All Dressed Up For Christmas

The State Botanical Gardens of Georgia in Athens. Photo by me, December 2022.

Christmas in Georgia is rarely white, but it can be cold as it was last year with lows at my house in the single digits and afternoon highs in the twenties for several days. The cold was refreshing and it made wandering through the state botanical garden light displays in Athens a more festive experience. More commonly it is a cool and cloudy holiday here. This year it will be a wet Christmas with rain expected from late Christmas Eve through the day after Christmas. I would have hated that forecast as a kid, but as an adult I am quite okay with the cozy weather.

 

Dahlonega, Georgia. December 2023.

 

People would likely disagree with me, but last Saturday the 16th in Dahlonega, Georgia the weather was near perfect with heavy drizzle falling and a temperature in the middle forties. I was there to see the lights and browse the shops on the square and so were many others from the crowds and traffic I encountered.

 

Dahlonega, Georgia. December 2023.

Dahlonega, Georgia. December 2023.

Dahlonega, Georgia. December 2023.

Dahlonega, Georgia. December 2023.

Dahlonega, Georgia. December 2023.

The lights were pretty, but not overwhelming. I saw prettier houses on the drive over through the city Gainesville than I did in Dahlonega. The mountain town north of Atlanta and just out of reach from its exurbs has been in the spotlight this year after being mentioned in Southern Living Magazine for the Christmas decorations and events. The mention was picked up by Atlanta television stations and the crowds flocked up Georgia 400. After going, I speculated if it was not some type of paid promotion to drum up tourism in the slowest of all seasons in the Georgia mountains. Had I not seen the stories on the Atlanta news websites, I probably would not have gone. I enjoyed myself, had a good lobster roll from a food truck vendor, but I was not impressed with the lights. Dahlonega is not my favorite mountain town anyway and the shops there are not on par with another mountain town, Blue Ridge.

Dahlonega has an interesting history besides being a former gold mining town, there was a bit of a scandal there in 2017. This story, in the U.K.'s Independent newspaper is quite kooky and worth the read.

Also last weekend I visited one of my favorite towns, Madison, on Sunday.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

 

 

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

Madison is a small town I would feel comfortable living in. It has a charming and refined beauty about its downtown with several good shops and many fine old homes. The people have been friendly on every visit. A shopkeeper remembered me from my previous visits and finally asked if lived there or if I had family that did.

 

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

 

Some of the shop windows were wonderfully decorated for Christmas.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

These are a couple of the many grand homes in Madison decorated for the holidays. The town has the appearance of what people would consider the Old South or antebellum style. 

I have been busy, like most people, dashing to and fro this month. I have been down to Atlanta two or three times during this period.

Phipps Plaza in Atlanta. Photo by me, December 2023.

Santa taking requests at Phipps Plaza in the city.

Sometimes the best way to see Christmas lights and enjoy the sights is to loaf around in the evenings and at night between the planned activities.

Dusk in Bethlehem, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

I pass through the small town of Bethlehem, Georgia once a week. Growing up in Georgia, I remember the annual news story that ran every December on the Atlanta television stations. It was the story of people making the drive to Bethlehem to mail Christmas cards for the Bethlehem postmark. Since mailing cards has declined I suppose people no longer visit the post office there in the numbers as they did decades before.

Photo by me, December 2023.

A nicely decorated home in Monroe, Georgia.

Photo by me, December 2023.

Photo by me, December 2023.

Photo by me, December 2023.

Every small town is all dressed up this time of year with Christmas lights. Monroe, Georgia does a simple but pretty job with their thriving downtown.

Season's Greetings And Christmas Cards

Some 1980s Christmas cards from WXIA-TV Atlanta that I received during my time affiliated with them from 1985 to 1990. Signed by Johnny Beckman, Guy Sharpe and other meteorologists and staff.

---

 Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, it was common to see the phrase “Season's Greetings” on Christmas cards, advertisements and other decorations, but the phrase dating back to Victorian times seems to have fallen out of usage or I seldom seem to encounter it any longer. My mother seemed to favor it for our family Christmas cards and I remember as a child seeing it the most often compared to other popular phrases like Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays. 

