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What a grand
adventure
the seasons' change
Nature rents
her icy garb
dons her cloak
of spring
Trees once frigid
void of leaves
awash in emerald
wear
budding plants
long unseen
adorn a regal air
lips
untouched
countenance
unseen
never fail
to stir this heart
my life roars
in fullness
the path sure
thoughts clear
yet
I am a sightless being
denied by distance
muted without
your laughter
it seems
I know you
hear you
Loved you
For eternity
My thoughts of you
multi-shaped, distinct in texture and touch
akin to leaves on a glorious oak tree
Anchoring a green pasture
adorned by grazing equines and country flowers
Perhaps it is the center of the universe
Who can know such things?
This tree bears my thoughts of you
An arraignment of color the rainbow envies
The leaves are apparel for the glories of nature
Lovely reds wondrous blues striking oranges
An admixture of shades and hues
No artist could conjure
The leaves populate the branches
Of the tree with thoughts of you
Fiery, pensive, explosive, longing
Loving, wanting, wishing
Pain, joy, bliss
Remorse, regret, recollections
As rich and varied as the leaves themselves
Each leaf blows gently
In the winds of years past
Then Autumn, glorious season
Nature's pageant God's gift
For lovers and dreamers arrives
And a mighty wind collects
What years could not do
The leaves, my thoughts of you
Are removed from regal branches
They scatter dancing lightly on
Natural thermals bounce gaily on breezes
Crafted in love
Gather in heaps and bounds separated
Only by the lovely footwork of a single child
Who plays in solitude, beneath the tree
Among my thoughts of you
In awe of the leaves he sings gaily
Suddenly the wind resumes
Enlists the ears of those who hear
the center of the universe
And the child peers into the sun kissed branches
Of the mighty oak
His mouth lowers in awe
The leaves, my thoughts of you
Already fill the boughs
Of the tree at the center of
The universe…and always will.
i sense the
seasons shift
my mind is
blooming
heart aflame
i cling
to white moons
in ebon stellar
wish-upons
ripe with dreams
unfulfilled
my body
hungers
seeks love
and never
will remain
for winter
i am a man
caught
in Summer
and released
in Spring...
One character that interrupted my last stay in Missouri was Jo Jo Sterling, the produce King. The name was bestowed on Jo Jo by his parents in a moment of indecision-the title was self-appointed.
I was toiling at a local produce market in the burg of Joplin, Missouri, donating gallons of perspiration to the holy cause of apples, oranges and watermelons. Truck after truck around the clock rolled into the dingy warehouse offloading tons of nature's goodness. It was my task to unload the trucks, a tedious and arduous task. Don't misunderstand- I respect hard work to a point, but if hard work was a train and I was late I wouldn't chase it down the track. Jo Jo shared this attitude. He rescued me from the rigors of manual labor with a simple job offer.
"What kind of work would I do?" I inquired.
"Do?" he murmured, seemingly baffled with the query. "Do?"
"I'd like to know what kind of work I could expect to do for a produce king."
"Well," he sighed, after significant rumination, 'I guess you would be my assistant. That's it-" he snapped his fingers- "you would assist me."
"Alright," I persisted, "just what is it you will do?"
"Ahhhhh." He smiled. "I'll watch you work!"
It seemed logical and certainly no worse than eight hours a day unloading trucks. I happily informed my supervisor of my career change and proudly pointed to my new executive officer, the famous produce king, Jo Jo Sterling, who stood in a dank corner of the warehouse chatting amicably with some local growers. My former boss laughed, shook his head and handed me my wages.
"What do I do?" I asked JoJo again.
"Can you drive a truck?" he grunted.
"Nope," I answered.
"Can you read a map?" he said hopefully, arching his graying eyebrows.
"Nope," was my response.
"Damn boy," he mused, " I think you might be a bit over qualified for this."
Despite my considerable resume I worked for the produce king. I soon learned JoJo's skills in driving a truck and reading a map rivaled my own. He could barely maintain a vehicle on flat pavement much less negotiate the hairpin turns wending throughout the Ozarks. The only thing I ever saw him read was a beer label. Lanky, wizened, his face pocked by a lengthy career of acne, JoJo had the appearance of a well-used wallet. He wore his cowboy outfits from dawn to dusk, and consistent with the frontier spirit, wore them two weeks at a stretch. A black Stetson graced his balding tome, and his denim jeans and jacket wore years of mysterious stains. He wore a red woolen shirt, the cuffs extending well beyond his jacket sleeves, and he never bothered his boots with socks. His vocabulary consisted of "boy" and "sonny" depending on how old you were or how tall you stood.
