Incorporeal Works

The last hours of September, 2008 are winding down. In terms of weather, we have been spared the roaring heat of last summer, which made the A/C units spin like hyperactive tops all last summer and into September. Still, high eighties much of this September have made me ready for fall weather. The past few mornings have been quite pleasant, hovering around 60 degrees, then heating up into the eighties later in the day.

The official, latest, subject to constant revision, forecast for tonight is “lows in the lower fifties.” Let it be. Goodbye, summer, hello and welcome October.

I heard today, twice, of a man I knew in my twenties well enough to ask him to be the godfather of my firstborn, a son, as he had asked me a year earlier to stand up for his newborn son. Just before noon, waiting to serve as chalice bearer at the 12:05 service at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Chattanooga, the Rector came in to arrange for the readings with me, and added a name to the prayer list for the sick. It was Jere. Donald said that Jere’s son, Jon, had just called to request that Jere be added to the prayer list, and that things were not going well with him, he was suffering from cancer and in rapidly declining condition.

I had last seen Jere to talk to at his mother’s funeral, sometime in the eighties. Long absent from Chattanooga, he described himself as a “gypsy,” working for a steel tube company, traversing the country. An hour ago, the secretary from St. Paul’s called me at Donald’s request to tell me that Jere had died. At my age, deaths of contemporaries are experienced more and more often. Even if it is someone who you have not seen for years, the sense of the world contracting weighs on you.

Through the 1960s, at the University of Chattanooga, various restaurants, beer joints and other places a floating group of young folk gathered and talked, laughed and shared their youth. I knew Jere in that place, and later Linda, his future wife. We talked of many things, as the women came and went, talking of other things. Jere went to Viet Nam. I did not. He joked about his time there, talked of fighting the war from a typewriter, although I think he saw combat during his tour. I think most men who spend time in war zones joke about their time, talking little of the grim realities they faced. My father did.

Jere and Linda married the year before I did, and their son was born close to my wedding day. After mutual godfather duties, life expanded and got more complicated. I moved out of town and a few years later Jere and Linda were divorced. Some years after that, I was as well. Years have gone by, as more and more I dwell on the years I was twenty and knew everything. Laughing with Jere and other friends over the follies of our parents’ generation. Now we are the generation which finally came to know how much we didn’t know.

My world contracted today, even though time and distance had combined to freeze memories twenty years past. Much more, the life of Jere’s family, his son and grandchildren, have grown a dimension smaller. I think of his son, and the grandchildren (when you have grandchildren yourself, that is an immediate thought.)

Ah, Jere. Selah.

After leaders of the House of Representatives reported they had an agreement on a slightly modified version of the Bush Administration’s financial bailout plan, the roll call vote ended with the plan defeated, 228 to 205. A number of Republicans blamed the partisan comments of Speaker Pelosi for the defeat, while Democrats said the GOP leaders couldn’t muster promised support from their own party members.

The markets went crazy, bad crazy.

It appears to me that both sides are playing electoral chicken with this issue, maneuvering for advantage in the elections this year and for years to come, tarring the other party as the ones who “lost the economy,.”

The damage to the economy is already done. The collapse of the housing bubble, lowering the value of real estate, including much mortgaged at subprime rates, has caused a huge drop in the value of all those mortgages, perhaps even amounting to the $700 billion proposed as the cost of the bailout bill. I do not know, nor do I believe anybody knows, the exact figure, or even an approximation. How to handle this loss is the only question; whether to gradually dispose of the mortgages or properties for some steep discount over a period of years, or allow the market take its course, resulting in immediate foreclosures and bankruptcies for many more financial institutions.

I believe there are congresspersons of character who will work to sort this out. I do not believe that today’s events were representative of those better angels of our government. Meanwhile, economic chaos.

*Sigh*

My Granny Phyllis was an outspoken product of her generation in the south, who never hesitated to call a spade a goddamn shovel. She shared the racial prejudices of her time, but not the polite language which talked around the subject. Even in the last decade of her life, after all the struggles of the 1960s had settled the de jure question of entrenched prejudice and established the official tolerance she never quite observed.

Following the Civil Rights acts of the middle 60s and the work of many Chattanooga civic leaders of both races, public places of all sorts, including restaurants, were integrated. One day Granny Phyllis was dining alone in the Home Plate Cafeteria when a well-dressed black man asked if he could share her large table. This request raised all her hackles, but she chose strategy over her usual directness. She smiled at the man, and as he seated himself, began to talk non-stop to him, never allowing him a chance to speak, although she peppered him with questions so that he put his fork down and began many times to reply. When she was ready, she gathered her things and left the man with a cooling and untouched meal in front of him. Granny Phyllis loved to tell the story, which she saw as her triumph over a Negro (not the word she habitually used) who didn’t know his place.