 

Without fail and with enjoyment, my mother sent out Christmas cards every December. Revco, Zayre, K-Mart, Richway, Rich's or from wherever she got them that year. I was there with her, going through the boxes in the aisle next to the wrapping paper, until she asked me what I thought and she decided on just the right one. Some years it was a reindeer, a sleigh, a bird or barn in the snow or Santa with a bag of toys slung over his shoulder that she chose. Sometimes we agreed and sometimes we did not.

Christmas cards from my childhood home in the 1980s.

 

The tradition was for her to retrieve the red address book from the telephone table in the living room and sit down to write out a stack of cards intended for friends and relatives. People got them even if she had not seen or spoken to them during the year; she was going to think of them for the moment it took to write their name.

 

The addresses rarely changed as people did not hop from house to house like the nomads of today seeking an upgraded kitchen and twenty car garage, except for a crazy aunt of mine who was constantly marrying, divorcing and moving. Houses are no longer homes, but investments and there are more people in Georgia than I ever would have imagined as a child. You could write my name and Route 5 Dallas, Georgia without any other numbers or a road and the mail carrier would have known exactly who I was and where I lived thirty or forty years ago. Not so today.

 

Christmas cards on a fireplace mantle in my former Louisville home. Photo by me, December 1996.

I sat next to my mother on the sofa and watched and waited for my turn in our conveyor belt Christmas card operation. Her handwriting was much prettier than mine; I am a left-hander and she was a righty, so she did the writing. My job was to stamp and seal the envelopes after she had signed the cards and filled in the address. Some television show would be on the background that neither of us cared for or in the seventies, she would have the Elvis Christmas LP from 1970 playing on the wood cabinet stereo.

No one interfered with us, as it was likely there was no one else around. When the writing, stamping and licking were done, we would drive to the post office in Dallas and I would run inside and drop them through the slots marked "Dallas Only" or "Out of Town."

A 1970s Christmas card from my great grandmother and great uncle in Visetown, Tennessee.

I do not imagine a scene such as that often plays out in contemporary life. Children have little interest in anything that is not on a phone screen and the same could be said of adults too. Christmas cards have been replaced by social media posts that sound like they were written by public relations firms and accompany an over stylized family photo in front of a Christmas tree or a summer beach vacation at Destin or Panama City at sunset with everyone dressed in white. The smiles will be wide, the hair will be blown, the sand will fill every wrinkle and the sunburn serious. Were these people stranded in the desert? After all, there are appearances to keep up and as I said to someone recently, everyone on social media appears to be happy and living the best life. Much show must be made of every moment at that very moment.

Most people of my generation and older will think of the Christmas card as an artifact of our past lives. Younger generations likely do not think of Christmas cards at all because they have probably never signed one. The Christmas card can be considered The Ghost of Christmas Past warning Scrooge to remember the innocent Christmas spirit that he possessed in his youth, lest he die miserably and sentenced to become a ghost chained up like old Jacob Marley. It might be Dickensian to hold the antiquated Christmas card in high regard or give it such powers of sentimentality. As a fan of Dickens, I fondly remember the cards as much as the parties more than I do any G.I. Joe or Star Wars action figures that I received as a present under the tree. Receiving a Christmas card meant that you mattered or were thought of, even if it was only for a moment. There was a human connection in the handwriting, the brief words written, the tearing open of the envelope and the licking of the stamp.

There is no human connection in the 'like' button or the heart icon underneath the thumb holding a screen. You might as well keep scrolling for the next video or selfie or time-wasting piece of content.

Half of the enjoyment of Christmas cards was receiving them in the mail. I liked to see the variety of cards that people chose and the handwriting styles. After opening the cards, they would be placed on the mantle above the fireplace, where they would sit until after the new year, when the decorations came down and were boxed up. While they were there for a month, I would look at them and be reminded of that person and imagine our card sitting on their mantle. The lifespan of the Christmas card was another part of the tradition. The unsatisfactory modern equivalent of social media posts cannot be perched on a mantle or satisfy my need to tear open an envelope. Their lifespan is less than a second, as it is scrolled by and never seen or thought of again. Such is contemporary digital life, where nothing endures.

