Billy Ray Barnwell Here

First things first

2009-01-09T08:00:00.000-08:00

Mr. Barnwell has requested that readers of his blog, er, book, er, blog put their comments in this section here at the top of the blog. He will entertain any and all questions and comments as long as they are relevant and interesting. Mr. Barnwell alone will decide what constitutes relevant and interesting.

Note. If you are a first-time visitor to this blog, skip this section for now. Go at once -- do not pass GO, do not collect $200 -- to the next post, the one entitled “Caveat Emptor!” and do not come back here until you want to leave a comment or read the comments of others. Mr. Barnwell feels that this will be the best way to interact with you. Also, he didn’t want to have to be checking his individual chapters constantly for comments. As you can see, it’s all about him, him, him and not about you, you, you. Oh, and he wishes to thank you in advance for your cheerful cooperation.

If you are the independent type who doesn’t like to be told what to do, go ahead and read the first couple of comments below to get a flavor of what you’re in for. But it’s ~~prolly~~ probably better to get bogged down in the book itself than in the comments, at least until you have been exposed to enough of Mr. Barnwell’s ~~twisted mind~~ book to decide for yourself how you want to proceed.

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Here are the first two comments received, along with Mr. Barnwell’s replies:

Pat - An Arkansas Stamper said...

Dear Billy Ray Barnwell

So far, I have read the Title Page and the Note From the Publisher (my eyes misted up with joy at what lies ahead) and would continue if I didn’t have to take Snuggles and Buddy back home this morning because last night I forgot to bring their dog food to my house whence I returned because I cannot sleep well in any bed other than my own and the dogs need a fenced yard in which to do their business so I don’t have to stay up or get up in the middle of the night, get them to hold still while I attach their leashes, then wander around a strange yard with no flashlight because my family let all their flashlights go dead and I don’t want to end up with a broken leg lying in the cold in my pajamas and my cell phone on the nightstand and no neighbor within earshot, and I will do so when I return to whatever I choose to call “normal” in my life. (January 9, 2009 7:22 AM)

Jeannelle said...

So, how long have you....er, Mr. Barnwell....been working on this? You mean you have a whole book here on this blog? This blog is a book, then. Very cool. Mr. Barnwell, I think you should go give your opinions on my post of 2 p.m. today, entitled Poll: Reading or Writing. I’d love to know your views, considering you are now a “published” author.

I will look forward to reading this blog.....er, book.....er, blog......

Good job! (January 9, 2009 1:28 PM)

Mr. Barnwell replies to comments from readers:

Pat, I completely understand the unavoidable delay caused by your dilemma with Snuggles and Buddy because I have had dogs myself starting with Tippy, a Border Collie, when I was just a kid and continuing with Sandy, a Shepherd-Collie mix, and then Frisky, another Shepherd-Collie mix, about whom my mother taught me to say, “I have a little dog named Frisky, he is a very intelligent pup, he can stand on his hind legs if you hold the front ones up” and each of those dogs lived to be three years old before they were hit by cars they were chasing so I certainly understand the need for a fence and I shudder to think about the possibility of you, make that your, ending up with a broken leg lying in the cold in your pajamas and your cell phone on the nightstand and no neighbor within earshot and may I also say that I admire your writing style immensely.

Jeannelle, rhymeswithplague posted about this book two times back in January of 2008 and even included Chapter 27 in one post as a teaser but no one seemed to take the slightest notice at the time and he also commented on your “Poll: Reading and Writing” post yesterday, not that it’s any business of mine what he does, he is an okay sort of guy when I can get him riled up about something but most of the time he is a complete drain on my creative juices and so I think I need not post my own answer on your blog as it might be somewhat repetitive but thank you for asking. (January 10, 2009 7:21 AM)

(Click on Comments below to leave a comment)

Caveat emptor!

2009-01-08T16:07:00.000-08:00

This blog was created on January 8, 2009, by Robert H. Brague, also known as rhymeswithplague. Billy Ray Barnwell is not exactly Mr. Brague’s alter ego, but he has taken up quite a bit of space in Mr. Brague’s head for some time. The only fair thing to do, Mr. Brague reasoned, was to give Billy Ray his own blog and so clear Mr. Brague’s head once and for all. To which Billy Ray replied, “Good luck with that.”

Mr. Barnwell often attempts to take over Mr. Brague’s thought processes. For example, Mr. Brague is not now nor has he ever been a fan of Elvis Presley. Still, Mr. Barnwell suggested to Mr. Brague that Elvis Presley’s birthday (about which Mr. Brague posted earlier today, also at Mr. Barnwell’s suggestion) would be an excellent time to show the world Mr. Barnwell’s book, Billy Ray Barnwell Here (The Meanderings of a Twisted Mind).

If you choose to read Billy Ray Barnwell Here (The Meanderings of a Twisted Mind) from absolute beginning to absolute end, which Mr. Barnwell highly recommends, you may find that Mr. Barnwell is taking up more and more space in your own head as well.

Comments are neither requested nor encouraged, but if you choose to leave any, Mr. Brague is not responsible for whether Mr. Barnwell might respond, or how.

TITLE PAGE

2009-01-08T15:58:00.000-08:00

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BILLY RAY BARNWELL HERE

The Meanderings of a Twisted Mind

by

Billy Ray Barnwell

(Not a memoir...Not an autobiography...Not Grapevine, Texas)

A Truly-Godawful Book

**********************************************************

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

2009-01-08T15:56:00.000-08:00

The manuscript that became this book was found in a manila envelope on the ground next to a dumpster behind a Waffle House restaurant in Crabapple, Georgia, on a cold night in January by Melvin, the cook, who was taking a smoke break. Attached to the envelope was a yellow Post-It note containing the following message: “Whoever finds this, you can have it, do what you want with it, I don’t care any more, I’m going to South Padre.” Eventually the manuscript made its way into our hands. An extensive search for its apparent author, the hitherto unknown Billy Ray Barnwell, has proven fruitless to date.

Because we believe A this is an important work that may become a modern literary masterpiece and B it will change the way you think about the English language and C it deserves wide distribution, the book we mean, not the English language, that and the fact that we couldn’t pay any editor enough money to touch it, we have decided to publish it virtually unchanged from the form in which it was found and furthermore we plan to hold all monetary proceeds from sales of the book in an interest-bearing account for the talented but elusive Mr. Barnwell until we locate either him or someone willing to admit to being one of his legal heirs, whichever comes first.

The preceding sentence-paragraph is written in what will surely become known to the general reading public as “Barnwellese” just as soon as Mr. Barnwell acquires a general reading public. That’s where you come in. Read. Enjoy. Tell others. This unusual but compelling book, which includes blurbs written by the author, a first sentence that is 274 words long, and not one but two dedications, deserves a wide audience.

One caveat: do not expect Mr. Barnwell’s writing to be burdened with conventional punctuation; as a matter of fact, not much about Mr. Barnwell is conventional. That said, we haven’t enjoyed a book so much since The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N.

--Robert H. Brague
President, Godawful Books

A NOTE TO THE PUBLISHER

2009-01-08T15:54:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, here are some blurbs you might want to put on the dust jacket unless you decide to use a plain brown wrapper instead, I prefer the plain brown wrapper, either that or a nice bright dayglow orange, or if you could pry that guy Fabio which is pronounced FOBBY-oh away from making those commercials for fake butter for a few seconds maybe a picture of him ripping at the bodice of a voluptuous but extremely willing maiden, and in case you are wondering, I made up the blurbs myself because a lot of these people are dead and the ones who aren’t would not return my calls.

“Step aside, P. Diddy and Britney Spears, pop music is dead. There’s going to be a new idol in America and his name is Billy Ray Barnwell.” --Simon, Paula, and Randy

“More fascinating than Bulfinch’s Mythology. Mr. Morris would be so proud.” --Elizabeth Beaver

“As refreshing as a snow-covered mountain in Alaska, as spectacular as a waterfall at Lake Louise, better than algebra.” --Belmont Brockett

“Any book that mentions me is simply fabulous, dahling, but this one is much more profound than Marcel Proust’s. I couldn’t put it down.” --Zsa Zsa Gabor

“Who?” --Bobby Clyde McWhorter

“Who?” --Elizabeth “Pie” Holland Griffin-Bonazzi

“Who?” --George Barton

“No comment.” --Horace Earl Triplett

FRONTISPIECE

2009-01-08T15:52:00.000-08:00

There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

--Julius Caesar, IV, iii

by Mr. William Shakespeare
(or maybe it was
Mr. Christopher Marlowe)

PREFACE

2009-01-08T15:48:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, Udella Mabry helped me sign on, if I were going to write me a novel, which I’m not, please note the subjunctive mood, which my old English teacher Mr. D. P. Morris back in Grapevine Texas said indicates an impossibility as in if I were you, which I also am not and could never be, I might call it Fifty Ways To Love Your Loser or something equally catchy but I sure wouldn’t sit down to a computer like this one and start pecking away at the keys like some Banty rooster trying to get his daily supply of corn kernels, no sir, no ma’am, no way, Ho-zay, and as the late great Tennessee Ernie Ford used to say on the TV, bless your little pea-pickin’ heart, no, I’d get me a big stack of yellow legal-size pads with blue lines and go out on the screen porch with a nice glass of sweet tea and proceed to do it using pen and paper the old-fashioned way, after all if it was good enough for President or rather ex-President Bill Clinton, the part about the yellow pads, I mean, not the screen porch and the sweet tea which he prolly can’t get either one up there in Harlem, then it’s good enough for me, and speaking of the old-fashioned way, how he could think of anything to write about except Monica Lewinsky is beyond me, it’s certainly what all the rest of us think about when his name comes up, and the kindest thing I guess we can say about that is at least it kept his mind off Hillary.

Wow, would you look at that, 274 words already and that was just the first sentence. I could learn to like this, I bet my novel will just fly by on this computer, not that I’m going to write one, novel I mean. You know, I learned so much from Mr. D. P. Morris, he wrote really helpful notes in red ink on the top of our papers, one time in the ninth grade my friend Bobby Clyde McWhorter got a paper back from him that said “Bobby, you need help in the areas of spelling, grammar, sentence structure, thought, reasoning, punctuation, and penmanship. It also would be nice if you researched your material” and another that said “The only reason I gave you the 60, I knew this had to be your work, because you could not have possibly copied it from someone else” and another that said “Someday, you will understand the reason for this grade” and another that said “Bobby, I know you have a talent for writing, I hope you find it before your senior year.” Whoever is going to be editing this book, do not add any commas in the previous sentence, I know where you think they belong but I like it better the way it is, I think it has the ring of au-then-tici-ty, plus its length is right nice too. Bobby Clyde was a true friend, even though there was that one time in the tenth grade when he tried to get me to cheat during an algebra test and give him the answers, which I of course refused to do and he wouldn’t talk to me for about a month, he was also really good at playing basketball and after we finally graduated from dear old G.H.S. I heard later he went into the army and became a guard at the Tomb Of The Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery outside of Washington D.C. for a while but I eventually lost track of him. All the papers I ever got back from old D. P. as we called him, not to his face, said “Great work” on them or if they didn’t I have blocked it out.

Mr. Morris, if you are listening somewhere up there in English teacher heaven, I have already written over 600 words and am still in the Preface so I feel that I am well on my way to fame and fortune, and by the way when I got to the university I took some kind of a test which they then let me skip both semesters of Freshman English and go right into Survey Of World Literature at the sophomore level taught by Dean Ruth Ferguson who was the local big deal because both of her two sons had been presidents of the local chapter of the Kappa Alpha Order, whatever that is, but one thing that still irks me about that whole experience is they wouldn’t give me but three hours credit instead of the full six, the university I mean, not Dean Ferguson’s two sons, which I still think was grossly unfair, I think if you’re going to let a person skip both semesters then you should let him have the credit for both semesters, don’t you? and if you’re still listening, Mr. Morris, what I loved most about your class was when we diagrammed all those sentences but I have heard they don’t teach English that way any more, well it’s their loss, but thanks for your expert tutelage.

.#.#. .#.#. .#.#.

It is now the next day and I have to say right off the bat that my total output yesterday was 666 words which gave me pause, what with that being the number of the Anti-Christ and all, so I went back and added some more stuff in there this morning to get around such an unfortunate start, after all Ann Landers the famous advice columnist said if life hands you a lemon make lemonade, I underlined the added part and I promise I will try not to do any more adding in the future and just let each day’s output stand on its own. Since this isn’t going to be a novel, maybe it will be my autobiography instead with the names changed to protect the guilty, ha ha ha, that’s supposed to be a joke, either that or a journal of personal reminiscences, I read that phrase once in a magazine, or wouldn’t it be a hoot if it turns out to be a scientific treatise or some sort of historical romance or maybe I’ll just try my hand at a few poems or some nice short stories. I can hardly wait to see what it turns out to be. It just occurred to me that Mama used to get a funny look on her face sometimes in the middle of our conversations and say you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, I often wondered why she did that, but I have always believed I might could maybe make a 50% cotton, 50% polyester purse out of just about anything if I put my mind to it, so anyways I will just plunge on ahead and give it my best shot and if I am successful or rather I should say when I am successful you may be reading these words somewhere ages and ages hence, as the famous poet Robert Frost might say, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

DEDICATION

2009-01-08T15:44:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, I let Udella Mabry who lives two apartments down read what I wrote for a Preface when she got back from her regular weekly hair appointment at Opal’s Beauty Palace and she said well, you have some pretty long sentences in there and you spell right good too, I was quite pleased to get both of those compliments because I consider Udella as fair and impartial a judge as they come plus you can’t hear nice things too often if you ask me, which you didn’t, but it reminded me of the only time I ever wound up anything but first in one of Mrs. Mary Lillard’s Friday afternoon eighth grade spelling bees, we would choose up into two sides and stand along opposite walls and if you missed your word you took your seat, I was always the last one standing and whichever side chose first always chose me before anybody else, it was kind of a guarantee of winning, but one time when several people were still standing, Mrs. Lillard gave me the word “material” to spell, only being a good Texan she said it like it had three syllables instead of four, I think that’s what threw me, because I stood right up there in front of God and everybody and spelled it M-A-T-E-I-R-A-L, and the whole room whooped and hollered for about three minutes, it was a day I would rather forget, prolly the low point of my entire life up to that time. Anyways, getting back to dedicating this book, if you managed to read the preface all the way through you prolly think I’m going to dedicate it to Mr. D. P. Morris, my old English teacher back in Grapevine Texas, well you would be wrong because I am not, I am going to dedicate it to Mrs. Janet Baines Brockett instead. Mrs. Brockett lived on the same gravel road we did about two miles out of town, we were the first house and she was the fourth, so we were neighbors even though it was about a mile to her house, Jimmy Wayne Oxley and Howard Griffin lived in between, Jimmy Wayne was two years behind me in school and his mother raised Poland China hogs, and Howard was the guy who later wrote the book Black Like Me even though he was white, Lord, that’s a whole story in itself, he went blind for ten or twelve years because of a plane crash he was in during World War II but one day when he was walking in his parents’ fields with his collie dog a blood clot behind his eyes suddenly dissolved, Howard’s eyes I mean, not the collie dog’s, and he could see again, and after that he said his blindness had taught him that the color of a person’s skin meant nothing, now this was a revolutionary idea in the South at the time, it was so shocking that after Howard’s book came out some local racists made a dummy and hanged Howard in effigy from one of the town’s two stop lights during the middle of the night, its right side was white and its left side was black and a big yellow stripe was painted down its back, the dummy I mean, not the stop light, and there it was the next morning, just hanging there, when everybody made the turn to go to school, personally I thought it said a whole lot more about the local racists than it did about Howard, and nobody took it down until after a news photographer from The Fort Worth Star-Telegram came out and took a picture to put in the paper. All Howard had done was he went down to New Orleans and paid to have a doctor chemically darken his skin, Howard’s skin I mean, not the doctor’s, and after wandering around the South for a while as a black man he came home, eventually his skin went back to being white and later he wrote about his experiences in a book, and his parents kept hogs just like the Oxleys, wait, I don’t mean the hogs were just like the Oxleys, I mean the Griffins kept hogs just like the Oxleys did, but they were Ohio Improved Chester Whites, the hogs I mean, not Howard’s parents. While he was blind, Howard had married Pie Holland, well her name was really Elizabeth but everybody in town called her Pie, and they had two children which he had never seen either her or them until that day he went walking in the field with his collie dog, you talk about a story. Anyways, not counting summers I rode to school with Mrs. Brockett every day of my life between second grade and eleventh grade, well Mondays through Fridays anyways, mainly because she was going there anyhow, she taught mathematics in the high school and all twelve grades were in the same building, and I would have gone with her in twelfth grade too if she hadn’t retired from teaching after my Junior year and the school hired old Mrs. Vickers, Flavill George’s mother, as math teacher when it hired Flavill as the new football coach, let me tell you she couldn’t hold a candle to Mrs. Brockett when it came to teaching, for one thing during trigonometry tests Mrs. Vickers let us use a sheet of paper with all the formulas on it, sines and cosines and secants and tangents, stuff like that, she didn’t make us memorize them like Mrs. Brockett did and as a result I can tell you very little today about trigonometry but I can still quote you the quadratic equation thanks to Mrs. Brockett, X equals minus B plus or minus the square root of B square minus four A C over two A, and to think some people actually say what good is algebra. Mrs. Brockett would tell me things on the way to school, for instance she told me about her grandfather who was a Southern Baptist preacher back in the early days of Texas before there was even such a thing as Southern Baptists, he supposedly baptized Sam Houston, stuff like that, and she got all upset at the thought that her daughter Genevieve had gone and married a Presbyterian but after visiting her daughter and son-in-law she seemed so relieved, she went to church with them and saw that Presbyterians preached the Scriptures too so she decided that they were just Baptists who have a little money, Presbyterians I mean, not Genevieve and John, although John was an architect so I suppose he had money, and also Mrs. Brockett’s son Delwyn became chairman of the board of Gulf Oil and whenever it was that Queen Elizabeth came over to Canada and dedicated the St. Lawrence Seaway Mrs. Brockett got to sit on the same platform with The Queen thanks to Delwyn. He was really Ernest D. Junior but I guess they called him Delwyn so they wouldn’t get confused at home and he went to Texas A&M and got a geology degree and eventually he married Francis Sammons from over in Keller and they had a son named Belmont who went to Duke University and years later after Delwyn retired from Gulf Oil they moved to the Royal Palm Yacht and Country Club in Boca Raton Florida and eventually it was bought out by British Petroleum, Gulf Oil I mean, not the Royal Palm Yacht and Country Club or Boca Raton Florida. But back to Mrs. Brockett, she drove her old two-tone green 1949 Pontiac with both hands on the wheel and both eyes on the road and she wouldn’t look anywhere else for all the tea in China, I know because I tried to get her to many times, but the thing I love most about Mrs. Brockett was after she retired from teaching I visited her in Arlington Texas when L.B.J. was in the White House, and I said, “Mrs. Brockett, you were a Baines weren’t you, are you any kin to Lyndon Baines Johnson?” and she said, “Oh, yes, Billy, I thought you knew that,” and I said, “Well, have any of the White House historians contacted you?” and she said, “Yes they have, but I told them they didn’t want to talk to me, they should go talk to the other side of the family,” and she wasn’t real happy that Lynda Bird or Lucy Baines one, I can’t remember which, had brown eyes instead of blue eyes like the Baineses and she told me how she and President Johnson’s mother, Rebekah Baines, were first cousins and how they used to go shopping together when they were young ladies before either one of them was married, we’re talking 1906 or 1907 here, and how Rebekah Baines was so stately and so dignified and that it was like being in the presence of royalty to walk down the street with Rebekah Baines and then Mrs. Brockett got a faraway look in her eyes like she was remembering something she hadn’t thought of in a long time, something she would rather forget if she could, only she couldn’t, and what came out of her mouth was “And then she had to go and marry that trashy Sam Johnson” and need I remind you she was talking about the father of the man who was then president of the United States and who if he had had a son in addition to his two daughters Linda Bird and Lucy Baines would prolly have named him Bird Baines, L.B.J. was so self-centered even his wife and dog had the initials L.B.J., Lady Bird Johnson and Little Beagle Johnson respectively, but L.B.J. the dog’s pups were called Him and Her and the president later got his picture in the newspapers when he picked up either Him or Her by the ears, I forget which one, dog I mean, not ear, and one time he even showed photographers the scars from his gall bladder operation, Lyndon’s operation I mean, not Him’s or Her’s, you talk about a trashy guy, I guess it’s true that the apple never falls far from the tree. Anyways, that one statement of Mrs. Brockett’s, plus the fact that A she may have been the first woman to graduate with a degree in mathematics from Baylor University in Waco Texas and B she lived to be 92 years old and C one day in the car on the way to school this woman whose whole career involved numbers shocked me by reciting from memory the first twelve lines of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard” complete with the beetle’s droning flight and the moping owl complaining and D when I came back from my hitch in the military and told her I had accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior she said, “You know, don’t you, Billy, that only a Southern Baptist minister has the right to baptize you,” is why I have decided to dedicate this book to the memory of the one and only Janet Baines Brockett, because they don’t make people like that any more, or if they do I haven’t met any, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 1

2009-01-08T15:41:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, okay before I get started for real I just want to say that I don’t have anything against short sentences or dividing things up into paragraphs or using past participles or semicolons or periods or having pronouns agree with their whatchamacallits, antecedents, I just think A all that stuff gets in the way a lot of the time and B you ought to write the way you talk, don’t you usually just open your mouth and let ‘er rip? well why should the printed word be any different, anyone in their right mind can still understand what you’re saying, except of course for the Triplett twins, Myrna and Verna from over in Smyrna, they haven’t been in their right mind or really understood much of anything since their big brother Horace Earl Triplett ran naked through the produce section down to the Super Wal-Mart in May of two thousand and four, he must have wanted to display the family jewels real bad, it really put them over the edge and they haven’t been seen in public now for nearly three years, the twins I mean, not Horace Earl’s family jewels, because to be more accurate I should have said first ran naked, everybody in town now knows he is their big brother if you get my drift. I kind of like saying “the Triplett twins” and “Myrna and Verna from over in Smyrna,” it makes me chuckle just thinking about it, have you ever noticed how some names are funny to write but not to say, like Garrison Keillor, and others are funny both to write and to say, like that childhood friend of Woody Allen’s, whatzizname, Guy de Maupassant Rabinowitz who Woody called Geeda for short, and some names just aren’t funny at all, like Dennis Miller. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Dennis Miller the man isn’t funny, just Dennis Miller the name, I guess it’s like with Horace Earl Triplett, it’s all in how you look at it.

That reminds me, a pet peeve of mine is when people say drug instead of dragged, snuck instead of sneaked, and hung when it should be hanged, for example someone might ask whatever happened to a certain outlaw in the Old West and another person says, “He was hung,” well excuse me, curtains can be hung and stockings are hung by the chimney with care, but “He was hung” means something entirely different altogether, as all the ladies who gather in the produce section down to the Super Wal-Mart hoping to get a glimpse of Horace Earl Triplett can tell you. Udella Mabry’s cousin Iva Parnell says Horace makes that actor in that Boogie Nights movie look positively prepubescent, I really wouldn’t know since A I never saw that movie and B I make it a point to stay at the QuikTrip and eat Krispy Kreme doughnuts on days when Horace is running, I don’t need to see what Horace has, I got my own. Daddy always said half the world has what the other half is looking for, and I think this is true no matter which half you happen to be in, I showed this chapter to Udella like I always do and she said something about a fish and a bicycle, I didn’t get what she was driving at, but then she said Billy Ray you’re all the man I want, well she is a sweetie but I have never even asked her out for coffee as she is always in the company of that Juanita Chastain anyways, why they’re practically joined at the hip, I mean it’s something else the way they are always together.

I think I am going to leave autobiography to the fiction writers and fiction to the autobiographers and write me some essays, after all it worked for E. B. White, I can hear some of you going “who?” well he was the guy who wrote that book Charlotte’s Web, okay that wasn’t an essay but he did write some good ones, essays I mean, and I am now going to let you in on a little secret, some of the names in this book are real and some are not and some of the real ones are used in a fictitious way and some of the invented ones convey the God’s honest truth, for example there is a Grapevine Texas but I didn’t go to school there, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 2

2009-01-08T15:37:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, in one of these little chapters or vignettes or whatever they are I absolutely positively must get started on a poem or essay or something really literary, boy it sure is hard being an author, there are so many possibilities to choose from that some days I can’t focus at all, maybe I could find me a pill I could take for that, but I sure wouldn’t want to become dependent on drugs like Udella Mabry’s cousin Virgil Abernathy did, that was a really sad case, but after he finished doing his time he went to school and became the town pharmacist, so all’s well that ends well, to coin a phrase. I do know this is not going to be a novel because if I were going to write me a novel the characters would already be saying things like “It don’t make me no never mind” and “If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy,” things I would never say in real life. I wish I could think of something interesting to write about today, nothing ever happens in this one-horse town, I will just keep pouring the words onto the paper and maybe something good will come of it, I have faith in the process. Mr. Morris said the only way to become a writer is to write, I don’t know why it took me so long to actually do it, Udella said the other day just think this is how Ernest Hemingway got started and I said I like William Faulkner better, then Udella’s buddy Juanita chimed in and said she didn’t care for Faulkner and I asked her why not and she scrunched up her face for a minute like she was trying to decide why herself and finally she said “too many words” well let me tell you I was flabbergasted, it was just like that scene in that Amadeus movie where the Italian composers tell the king or duke or whatever he is that Mozart’s music has too many notes, well in my opinion we should all have too many notes like Mozart or too many words like Faulkner, even though he did tend to use words like “scrofulous” and “phylacteries” and “lugubrious” and “mendaciously,” Faulkner I mean, not Mozart, which always sent me scurrying to the dictionary, wait a minute, hold the fort, that isn’t Faulkner I’m thinking of, that’s Thomas Wolfe, talk about a man who used too many words, O by the lost and wind-grieved ghost come back again my eye, why couldn’t he just write about simple things, a stone, a leaf, a door, that’s a joke for all you literary types, I’m sure it will bring great guffaws in English departments at universities all across this wonderful land of ours, and for those of you who don’t get the joke, I don’t want to ruin your concentration by explaining it, the joke I mean, not your concentration.

I wouldn’t want to think the well is running dry or anything, but all I can think to tell you about right now are things my father used to say, such as using a condom is like wearing socks to take a shower, or when you eat beans if you also eat macaroni you will get a pipe organ effect, or the ever popular pull my finger, he was a real delight to know, I didn’t think so then and I don’t think so now, in fact I prayed many times for him to be gone and now that he is I miss him more than I like to admit, damn was his favorite adjective and hell was his favorite noun, he smoked Chesterfield cigarettes like they were going out of style and between him and Mama the ashtrays at our house were always full and the air was always blue with smoke, and in spite of all of that or maybe because of it he started teaching the men’s Sunday School class at the Methodist church, you couldn’t make this stuff up, truth is stranger than fiction, I guess I should cut him some slack, he was a good man trying to do his best, he served in the U.S. Navy during the Second World War as a machinist’s mate, whatever that is, on a ship called the PCE869, which PCE stands for Patrol Craft Escort, I know because he talked about the Navy every single day of his life and it is emblazoned in my brain along with the Great Lakes Naval Training Center and the Panama Canal Zone that has towns named Cristobal and Colón and when you say Colón it is not like the part of your body that is somewhere between your stomach and your anal sphincter, it is like the cologne that a man might want to splash on various parts of his body before going out on a big date so that if a person got close enough to smell him that person would end up smelling the cologne and not the body parts, oh by the way Cristobal Colón means Christopher Columbus in Spanish, he drove me absolutely bonkers, my father I mean, not Christopher Columbus, but he did have what every man wants and what every woman dreams about, Udella please tell Juanita she can stop laughing, I’m talking about a weekly paycheck, he was a good provider, for nearly twenty years he worked at Consolidated Vultee Aircraft which changed its name to Convair and then changed it again to General Dynamics Corporation, he was a turret lathe and milling machine operator, he helped build the wing assemblies of the B-36, B-58, and F-111 airplanes with guys named Jim Hodges and Ike Pemberton and Finn Wahl, and he rode thirty-four miles each way to work in a car pool with guys named Bill Poe and Wayne Harmon and Hubert Beard, his round dark green plastic-covered badge said he was employee number 183473, Daddy’s badge I mean, not Hubert Beard’s, not that I ever really noticed, then he got sick and died about a year and a half before he would have been eligible to retire and it’s a damn shame, pardon my French, that he died of pancreatic cancer, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone so be careful what you pray for because you just might get it, and it is way past time to end it for now, this is Billy Ray Barnwell your roving reporter signing off.