I became involved later in her life in a situation that might have blown up rather badly. Granny Phyllis, who refused to give up her driver’s license, had rear-ended a car. The officer investigating ticket her for following too closely, pointing out the court date. Granny Phyllis was furious. As she told me a number of times over the weeks before the court date, that “little monkey” had not treated her with respect. The officer was black, you see, and regardless of her fault, she took exception to his attitude.

I accompanied my grandmother to city traffic court on the day, fearing the worst if the officer and the accused shared the same space. The proceedings dragged on in the usual way, and I had to make a quick run to feed my meter. When I got back, Granny Phyllis was ready to go. The other motorists had not appeared, since her insurance company had settled with them, and as customary the judge dismissed the ticket. Nothing passed between the “little monkey” and my grandmother. I was relieved.

My grandmother was unfailingly kind to those less fortunate than she…as long as they remembered their place.

What drama, what confusion, what ideological posturing has taken place in Congress over the past two days.

First the President proposed a $700 billion purchase by the federal government of bad assets of banks and financial institutions, to restore confidence and free banks to lend again. Overnight rebellious leaders of the President’s party came up with another plan, insuring loans rather than outright purchasing them with taxpayer dollars.

Lacking the financial knowledge to analyze the meager details released about either plan, I have no idea who is blowing the most smoke here, but I suspect everybody is scrambling to cover their electability in the near future, from the presidential candidates on down. As I understand it, there are many banks on the list the Fed keeps of problems serious enough to watch. If we string this debate out, many more dominoes are going to fall, and credit, already contracting, will disappear. The economy is already the “sick man of the G8,” what will happen then? Foreign governments hold a prodigious amount of debt instruments sold by the federal government. Runs on banks could morph into a run on the United States Treasury.

When I read the comments by Republican opponents of a bailout, I keep hearing the theme song from “All in the Family,” with Jean Stapleton and Carroll O’Connor disharmonizing,

Mister, we could use a man
Like Herbert Hoover again . . .

I wonder if there is light at the end of this tunnel?

I hope so, for me, and for my children and grandchildren.

As I began second grade, school was interrupted for a week or ten days for me by polio. Bulbar poliomyelitis, to be exact. One morning my neck felt sore and weak, so I complained to my mother. Publicity about a polio epidemic had been heavy as the late summer continued hot into late September, so my mother immediately recognized a common symptom, and while my sister went to school I went to the pediatrician, then almost immediately to T. C. Thompson’s Children’s Hospital. Later that day, a neighbor girl joined me in a room with two roll-around beds with high sides. Not quite cribs, but meant to guard against falling out of bed.

We were not terribly upset at getting out of school, as we didn’t really feel sick, other than the neck thing. My voice also began to sound like Donald Duck, an effect of paralysis of the soft palate. We thought it odd that our parents, when they visited, had to wear surgical masks, and we were intrigued by an iron lung parked over in one corner of the room. When my friend Jean asked her parents what “polio” was, her mother became agitated and denied that what we had was polio. Sort of disappointing for us, it sounded important, and we wanted to believe something extraordinary was happening to us.

In boredom, Jean and I discovered we could rock back and forth standing up in our beds, and roll around the room. The nurses were unamused, and fastened the locks on the wheels. The one really satisfactory thing about my bout with polio for me was that partway through the stay at the hospital, I was placed in an oxygen tent. I am sure my parents were terrified at this reminder of the fatal possibilities polio carried, but I thought it was great. In 1951, few places in town were air-conditioned, and T. C. Thompson’s was not one of them. September was very hot in 1951, as in most of the early 1950s. The air pumped into my tent was deliciously cool.

I left the oxygen tent after a day or two, and shortly a physical therapist came to give us lessons in walking all over. Our legs were not affected by the disease, but we had not been allowed to walk during our stay. Then our parents came to take us home. No lingering paralysis, no limp, nothing. I did take a while to stop talking like Donald Duck, however. I suspect I played it up to irritate everybody.

The one lasting effect for me from my hospitalization was that my teddy bear did not come home with me. My mother explained that it was contaminated with germs, and could not be sterilized. I was upset. I got over it. Twenty years later, when I had my own first child, a son, my mother visited one day and with great glee presented me with my vanished teddy bear. She had lied to a helpless child and hidden Teddy away. Ha, Ha. Thanks, Mother.

There comes a point in long-distance running called by those who encounter it “the wall.” I have not run on purpose since childhood, and was never a medium-distance runner, maybe 440 yards tops, at a very slow pace. But for committed long-distance runners, their physiology begins to go into chemical arrest at some late point in a long race, a marathon, for instance. With enough training and will, the best runners will simply run through that point, and complete the race. Others do not, or end up walking and limping to the finish line long after the cheers are no longer even echoes.