 

The Lenox Square tree in 2007. Photo by me.

Similarly, Macy's killed off the Rich's Christmas tree tradition after seventy-four years in Atlanta. I have been to Lenox Square twice since Thanksgiving this year and the Christmas spirit was lacking and some of that was not seeing a Christmas tree atop the Rich's (it'll never be Macy's to me) store. It was a tradition I grew up with, even in years I did not see the tree in person at the Rich's flagship downtown store on the crystal bridge or when it moved to Buckhead, as the night of the lighting was always broadcast on television. In my lifetime until now, it has always existed and so from my perspective, it should always continue to exist. Tradition is something humans grasp onto when other aspects of life shift with the times and become unrecognizable. They are reassurances on cold, windy nights that some things still matter and are constant when little else behaves in that manner.

The last Christmas card my mother sent me four months before she died.

The season's greetings are not mailed anymore, but are more likely Instagrammed and forgotten. Traditions require too much time, thought and effort in the age of instant and constant gratification. This is how traditions fade out little by little with the passage of time and people. I still send Christmas cards and I will keep sending them until I can no longer find them in the stores or have no one to send them to.

 

Shorter Days, Reflections On A Year

 

Photo by me, January 2023.

The shorter days of fall and winter are my favorite days. I like the late morning sunrise and the growing darkness that begins by four thirty in the afternoon when the sun slides behind the tall trees downhill toward the river. Inside our cozy homes with lamplight, some of us hibernate behind books or for others, in front of a glowing television or phone. I have mostly been ensconced at a computer screen, finishing the first draft of my third novel. I completed that this month.

It is thirty-seven degrees on the fence underneath the crepe myrtle as I sit at my desk and write this at eight o'clock at night with a hole in my sweater. The roses are finished for another year and they bow their last blooms to the morning frost. Shorter days and longer nights - I like the trade.

2023 has gotten away from me like a misplaced sock hiding somewhere underneath a bed. I rambled around the South with trips across Georgia and out of state to North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama. Mississippi was neglected this year, but that is usually the case. There was no long-distance trip to some unfamiliar place this year, but I did not have that most precious commodity known as time. 

Thoughts have turned inward to reveal what was underneath the fleece throw of the mind. 

It is perilous to think that with the aches and pains of age, experience and the nectar of knowledge that we have it all figured out or that we know the truth that others do not, but that is complacency fooling us into having too much self-confidence. Sometimes there is little difference between the blinders affixed to a horse and the ego of the human mind. One lesson that life teaches us over and over is that we do not know everything. Life is good at humbling reminders. Every person is a student from birth until death.

The approach that works best for me is to go through life with the perspective that I know less each year, I am less certain of my beliefs and it is best to try and retain a childlike sense of wonder.

 

The caught off guard me. Charleston. August 2023.

I thought a lot (what's new?) in 2023. I wrote through most of the year, excluding my summer blockade. I had serious doubts about whether I wanted to write this novel. It is complicated, it is sad and it is full of tragedy and stupidity. The humor and the high moments are scaled before gravity says not so fast. A number of years ago, there was a public service campaign with the slogan, "it gets better." Maybe it does for some and maybe we all get there in our own time, but I would be dishonest to say that it always does. 

 

What was the solution in these years that I have written about and was the escape foiled again? Did I keep running like the boy at the beginning of Dweller On The Boundary or keep driving like my mother and me in Uncivil X? The escape route was planned, but my shoe was untied and I tripped and my mother and I turned around. 

 

In Shadow's Gravity, that is the title of the third novel, does the man stop resisting or break free? Did he make the wrong decision atop the levee in Indiana with the Louisville skyline and a different future staring him in the face? Did he get on the plane to Asia?

I know the answers. I was him.

