Scenes From Spring

Beautiful scenery along the Ivy Creek Greenway. April 2023. Photo by me.

The weather has been odd this spring in that it has felt like spring instead of what has become all too often for the past several years a period that felt more like early summer by April. This spring the temperatures have fluctuated from chilly afternoons to warm ones and some mornings have been much below average. The fluctuations have continued into the last week of April when over the last several springs this area had already settled into afternoons in the eighties and mornings in the sixties. Today's high, for example, under the gray sky and occasional light only reached the fifties. I am not complaining about still having to wear fleece jackets and long pants instead of shorts every day this spring. I have liked it.

The miles walked have added up this spring. This past Sunday I was out walking for six and a half miles and in shorts. The temperatures were in the upper sixties and the sky was partly cloudy then the wind changed. The clouds rolled in from the southwest and the warmth of the sun was gone. I regretted the shorts by the time I reached the end of my walk. This was only the second time this spring that I have walked in shorts this year and I go for long walks or hikes once or twice a week. This year is in stark contrast to the past several years. It was not unusual to be out in shorts in early February the past few years.

A group of deer scurry when spotted in the woods. April 2023. Photo by me.

We had late deep freezes in the twenties early in spring this year. It killed all of the leaves on my crepe myrtle and it has only recently sprouted new leaves. Some of the hedges in front of my house were damaged the same and also have only begun to send out new leaves. The growing season is behind this year, but the coolness has helped with transplants of bushes and trees, they have not been stressed with early heat.

Rain muddied Ivy Creek. It kind of resembles a canal in the English countryside. April 2023. Photo by me.

Like walking through a green sea. April 2023. Photo by me.

As the clouds came late in the day. April 2023. Photo by me.

April 2023. Photo by me.

April 2023. Photo by me.

The rabbits are here so they know it is spring. I have seen them in my yards eating the grass and clover and while out walking on Sunday on a nature trail. If the fat rabbits are out then there is no denying the time of year.

I will gladly take a cool spring that is refreshing with cloudy and rainy days except for that freeze that damaged the vegetation. As nature does its balancing act, I do fear that these days will be paid for by abnormally hot and dry weather this summer - maybe not. A cool, by Georgia standards, summer and fall would be fine with me too.

New Hope A Place Called Childhood

 

New Hope Cemetery in Paulding County, Georgia. April 2023. Photo by me.

It could have seemed dramatic, cathartic or life-altering but it was not; however it was significant for me to be able to stop and put my feet on the ground of New Hope, Georgia for the first time in eighteen years.

 

I joked on Facebook before I went to New Hope that I would be playing Bob Seger as loud as I could tolerate as a warning that I was coming. As much as I enjoy Main Street, Against The Wind, Fire Lake, Turn The Page and his other music, I did not listen to Bob Seger; I turned the music off.

 

2005 was the last time I was in New Hope and that was at my childhood home that my father was selling. He had offered to sell it to me two years before, but I had declined. I had no desire to ever live in Paulding County again and especially on the same hill that I grew up. In those eighteen years I never returned to New Hope and though I returned last week to the community I came from, I have never returned to what I called Aviary Hill, my childhood home.

 

Coming through a traffic light in 2023 where there was no traffic light before, or any in New Hope, was disorienting. I had already passed a Publix shopping center and a drug store when none of those types of businesses would have ever had been dreamed of in the community of New Hope when I knew it. There was traffic too and there was none of that before. Who were these people, where had they come from and where were they going?

I pulled into one of the few places I recognized, New Hope Cemetery; at least they had not raised the dead or paved them over and were still in the same spot. With the passage of so much time it was difficult to find the islands of my memory in the sea of change that has flooded New Hope.

 

April 2023. Photo by me.

 

This cemetery I wrote about in my novel, Uncivil X. I had walked every inch of this ground in the early 1990s looking for Oliver and hoping not to find him. This was the first time I was back in this cemetery on a warm April late morning. I was the only living person there. A few minutes were needed for me to get my bearings and not feel like ghosts waited to surprise me from behind the headstones. 

 

April 2023. Photo by me.

April 2023. Photo by me.

April 2023. Photo by me.

April 2023. Photo by me.

April 2023. Photo by me.

Despite my family history in New Hope, I have not a single ancestor buried here. As I have written before, this graveyard is not the prettiest graveyard I have ever seen. Yet, on this visit in the spring, among the sprawl of now suburban Atlanta, it was pretty in its weedy, simple and familiar way. The headstones leaned a little more with time and weather as a nod to lives we have known. If there was a place in New Hope that I could not feel like an outsider or that the place was not secretly sinister, then it was here.