CHAPTER 3

2009-01-08T15:35:00.000-08:00

In the spring of my fourteenth year, my parents decided to give me a horse for my birthday, and after some searching my father eventually brought home a gentle fourteen-year-old mare that I named Silver after the Lone Ranger’s big white stallion even though she looked nothing like her famous namesake. She was a Pinto, a painted pony with big splotches of brown and white, and we kept her in a dilapidated structure that might have been red once, a multipurpose building that was part garage, part barn, part pigpen, and part henhouse. She shared it with a small, similarly splotched flock of chickens that included White Leghorns, Buff Orphingtons, Rhode Island Reds, and Black Dominicks; and she also shared it with Lady Henrietta, the pig I was raising to meet the personal project requirement in Mr. Ben Barber’s ninth grade vocational agriculture class and who later provided us with a delicious supply of ham, sausage, bacon, and pork chops, Lady Henrietta I mean, not Mr. Ben Barber.

All summer long I rode Silver around our pasture bareback, using only a bridle because my parents couldn’t afford to buy a saddle and stirrups, and I loved that horse more than any dog or cat that ever lived. She had about two acres in which to roam and graze; a third acre held a vegetable garden and all sorts of trees that old Mrs. Mason, the former owner, had planted: apple trees, pear trees, peach trees, cherry trees, plum trees, persimmon trees, mulberry trees, and there were also fig bushes, blackberry bushes, a grape arbor, two big oaks, two big elms, and another dilapidated and unpainted structure that housed Mama, Daddy, and me in its four small rooms. Between the house and the barn-garage-pigpen-henhouse sat an old Dodge pickup that had seen better days, rusting, with grass and weeds growing up all around it and, thanks to holes in the floorboard, into it as well. We didn’t have indoor plumbing; whenever Nature called, we had to walk down a well-worn path about fifty yards to an outhouse. Every drop of water for drinking, cooking, and bathing was obtained by lowering a bucket on a rope over a pulley into a well next to the back door and drawing it out by hand, every drop except what we gathered in pots and pans and jars and basins whenever an occasional rainstorm pounded on our corrugated tin roof and demanded to be let through. On the kitchen counter sat a bucket we drank out of using a long-handled ladle. There was no sink. On the counter next to the bucket sat two basins, a round metal one, white with a red rim, where Mama put soapy water for washing dishes, and a square one made of red plastic where she put clear water for rinsing. When the dishwashing was finished, we simply opened the screen door and threw the water into the back yard. We bathed in a number three tin tub that my father would set in the middle of the kitchen, spreading newspapers around on the floor to absorb any water that might slosh over the edge of the tub onto the ancient, cracked, nondescript linoleum. The water for the tub and also for the dishwashing had to be heated on an equally ancient wood-burning stove. We had a wooden icebox instead of an electric refrigerator like everybody else, and supplying it with blocks of ice every week and emptying the drain pan every day were a regular part of our routine. Even allowing for it being Texas in the nineteen fifties, it was a pretty primitive existence; I was the only kid I knew who lived this way.

Eventually we acquired a real refrigerator and an electric stove from the local Western Auto store, but Daddy never did put in plumbing. The shallow well went not dry but bad when a film of oil developed on the water, so it became my job two or three times each week to go through Silver’s pasture carrying a five-gallon bucket in each hand or sometimes pulling my old Red Flyer wagon with a large metal garbage can balanced on top, to a neighbor’s house about a quarter of a mile away, where my parents had been given permission by Florabelle Oxley, Jimmy Wayne’s mother, to get our water supply from a hose hooked to an outdoor spigot on the side of their house. Sometimes I would call to Silver, “Hey, girl,” whereupon she would stop grazing, look up, and neigh softly as if to say she understood completely the humiliation I felt, having to depend on others and living in substandard housing herself. Today, all these years later, when I turn on the sprinklers to water my azaleas I still think about pulling that red wagon across Silver’s pasture to the Oxleys’ house to get water; it’s hard to forget that Florabelle Oxley’s Poland China hogs lived better than we did.

In late autumn, when the “blue norther” cold fronts for which Texas is famous came roaring down the plains from the Panhandle and the weather turned wintry, Silver stayed in the barn most of the time eating hay. By the time spring arrived, when Mrs. Mason’s jonquils and violets and irises and God’s bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes splattered our yard with their colors, my father thought Silver might be a bit skittish since she hadn’t been ridden all winter. “I’m going to ride the damn horse first,” he said. Mama didn’t think it was a good idea, but Daddy was adamant, and since he wore the pants in the family, the decision was made. Whether it was Silver’s skittishness or the fact that my father was twice my weight I’ll never know, but as he swung himself up onto her back she bolted out of the barn door and began galloping across the pasture with my father holding on for dear life. At the far fence line she made a turn and headed back straight toward the plum tree where Mama and I were standing and staring in disbelief. Daddy was yelling “Whoa! Whoa!” and doing his best to get the horse to stop, but Silver, who apparently wore the pants in her family, kept running toward us. When she reached her destination, she deftly scraped my father off her back under a low-hanging branch of the plum tree, then stopped and began grazing calmly as though nothing had happened. Daddy lay on the ground, conscious but stunned, trying to comprehend what had just occurred. By this time Mama was laughing hysterically. “What the hell are you laughing at?” Daddy demanded, but Mama just kept on laughing. Picking himself up off the ground, Daddy dusted himself off, said, “You damn fool,” and slowly made his way back to the house. The doctor said Daddy had three cracked ribs and taped his chest up for a month, Daddy’s chest I mean, not the doctor’s. Before the tape came off, Silver had been sold, and even though I cried buckets the day they took her away, my father never bought another horse.

CHAPTER 4

2009-01-08T15:32:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, a while back Udella showed me a letter she and Juanita got from their old friend Ila Faye Hostetter who lives down in Micanopee Florida and it was right intriguing so I said let me have Ila Faye’s address I might want to write to her sometime, so she did and I did and I’ll be dog if we didn’t strike up a whatchamacallit, a correspondence, last month I sent her an original poem I wrote, it went like this:

Whene’er urine micanopee
I hope that yew will thank of me
And ever time I thank of yew
I’ll be micanopeein’ too.

She wrote back and said my poem was real good, she liked it a lot and that she was mighty flatured, so I wrote her back last week and said that I have not been mighty flatured in quite a spell but I keep a special spray can in the bathroom for just such occasions, I can’t wait to hear from her again, well I know this is short but I have to run over to the post office and check my box, so this is Billy Ray Barnwell temporarily putting it on Pause.

.#.#. .#.#. .#.#.

Okay it has been three days since I got back from the P.O. but I have been unable to write one single word until now because I am completely devastated, I got a short note from Ila Faye that said, “Do not ever write to me again, I am no longer amused by references to bodily functions, I have started going to a Pentecostal church, you need to get right with the Lord” and that was it, well excuse me but from what I hear I think Pentecostal people are interested in a lot of bodily functions, I mean waving your hands in the air is a bodily function, speaking in tongues is a bodily function, rolling around on the floor is a bodily function, the whole Pentecostal ball of wax seems to be a very physical experience plumb full of bodily functions if you ask me, which I know you didn’t but I’m just saying, okay I will concede that swinging from the chandeliers is not a bodily function, it’s more of an acrobatic skill, not that I’ve ever seen anybody actually do that but I have it on very good authority that that’s what they do, gosh I sure am going to miss hearing from Ila Faye, I wrote her once that I owe my love of stream of consciousness to Joyce and she wrote me back and said “Joyce who?” which made me laugh, it reminded me of the time I had to go by the church to rehearse a song with Mary Louise Calcavecchio and Calvin Bryson for someone’s wedding and I got there first so I sat down at the piano and started playing Clair de Lune to pass the time and towards the end of it Mary Louise came in and said “what is that?” and I said Clair de Lune and she said “who wrote it?” and I said Debussy and she looked puzzled and said “W. C. who?” but I did manage to keep from laughing that time, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 5

2009-01-08T15:30:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, well since my long-distance relationship with Ila Faye Hostetter went belly up a couple of weeks ago and we are no longer Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, we are no longer Heloise and Abelard, face it, we were never even Sonny and Cher, I figured I needed to do something else with my life, something important, or I would go crazy, so I thought and thought about it and here’s what I have decided I will do, I have decided I will become a real estate agent so I can sell houses and maybe also those whatchamacallits, condominia, to all the new people moving in around here but I just have to wait a few more days until my nose heals up and this black eye goes away. See, what happened was Udella Mabry and her friend Juanita decided to take me out on the town last night to get my mind off Ila Faye, I think what they really wanted was to get me good and drunk even though they know I don’t drink, well actually I do drink, everybody drinks, I just don’t drink what they drink, I heard the famous singer Pat Boone say that one time on the Tonight show with Johnny Carson, so anyways we went to a new club out on McFarland Road, Saffron’s or Sapporo or something like that, no wait, I remember now, it was called Sappho’s, well wonder of wonders I had my pick of any woman in the place to dance with as it turned out I was just about the only man in the entire establishment, it was kind of fun in a weird sort of way, all the women were dancing with each other, and you know what, they seemed to be having a good time even without benefit of male companionship, go figure. Well, I must not have been sending out the usual waves of animal magnetism, or maybe it was because of the funk I was in over losing Ila Faye, but would you believe it, not one of those lovely ladies would consent to take a spin around the floor with me so since there was no action whatsoever at Sappho’s I left Udella and Juanita there and went across the street to a place called The End Zone, which turned out to be a sports bar, and ended up watching professional football on the big screen. I ordered a root beer and a hamburger and struck up a conversation with this guy sitting next to me at the bar who looked big enough to have been a defensive lineman in the NFL himself. “I just come from Sappho’s across the street” I said and he said “Well I’m new in town but I hear that place is full of lezzies” and my first thought was how shocked Udella and Juanita would be if they knew, and then it occurred to me that since this guy had just moved here he might be a prospect for my upcoming real estate career, so I decided to change the subject, I leaned in a little closer to him and said, “Well I don’t know about that, but would you be interested in having a condominia?” and I won’t repeat what he said back to me but it was ugly and uncalled for and then before I even knew what was happening he hauled off and socked me square in the jaw with one fist and up side of the nose with the other, bam, bam, just like that, I guess it was what people call a one-two punch, he hit me so hard I flew off the barstool and landed face down kersplat on the floor, I ended up with a broken nose and a black eye on top of a sore jaw, I have no idea why Mr. NFL got so upset, it’s a mystery to me, but I’m just glad I still have all my teeth, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 6

2009-01-08T15:28:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, while my nose was healing I decided to read back over everything I have written so far which you prolly won’t believe this but according to the computer comes to over six thousand words, Mr. Morris was right after all, and it was a real eye-opener for me because I learned something about how inspiration works, I didn’t realize it before but I’m pretty sure the seed for the story about my horse Silver in Chapter 3 was planted in my mind when I happened to write the phrase “one-horse town” in Chapter 2 and then I just kept pouring the words onto the paper like I said I was going to do and soon, I don’t know why, I was telling you things my father used to say and as the French say, vwah-lah, Chapter 3 just sort of appeared out of nowhere, it just popped out fully grown kind of like Athena I think it was did from the forehead of Zeus according to Bulfinch’s Mythology, which if you have never read you ought to run right down to your public library and check out. Those old Greek and Roman guys were pretty smart, I learned a lot of neat stuff in Bulfinch’s about Echo and Narcissus and Arachne and Tantalus and a whole lot of other folks besides, Vulcan the god of the forge and Persephone which rhymes with Stephanie and not telephone to name two. I guess the Greek language is still managing to hang in there, especially for people who happen to be from Greece but I hate it that Latin is dead, did you know that someone with a lot more spare time than brains went and translated Winnie the Pooh into Latin? well they did, it was called Winnie Ille Pooh but as my old work buddy Tom Bledsoe says about his days in Latin class, “flunko, flunkare, flunkuisti” and I imagine his experience is prolly more common than you might think, well I must say I don’t think we have improved any since the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, all kids care about today is stuff like American Idol on the TV and Britney Spears clones and P. Diddy and drugs and driving their parents bonkers. And sex of course. Hey, maybe things haven’t changed that much over the centuries after all, we just don’t talk about it in Latin any more, except in my family we sometimes did, when my uncle would get really disgusted he never cussed, he would say “sum esse fui” and then smile mysteriously, for years I thought he was saying “so messy phooey” and even Mama would sometimes say “heek hike hoke hoo-yus hoo-yus hoo-yus” and begin to giggle. I asked her to write that down one time and she wrote “hic haec hoc” in one vertical column, if that’s redundant you can just go ahead and report me to the Department Of Redundancy Department, and then she wrote “hujus hujus hujus” in another, I thought A it was a very strange thing to do and B it looked more like hick hake hock than heek hike hoke, and C why a J would be pronounced like a Y is beyond me, I asked her why she put it in two columns like that and at first she didn’t answer but when I said Mama aren’t you going to answer? she said “I respectfully decline” and began to giggle again, I guess I come from a strange breed, I wouldn’t know, I never met but one of my grandparents, so anyways instead of giving up I have decided to continue pouring the words onto the paper, God bless you Mr. Morris, well as Tigger in Winnie the Pooh would say, Ta Ta For Now, I wonder what that is in Latin, and I just want to say here that like my uncle I never cuss but where I spit grass never grows again, oh by the way I have decided not to go into real estate and this is illy-Bay ay-Ray arnwell-Bay igning-say off-ay.

CHAPTER 7

2009-01-08T15:25:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, Mama always said fools rush in where angels fear to tread, but here goes anyway, some people have unusual names, don’t you think? for example the principal of the high school I attended back in Not Grapevine Texas was named Willie Pigg, he had a daughter named Barbara Ann and a son named Billy Dale, you’re prolly saying what’s wrong with that? well don’t look now but their initials were B. A. Pigg and B. D. Pigg, why would anyone do that to their children?, and back around World War Eye as the famous bandleader Lawrence Welk would say there was also a Governor of Texas named Jim Hogg, he and the lovely Mrs. Hogg had a daughter they named Ima, that’s right folks, Ima Hogg, and legend has it there was also a Ura Hogg but that has been emphatically denied, I have heard that in her old age Miss Ima Hogg reigned supreme as the grande dame of Houston society sort of like Alice Roosevelt Longworth the daughter of President Teddy Roosevelt did up there in Washington D.C. with her little pillow that said if you can’t say something nice about someone come sit by me, but I don’t know whatever became of Miss Ura, if indeed there ever was a Miss Ura, I guess the jury is still out on that one. In the service I had a friend named Jim Parsley and I knew of a guy whose last name was Turnipseed and I worked with a Marsha Lamb, I don’t know what it is with animals and vegetables, oh and my first grade teacher back in Pawtucket Rhode Island, as the famous newspaper columnist Dave Barry says I am not making this up, was Miss Edith Wildegoose, I still have her wedding announcement that Mama cut out of the newspaper to prove it, yes I was born in Rhode Island but only because I wanted to be near my mother and she happened to be there at the time, but just as soon as I could convince my family, we moved to the South, well that’s a little joke but it’s not entirely untrue, I was six years old and pre-asthmatic when the doctor told my parents I would prolly do better in a drier climate, and since my father thought he might find work in the aerospace industry, we sold our furniture and packed up our clothes and left our third-floor apartment at 61 Larch Street and our landlord Mr. Lee Vitale pronounced Mr. Leave-a-TALLY and the Misses Irma Chisolm and Yvonne Schack at the Pawtucket Day Nursery and also Mrs. Mullins who taught me for one whole week in public kindergarten before I was moved into the first-grade class of the aforementioned Miss Edith Wildegoose at Hancock Street Elementary School and moved to Fort Worth Texas on a train, a trip that took three days and two nights. I can hear some of you saying Texas isn’t the South, it’s the Southwest, well it seceded if that’s any qualification, but getting back to odd names, let us not forget Tom Bledsoe, and Mama said she knew a girl back in Philadelphia named Violet Roach, and when I finally got around to taking Latin in college the teacher who taught me all about conjugating the verbs and declining the nouns and adjectives so that I finally understood Mama’s little joke and also realized that my uncle wasn’t saying “so messy phooey” at all, he was saying the principal parts of the verb to be in Latin, was named Elizabeth Beaver. I have heard that when people began using surnames several hundred years ago they might pick a nearby geographical feature like Hill or Field or Rivers, or their occupation like Carpenter or Taylor or Cooper which means barrel maker, or an identifying physical characteristic like Long or Short, we won’t delve into that any further, or an animal name like Wolf or Fox or Byrd, but why someone would choose Beaver or Roach or Wildegoose is beyond me, and it’s not just animals either, some names just sound right and some do not, take colors for example, we all have friends named the Whites or the Blacks or the Browns or the Grays or the Greens but do we have friends named the Yellows or the Purples or the Oranges or the Beiges? no we do not and in the great overall cosmic scheme of things there’s prolly a very good reason why we do not, and some people go out of their way to try to be cute, for example that guy who wrote the book Chitty Chitty Bang Bang had characters in it named Truly Scrumptious and Caractacus Potts, of course those people were not real, but I think trying to be cute can create a burden for the child, for example George Lear who created Lear Jet airplanes named his daughter Crystal and so far so good but her middle name was, are you ready for this?, Chanda, that’s right, Crystal Chanda Lear, and my friend John Cornelius told me the other day he used to know a girl named Candy Machine but he may have been pulling my leg. Girls seem to have to bear the brunt of parental inventiveness, for example I know a family named Musselwhite where the sons are named Fred and Wayne but the daughter’s name is Fredonia, and I know another family named Furbush where the son’s name is Carl, common enough, but the daughter’s name is Tranquilla. Fredonia Musselwhite and Tranquilla Furbush and both of them are Caucasian, so you can stop giggling and rolling your eyes about the Sha’niquas and Champaydrons in your local African-American community. Two of my all-time favorite names are Ninnie Threadgood and Fannie Flagg, one is real and one is made up, in fact the one that is real made up the one that is made up, maybe we could start a contest and you can guess which is which, just send your postcard entries to me, Billy Ray Barnwell, care of General Delivery, Not Grapevine Texas, say either “Ninnie Threadgood invented Fannie Flagg” or “Fannie Flagg invented Ninnie Threadgood,” whichever one you think, we could have a drawing for the big prize, maybe a year’s supply of fried green tomatoes or something, this could be big, really big, but getting back to names, we all know families who fixate on a particular initial, for example I know a D group, Don, Doris, Darryl, and Dawn and I know a J group where the children are Jonathan, Jennifer, Jessica, Jeremy, Jason, Justin, and Julia, but the parents, go figure, are David and Sabrina. I also know a woman with a beautiful name, Amalfi, who told me her father was visiting in Italy and saw a highway sign that said Amalfi and he said if he ever had a daughter he was going to name her that, I told her if he had gone to Atlanta instead we would be calling her I-285 today, either that or Peachtree Industrial Boulevard. Amalfi’s sister Sammie has a total of 21 names because her father happened to be the pastor of a small church and when his wife became pregnant every woman in the congregation suggested a name for the new addition and since the pastor and his wife didn’t want to show favoritism or hurt anyone’s feelings they used all 21 names, Amalfi can rattle them off without blinking an eye but I can never remember what all of Sammie’s names are, the whole concept is so overwhelming, so whenever I see Sammie I just make some names up and say Hi there, Sammie Imogene Esmerelda Hildegarde Florence Ophelia Desdemona Eleanor Bess Mamie Jacqueline Ladybird Thelma Betty Rosalyn Nancy Barbara Hillary Laura, well you get the picture, and we all have a good laugh, Sammie doesn’t mind, but one thing she does do is she gets married a lot, she has been married several times in what I believe is an unconscious attempt to have enough last names to bring the scales into balance. Then there’s the case of everyone’s favorite violet-eyed actress, the famous Elizabeth Rosamund Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Burton Warner Fortensky, I don’t know what her reason is, and let’s not even attempt to understand Zsa Zsa Gabor who is from Hungary and has been married so many times her wedding dress is prolly drip-dry. Speaking of Hungary, foreign names are a world unto themselves, for example people from India all seem to have names like Praline Lolafalana or Bajeeb Bagoshbaghali, don’t you think? and we have all heard about names that are prolly just jokes, you know the ones, let me write phonetically here, fuh-MOLLY, oh-RON-juh-LO, luh-MON-juh-LO (female, orange jello, lemon jello), it just gets worse, my step-uncle, that would be my stepmother’s brother, married a woman named Ovaline and I always called her Ovaltine, behind her back of course, and years ago when a friend of mine married his wife Udella, no kin to Udella Mabry, three little kids I know began calling her Umbrella, behind her back of course, maybe it’s something in their DNA, like I said earlier the apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree, and on that disturbing note this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 8

2009-01-08T15:21:00.000-08:00

“Sibman.”

I can still see you saying it, Mama, hurrying to get it over with, hoping they didn’t hear too clearly. They never did. You knew they wouldn’t; you made sure they wouldn’t. Sometimes it came out different, your ear searching for the right sound: “Zimmerman,” you would say, or “Sellman,” or “Simmon.” I liked that one best. It made me smell hot cinnamon toast and taste the sweet persimmons from our yard.

I can still hear your eyes, Mama. Looking outward, seeing inward, they were the frightened eyes of a doe fleeing the hunter. But you were quick, you’d glance down, and they never saw. You always made sure they never saw.

But I did.

I saw and I heard, and I wondered why you were afraid, why you were so reluctant to reveal your maiden name. It seemed a fine name to me, a perfectly fine Jewish name. I liked the sound it made inside my head: Silberman. Bells chimed when I thought of that name. On our solitary visit to Pennsylvania when I was fourteen, when the telephone rang in your brother’s house and Uncle Jack who was really Jacob answered it with a cheery “Dr. Silberman,” I could hear in his voice a torrent of bells.

You told me never to say it to anyone, and you gave me other orders, too. “If someone wants to know what you are, say German,” you told me. “And never say Uncle Sol, call him Uncle Paul,” you said. Though I didn’t understand, the look in your eyes told me not to question, and I obeyed. Later, when I had heard of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Dachau, I realized that you had private horrors and unspoken fears of your own. What happened, Mama? Did you plan to tell me someday? Was I too young? If you were waiting, you waited too long.

The cancers entered your body, crowding your life away, and as they advanced you receded. From a hundred and eight pounds at peak health, you were less than seventy at the end. I was sixteen years old when you died all those Octobers ago, all those eons ago.

Three eons after you were gone, I heard a pianist play something by Debussy at a recital at the university, a piece called La Cathedrale Engloutie, and in the swelling chords, the rising waters, I recognized the choking cancers growing also until, like the cathedral in the legend, you too were engulfed.

In the months and years before, in the dust and heat of the dry Texas sun, far from your early Philadelphia years, you were afraid. You were Jewish and afraid. But not me. I was a Methodist. Every week you sent me with the neighbors into town to attend Sunday School, and no one ever knew that you were Jewish, that I was half Jewish. It was our secret. Yours and mine and his.

I was twelve when I overheard the two of you arguing in whispers about a picture in a locket, a picture I never saw because he tore it to pieces that day. I knew then that he wasn’t my father at all. But you never knew I knew. It was our secret from each other. “Leave him alone,” you would cry whenever he hit me, “he never asked to be born.” All three of us had understood the message of your cry. When he began to try to tell me, after you were buried, all the color drained from his face when I said calmly that I had known for four years. He never touched me again. Eight months later he married a widow with four teenage children and life, as some people say, went on.

You had me, Mama, you loved me, and you kept me. And I know now that you were only trying to protect me, to spare me some of the hate in the world. You shouldn’t have been so afraid, Mama. Jesus said that we would know the truth and the truth would make us free. I read in a book that Louis XVI once asked Blaise Pascal to name one proof of the existence of God and Pascal answered, “The Jew, Your Majesty, the Jew.” You didn’t have to be afraid, Mama. Oh, they try to destroy us. The pharaohs tried, the Romans tried, the Inquisitors tried, Hitler tried, the Arabs are still trying today, but no one will ever destroy the Jew.

Once I came home from Sunday School, Mama, and asked you whether the Jews crucified Christ. Turning slowly toward me, your eyes widening, you said, “We were taught it was the Roman soldiers.” I know now it was neither Jew nor Roman soldier. It was all of us, Mama. All mankind in every century nailed Him to the cross, and He died for the sins of the whole world. You tried to take away my Jewishness, Mama, but my Messiah has come. Don’t you see, Mama? I wasn’t converted. Only Gentiles, goyim, are converted. I was completed. “Christ, our Passover, is sacrificed for us,” wrote Saul of Tarsus, a Jew. The exodus from fear can finally begin.

After the second funeral, I wrote to Aunt Miriam in Pennsylvania to learn more about my real father. “Ruth met him in New York,” she wrote. “He was a musician, a French-Canadian. He joined the Army and disappeared. We think he went to Panama when the war came. “What’s important, Billy, is not what he was, but what you are.”

You had two secrets, Mama--at least two. Awful secrets, as cancerous to your soul as the disease that wracked your flesh. How many more secrets there were I’ll never know.

Persimmons and eons, Mama. Cinnamon, persimmons, and eons. I love you, Mama, across the eons. “Dust thou art,” says the Bible, the Torah, “and unto dust shalt thou return.” Not you, Mama, not you. You’ll never be dust. You’re a Madonna in a cathedral. An emaciated Madonna in an engulfed, eternal cathedral. Even now, I can hear the bells chiming.