 

Suddenly I'm on the street. Seven years disappear below my feet. Been breaking down. Freedy Johnston's Bad Reputation

I do not spread my heart like butter on an English muffin with social media, but I went through a serious period of depression this year. Somewhere I took a wrong turn, stepped into it and it was stuck to my shoes. I could attribute it to swimming in the territorial waters of the past to write a book, but I do not know. It could have been as simple as reading too much news or listening to too much Radiohead. As much as we sometimes want answers, we might never have them. Maybe that is why I liked that television show In Search Of as a kid.

 

That is life at the end of 2023 - another year closing, a sentence written and an additional mile walked. It is nothing to be maudlin about; people came and went, there were chance meetings with long-lost faces, lengthy emails, hours-long phone conversations and text chats and in between all of that, I became a great uncle as I watched the sunset from the beach.

 

The Christmas decorations are up, the lights are on and the cards posted. The sounds of the Vince Guaraldi Trio's A Charlie Brown Christmas and Mannheim Steamroller's Christmas album from 1984 are the soundtrack to washing dishes, getting the mail, making notes, sitting at a traffic light or sipping coffee. Life has settled here between the Egyptian cotton sheets, the wool socks and crossing off the last days on the calendar before it begins again. Somewhere in time, I am sliding around on the leather backseat of my father's Cadillac and Paul McCartney sings my favorite Christmas song. It is cold and I cannot wait to get home and sit in front of the fireplace. Heavy-lidded and drowsy, tired I am and in need of a good sleep. The life has been drained from another year.

Thank you for reading. I hope you have a merry Christmas, happy holidays and I wish you the best for 2024.

 

 

The planned, the unplanned and a few moments I shared and did not in 2023.

Some place far from anywhere that I'll probably never write about in detail.

The favorite moments of 2023 occurred in the absence of social media. Driving down a gravel and sometimes rutted dirt road in search of a ghost town on a March afternoon was one. It was overwhelming silence standing there with no phone signal, the mind alert to only that moment and that moment only. Life used to be like that, do you remember?

Somewhere in South Carolina. August 2023.

The same enjoyment occurred in another desolate place in the ruins of a church in the low country of South Carolina. This time was down a road, somewhat paved, but guarded by oaks with Spanish moss draped overhead.

Pensacola. September 2023.

Alas, I love a good ruin. 

 

Chenocetah Mountain. March 2023.

And foggy days.

Birmingham. August 2023.

I spent a lot of time in places that looked like this.

Greenville, South Carolina. August 2023.

You can try many things in a small town, but I don't recommend a certain country song. Try John Mellencamp instead, from a person that actually grew up in a small town. Greensboro, Georgia. March 2023.

Miles were walked in cities, small towns and woods.

 

February 2023.

 

I returned to horseback riding for the first time in twenty-five years.

 

Athens is always good for people watching. June 2023.

There were festivals and some were good and others bad.

Spy the rainbow? August 2023.

I stood on a roof at a private event and no longer recognized an old neighborhood where I had lived.

 

April 2023.

I became obsessed with an abandoned plantation. 

June 2023.

There were botanical gardens.

I spent plenty of time in bookstores and drinking coffee. I listened to stories from others and told a few.

Somewhere in South Florida. April 2023.

 I napped on an island and swam too far out. 

 

Asheville, North Carolina. March 2023.

 

I discovered invisibility in Asheville. Listened to Bach. An ex emailed me out of the blue while I made hotel coffee. A long lost friend appeared. I bought a gigantic book of old New Yorker cartoons.

 

I returned to New Hope for the first time in almost twenty years.

Down In The City

 

Atlanta at the Brookwood Split looking south. Photo by me, November 2023.

Today was the first time I have been down to the city since August when I was at Ponce City Market and the Beltline. It was a gloomy day with mist in the afternoon and it was quite nice. I was hanging out in West Midtown and Blandtown. I still have a kernel of fondness for the city, especially when it is gloomy, but I do not want to live there again.

Otherwise, I am locked away at home being very productive with the next novel due in 2024. Atlanta and my life there in the 1990s and early 2000s are apart of this book. Much of what I have written is critical of the city during that time, though in some ways it might have been a better city then than now. It was certainly more relaxed and laid back during that period compared to today and some of that criticism could be extrapolated on a national cultural level. The skyline with the new buildings is nice to look at, but generally life in the city proper is not that appealing at street level.

