On Excuses, Excuses (and Sexton's Creek)

Well, I fell a little bit short of my original challenge to discover something new everyday posts because I didn't make it the whole month.  In fact, I only made just over half a month.  I won't list the reasons why here, but let's just say life intervened, as it sometimes does.  And here's a discovery I made (which I already knew, but had to be reinforced for me):  sometimes life must take the driver's seat, even over your writing.  The thing is, though, life doesn't know this, but no matter what is happening, the writing is still in high gear.  Because even though I wasn't able to write those discovery posts everyday, the real-life problems I was having that was keeping me from posting were, in fact, teaching me more and more discoveries every single day.  So I'm thankful for that.  And if I learned one thing during my little exercise in trying to discover something new everyday (and posting it online) it is...well, it's two things:  1.  You can discover something perfectly well without posting it online and 2.  the discovery is all that matters.  It's like that line in one of my favorite books of all time, Fair and Tender Ladies, by Lee Smith:  "It was the writing that signified," the narrator, Ivy Rowe says, after she burns a bundle of letters she has written over the past century.  Well, this time the discoveries signified.  

Now I know I can at least post a new blog every month, and before this exercise I couldn't even do that.  Thanks for listening.  

During this post I did want to share a little piece of writing of mine.  Here's a video of the song "Sexton's Creek," to which I wrote the lyrics and my boon companions Kate Larken and Jason Howard wrote the music.  It's my favorite song that I've written or co-written because, like a good short story, I think it works on lots of different levels. The video was filmed by another boon companion, Denton Loving, at the Highlander Research and Education Center's 77th Anniversary Celebration. It was such an honor to speak there, where people like Rosa Parks learned to do civil disobedience and people like Myles Horton and Don West helped to light the fire of revolution and pride in Appalachia. Oh, and if you've never been to Sexton's Creek, in Clay County, Kentucky, then you've missed a little foretaste of glory.  I hope you like it...

On Dogs (Discovery for 8.29.09)

Good dogs are everything that humans hope to be, but never have quite achieved yet.  

When I think back on all my good dogs I had when I was a boy, I can't help getting a little bit sad. There was Arky, a little obese weiner dog my aunt in Arkansas gave me.  He thought he was a big, ferocious dog, and would bare his teeth to anyone who threatened me.  He sat right beside me when I propped my back against a tree to read a summer afternoon away.  There was Fala, a white spitz I named after FDR and Eleanor's trusty dog.  Every day Fala trotted out to Hoskins' Grocery where my bus let me off. Everyone on the school bus crowded to one side so they could see him sitting there patiently awaiting my arrival.  When the bus screeched to a halt there he'd wag his tail--three thumps on the ground behind him--then jump up to walk home with me.  

Those were the two I had the longest, although there were others along the way.  I miss them every single one.  

And now I have other dogs, but my favorite of all is old Rufus, who is ten years old now, and showing his age in the way he's not running quite as fast anymore, in the slow way he arises in the mornings when I first step outside, in his wise brown eyes.  He's the best of dogs because he always knows when you need him, and when you do, he'll sit right there and not move a muscle until he knows that you're done with being still.  Then he will arise and even though he's old and tired he'll dance around a little to get you smiling.  And once he knows he has done his job he'll zoom back off into the woods to rush rabbits out of the underbrush or mess with a groundhog.  Sometimes he emerges from the woods completely covered in mud from rolling around in the shoals of God's Creek.  Or covered in burrs from an overgrown pasture he's travelled through.  Once he came back home with his butt full of buckshot.  But he always comes when I whistle for him.  

That's the main thing we can ask of those we depend on the most:  to simply be there when we call.  That's what Rufus always does.  That's what the really good dogs always do.  The thing is, dogs are so much more dependable that way.  They're who we want to be.  

On Opportunity to Start Anew (Discovery for 8/27/09)

Every morning the whole world gives us the opportunity to start our lives anew. 