A typical workday with Jo Jo included avoiding all weigh stations and bluffing country grocers. We loaded the ancient gray Chevy at five a.m. and by eight in the morning had driven a hundred miles, sailing the long dull roads of Kansas and Oklahoma and navigating the serpentine back roads of Missouri and Arkansas. Everyone on the route knew Jo Jo, particularly the waitresses and barmaids who waited patiently for a better table.
Jo Jo was a smooth talker. "What I have here today sir," he would intone, " is the finest crop of vegetables ever grown in a field. And for you, and only you, the finest price imaginable in the four state areas. I guarantee you will make your margin and more on these potatoes and cauliflowers." Jo Jo chewed Skoal between sentences while he stared disdainfully at the grocer's current produce selection.
We made stops on established routes and serviced established clientele. Occasionally, Jo Jo would grow bored with the routine and would steer the ugly pickup in a new direction. This required map reading skills, which genetics had failed to provide us.
"Where's a sign?" the bombastic one barked. "Where's the damn sun at? Jesus Mary Joseph why can't these damn farmers afford a road sign?"
Pause.
"Where the hell are we sonny?"
One crisp morning we arrived at a little town off our regular route. The entire town numbered only a few hundred and Jo Jo had never noticed it on a map. Not that he would notice any town on a map unless it was named Coors.
"This isn't much of a town, is it sonny?" he lamented.
"There's bound to be a grocer somewhere. These folks eat don't they?"
"Yeah." He spit out the window, the long brown stream of tobacco juice whipping out the window. "We'll be lucky to find a corner, much less a grocery store in this place."
But we did find one. Two blocks down the main street was a little market. I offered a whispery cheer as we parked in front of the store. Jo Jo shook his head as he eased out the truck and walked to the entrance.
I caught up with him in the back room of the store. He already had the manager cornered. They held a brief conversation and JoJo pointed at me, indicating I was to join them.
"But I usually buy from Harry Arnold," the manager said. He was easily three hundred pounds with black marble eyes and a nametag that said "Friendly's."
"I already told yuh, I'm running for Harry today. Harry is sick. Sick bad." Jo Jo nudged me with his elbow. "This is Harry's son."
The manager eyed me suspiciously. 'You Harry's boy?" he asked.
"Yeah," I mumbled, feigning intense interest in a crate of nearby Imperial apples.
"How is Harry?" the manager persisted.
I shrugged my shoulders. "Sick?"
The manager shook his head and returned his attention to Jo Jo. "What's he got?" he said.
JoJo smiled. "Six lugs of tomatoes, six dozen head lettuce and corn to beat the band," adding, "and the flu."
We unloaded the produce quickly and sold him an extra twenty-five pounds of potatoes. JoJo calmly collected his cash, rolling it into a tight bundle and wrapping a string around it. He shook the store manager's hand and the cashier's as well and we returned to the truck. Once boarded, JoJo pointed to the pedal and yelled, "Drive like hell!"
As we left the main road we passed another pickup. It was a cherry red Ford, a nice new model, and emblazoned on the driver's door were the words "Harry Arnold Produce Inc." JoJo also spied the truck.
"Is he really sick?" I asked.
"Well sonny," Jo Jo replied, "If he's not he will be. He soon will be."
Jo Jo initiated his produce career in the same fashion I started mine. He learned the ropes, discovering who bought what for how much and when. He learned the quickest routes, the best truck stops, and the worst weigh stations. It was a difficult life, one that yielded small profit and it was a life destined to end. The need for local produce runners was diminishing. The advent of giant supermarkets in the larger towns offering better price and selection justified a longer drive for the consumer. The small grocer died out, and people like Jo perished with them in the wake of giant rigs that serviced entire counties with one load. For all those days and nights spent pushing his old pickup truck down the back road few traveled, I wondered if he had any regrets.
He smiled, which he didn't do often. "Boy," he mused, "I was meant to do this work. It's my purpose and my place and when I no longer have this purpose I will no longer do it. It's been hard, frightfully poor sometimes. I have no family; I have no woman with my picture on her mantle. But I ain't complaining, because I've always felt that for some folks in this world the hardest thing about a hardship was to simply shut up about it."
It was as profound as produce king ever got.
There will be rivers of words written about the incidents of 9/11/01.
It will be a date that needs no explanation-a day of national pain as
no other. Many who never tasted life's sharp sword of pain simply
found themselves beheaded on Tuesday.
I have nothing to offer in the area of clarity, rationale, or solutions. I imagine were we able to solve the riddle of evil we would have shoved it under a microscope long ago and developed a vaccine. But we have not managed to do that. We place men on a rocky lunar surface, but we can't keep children from immolation. We transport ourselves across the earth in a matter of hours, but we fail to co-exist for over five minutes.