Photo by me, November 2023.

Some of the smaller scale new construction, like this in Blandtown, is hideous and cheap looking. This residential building looks like three shacks stacked atop each other or maybe an overcooked french fry. It also has no relationship with the street other than the cookie cutter stencil style mural. However, I would imagine the price is anything but cheap.

Photo by me, November 2023.

Many years after being built, the 17th Street bridge remains a complete abomination for pedestrians.  Imagine walking across that concrete wasteland in the heat of summer with all of the pollution from the traffic wafting upward and no shade. The only redeeming value of the bridge, besides traffic management, is the view of the skyline.

Trains, Towers and Time

 

A leaning oak tree questions its existence in the fog. Photo by me, March 2023.

Some people are spring and summer people and others, like me, are fall and winter people. I will gladly accept a gloomy, cool to cold day over a blazing hot and humid day that can occur here in the northern third of Georgia anywhere from April through early October. I compare it to music: I would rather listen to the Cocteau Twins, The Cure, Echo & The Bunnymen, Nirvana or Joy Division than Aerosmith, Poison, Britney Spears, Lady Gaga or whatever passes for the computer-generated pop music these days. Do not get me wrong; I can relish a hot July day dipping my toes into a lake or squeezing hot white Florida sand between my toes, but I love the gray, damp and cozy winters of home much more.

This past March, I experienced the perfect weather day, if such is possible, like it was one of the scenes from my novel Dweller On The Boundary when I lost my dog Raven in the fog. It was an early March day as I went north into the higher elevations of the mountains. The temperatures dropped into the upper forties and drizzle made everything dripping wet. It was the type of weather that makes me want to walk forever or rest my bones by a fireplace and look at old photos.

Better times in Clarkesville, Ga. Photo by me, March 2023.

Take the last train to Clarksville
And I'll meet you at the station
You can be here by four thirty (Train)
'Cause I made your reservation
Don't be slow
Oh, no, no, no
And I don't know if I'm ever coming home.
-The Last Train To Clarksville by The Monkees.

 

The first town I loafed into was Clarkesville, no connection to that 1960s Monkees song Last Train To Clarksville. The Habersham County town of nineteen hundred residents has been bypassed by newer and bigger highways, pinching it off from the eyes and dollars of passing motorists. The last passenger train service, via the Tallulah Falls Railway, ended in 1946. The isolated situation might not make for a thriving economy, but it has preserved the town's character and identity from the newer and more cheaply built development that is devouring much of northern Georgia like a fatal disease.

 

My thoughts are not original on this topic; I share them with the late writer and Atlanta newspaper columnist Celestine Sibley, who lamented the changes during her lifetime in her beloved Sweet Apple in what was then rural North Fulton County. I, like many longtime residents of Georgia, have watched the rolling wooded hills and mountains become parking lots and cul-de-sacs with names that only remind us of the natural landscape that existed before. This is a concern that I have also written about in my novels.

 

Progress only seems to come in one shade and which is newness and not in another, which is better. The zealots of progress would likely disagree, but I could never be convinced that a metal building is more attractive than one made of brick or stone. A patch of kudzu is more attractive to my eyes than most of that ghastly and inhumane plastic-looking crap that is built today for people to live, work and play. In modern design, beauty has been sacrificed for cheap progress.

I might be wrong and overly sentimental too, so think for yourself. Those who are most certain in their opinions are most certainly wrong.

My childhood cookie jar. Photo by me, March 2023.

I poked around a couple of antique/junk shops located in a former textile mill without buying anything. I am now of the age where these kinds of shops are museums of my childhood, filled with objects I grew up with. Sometimes people from the past show up too, but that is another story for another time.

 

The blue/green glass canister above was the exact same one my mother had in my childhood home since the 1970s. My grubby little hands were always prying it open and sneaking cookies before bedtime. I was tempted to open this one and see if it smelled like the homemade oatmeal cookies she made. 