As I walked, a little of the younger me returned and I shed some of the judgement that the eyes of the older me had about New Hope.

 

The American Civil War battle in New Hope. April 2023. Photo by me.

An American Civil War monument on the road I grew up in New Hope. April 2023. Photo by me.

An American Civil War trench dug in the 1860s on the road where I grew up in New Hope. The bloody history of my community was inescapable like the humidity in July. April 2023. Photo by me.

 

New Hope is a place of monuments and markers between the Dollar Tree and gas stations because so much terrible history occurred there; history included in my books. It was called The Hell Hole for the bloody and intense American Civil War battle in May 1864. Then in April 1977 it became the site of the deadliest commercial aviation accident in the United States, at the time, when Southern Airways flight 242 crashed into the middle of New Hope. I came from a community where tragedy was baked into the Georgia red clay underneath me and rose to become stone monuments.

April 2023. Photo by me.

April 2023. Photo by me.

April 2023. Photo by me.

This was my first time seeing the new monument dedicated to the victims and survivors of the Southern Airways 242 crash. The plane crash may no longer be the deadliest commercial crash in United States, but it is still the deadliest in Georgia. Surrounding the base of the obelisk are the names of the fatalities and the survivors. I was surprised and gratified to see how well the monument was constructed and tasteful it was. It was certainly the most elegant structure in modern day New Hope.

I had just turned four when the plane crashed a mile from my house, but I have no memory of that day or the events after. I grew up hearing about the crash in New Hope, seeing the visible scars and reading about it. The crash always felt like an open wound when I was young because it was so recent then and little ever changed until the time I left in 1995. My father told me stories of how he went to the crash site and my mother told me a story of how difficult it was to get around in the aftermath with roads closed and media from around the globe coming to our tiny community. Others, old enough to remember April 1977, have told me their memories since my first novel was published.

April 2023. Photo by me.

April 2023. Photo by me.

That was my elementary school in the above photos. Seeing my old school made me happy. I thought about baseball games, the smell of the cleaning supplies that the school smelled like every Monday morning and other fond memories. Seeing that school, which to me was the heart of New Hope, was like being eight years old and invincible again.

 

I have written in my books about how the school was directly across the road from the cemetery and how that added to the creepiness of the 1980 Halloween festival where I stumbled and fell on the gravel with an untied shoe at Robin's feet. In so many ways New Hope delivered me to him or him to me.

 

The views above are from the rear of the school. It was W.C. Abney School when I attended first through sixth grades there, but it is some other school now. The building remains, the name is gone, the memories I can still visualize. 

 

The buildings were the same except that the unpleasant dark gray paint was white and that was the new addition to the school in my years. It housed the first and second grades and the cafeteria that doubled as a gym on the rainy days during physical education. The original red brick portion of the school was for third through sixth grades. The classrooms had walls of windows then, but unfortunately children are no longer allowed to see sunshine and they have been covered over in beige painted wood that resembles a prison. We enjoyed watching it snow out those windows, watching cars of parents line up at the end of the day and daydreaming or exploring our imaginations out those windows. The closing of the windows seems like a closing of opportunity, freedom and minds. How can a child be inspired when a child cannot even be allowed to watch the rain slide down the panes of glass during math?

 

Wherefore art thou old Rock Store? April 2023. Photo by me.

The two landmarks that most knew New Hope by when I was growing up were the two churches that sat facing each other at the end of my road. I wrote about the two churches and walking past them on my way home and they still stand today exactly as they did before. Looking at the two churches was the closest I came on my visit to actually feeling the past. 

 

The Rock Store for which that road in the photo is named after is no more, just like when I wrote about how subdivisions were named after the natural beauty they plowed under. My road, Bobo Road, passes between the two churches and there was no traffic light then as there was no need for one, not enough people lived or passed through for it to be necessary.

April 2023. Photo by me.

This is the vantage point from Bobo Road. The gravel lot where I stood to take the photo is where my father's mistress would wait for him to pass after he visited us at my house in the 1980s. I did not write about this story, but I could not help but think of it as I stood there decades later. One day my mother caught my father's mistress parked at the church and a car chase ensued. My brother was in the car with my mother and he finally persuaded her to stop the pursuit. The mistress got away that time and the close call did not stop her from hanging out at the church parking lot waiting on my father.