What now? The rubble will be cleared, the dead found and buried. We will return to the skies as passengers and eventually think of something other than fanaticsm, hatred and terror. Already my companions bemoan the lack of sporting events and television shows, two very proven and hungered for distractions.
This will pass. It always does. Two decades ago a man known as Huberty walked into a San Ysidro, California McDonald's restaurant and murdered nearly two dozen men, women and children. Babies were shot point blank in car seats. Are there degrees of horror?
Do we need there to be? There is a park where the razed McDonalds stood. It is visited by citizens of Mexico and the United States frequently, people blissfully ignorant of the violent origins of the park . The denizens of San Ysidro continue to populate the bustling gateway city, one of the largest border crossings in the world. McDonald's remains the industry leader in indigestable food products.
So what now?
Few will participate in the inevitable retaliation and revenge for the heinous acts of Tuesday, 9/11/01. We need, deserve and crave remedy for this injustice for ourselves as well as the thousands snatched from this fragile tendril called life.
What can we do?
May i humbly suggest we grasp this brutal and unwanted explosion of perspective and priority and never release it? We need memorials and we meed parks but we also need to build on this sudden hunger for loved ones and connection we experienced that Tuesday. We need to act on this sudden and inexplicable rapport we have with complete strangers. If there be any good resulting from this murderous rage let it be an improved sense of living, rather than a demand for death.
We are sewn and stitched by this horror. The wounds that bleed are community. We weep, pray and support the victims we will never know and the men and women who will continue to strive for our security and safety.
Smile at someone today. Greet a stranger. Call an acquaintance you haven't talked too in years. Restore a damaged relationship. Give something away.
Why? Because you can. America responds crisis after crisis, collectively and indivudually. Would our crisis ratio be lower and less severe if we were more responsive to one another between them?
We are members of a historically unprecedented dazzling amalgam of heritage, heresy and humanity we call home. It is also known as America. This is our country. Love it, serve it as you know how.
Remember the victims, past, present and future by not forgetting the
living.
On a single lane road that unrolls like oily black carpet to Dallas is a small town called Childress. Preceding the town is a one-lane bridge, which crosses a body of water the maps refer to as Danforth Lake. Landis Danforth drowned here in 1979 in eight inches of green, mossy water. No one boats here because huge boulders embedded beneath the surface can shred a boat bottom like tissue paper. There are no fish. No one swims here. It's just a body of water called Danforth under the bridge on the road to Dallas.
The town is one of those tiny dots you overlook on a map. A few hundred people live here and there is one place to eat, a small drive-in restaurant known as Bill's Burgers. Bill manages the place with three employees, Ricky Kaye, Martha Flanders, daughter of Bill, and Kara Tyler. These words concern Kara Tyler.
Kara's birthday is the fourth of April in the year 1969. On that warm overcast Sunday afternoon exactly twenty-eight years ago few noticed the screaming babe in light ash locks. Kara recalls a house filled with laughter in her young life, and remembers her earliest dreams and wishes and the haphazard course they ran with the realities of small town living in Texas.
Kara remembers hours of play behind the old laundry mat owned by Ed Atkins, the man with "money" in Childress. The town was a footnote of the oil boom and handmaiden to better days and quite a few more laundry mats. But that didn't burden Kara as a child- her preoccupation was dashing back and forth across the dryer vents, struggling to avoid the sporadic blasts of hot air they produced. Occasionally a gust would catch her pigtail and lift it above her head. Walter, her only sibling, would chase her around the empty lot. Kara would scream in delight, her tiny chest pounding, breath heavy and deep in her throat. Walter would finally catch her (was he trying?) and drag her back to the laundry mat and surrender his younger sister to the noisy vents of the old creaking dryers. Walter would release her and the game would resume, lasting as long as it took her mother to finish folding the family clothes.
Today Kara glances at the clock hanging in Bill's Burgers. She notices the greasy film on it's chipped plastic red face. Instinctively she touches her own. It is ten minutes until twelve a.m. A fan rotates lazily overhead, slicing the humidity with leaden blades in a hapless attempt to discourage the flies.
Kara remembers bathing in a rusty propane tank, perched precariously on the back porch of her childhood home. The tank was balanced on the stump of an old elm felled by disease. During the warm months water was poured into the open tank and allowed to warm via sunlight. Bathing was reserved for the evening, to wash the day's accumulation of grime and sweat off the skin. In the winter there was no perspiration.
But Summer! Kara would frolic in the water for hours, splashing happily, singing the songs of childhood. As the day declined into dusk fireflies would appear in explosions of amber. So many! She would attempt to count them. A sweet hint of suckle was omnipresent.