 

It is tempting to buy these unnecessary items and recreate the past. These objects set off a physical tingle and produce a smile, but it would feel wrong to have them again, like reconciling with an ex - you just know it is not going to work out no matter how good they make you feel. It is a fight sometimes to avoid succumbing to nostalgia for objects that were once a part of my life. I do not want to slip on a permanent pair of rose-colored shades that block out the negative realities of the past. Also, I do not bake cookies and have no need for a cookie jar.

 

I touched the smooth glass of the jar but did not open it. I feared disappointment that it would not release the aroma that my mind and heart hoped. My memory was more important to keep intact than to potentially spoil it. I exited the temporary haze of nostalgia and then I left Clarkesville. Stephen King's town of Castle Rock, Maine and that novel of his that I read as a teenager, Needful Things, were on my mind.

The Big Red Apple outside the old Cornelia train station. Photo by me, March 2023.

Cornelia, Ga. Photo by me, March 2023.

 

A stopover in nearby Cornelia had me standing next to a monument of a big red apple and the old train station. I do not associate Cornelia with apples in Georgia, but apparently they grow them and required a large monument to them, maybe to appease the apple gods. Who knows and I am not sure? Since the nineteen eighties, I have associated Georgia's apple industry with Ellijay and Blue Ridge where my family would buy them in the fall and I still do today. 

 

The plaza was empty in Cornelia, as I imagine it is most days; the flags flapped in the breeze, a pink magnolia showed off and the daffodils entertained themselves. No one waited for a train that does not stop there anymore, though Amtrak does make stops in nearby Toccoa and Gainesville. The passenger train that once ran through here went to Clarkesville, Tallulah Falls and into North Carolina. The leftover caboose was a prop for when or if the Instagrammers of the world find Cornelia or for an older person to explain to a child what the big red relic was. 

 

What a fine day it was to stand in the mist as my hands grew cold around my camera. I knew of a place outside Cornelia that I wanted to visit and this seemed like the ideal day to make the detour up there. I had found my destination and no train could take me there.

 

On the edge of the Lake Russell Wildlife Management Area stands a stone tower built in 1937 by the Works Progress Administration for the National Forest Service. To reach it, you drive a narrow paved road through a residential neighborhood planted on the side of Chenocetah Mountain. The tower is fifty-four feet high at an elevation of one thousand eight hundred and thirty feet above sea level. On a clear day, from the top of the tower, you could see for miles. It served the same original purpose as the metal fire tower atop Elsberry Mountain that was behind my childhood home: spotting forest fires.

This was not a clear day; this was a perfect weather day.

The fog on Chenocetah Mountain. Photo by, March 2023.

A tree indicated the way. Photo by me, March 2023.

I parked on the side of the road and could not see the tower further up the mountain through the fog. The crunch of gravel underfoot was the only sound as I went uphill. The atmosphere was eerie and the experience thrilling that I came on the perfect day. I was a boy again in the woods. There was no other world except where I was at that moment, which blurred with the past. It happens every time I set foot on a wooded trail: I am inspired. Dweller On The Boundary was born on a trail lined with Chinese privet on a hot summer's day.

Photo by me, March 2023.

Chenocetah Tower emerged in a clearing at the top, behind the gray sentinels, awaiting orders for when to begin to grow leaves again. The tower appeared like a sweet memory among the often mundane and trivial thoughts of the everyday that populate Facebook and the television news. Tell me what you really think or what is important and not some politically inspired pose for attention.

Photo by me, March 2023.

A pleasing land of drowsy-hed it was,
Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye;
And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,
Forever flushing round a summer-sky.
The Castle of Indolence, Canto I, VI by James Thomson in 1748. Also quoted at the opening of Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

The fog dressed the landscape in a cloak that distorted time. A person could have stood in that spot for almost the last one hundred years and it would have looked similar. In that distortion, I imagined myself calling out for my lost childhood dog, Raven, into the wall of gray. The conditions were the same as that 1980s day that I sank into the ground of Rabbit Tobacco Field. This was not a nostalgic trance, but history rattling my bones as if I needed to remember.

Photo by me, March 2023.