I did not write about another story involving this parking lot. I was desperate to find a way to limit my time on the school bus when I was fifteen years old. I had to get away from the kids that did not like me including Rowe, these were kids that threatened me and were dangerous. I knew how to drive, had plenty of experience on our property and the highways and was confident in my abilities. I decided that I would start driving our Cadillac down to the church on my learner's permit on school mornings alone and without permission. I would park the car there then walk to my elementary school and catch the bus to the high school. In the afternoon, I got off the bus from the high school at the churches, got in the Cadillac and drove home. I could do this because I would be home before my brother or parents returned in the afternoon. I got away with it for a month, until I came up the driveway of Aviary Hill to find my brother had come home from work early. He told me that he thought the Cadillac, which would become my first car, had been stolen and that he was about to report it when he saw me arrive. My brother and I rarely agreed to keep things between us in our youth or shared a secret, but I begged him to make a deal with me for his silence. I agreed to stop driving illegally and to wash his car for a month for not telling our parents about what I had done. I went back to walking home from New Hope after school until the day I turned sixteen.

 

Bobo Road. April 2023.

As I wrote about it in my books, I walked the mile home from the two churches every afternoon during seventh, eighth, ninth and most of tenth grade until I turned sixteen. I wrote about the true stories of my encounter with the ice cream truck driver, The Magazine Game and how I had to walk by Rowe's house.

 

It might sound like an old man's tale, but it really was a mostly uphill walk to my house and then I had to walk up Aviary Hill. I walked it in the rain, the cold and the heat as anything was better than being on that bus even if it exposed me to Rowe. That walk through the tall grass in the ditch was the longest mile I have ever had to walk.

The location of where Rowe tried to kill me in the 1980s. April 2023. Photo by me.

The entrance to this new housing subdivision that did not exist then and was just beyond the Georgia Forestry Commission branch office was the exact spot Rowe tried to kill me. The ditch was much steeper then and below it, through the woods, was a logging road, that was how I escaped him that day. If I had not known those woods blindfolded I might not be here today.

 

It was surreal to pass, at this very spot, an oncoming ambulance with its emergency lights flashing and siren sounding as I made my first trip down Bobo Road in eighteen years. New Hope still had warnings for me after all this time.

April 2023. Photo by me.

At first glance this appeared the same as it had, but out of sight to the left are many houses in what was dense woods. The road is beginning to enter the curve that hid my house on the right hand side of the road. That is Elsberry Mountain Road to the right that ran behind my house and Aviary Hill. It was a dirt road then with patches of gravel scattered on the first part of it before it became an abandoned logging road that led to Elsberry Mountain. More than once my school bus became stuck in the mud on that road; Paulding County had more miles of dirt road than any other county in the state of Georgia.

Blackout Log to the right. April 2023. Photo by me.

On the right is part of the reason I had not returned to New Hope for almost two decades - up that bank and in those woods is where the real Blackout Log chapter takes place in my novel Dweller On The Boundary. I felt sick passing it and regretted driving through. That hill was my favorite place to play with my Star Wars action figures as a boy. The creek that ran behind my house and across our property also crosses underneath the road at this point. Before Blackout Log, in the late 1970s and early 1980s we played there often as there was a concrete tunnel under the road where the creek flowed. It was the best place to catch frogs and the tunnel was always cool in the summer though kind of creepy. The creeks banks were thick with ferns and it reminded me of where Yoda had exiled himself on planet Dagobah. I even had one of those brown plastic Star Wars Dagobah sets that resembled a tree stump and was where Yoda lived. This was where I always played with the Dagobah and Yoda until Blackout Log.

My driveway up Aviary Hill is just in view on the right of the road. Cross Creek subdivision, or what I called Cannon Creek in my books, is approaching on the left.

 

Aviary Hill. Photo by me, April 2023.

 

That was my driveway up Aviary Hill to where my childhood house still sits. The house remains hidden much as it did through my twenty-two years of living there. You have to look quick to see it or you will pass by not knowing it was there. The roadside is just as wooded as it was and the only changes are that the gate has been removed, the mailbox has been switched to the opposite side and the grounds seems to be less cared for than when I did it. Also, I never let the pine straw collect on the gravel drive, I raked it off.  In the late 1980s I had planted a row of Piedmont Azaleas on the left bank as you entered the driveway, those are gone now too.

 

 

My feelings on seeing Aviary Hill were mixed. I was partially happy to see it still up there in the trees. I was sad to see it not as loved and lived in by strangers. I have mentioned to people that if the house were torn down, I would not mind. The house has little sentimental value for me. I would hate and be upset for the land to be turned into another subdivision. Part of me knows that one day it is inevitable that there will be no trace of Aviary Hill - I hope that day, if it does come, is after I am gone.  

