I'm Fifty and I Don't Know Nothing

Dear Alice and Violet,

I heard about you quite a while ago, and I thought about you deeply at that time. Toni Morrison is the one who was telling me. . . about you, about your lives, about the songs your lives were singing in a blue, blue melody with overtones so pure and so sad.

Well, dears, I just want you to know that I understand and the questions you raise are. . . well, I just wanted to tell you you're not alone.

Here's what you said that caught my ear. Toni was talking, telling me, and I just started writing it down. I was driving at the time. (My writing gets so squiggly when I'm driving, like the line of a saxophone solo, and the sentences get out of place.)

For instance, "I'm 50 & I don't know," is what near-onto stopped me in my tracks, that is, if I hadn't been driving about 70 miles an hour past the big Watt Road truck stop. Now, there is a place NOT to stop in your tracks, with those double-semis roaring across lanes. The lanes from Nashville join in right there. Some lanes hot-foot-it up from the south and some come in from the west. Those drivers are not fooling when they hedge you, in a flash, with a blinking light saying, "Want over! NOW!"

"We born around the same time, me and you," said Violet. "We women, me and you. Tell me something real. Don't just say I'm grown and ought to know. I don't. I'm fifty and I don't know nothing. What about it? Do I stay with him? I want to, I think. I want. . . well, I didn't always. . . now I want. I want some fat in this life."

"Wake up. Fat or lean, you got just one. This is it."

"You don't know either, do you?"

"I know enough to know how to behave."

"Is that it? Is that all it is?"

"Is that all what is?" There's more of this conversation excerpted here.

I do understand, Alice, Violet. Getting old is no trick. And sometimes you look up from your reading, or driving, or laundry, or sewing, or music, or writing of blogs and say, "Hey, wait a minute. Is this it?" And you're not sure what "behaving" has to do with it.

Well, I want to encourage you, not that I'm sure of everything, because I'm just me, but I've lived and come from a family of folks who have lived a long time.

My husband calls me a Communist, but I'm not. I'm just a socialist. And I'm not even a good socialist. I haven't even read Karl Marx. But I kind of believe that in some ways all things are equal. The sky up above our heads and the solid pavement or earth beneath us lend some equality to all things. And, it is the embrace of this equality and availability of good things that can grant to us the opportunity to say, "Yes. That is all there is. Isn't it fine!"

My mother said, the other day, that she was thinking about heaven. She said, "It's so close!" She wasn't fearful. She meant, "Isn't it grand." I was out the other day and saw eight deer in a field. My children were together at Thanksgiving and played kickball in the cold. They let me play even though once they observed my running style, they thought I'd better be the pitcher for both teams.

In spite of what you hear from various sides, both conservatives and liberals, "behaving" does have something to do with living a happy life. You can't spend up your capital. . . energy and money and emotional engagement on foolishness. You can't shut your window and breathe fresh air. You can't run after what doesn't exist and find it. How do I say that in the terminology of behaving? You can't covet something you don't have and enjoy what you've got. You can't be unfaithful to your husband, wife, and family and experience the delights of your husband, wife, and family. You can't lie and still believe. You can't curse and be blessed. You've got to behave yourself.

I'm way over fifty now. I don't know much. But, as much as I know anything, I know that love and faithfulness, beauty and truth, goodness and justice, with a good dose of humility thrown in are investments whose payback is the only payback. So that's what you invest in.

BRD

P.S. Christianity is, by the way, about second chances. That's why I believe in the gospel of Jesus. The story there is of redemption. A second chance at the fat of life. Today is always the day for new investment in that which is the real fat.

There is a commonly known passage from the Bible that talks about enjoying the beautiful fields of our lives and following after God and spiritual things in a way that brings fulfillment. It ends with these words, "Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever." How fat is that?

The Road (Through the Smokies) by Cormac McCarthy

Dear Cormac,

Don't you hate reading the critics? Right or wrong they overstate to the point of nausea. So here am I writing a critique. "I'm sorry," as Papa said over and over and over again in your book.

I rather liked what this guy said. “The Road is the logical culmination of everything [McCarthy]’s written. It is also, paradoxically, his most humane and compassionate book . . . The question that the novel implicitly poses–how much can you subtract from human existence before it ceases to be human?–takes on heartbreaking force . . . One measure of a good writer is the ability to surprise. Terse, unsentimental, bleak–McCarthy’s readers have been down that road before. But who would ever have thought you’d call him touching?” –Malcolm Jones, Newsweek

"Down that road before". . . his pun "intended". But what a metaphor it is. I don't think any of us tire of the journey of life, so how can we tire of the symbol. I was very taken with this story, for I am a perpetual student of life and have actually surveyed the subject of The Good, the Summum Bonum of life, and this book tackles it so "head on" that I could hardly fail to love it.

My cousin Geoff says he knows you, that he used to drink with you in a bar somewhere in the Southwest, maybe in Mesilla near where routes 180 and 85 separate but before route 70 joins 180 going west. You know that little place? That was long ago, for he has not been to the Southwest for a long time. He liked you though. Maybe I have seen you. Do you ever come back and visit Knoxville, disguised to avoid Knox News reporters, disguised as a University of Tennessee professor who has tired of wearing orange. I think Knoxville is a good place to live and work and write blogs. You are welcome to come back any time.

The roads of Knoxville have always been an important part of the place. I remember talking with this woman who lived in Cosby. Her daddy was a moonshiner. He carried his shining goods back and forth along "Thunder Road" to Knoxville and beyond. She may or may not have followed her father's liquid tradition, but she could play a lick on a dulcimer. She knew the roads of the Smokies well. I've spent some time with a few of the Old Timers too. Old Timers are the folks who had actually lived on the land that is now the Smoky Mountains National Park. And Old Timers knew how to survive, and knew how to trail through those mountains with no more than a deer path to guide them.