After her mother's third or fourth "suggestion" Kara would finally remove the torn washcloth that served as a plug in the tank. Freed, the water would swirl in mad little circles, grabbing playfully at her hand. The water vanished into the dark drain. When a merely fragment of soap remained, it would join the water's futile spin against gravity, desperately hugging the tip of the old drain. It too would disappear. Kara would peer into the drain, searching for the mountain of soap bits she was sure must be accumulating there after so many baths.
Business at Bill's Burgers slows around midnight. Few venture down the long black ribbon to the city at this hour and the crew cleans the restaurant and prepares for the next day's work. Kara wipes an ancient cutting board with a dirty towel, pushing the water forcefully into the deep, scarred plastic, struggling to remove the permanent stains of red, yellow, and green. The water forms tiny, discolored beads on the board. Kara wipes it again and again.
At the age of ten Kara attended her mother's second wedding. Kara's stepfather was an ugly, complaining bitter hulk of male whose company few solicited, much less enjoyed. Kara's stepfather sensed her dislike for him, and their relationship was quickly defined.
Kara would run, until her lungs hurt, and when she felt she could run no more she ran still, forcing her young legs in front of one another until they gave out and she tumbled to the hard rocky earth like a forlorn star. Her stepfather would drag her back into their front yard and produce a
baseball bat, a dark seared pole of walnut. He would hold the bat over her head, akin to an executioner's axe. It was the "game." He would slowly wave the bat over Kara's head, taunting her, urging her to catch the bat as it passed overhead. When she refused he dropped the bat, lowering its dangerous pendulum.
Sleep was a nightmare punctuated by the long ebony shadow of the bat. It followed her everywhere. She stopped bathing in the tank because the bat was kept on the porch. Hiding was futile. There were only five rooms in the house. Walter had joined the Army, serving duty in Germany. Her mother didn't believe her tearful tales. The stepfather only laughed when Kara pleaded.
The day of the beating was no different than the other days. There was a light breeze under a merciless sun. Her stepfather returned from his job at the refinery and called for her. She ran, far and fast, or so it seemed, but he was right behind her, calling her name over and over into the soulless wind. He caught her and dragged her back into the yard. She felt the jagged edges of the rocks cut her legs. The dog joined the game, barking furiously and nipping at her heels.
Kara cried. He kicked her. She threw her arms into the air for mercy and her he slapped them away. The dog growled. A voice cried out, miles away. The hiss of the bat announced in a low menacing tone, lower and lower, slower, then faster. Kara stared in horror at his face, their eye connection severed only by the swing of the bat. Abruptly, Kara shoved her arms at him.
A startled gasp. A curse, the crunch of broken teeth followed by silence. The bat had returned violently to its owner. By her hand Kara's stepfather lost three teeth. By his hand, before a neighbor's intervention, Kara suffered three broken ribs and a punctured eardrum. It was an end, and a beginning.
Bills' Burgers closes a one a.m. Kara glances at the clock. Arnie would arrive momentarily with little Walter to pick her up. Arnie was her husband of two years, a former soldier and a good provider. A loving,tender father. There were no bats now. No more sinister black shadows. Not now.
Kara rubs her jaw. It is still sore, but the skin isn't broken. None of her co-workers noticed the bruises. It had been a pretty good week, overall. Perhaps, just maybe, it would all work out.
Someone wishes Kara "happy birthday" and touches her shoulder. She nods. The manager locks the front door and flicks a pair of light switches. Kara reaches for the towel and wipes the cutting board one more time in the dim glow of neon.
In Childress they still gather at the laundry mat and play behind the dryer vents. They still won't swim in Danforth Lake. And above Kara, the long blades of a ceiling fan cast long black shadows across the floor.
I have read reams of articles and stories about the attacks and their aftermath. At my own workplace I am searched, scanned and surveyed in the name of freedom. Nervous laughter dominates the line of workers fumbling for their identification and licenses. Surveillance and security are the buzzwords. Bio-terrorists are no longer plot lines in Arthur Clarke novels. The world has changed.
Have we?
The best thing I have read about events post 9/11/01 was a simple letter to the editor regarding the attacks in one of the high profile news magazines. The reader collected magazine issues- he saved election issues, war issues and other landmark events depicted in the magazines pages. He did not, however, choose to save any of the issues after 9/11/01. Rather, he saved the issue prior to that date, because, in his words, "that was the last week the world was sane."
In succeeding page publications a serial will run titled " The Upper Left Hand Corner of the World". It will run sporadically and unpredictably, hopefully encouraging frequent and rewarded visits to this address. I wish to thank those who do stop by, many of you anonymous. As netizens we all bear the responsibility of committed honesty and communication. I think we've seen the last several weeks how wonderfully enlightening and how tragically slanderous the internet can be.
May the tartan of touch and tenderness cover us all.
MoEvad
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