 

This was like walking through one of my stories or how I imagined the landscapes to be in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. If the Headless Horseman rode past, I could not see him in the dense water droplets suspended in the air. Raven could have been out there too with her jingling vet tag, but I would not know; all sound was muffled.

Photo by me, March 2023.

 

Photo by me, March 2023.

Photo by me, March 2023.

I could not climb the tower as much as I wanted to do just that. The blue door was locked tight to keep the vandals from having their way with it. The wood and stone were spared from high school sweethearts pledging eternal love and devotion on it. The tower is only open to the public one weekend a year, during the Cornelia apple festival. 

 

I admired the tower at ground level and thought about how structures of this quality are not commonly built anymore and have not been during all of my fifty years. I like the older architecture and craftsmanship, but do not confuse that with my liking older times better. My admiration for old buildings probably was spawned when I first saw the stone house of my great-grandparents in Tennessee as a child or visiting the Biltmore Estate in Asheville in the 1980s. I simply saw that when it came to buildings, the older ones appealed to me.

 

When my twenties arrived, I chose to live in some old places: a former Atlanta Ford Factory built in the 1920s and a Victorian mansion from the 1880s in Louisville, Kentucky. Living in places that old is living inside history and sharing them with the unseen past, which is kind of similar to living in an eternal fog. Sometimes in those places I caught a whiff of the scent of the past or a glimpse of it darting around a corner, but I never came face to face with it as I did as a young boy in my backyard underneath an oak tree or again much later in life.

Whatever ghosts are, I believe in them. They can exist in foggy woods and fields, creaking mansions, antique stores, words in a book, in a mind and in a heart. I carry them around with me, write about them, sometimes encounter them and try not to be haunted by them.

Photo by me, March 2023.

 

Photo by me, March 2023.

There on the foggy mountaintop, the time distortion was strong and I traveled on the perfect weather day. Despite my possible resemblance to Ichabod Crane, no pumpkins were hurled my way as I stood next to the tower with cold cheeks and damp hair. Raven still ran through my memories as black as her namesake. Time travel is not only an H.G. Wells story or that television show I loved as a kid, Voyagers!, but a real phenomenon and that can be achieved by closing one's eyes. The keys are imagination and memories. A person can go to any place or time that they can imagine or remember, but there are reservations to be considered. The past is as set as the stone in the tower and cannot be changed, as some might want. However, time travel can influence the present and future if you allow it, so be wise in making those choices.

Unpaid Shoes

Sinead: Her Life and Music by Jimmy Guterman. Published 1991.

 

The Irish eyes will always lure you in and torture your heart, I write that with plenty of personal experience behind it. When I heard the news, the image that came up in my mind was of those eyes.

Sinead O'Connor was mesmerizing to my seventeen-year-old American eyes in 1990. That Prince song she sang would come on and I would gawp at the video. It was one of those collective moments in pop culture that do not happen anymore when she appeared all in black between the trees with a nearly shaved head, stared straight through me on MTV and sang until she cried. You did not see women like her and one with such a beautiful voice on television.

 

Her death this week was not surprising like Prince’s or George Michael's and that was maybe the saddest part of her tragic life. Someone sitting in my living room told me the news and the first thought I had was that she must have finally killed herself. If you knew anything about her for the last couple of decades you kind of expected it.

Sinead O'Connor became the latest memorable artist that entertained Generation X to die at a young age. She joined River Phoenix, Kurt Cobain, Chris Cornell, Michael Hutchence, Scott Weiland, Prince, George Michael, Amy Winehouse, Philip Seymour Hoffman and many others who have died too young. The untimely deaths among my generation have been too copious for me to recall. It would be a gruesome hobby to try and maintain a list in my head and I would rather not. There were those who have died from mental health issues, drugs, alcohol or a cocktail of all three.

O'Connor will be mostly remembered for two things: singing 1990's Nothing Compares To You, written by Prince, and ripping up a photo of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live in October 1992.

It would be nice if she were remembered for more, but those were the two most newsworthy events of her sometimes troubled life that included getting caught shoplifting shoes as a teenager, her own childhood abuse, the hanging death of one of her sons in 2022, her suicide attempts and ultimately her death at the age of fifty-six. Documentaries will be made, books will be written and some people will take the time to get to know more of her story, but most will not.