I saw Robin's house in Cross Creek subdivision and maybe that hurt the most and not for the state of dishevelment that it now exists, but for other reasons - reasons deep inside me like my bones. I could still write a thousand or more stories about him and that house and what went on there. They would be happy stories, loving stories and ones that would be sad. My eyes saw the house and its current state and my mind saw flashes of the past flickering on its hidden screen. If I could only write what I saw, the first image in my mind and it was not his blue eyes, pink lips, a Police poster on the wall - it was something else and I could smell it. I cannot write that, just as I cannot write or say his real name.

 

I kept going, never to stop again.

My grandparent's house. April 2023. Photo by me.

Two houses from mine on the same side of the road was my grandparent's house in Georgia. I wrote about my times there, the holiday parties, spending the nights and sneaking in the back door in costumes to entertain them as a boy nicknamed Sneaky Snake. My grandparents kept the house even though by the mid 1980s they were spending more and more time at their two houses in Decatur County, Tennessee.

My grandfather died in the summer of 1989 when I was sixteen and I have never set foot on that porch again. I ran across those porch boards daily as a boy without a second thought in my head. I was there for Pawpaw to steal my nose, wink at me and watch M*A*S*H. reruns in the afternoon on channel 2 before the news came on. I still hear the television show theme song and I am in that black rocking chair with my feet not reaching the ground and he is sipping his coffee from a cup on a saucer and maybe soaking his feet. As a boy, he was the one adult that I never had an ounce of fear of and he never said a cross word to me - not one - I cannot even say that about my mother. I was a very shy child and it did not seem to matter to him, we could sit together and speak only a few words and it was perfectly natural. He loved his grandchildren, even the odd ones like me.

Today, the house is largely the same from the outside. It was mustard yellow when I knew it in the 1970s and 80s and there was no second floor window, that was an unused attic then. The pea gravel driveway that killed my bare feet in the summers is now concrete. The well shed has been replaced, the gazebo is gone as was the barn and greenhouse in the rear. The gigantic magnolia is gone from the front yard too and some oaks.

 

As a kid, the Cannon Creek Boys and I would throw the magnolia seed pods like grenades at each other. They hurt when they hit you, especially in the face. Robin once dared me, as he often did, to chew and eat the red seeds in the pod. I lived on every word of his and did it. They were bitter and nasty, but I chewed and swallowed to please him - no dare was ever too much. It was gross, but nothing would ever be more gross than swallowing his Skoal Bandit flavored saliva.

 

In the early 1980s the children of the family that once owned my grandparent's house before they purchased it came for a visit. I remember that day though I was not present when they came, I was off in the woods being that boy and heard about it over dinner. The two children were twin girls, but were elderly adults by that time. They wanted to see where they had grown up and not seen for twenty-something years. My grandparents invited them in and they looked around, shared stories and marveled at the changes. The house built in the late 1800s had changed for them. Underneath those changes it was still their home, their past and memories. I wonder how much or if they felt lost sitting in my grandparent's living room with the floor to ceiling windows and columns?

But they stopped. The twins stopped to have their childhood again for an hour or so. I kept going, running the down the red dirt road of my mind - never to stop again.

 

There was a finality about my visit to New Hope, as if I never need to return or see it again. Rabbit Tobacco Field is forever a place in my head and what I call the office where I write these words now. Most of what I saw in New Hope was not the place I was raised or loved; it was some other place, a new place, a different place and not home. This perspective is not limited to New Hope, but to all of Paulding County. The home I loved is forever buried in my books.

 

 

April 2023. Photo by me.

 

One final photo from a little down the road from my grandparent's house. I had played in those woods. This is the Paulding County of today and "the progress." The beauty of the hills is carved up and trucked away, the woods obliterated, the creeks filled with silt and new houses packed closely together in the most inhumane way sprout. This is not the Paulding County I knew or loved, but it is the Paulding County that future residents will come to know. I hope they love living in a place named after what once was. If I could choose the name of this subdivision, I would call it Childhood.

Asheville And Our Times

The Biltmore Estate. Photo by me, 1980s.

The last time I was in Asheville, North Carolina was in the late 1980s as a teenager. I was there with my parents and we did what most first-time visitors do in Asheville which was to tour the Biltmore Estate. It was much cheaper then and not the price equivalent of a day at Disney World in those days. It will not cease to amaze me the price the public will pay to tour the home of a rich person.

That was a long time ago, too long ago, and tourist attractions have changed with the times. Places now are events and experiences designed to be consumed as such. Try going to a museum without someone posing for a selfie in front of a painting you would like to admire in the moment. I remember when museums strictly forbade photography and security harassed patrons for even considering it. I shall never forget that incident from my childhood at the High in Atlanta when I was accosted for daring to stand an inch too close to a painting. I was scarred, I tell you.