CHAPTER 9

2009-01-08T15:20:00.001-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, another teacher I remember from back in Not Grapevine is Mr. Steelman who taught us Chemistry, his first name was Noble or Norris or something equally weird, I don’t remember much about the Chemistry class itself except that in the lab my precipitate never would do what it was supposed to, what I do remember is Mr. Steelman got upset at someone one spring afternoon for having made the mistake of chewing gum in his class, he didn’t rant and rave the way Mrs. Lillard did in the eighth grade one time when Melvin Lovinggood sassed her and she came up the aisle to where he was sitting and screamed in his face and grabbed Melvin by the hair of his head and bounced him up and down two or three times right there in the seat where he was sitting and we all learned that when a red-headed woman gets angry she is a force to be reckoned with, no, Mr. Steelman just said in his very calm way that it wasn’t the chewing of the gum that bothered him so much, it was the smell, the gum was Juicy Fruit and Juicy Fruit made him sick to his stomach, it smelled just like a pair of old ripe socks he said, we all sniffed the air and you know what, he was right, well many years have passed since then and I have never been able to put a piece of Juicy Fruit chewing gum in my mouth since that day, it’s crazy what you remember, you would think I might remember something from the periodic table of elements, but no. I will also never forget an important lesson I learned at the feet of Mr. Ben Barber, the vocational agriculture teacher, he was one of the finest gentlemen I have ever had the privilege to know, he spoke with a slow Southern drawl, a very slow Southern drawl, it’s unbelievable how slow his Southern drawl was, and one day in class he said Boys, as you go through life you will be faced with many decisions, some are more important than others, and if you need help deciding whether you should or shouldn’t do something, or if you ever are wondering how important your decision could turn out to be in the overall scheme of things, Boys, just think of a plate full of ham and eggs, well we just looked at each other like Mr. Barber had finally gone off his rocker, but he just smiled and kept on talking, very slowly, and I have never forgotten what he said next, he said Boys, never forget when you are thinking about that plate full of ham and eggs, that on the part of the hen it may represent a commitment but for the pig it is a real sacrifice. Mr. Barber also was not a big fan of pasteurization of milk, because it didn’t remove the impurities, he said, it just neutralized their effect. Well that’s not exactly correct, what he actually said while we all sat there silently praying Dear God, please can’t you make Mr. Barber talk a little faster was Boys, if I had a big old ugly oozing boil on my arm and squeezed it into a pail of milk fresh from the cow, or if I blew snot from my nose into that pail, would you want to drink that milk? and we said no sir, we sure wouldn’t, and he said, well, if I took that pail of milk with that boil and that snot in it and instead of pouring it out I heated it up to a high enough temperature to where all the harmful bacteria in the boil and the snot are killed and can’t hurt anybody and then let the milk cool back down to where you could drink it without burning your mouth and put it in bottles and put the bottles in the refrigerated dairy case at the grocery store, now remember boys it still has the boil in it, it still has the snot in it, would you boys drink it then? and we said eeewww, no way Mr. Barber, no sir, we wouldn’t drink that milk and he said well boys, that is how pasteurization works, it doesn’t remove any of the impurities from the milk, it leaves them all in there, all it does is neutralize their effect, and we found out he really wasn’t against pasteurization, he just thought a good cheesecloth strainer could also prove useful, and you are prolly beginning to understand why all the boys who ever passed through his class and who are grandfathers by now can still remember what Mr. Ben Barber said, he really had a way with words. But he and the assistant vocational agricultural teacher, Mr. Troy Smith, could also be really hard taskmasters when the occasion demanded, for example if someone was caught in a major infraction of the rules, such as swearing loud enough to be heard by the teacher or getting caught smoking in the boys’ restroom, Mr. Barber and Mr. Smith both would say Boys, wear your widest belts tomorrow because so-and-so is going to be running the belt line and we all did because truth be told we kind of enjoyed inflicting a little pain upon a fellow student’s behind, it was invigorating in a sadistic sort of way and also very therapeutic for the rulebreaker, and sure enough the next day the class would be dismissed five minutes early and we would all file out and gather behind the gymnasium and form two lines, kind of like one of Mrs. Lillard’s spelling bees only closer together, and then we would take off our belts and Mr. Barber or Mr. Smith one would say, now Boys hold the buckle end in your hand, there’ll be no whipping with buckles, and then the offender would run as fast as he could almost the entire length of the gym between the two lines of eager boys and we really got in some good licks now and then, it made a person realize he didn’t want to break the rules too often, well not get caught anyways, and then we would all put our belts back on and come out from behind the gym with beatific looks on our faces like nothing had happened and go to our next class where one of us would take his seat a little more gingerly than the others and try to look as angelic as possible, and by the end of the day his reputation among all the students, boys and girls alike, would have grown mightily and he would have no trouble getting a date for the football game on Friday night, well the world has changed a lot since then, good is bad nowadays and bad is good, right is wrong and wrong has become right, Mr. Barber and Mr. Smith would prolly be put in jail for all the trouble they went to trying to make us into good citizens, the television reporters would definitely show up with their cameras to interview the boy’s indignant parents, we would prolly all see Mr. Barber and Mr. Smith being led away in handcuffs on the evening news, and the boy’s date for the football game on Friday night might even be one of the guys from the belt line, but we did have some good times in those days back in Not Grapevine, the lessons we learned were not always in books, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 10

2009-01-08T15:17:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, I really don’t mean to be indelicate but I’m going to tell you a little-known bit of showbiz history in which some people from Not Grapevine, especially one, played a significant part. Once upon a time, many years ago, in a place referred to by many as Tinseltown, diminutive actor Gary Coleman was on his way to the taping of the first episode of a new television sitcom in which he and fellow actor Todd Bridges were going to be playing the adopted children of Conrad Bain, interracial adoption was very cutting edge back in those days, not like today when every Tom, Dick, and Angelina Jolie do it, well anyways Gary was having difficulty remembering what Todd’s character’s name was, and he was concentrating so hard on memorizing his lines that he got off the elevator on the wrong floor and found himself on the set of The McGuire Sisters show. The sisters were arguing over who was supposed to sing which note of a particular chord in “Sincerely,” their featured number, well their arguing went on until Gary couldn’t stand it any longer, he drew himself up to his full height and said “What’choo talkin’ about, Dottie? What’choo talkin’ about, Christine? What’choo talkin’ about, Phyllis?” and left, still trying to remember Todd’s character’s name.

He got back on the elevator to go to another floor and found three guys wearing blue corduroy jackets with big gold emblems on the back that said Future Farmers of America, and here’s where the indelicate part comes in, sorry ladies, they were arguing about when you are artificially inseminating a cow, what did Mr. Barber say was the best way to extract semen from the bull. Gary listened, fascinated, and realized he was tingling in a familiar place, but he said nothing and got off the elevator on another floor. He found himself on the set of the Mary Tyler Moore show, where Mary was doing a scene with her best friend and her landlady, and they were arguing over how the scene should be done, well their arguing went on until Gary couldn’t stand it any longer, he drew himself up to his full height and said “What’choo talkin’ about, Mary? What’choo talkin’ about, Rhoda? What’choo talkin’ about, Phyllis?” and left, still trying to remember Todd’s character’s name.

He got back on the elevator to go to another floor and found the same three guys in blue FFA jackets arguing, sorry again ladies, about when you are castrating sheep, what did Mr. Barber say was the right number of times to wrap the rubber bands around the ram’s testicles. Gary listened, even more fascinated, and realized he was tingling in a place that hadn’t tingled in quite a while, but he still said nothing and got off the elevator on yet another floor. He found himself on the set of the Grand Ole Opry show, where three country singers--a man dressed all in black, a curvaceous blonde, and a guy whose act seemed to consist of stuttering--were rehearsing, and they were arguing over who should sing which songs, well their arguing went on until Gary couldn’t stand it any longer, he drew himself up to his full height and said “What’choo talkin’ about, Johnny Cash? What’choo talkin’ about, Dolly Parton? What’choo talkin’ about, Mel Tillis? and left, desperately trying to remember Todd’s character’s name.

He got back on the elevator to go to still another floor and even though it sounds incredible he found the same three guys arguing, blah blah ladies, about when you are culling chickens out of a flock, how many fingers width did Mr. Barber say meant a hen was not a good layer of eggs. Gary listened until he couldn’t stand it any longer, mainly because he realized he was tingling in a place he didn’t even know he had. As he was drawing himself up to his full height, he noticed that each guy’s FFA jacket had “Not Grapevine Texas” embroidered over one pocket and the guy’s name embroidered over the other pocket, and Gary said “What’choo talkin’ about, Charles McMillen? What’choo talkin’ about, John Galloway? What’choo talkin’ about, Jerry Willis?” well something clicked and the rest is history, Gary Coleman eventually found the right studio and never had any more trouble remembering the name of Todd’s character. I truly apologize ladies, but sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 11

2009-01-08T15:09:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, okay I admit it, I lied, I made up the preceding chapter, it never happened, I invented it out of whole cloth, except of course the parts about Mr. Barber, those parts are true. I guess I should repent and ask for your forgiveness because, as Virgil Abernathy’s sister Darlene always says, there’s a special place in Hell for liars, boy howdy, I am discovering that writing is really hard, prolly about as hard as being a stand-up comedian, which everybody seems to think they are these days, oops, Mr. Morris would say it should be everybody seems to think he is or seems to think he or she is or maybe even, God help us, seems to think s/he is, a monstrosity foisted on us by the W.M.B.C.I.P.C.L.P. which stands for the Well-Meaning But Completely Idiotic Politically Correct Language Police, I made that up too, but sometimes you just have to follow the crowd, go with the flow, take the easy way out, vox populi and all that, I do know when to say whoever and when to say whomever and I will never ever say between you and I so Mr. Morris you can rest more or less in peace, by the way how are you and Mrs. Brockett doing up there or out there or wherever you two are, it’s hard to place you exactly, it’s not like you’re on vacation in Corpus Christi, speaking of which, South Padre Island has always seemed a little like Heaven to me, only without the snow-covered mountains and spectacular waterfalls, if you know what I mean, even though I once lost a pair of prescription sunglasses in the surf there, South Padre I mean, not Heaven, well to tell the truth places like Alaska or Banff or Lake Louise up in Canada seem even more like Heaven to me than South Padre does for the simple reason A I have never been to any of those places but I would like to go one day and B they already have the snow-covered mountains and the spectacular waterfalls, but when I went to South Padre and stood on the white sand beach it had a beauty all its own, wild and spare and untouched and completely invigorating, it made me think of that old hymn I will sing, yes I’ll sing the wondrous stooory of the Christ, of the Christ who died for me, who died for me, sing it with, sing it with the saints in glooory standing by, standing by the crystal sea, the crystal sea, most churches don’t sing songs like that any more, nowadays they sing what a lot of people call seven-eleven music, you know, where the song has seven words and you sing it eleven times and you never have to crack the hymnbook because the words are on a big screen up on the front wall, well South Padre may not have streets of gold but it certainly has the crystal sea. I can hear some of you thinking what’s the big deal it’s just the Gulf of Mexico, well if you don’t appreciate what God made down here how are you going to appreciate what He made up there, I think people who make it into Heaven prolly aren’t the type who would look around and say it’s just a crystal sea, it’s just streets of gold, it’s just the throne of God, so before you get that blah-zay please remember that the One sitting on that throne is the same One Who created the Gulf of Mexico, I think if people spent more time at places like South Padre instead of watching The Real World on MTV or listening to blue material on what is called The Comedy Channel the world would be a better place, this isn’t blue but did you hear the one about the preacher who asked his congregation one Sunday evening how many want to go to Heaven? and everybody’s hand shot up except for this one old man, well the preacher thought the old guy might be a little hard of hearing so he leaned out over the pulpit and asked a second time a little louder how many want to go to Heaven? and again every hand was raised except this one old man so the preacher left the platform and went and stood in the aisle right next to the pew where the old man was sitting and put his hand on the man’s shoulder and asked a third time how many want to go to Heaven? and the old man still didn’t raise his hand so the preacher said to him, Sir, I’m surprised, don’t you want to go to Heaven when you die? and the old man said well sure, preacher, when I die, but it sounded like you were gettin’ up a load tonight, now just between you and I that’s comedy and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 12

2009-01-08T15:02:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, we are all the way up to Chapter 12 and I still have no idea what this is, maybe you do, if so drop me a line, Billy Ray Barnwell, General Delivery, Not Grapevine, Texas, and explain it to me because I don’t have a clue as to the nature of just what it is I am doing, a lot of you prolly figured that out already, well I just hope Mr. Morris is still smiling down on me, he never did smile much, he just chewed gum and taught Shakespeare, Julius Caesar to the sophomores and Macbeth to the seniors, only our class never got to read about old Julius because a second English teacher named Mrs. Field was hired who was very modern and up-to-date and when they gave her tenth-grade English to teach she decided we should read The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit instead, so there are a bunch of folks of a certain age in Not Grapevine to whom Et tu, Bru-tay? means absolutely nothing and also to whom friends, Romans, and countrymen never lent their ears, all we got was a minor novel that Hollywood made into a movie starring Mr. Gregory Peck before it disappeared forever, the novel I mean, not Hollywood, Hollywood is still very much with us even though Mrs. Field isn’t, she lasted all of one year before they replaced her with Mrs. Propst, whose home room I sat in or rather in whose home room I sat for my entire junior year but who was apparently so forgettable that I cannot remember one single thing about the woman, she puts me in mind of the actress who played the English teacher in that movie Splendor In The Grass starring Natalie Wood, she was not the sort who would light up Debbie Boone’s life at all, Mrs. Propst I mean, not Natalie Wood, in fact I think it’s safe to say that if the famous singer Nat King Cole and his daughter who was also named Natalie, what a coincidence, were ever asked to sing a duet about Mrs. Propst, both of them would prolly be struck dumb.

But enough about Not Grapevine High School during the Pleistocene Age, I really did not set out to write School Days Revisited, but it occurs to me A that I am following in the footsteps of the famous French writer Marcel Proust who wrote a little something in seven volumes called Remembrance Of Things Past only he actually called it Á la recherche du temps perdu because he wrote it in French, don’t worry, I promise not to fill seven volumes and it certainly won’t be in French, and B that the only things any of us can remember are things that are past because if they weren’t in the past we wouldn’t be able to remember them, would we? now that is deep, and so much for the profundity of M. Marcel Proust, I mean if he really wanted to be profound why didn’t he write Remembrance Of Things That Haven’t Happened Yet instead? Sometimes it scares me how deep I am, like one time at work my friend George Barton said to me you’ll get what’s coming to you and I said well of course I will, if it’s coming to me I am going to get it, in fact if you stop and think about it that’s the whole reason for the existence of the United States Postal Service, to make sure that all of us will get what’s coming to us, well I don’t know why but George just walked away shaking his head, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 13

2009-01-08T14:58:00.002-08:00

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CHAPTER 14

2009-01-08T14:55:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, I hope you enjoyed reading Chapter 13 as much as I enjoyed writing it, I started not to have a Chapter 13 because some people, not me of course, are superstitious, hotels don’t even have a thirteenth floor except they certainly do, they just call it the fourteenth floor, but I don’t have a superstitious bone in my body except for maybe on that rare occasion when a black cat actually runs across the street in front of my car or somebody spills some salt or breaks a mirror, then for just a teensy-weensy second or two I do get a tad superstitious and a little voice in my head goes “uh-oh,” like something bad could happen, I don’t know what exactly, maybe a whole chapter would just up and disappear, poof, from my book, you know, a ridiculous thought like that, but then my head clears and I get over it and come back to reality, because as the famous president Francis X. Roosevelt said, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, don’t worry, I know it’s Franklin D. and not Francis X., I was just testing to see if you were awake. Anyways, I’m really proud of Chapter 13, I think it contains some of my best work so far.

Well, Mama used to say “Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back” so let me just plunge on ahead, because a word to the wise as we all know ought to be sufficient, plus as my friend Harlow Vandervoort whose father attended Cornell University in Ithaca New York always tells me, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. Just think about that for a few seconds and you will see that it really is true, I mean if something is worth doing at all it’s worth doing period even if you don’t do it well because if you do it poorly at least something worth doing is getting done after a fashion and that is better than not doing it at all, unless of course you are that guy who owned the Tri-State Crematorium outside of Chattanooga Tennessee where they found something like three hundred and thirty-four uncremated bodies stored around on his property, Harlow’s Little Axiom does not apply to you, sir, because you, sir, and I use the term loosely, are what Mrs. Brockett used to call the exception that proves the rule, in your job it was extremely important to do your job very well indeed and now you have a lot of time, twelve years to be exact, to think long and hard about what you did or rather what you didn’t do, well anyways, Harlow Vandervoort still makes a lot of sense to me, but then I’m a deep thinker, not that I think I’m doing this poorly, in fact in my own humble opinion I think it’s right good.

Mama used to say lots of other things too, her sayings were not earthy like my Dad’s but they were every bit as memorable, for example she might say “Faint heart ne’er won fair maid,” or “A soft answer turneth away wrath,” not that a soft answer ever did any good when Dad launched into one of his tirades, or “There but for the grace of God go I,” or “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds,” or my personal favorite, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” I swear sometimes she sounded just like a page out of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and how they ever got together is beyond me, Mama and Daddy I mean, not Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, they were such different individuals, he left school after tenth grade and she received her teacher’s certificate from West Chester State College, his father went to work on a bicycle that none of his five boys could touch on penalty of being whipped with a razor strop, her parents owned two or three cars and her father was a gentle soul who never even raised his voice let alone a hand except to play the violin and the clarinet, not at the same time of course, and he also owned a successful real estate and insurance business, he’s the one grandparent I met, I saw him three times, when I was 14, 17, and 27 and he died when I was 29 at the age of 95, I mean he was 95, not that I was 29 and 95 at the same time, well getting back to what I was saying, Dad’s parents stood in lines to get soup and bread during the Great Depression, Mama’s parents put a son through medical school, Dad played lacrosse on the banks of the frozen Mississippi River with Indian kids that he knew in Wisconsin, Mama attended synagogue in a well-to-do suburb of Philadelphia, I mean you can’t make this stuff up, they were as different as night and day, Mama said once that she fell in love with a sailor suit and didn’t realize until later that she didn’t care much for the sailor, so I say again what I said in an earlier chapter, be careful what you pray for because you just may get it.

Speaking of praying, there’s this story Wendy Bagwell used to tell about the time he and the Sunlighters drove their bus all the way from Smyrna to east Tennessee to minister in song at a little church up in the mountains, and after they finished their part of the service they sat down on the front row, partly because it would have been impolite to leave but mainly because the love offering they were going to receive wasn’t going to be collected until the end of the service, well the preacher started in to preaching, and after about twenty minutes of what can only be called very spirited preaching the congregation was beginning to get pretty excited so the preacher reached down and pulled out a wooden box from under the pulpit and the congregation got even more excited and Wendy and the Sunlighters just looked at one another, then the preacher took the top off the box and the congregation began to get wild and Wendy was wishing he had sat on the back row so he could sneak out unnoticed, but there they were on the very front row, so Wendy asked the guy sitting behind him what was in the box and the guy said rattlesnakes and Wendy really wanted to get out of there because he had never been in a snake-handling meeting before and he wasn’t eager to start now, so he turned to one of the Sunlighters and said “Where’s the back door of this church?” and the Sunlighter said to him “Wendy, there’s only one door in this church, the one we came in back yonder in the vestibule, this church doesn’t have a back door” and Wendy said “Reckon where do they want one?” and the only reason he’s not telling that story any more is that he’s dead, not from snakebite, I hasten to add.

Now sir or madam as the case may be, if A you don’t think that story is funny and B you would never say reckon under any circumstances then you are definitely not a true Southerner, you prolly wouldn’t know Patsy Cline from Lulu Roman, you wouldn’t know Dale Earnhardt from Junior Samples, you wouldn’t know Minnie Pearl whose real name was Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon from Billy Ray Cyrus whose real name is Billy Ray Cyrus, in fact I will go further, you wouldn’t know Appomattox from Chickamauga, you wouldn’t know Tammy Faye Bakker from Kathryn Kuhlman, you wouldn’t know scuppernong jelly from muscadine wine, in fact here’s a little test you can take to see just how Southern you are, match the following names:

(1) Sam, Rusty, Howard, and Vestal
(2) Brock, Rose Nell, Mary Thom, and Ben
(3) Alphus, Urias, and Eva Mae

with their groups:

(A) The Speer Family
(B) The Lefevres
(C) The Happy Goodmans

because all true Southerners, black, white, green, purple, Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish, I can’t speak for Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists, can ace that test in about two shakes of a lamb’s tail, they can do it quick like a bunny as my Dad used to say, 1-C, 2-A, 3-B, even if they live north of the Mason-Dixon line or way out west somewhere, they don’t even have to think about it, so if you are wondering who in H. E. Double Toothpicks are The Speer Family, The Lefevres, and The Happy Goodmans, I’m pretty sure A your Great-great-grandpa fought on the Yankee side during The Late Unpleasantness and B you prolly never thought of eating turnip greens and ham hocks with black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day for good luck and C if I were to mention Hoppin’ John you would say “Who?” and D you would put sugar on grits in a heartbeat, oh something else Wendy Bagwell said that bears repeating, he said he prayed and asked the Lord one time, Lord, would you let me be a great musician and a great singer? if you would do that I would always give you the credit, would you please do that Lord? and the Lord said No, but I’ll tell you what I will do, I’ll send you to a crowd who don’t know the difference and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 15

2009-01-08T14:51:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, it doesn’t matter whether you are A a U.S. Supreme Court Justice named Ruth Bader Ginzburg or B a New Testament Greek scholar named Spiros Zodhiates which is pronounced SPEE-rohs zoh-dee-AH-teez or C a former member of the doo-wop group Pookie Hudson and the Spaniels which is a real group just like Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys who sang “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed,” Kinky did I mean, not Pookie, or D the current prima ballerina of the New York City Ballet, I hope this book will cause you to think, so just stop right now and ask yourself this question, if someone could write a book called Olive, The Other Reindeer, and by the way someone did, then why hasn’t someone written a book called Gladly, The Cross-Eyed Bear? I mean, if that doesn’t cause you to think nothing will because to coin a phrase inquiring minds want to know, and speaking of wanting to know, I was sitting at my desk the other afternoon trying to look busy but really making up songs about former members of the Atlanta Braves baseball team, for example I sang “Dale Murphy is the guy to see, He’s Mormon as he can be” to the tune of the theme song from Green Acres, not out loud but just in my head, and then I sang, “Biff Pocoroba, Biff Pocoroba, I wonder what became of him?” to the tune of La Cucaracha, and I had just started in to singing “Ryan Klesko, Ryan Klesko, we miss you, we miss you” to the tune of Freré Jacques which you may know as Are You Sleeping? when all of a sudden it occurred to me that I hadn’t told you anything about Not Grapevine Texas in a while, so let me correct that oversight immediately, I think oversight is a really interesting word, I mean sight and see and look and view all mean about the same thing but oversight and oversee and overlook and overview mean four different things entirely just because of that little word over added in the front, there is a group called the Church of God that used to have a General Overseer before they changed his title to Presiding Bishop but they never had a General Overlooker even though most religious organizations would prolly benefit from one and if I had a mind to I would explore that a little further but I’m over it, ha ha ha.

Getting back to Not Grapevine Texas in the Pleistocene Age, there was this teen hangout place called Flurry’s just outside of town near where the Kow Town Rodeo Arena was later built which was part hamburger joint and part dance hall, Flurry’s was I mean, not the Kow Town Rodeo Arena, and by dance hall I mean a long, low, large, dark, cavernous space that could hold a couple of hundred hormonally-inspired young people plus what had to be the world’s loudest jukebox where teens from miles around flocked on Friday and Saturday nights, well to be more accurate white teens because A there weren’t many Hispanics around in those days except for a few seasonal migrant field workers up from Mexico each spring and fall and B even though it had been three or four years since Brown v. Board Of Education the schools in Texas had not yet been integrated and most of all C Coy Flurry had taken a bucket of white paint and painted in big letters three feet tall across the plate glass windows in front of the restaurant portion of the building WE DON’T SERVE N-WORDS, well he didn’t put N-WORDS, he put N-WORDS, there’s just no way I’m going to put what he put. I might be wrong but I think Coy was one of the movers and shakers of what was left of the local Ku Klux Klan, it was pretty much dying out in those days but one of their last gasps was hanging the dummy of Howard Griffin from one of the town’s two stop lights, I already told you about that. Alcohol and beer were not allowed in Flurry’s but there always seemed to be plenty in the parking lot, Coy didn’t care as long as no one got too rowdy inside, every once in a while it would get too much even for him and he would grab the offender by the collar and the seat of the pants and physically throw him out of the building, and as you might suspect Flurry’s had the town fathers up in arms but they couldn’t do anything about it because Coy built his establishment just outside their jurisdiction, but it was the delight of the high school crowd for miles around, that’s for sure, which by high school crowd I mean anybody up to about twenty-two years old who either A wasn’t married or B hadn’t gone off to the army or college or the big city, in other words the local and not so local yokels, it was very dim in the dance hall part of Flurry’s, in fact the only light came from the restaurant end and the jukebox, and sometimes the crowd would gather around in the darkest part farthest away from the restaurant end and watch couples dirty bop to “Annie Had A Baby, Can’t Work No More,” pretty tame by today’s standards I suppose but rather daring for back then, no girl ever got pregnant at Flurry’s but it wouldn’t surprise me if one or two did on the way home, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 16

2009-01-08T14:45:00.001-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, I saw the strangest thing in Florida recently, or rather I saw three strange things, I was driving along on an interstate highway minding my own business when in the space of a hundred miles I passed not one, not two, but three, count ‘em, three billboards with exactly the same message, a very odd message if you ask me, which you didn’t but I’m just saying, and what those three billboards said was “Reduce the risk of bark beetles: Thin Your Pine Forest” and underneath in little print was www.fl-dot.com which to my feeble mind’s way of thinking ought to mean the Florida Department of Transportation but given the message on the billboard it may mean the Florida Department of Trees, I don’t know if there even is such a thing as the Florida Department of Trees but why would the Florida Department of Transportation be spending good taxpayer money to ask the driving public to reduce the risk of bark beetles in their pine forests anyway, which leads me to my next thought, exactly how many of the hundreds of thousands of drivers driving along interstate highways in Florida each day do you suppose would even own a pine forest, let alone one that needed thinning because of the apparently terrible threat of bark beetles?, well apparently there are enough of them, drivers I mean, not bark beetles, to warrant erecting billboards with exotic and esoteric messages along our public highways, and this was a real eye-opener for me because from the nightly news on the TV a person might conclude that all Floridians live either in those expensive high-rise beachfront condos in Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale or in trailer parks in places like Palatka and Sebring and Tarpon Springs, what exactly is a tarpon anyway? and wherever they live, Floridians I mean, not tarpons, they seem to need more help with interpreting their presidential voting ballots than with thinning their pine forests, and it just makes no sense at all to me for the fl-dot, whoever they are, to go to all the bother and expense of erecting billboards every fifty miles just to embarrass the comparatively few pine forest owners into doing their duty, or maybe the fl-dot folks are trying to drum up enough indignation among the passing motorists that we will march on our seats of government or at least deluge our elected officials with letters and phone calls demanding that something be done about those thoughtless and ignorant owners of pine forests, or maybe the fl-dot folks just sit around all day thinking what kind of idiotic billboard can we put up next? hold the fort, I may be having a satori, you know, one of those Buddhist-type enlightenments where you suddenly know something you didn’t know before, like the sound of one hand clapping for instance, or like the time I met Sam and Clara Medlin, the parents of our pastor’s wife, Jimmie Sue Rathbone, and it came to me all in a flash that if Jimmie Sue ever left Brother Rathbone and went back home to her Mama she would have quit preaching and gone to Medlin, and in my current satori it has suddenly dawned on me why the fl-dot is telling us to thin our pine forests and warning us about those dreadful bark beetles, the reason the fl-dot people want fewer bark beetles is so that there will be more trees so that there will be more lumber so that they can put up even more billboards, but if you try to figure out how thinning your forest ends up giving you more trees you will have a big headache along with your satori, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 17

2009-01-08T14:40:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, telling you about Flurry’s got me to thinking again about my old neighbor Howard Griffin, people who know him only from his book refer to him now as John or John Howard or John H., but ever since the day a blind man on horseback rode up to our door and introduced himself as Howard and handed us our evening newspaper, that’s what we called him, Howard I mean, not the evening newspaper. Black Like Me wasn’t the only thing he wrote, he also wrote other books, Nuni for one, which was about life and love on an island in the South Pacific, and The Devil Rides Outside for another, which was about life and love in a Catholic monastery and it was banned in Boston and Detroit, the book I mean, not the Catholic monastery. Howard had spent time in both places, I don’t mean Boston and Detroit, I mean on an island in the South Pacific during the second world war and also in a Catholic monastery in France when he studied Gregorian chant earlier in his life, he was an excellent musician as well as a writer, and when I graduated from Not Grapevine High School he gave me a book containing the collected letters of Ludwig van Beethoven as a graduation present. After regaining his eyesight he became very interested in photography and Thomas Merton and Jacques Maritain and civil rights, a real man for all seasons to coin a phrase. Mama helped him with the title for his first novel. He had stopped by one afternoon with our newspaper and Mama invited him to stay and chat for a few minutes. We were sitting in lawn chairs under our elm trees when he told her he was almost finished with his novel but he hadn’t come up with a title yet, and Mama asked, “What is it about?” and Howard described a little of it to her and Mama said, “Maybe you should call it Angel On The Inside or Devil On The Outside” and the rest is, I don’t know, history. When I happened to see in Time magazine many years later that he had died at the age of sixty, even though I hadn’t seen Howard in over twenty years I felt like a sweet part of my childhood had died too.