 

Nirvana performing on SNL in January 1992.

I saw her performance on Saturday Night Live that eventful night. I watched the show for the musical guests back then in the cozy, fuzzy sweatered and moody 90s. My favorite band at the time, Nirvana, performed on the show in January of the same year. SNL mattered in the cultural zeitgeist during the early 1990s just as magazines, record stores, MTV and zines did. Those years were defining years in the lives of Generation X, as many of us, including myself, had come of age and were shaking off our dewy youth to find a way in the wilds of slackerdom.

 

Sinead on SNL in 1992.

The big moment when she ripped up the photo of the Pope did not seem shocking to me then, nor does it now. I understood it was some form of protest, but I did not have the context. Artists have a long history of protesting for causes that matter to them. I expect artists to be unconventional and I want them to be unconventional if they are genuine in their convictions and not merely a poseur. Sinead's protest went over my head that night. I never read anything about the Pope or religion in Rolling Stone or any of the other magazines I subscribed at the time. It was not until later that I learned it was about sexual abuse in the church. What did I know about religion or the Catholic church? I was raised without religion and was an atheist by the time I was a teenager.

Sinead was an easy target for the establishment of entertainment and media to react against. The more conservative elements in society were already keen to criticize her for her buzzed hair and implied that she was a lesbian and that was oh so taboo to be considered gay or lesbian thirty years ago. The backlash against the SNL protest was immense and grandstanders like Frank Sinatra and Joe Pesci publicly attacked her. Cowards and bullies often wrap themselves in either patriotism or religion when challenged with the uncomfortable truth that rattles personal ideology and their hold on power.

 

Morrissey, never one to bite his tongue, had this to say about Sinead in a scathing critique of the music industry, the media and modern society:

"She was a challenge, and she couldn’t be boxed-up, and she had the courage to speak when everyone else stayed safely silent. She was harassed simply for being herself."

 

His entire critique, You Know I Couldn't Last, is worth a read.

 

It was not easy being Sinead and few rallied to her defense in 1992 despite the tributes to her today. From my own life experiences, I can say that the few against the many and the more powerful is a lonely position in which to live. Popularity contests and the willingness to conform against your better judgment are for the weak. Strength is required to live on an island and Sinead had that until she ran out of it. Part of my attraction to her was her fearless willingness to be different. I did not have the glare of super stardom on my shoulders as she did beginning when she was twenty-three years old. Her appearance was not a contrived marketing gimmick, she had said as much in interviews at the time. She was not about being a pop star and the glamour, she wanted to be accepted as a serious artist.

Another part of my attraction to her in 1990 was her incredible beauty. With her buzzed head, beautiful face and the captivating Irish eyes she tripped off my attraction to androgyny. In faded jeans and Doc Martens boots she would have made one beautiful young man and I was attracted to the gay skinhead look that was fashionable in some circles. Yes, there was such a trend, though many might not remember it. It was the skinhead look without the politics attached.

There were also her talents of singing and songwriting. She was not an artist I followed closely for the last thirty years, but I knew she was out there still performing and struggling. I would revisit her music and interviews from time to time, like I do with many artists from the past. I had an emotional connection to some of her work and sometimes it was nice to pull out that old shirt buried deep in the closet and wear it again.

Upon further consideration, if she is remembered for Nothing Compares To You and the Saturday Night Live protest, then that is not such a bad way to be remembered. She can be remembered for her success and courage in standing up. What will fail to remain in the collective memory is the manner in which portions of society treated her and it is too late anyway.

It is worth knowing if her death was a suicide and not accidental or some other circumstance. A definitive answer is needed so that there can be an examination of what the reasons were and maybe it will help prevent some other person from experiencing a situation where they too feel like suicide is the only option. It was not until later that it was learned that Michael Hutchence had brain damage from an assault, which, along with some seriously bad choices in his private life contributed to his suicide. Whatever the reasons were for Sinead, she had seen, heard and experienced enough of this life and she deserved better when she was living - unpaid shoes and all.