That's what I kept thinking as I drove the winding roads of Eastern Kentucky yesterday as the land came

awake.  A thin mist breathed out over on the hills and hollers.  A white rind of moon in the struggling

shadows of first daylight.  The sky burned purple and gray on the horizon.  I passed through Big Hill, Morrill, Clover Bottom, Sand Gap, Gray Hawk, Mummie, Elias, Traveller's Rest, Levi, and other little communities.  In each of these, the houses along the road were coming awake, too.  Yellow rectangles of light in the windows.  An occasional square of blue where a television flickered the morning news.  

Best of all, the people stirred outside.  

A woman sweeping her porch, her mind on something far, far away.

Two women sitting on a bench outside the Little Angels Daycare Center, smoking and laughing. One of them threw her head back to cackle out; the other slapped her knee.

A man stretching beside his truck before he climbed into it to head off to work.

Children, sleepy-eyed, disgusted, waiting for the bus. 

A group of men standing around a truck at the quarry entrance, passing around a packet of powdered donuts.  Their shoulders were heavy with the prospect of their labor that lay ahead of them, their hands big and square-fingered.

Several good dogs:  a yellow one trotting down the shoulder of the road as if on a determined path; a white spitz marking his territory; a beagle yawning on the concrete porch steps of her home; a long-legged black dog coming out of the kudzu-covered woods from a long night of carousing. 

Along the way there were all kinds of little businesses and churches:  The Frostyette Dairy Stand, The Lord Jesus Christ Bapticostal Church of God, Mack's Used Cars, the Bobcat Diner.  

And along the way there were a million trees, blue in that space before full daylight.  And wildflowers, still not completely awake, standing tall, bright in their purpleness and whiteness and yellowness.  In all the dew-laden grasses there clicked the night bugs that didn't quite understand that day had arrived, their songs slowing, quieting.  

Silver Creek, the South Fork of the Kentucky River, Spruce Fork, Brushy Creek.  Water creeping along, and rushing along.  Clear and wild, slow and coffee-with-cream-colored. 

 

All of this, and so much more, stretching, awakening, opening eyes, hoping, hoping, hoping.

Every morning we get the chance to start our lives anew, and the world offers that to us like a prayer, every single day.  That's why it's a comforting thing to drive the winding roads of Eastern Kentucky on an August morning when the night has been cool but the day promises to be hot, because it's so easy to discover all of that.  

  

On Roadside Discoveries (Discoveries for 8/25/09 and 8.26.09)

1. 

A homeplace, left to be devoured by the ironweed.  Once, someone lived there.   A family, maybe.  They had lives and loves and sorrows and most of all, they had their own stories.  In the cool of the day they'd sit on the porch and tell big tales and flies buzzed in the kitchen and the children ran down to the creek to play and a woman with weary eyes broke beans on the porch, so used to this work that her hands didn't even think about what they were doing.  One of the children--the last one--left when he was eighteen and looked back at the little house and remembered all the good and the bad and everything in between.  He had no idea that he'd never be back there, that he'd go off and forget who he was.  He had no idea that someday nobody would remember any of them and the house would sink down and down and down until it had been completely overtaken by the wildflowers, the weeds.  He had no idea that the only thing that kept the roof from taking flight was the gathered mass of their stories, an entity which survived, a poltergeist, hiding in the corners, warmed by the heat of tin on an misty August morning.  

                                                                                

2.  The book of Habakkuk is part of the Old 

Testament and is only three chapters and

has three clear parts:   A discussion

between God and the prophet,

an oracle of woe, and a psalm.  

They call Habakkuk a minor prophet, but

Paul the Apostle admired his writing, and

used it, and spread the Word of it.  Some 

prophet in Irvine, Kentucky took it upon

him or herself (let's say it was a man, just for

the sake of brevity) to work hard on this sign.