Everything and every place is now cheapened to an experience that is a cross between a Chuck E. Cheese, a traveling carnival, an outlet mall and a theme park. Thank you and now please pay twenty-five dollars for this photo; we made you stand in line for. Places do not exist now solely for their beauty or history or maybe they do not generate enough cash flow to satisfy the greed of the owners. There must be distinctions of access between the masses and some years later we can brag to our cousin at Thanksgiving that we skipped the lines with a VIP All-Access, behind-the-scenes pass for which we paid a month's mortgage. The cousin will surely be impressed and will have seen the posts on social media and posted a jealous emoticon. We need neon signs that tell ourselves and everybody else that we are having fun and that food is a fetish worthy of sexy photography while we pose for a fake smiling selfie in front of a mural with a craft brew in hand – gosh, are not we a special and hammy lot! Hashtag that! None of it is genuine, it is done to present an image to our “followers.” In these times, we are all in the public relations business. Not only have the attractions changed, but society changed too.

 

The 1920 art-deco Asheville city hall.

Asheville is more than the Biltmore, I think or I hope it is. It must be, with over 94,000 people living in the city limits and they cannot all be a Vanderbilt. Can they? After spending time there as an adult, I came away with different impressions though they remain distant and unclear as though I had met a person from the past for a reunion over lunch. I was never close friends with that person, I kind of knew them, could remember fuzzy details about them, but never had a firm opinion on what I thought of them. Asheville was like that; a murky, nonthreatening fast food fish sandwich.

After my recent trip to Asheville I came away without a full understanding of the city, but my impression was that it did feel smaller than a city its size. It reminded me of a teenage boy wearing his father's clothes that needed to be grown into. The city has what every city has today that wants to appear trendy: breweries, breweries, breweries, coffee shops and colorful cartoony murals that either strive for a deeper social meaning or exist to be Instagrammed as a selfie background – you know the ones where we see more of your face than what you are actually standing in front of. The downtown scene seemed like a cliché.

 

The Grove Arcade built in the 1920s. Atlanta had one of these too (built in 1917), but of course it was torn down in 1964. Progress and all that. Photos by me, March 2023.

One night I sat at dinner with my back to a table of women in their fifties and sixties. They were locals and the conversation was mostly about religion and charity work. I am a notorious eavesdropper. My country fried steak with gravy came and I nibbled it. The women were waiting on one more person to join them before they ordered more than tea and sodas. One woman said, “You'll love my niece, everyone does. She should be here any minute; she works at Biltmore.”

The inescapable Vanderbilts appeared at dinner.

I tuned out their conversation until the niece arrived. She was a woman in her late twenties. The waitress was eager to get this party moving along, took their orders and then the table went through a round of prayers.

My fork and knife sliced through my steak and I did not fall in love with the niece that was inches behind me. I did not even get a whiff of her fragrance.

 

Probably a Vanderbilt. Photo by me, March 2023.

I have entered the invisible age or mercifully I have existed in that space for most of my life, but I am truly living there now. I am on the wrong side of the clock of life, where I can sit unnoticed by the young – the beggars are another matter as they have pinpoint vision, but seem unable to hear the word no. I sat outside the hotel one morning, sipping coffee and shooting Bach into my ears through my earbuds. I was jump-starting my brain; it takes longer these years for the gray matter to function in the morning with the fog of melatonin a hazy veil that lifts in small increments like a stubborn shade.

A young man came out of the hotel and sat twelve feet away. His music, the music made in labs with lyrics generated by Mad Libs, begins to blast. The young are immune from ear buds or headphones, they need their music surrounding them and everybody else to project their self-image. I was a teenager once, but we had boom boxes, car stereos and of course our music was real music.

I gave him an accusatory squint, but he ignored it and I increased the volume of my injection of Bach. Ah, soma! Hotel mornings are disorienting with coffee that never is as good as home, puffy-faced strangers, half-dressed and with bed head leaning over their phones in search of something more entertaining than their reality – the next experience, the next dose of dopamine.

I did recently have a fine cup of coffee at a Bloomingdale's cafe at the Mall of Millennia in Orlando, but that is another tale for another time.

In the time I was in Asheville, I turned fifty years old, I put on my invisibility cloak that is a permanent one. The cloak came with an AARP application and welcome card stuffed inside the pocket. I am on the wrong side of time where the years ahead are shorter than what is behind. I could get depressed about that, but that would be like getting depressed about another Dollar General opening down the road – it is undeniable and inevitable. I raise a lighter into the air to my youth, torch it and sing along to Bon Jovi's I'll Be There For You swaying back and forth. I understand those lyrics, “these five words I swear to you.”