Anyways, what I really want to tell you about is a philosopher named Epititus and something he said a long time ago, back in the first century to be exact, well to be accurate it’s not what he really said, it’s someone’s translation into English of what he said, which when you think about it is not the same thing at all, I mean sometimes if you translate what a person said you don’t get what the person meant and if you translate what the person meant you don’t get what the person said, for example our old friend Marcel Proust’s temps perdu has always looked more like “time lost” than “things past” to me but to be fair I took only one year of French and that was from Mme. Deschner at the second college I attended, Arlington State College, which is what the University of Texas at Arlington was called before it became the University of Texas at Arlington which itself is ironic because back in those days Arlington State College was part of Texas A&M which if you don’t know let me tell you, Texas A&M and the University of Texas are bitter rivals, they hate each other like Alabama hates Auburn or like a Florida Gator hates a Florida State Seminole, she was from Finland and had learned her French in Switzerland, Mme. Deschner I mean, not the Florida Gator or the Florida State Seminole, and another example would be the many versions there are of the Holy Bible that all say something different or they might could be saying the same thing in different ways I suppose but that’s kind of a stretch, some people say you can prove anything by the Bible, I don’t know whether you could prove by it that Bear Bryant was the greatest football coach who ever lived, that’s a topic for another occasion, not whether he was but whether you could prove it by the Bible, but getting back to Epititus, what he is supposed to have said was “Either things are and appear to be, or they are but appear not to be, or they are not yet appear to be, or they neither are nor appear to be” and right off the bat my old English teacher back in Not Grapevine Texas Mr. D. P. Morris would say you should use either and or when discussing two options as in either one thing or the other, but not when discussing three or four things as in either this or that or that or that like Epititus, Mr. Morris would call that a linguistic impossibility, I mean apparently the English teachers of the world think it’s all right to talk about A or B or C or D, but it’s not all right to talk about either A or B or C or D, it’s that nasty either that gets in the way, no wonder nobody pays any attention to English teachers. Getting back to Epititus, when I first heard what he said I just wanted to scratch my head and say with the king of Siam, as Oscar Hammerstein’s half of the famous songwriting team of Rodgers and Hammerstein once caused the famous bald-headed actor Yul Brynner to say, “Is...a puzzlement!” but then I let it sink into my brain where I could cogitate on it for a while and you know what?, it suddenly turned into one of Mrs. Brockett’s algebra problems, Epititus’s little quotation I mean, not my brain, Boolean algebra to be exact, or maybe it was binary arithmetic, I can’t remember which, but it’s how all computers work, everything inside a computer is either a one or a zero, either on or off, either yes or no, so with Epititus’s two subjects, let’s call them existence and appearance, you get four possible settings in a computer, you get either 11 or 10 or 01 or 00, and if you call existence A and appearance B from there it’s just a small leap to translating the zeroes and ones into (A AND B) and (A AND NOT B) and (B AND NOT A) and (NOT A AND NOT B), which that last one can also be stated (NEITHER A NOR B) in real life, I don’t know about in Boolean algebra, and I know your head is prolly spinning about now, mine is, so I won’t even bring up hexadecimal notation, but I know somewhere Janet Baines Brockett is smiling that even philosophy can be expressed in mathematics, I don’t know whether “Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard” could, especially the part about the paths of glory leading but to the grave, maybe that would be either a great big zero or a great big infinity, I bet Bear Bryant knows the answer, you can substitute Tom Landry or Joe Paterno or Vince Lombardi or anybody you like, but that will not change the fact that just about everything I need to know I learned in Not Grapevine Texas and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 18

2009-01-08T14:37:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, the late Wendy Bagwell who I told you about in an earlier chapter, I mean whom I told you about in an earlier chapter, I mean about whom I told you in an earlier chapter, thank you Mr. Morris, lived over in Smyrna before he went on to his great reward, I believe I already told you that, and so did Mr. Claude Akins of B-movie and early TV fame even though you might never have heard of either one of them and so did the great Julia Roberts who is a graduate of Campbell High School which isn’t there any more, gosh I wonder if any of them ever ran into Myrna and Verna and Horace Earl Triplett, I suppose it’s more likely that Horace Earl Triplett might have run into them, anyways getting back to what I was about to say, I guess every place tries to claim someone famous, for example right next door to Smyrna is Marietta Georgia where the famous country singer Travis Tritt and the famous I-don’t-know-what-he-is celebrity carpenter Ty Pennington both attended Sprayberry High School at the same time. Marietta also claimed actress Joanne Woodward in the dim distant past, and if you are reading this several years down the road and have no idea who any of these people are then it just proves that the phrase “out of sight, out of mind” is true, and also sic transit gloria mundi, a Latin phrase which loosely translated means by the time Norma Desmond said “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up” she was not only bonkers but had not been mentioned in the tabloids for a very long while. Somebody from my old hometown of Not Grapevine Texas went to Hollywood and gained fame and fortune way back in the 1940’s, her name was Ella Mae Morse, okay, so she may not have been up there with the likes of Virginia Mayo and Betty Hutton and Veronica Lake and Thelma Ritter but she did appear in several B-movies just like Smyrna’s Mr. Akins. I prolly shouldn’t talk about show-biz celebrities because they come and go so quickly, they flare up like a supernova and then they disappear altogether, they strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard no more as Mr. William Shakespeare once said or maybe it was Mr. Christopher Marlowe, they pass off the scene and are forgotten, out out brief candle, for example there used to be a joke that would prolly be considered politically incorrect these days but I still think it’s funny, what’s black and white and has three eyes? and the answer was Mr. and Mrs. Sammy Davis Junior, this was way back when he was married to a blonde from Sweden named Mae Britt which is pronounced My Brit as the Duchess of Windsor Wallis Warfield Simpson might could have referred to the Duke, this was before he was married to Altovise, Sammy Davis Junior I mean, not the Duke of Windsor, and there was another joke that went did you hear about the guy who was half black and half Japanese?, every December 7th he attacked Pearl Bailey, well that’s enough of that, these put me in mind of the King of One-Liners, Mr. Henny Youngman, but there are people today who don’t know these names or they know them only because their local TV anchor person trots them out during Black History Month, not Henny Youngman of course, and that’s a crying shame, the part about their not knowing, not the part about Mr. Henny Youngman not being trotted out during Black History month, of course it works in the other direction too, for example I haven’t learned the names of most of today’s singers and actors either because they come and go so quickly, why even bother. Someone, not me, summed it up really well by coming up with The Five Stages Of An Actor’s Career, which are who is Hugh O’Brian?, get me Hugh O’Brian, get me a Hugh O’Brian type, get me a young Hugh O’Brian, who is Hugh O’Brian? and besides thinking A how that is right on the money and B the public can be really fickle, I bet some of you older readers are picturing Wyatt Earp right about now and some of you younger readers don’t have a clue as to why they would be doing that, for all I know you younger readers might be picturing J. Lo’s “spectacular derriere” as one weekly glossy magazine once referred to a part of the former Jennifer Lopez’s anatomy that has also disappeared thanks to the modern miracle of plastic surgery, which proves that although some things may be gone they are not always forgotten, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 19

2009-01-08T14:34:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, I’m convinced it’s not what you don’t know that can hurt you, it’s what you do know that isn’t true, I mean some people are absolutely sure of things that couldn’t be more wrong, for example those people who persecuted Galileo or Copernicus or whoever it was for saying that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe or solar system or something, sometimes it is just a slip of the tongue like when I heard a reporter on CNN say after Pope John Paul II died that he was the first non-Catholic Pope in four hundred and fifty years, I knew she meant non-Italian and not non-Catholic, that would be downright silly, so I have no animosity toward her whatsoever, she just opened her mouth before her brain was engaged, but other times it is not a slip of the tongue at all, for example I was in my car listening to the famous radio talk-show host Sean Hannity the other day, I suppose calling a radio program a talk-show is redundant, unless there’s music it would have to be a talk show if it’s on the radio, otherwise all you would have would be a lot of dead air with nothing in it and nobody is going to listen to that for very long with the possible exception of the 100 members of the U.S. Senate and the 435 members of the House of Representatives plus a woman named Eleanor Holmes Norton who represents Washington D.C. but is not allowed to vote, anyways back to Sean Hannity, he is the guy that another nationally syndicated radio talk-show host named Neal Boortz refers to sometimes as Cutie Pie and sometimes as Baby Jesus depending on his mood, Neal Boortz’s mood I mean, not Sean Hannity’s, which by the way the name Sean does not rhyme with lean, mean, green machine, it rhymes with on the lawn at dawn I saw a fawn, don’t ask me why because I do not know, but I do know that it is one of the many forms of the name John that exist throughout the world, like Juan in Spain and Jean in France and Jan in Holland and Ivan in Russia and Ian in Scotland and Evan in Wales and Johann in Germany and Iohannes in Greece and Giovanni I think it is in Italy to name a few, Sean is the Irish form in case you were wondering, but getting back to what I was saying, Sean, who was talking to some guy who had called in from Memphis Tennessee, said casually, just making conversation I guess, “Memphis is the birthplace of Elvis Presley, right?” and the other guy said, “Yes,” and they went on talking like nothing had happened, well a cataclysm had occurred in my brain, it was like rockets going off, I was so shocked, frustrated, and exasperated all at the same time that I almost drove my car off the road, every true Elvis fan who ever lived knows good and well that Elvis was born in Tupelo Mississippi, not Memphis Tennessee, so not only did this famous radio personality send out misinformation over the airwaves to several million listeners, his erroneous statement was corroborated by this know-nothing who called in, Mama used to say “one lies and another swears by it,” well to be a tad more charitable Elvis’s career did pretty much start in Memphis at a little place called Sun Records and he also died in Memphis at another little place called Graceland, maybe both of them were just confused, Sean and the caller I mean, not Sun Records and Graceland, it blows my mind to realize Mr. Sean Hannity may be wrong about something but Elvis most definitely was not born in Memphis and Mr. Hannity has gone down several notches in my estimation, I mean if he can’t even get a little thing like that right what else might he be telling us that is incorrect, it really makes you stop and think, if the truth sets you free what does falsehood do, maybe he just ought to hang up his microphone or take it off or lay it down or whatever it is one does with a microphone, I guess it depends on the type of microphone, and find another line of work, okay I won’t make him go to that extreme, but you really have to be alert and stay on your toes and not just let everything that comes over the radio or the TV take up residence between your ears, I mean you can’t help hearing things but you need to decide when to let them pass on through and when they’re worth believing, my Dad used to say “use your head for something besides keeping your ears apart” and although I didn’t like to hear him say it and he spent his life in a factory making wings for jet airplanes and never had a nationally syndicated radio program, there was a man who could make real sense sometimes, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 20

2009-01-08T14:31:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, I have decided to foist upon you, I mean let you read, one of my poems and if the mood strikes me I may just foist, er, share, a whole bunch of them, I don’t know, let’s just wait and see what happens with “my Muse” as Diane Chambers played by the semi-famous actress Shelley Long used to say on the old TV series Cheers, I forget which Muse she thought was hers, but I looked “Muse” up in my big desk dictionary and found out that A in Greek mythology the Muses were the nine daughters of Zeus (pronounced ZOOHS) the king of the gods and Mnemosyne (nih-MAH-suh-nee, Greek is really odd, it looks like muh-NEE-moh-sign to me, but what do I know) who was the goddess of memory, a word to the wise here, we get the word mnemonic from her which some people call pneumonic but that is something different altogether, like hung and hanged, and B their names, the Muses I mean, were number one Calliope which is pronounced not KAL-ee-ope but kuh-LYE-oh-pee, number two Clio which is pronounced KLEE-oh, KLY-oh, whatever, number three Erato which is pronounced EHR-uh-toe, not uh-RAH-toe like you prolly thought, number four Euterpe which is pronounced you-TER-pee, number five Melpomene which is pronounced mel-PAH-muh-nee, number six Polyhymnia which is pronounced just like it looks, pah-lee-HIM-nee-uh, number seven Terpsichore which is pronounced not TERP-sih-kore but terp-SIK-uh-ree, go figure, number eight Thalia which can be pronounced the-LYE-uh, THAIL-ee-uh, or THAIL-yuh, no one seems to know for sure, and number nine Urania which can be pronounced either you-RAH-nee-uh or you-RAY-nee-uh, take your pick, and back to the original list C each of them presided over a different art or science, sort of like Saint Jude in the Catholic church is the patron saint of hopeless causes and Saint Christopher used to be the patron saint of travelers before they demoted him, the Catholic church I mean, not the travelers, and with a little help from AskJeeves on the Internet I also was able to discover what those different arts and sciences were that the Muses presided over, so ready or not I’m going to tell you, Calliope was the Muse of epic poetry and rhetoric, Clio was the Muse of history, Erato was the Muse of erotic poetry, Euterpe was the Muse of lyric poetry, Melpomene was the Muse of tragedy, Polyhymnia was the Muse of sacred hymns and harmony, Terpsichore was the Muse of music and dancing, Thalia was the Muse of comedy and idyllic poetry, whatever that is, and Urania was the Muse of astronomy, please understand that this is all according to AskJeeves and if I looked somewhere else I might get a whole different bunch of answers, but it occurs to me that there are a whole lot more arts than sciences in that list, in fact astronomy looks like the only true science in there to me, history is more of a social science which as we all know is not a science at all, it’s one of the humanities or whatever they’re calling it these days. In the other column on the same page in my dictionary was an entry called “muscae volitantes” that caught my eye so I kept on reading, the pronunciation was mussy voh-lih-TAHN-teez which sounds like the name of a chorus girl from Bayonne New Jersey to me but the definition said small motes and threads that seem to move about the field of vision, due to the presence of cell fragments or other defects in vitreous humor and the lens of the eye, and in Latin mussy voh-lih-TAHN-teez means fluttering flies, now there is something really scientific, I mean my eye doctor just calls them floaters, won’t he be surprised when I tell him they’re not floaters, they’re mussy voh-lih-THAN-teez, boy you can sure learn a lot from reading the dictionary. Anyways, herewith, for your reading pleasure, is a poem:

The Ogden Nash Travel Agency

The next time you go to Cambodia,
Be sure that you see Angkor Wat;
The Khmer Rouge will all say hellodia,
But some other natives may not.
Avoid controversial discussion
In the capital city, Phnom Penh;
Prefer Chinese cooking to Russian –-
You may want to go there agenh.

When sailing upon the Aegean,
Remark on the dullness of Crete.
To do otherwise is plebian;
‘Twill help make your visit complete.
Don’t make the mistake in the Bosphorus
Of calling the place Dardanelles;
A slip here could mean total losphorus:
We’d be laughed at from here to Seychelles.

While backpacking through Micronesia,
You’ll have, we expect, a real ball!
The folk there go all out to plesia;
Some natives wear nothing atoll.
They’ll know that you’re not a “wah-heeny”
If you don’t sport an all-over tan.
For modesty, take a bikini;
It’s called the American plan.

A weekend in Mesopotamia
Or one on the coast of Brazil?
Do both! Go on, splurge! We don’t blamia
For wanting to have a real thrill!
So float down the mighty Kaskaskia
Or tour Vladivostok by bus;
Just one little thing we would askia:
Please purchase your tickets from us.

Okay so that poem is not epic or erotic or lyric or idyllic, what I hope it is is humorous, so I guess the ancient Greeks would say the Muse that inspired it was Thalia, of course an ancient Greek would not have ever heard of most of the places in the poem so it would be like Greek to him or her if he or she were not Greek already, personally I would have had a lot of trouble trying to keep all the gods straight if I had been an ancient Greek, I think monotheism is so much simpler, which reminds me of the time at the office when Kermit Plodkowski, our self-avowed atheist, was promoted to Distinguished Senior Member Of The Technical Staff and people were congratulating him after the meeting and I said to him well Kermit, I guess with your being a self-avowed atheist and all you have nobody to thank but yourself, he got a strange expression on his face but he didn’t walk away like George Barton did, he was much too distinguished to do that, or maybe he was shocked to hear someone actually put the subject of a gerund in the possessive case, would you look at that, the computer tells me I have passed twenty thousand words, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 21

2009-01-08T14:27:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, it has been several weeks since I wrote anything, life just got more hectic than usual all of a sudden for reasons I won’t go into and there was no time to do anything except buy groceries, mow the lawn, pull weeds from the flower beds, walk the dog, install curtain rods, get prescriptions filled, try to find a service station that doesn’t charge an arm and a leg for gasoline, pick up the dry cleaning, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg, I have found out how soccer moms feel and all I can say is this abundant life is killing me. A semi-famous writer named Anne Lamott says if you just keep writing five hundred words a day, before you know it you will have written an entire book, you build your flock bird by bird so to speak, well I forgot that for a while but now I’m back so all’s well that ends well to coin a phrase, only it hasn’t ended yet, and as we all know thanks to Yogi Berra the famous baseball player, not the cartoon character that lives in Jellystone Park, it ain’t over till it’s over, so I will keep on with this thing until it feels like it’s finished and then and only then will I stop and not before. This is so much more fun than all those chores but it is also hard work and when I say hard work I don’t mean as in pouring concrete, I mean as in mentally because you just never know what’s going to float up from your subconscious into your conscious mind in that old brain of yours and insist on being put down on paper, you know what, Udella Mabry is right, I do write pretty long sentences.

As if the world is not strange enough already, tonight there was a program on public television of all places about a group of hillbilly singers from seventy or eighty years ago named A.P. and Sarah and Maybelle Carter, the Carter family, I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears, it was on a program called American Experience but I would bet money that most Americans do not identify with that particular experience, it almost required a suspension of disbelief to sit there and realize that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is spending its money, or rather our money, yours and mine, in this unlikely fashion, not that it wasn’t entertaining or informative in a bizarre sort of way, but what I was expecting was the three tenors, Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti and that other one, the Spanish dude, I can’t remember his name, now that’s what I call music, not this hillbilly stuff, which reminds me, when President Clinton was in office our First Couple was actually named Hill and Billy. Anyways, so much of our life nowadays, in America at least, seems to revolve around the entertainment industry, and talking about suspension of disbelief, which one of the following five movies do you think required more of it, Field of Dreams, The Matrix, Purple Rose of Cairo, City of Angels, or Big Fish? All five are pretty far out if you ask me, which you didn’t, but I’m just saying. I had an idea once for a movie, it was going to star Tatum O’Neal and Farrah Fawcett, and it was all about the adventures they had and the dangers they faced while trying to protect a loved one from the sharp knife of the evil Lorena Bobbitt, the name of my movie was Saving Ryan’s Privates and I put my idea in an envelope and mailed it off to Mr. Steven Spielberg in Hollywood but he never answered back, and that’s too bad because I also thought my movie would have made a great vehicle for Horace Earl Triplett to break into the acting business. Okay, so if you’re not the type who goes out to movies, you can always sit at home and watch even more bizarre things on television like the life and death of one Anna Nicole Smith or reruns on cable of those lame excuses for newlyweds Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey which is pronounced Lah-SHAY, why they didn’t even have the same last name for Pete’s sake plus his mouth needed to be washed out regularly with soap. Lately I’ve taken to turning off the TV and reading my Bible just to get some sanity back in my life, some of the stuff in the Bible can beat any soap opera on television hands down.

If you have been reading carefully up to this point you are prolly wondering how it can be that a person who thinks everyone should know who the Happy Goodmans, the Speer Family, and the Lefevres are wouldn’t be familiar with the Carter Family, well I did know that Mother Maybelle was the mother of June Carter Cash who was the wife of Johnny Cash, he was the Man In Black who sang “I Walk The Line” and “Ring Of Fire” and “Folsom Prison” and “I’ve Been Everywhere, Man” and “The Rock Island Line Is A Mighty Good Road” and numerous other country music hits, but I had never heard of A.P. and Sarah, don’t ask me why, maybe a part of my education was simply deficient just like some of you prolly don’t know who Annette Funicello is, or Florian Zabach, boy could he play the violin. I guess we like to think we are all alike because we watch the same television programs when really each of us is a unique, one-of-a-kind being and the great miracle is that we can understand each other at all when you consider how different we all are under the skin, I mean physically we can recognize that we are members of the same species, but internally I cannot be you and you cannot be me because our experiences are as different as night and day, and as the French say, vive la difference! which is pronounced VEEV-lah dee-fair-AWNTZ! and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 22

2009-01-08T14:20:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, Virgil Abernathy dropped by for a visit the other day and we were just sitting around chatting when out of a clear blue sky he said, “So how long have you been a philanthropist?” which threw me for a second because I consider myself to be pretty tightfisted with my money, which by the way I don’t have much of at all and certainly am not in the habit of giving away, so I said “What makes you think I’m a philanthropist?” and he pointed up at my bookshelf. As I turned to see where he was pointing he said “I didn’t know you collected coins.” I suppressed a grin and said “You’re not thinking of a philanthropist, that’s the wrong word, you’re thinking of a philatelist, but that’s also the wrong word, a philatelist is someone who collects stamps, there’s another word that means someone who collects coins” and he said “What is it?” and I said “Numismatist” and he said “Well I knew it started with a P” and I said “Numismatist doesn’t start with a P” and he said “What does it start with?” and I said “An N” and here’s why I’m telling you this story, he said “Are you sure?” and it was like Copernicus and the solar system all over again, people simply refuse to believe the truth when they hear it, I mean sometimes he mispronounces the word plethora on purpose just to provoke me into correcting him, Virgil Abernathy I mean, not Copernicus, but he was serious as all get out, and if people aren’t using the wrong word they’re mispronouncing the right word, have you noticed that some people add an R in subsidiary and say subsiderary and some people drop an R from peripheral and say periphial and many times they’re the same people? Some people just flat out use the wrong word, for example Udella Mabry says ideal instead of idea, as in “I have no ideal what to have for dinner” or as in “I have an ideal, let’s go out for dinner” and she also says whelps instead of welts, as in “his arm was covered with big red whelps” but so far I have restrained myself from correcting her because I have just enough brain cells left to know that Virgil Abernathy and Udella Mabry are two very different people, and even Mr. D. P. Morris, my old English teacher back in Not Grapevine Texas, would drop an R from orchestra and say ochestra but he would add an R in appetite and say appertite, go figure. I prolly say some things wrong also, but it’s easier to hear when another person does it. We humans, and I don’t know who else would be reading this, are pretty quick to criticize and pretty slow to learn, so when I happen to point a finger at somebody else I always try to remember that I have three fingers pointing back at myself, but sometimes I forget. What really gets my goat is finding errors in magazines and newspapers that wouldn’t be there if the editor or facts-checker had half a brain. Case in point, one of the grandkids brought home an issue of My Weekly Reader from school last month and showed me an article about places to visit when you are in Washington D.C., one picture that caught my eye showed the new Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial which has a statue not only of FDR but also of his little dog, which anybody at all of a certain age knows was named Fala, the dog I mean, not the statue, but there in My Weekly Reader for all children everywhere to see it said the dog’s name was Falo, it made me so angry I wanted to spit, and recently in a local glossy free monthly magazine called Points North which is aimed at the upscale, affluent, high-income people who are taking over everything between the city of Atlanta and the mountains of North Carolina there was an article telling about an exhibit having to do with former First Ladies at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, it’s the exhibit that’s at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, not the former First Ladies, and the article included a full-page black-and-white photo of six former First Ladies on somebody’s front porch, it was a wonder, Lady Bird Johnson and Pat Nixon were sitting on the left, Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush were standing in the middle, and Rosalyn Carter and Betty Ford were sitting on the right, but the caption to the photograph said, “Left to right: Former First Ladies Lady Bird Johnson, Mamie Eisenhower, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, Rosalyn Carter, and Pat Nixon” which was just wrong, wrong, wrong, I mean, even I prolly wouldn’t be able to identify anyone prior to Eleanor Roosevelt except for maybe Martha Washington and Mary Todd Lincoln, I wouldn’t know Edith Boling Galt Wilson from Grace Goodhue Coolidge, but how anyone old enough to hold a job in journalism today could mistake Pat Nixon for Mamie Eisenhower or think that Betty Ford was Pat Nixon is beyond me, that’s just plain incompetence, four right out of six is sixty-six and two-thirds per cent which is a D or maybe an F in my book, but I bet that magazine’s editor can name every contestant in the final twelve on American Idol, so what does that say about where we are as a society?

On another note entirely, it hit me all of a sudden a couple of days ago that the eastern half of Cherokee County Georgia where Brother Rathbone’s church is is a lot like the hem of the high priest’s garment in ancient Israel as described in the Old Testament, because if you went around the hem of the high priest’s garment in ancient Israel as described in the Old Testament you would see a bell and a pomegranate, a bell and a pomegranate, and if you go around the eastern half of Cherokee County Georgia where Brother Rathbone’s church is you will see a farm and a subdivision, a farm and a subdivision, what I’m trying to tell you is the real estate developers are going like gangbusters in our area, they’re taking over our fair county, the modern world is crowding out the horses and cows and sheep, traffic is increasing on all of our two-lane roads, which are the only kind we have, and it is clear as a bell (and a pomegranate) that what some people call progress has arrived, we have gone from rural to not suburban exactly, more exurban if you ask me, which you didn’t but I’m just saying. We now have a supermarket four miles west of us and another one four miles east of us along with the usual hamburger and pizza joints, a couple of Mexican restaurants, a Chinese take-out place, five nail salons, four gas stations, three dry cleaners, two drive-through banks, and a partridge in a pear tree where there used to be open land, they’ve already cleared the land for a carwash and a fried chicken place, that’s two places actually, nobody is going to wash your car and sell you fried chicken at the same place, nobody in his right mind anyway, and up at the corner a mile from my house a new elementary school is being erected as we speak so that the offspring of all the new people moving into all the new subdivisions can receive an education, the four-way stop sign has been replaced by a flashing red light, God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world to hear all the local elected officials tell it, we’re practically uptown, and even though it is still twenty miles to a real mall with major department stores we cannot be considered country bumpkins any more, except maybe for the neighbor who A flies a Confederate flag in his front yard and B told me once that Teddy Kennedy lives in Highness Port Matchatoochitts, that’s what happens to a person’s brain when that person lives too close to a chicken farm for too many years, the aroma alone could stop you in your tracks, to say nothing of a thousand teenaged roosters crowing every morning at dawn, it proves that even though God may be in His heaven, all is not right with the world, thank goodness the one between my house and the new elementary school, chicken farm I mean, not Heaven, will be torn down and only a memory before any children start arriving for classroom instruction, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 23

2009-01-08T14:04:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, I’m sure it will prolly come as no surprise to you, but a lot can happen in a hundred years, and each and every year is memorable for various reasons, take 1901 for example, in that year A the queen of England, Queen Victoria, died after a long reign and B President William McKinley was assassinated in the United States and C the recent end of a war with Spain brought the formerly Spanish territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippine Islands under U.S. control, but as often happens headlines in one century wind up as mere footnotes in the next and by The Year of Our Lord 2001, which is what A.D. which is short for Anno Domini means in our old friend the Latin language, it turned out that A Victoria’s name, when it was mentioned at all, was usually followed by the word “secret” and B the mountain in Alaska named for Mr. McKinley had been called Denali for some time to please the Inuit population and C persons of Hispanic descent, far from being conquered, had become America’s largest minority group. Like I said, a lot can happen in a hundred years. Consider the case of Palm Beach County, Florida, which a hundred years ago didn’t even exist on a map, it was just the northern portion of a very large Dade County (think Miami). Even forty years ago, traffic practically evaporated in South Florida at the end of the winter tourist season, why a person could just about lie down in the middle of U.S. 1 and take a nap, a person might even see crabs crossing highway A-1-A (please, no cracks about your Aunt Mabel and Uncle Claude in Boynton Beach). By 2001, however, discussions about Palm Beach County were not about the increase in automobiles or the decline in crabs but about the disputed 2000 presidential election between Vice President Al Gore of Tennessee and Governor George W. Bush of Texas, well you may not want to believe it, but a hundred years from now people may not care about the role Florida played in the 2000 election, they may not know what a butterfly ballot was, they may not have any idea what chads, dimpled or otherwise, were because for better or worse, life does go on, as proof let me ask you this question, when was the last time you became apoplectic over the 1876 election between Samuel Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes? Anyways, I wrote a poem called “The Ballad Of Palm Beach County (Centennial Edition, Annotated)” which you will be reading shortly which may make you smile or laugh or even cry, but I hope it will make you think about some other things as well, such as A the historical inaccuracies that sometimes creep into what passes for scholarly research and B the arrogance and self-assumed superiority of some researchers and C the way some people blindly accept as fact whatever is presented to them and D the enormous chasm between the haves and have-nots in our society and E the false impression of us that future generations may have and maybe even F the ever-so-remote possibility that our own impression of previous generations may not be entirely accurate. I realize that’s a lot to ask one poem to do, but hope still manages to spring eternal in the human breast, to coin a phrase. Whatever your reaction turns out to be, I now send my poem forth into the world, along with two more hopes, G that it will give you pleasure, pause, and enough food for thought to make a meal and H that its purpose, unlike the remains of the Key Biscayne Zoo, does not remain a mystery.

