve'.

For as long as I can remember I have been collecting the delicacies. It became a sort of ritual or rite of passage for me, I would spend those few days before the 1st of July crawling through the poison ivy and brush, swatting mosquitoes, and saturating my old shirts with sweat in the steamy bush of central Indiana to collect the dark berries. I would bring them home in an old milk jug and give them to my mother who in turn would bake a pie of them for my birthday present.
I always enjoyed consuming the majority of the pie with most of a gallon of ice cream.

The summer that my father suffered with brain cancer was very difficult. The disease caused considerable confusion and dementia within my father who had always been so clear of mind and thought. This was an understood condition, all of my siblings had suffered the same, but knowing that fact did little to satiate the pain I felt dealing with his state and time of dying.

I managed to complete my ritual that summer, I brought home the fruit and my mother managed to bake the pie. My mother, my father, and I sat at the small table under the light in the kitchen on Lone Oak Road. My fathers condition left us mostly silent as my mother served us all a piece of pie. The room was quiet except for the occasional 'tink' of the flat ware on the saucers. We all suffered in that silence as my father tried to feed himself. The dark juice from the berries trickled down his hands and onto his palms, he noticed this before we did and in his lost state believed and exclaimed with a great amount of panic that he had cut himself.
Quite a bit of time and consoling brought him back to a state of calm. He would have these episodes often, the troubling part for me was seeing the panic in his eyes during the fits, and what seemed to be shame and regret in those same dark eyes once the episode had passed. It appeared as if he, in a glimmer of sanity, realized the state of his mental condition and health and knowingly could do nothing.

My fathers body was placed in the ground that winter. Many years passed before I collected berries again. I have had black berry pies since then, and I will make pies with this seasons harvest, but the pies don't (and I don't think they will ever) taste as sweet as they did before that dark summer.

Red Light

I believe in finding and understanding the source of things.

Why ask why? I believe the answer to all questions begins before the thought of "Why?".

And in following the above statement my view must turn to things ancient and sometimes forgotten.

I will pose the following question I had while pumping gas into the work van this Spring as I stared blankly across the street at the local Hardees.

Why are the red lights of the Hardees dinning area so appealing in the dark of morning? Are they appealing because in the recesses of me there is a memory of red light, filtered through my mothers skin; a warm glow before my eyes while bathed in warmth, muffled sound, and the rushing of mixed heart-beats permeating my unformed and void person? Are they so appealing because they remind me of my first and last safe haven? Or is that warm glow reminiscent of warm hearths and fire sides. Maybe it is a genetic memory of the light that was cast on walls of safe caves and skin houses for so many thousands of years. If one believes in natural selection, which I do, one could link the physical reaction caused from the feeling of that appealing light to the subconscious knowing that if I place myself near that light I will find not only physical warmth, but emotional, mental, and spiritual as well. If I am near that light I will live. If my camouflage is perfect I will live. If I am fast enough I will live. If I am smart enough I will live.If I continue to live I will pass these traits genetically and hopefully through teaching to my offspring.....

Red Light....