Ah soma...

The regular kind of graffiti, not the touristy, social messaging mural kind. Photo by me, March 2023.

A 1920 art-deco gem turned food hall. Photo by me, March 2023.

As I looked at the sign I could hear the voice of Georgia native Sterling Holloway as the Cheshire cat. Photo by me, March 2023.

Kress buildings are kind of a thing with me, I have photographed them in various cities. Photo by me, March 2023.

I wandered around downtown Asheville on a cool early evening through the streets bounded by Patton Avenue on the south and Broadway to the east. Reviews on the internet said this was a hip area and there was a Hotel Indigo so it must be. There were unique shops, restaurants, bars and enough people to not make it feel desolate. I enjoyed the human-scaled architecture that had survived the ages and the general grit that had not been pressure washed into the gutter. I found Lexington Park antiques on Walnut Street interesting in a grungy and dusty way and rummaged in there for too long. After a time spent walking the streets and browsing shops I felt I was missing some cool place that was always just around the corner and I never found. 

 

If everything in Atlanta is Peachtree, then everything in Asheville is Vanderbilt. Photo by me, March 2023.

 

Asheville, you are one elusive creature.

 

Rusted and vine covered machines outside the Antique Tobacco Barn. Photo by me, March 2023.

Antiques shopping was why I was in Asheville and I enjoyed shopping at a large place south of downtown called the Antique Tobacco Barn.

Hi yo Goldie! Photo by me, March 2023.

Over the past few months and in three states, I have been seeing these metal horse clocks. I saw the first one in 2022 at an antique store in Monroe, Georgia. I was so taken by their tackiness that I wanted one, but it was grossly overpriced. I have since seen them more reasonably priced at other antique stores and online. I am patiently waiting to find the right one for my office. I was so curious about these horse clocks that began appearing before me that I did some internet searching. These clocks were novelty clocks often made by the United Clock Company, that is the brand I have been finding, and were mantle clocks made during the 1940s and 50s. Some refer to these clocks as “carnival clocks” as they were often the top prize that could be won at a carnival booth. I have noticed that these horse clocks have sometimes had their bases replaced with stone or wood and not the original metal.

 

Ripped from history. Photo by me, March 2023.

It will never not stop me cold whenever I come across family photos for sale in an antique store. There are some fragments of lives that are too precious, too private to ever be sold and those are family photos. I would rather see them shredded, thrown away, burned or donated to a museum collection than sold to strangers looking for a bargain. The context and history of the photo are lost and it is likely to be stuck to a refrigerator with a six dollar magnet from some experience as decoration.

 

Photos by me, March 2023.

There were some interesting pieces of furniture and decorative objects. I would gladly return here.

Leaving Asheville and the mountains around it. Photo by me, March 2023.

I left Asheville with more than I came and thank you for the memories elusive, Vanderbilt, craft brew drenched city. I left not feeling like I knew the city any better and in closing, it did not feel like it had any connection to the mountains surrounding it.

 

Dispatch From The Deep Water

Somewhere in South Florida. April 2023.

 

Somewhere in South Florida, Fort Lauderdale mostly, I write this. I am here working on the first drafts of my next novel. I am dueling with myself over whether to write the remainder of the nineties or skip it until some other time. I winged my shadow in the standoff of decisions, yet I am writing and it is the back half of the nineties for now. I really want to write about Brian and his important influence, the other Mark with powdered sugar noses and declare my answer after years of being asked to father a child for someone. The nineties made me as much as any other decade and why not tell it all from the paths that wound through Louisville's Cherokee Park to the stick lady of First Street?

The weather has been blistering hot since I arrived last week, the wind has been moody from offshore to on and nary has there been a drop of rain. The landscape is scorched dry and I sometimes believe I am in Southern California without the Santa Anna. The Mean Season will come and my cracked lips will be grateful. I cannot complain in South Florida, only observe, unless I am stuck on that fatally clogged I-95 with more blockages than Cheney's heart.

 

April 2023. Photo by me.

The music that has been kidnapping my ears is from the Cure's albums: Seveteen Seconds, Faith and Disintegration. Listening to them puts me back in the seat of my Z as a teenager, afraid of going through with it with that guy with the funny hair, that sweaty handed nervousness and the guilt before I knew how his lips tasted. I need a little fear and nervousness in my head to get me to write what I need to write. I have to be back down there to touch the bottom of the pool of feelings.