I'd love to know what the builder thought while 

he worked, while he latched those black letters to the

board.  I'd like to know why he used a U instead

of YOU.  I'd like to know what happened to 

him that caused him to feel to strongly about

drinking.  Maybe he had a good, thick testimony

when he stood up in church and curled his calloused

fingers over the rounded part on the back of the ash-wood

pews.  Maybe one of the hands rose up into the air

as his voice grew in strength, telling how he used to be

an old drunk but then a stranger stopped and helped him

and made him see the Light and ever since then he had been

living that good old way and then the whole church might

have exploded in praise, the Sermon the Mount fans stopped 

from their waving momentarily while the people cried out

their approval.  The next day, I bet he went back to 

work on the sign and felt that his hands were being 

directed by God.  And for all we knew, they were.   

On Headaches (Discovery for 8/24/09)

An especially terrible headache is as big and endless and dark as the ocean, stretched tight across the globe, middled by black white-capping waves that chop at the horizon, a largeness and darkness like death.

Eli the Good Reading

The discovery blogs are temporarily on hold while Silas is briefly out of the country.  In the meantime, a reading from ELI THE GOOD...(double click to watch full-screen)

On Dancing (Discovery for 8/19/09)

Once you stop dancing, you die a little.

            I used to dance all the time.  In my early twenties, we were out at honkytonks every Saturday night.  I ran around with all of my cousins back then.  We never went anywhere without each other.  Even when we weren’t at a bar or a club, we’d find a way to dance. If we were in a restaurant that had a jukebox loaded down with good songs, we’d get up and dance.  Didn’t matter if there wasn’t a dance-floor.  We’d lean our heads back, close our eyes, and listen only to the music.  We danced on the lake bank, in our living rooms, on the wide front porches of our youth. 

            Once I settled down and had children, the only dancing I ever did was with a baby on my hip.  Some of my favorite memories are of dancing with my daughters.  I’d slow-dance them to sleep, drawing in that scent that can only be found at the nape of your daughter’s neck.  When they got older, I fast-danced with them.  We used to dance every single night, the music turned up as loud as it would go.  I taught them how to clog.  I taught them that the best dancing song in the entire world is “Hurts So Good” by Mellencamp.  I taught them to not care what anyone thinks when they are dancing, to just listen to the music. 

            My girls are getting bigger now, so we don’t dance as much as we used to, and nowadays it’s more that they demand that I dance for them and they sit and hold their stomachs laughing as they make me dance to songs they think I probably won’t like.  Tonight was like that.  They made me dance to “Diva” by Beyonce, which is a song I would most likely never dance to unless someone was making me.  But I did, for them.  I closed my eyes, leaned my head back, tried my best to listen to the music.  There wasn’t the same attachment to the music that I might have gotten from Mellencamp, but I found the beat, and went with it, much to the girls’ delight.  They laughed until tears streamed.  But I didn’t care.

            The only real dancing I ever do these days is at the square dances that pop up occasionally around home, or more often, at writing workshops where I teach.  Less than a month ago I was cutting a rug up at the Hindman Settlement School at a big square dance.  Some of my best friends were there, so that made it even better.  Square dancing is the most communal kind of dancing.  You are forced to touch others, to speak to them, to learn the way they move and move with them.  Square dancing makes you realize that you are all dancing together, working together, helping one another.

            In some strange way, I remember every single person I ever danced with, whether it was at the Moose Lodge, the Maverick Club, the Cumberland Falls Square Dance, the Dixie Café, or any other.  Most of them don’t remember me, but I recall them sometimes, all those strangers and lovers, all those people I spent four or five minutes of my life with during a great song.  It’s a connecting thing, dancing. 

            I’m in my late 30s now, so some people might say that’s too old to be out dancing.  But I don’t intend to stop anytime soon.  In fact, I intend to do it even more.  I’ll just close my eyes, listen to the music, not care what anyone thinks, and be a little more alive in the process.