The Ballad Of Palm Beach County
(Centennial Edition, Annotated)

(Note to reader: Research by anthropologists and archaeologists at the National Archives indicates that these are the original lyrics sung by the great Nathaniel and Wyoming, the Joads, in 1994. To get an idea of what late twentieth-century audiences must have experienced, read through the entire song once, ignoring the footnotes. Then, read the song again, this time referring to the footnotes. In so doing, you will understand better the song’s many obscure references, and you will also be in compliance with President Lopez-Walesa’s executive order.)

Oh, Burt Reynolds(1) has a ranch in Palm Beach County,
And Jack Nicklaus(2) sells new cars in Delray Beach(3),
Cubans migrate north from Dade, but the people in Belle Glade
Know that livin’ in the fast lane’s out of reach.

Perry Como(4) owns a mansion in Tequesta,
And Rose Kennedy’s(5) forgotten how to die,
Lots of money down in Boca(6) is derived from leaves of coca,
But the people in Belle Glade go home and cry.

For the people in Belle Glade get mighty tired
Of workin’ in the cane fields(7) all day long,
And the children pray(8) that Daddy won’t get fired,
And they pray that God(9) will keep their Mama strong.

Oh, the snowbirds(10) come and go each spring and autumn,
And Rose Kennedy just turned one hundred five;
And they call their banks from condos while the symphony plays rondos,
But in Belle Glade people fight to stay alive.

All the fishing boats go out on Okeechobee(11),
And the tourists(12) all complain about the heat,
And some citizens of Broward say their congressman’s a coward,
But in Belle Glade there is not enough to eat.

And the people in Belle Glade get mighty tired
Of workin’ in the cane fields all day long,
And the children pray that Daddy won’t get fired,
And they pray that God will keep their Mama strong.

Oh, the honky-tonks(13) are full on Dixie Highway(14),
And Rose Kennedy’s one hundred seventeen;
Tourists sail on the Atlantic, but in Belle Glade things are frantic,
And it looks like one more year in old blue jeans.

Burt and Loni raise their child(15) in Palm Beach County,
And the Kennedys throw parties all year long,
And the rumor mill is juicy with affairs in Port St. Lucie,
But in Belle Glade people know there’s something wrong.

For the people in Belle Glade get mighty tired
Of workin’ in the cane fields all day long,
And the children cry ‘cause Daddy just got fired,
And they pray that God will make their Mama strong.

On the coast they drive fast cars and chase loose women,
They water ski, play golf(16), and just have fun;
While the folks on A-1-A(17) just grow richer every day,
Out in Belle Glade seems like work is never done.

So the tourists come and go, Rose lives forever,
And the coca down in Boca is high grade,
But the people that God sees are the ones down on their knees,
And God hears the people praying in Belle Glade.

Yes, the people in Belle Glade get mighty tired
Of workin’ in the cane fields all day long,
And the children pray that one day they’ll be hired,
And they thank the Lord their Mama was so strong.(18)

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(1) An actor remembered not so much for his thespian abilities as for numerous sexual liaisons with various beautiful, mostly older women. Among them were actresses Dinah Shore, Sally Field, and one Loni Anderson, about whom little is known (see “U.S. Supreme Court, Reynolds v. Anderson” in the Encyclopedia Tropicana). Unsubstantiated rumors persist even today of Reynolds’s alleged trysts with publisher Helen Gurley Brown and the legendary eight-term governor of Texas, Ann Richards.
(2) An obscure athlete, possibly a golfer.
(3) A town once located on the coast. Delray Beach and other coastal communities mentioned in this song apparently thrived in the days before the successive calamities of Hurricanes Andrew, Ivan, Hannah, Marcia, Penelope, Steve, William, Yasmin, Agamemnon, Hildegarde, Eunice, Bertha, and Claude.
(4) May have been a singer.
(5) Great-great-great-great grandmother of U.S. president Shriver Schwarzenegger Cuomo Lopez-Walesa.
(6) Boca Raton, a coastal town destroyed by Hurricane Steve.
(7) In the days before the Great Disasters caused a population shift inland, the current state capital was an agricultural center.
(8) A religious exercise formerly thought to have value, now discredited.
(9) A deity worshiped by the pre-Presleyites.
(10) Possibly tourists (q.v.) or egrets (white-plumaged waterfowl, extinct)
(11) Before public pressure caused the Florida State Legislature to convert Okeechobee into a gigantic rollerblade center, it contained water.
(12) Until marauding bands of vigilantes (see “Posse Floridus” in the Encyclopedia Tropicana) discouraged all but the hardiest of travelers, persons known as “tourists” or “snowbirds” (because of their pale skin and seasonal migratory habits) visited the Florida peninsula on a regular basis, their arrival usually coinciding with the snows in the North. Some historians believe that the great calamities hastened the demise of “tourism”; others attribute it directly to the cataclysmic earthquake along the Santa Katherine Harris fault that destroyed Janet Reno World south of Orlando in the autumn of 2025.
(13) Places where “honkies” (Caucasian pre-Presleyites, many of whom, according to The New World Order Dictionary, were rude drivers, hence the name) “tonked.” Tonking, according to the NWOD, consisted of desperate and sometimes pathetic attempts to arrange sexual liaisons with honkies of the opposite gender while dancing to Elvis Presley recordings. Many historians believe that tonking also involved the consumption of large amounts of alcoholic beverages, but this has been vehemently denied by the Society of Reformed Neo-Presleyites.
(14) The name is of unknown origin. Some scholars believe this one-time major thoroughfare was named in memory of Ms. Dixie Lee Ray, an early chairperson of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Others of equally reputable stature believe Dixie Highway was named in honor of a paper cup. References in earlier editions of the Encyclopedia Tropicana to a “Mason’s and Dixon’s line,” alleged to have divided Pennsylvania (supposedly part of “the North”) and Maryland (supposedly part of “the South”) have now been thoroughly discredited by the diligent research of the National Archives anthropologists.
(15) Quinton Reynolds, the infamous Senator from North Dakota who led an incursion into New Cuba in 2039 in an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow King Elian II.
(16) A game, no longer played, believed to have originated in Scotland at the St. Andrew Lloyd Weber Country Club, in which players such as Jack Nicklaus (see footnote 2) used dowels to try to move small spherical pucks into a series of sandy areas, or traps, near manicured lawns. If the players, called “golfers,” succeeded, spectators often burst into applause. Thus, a new word, “claptrap,” was added to our language.
(17) Traces of this road can still be seen in a few places where rubble has been cleared.
(18) “The Ballad Of Palm Beach County” (originally called “The People In Belle Glade”) was adopted as the new national anthem on August 23, 2087, by the 150th Congress, replacing “You Ain’t Nothin’ But A Hound Dog.” The tune sung by the Joads in 1994 has unfortunately been lost to us due to the tendency of late twentieth-century musicians to record their work on compact discs (CDs). The familiar music now used with our national anthem was originally known as “To Elian In Heaven,” a tavern drinking song composed by Katherine Harris Bush a few days before the fatal 2025 earthquake that destroyed her villa on Francis Scott Key in New Cuba. Archaeologists exploring this hallowed site in 2101 discovered evidence of earlier buildings known collectively as the Key Biscayne Zoo, whose purpose remains a mystery.
----------------------------------------

and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 24

2009-01-08T14:00:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, let me just state for the record that even though I did live in South Florida, specifically in the city of Boca Raton, from September of 1968 until June of 1975, I personally have no knowledge whatsoever about “the coca down in Boca,” it was just an intriguing internal rhyme that popped into or out of my head, I don’t know which, one afternoon when I was writing a poem, and by internal rhyme I mean internal in the poem line, not internal in my head, and I also have no way of knowing whether Boca’s coca is high, medium, or low grade, but the local Knight-Ridder newspaper did report with some degree of regularity about drug busts on the beach amongst the high school crowd, no pun intended, and also rumors were rampant all over town that people from Colombia had moved their families into the Royal Palm Yacht and Country Club and were paying for their mansions with grocery bags full of cash that they carried around in their luxury cars, I don’t know whether it was true but it sure made a good rumor, gosh I sure hope they didn’t bother Delwyn and Frances Brockett over there what with Delwyn having been the CEO of Gulf Oil and all, he deserved a little peace and quiet in his golden years, but all of that is water under the bridge or over the dam, all I’m trying to do right now is clear up any misconception you might have about my use of the phrase “the coca down in Boca,” and even though you may be trying to think of a male counterpart to Mr. William Shakespeare’s “methinks the lady doth protest too much” or maybe it was Mr. Christopher Marlowe, I will move on to another subject, let’s see, sex is always an interesting topic, a while back it was reported that the average American male thinks about sex 238 times a day, well this startled me because besides wondering how they could possibly have obtained that statistic it seemed just a teensy-weensy bit high to me, but then I started thinking about it, how they came up with that statistic I mean, not sex, and if you round 238 up to 240 just to make the math easier and you realize there are 24 hours in a day then that comes to 10 times an hour, or once every six minutes, which leaves no time at all for sleeping, so if you take eight hours away from 24 to allow for sleeping you have 16 hours left which times 60 minutes in an hour comes to 960 minutes and if you then divide 240 times a day into 960 minutes you come up with once every four minutes, and you know what? upon reflection that doesn’t seem so far-fetched, in fact it’s prolly about right, I mean let’s face it ladies, given the fact that A men are wired differently from women and B persons of distinctly feminine persuasion parade around scantily clad on beaches and cable television and in certain movies and magazines day in and day out, to say nothing of on the streets of every American city and town, well even if your man is a devout Christian or Jew or Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu or whatever he isn’t blind unless his name happens to be Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles or Ronnie Millsap, I’m not saying it’s women’s fault and I’m not condoning the pornography industry in any way whatsoever, but when Nature takes its course and your man has thoughts about sex every four minutes because Nature wants the species to continue, just be thankful that he doesn’t act on those thoughts until he comes back home to you, or maybe that’s what gets you so upset in the first place, because of how often he wants to act on his thoughts when he comes back home to you, I know you prolly don’t want to hear about it, you’d rather go shopping at the mall or buy some more Mary Kay products from the lady down the street or watch the latest episode of Desperate Housewives, why even no less a personage than former First Lady Barbara Bush said on the TV that a woman doesn’t want to hear what a man thinks, she wants to hear what she thinks in a lower octave, now there is one smart lady, at least she isn’t laboring under any delusions, and it just occurred to me that even Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles and Ronnie Millsap prolly think about sex too so the problem, if that’s what you want to call it, is not in a man’s eyes, it’s somewhere between his brain and his crotch, which mathematically speaking may be a new definition of the shortest distance between two points, but it further occurs to me that philosophically and anatomically speaking the place that’s somewhere between a man’s brain and his crotch is his heart, let’s not get off on a side discussion about his stomach and intestines, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 25

2009-01-08T13:58:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, when I get around to writing that novel, Myrna and Verna from over in Smyrna are definitely going be in it, and also a set of boy twins that I invented recently, Darnell and Parnell Witherspoon, they go by the nicknames Tooter and Scooter which their mother, Lucy Maud Witherspoon, gave to them when they were small and only God knows why, I mean why she gave them those nicknames, not why they were small. Lucy had to raise the boys by herself after her either darling or no-account husband Herbert either died of the herpes or ran off with trashy seventeen-year-old LuAnn McLeroy from two houses down, I can’t decide which, but I’m sure it’s going to be a wonderful book, greatly beloved by all who read it, maybe I will have Myrna and Verna meet Darnell and Parnell at the big dance during Smyrna’s annual bluegrass festival and they will all fall madly in love with one another and get married in a big double wedding at either the local Elks Club or the Holy Ghost Tabernacle Of Fire-Baptized Believers Church fellowship hall followed by a lavish double honeymoon in either Honolulu Hawaii or Rio de Janeiro except that none of them can speak Portuguese which is what people do in Brazil in case you didn’t know, I mention Brazil because that is where Rio de Janeiro which means River of January is located if you are completely clueless, and then they might could all end up living next door to one another and raise their children like brothers and sisters which is practically what they are anyway being double first cousins and all, I just love being a writer, I wonder if Fannie Flagg started this way. I can hardly wait to get started on my novel but first I have to finish this book, which by the looks of things it may just go on and on and never stop, speaking of which lots of people nowadays have blogs on the worldwide web but that’s way too high-tech for me, other people keep a big notebook handy so they can journal their thoughts, hold the fort, my old high school English teacher back in Not Grapevine Texas Mr. D. P. Morris would definitely say that journal is a noun, not a verb, and people do not journal their thoughts, they write their thoughts in a journal, like how they feel about their dentist appointment next Thursday afternoon or how far they went on their date last night, people used to call that a diary and kept it under lock and key. I wish you could have known Mr. Morris, he had us memorize a little poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson that begins “Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies” and ends up wondering what God and man is, that should prolly be what God and man are, even Mr. Alfred Lord Tennyson might could have benefited from knowing Mr. D. P. Morris. Well I find that I have nothing else to say at this time, so this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 26

2009-01-08T13:52:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, even though this book seems to have no unifying theme, no subject tying all these chapters together, no raison d’être which means reason for being and is pronounced RAY-ZAWN DEBT, French makes no sense to me, I mean to put letters in that aren’t going to be spoken is a complete waste of the alphabet if you ask me, which you didn’t but I’m just saying, I continue to put pen to paper or rather fingers to keyboard when there’s no reason on God’s green earth for me to be doing it, maybe this is what a psychiatrist would call a compulsion, or maybe the fact that you’ve read this far shows that you have one too, compulsion I mean, not psychiatrist, hey we’re all in this together, writer and reader, we’ve formed a kind of bond I suppose, even though you’ve never laid eyes on me and I’ve never laid eyes on you, I have no idea what you look like, whether you are tall or short, thin or fat, young or old, rich or poor, stupid or brilliant, male or female, but I trust that you are there and because I do we continue to have this conversation, it’s kind of like prayer, trusting that Someone is listening. The famous theologian Lily Tomlin once asked a very good question, she said how come when we talk to God it’s called prayer but when He talks to us it’s called schizophrenia? and I think that is a very good question indeed, if you ever figure out the answer please let me know, send a postcard to me, Billy Ray Barnwell, at General Delivery, Not Grapevine, Texas, because I would love to know the answer, but that is not why I started this chapter, I started this chapter because a scene from the 1968 movie Funny Girl starring Barbra Streisand came into my mind, Funny Girl is based on the life of Fanny Brice who you might say was the Barbra Streisand of an earlier generation and in this scene Fanny is having a conversation with her mother about her husband, Fanny’s husband I mean, not her mother’s, his name is Nicky Arnstein and he is played by Omar Sharif pronounced Oh Marsha Reef, who was arguably the most handsome Egyptian actor ever to step foot on a Hollywood sound stage, and the problem is that Fanny makes a lot of money working in the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway and Nicky Arnstein just gambles it all away as fast as she can make it, talk about a compulsion, but Fanny doesn’t confront him because she has been mesmerized by him ever since the time he gave her a blue marble egg, so she says “But Ma, I love him,” and Fanny’s mother who is played by an actress whose name I can’t remember answers her with one of the best pieces of advice I have ever heard in my entire life, on-screen or off, she says, “Fanny, love him a little less; help him a little more,” I love that line because many times loving or what we think is loving is just not enough but helping just might be the highest form of love one person could offer another, so if your kid or your friend or your spouse or your POSSLQ which A is pronounced POSSIL-queue and B means Person Of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters and C is an actual category recognized by the United States Bureau of the Census is strung out on drugs or alcohol don’t just weep into your pillow at night, take him or her to someplace like Teen Challenge or the Betty Ford Clinic which is equipped to deal with the problem in ways you cannot, I don’t mean to preach, I’m just saying don’t just sit there, do something, although I suppose we shouldn’t forget that there are also times in our lives when the proper response might be don’t do something, just sit there, with me it was when my Dad was in the middle of one of his three-hour lectures and if a tear ran down my cheek he was apt to go ballistic and say don’t you dare cry, if you start crying I’ll give you something to cry about or he might lose it altogether and just backhand me and slap me so hard the glasses would fly off of my face, I tried awfully hard not to cry and get my Dad upset but usually it didn’t work and then Mama would say something to get his anger redirected towards her, she was willing to be the target, the trick is knowing when to do one and when to do the other, doing something or just sitting there I mean, if life came with a book of instructions it would make things a whole lot easier, well as a matter of fact it does come with a book of instructions called the Holy Bible but the thing is you actually have to read it and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 27

2009-01-08T13:48:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, I would be the last person in the world to tell you how to run your finances, there are plenty of financial planners in the world willing to do just that for a fee if you are dumb enough to let them, but I do want to pass along the best piece of financial advice I ever heard or rather ever saw, we had stopped to eat at a Stuckey’s just off the interstate years ago on the way to somewhere, I forget where, we were prolly in south Georgia or deep in L.A. which in my part of the world means Lower Alabama and I was checking out the souvenirs on the way back from the restroom, you know the ones, the baseball caps with the Confederate flags that say “Forget, hell” and the sets of shot glasses with somebody else’s favorite college football team logo on them and the beach towels that say Harley-Davidson and the salt and pepper sets that look like little outhouses, stuff you cannot possibly live without, and suddenly I saw this plaque that you could buy to hang on your wall that said If your outgo exceeds your income your upkeep will be your downfall, the plaque said it I mean, not your wall, and I was dumbfounded, I had this epiphany just like O. E. Parker did when he was in the tattoo parlor in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Parker’s Back” and saw this Byzantine Christ tattoo whose eyes said to him GO BACK, boy I wish I could write like Flannery O’Connor, either her or Pat Conroy, his prose flows and hers shocks, I guess if I had to pick just one it would be Flannery, but unfortunately the only way I know how to write is like me, anyways I knew I had to have that plaque, I wanted to buy it so bad I could taste it but I also knew we couldn’t afford it even though it was only $9.95 because we had saved for months just to make that trip to wherever it was we were going and we needed every penny we had for food and for gasoline to get back home on, so I did the next best thing, I committed that saying to memory instead, who needs a plaque on the wall when it is emblazoned in your heart is what I say, so for years that saying has been my watchword, well more of a goal I would have to say, as there have been many times when my outgo did in fact exceed my income and I was very much afraid that my upkeep was indeed going to be my downfall but somehow we always managed to make it through to the next paycheck, thank you Jesus, it’s always darkest just before the dawn is what my stepmother used to say, not the thank you Jesus part, that was me, and she would still be saying it too only she passed away last November in Texas at the age of eighty-nine years, seven months, and twenty-eight days, not that anybody was counting, and she was right, about the darkness and the dawn I mean, because dawn always came and that black cloud would somehow have a silver lining and life would go on, except of course for her it didn’t as of last November, but you get what I’m saying. It’s funny how at the most unexpected times I get a flashback to a story I’ve read or a movie I’ve seen like that scene from Funny Girl I told you about, the movie Field of Dreams has that effect on me too because my Dad moved from LaCrosse Wisconsin to Cedar Rapids Iowa when he was in junior high school, he joined the Navy from Iowa, he and I were such different people, we never threw a baseball to each other on more than a couple of occasions, he was always working at the factory and I was always reading a book or practicing the piano, I was never very good at sports but I did love baseball and except for the minor detail that I couldn’t hit, couldn’t catch, couldn’t pitch, couldn’t throw, and couldn’t run, I could have played baseball, I always rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers whenever they ended up playing the New York Yankees in the World Series, so I was drawn to a movie like Field of Dreams, I become a blubbering idiot every time I see it, Udella Mabry’s cousin Darlene Abernathy says well why do you watch it then and I really have no answer except that something grabs me in the pit of my stomach every time Kevin Costner which is pronounced Kevin Costner finally has that encounter with his father, the person he could never communicate with, and his father, who has been dead for many years but looks as young as or maybe even younger than Kevin, thanks Kevin for building the baseball field and says “It’s like a dream come true” and then asks “Is this Heaven?” and Kevin looks around at the baseball diamond and the cornfield and says “It’s Iowa” and his father says “I could have sworn it was Heaven” and Kevin says “Is there a Heaven?” and his father says “Oh yeah,” and after a short pause in which you can tell Kevin is thinking “What’s it like?” his father says “It’s the place where dreams come true” and Kevin looks around at his house and his wife and his daughter and says “Maybe this is Heaven” and he and his father finally have that game of catch and up on the front porch of the house Kevin’s wife throws the switch and the baseball diamond is lit up in the growing darkness and the camera pans back and up and you see all these hundreds of cars with their headlights on making their way in the twilight to the baseball field all because Kevin heard the voice saying “If you build it he will come” and “Ease his pain” and “Go the distance” and went to see James Earl Jones as Terence Mann and then the both of them went to see Burt Lancaster as Archie “Moonlight” Graham who gave up his heavenly baseball career to save Kevin’s daughter from choking to death on a hot dog and by this point I have been reduced to a puddle on the floor thinking about what never was and what might have been and what part of the fault was mine, Virgil Abernathy says he can tell from all the time he spent in rehab that I am way too involved with that movie, I’ve never been in rehab but he is prolly right, some other movies I especially like include Dances With Wolves which also has Kevin Costner in it, some parts are almost like looking at a painting in a museum, parts of the movie I mean, not parts of Kevin Costner, oh and there’s To Kill A Mockingbird and Some Like It Hot and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Prince Of Tides and Out Of Africa and of course the incomparable Casablanca, and if you ask me, which I know you didn’t but I’m just saying, the motion picture industry is in a great decline nowadays with the notable exception of the three Lord Of The Rings movies, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 28

2009-01-08T13:43:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, I’m getting ready this week to play for a wedding at our church, Ashley and Dustin are getting married, and they’re a lovely young couple, really they are, but every time I think of the phrase “Ashley and Dustin” I don’t see the beautiful blond girl and the handsome tall boy, what plays on the movie screen of my mind is, wouldn’t you know it, right out of the movies, only it’s kind of warped, I see Dustin Hoffman as Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy walking down the streets of Manhattan but Jon Voight is not walking next to him wearing that great fringed cowboy jacket, no, who I see walking next to Dustin Hoffman is Leslie Howard, the actor who played Ashley Wilkes in Gone With The Wind in 1939, he was the one that Scarlett O’Hara wanted and sweet Melanie got, and it really freaks me out as to why Dustin Hoffman would be walking with Leslie Howard, Leslie is all dressed up in his Ashley Wilkes Civil War uniform, gray for the Confederacy, and Dustin and Ashley are holding hands in my movie just like George W. Bush and that prince from Saudi Arabia did, maybe I’m finally going off the deep end, I’m sorry but that’s what I see, whatever happened to good old-fashioned names like Willard and Edna, Cletis and Eula Mae, Herb and Phyllis, Walter and Margaret, Arthur and Irma, Clarence and Mildred, Vernon and Gladys, you just knew with names like those that their marriages were solid as a rock, nobody ever got divorced in the old days, or if they did we don’t seem to have kept a record of it, they were pretty good back then about making their bed and lying in it, not like nowadays where if a relationship doesn’t make you tingle all over at all times you just shed it and try another one, it’s kind of a serial polygamy if you ask me, which I know you didn’t but I’m just saying, but at least Ashley and Dustin, the real ones I mean, not the figments of my overworked imagination, are getting married, they haven’t forsaken the institution, their mamas raised them right. So anyways I thought as a public service I would include a list of light classics that are suitable for playing at weddings, it’s also a fitting tribute to my piano teacher, Mrs. Alyne Eagan, who had polio when she was younger and walked with crutches but it didn’t keep her from driving a car and after I had taken piano lessons from her for about eight years she suddenly married a Mr. Cyrus and moved to Las Cruces New Mexico with her slightly crazy teen-aged son and the only person left in town who taught piano was Miss Clara Malone of Holly Springs Mississippi, how Miss Clara ever wound up in Not Grapevine Texas would prolly make a story in itself except I don’t know it, but I do know she couldn’t teach piano worth a lick, mostly she prepared people to go back to their church and play hymns out of their hymnbook, she was a Methodist but she preferred the Southern Baptists’ Broadman Hymnal to the Cokesbury, I never did know what Mrs. Eagan was but she would drive into Fort Worth every month and play for the Downtown Kiwanis Club’s monthly luncheon meeting and she claimed to have accompanied Ginger Rogers before she became a famous dancer and movie star, Ginger I mean, not Mrs. Eagan, now that would have been a sight to see, her doing everything Fred Astaire did only backwards and in high heels while also using crutches, well anyways back to the list of wedding music, there’s “Clair de Lune” which means moonlight and also “Reverie” which means reverie, both of them are by the French composer Claude Debussy, there’s “Liebestraum” which is German for Dream of Love by Franz Liszt, I always have to work hard to get the cadenzas right, and there are several good ones by Frederic Chopin which is pronounced SHO-pan such as his “Etude in E Major,” and there’s the “Eighteenth Variation From Rhapsody On A Theme By Paganini” by Sergei Rachmaninoff, no kidding, that is what it is called, Eighteenth Variation From Rhapsody On a Theme By Paganini which is not by Paganini but by Rachmaninoff, the Variation I mean, not the Rhapsody, which is by Paganini, or maybe it’s the Theme, how confusing can you get, and by the way the composers’ names are pronounced SAIR-GAY Rock-MAH-nih-nawf and pagguh-NEE-nee respectively, one was Russian and the other was Italian, you might have heard it in the movie Somewhere In Time if you weren’t drooling over either Christopher Reeve or Jane Seymour, so if you want a classy wedding choose those pieces, I have also played at weddings where the bride wanted things like “Beauty And The Beast” which I definitely think sends the wrong message about the groom, or “The Little Mermaid,” Disney stuff, people have gotten away from songs by Karen Carpenter and that one by Noel Stookey of Peter, Paul, and Mary, I can never remember whether Noel was Peter or Paul but he definitely wasn’t Mary, and certain movie themes are popular like the themes from Ice Castles and Somewhere In Time and “Tara’s Theme” from Gone With The Wind, hey, there’s Gone With The Wind again, some of the older wedding music is completely dead and buried now, “Oh Promise Me” and “I Love You Truly” and “Because” to name three, they’d laugh you out of the church if you sang those today or maybe they’d just sit there in complete shock, oh one that is quite popular of late is “The Prayer” as sung by Celine Dion and Andrea Bocelli, it says so right on the sheet music, only most of the times I have heard it sung it hasn’t sounded the least bit like Celine Dion and Andrea Bocelli, but at least people are still getting married and I have to hand it to Dustin and Ashley for respecting the institution of marriage, like I said, they were raised right, Ashley’s mother plays bass guitar in our church’s praise band and Dustin’s mom and dad sing alto and bass in the sanctuary choir, well to be precise his mom sings alto and his dad sings bass, I didn’t mean to imply that they both yodeled in the choir. I guess Tevye in Fiddler On The Roof was right, there’s something to be said for tradition, of course the Bible says that you have made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition, don’t get mad at me, Jesus is the one who said it, and by you and your he meant the scribes and the Pharisees, they were the ones he was talking to, so if you are neither a scribe nor a Pharisee then you needn’t get your panties in a wad or your knickers in a twist as they say in Great Britain which is also called the United Kingdom even though it has a queen, but if you are one, a scribe or a Pharisee I mean, not a queen, then do us all a favor and clean up your act, the world would be a much better place, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 29

2009-01-08T13:34:00.000-08:00

Click.