The people of the Smokies were a unique breed of folks. They cleared a very rough land. And a successful year barely got them through until Spring. The wild vegetation would spring up so quickly that it reclaimed the south 20 'bout as fast as the settlers claimed the north 20. Yet they remained hopeful and found unique expressions in singing, and story telling, and such. You can still join with a group that does shape note singing--I saw the next sing advertised in this week's papers. I suppose they need new members to survive these days so they put it in the papers. Next thing you know they'll be on YouTube.



Passing on things to our children is one of the things The Road talks about isn't. It is one of the goods we have to offer our loved offspring. The Smoky Mountains were always good for a story. One of the great story tellers was Wiley Oakley. He called himself the roaming man of the Smokies. He could have, I suspect, entertained Papa and the boy had they come across him while walking through those mountains.
This was Wiley.

I remember one mountain oldster showing me the trees that now stand on the home site of his birth. His pathos reminds me of the losses that your characters faced. It was a different set of circumstances, less dire of course. Yet the Old Timers of the Smoky Mountains felt a great loss when they lost the land where they were birthed. And many never strayed too far from where they had been born . . . even now. Close enough, they've stayed, to visit the graves at plots now only reachable by vehicles with special permissions and assists. Graves slowly being taken by the soft reaches of the biospheric multiplicity that is the Smokies. At least that was not lost.

Have you, (I'll bet you have) ever sought out morels? Yes? But they are hard to find even in the best of times. Hidden, camouflaged in the greys and ripples of the earth. They have always been a precious find like the one you described in The Road, and one that was always a great secret. It was never polite to ask where an Old Timer found their morels. That kind of prying just wasn't done.

The Old Timers of the Smoky Mountains led a gray and sparse existence, but one of hope, nonetheless. This, you captured and were, perhaps, inspired by as you wrote of the man and boy crossing this terrain. What route, I'm wondering were they traveling? I picture them plodding through the heart of the Smokies from Gatlinburg to Cherokee, crossing over near Newfound Gap. But the story doesn't really hold up under this theory. Mentions of Rock City make me believe the duo passed along the edge of the mountains on Route 129. Of course, Rock City signs are plentiful and from quite a distance, even as far as Bristol. None on Route 441 through the mountains, through the National Park.

What was in your mind?

Not place so much as theme, I bet. What makes 'good' in a human soul? What fires 'hope'? Salvation? What does that mean when we are stripped done to two people plus 'love'? You have drawn a good landscape for us to enter and think about those things.

You spent part of your life near Knoxville. I spent part of my early life near Pittsburgh. I read that the movie version of your book was set in the Pennsylvania environs. Yes, there is a bleak cast upon the face of Western P.A. (When they say PA, they say the P separately from the A). Coal and steel fired through that area and burned it up. Pittsburgh took a big hit. Fortunately, for hope, the city has rebounded and is doing better these days. Perhaps that will happen to your post apocalyptic world. Will morel mushrooms survive, thrive, and feed the sparse population of earth? Or is that even necessary for hope to live and fire the souls of even the last earthy citizens?

The Old Timers of the Smokies hoped and lived on little. They never wasted bread or bullets or friends or love or even many words, except for Wiley Oakley. But the ones I've met personally, Wiley's sister, Lucy (I think it was), Glen Caldwell, one of the park rangers, and others--they met life with a kind of fire that could survive on little and they brought to that life a great respect for land and people, continuance and love. That, there, is the Road, post apocalypse or not.

BRD

Read Your Bible, Pray Every Day

Dear Son,

Quite a while ago I promised to give you a list of the ten most important things that you should do in your first year of freedom. What is important to do? What is important to know?

I have thought about that for a while and hardly know where to start. I have several unfinished postings that talk about different things, literature, music, justice. But yesterday during the church service that I was attending, I realized where I should begin. You will, perhaps find this to be a repeat of what you have heard over the years, what you have heard from your grandmother. It is, however, the number one thing I have to suggest of all the things I might say.

Let me start with the "New Testament reading of the day" from the 17th Sunday after Pentecost.

1Tim 6:6 (NRSV) Of course, there is great gain in godliness combined with contentment;

7 for we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it;

8 but if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these.

9 But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.

10 For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.

11 But as for you, man of God, shun all this; pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness.

12 Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.

13 In the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pon'tius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you

14 to keep the commandment without spot or blame until the manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ,

15 which he will bring about at the right time--he who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords.

16 It is he alone who has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see; to him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.

17 As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to be haughty, or to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but rather on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.

18 They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share,

19 thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.

It was that last phrase, "Life that really is life," that most captured my imagination. Where in our world do we find much active talk about finding life that really is life. Where do we hear teaching about the importance of doing good over the importance of getting rich. All about us from billboards to movies, from sitcoms to malls, from the internet to ball field scoreboards, hucksters are telling us what to buy, what material goods to want, what gusto to grab. Few are the messages that we receive that say, stop. Riches and goods are not the summum bonum.

However, you will find that as regular fare in the Bible. Your palette is whetted with words like, "Be ye kind, one to another."
"I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content."

"Real joy."

"Let him who glories, glory in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD who practice kindness, justice, and righteousness in the earth."

So #1 on my list of ten things to do this year echos the old children's song, "Read your Bible, pray every day, and you'll grow, grow, grow." You won't grow into some predetermined ideal. You'll grow into you, and the you who is conscious of the life that can be lived above or beyond the surface of a society carefully constructed with Madison Avenue paper mache and glitter. You won't find the answers to every question that will arise in the course of living, but you will find direction and hope and good.

Invest in this discipline.

MOM aka brd

XOX