 

A Fort Lauderdale canal. April 2023. Photo by me.

Back to the surface for air and a boat rips down the canal. The water parts in its wake like an undone zipper. Here I am far removed from my office, Rabbit Tobacco Field, and in another place I love that has a name too. A stray cat prowls (not a Hemingway cat), a lizard bobs its head and life slows down enough for me to spin it around in my mind to stare at it from different perspectives. I hear a fountain below me in the courtyard and around me I see a different Florida than what I knew before I ever came here fourteen years ago. This place is not a strip of road littered with Alvin's Island gift shops, put-put golf volcanoes and restaurants named after captains that serve fried seafood. This is a place I had not imagined existed in the states, but it does and this state is not a monolith or what we see presented to us in movies or the news. I cannot share the name, it would give away a secret that I want to keep for now. The name has no associations to Fort Lauderdale or South Florida or water or beaches or birds.

 

April 2023. Photo by me.

I am here to remind you that you are only as old as you feel. Though I may look old underneath my hat, SPF 1 zillion sunblock and behind my sunglasses, I suppose I am feeling pretty good at fifty after swimming against the current, walking through the dunes and getting spooked by the dolphins after being out too far. I have a long history of getting out too far into the deep water. Anyway, this little island paradise, which is not Fort Lauderdale, is my favorite beach from the Keys to Pensacola. You will likely never see me much happier than this. Life is funny … time to eat fresh oysters at this hole-in-the-wall that has walls plastered in one dollar bills signed by patrons – it can not be found on Trip Advisor or in Conde Nast Traveler.

 

 

The Cure, The Same Deep Water As You

A Night in Peachtree Battle

A blurry night from the west side of Atlanta. Photo by me, 2011.

 

It was likely fifteen years ago that a friend and I gave three women in their early twenties a ride home at the end of the night as Swinging Richards pushed us out the door into the parking lot on Northside Drive. This was well before that neighborhood began to gentrify and like every place from urban to rural, there are potential dangers in the darkness. The women waited on a taxi that was never coming in the chilly hours of an early spring morning. We offered them a ride and they accepted without hesitation – maybe it was the alcohol or we looked like two harmless skinny gay guys that they outnumbered.

When we arrived at their small apartment building, tucked down a street somewhere in Peachtree Battle, they invited us in for drinks. It was after three in the morning and this was not uncommon for us to either host an after hours drink for friends and strangers or to be invited to an after hours party that might go past sunrise. These gatherings were unpredictable and it was impossible tell in advance how these things might go or spin out of control as many had. The later and more intoxicated people became it increased the chances of a girl named Britney grabbing you by the arm and attempting to drag you into a pink tiled bathroom of a brick ranch in Scottdale to make out, even if you are gay guy - true story, but I did escape before she closed the door.

Drinks were poured that night in Peachtree Battle and the standard introductions made. It was a large, open studio apartment with exposed brick walls, moody lighting and furniture purchased on credit cards at Pottery Barn. The decor was very of-the-moment and the apartment smelled like a candle shop at the mall. I remember none of the names the women gave, but I had tossed out my regular fake name of Eric. It was believable, I thought I kind of resembled my idea of what an Eric should look like with dark brown bangs, blue eyes and a thirty inch waist. I was one of those people that blended in with the furniture at any type of event or place from coffee shops to hotel lobbies or buying a fishing license at an Alabama Walmart.

Conversation pitched back and forth like a row boat on a windy day and one of the women and I had the oars. We had hit it off and not too long after she said she had something to show me. She was excited and I was nervous about what she meant. She stood and motioned for me to come with her. I rose and she grabbed my hand, intertwining her fingers in mine. I was nervous like I was as a young boy on a date in junior high seeing a movie at the Paulding Plaza. She pulled me to the bedroom area of the place behind a shoji screen and turned on a lamp. None of the others talked behind us as they became spectators or at least the eyes in the back of my head assumed they watched.

She and I faced a wall from the foot of her bed. She raised her left and arm and pointed. With pride she asked me what I thought. Relief glistened on my forehead as I stared at a modern art painting. It was a swirl of colors from every flavor of Ben & Jerry's or the condiment aisle at Publix. I did that move that I do when I do not know what I am looking at or what to say: I tilt my head to the side, un-focus my eyes and bite my lower lip - the built-in thesaurus for adjectives in my head works better in that transcendental state.

Before I could settle on a specific word she said it was a certain painter from Atlanta that I did not know at the time. She was proud of her purchase and probably paid a lot of money for it. The name was spoken like I was supposed to know this painter and should be jealous and honored to be so close to one of his paintings.