The inordinately long primary/caucus/nomination/election campaign for the Presidency of the United States is my marathon this year, and I have hit the wall. Six or seven weeks until election day, and I am unable to concentrate on even one more exchange between talking heads, or read one more letter, post or rant for or against either candidate. The pretense of civility is tattered, the nimbus of non-official deniable attacks in the op-ed columns and on the internet grows so dense that the candidates seem lost in the fog.

Enough. I am simply going to do what could have been predicted a year ago, and vote against the party now in possession of the White House. I am too tired to tell over the multiple errors, misleading statements, costly blunders and ravaged economic plans de jour. Bush, Cheney and company have screwed the pooch, in the language of The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe’s great book about fliers, astronauts and the male ego. In the end, all George Bush could do was wear a flight jacket and mutter a few sound bites which came back to haunt him. “Bring it on.” Yes, that would sound good in an action movie. The real world is much more complex. Pfui. Bring on the election and deliver us from this slow twisting in the wind, in time for the real world to shatter all the rhetoric and demand some sort of ameliorative action.

God help us, every one.

Today at 11:44:18 a.m. EDT, at this latitude the sun will hang for an instant exactly in the east. The equinox, when day and night are equal in length. In astronomical terms, days in the northern hemisphere of earth will begin to be shorter than night, as that instant marks the beginning of Autumn.

Of course, leaves on trees will not immediately turn colors and begin to fall, although in the prolonged drought of the past few years, this happens earlier and earlier, nor will temperatures suddenly grow chilly. The great wheel of the planets and their sun work slowly, and the heating of the earth that has been growing since Spring will only reluctantly loosen its grip.

Were all the clocks and calendars to disappear, we could fall back on the stars, sun and moon to gauge our seasons, as generations in pre-history did for thousands of years. In the 21st century, that is unthinkable, of course, the stuff of dystopian fiction. So, just take a walk each evening and pick out the stars, planets and moon, remembering the cycles that rule us all, even in our technologically oriented life.

The black women, in layers of worn dresses, shirts, jackets and scarves, move between the pecan trees in the early morning October light. The old man, in faded khaki work clothes from Dickies points here and there to different rows of trees, with gruff, unintelligible instructions that the women seem to understand, changing direction among the rows in response to the old man’s mutterings.

I have met him here, at the “big house” of my Great-grandfather and grandfather’s stewardship, so that he can guide me on a tour of acreage owned by my family over two counties and across one elevation of the shard of the Cumberland Plateau known as Lookout Mountain. Failing at college, ill content with the family business, yearning for a simpler and more organic existence, I want to see the rural past that underlies my family history. I have in the past week subscribed to “Mother Earth News,” and begun to read up on organic farming, with emphasis on raising pigs. I read lengthy essays by English 19th century eccentrics on the sanctity of raising your own bacon and brewing your own beer.

I do not speak of these things to the old man, who has spent his life first driving my great-grandfather’s car, then managing the farm and surrounding acreage for my grandfather and his sister, following my great-grandfather’s death. The old man still remembers most of my unknown family history, and briefly and elliptically touches on many things I would like to know. But in his declining years patience with children, which at 22 I surely am to him, grows thin. He looks blankly at a TVA topo map I have marked with the property I want to see, says vaguely, “don’t use maps much,” and rides shotgun with me in my car to tour the land he knows firsthand.

Over the mountain, in a back valley threaded with a dirt road, he directs me into a weedy track leading up to an old house on the side of a ridge. An old couple are tenants there, among the soybean fields planted by help hired by a doctor who rents the land. The old man gets out of my car, steps behind the small horse barn, and urinates into the mud and straw of the pen, shielded from the house by the barn. Continues to talk about the land and crops as he pisses. Suburban fastidiousness I brutally suppress. This is real, unadorned rural society.

At the end of the day, I return the old man to his truck at the big house, the pecan harvesters long gone. He genially wishes me a good evening, and follows me out the drive, stopping to lock the gate. I drive home to my apartment, feeling oddly unfulfilled. Is that all there is? Several years later, I find, that for me, it was. Farming is not an amusement park for suburban gentry, un-conversant in the arts and understanding that comes with years of dependency on making things work.

I was twenty-two. Eight years later, with two children and a wife, I tried again. With more consequential results. Experience is the only school in which I have learned anything, and I learn it again, and again.

God’s mercy on all his children.

…but unfortunately we won’t be attending, since the tickets for the Chattanooga Symphony and Opera production of the Ninth Symphony (and Choral Fantasia) start at $61, topping out at $230 for a box seat. Neither Barbara nor I have attended a live performance of this tremendous piece of music, and we had hopes. After the wonderful performance last winter of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, we will be sorry to miss this one.

The organizers have a contest going, with the first to spot Beethoven’s picture on the CSO website this week getting two free tickets. Maybe both of us could stay glued to the computer and win.