...can expect warmer temperatures today with scattered showers possible during the afternoon rush hour...

...Shimmy Shimmy Ko Ko Pop, Shimmy Shimmy, Pop...

...for National Public Radio, this is Daniel Schorr...

...precios bajos todos las dias, garantizados...

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...Howdy, frinds, and a warm welcome once again to The Daily Radio Chapel Of The Air, this is your radio pastor Brother Wesley Chappell with two P’s and two L’s, three if you count the one in Wesley, saying we love you with the love of the Lord, welcome, welcome in the middle of your busy day to this little oasis where all is peace and perfect love, Sister Opal is here and also little Wanda June at the keyboard of the Hammond organ, I wish you could see her, her little feet barely reach all the way down to the pedals. Wanda June will be our regular organist from now on because I have some sad news to relate to you, Estelle DeGarmo who has been playing our organ for the past nine years is not with us any longer, she didn’t die or anything, no, she just up and ran off with the owner of Angelo’s Body Works over on Buford Highway, Sister Opal said Estelle apparently found out that it was true, and I said found out that what was true? and she said that Angelo’s body works, anyways please keep them in your prayers and also Sister Opal while you’re at it. Frinds, I know you’re going to enjoy the program today because we have some special guests here in the chapel, the Gem Tones Quartet of Redondo Beach, California, will be joining us today and they will bless your heart with their anointed singing, actually they’re family, the quartet is made up of Sister Opal and three of her sisters, Jewel, Pearl, and Ruby, and of course little Wanda June will be accompanying them on the Hammond organ, they’ll be singing their latest gospel hit, “Jesus Been A Long Time Gone” from their new CD, I Just Want To Make Heaven My Home, they’ll be along a little later, but right now let’s open up the mailbag and read some letters from some of you wonderful listeners out there in radio land, here’s one from a Mr. Horace Earl Triplett of Smyrna, Georgia, who has included a generous contribution, a very generous contribution indeed, my my, may the Lord richly bless you Brother Triplett, “Brother Wesley,” he writes, “I never miss the Daily Radio Chapel Of The Air, I listen to it every time it comes on, we get it four times a day on four different stations here in the Atlanta area, and I’m enclosing a small monetary gift in appreciation of the wonderful pamphlet you sent me on the Book of Job entitled “Naked Came I From My Mother’s Womb And Naked Shall I Return Thither,” please send me fifty more copies as I want to share its enlightening message with the people of Smyrna, and also please say a prayer for my two sisters Myrna and Verna, I don’t know why but they don’t seem to be coping with life too well these days.” We’ll do that right now, frinds, stretch your hands toward the radio and pray with me that Myrna and Verna Triplett over there in Smyrna Georgia will perk up and join their brother Horace Earl in the wonderful service he is providing to their community. I wish every town in America had a Horace Earl Triplett. Here’s another letter, thank you Sister Opal, from a Mrs. Cecil Field of Jacksonville, Florida, “Dear Brother Wesley,” she says, “please remember all the boys and girls here at the Naval Air Station, pray they don’t stray too far from their moorings, pray that they will cast their anchor onto the solid rock, pray that they will all see the light from the lighthouse, pray that they will all make it safely into the old Ship of Zion before they leave the harbor for the last time. Keep on throwing out the lifeline, Brother Wesley, someone is drifting away. Here’s a little something to help you in your ministry, Brother Wesley, because we’re all counting on you to turn the tide, let the lower lights be burning, send a gleam across the wave; some poor fainting struggling seaman you may rescue, you may save.” Isn’t that poetic? Isn’t that inspiring? It also reminds me, Sister Opal, be sure we have a good supply of seasickness pills for our third annual Hallelujah Cruise coming up next month, we hope many of you frinds out there in radio land will be able to join us on this once in a lifetime opportunity, we will be cruising the Gulf of Mexico for Jesus, departing from Galveston Texas the fifteenth of next month and sailing to Bradenton Florida, seven nights on the open water and once again we will be playing Heavenly Bingo each night while we are at sea with all the proceeds going to support our orphanages in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, we hope we will see you in Galveston, send us your non-refundable five hundred dollar down payment today, make out your check to Brother Wesley Chappell, that’s with two P’s and two L’s, three if you count the one in Wesley, and send it to The Daily Radio Chapel Of The Air, Radio Station XERF, Del Rio, Texas, and the remaining three thousand dollars will be payable when you board, cash, money order, or certified check only please. Sister Opal and I are looking forward to seeing each one of you. And thank you, Mrs. Cecil Field down there in Jacksonville, Florida, and also Mr. Horace Earl Triplett of Smyrna Georgia for your very kind words, what an inspiration and encouragement to receive your cards and letters, and especially when you can include a little something for the ministry so that we can continue to do what we believe the Lord has called us to do. I have another letter here from Mr. Tom Bigbee of Tuscaloosa Alabama that I wanted to read but Sister Opal is indicating that the time is getting away from us so we’ll save that for tomorrow’s broadcast. In just a moment I’ll be bringing you the next message in our current “How Beautiful Are The Feet Of Them” series, today’s message is entitled “Set Your Affection On Things Above,” but first, here as promised are The Gem Tones, a quartet made up of Sister Opal and three of her sisters, Jewel, Pearl, and Ruby, to sing their latest gospel hit, “Jesus Been A Long Time Gone” from their new CD, I Just Want To Make Heaven My Home, accompanied by little Wanda June at the Hammond organ keyboard...

...friends of Beyoncé and Paris Hilton today denied...

...Nocturne in D for Strings by Alexander Borodin...

...islands in the stream, that is what we are...

...an erection lasting longer than four hours...

Click.

CHAPTER 30

2009-01-08T13:09:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, I didn’t mean to go on about wedding music like I did but it’s one of the few subjects I know anything about, you already know I’m not good at sports, I can’t play baseball although I love to watch it, I never wanted to participate in football or basketball or soccer or wrestling or what they call track and field, a person could get hurt with all that bodily contact plus you sweat a lot, golf and tennis are both for the rich which I am not, stock car racing is for everybody else but it’s the absolute worst, it’s the pits, ha ha ha, how people can go stand in the hot sun and drink beer and inhale all those exhaust fumes just to watch cars go round and round the track is beyond me, you can’t even hear yourself think in the infield, I really don’t have any hobbies to speak of, fishing bores me to death, I tried a little bird watching, excuse me Mr. Morris, I mean I tried bird watching a little, you know what, you have to be real careful about misplaced modifiers because you can end up saying something you didn’t mean to, like one time I went into a department store and told the clerk I wanted to buy a black man’s umbrella and I suddenly realized I meant to say a man’s black umbrella but it didn’t seem to matter to the clerk, I still have my binoculars but I don’t know where my Audubon book is, I guess I misplaced it too, my Dad collected stamps and coins when he wasn’t yelling at Mama or me, he could sit at the kitchen table for hours examining his treasures with his little magnifying glass, he enjoyed finding out whether a stamp had ten perforations or twelve and he loved licking those little translucent hinges, he collected plate blocks and some of them were old and quite beautiful, it was a way to learn about history he said, and he lived in hopes of someday finding a 1909S-VDB Lincoln penny or one of those really rare 1913 nickels, he was going to leave his collections to me but my stepmother had to sell them to help pay for his hospital bills, when I went back home for his funeral she did give me a couple of his ties even though they were very narrow and the style had changed to wide by that time, she also gave me his eyeglasses and she offered me his false teeth but I respectfully declined, my youngest stepbrother got his hunting rifles and his handguns but I wouldn’t have been interested in those anyway, so while everybody else is going bananas over Super Bowls and Final Fours and American Idols and NASCAR, NASCAR, NASCAR, I really don’t get the fascination, I like to read a book or play the piano or go to a movie if it’s decent, I guess I’m one of those wonderful people out there in the dark that Gloria Swanson was talking about in Sunset Boulevard, but as time goes by, I threw that in for you Casablanca fans, even the movies have less and less appeal to me, I identify more and more with Mr. J. Alfred Prufrock who was created by Mr. Thomas Stearns Eliot, “I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled, shall I part my hair behind? do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach, I shall hear the mermaids singing each to each, I do not think that they will sing to me,” or something like that, I’m quoting from memory. Prufrock also said “in the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo,” well I saw a Michelangelo once in the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, I even made it to Europe once but I didn’t see a Michelangelo there because I was in Stockholm Sweden, another place I never made it to was the Interlochen Music Camp in Michigan like Miss Sally Pierce my band director and clarinet instructor suggested but I did make it to Eastman School of Music in Rochester New York, not as a student but as the parent of a student and after touring the campus and the big theater we drove north for a while until we came to a park at the edge of the water and as we stood there looking out over this great expanse I thought about the people who lived in Rochester and out of the blue a line of poetry popped into my head, “in the room the women come and go talking of Lake Ontario,” I had to smile at the combination of cleverness and audacity my brain had just come up with, I guess we get our jollies in different ways, to each his own is what I say, whatever floats your boat is all right with me as long as it is legal and doesn’t hurt anybody and you keep it to yourself, of course I’m not the one you have to answer to, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing, oh P.S. I also wrote a song parody once a long time ago, it was back in the days before organ transplants were common, they were still experimenting and it was announced on the television that a baboon’s heart had been transplanted into a little girl’s body, the media referred to her only as Baby Fae to protect her family’s privacy, the little girl’s family I mean, not the baboon’s, well my mind being what it is I immediately thought about the old song “Baby Face” which you may or may not know, and wrote a little song in about thirty seconds, sometimes inspiration works like that but most of the time it takes blood, sweat, and tears to coin a phrase, so anyways here’s a song you can sing to the tune of “Baby Face,” it helps if you try to picture a line of chorus girls singing it and move your hands back and forth like they would do in show biz.

Baby Fae

Baby Fae,
You’ve got that certain somethin’,
Baby Fae,
Keep that new heart a-pumpin’,
One day real soon
You’ll be a baboon,
Gee, the doctors love ya,
They made a monkey of ya,
Baby Fae,
If you like strained bananas
Sue the A.M.A.,
With missing links they toyed
And now you’re anthropoid,
Our little ape-girl, Baby Fae!

and now for the reprise and the big finish:

Baby Fae,
If you like strained bananas
Sue the A.M.A.,
With missing links they toyed
(dunt dunt dunt DUNT dunt dunt)
And now you’re anthropoid,
(dunt dunt dunt DUNT dunt dunt)
Our little ape-girl baby,
Little ape-girl baby,
Little ape- (kick) girl (kick),
Bay- (kick) bee (kick) Faaaaaaaae!

and exit, stage left to wild applause. I wish I had thought to send it in to Saturday Night Live or somewheres but I didn’t, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off for real this time.

CHAPTER 31

2009-01-08T12:59:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, the other day I was thinking about Santa Claus which right off the bat seemed odd because it happens to be the middle of July and I was also thinking about how shocked I was when I learned courtesy of some researchers at the University of Toronto that Clement Clarke Moore did not write “A Visit From St. Nicholas” after all, it was some other dude all these years, when all of a sudden another twisted line of poetry popped into my head out of nowhere, “he had a broad face and a little round belly, that shook when he laughed just like Liza Minnelli,” I mean what are you going to do with a mind like mine, I’m just glad God gave it to me instead of putting it somewhere where it could cause real damage, and I’ve also been trying to decide on a title for this book, I’m currently vacillating between either A Mr. Morris, Are You Listening? since a lot of the book turned out to be about my days at Not Grapevine High School or B Pay No Attention To That Man Behind The Curtain since a lot of the book turned out to be about the movies but also because of Epititus’s little quotation about how things are versus how they appear to be and I think the Wizard of Oz, the man I mean, not the movie, was a very good example of something not being what it appeared to be, and maybe I myself am also a pretty good example, I haven’t made up my mind yet about the title, other possibilities may emerge because a lot of the book is also about Heaven and a lot is about sex, without any four-letter words of course, I mean I know them but I don’t think I could ever write them down let alone say them, Florabelle Oxley once told Mama “he wouldn’t say S-WORD if he had a mouthful,” only she didn’t say S-WORD, she said S-WORD, well you get the picture, I sure wish Mama was here to help me with the title like she helped Howard Griffin, oh it just occurred to me that Liza Minnelli is the daughter of Judy Garland who played Dorothy from Kansas in The Wizard Of Oz movie, talk about a coincidence, and speaking of Mr. Morris, I originally intended to become an English teacher just like him, okay I know some of you are prolly thinking the same thing Orion said to the Horsehead Nebula, which in case you are wondering was “You can’t be Sirius!” but the closest I ever got to being one, English teacher I mean, not Horsehead Nebula, was I became a technical writer at a Fortune 500 company for a few years, and the first thing I did when I got there was I put up a sign over my desk that said “Eschew Obfuscation”, the sign said it I mean, not my desk, because that little phrase was considered high humor among the literati back in those days, then someone showed me a list called “10 Rules On How To Write Good” and I put it up next to the sign, I think the rules were distributed by the Minnesota Society Of Newspaper Editors or some group like that, along the way I have misplaced them, the rules I mean, not the Minnesota Society of Newspaper Editors, and they were very good rules too because each one was an illustration of itself, for instance one said “Remember to never split an infinitive” and one said “Proofread your writing to see if you any words out” and one said “Passive voice should never be used” and one said “Don’t write run-on sentences they are hard to read” and one, my favorite, said “When dangling, watch your participles,” if you ever find yourself dangling you might try that, all in all I got many a chuckle out of those ten rules, I sure hope I’m not guilty of plagiarism by telling you about them, in some quarters these days plagiarism is considered worse than terrorism, now there are some truly twisted minds if you ask me, which I know you didn’t, but I’m just saying, I’m referring both to terrorists and to people who think plagiarizing is worse, I also put up a sign one Christmas that said Merry Sprachgefuhl but I don’t have time to go into that right now.

My memory banks are not completely filled with clips from the movies, there are a lot of black-and-white images from the golden age of television in there too, it’s not clear to me why it’s called the golden age of television, it wasn’t golden at all, it was black and white and various shades of gray on a twelve-inch screen to be exact, for example before there was a program called Wide World Of Sports there was its predecessor called Wide Wide World which wasn’t about sports at all, we have Mr. Roone Arledge to thank for that transformation, it was a Sunday afternoon program sort of like Omnibus which was hosted by Mr. Alistaire Cooke on another network, Wide Wide World was hosted by Mr. Dave Garroway, some of you have never heard of any of these people, and the thing that sticks in my mind is the way Dave would end every program by reciting four lines of poetry which I learned later are from “Renascence” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, he would say “the world stands out on either side, no wider than the heart is wide; above the world is stretched the sky, no higher than the soul is high,” and then he would raise his hand just like an Indian chief about to say “How” only he didn’t say “How,” what he said was “Peace.” It’s funny the way images stick in your head like that, it would be good if today’s kids had images like that in their heads instead of pelvic thrusts and gangsta rap and wardrobe malfunctions, I can’t imagine Mr. Dave Garroway doing any of those things. Another black-and-white scene in my head from early TV days is Tallulah Bankhead, an actress with a baritone voice like Bea Arthur who sang “Bosom Buddies” with Angela Lansbury in Mame on Broadway, Bea sang it I mean, not Tallulah, and she is sitting there talking with Merv Griffin, Tallulah is I mean, not Bea Arthur or Angela Lansbury, and they are discussing Tallulah’s recently published autobiography which is entitled Tallulah! also, “surprise, surprise!” as Gomer Pyle would say, or rather Jim Nabors playing Gomer Pyle would say, when Tallulah suddenly says “I wanted to call it Ah, My Foes, And Oh, My Friends but the publisher thought that was a bit obscure,” well I realized immediately that we were having another Dave Garroway moment because the title Miss Bankhead wanted to use but her publisher wouldn’t let her was also a quote from Edna St. Vincent Millay, curiouser and curiouser as Alice in Wonderland would say, it is from a little poem called “The First Fig” that goes “My candle burns at both ends; it will not last the night. But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends, it gives a lovely light,” and I suppose it is because of the literary reference that my mind tucked it away, I mean I can’t imagine why that particular clip would be in my memory banks otherwise. I can also see Helen Hayes on one of those Omnibus programs, I can hear her saying in that wonderfully warm, rich voice of hers “and the white magnolia grew and grew” and I can see Jack Paar on the old Tonight show introducing his next guest by saying “ladies and gentlemen, here they are, Jayne Mansfield” and speaking of Jack Paar, whatever happened to Alexander King and Dody Goodman and Peggy Cass and a French singer named Genevieve which is pronounced ZHAWNH-uh-vee-ev, they were all regular guests of his, Jack Paar I mean, oh and I can also see Peggy Wood as the Norwegian mother of Katryn, her little sister Robin, and her big brother Nels on a program called Mama, not Mama’s Family, that was an entirely different show altogether, the part of Nels was played by the actor Dick Van Patten who also played the father on Eight Is Enough, years later of course, after he had lost his hair, and Judson Laird was Papa, on Mama I mean, not on Eight Is Enough, and the only thing I have never been able to understand is why I remember these particular things, maybe I’m either an idiot savant or a high-functioning autistic, not that there’s anything wrong with either of those, Florabelle Oxley told Mama one time “all he knows is book learnin’” and even though all Florabelle’s son Jimmy Wayne knew was how to drive a tractor and how to hunt squirrels, I guess in many ways she was right but she didn’t have to say insulting things just because she was letting us get water from her spigot, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 32

2009-01-08T12:53:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, something else Mama used to say was “Everyone’s crazy but me and thee, and even thee is a little bit crazy,” I know she didn’t mean me personally, at least I hope she didn’t mean me personally, one time she said it after Helen Poe dropped by to show us her new dachshund puppy and Mama said “Are you going to call it a good German name like Weinerschnitzel?” which if you don’t know is pronounced VEE-ner-schnitz-uhl and Helen said no, she had decided to name the puppy Cement Mixer so that when she opened the back door, Helen I mean, not the puppy, so that she could do her business in the back yard, the puppy I mean, not Helen, boy, writing clearly can be really difficult at times, she, Helen, was planning to call out “Cement Mixer, potty, potty” loud enough for all the neighbors to hear, well that will prolly strike what’s left of the World War II crowd as funny but if you weren’t around during World War II you might be a bit confused, that’s okay because most people are these days, confused I mean, what with A President Bush’s poll numbers plummeting to levels not seen since the last year of the Nixon administration and B a woman named Nancy Pelosi becoming the first woman Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and C Hillary Clinton finally announcing that she is going to be, surprise, surprise, a candidate for president in 2008 and D the revelation that Senator Barack Hussein Obama of the great state of Illinois, darling of the mainstream media until Hillary took the spotlight away, the Senator was the darling I mean, not the great state of Illinois, received part of his education in Wahhabi Islam schools just like the terrorists did who flew the planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on nine-eleven which for all you readers in the far distant future who have forgotten your history means September 11, 2001, I hasten to add that I do not necessarily believe in guilt by association although it can certainly prove quite useful at times, and most of all E another new season of American Idol has begun on the TV and we are once again treated to the sight of Paula Abdul, Randy Jackson, Simon Cowell, and of course Ryan Seacrest in the role made famous by Dick Clark enduring the most horrendous display of non-talent ever to appear on a stage in the history of the world with the possible exception of A for you fifty-somethings Mrs. Elva Miller who sucked ice and whistled on Ed Sullivan’s Toast Of The Town show or B for you forty-somethings Tiny Tim strumming his ukulele and singing “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” or C for you thirty-somethings Roseanne Barr desecrating the national anthem at a major league baseball game or D for you twenty-somethings the one and only William Hung about whom nothing more need be said, and E for you teeny-boppers the magnificently incomparable which is pronounced in-KOM-pra-bul Sanjaya Malakar and his hysterically sobbing thirteen-year-old fan, Ashley, so you have every right to be confused, oh and to return to our original list of reasons why you might be a bit confused let us not forget F the increasingly strange case of The Reverend and I use the term loosely Ted Haggard, president or rather former president of the National Association of Evangelicals which is called the NAE for short but not for long, ha ha, it turns out he was a regular customer of a male prostitute-masseur-drug-dealer in Denver Colorado, male masseur is definitely redundant, and by the way the word gay used to mean happy but it hasn’t meant that for a long, long time, not that Ted Haggard is gay, he has assured us himself that he is not, but what he seems to be in my opinion is very confused. I do not think the world is getting better and better as the post-millenialists would have you believe, it is getting worse and worse just like the pre-millenialists have said all along, if you don’t know what I’m talking about it’s just too complicated to explain in a few words, but pre-millenialists believe that the Lord Jesus Christ Himself is going to return in the clouds and take all true Christians out of this world in something called The Rapture just before something else called The Great Tribulation occurs which is going to last either seven years or three and one-half years after The Rapture occurs depending on whether you are pre-trib or mid-trib, all of this makes complete sense if you are super-funda-mental-istic-expi-ali-docious, Ted Haggard knows exactly what I am talking about even if I don’t, all I know is that John and Peter and Paul who wrote some of the books of the New Testament were boiled in oil, crucified upside down, and beheaded, respectively, which it might be well for all of us, pre- or post-, not to mention a-, to remember from time to time, I wonder whether John and Peter and Paul were pre-trib or mid-trib, anyways trying to imagine what some people are hoping to escape from isn’t half as scary as realizing what other people have already endured, and if you don’t believe me try reading Foxe’s Book of Martyrs sometime. For the whole last half of the twentieth century, which is the only century I can speak of from actual experience, most people thought the days of such cruel and unusual punishments were long past, but suddenly just after the turn of not only the century but the millennium we here in the good old U. S. of A. have learned with a shock that although such punishment may be cruel it is not all that unusual, in fact if you have a strong enough stomach you can even watch beheadings on the internet these days, so tell me again how much progress the human race is making, I keep forgetting, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 33

2009-01-08T12:28:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, I feel this thing winding down, I really do, I wish it didn’t have to be this way, but as Mama used to say, “if wishes were horses then beggars would ride,” I’m telling you, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Daddy would say “wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which you get the most of” only sometimes he wouldn’t say spit, the word he said did rhyme with spit however, but before I throw in the towel, before I call it quits and walk off into the sunset, before I say “and good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are” like the great comedian Jimmy Durante, I thought I would share a few more poems with you that I have written over the years and just stuck in a desk drawer, some of them go way back, my poems I mean, not my desk drawers, and the reason I’m going to share them with you is I may never write another book, I mean I never intended to write this one, it just sort of happened, bird by bird like Anne Lamott said, five hundred words here, five hundred words there, sometimes more, sometimes less, bit by bit, day by day, it turned out that sitting in front of a computer was more habit-forming than I ever dreamed it would be, when I said in the beginning I could learn to like this I had no idea, so along with all this new stuff I have churned out I don’t want the old stuff to go to waste, not that anything ever really goes to waste if you believe Mr. Albert Einstein, E equals m c squared and all that, I have no idea if what I just said is true, the part about nothing ever really going to waste I mean, not the E equals m c squared part, I presume that that is true although I don’t know how you could ever prove it, I guess that’s why it’s called the THEORY of relativity, because no one can prove it, physics was my worst subject back at Not Grapevine High School, all I remember is something about levers and fulcrums, the rest went in one ear and out the other and never settled down in my gray matter, of course it didn’t help that the physics teacher also sang high tenor in a Southern gospel quartet on weekends, he didn’t know a glissando from a hemidemisemiquaver but still tried to teach us to read shaped notes like the Sacred Harp crowd does, that’s another Southern tradition that prolly causes you Northern readers to scratch your heads, I won’t go into shaped notes or Sacred Harp, both of them are just too bizarre, you have to remember what a diamond and a square and a kettle and different kinds of triangles mean and you have to sing fa sol la fa sol la sol fa, you talk about strange, I prefer A to take my fa sol las with do re mis at the beginning and a ti do at the end like any normal person would and B to look at round notes, well to be honest they’re actually elliptical, oval, ovoid, whatever, and C to remember F-A-C-E and Every Good Boy Does Fine for the spaces and lines in the treble clef and All Cars Eat Gas or All Cows Eat Grass and Good Boys Do Fine Always for the spaces and lines in the bass clef instead, mnemonic devices are an interesting phenomenon in themselves, there are acronyms like COMOS to help you remember the five tribes of the Iroquois nation only I think I remember reading there were six and there’s TULIPS to help you remember the six tenets of Calvinism only I think I remember reading there were five, and there are phrases like Gentiles Eat Pork Chops and General Electric Power Company to help you remember the order of some of St. Paul’s letters in the New Testament, people tell me all the time I should try to get on Jeopardy and the truth is I did, try I mean, not get on, I went one bright spring morning in April of 2003 to the Marriott Marquis Hotel in downtown Atlanta to their auditions, they were in town for three days, Jeopardy I mean, not the Marriott Marquis Hotel, and I was one of four people who passed the written test in my particular session, there were about sixty people in this big room and some of them had come from as far away as Pensacola Florida and Greenville South Carolina and Knoxville Tennessee and after the other fifty-six had been dismissed the four of us who were left played some sample games of Jeopardy complete with those little buzzer dooma-flotchies right there in the Marriott Marquis, and after the games we filled out some forms and they took Polaroid pictures of the four of us, individually I mean, not together, and said they would keep us in their files for fourteen months but unfortunately I never heard another word from the folks at Jeopardy, it kind of hurt my feelings, I don’t know about the other three, but I eventually got over it, and let me just state for the record here that I don’t study trivia, I don’t like the game Trivial Pursuit at all, things just enter my mind through my eye gates and my ear gates and they stay there except of course anything having to do with physics or chemistry, for example I learned years ago A that comedienne Carol Burnett had a younger sister named Christine who was married to an actor named Will Hutchins who starred in a TV western series called Sugarfoot and B that the wife of Mexican actor Ricardo Montalban was the sister of Oscar-winning actress Loretta Young and C that Roy Rogers and Dale Evans were names somebody in Hollywood invented for two people named Leonard Franklin Slye and Francis Octavia Smith and I just never forgot those facts, one doesn’t try to explain these things, one just suffers in silence for the most part, and when some fact comes out of your mouth, which it inevitably will, people think you are showing off when you’re not, someone wrote a love song once called “You’re Easy To Remember, And So Hard To Forget,” well that describes my malady pretty well, maybe it’s not a malady, maybe it’s a blessing in disguise, I remember being at a computer conference in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania back in 1969 and some of us were having dinner in the hotel with some colleagues from Sweden who were attending the conference and one of the Swedes said something about kviksilver and everyone’s face had a blank expression except mine, I said, oh, we have that word in our language, you’re talking about mercury, an old name for mercury in English is quicksilver, not quick as in fast but quick as in living, quick as in the phrase the quick and the dead in the Apostles’ Creed which means the living and the dead, quick as in quickening which is what they used to call it when a pregnant woman first knows the baby inside her is alive because she feels it moving, plus mercury looks alive as it rolls around in little balls which you would know if you have ever broken a thermometer, but it might could mean fast silver also because Mercury is of course the messenger of the gods and he is always pictured with wings on his helmet and on his heels because he is so swift, I believe he is also the symbol of the Florists Telegraph Delivery Service but I may be wrong, or maybe the whole thing is just a big linguistic coincidence, of course you do have to be living to be fast, dead people just lie there and don’t move at all, it all came out in a torrent like it had been dammed up for a long time and Lars-Gustav Halverson kind of harrumphed and said “trivia” and Sue Levy from our office, bless her heart, leaped to my defense, well she didn’t actually leap because we were all seated around the dinner table, what she actually did was she said to Lars-Gustav which is pronounced Larsh GOO-stawf, “What’s trivia, anything you’re not interested in?” and she became one of my heroes at that moment and all of these years later I still remember that evening, boy I would like to see them try to make a movie out of this book, Hollywood I mean, not Sue Levy and Lars-Gustav Halverson, and maybe in the next one, if there is a next one, book I mean, not movie, I will be able to set aside all the trivia and tell you about the people who are really important in my life, for instance there’s A Eleanor, my wife of, lo, these many years, and B our two great sons and their wives and C our wonderful daughter and her husband, and D our six absolutely magnificent grandchildren, two were born in Marietta Georgia and two were born in Birmingham Alabama and two were born in St. Petersburg Florida, but before I could even begin to tell you about them I need to clear my mind of all this clutter, well I guess the time has come to say it one last time, this is Billy Ray, oops, I almost forgot about the poems.