Pages flipped in my mind and the best I could do was to say that the painting was beautiful. I gave the most generic response and even my Eric-fake-name-generated-enthusiasm could not achieve the tone of believability.

She released my hand. The budding bond of after hours kinship fueled on the vapors of alcohol evaporated.

She must have expected a different reaction like I was to get on my knees and tears were to stream down my cheeks. It was only a few minutes ago that all of us were giving dollars bills to male strippers pretending to be firemen, cowboys and fantasies of flesh that could be rented in the back if you had enough cash or remembered your ATM pin number. My mind had not transitioned from that scene to the art scene with delicate brushstrokes.

I again said it was very nice, thanked her for showing it to me and returned to the group.

The conversation lost its momentum and we made our exit from the artificial pear and cinnamon candle scented Peachtree Battle apartment.

Beauty in all its forms from the arts or the natural environment to naked strippers is personal and subjective. Offense taken when someone disagrees or politely declines to share your enthusiasm is immature. I love the most distorted and twisted paintings of Kandinsky, but I can surely understand if someone thinks it is a joke or depicting the great battle of the jellyfish versus the emaciated storks. Many may not share my love for Goldfrapp's Felt Mountain either or get as excited about the films of Tarkovsky and that is perfectly okay. The world would be a boring and humorless dystopia if we were all in lockstep, drove Volvos and hummed along to the latest computer generated number one pop hit.

 

Untied

At my grandparent's kitchen table looking at photos in the 1980s.

It is just after five in the morning as I sit with my coffee on the patio in the rear of my house. I am sitting on the creaky wooden bench I got from my mother's house after she died. I am enjoying that special silence that comes this early or late depending on the hours you keep. My mind is out there in the stars of the western sky and I ask them what I did wrong. My tendency is to always blame myself when something is wrong, even though I did nothing to cause these circumstances just like I had no role in putting those stars in the sky.

I did not outgrow my family. I spent much of my life around family until I was thirty-one years old. It was when my mother died when I was thirty-one that I realized how little affection for me there was on my mother's side of the family. I thought that all those years together, having coffee, talking around the table, the reunions, frequent family gatherings meant something, but I over estimated my position. It was my mother that everyone had the affection for and I was tagging along at her request, but I also enjoyed those times around family nonetheless.

In the shadow of my mother 1995.

I was tolerated, not accepted. It was in the 2010s when I was invited to a Thanksgiving dinner at an aunt's house that I realized I was wrong about what my family thought about my life. Though I had a long term partner my aunt explicitly made it clear that I was the only one invited and that he was not. I was not seen as the boy that they knew as a child and gave nicknames, I was an aberrant identity to them now. So much so that this aunt said the world was going to end soon because I finally had the right to marry and be treated equally. These were the people I looked the most like and shared a blood line, but somehow I was inferior.

I went to two of these Thanksgiving dinners alone so that I could see my family. I subjugated my pride and self respect just to see them. None of them were asked to check their self worth at the door, except me. I was glad to see my family for a steep price. I held my quiet indignity tight so that I could hear their voices and see their faces again.

Family are people that know us in ways that others cannot. They knew us when we were unguarded children getting grass stains in hand-me-down jeans or what we were like before we succumbed to roles of adulthood later in life. They remember when you were tired of the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at summer lunches. They may remember our differences, but they are supposed to be better at overlooking and forgiving them. They are family and they are what ties us back to our beginnings like eternal shoestrings and to our family history.

 

Those shoestrings have come untied for me and them.

Silence has settled in for the past eleven years between my mother's side of the family and me. There was no fight, no disagreement, nothing – it was a disconnect as if I no longer existed. I have not heard from them, received a phone call or Christmas card. I hear things about them, sometimes, but that is all. I know some of them have read my books and none of them reached out to me to discuss any of the revelations in them, though some of them knew part of what happened at the time. I went as far as protecting some of them and their feelings by not writing about them or leaving out details that might hurt them. I tried to be as considerate as I could and write as much truth as possible; that is not an easy line to walk when the truth is painful.

The silence nags at me. I would reach out to them, but I expect to be ignored or worse rejected. The stars are bright white dots in the sky and I am red Mars in the corner. I search for reasons and find none. I am an easy person to find on the internet, there is this website with my email that I have had since the beginning of Gmail, I am on Facebook and I have had the same phone number for well over a decade. 

 

Me in my home office in 2023.

I believe my mother would be disappointed at how I have been treated by her/our family. I have their photos on my walls and I can assume they have none of me on their walls. That name I share meant as much to me as the name that I wear. That name is impossible to hide and is obvious as looking at me.