The People In Belle Glade

Oh, Burt Reynolds has a ranch in Palm Beach County,
And Jack Nicklaus sells new cars in Delray Beach,
Cubans migrate north from Dade, but the people in Belle Glade
Know that livin’ in the fast lane’s out of reach.

Perry Como owns a mansion in Tequesta,
And Rose Kennedy’s forgotten how to die,
Lots of money down in Boca is derived from leaves of coca,
But the people in Belle Glade go home and cry.

For the people in Belle Glade get mighty tired
Of workin’ in the cane fields all day long,
And the children pray that Daddy won’t get fired,
And they pray that God will keep their Mama strong.

Oh, the snowbirds come and go each spring and autumn,
And Rose Kennedy just turned one hundred five;
And they call their banks from condos while the symphony plays rondos,
But in Belle Glade people fight to stay alive.

All the fishing boats go out on Okeechobee,
And the tourists all complain about the heat,
And some citizens of Broward say their congressman’s a coward,
But in Belle Glade there is not enough to eat.

And the people in Belle Glade get mighty tired
Of workin’ in the cane fields all day long,
And the children pray that Daddy won’t get fired,
And they pray that God will keep their Mama strong.

Oh, the honky-tonks are full on Dixie Highway,
And Rose Kennedy’s one hundred seventeen;
Tourists sail on the Atlantic, but in Belle Glade things are frantic,
And it looks like one more year in old blue jeans.

Burt and Loni raise their child in Palm Beach County,
And the Kennedys throw parties all year long,
And the rumor mill is juicy with affairs in Port St. Lucie,
But in Belle Glade people know there’s something wrong.

For the people in Belle Glade get mighty tired
Of workin’ in the cane fields all day long,
And the children cry ‘cause Daddy just got fired,
And they pray that God will make their Mama strong.

On the coast they drive fast cars and chase loose women,
They water ski, play golf, and just have fun;
While the folks on A-1-A just grow richer every day,
Out in Belle Glade seems like work is never done.

So the tourists come and go, Rose lives forever,
And the coca down in Boca is high grade,
But the people that God sees are the ones down on their knees,
And God hears the people praying in Belle Glade.

Yes, the people in Belle Glade get mighty tired
Of workin’ in the cane fields all day long,
And the children pray that one day they’ll be hired,
And they thank the Lord their Mama was so strong.

Sonnets for the Space Age, circa 1976

..............................I

Technology has shrunk our modern world;
No room today for the miraculous.
In space a big blue marble has been hurled,
And astronauts report the marble's us.
Computers speed man's progress on its way
Without regard to race or sex or creed;
The federal grant's the order of the day
Without regard to truth or cost or need.
So equal opportunities abound
(Minorities don't ever fall from grace);
And new solutions, almost daily found,
Are rushed to cure the ills of Adam's race.
But seldom now does prayer storm Heaven's gates:
Inside, the Lord sits patiently and waits.

..............................II

There was a time when life was slower-paced
And one could get to know his neighbor well.
Today each moment's precious, none to waste.
Man's much too busy hurrying toward Hell.
And like a lemming, jostled by the crowd,
He thrashes wildly with the drowning men;
He downs his drink and laughs a bit too loud,
And dashes out into the night again.
So helter-skelter, racing madly on,
He wears a mask to try to hide the lies;
His painted smile denies that time is gone,
But something doth betray him 'round the eyes.
Exhausted, spent, he plunges past the goal
To gain the world and lose his sacred soul.

..............................III

Polaris is a missile and a star,
The one deployed on restless submarine,
The other keeping vigil from afar
While nebulae and comets roam between.
Much nearer Earth, the evanescent moon
Maintains her distance from our planet's face.
Perhaps she senses conflict coming soon,
The Armageddon of the human race.
So warily she orbits overhead.
A quarter-million miles into the void,
She too keeps guard. We talk of peace instead,
Let our guard down. With warheads unemployed,
While newsmen speak of cabinets and kings,
Calamity is waiting in the wings.

..............................IV

Three heavens stretch above Earth's little pond:,
The daylight blue; the midnight's starry host;
Incalculable distances beyond
These two, the one that modern men fear most.
(For if there is a Heaven they should gain,
A Hell to shun the day they pause to die,
Then all their science simply can't explain
How in the merest twinkling of an eye…)
So, flippantly declaring it absurd,
Men laugh until their laughter turns to tears;
But Saul of Tarsus visited that third
And dared not speak of it for fourteen years.
If not till set of sun come out the stars,
Why balk at glories waiting behind Mars?

..............................V

No sooner had the missiles disappeared
Than waves of bombers rose up in their stead.
When all debris and rubble had been cleared,
We found almost a hundred million dead.
And some who lived were maimed, and some were charred,
And some no longer see, or hear, or walk;
And many, although outwardly unmarred,
No longer smile, no longer even talk.
For laughter is a thing of bygone days
When children played at imitation war.
Today most people stare with hollow gaze
Rememb'ring times, once real, that are no more.
When men cried, "Peace and safety," all was lost.
We were not ready for the holocaust.

An Amplified Catharsis

Uncontrollably (ungoverned, not hindered),
.....unbidden (unplanned, spontaneously),
.....rivulets of salty tears ran down her cheeks
.....in trenches (gullies, arroyos, canyons)
of pain.

Later (subsequently, eventually, after a time),
.....when the tears had subsided (lessened, abated, returned
.....to their banks), she emerged from the dark cavern of
.....herself to find (perceive, discover, learn) in the
sunlight

that although her inner wound (injury, hurt, pain, agony),
.....which she tried (attempted, endeavored) to hide (conceal,
.....suppress) from her companion (partner, significant other),
.....had been lessened (diminished, shrunken, made smaller,
reduced),

her soul (mind, intellect, ego, inner self) was enlarged
.....(increased, expanded, made greater than before)
.....by the experience, but not necessarily cleansed;
.....a truly surprising (unforeseen, unexpected, serendipitous)
event.

An Afternoon Encounter

The winter sun is tangled in an oak
And, white with rage, she struggles to break free.
His icy boughs clutch tightly, try to choke
This one who strayed too near, this enemy.
How fortunate the oak to trap this prize!
What luck just now to catch so rare a prey!
How unexpectedly his victim lies
Imprisoned in his snare at close of day!
But blushing now, embarrassed at her plight,
And fighting on, the sun at last is freed.
Disheveled, she limps homeward for the night
To nurse her wounds. One wound begins to bleed.
The sun, retreating, leaves a crimson stain
And wraps herself in clouds to ease the pain.

And All The While The Far Hyena Laughter

And all the while the far hyena laughter
...Reverberates against the unturned sod
......As senseless, faceless hordes of men come after
.........To plough the earth and shake their fists at God.

All serpentine, the river rages southward
...And bears the silt of ages to the sea;
......All ravenous, with morsels lifted mouthward,
.........Rebellious sons refuse to bow the knee.

For few men seem to sense that day approaching
...When all shall bow, confess with mortal tongue;
......The world, the flesh, the devil, now encroaching,
.........Till then will glorify a heap of dung.

But here and there, amid the hollow laughter,
...The sneers, the rotting flesh, the empty mirth,
......Expectant souls await One coming after,
.........And so preserve a faith upon the earth.

Beyond the hills, the far hyena laughter;
...Beyond the stars, the seraphim rejoice;
......Beyond the whirlwind, earthquakes soon come after;
.........Beyond the fire, a sudden still small voice.

Be Still And Know

Somebody told him, or maybe
he read it in a book,
“God speaks in silences,”
but he, a creature of noise
living in a land of achievement,
filled his days and nights
with meaningless activities
because he had no time
for silence.

He rushed to obtain
the prize that dangled before him,
he pushed every obstacle out of the path,
he devoted his energy to running the race;
he was nearly trampled in the stampede.

He sought the spotlights and the applause,
public acclaim and celebrity,
but the gods he worshiped were fickle deities
who soon tired of him and
turned their attention
to other contestants.

Shaken, abandoned,
brushing the dust from his clothes,
he left the arena unnoticed
with the voice of the ringmaster,
the one who had urged him on,
ringing in his ears.

He turned to curse the ringmaster,
the one responsible for
all of his miseries,
but the curse died in his throat
as he saw with a shock
that the ringmaster’s face
was his own.

After a very long time,
after the unmistakable
laughter of demons
finally stopped,

there came
a silence,

an
almost
unbearable
silence.

He tried to convince himself
that the silence was empty,
that nothing was there,
but after another very long time
he realized with
another shock
that something
indeed was there,
something,
no, Someone
was most definitely there

waiting.

Finally he admitted
to the deep, penetrating sky
that he needed help,
that he could not do it on his own,
that he did not even know
what it was he was supposed to be doing,
and most important of all,
that he was not in charge.

At last,
he begin to hear,
though not with ears,
faint at first
but growing stronger,
the undeniable
singing of angels,
and
the irresistible
voice of God.

Canute (994?-1035)

I, King of all the Britons, and Denmark mine as well!
My star approaches zenith! In Caesar’s train I dwell!
More kingdoms to be conquered! And all shall be laid low!
And feudal lords shall bear me liege wherever I may go!

And shall I stop at kingdoms? Nay, tarry here and see!
The winds and waves shall hearken, and both bow down to me!
No more shall raging ocean erode this harried shore!
But it shall do my bidding, as Christ’s in days of yore!

No more shall sea advance upon the gray and shifting sand!
Now cease your endless churning! Subside at my command!
It is Divinely ordered! You must obey my will!
In God’s name I command you! Hear and hearken: “Peace! Be still!”

But can I be mistaken? And can I be denied?
My words have no effect! Still onward comes the tide!
The swirling eddy rises! The tide attacks my knees!
It hears commands more regal than this lowly creature’s pleas!

God’s kingdom is eternal, mine but of measured span!
What foolishness emerges from the haughty heart of man!
I am but mortal monarch! O, hear my fool’s heart cry!
‘Tis chastened by the deafness of a greater king than I!

Deathwatch

Gloom, hanging heavy
like a drapery of velvet,
separates the sunlight
.....from the soul.

Despair, entering quietly
with the lengthening shadows,
darkens the windows
.....of the mind.

Foul odors rise
from hidden places; the room,
growing quiet, gathers
.....momentum.

Grief, moving
into striking position,
creeps in stealthily,
.....like vermin.

The sinister moon, hoping
to bathe the scene in a ghastly glow,
waits patiently in the
.....afternoon sky.

At the window,
a light breeze moans softly;
beyond it, the willow
.....is still.

In a distant place,
an angel choir rehearses;
the director calls out suddenly,
.....“Places, everybody.”

December, 1972

Peace on earth, good will toward men.
They’re bombing North Vietnam again --
B-52’s lost this week total ten --
Peace on earth, good will toward men.

It came upon a midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
Yellow-skinned children huddle in fear
Against the wind and the cold
And wonder what new horror
Will the midnight blackness bring,
And the whole earth gives back the song
Which now the angels sing.

Has Johnny talked to Santa Claus?
They’re talking about a bombing pause.
Inaugural plans are proceeding well;
Pat will wear yellow. War is hell.
Do you think man has an immortal soul?
Do you think they’ll blackout the Super Bowl?

Silent night, holy night,
Napalm gives a lovely light;
Holy Infant, so tender and mild,
How does it feel to destroy a child?

Peace on earth, good will toward men.
They’re bombing North Vietnam again --
B-52’s lost this week total ten --
Peace on earth, good will toward men.

Delirium

No Byron, I, and yet the thought still lingers,
Will-o’-the-wisp, upon my fevered brow;
Elephantine, its moving, grasping fingers;
Lady Macbeth, and do you haunt me now?

Ramifications swell in deep contrition;
Oceans recede, but in their sunset glow,
Farther away than ever life’s ambition;
Kennedy-like, the newly fallen snow.

Brandishing swords, the ballerina tiptoes;
Duchess of Windsor, grieving at her loss;
Scalpel in hand, the purple eucalyptus;
Garden of Eden; Christ upon the cross.

Mountains volcanic, carousels spinning brightly;
Feeding the turtles, innocent, childlike, pure;
Mother of God, why do you visit nightly?
Pity my state, and pray they find a cure.

Eyewitness

We was standin’ on the corner with a couple of the guys,
Sizin’ up the passin’ girls and tradin’ baldfaced lies;
One liar in particular, a fellow name of Pete,
Hitched up his pants and rubbed his hands and spit into the street.
This glassy look come in his eyes, beat all I’d ever saw,
Then he commenced to tremblin’ and a-quiverin’ in the jaw.
He all at once throwed back his head and let out one long scream;
He started in to talkin’, but he gurgled like a stream.
The voice a-comin’ outa Pete, it weren’t like him at all,
More like a dozen voices bouncin’ round some empty hall.
And some of us begun to laugh, and one begun to cuss,
But I begun to fear for what was happenin’ to us.
He said he was a prophet and a prophet’s son as well;
He said our destination was the outer banks of Hell
Where men like us are shipwrecked in the mists that never clear,
Said we’d be always haunted by a dark and nameless fear.
He called hisself Ezekiel and smiled the queerest smile;
He ranted on some more like that, but then, after a while,
He kinda come back to hisself and fell limp on the ground.
We looked at one another, but nobody made no sound.
We took him to the doctor, and we told him how Pete did,
Excep’ about the things he said; that part alone we hid.
They’d think we all was crazy if we told a thing like that,
So we agreed amongst ourselves to keep it ‘neath our hat.
Now Pete don’t ‘member nothin’ ‘bout that eerie afternoon,
And sure ain’t none of us’ll be a-tellin’ no time soon.
Doc said Pete’s eptilectic, said we shouldn’t be afraid,
But now and then I get a chill like tombstones bein’ laid.

Glossolalia, or The Gift of Tongues

Not like a finely crafted poem of old
with much attention paid to rhythm and rhyme,
precision sought within a rigid frame,
and fourteen lines to do the will of God;
.....No.

More like an explosion of heat that whooshes into the room
so quickly that it takes your breath away,
shattering the cold silence of December,
a sudden Presence where none was before;
.....Yes.

More like a young girl bursting into the house
with news of great importance, unexpected and unplanned,
but completely welcome,
.....Yes
because she is
.....Yes Yes

Alive.

In Crowded Elevators, Silent Men

In crowded elevators, silent men
Are crushed together in the daily race
For wealth and fame. Like lions in a den,
They wait to stalk their prey, resume the chase.

In silent elevators, busy men
Avert their eyes from one another’s face
And no one speaks. Doors open now and then
To let them disappear without a trace.

In busy elevators, weary men
Preparing to pursue the killing pace
Deceive themselves, deny what might have been,
Embrace a world of works, devoid of grace.

In weary elevators, empty men
Appraise the riders sharing the cramped space;
They judge them fools, then leave the cattle pen
And march with pride into the slaughter place.

In empty elevators, phantom men
Wait patiently for flesh to take their place;
Descending to their own abode again,
They shine their ruler’s scepter, orb, and mace.

Intrusions

Sitting in bleachers at the high school gymnasium,
.....surrounded by parents and other fanatics,
suddenly
.....emptiness,
.....anguish,
.....despair.

Standing at curbside with other mute strangers,
.....waiting obediently in wind-battered silence
.....to resume separate journeys
.....as soon as the traffic light
.....grants its permission,
suddenly
.....loneliness,
.....bitterness,
.....oss.

Lying on blankets of uncertain vintage
(the color of armies) near the brook in the park,
.....watching the desperate joggers
.....race incessantly in cool autumn sunshine
.....only to be passed
.....by their afternoon shadows,
suddenly
.....hatred,
.....self-loathing,
.....contempt.

Circling in airplanes over night-fondled cities
(pinpricks of light, reflection of stars),
.....emerging unscathed from
.....mazes of concourses strangely familiar,
.....detained once again
.....by reluctant luggage,
suddenly
.....rage
.....at a world
.....going mad.

Lament

What has become of my darling –
(She of the flaxen hair
Who climbed in my lap of an evening
And beamed with a radiance fair)?

What has become of my daughter –
(She of the ruby lips
Who smothered my cheeks with wet kisses,
My cheeks and my fingertips)?

..........She has gone, gone away for a season
..........Like the last faded October leaf;
..........But no one can give me a reason,
..........And none can assuage my grief.

What has become of my sweetheart –
(She of the green-gold eyes
Who melted my heart with her glances
And made each new day a surprise)?

What has become of my baby –
(She of the velvet skin
Who conquered so quickly with laughter
And toppled my whole world in)?

..........And autumn has now turned to winter,
..........And after the winter, what then?
..........Do I dare trust in God to send springtime?
..........Will I see my dead daughter again?

Matins

The white gulls fly out seaward to greet the golden dawn;
.....The naked earth, arising, puts robes of morning on;
The sun, leaving her chambers to start another day,
.....Now pauses for a moment and kneels at sea to pray.

The white gulls hang suspended, the east wind holds her breath,
.....And men in warm beds waken from dreams of love and death;
The sun now turns from praying, her intercession done;
.....The white gulls circle softly: a new day has begun.

Meditation for Christmas Eve

(“Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born, it will avail thee naught, save He be born in thee.” -–Bernard of Clairvaux, 12th century)

The wise men came to Bethlehem and worshiped you,
.....Before a newborn king they knelt in awe.
The shepherds came and knelt in adoration too,
.....Still wond’ring at the things they heard and saw.
The virgin mother smiled and kissed her baby’s face,
.....Rememb’ring words an angel came to tell;
Jehovah God would come to save the human race,
.....And here You are, with us, Immanuel.

And the night was filled with angel song, heralding Your birth.
.....Still their message echoes loud and strong of joy and peace on
.....earth!
Your star still shines, a beacon burning bright!
.....Jesus, I worship You, be born in me this night.
You are sinless, holy, worthy of all praise;
.....Lord, I love You, adore You, I’ll serve You all my days!
You changed my life, I’ll never be the same.
.....Jesus, I worship You and magnify your name.

I worship You, Creator of all time and space;
.....I worship You, Redeemer of my soul.
You spoke in pow’r and all the stars were hung in place,
.....You spoke in peace and made my spirit whole.
I worship You, O Holy One of Israel;
.....I worship You, Who’ll die upon a tree.
By Your own blood You’ll break the pow’r of Satan’s spell!
.....You’ll conquer death and set this captive free!

You are Savior, Healer, You’ll cause blind eyes to see;
.....You are mighty, holy, merciful to me!
You changed my life, I’ll never be the same!
.....Jesus, I worship You and magnify Your name!
On a rugged hill called Calvary, You’ll give your life for me,
.....From the grave You’ll rise on Easter morn, from sin and death
.....I’m free!
You changed my life, I’ll never be the same!
.....Jesus, I worship You and magnify Your name,
Your precious name, Your holy, matchless name!

Nebuchadnezzar To His Astrologers

Last night, in dream or vision (I know not which),
I saw a splendor rise before me.
Awe filled my soul, and beholding, I grew dumb,
Wondering at its meaning.
Resplendent it was, and marvelous,
Too wonderful to view.

This morning is my soul stirred,
And I desire from you
What the gods conveyed to me,
For the dream has left me.
The vision has fled with the
Warming rays of the sun.

I know not what I saw,
Nor what now troubles me.
But work your work, ply your craft,
Can you not divine it?
Surely I would tell you,
Could I but recall it.

Answer now,
Your king is
Waiting.

On Being Shown a Photograph of an Ancestor

Those things speak most that never say a word,
Like eyes that meet on streets when strangers pass;
The loudest cries so often go unheard,
Like silent prayers reflected in a glass.
Though never have we spoken, there’s a bond
That shatters my veneer, my thin disguise;
You look beneath the surface and beyond,
And all of time is frozen in your eyes.
Departed generations in between,
Like links of chain from viewer to the viewed,
Peer over Heaven’s edge, survey the scene,
Hold their collective breaths, and don’t intrude.
While thoughts of love, and death, and DNA
Swirl through my brain, they bow their heads and pray.

On Viewing a Medieval Bridal Chamber

Half a morning’s measure,
.....Stripped of veil and train,
Here, in languid leisure,
.....Maids with men have lain,
Off’ring up their treasure,
.....Off’ring sweat and stain,
Little gasps of pleasure,
.....Little cries of pain.

In their sweet uncladness,
.....Still all lovers cling,
Thinking, in their madness,
.....Lusty flesh is king;
What now gives them gladness
.....All too soon shall bring
Little sighs of sadness,
.....Little tears that sting.

October 25, 2004

Our friend Carolyn came over for lunch
And as we finished at the table
Someone said, “Let’s go for a ride!”
So into the car we piled,
Like children giddy with anticipation,
Not knowing where we were headed
But eager to be having an adventure;
And someone said, “Where shall we go?”
And we said, “We don’t know!”
And someone else said, “Name a direction!”
And because the fall thus far at home
Had been drab and disappointing,
We headed north toward the mountains, laughing.

Five hours later we returned,
Tired but invigorated,
Having been to Helen and Unicoi Gap
And Hiawassee and Lake Chatuge,
Making all of the hairpin turns
And ascending, always ascending, until
We crested and began to descend
Through another set of hairpin turns,
And all the while we oohed and ahhed
And said how glad we were that we had come,
Drinking in the brilliant reds, the dazzling yellows,
The shocking oranges of autumn, the mountains ablaze
Against a clear blue sky.

The Entrepreneurial Spirit In The Twenty-first Century

Take a good idea involving
two sets of neighbors,
two days,
a thousand dollars,
put it on television,

change production companies
after the first season,
fire the doe-eyed host,
get a perky one,
a simple girl
with Broadway experience,

add new designers,
take some away,
have them put
feathers on walls,
put moss and rust
and cardboard,
put hay,

spice it up
with giggling jiggling blondes
and guys in leather pants,
call yellow by
a thousand different names,

run it into the ground
with versions for kids,
families, paying off
somebody’s mortgage,

make your millions,
and laugh all the way
to the bank.

Poem, Untitled

The page is blank, like my life.
All sorts of subjects flit through my mind
On the way to somewhere else
But not one settles down, makes itself
Comfortable, takes root, or starts to grow
Upward toward the light that arches
High above, beckoning all things to
Itself, not a single one.

The page is empty, like my brain.
I want to write a poem
But nothing comes to mind,
Only a formless maelstrom,
Swirling like one of the
Hundred million galaxies
Out there in the cosmos,
Moving toward the light.

Revelation

An anguish I could not explain
.....Awakened me at dawn;
A heavy sigh escaped me as I
.....Pulled my trousers on;
Unbidden tears coursed down my cheeks
.....And later in the day
I found myself, astonished,
.....Kneeling in a church to pray.

I cannot name what troubled me,
.....What filled me with such dread;
I can’t identify the fears
.....That raised me from my bed;
I cannot place the sudden chill
.....Enveloping me now,
Nor do I know the reason
.....That this sweat pours down my brow.

I hesitate to speak these things
.....(You may think me deranged),
But this I know: I’m different;
.....I’ve been profoundly changed.
I move ahead with confidence
.....Into the growing night;
While others walk in darkness,
.....All I see is brilliant light.

Table Grace With Musings Afterward

“God is great, God is good;
Let us thank Him for our food.
By His hands we all are fed.
Thank you, Lord for daily bread. Amen.”
Okay, everybody, dig in!

.....God is deaf, God is blind
.....To the ills of humankind;
.....While we struggle here below,
.....Seraphim fly to and fro before his throne
.....Crying, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts.
.....Heaven and earth are full of Thy glory.
.....Glory be to Thee, O Lord, Most High.”

.....Hogwash.

.....Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.
.....Secula seculorum,
.....World without end,
.....Amen.

Please pass the butter.

.....And the angel said, “Hail, Mary, full of grace,
.....The Lord is with thee.”
.....(Closer than your next breath,
.....Nearer than a heartbeat.
.....With thee With thee WITH thee WITH thee...)

More coffee, anyone?

.....How is it
.....That a God so pure, so holy that He
.....Cannot look upon sin,
.....A God so high, so lifted up that His train alone
.....Filled an ancient temple,
.....Has turned from His headlong march in the opposite direction
.....And looked upon me?
..........(I believe in the Holy Spirit…)

.....How is it
.....That His single gaze pierced through
.....My carefully constructed armor?
..........(The holy catholic Church…)

.....And how, finally, is it
.....That His eyes, aflame like
.....Hot coals from an altar, yet filled with
.....Indescribable tenderness,
.....Can see everything and still, in the seeing,
.....Forgive?
..........(The communion of saints…)

Cream and sugar?

.....It is not for us to know the times and seasons…
..........(The forgiveness of sins…)
...............Credo in unum Deum.

.....Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face…
..........(The resurrection of the body…)
...............Deum de Deo, Lumen de Lumine.

.....Then we shall know even as we are known…
..........(And the life everlasting.)
...............Deum verum de Deo vero.

.....Neither do I condemn thee: Go and sin no more...
..........He knows. He loves. He forgives.
...............It is enough to know for the present.

Does anyone want dessert?

The Thing About His Poetry Is

The thing about his poetry is
it just lies there, flat as the proverbial
pancake, it doesn’t lift off the page
like a rocket bound for some distant
world, it doesn’t make your brain want to
soar into the blue. The herons are

never flying in his poetry and no stars
are ever mentioned; he wouldn’t recognize
a constellation if one hit him square
in the face. Your heart with rapture
never fills, there are no fields of
daffodils with which it can dance, in fact

dancing itself is pretty much
frowned upon in his economy,
it’s all business with him, cut and dried.
If his poetry were the financial section
of the newspaper there would always be
a bear market without the slightest hint

of hope, and in spite of all this
the public can’t get enough of him,
his books are all best sellers and
he’s making money hand over fist
even though the thing about his poetry is
it just lies there, flat as the proverbial

pancake.

Nancy Reagan

When Spring comes, I shall walk the fields again
And watch the earth take on a greener hue.
Your heart and mine will be united then,
Though this time I shall walk them without you.
And I shall miss your love, your soft caress,
The sweetness of your kiss, your gentle breath,
Your quiet touch, your looks of tenderness,
With me atop the earth and you beneath.
Despite the awful absence of your hand,
Despite the empty aching in my loins,
This truth shall journey with me o’er the land:
“What Death divides, it once again rejoins.”
And in my heart, truth’s promise I shall keep;
When Spring comes, I shall walk and you shall sleep.

Oz Redux

Somewhere over someone’s pretty rainbow
Pterodactyls lick their chops and hover,
Judy Garland’s dead, O.D.’d, we miss her,
Toto, rabid stray, has run for cover.
Rusting tin men fall apart in junkyards,
Scarecrows never have the urge to talk,
Broomsticks are for sweeping, not for flying,
Wicked witches take a bus or walk.
Child molesters prey on little munchkins,
Auntie Em was in her youth a whore,
One thing, though, is constant, one thing certain:
Folks, we’re not in Kansas any more.

Six Six Six

A mark in the forehead or one in the hand –-
A great tribulation is stalking the land.
If no one is selling, then no one can buy;
Though many have vanished, I can’t seem to die.

If no one is buying, then no one can sell;
If none can earn Heaven, we’ve surely found Hell.
But who can find answers when no one explains?
And peace now is passing, but torment remains.

Byzantine Christ

Naught else consumes me, naught but the prize,
Naught but the flicker of love in your eyes.

All else I flee from, all else abhor,
All else excoriate, all else deplore.

This is my one goal, this is my quest,
This my one hope, and away with the rest.

All else is vanity, all I despise;
Say me a silent Well done with your eyes.

Thy Brother’s Blood

A poet (I forget his name) spoke
at the second inauguration
of little Billy Blythe of Hope, Arkansas,
whom the world knows as William Jefferson Clinton,
and let me just state here for the record
in this year of our Lord two thousand four
that many people would like to forget
the name William Jefferson Clinton,
many people wish his smiling face
would disappear from our national consciousness
or, to be more accurate,
that it had never appeared there in the first place,
but thanks to the wonders of modern technology
and the incessant, arrogant media,
the relentless, pontificating media,
who know with perfect knowledge
what products we should buy
and what entertainments we should enjoy
and whom we should admire
and what thoughts we should think
and do not hesitate to tell us at every opportunity,
we cannot, we are stuck with him
and his power-hungry wife,
but I digress.

I remember the poet’s name: Miller Williams.
He mentioned “the anonymous dead”
and I did not get a warm fuzzy feeling,
I did not get all cheery and hopeful,
I did not feel the way I felt when Maya Angelou,
the unforgettable Maya Angelou, urged us all
four years earlier to say, with hope,
“Good morning,”
I did not feel that way at all.

I have seen the skulls and skeletons
beneath the subways of Paris,
there in the catacombs, piles and piles
of anonymous dead
(though they are not anonymous),
photographed in living color
and published in Smithsonian magazine;

I have read of the mass graves
in Iraq and in the former Yugoslavia;
I have read of Sudan and Rwanda,
where they didn’t even bother to dig graves;
I have read of the Mekong Delta and the Hanoi Hilton;
I have read of Chosin Reservoir and Pork Chop Hill;
I have seen old newsreel footage,
black and white and grainy,
of soldiers standing before the opened oven doors
at Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and Treblinka;
I have seen the charred and broken remains
of what once were human bodies
(and they are not anonymous);
I have read of the Bulge and the beaches of Normandy,
Utah and Omaha and Pointe-du-Hoc,
I have read of Okinawa and Guadalcanal;
I have read of Iwo Jima and the death march on Bataan;
I have read of the Marne and the Argonne Forest;
I have read of Gettysburg and Antietam,
of Shiloh and Chickamauga;
I have read of Valley Forge;
I have walked through rows and rows of graves
at Arlington National Cemetery;
and one sunny September morning
in the year of our Lord two thousand one
I watched with my own eyes
on live television
as the second plane
hit the second tower;
I watched both buildings fall.

Make no mistake,
these common, ordinary people,
these so-called anonymous dead
(though they are not anonymous)
who have come to include
office workers in lower Manhattan
and commuters on trains in Madrid
and schoolchildren in Chechnya,
and millions upon millions
of aborted American babies,
they are not anonymous,
and they are not silent.

To Lukewarm In Laodicea

Were every bush a burning bush
.....And every leaf a clue,
You’d see the cleansing hand of God
.....In every fiery hue;
You’d know the strong Refiner’s touch
.....Can pierce a soul clean through,
Were every bush a burning bush
.....Then any bush would do.

Were every tongue an unknown tongue
.....And every sigh a psalm,
You’d speak the oracles of God
.....To those in need of balm;
You’d tell of healing virtue and
.....Of saving power too;
Were every tongue an unknown tongue
.....Then even yours would do.

Were every tomb an empty tomb
.....Like that near Calv’ry’s hill
And every boulder rolled away
.....That keeps you from God’s will,
You’d know the Lord as risen Lord
.....Whose pow’r makes all things new;
Were every tomb an empty tomb
.....Then yours might empty too.

A Hummingbird Came To Our Patio

A hummingbird came to our patio
to sample the pink blossoms
that glistened with dew
in the strawberry pots
.....by the wrought iron chair.

She darted and hovered, darted and hovered,
and we held our breaths, transfixed,
and dared not look at one another,
and we listened as our beating hearts
.....tried to match the flutter of her wings.

She was gone as quickly as she came,
and we exhaled in a kind of thanksgiving
and looked into each other’s eyes
with no little disappointment
.....that the shared moment, so perfect, was so brief.

Two hours later, eight miles away,
we saw another hummingbird,
ruby-throated,
outside the kitchen window of a friend,
.....twice in one day, a very special gift.

Visitation

Near the mill, in the mist of a morning,
Where the dew was an emerald sea,
There was brilliance aplenty adorning
When angels came walking to me.

For they came with a glorious splendor;
They approached with a jubilant psalm;
And the song that they sang did engender
Magnificent, infinite calm.

Oh, I cannot remember their faces
(Though the music was jubilant psalm),
But a Light filled my hiddenmost places
And healed them with Gilead’s balm.

They passed by without seeming to see me
As they joyously went on their way,
But their jubilant singing did free me
As the Light turned gross darkness to day.

And the glory that shone was resplendent,
And the triumphant sound of their song
That had made one brief moment transcendent
Shall stay with me all my life long.

For the mill was in mist on that morning,
And the dew was an emerald sea
When, with brilliance aplenty adorning,
The angels came walking to me.

Florabelle Oxley (1918-2007)

Born Florabelle Stillwater, part
Choctaw Indian, or maybe it was Cherokee,
in a little town in Central Texas;
she married Bud Oxley, a nice enough guy
who owned his own plumbing business
in another little town
and who also drank
maybe a little too much
a little too often;
she had two sisters, one in
North Las Vegas, Nevada,
and one in Tulare, California.

Florabelle raised Poland China hogs on
a forty-acre farm she and Bud owned
two miles north of town;
she also raised a
son named Jimmy Wayne who
didn’t do well in school
but loved to hunt squirrels, loved
to drive a tractor, loved to
swim in the pond where the hogs
and a small herd of cattle
came often to drink,
loved most of all to fish
in the selfsame pond,
and after leaving home
he became a fishing guide
somewhere down in
East Texas.

We could hear Florabelle
calling her hogs
every afternoon at four-thirty,
regular as clockwork,
sooooooey, sooooooey,
suey, suey, suey,
sooooooey, sooooooey,
a siren beckoning to Ulysses,
or Circe wooing Ulysses’ men
in from the fields to be
slopped and penned up for the night,
fattening them up for the kill
but not before winning prizes at
the annual Livestock Exposition and
Fat Stock Show in Fort Worth.

Florabelle had a heart of gold,
telling my parents, “So sorry
about your well,
of course you can get water
from the spigot and hose on the
side of my house,” which we did
for three long years,
or rather I did,
I, carrying drinking water
in buckets across the pasture
between our houses every other day,
I, pulling an old Red Flyer wagon
with a large aluminum garbage can,
shiny and new
and filled with water,
balanced on top
across the same pasture
twice a week,
I, hauling water so we could
bathe and wash dishes
and have clean pots and pans,
I, whose mother had earned
a teaching certificate from
West Chester State College in
Pennsylvania but
died of cancer anyway
in October of my senior year,
I, whose father never finished
high school and didn’t intend
to part with good money
just to dig a new well or
install indoor plumbing
for a sick wife,
I, who did quite well at school
and became valedictorian
of my class,
dependent on a country woman
with little education
who raised hogs
and had a son who
didn’t do well in school
didn’t do well
at all.

After fifty-three years of
living with Bud, Florabelle
became a widow and lived
thirteen more years
to the ripe old age of
eighty-eight; she was
confined to a wheelchair
for the last three years of her life,
but that didn’t slow her down much
because Bud’s niece, Jolene,
his sister Gaye’s youngest daughter
whose father had been mayor of the town,
Jolene, who as a teenager thought
dancing was a sin and told us all
she was going to become a
Southern Baptist missionary,
Jolene, who instead became
a registered nurse and
a three-time divorcee,
and decided to learn how to
square dance when she was
in her fifties,
Jolene, who fell in love
for a fourth time with
David, a Mormon guy from Utah,
and told him, “If you agree
to learn to square dance for me,
I’ll become a Mormon for you,”
and he did, and she did,
and they lived happily ever after,
that Jolene, at the age of sixty-three
assumed full responsibility
for Florabelle who was eighty-five
and confined to a wheelchair and
needed help getting dressed
and into and out of bed and couldn’t even
go to the bathroom by herself
and had a touch of the
Alzheimer’s
to boot,
assumed responsibility for her aunt
because Jimmy Wayne was still
somewhere down in East Texas
helping all those city people
catch fish on weekends;
she and David, her fourth husband,
toted Florabelle all around the country,
driving all the way to North
Las Vegas, Nevada, and Tulare, California,
and back east to North Carolina
to visit Jolene’s sister, Bernice,
and all the way up to Washington state
where they flew kites on a beach
by the Pacific Ocean and took
photographs to prove it,
and out to Kaysville, Utah,
several times each year
to visit David’s children
and Jolene still found time
to produce and distribute
a quarterly newsletter complete with
scanned photographs
on her laptop computer
for her old classmates.

On the night all forty-six members
of the class of 1958
marched across the football field
and sang “Moments To Remember”
as sung by The Four Lads to the crowd
assembled in the stadium seats
and I gave my valedictory address
and we graduated from high school,
Jolene was my date, although date
is the wrong word because I
didn’t know how to drive yet
so we sat in the back seat
of my Dad’s car while he and
my soon-to-be-stepmother
took us somewhere to eat
and drove us around for a
couple of hours, pretending to
have a good time
when they probably wanted to
be somewhere else;
it was Florabelle who had quietly
suggested one afternoon
that it would be nice
if I asked her niece
to go out
after graduation.

A couple of years ago
Florabelle, Jolene, and David
spent a Saturday night with us
in North Georgia
on their way back to Texas
from North Carolina;
Florabelle didn’t know
who we were or where she was
but she did remember
Ruth, Ted, and Billy,
her old neighbors from
fifty-some years ago, and she
flirted shamelessly with David
at the dinner table,
and they all attended Easter service
with us the next day because
Jolene wanted to hear me
play the piano once again,
and Jolene seemed to enjoy our church
even though Florabelle said
the service was too long
and David said it was
more exuberant than he was used to,
and before they left
to get back on the road
Jolene snapped some pictures
and scanned some photographs
to use in a future newsletter.

Last week Florabelle died. I sent
flowers to the funeral home and
signed the online guest book
that was provided by the
obituary department of the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram;
I left a note saying what a
good neighbor she had been,
always ready with a laugh or a tear,
whichever fit the occasion,
and that Mama and Florabelle
were neighbors once again;
the next evening
one of the class officers
called and said “I went
to a funeral today and
your name came up; it was
mentioned from the pulpit.”

According to the Bible,
love covers a multitude of sins;
I would simply add that
love lets your neighbors have water
when they have none,
love makes you more than happy to
rearrange your life
to care for an elderly relative
who can no longer care for herself;
love doesn’t mind all the equipment
you have to lug around or
all the trouble it is
to produce a quarterly newsletter
for your classmates.

Dancing is not a sin;
being divorced three times is not a sin;
drinking maybe a little too much
is not a sin;
wanting to be a fishing guide
is not a sin;
not having enough money to be able to
afford to have a new well dug
is not a sin.

Sin is that which causes you,
upon receiving a brand new
telephone directory, to look at
your own name and address first;
it is loving yourself
to the exclusion of others,
it is concentrating on your own needs
and ignoring anyone else’s;
it is the complete self-centeredness
that makes you secretly pleased
to hear that your name
was mentioned from the pulpit;
it is trying to write a poem
to honor a neighbor or a friend
and ending up making it about yourself;
it is the missing of the mark altogether,
the coming short of the glory of God,
the glory in which, I hasten to add,
Mama and Florabelle now reside.

The Writer

....................With words alone, he paints
....................from the palette of his mind,
.........................mixing,
.........................blending,
.........................combining
.........................hues and tints
....................until he sees the exact shade
....................he wants.

....................With words alone, she chips away
....................rough edges of meaning,
.........................chiseling,
.........................hewing,
.........................gouging
..............................the solid rock
....................until the long-sought shape
....................emerges.

....................With words alone, she pins and drapes
....................original ideas
....................over the naked manikin page,
.........................tucking in a bit of material
.....................................................................................here,
....................snipping off
....................a dangling thread
there,
....................dropping thoughts
....................as easily as hemlines.

....................With words alone, he composes
....................irresistible music,
.........................charming,
.........................seducing the ear,
.........................searching for a particular chord,
....................the one right sound his words must make
....................for echoes
.........................to linger.

and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

EPILOGUE

2009-01-08T07:23:00.000-08:00

Billy Ray Barnwell here, okay, before signing off for good I am going to pass along one last piece of advice, if you are feeling down in the mouth, and don’t we all at times, or if you just want to have a good laugh, you don’t need to spend your hard-earned money to listen to some foul-mouthed comedian in some sleazy nightclub tell raunchy jokes, all you need to do is run your written work through your computer’s spelling checker program, I’m telling you it will absolutely make your day, it will lift you out of that funk, it will turn you around completely, it will put a smile on your face, because the computer will give you some of the most outrageous and absurd suggestions that ever came down the pike on how to improve your writing, such as change Flavill George to Fluvial George and change Consolidated Vultee Aircraft to Consolidated Vulture Aircraft, I first learned this several years ago when I worked for a woman named Mary Alice Haynie and the computer suggested that maybe I meant to say Mary Alice Haystack. It’s not the computer’s fault, a man named John Kemeny who was a professor of mathematics at Dartmouth University up in New Hampshire when he said what I am about to tell you and who went on to become president of that very place, Dartmouth University I mean, not New Hampshire, once said that A the computer is incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid and B man is unbelievably slow, inaccurate, and brilliant and C the marriage of the two is a force beyond calculation, and while this is prolly true it’s also true that if you put garbage in, you get garbage out, I’m talking about whoever it was that programmed the spelling checker, not my own work.

I don’t know when or even if I’ll ever write that book about my family, which as I told you by family I mean my wife, my children, and my grandchildren, there are so many things I left out of this book, to tell the truth a lot of clutter is still rolling around inside my head when I thought it all was out, I mean I never wrote one word about A Julius LaRosa who sang “E Cumpari” which is pronounced ay-koom-PAH-ree, he’s the guy who got fired on the air by none other than Arthur Godfrey for his alleged lack of humility which certainly seemed to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black or B Durwood Kirby who was the tall, thin announcer for The Garry Moore Show which is where Carol Burnett got her start on television after singing “I Fell In Love With John Foster Dulles” on Ed Sullivan’s show or C Dorothy Kilgallen who was the chinless wonder on What’s My Line? every Sunday night along with Arlene Francis and John Daly and Bennett Cerf, yes kiddies, there was life on this planet before you came along and God willing there will still be after all of us are long gone, or D William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy saving a couple of whales named George and Gracie in one of the many Star Trek movies or E Paul Anka who not only sang “Diana” but also wrote the theme music to the Tonight show that Doc Severinson and the Orchestra played every single night or F Mr. Neal Sedaka who sang “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do” in that funny little high-pitched voice of his or G those crazy songs Groucho Marx used to sing like “Hello, I Must Be Going” and the one that began “Lydia, oh Lydia, say, have you met Lydia, Lydia, The Tattooed Lady?” and ended “You can learn a lot from Lydia” which by the way when Robin Williams sang that song many years later in a movie called The Fisher King he changed the line “when her muscles start relaxin’, up the hill comes Andrew Jackson” to “up the hill comes Michael Jackson” which makes no sense at all when you think about it or H how much fun a bunch of ukulele players can have wearing leis and grass skirts and singing “I want to go back to my little grass shack in Kealakekua Hawaii, where the humuhumunukunukuapua’a which is pronounced HOO-moo-HOO-moo-NOO-koo-NOO-koo-AH-poo-AH-ah go swimming by” or I Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride who played Ma and Pa Kettle in a movie called The Egg and I which I believe starred Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert or even J Muhammed Ali who originally was Cassius Clay of Louisville Kentucky, he was called “the Louisville Lip” and said “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” I’m sort of like him, I float like a Butterball and sting like Aunt Bee, ha ha ha, that is not original with me but it’s so funny I just had to put it in, they say Milton Berle had a whole file cabinet full of stolen jokes, I just don’t know what I am going to do about all this stuff in my cranium just screaming to get out, it’s not just about TV and movies either, for instance back in Not Grapevine Texas I took Edna Rainwater to the Not Grapevine Junior-Senior prom the year we were both juniors, some of the girls in our class decorated the gym with crepe paper streamers and the night of the prom they sang “Dream, Dream, Dream” by Phil and Don, the Everly Brothers, the girls did I mean, not the crepe paper streamers, and because I couldn’t drive a car yet we double-dated with Travis Murchison and Doris Ann Bradshaw, Travis came by and picked me up in his Dad’s car and then we picked up our dates, and a good time was had by all, after the prom we drove around town for a while and got something to eat just as Flurry’s was closing but there wasn’t really much to do except go out to the lake and watch the submarine races as my Dad and stepmother used to say, well Edna and I just sat in the back seat and watched Travis and Doris Ann smooch in the front seat, we were not sweet on each other like they were so we didn’t want to do anything like that, we just attended the local Methodist Youth Fellowship together and neither of us wanted to sit at home on prom night, I did buy her a lovely Dutch Iris corsage to wear, blue to go with her dress, Doris Ann attended the Methodist Youth Fellowship too but Travis didn’t, he was either Catholic or Church of Christ one, I forget which, not that it matters, so anyways around one a.m. after a lot of heavy breathing from the front seat we left the lake and Travis dropped me off at Edna’s house while he took Doris Ann home which was less than two miles away and then he was going to come back and pick me up and take me back to my house which was about three miles away in the opposite direction, well Edna and I sat on the front porch and talked quietly because we didn’t want to wake her parents who or rather whom we could hear snoring in their bedroom, after a while we ran out of things to talk about so we just kind of looked at each other and we waited and waited but no sign of Travis, and after another very long while during which the silence grew almost painful Edna went inside and called Doris Ann’s house and came back out and said Doris Ann’s mother said Doris Ann hadn’t come home yet so we knew she and Travis wanted to make out in the worst way, Doris Ann I mean, not Doris Ann’s mother, and when they dropped us off so they could get on with their evening’s activities they must have lost track of the time, finally about two-thirty Edna went back in and woke up her father and asked if he would take me back to my house so he got up and got dressed and did, we never did find out what happened with Travis and Doris Ann but we had a pretty good idea and we never even got so much as an “I’m sorry,” I don’t think Travis and Doris Ann ever dated again, apparently after Travis got what he wanted he moved on to his next conquest, or maybe it was Doris Ann who moved on, we were never quite sure, and about two years after we all graduated from dear old Not Grapevine High School I played piano or organ one, I can’t remember which, at the wedding of Edna Rainwater and Curtis Eberhardt whose job was cleaning out septic tanks all over the Fort Worth and Dallas area which is now called The Metroplex, a long time ago the famous country duo Homer and Jethro, not to be confused with Lum and Abner, sang a special version of The Yellow Rose of Texas that went “she’s the sweetest little rosebud, the fairest gal on earth, her right eye looks at Dallas, her left one at Fort Worth,” it was a regular knee-slapper, and in case you didn’t know it Fort Worth is where the West begins and Dallas is where the East peters out, I mean you can’t just let this stuff go unrecorded, by the way I’m currently thinking of calling this book Whatchamacallits, Antecedents, but when I find a publisher the title may change again, and if I can’t find a publisher I may just publish the book myself, I really don’t want to let any editor change a single word I write, in that respect I’m a lot like a writer named Iris Murdoch, although in other respects Iris and I are completely different, the most noticeable difference being that she’s dead and I’m still very much alive and kicking, when you publish your own work it’s called vanity press but I don’t believe I have a vain bone in my body, I mean I may well have one, I just refuse to believe that I do, well I want to have a memorable ending to this book, in Mr. Morris’s class back in Not Grapevine Texas we read Mr. Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables which is pronounced LAY-ME-so-ROB, at least that’s the way Mr. Morris said it, and the character Jean Valjean which is pronounced ZHAWNH-val-ZHAWNH said something very famous at the end of it, gosh I sure hope something in my book turns out to be famous, what he said was “It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better place to which I go than I have ever known,” you talk about vain, wait a cotton-pickin’ minute, hold the fort, that isn’t LAY-ME-so-ROB, that’s A Tale Of Two Cities by Mr. Charles Dickens, you know, the one that begins “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” well I have been through some very good times and some very bad times myself, Brother Rathbone says some people will never know that Jesus is all they need until they get to the place where He’s all they have, he often ends his sermons by quoting a stanza of an old hymn or maybe a poem, Brother Rathbone I mean, not Jesus, and if it’s good enough for Brother Rathbone it’s good enough for me, he’s been to seminary and all and I never even finished college, but that’s okay because another preacher I used to know down in Florida named Dr. Torrey Johnson whose doctorate was earned and not honorary said he knew people with lots of degrees but no temperature. Some beginnings are better than others, for example there’s A “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” which most people know is from the Holy Bible and if they don’t they should and B “Call me Ishmael” from Moby Dick by Herman Melville and C “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York” from Richard III which is not a book but a play by Mr. William Shakespeare or maybe it was Mr. Christopher Marlowe but my very favorite beginning is D, actually it’s two sentences and it’s not from a book either, “General Sash was a hundred and four years old. He lived with his granddaughter, Sally Poker Sash, who was sixty-two years old and who prayed every night on her knees that he would live until her graduation from college,” it’s the opening of a short story called “A Late Encounter With The Enemy” by the one and only Flannery O’Connor, I won’t give it away except to say he did and he didn’t, live until her graduation from college, that is, Sally Poker Sash’s graduation I mean, not Flannery O’Connor’s, we never do find out why Sally’s middle name is Poker, but the point is you just know when you read a beginning like that, this is going to be a story worth reading, you can feel it in your bones, of course everyone knows it’s not where you start that matters, it’s where you finish, several years ago I ran across a little four-line poem by Ogden Nash that wasn’t written in his usual humorous style, it was sweet, sweet like a persimmon, and maybe I will end my book with it, it goes like this: “When I remember bygone days I think how evening follows morn; so many I loved were not yet dead, so many I love were not yet born,” hey maybe I should call this book So Many I Loved. On second thought that title wouldn’t really be true because I haven’t loved many at all, I may have liked many and been fascinated by many but I’ve loved only a few. Mama, Eleanor, the children, their mates, the grandchildren. A few others like my aunt and my grandfather and a lady I called my “other mother,” I can’t believe I never even told you one word about her, her name was Mrs. Sally Huffman, out of all the Sunday School classes in all the towns in all the world I walked into hers when I was seven years old and it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship to coin a phrase, she was the wife of the superintendent of schools in Not Grapevine and one year they were Worthy Matron and Worthy Patron of the local Order of the Eastern Star, Mr. and Mrs. Huffman I mean, not the schools in Not Grapevine, her favorite color was orchid and she called her husband Lloydie but a lot of the kids at school called him Beaky behind his back because he had a humongous nose, I wish I could get into that now, their part in my story I mean, not his nose, but I can’t because this thing is about over. A man named John Donne said a long time ago that no man is an island, well that may be true but some people are definitely peninsulas. Take me, for instance. I do not feel involved with mankind. I’ve been more of an observer than a participant. I’ve been more caught up in remembering the past than in experiencing the present. I’ve been more involved with images on screens and words in books than with flesh-and-blood human beings. Dear God, Florabelle Oxley was right. I’ve been blind, as blind as old John Milton who wrote a sonnet called “On His Blindness” over four hundred years ago which Mr. Morris made us memorize in ninth-grade English and stand up and recite in front of the whole class back in Not Grapevine Texas, it went “When I consider how my Light is spent e’re half my days in this dark world and wide, and that one Talent which is death to hide, Lodg’d with me useless,” the sonnet did I mean, not the whole class back in Not Grapevine Texas, although in a manner of speaking the whole class did too, one person at a time. I don’t remember the middle part, something about God I think, sorry Mr. Morris, and then it ends “Thousands at his bidding speed and post o’er Land and Ocean without rest; They also serve who only stand and wait,” gosh I haven’t thought about that poem in years, I think I may have been posting o’er Land and Ocean without rest and not necessarily at his bidding either when maybe what I should have been doing was standing and waiting, well as Chester A. Riley played by the famous actor William Bendix used to say at the end of every episode of The Life Of Riley, what a revoltin’ development this is. Maybe I should call this book Lilies That Fester, or maybe We Shall Not Cease From Exploration which would be a nod in the direction of Mr. T. S. Eliot which by the way I have decided that J. Alfred Prufrock was prolly a jerk, a pathetic one maybe, but a jerk nonetheless. Or maybe, just for fun, I might call this book What’s The Frequency, Kenneth? which would be a nod in the direction of Mr. Dan Rather who used to be a nightly news anchor on CBS-TV, well as my dad used to say, cheese and crackers got all muddy, the hardest part of writing a book seems to be coming up with a title. Now I know what Howard Griffin and Tallulah Bankhead went through, and speaking of Howard Griffin, I believe I’m having another satori, he’s really the one I’ve been as blind as, not old John Milton at all, I have been walking through fields just like Howard with his collie dog, and a blood clot seems to have suddenly dissolved behind my optic nerve, I’m seeing things clearly for the first time in years. I haven’t fully appreciated the treasure that’s right here beside me and that treasure has a name and her name is Eleanor. Mrs. Brockett, I have changed my mind, I’m not going to dedicate this book to you after all. I have decided to dedicate it to my Eleanor instead, and the dedication is going to be in the form of one more poem that sums up my feelings about her, she is a living saint. I do believe she is what has kept me sane all these years.

To Eleanor

The moon, falling softly on the sea;
The wind, moving gently through the grain;
And you, turning quietly to me –
You three bring joy, silent joy that stills my pain.

The sea, which receives the moon’s caress;
The grain, which receives the wind’s soft touch;
And I, who receive your quietness –
We three are blessed. No one else can know how much.

and this is Billy Ray Barnwell, signing off.

PUBLISHER'S AFTERWORD

2009-01-08T07:07:00.000-08:00

So there you have it. From first blurb to final poem, you have just finished reading the latest Truly-Godawful book, one we are extremely proud to have played a part in making available to the reading public. The founders of our firm, Phyllis M. Truly and Sheldon Godawful, in whose footsteps we are privileged to walk every single day, were giants in their field and had an extraordinary vision, but even they could not possibly have imagined the day when we would publish a book such as this one.

For readers who might decry the lack of any readily discernible plot, we can only point them to Mr. Barnwell’s favorite writer, Flannery O’Connor, who once wrote the following to a friend:

“You would probably do just as well to get that plot business out of your head and start simply with a character or anything that you can make come alive...Wouldn't it be better for you to discover a meaning in what you write rather than to impose one? Nothing you write will lack meaning because the meaning is in you.”(1)

Nothing Billy Ray Barnwell wrote lacks meaning because the meaning, as you have discovered, was in him.

Phyllis Truly and Sheldon Godawful were not particularly religious people, but, like so many in our own generation, they considered themselves to be very spiritual. The corporate watchword they chose was first spoken a long time ago: “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit.” We are confident, therefore, that anything in this book born of the flesh will eventually go the way of all flesh. We are equally confident that anything born of the spirit will, to borrow E. B. White’s famous reference at the end of The Elements of Style to Robert Louis Stevenson’s cow(2), live on and on and on.

--RHB

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(1) O’Connor, Flannery, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, Selected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald. Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, Inc., New York, 1980, p. 188. (Originally published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., New York, 1979.)

(2) Strunk, William, Jr. and E. B. White, The Elements of Style, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., New York, 1972 (second edition), pp. 77-78.