Growing up together, music and our journey

Finishing Growing Up Together

When you are 19 years old it’s in the back of your mind that every new thing you see or do may be the start of something big. Your inner dialogue says in the voice of someone as if on TV, “Historians look back at 1975 as a turning point year in the life of the young Tanga Bea or the young Mike.” That year our inner dialogues were correct. I realize I am assuming we think alike, which is admittedly a shaky proposition.

           

When we met we were still 18 years old. You had taken the ferry to Indiana and seen the Reds at Crosley Field, but you had never been more than 200 miles from Covington, Kentucky where you were born. Compared to you I was a world traveler, having ventured as far east from my birthplace of Greenville, South Carolina as Goldsboro, North Carolina, as far south as Columbia, S.C., as far north as Cincinnati, and as far west as Frankfort, Kentucky. By the time you met me my head was still spinning from all the travel.

           

We were apparently on the same football field with our respective bands, Pendleton County and Lee County, in 1971, at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Kentucky, you with your flute and me with my tuba. You could charm snakes from beneath the porch with your flute, but I only made my spine more crooked with the tuba.

           

I first met your mother in the Fall of 1975 or Spring of 1976, in other words, when she was 57 years old. It seems I knew her much longer but it was only about 25 years. Of course, to know her for a minute was to know her for a lifetime, she was so steadfastly herself. I met her and probably Aunt May and Aunt Sylvia when the choir came to Falmouth to sing. You can correct me on this later.

           

Just think, in the Fall of 1974 we wandered around Weatherby Gym picking up class cards, not knowing we were wandering around in one another’s presence. In fact, we were wandering around among what would turn out to be lifelong friends, Evans, Aschcrafts, and Wilsons were wandering around Weatherby too.

           

What are those times? They no longer exist and therefore are as dead as the people who have literally passed and lie in state from that era, but we continue to recall the scenes, the conversations and the faces. Only those usually pretty bad pictures they took as we left registration remain as proof that it happened, those and the records we made with our grades, kept in file drawers in the administration building.

           

Even the pictures and paper records would be impeachable in a court of law. Some slick attorney would be able to cast a shadow of a doubt as to their authenticity. The fact that we rehearse those times regularly with the people who shared them with us allows us to keep them fresher in mind. My guess is, those who have not kept in touch with friends from that era find most of it a total blur. But the fact that we work so hard to remember is testament to our understanding of how tenuous our claim to times passed really is.

           

We give accounts to make ourselves more comfortable with the memories, supplying lost details with current biases. Maybe that’s why we find ourselves so often wondering which year something happened, or exactly who was there or where we were living at the time, or later on, which grade the kids were in. If we can establish these things, the whole account gains needed credibility. The love we have for one another does not permit us to be overly honest. We are generous to a fault. We tend to say to one another; you were, back then, what you apparently remember yourself to be and I will defend your right to go on believing that, especially if you will help me do the same.

We finished growing up together. Two can live more cheaply together than the two can live separately -the cliché is worded more informally. Two can finish growing up together more efficiently than the two can finish growing up alone, except, when two people complete their ascent into adulthood as marriage partners, they run the risk - or merit the benefit - of not fully confronting their individual adjustment shortcomings. They may become sociological or psychological crutches for one another.

           

I will never know what it might have been like to work my way through graduate school depending only on interaction with other graduate students or just other people for my emotional health. As it was, neither of us had to contend with the difficult-to- accommodate nuances of other people. If we did not like someone with whom we found ourselves having to spend a good deal of time, we could always retreat to our relationship and soften the blow for ourselves. “I don’t like the personality adjustment this person demands of me”, we might have said, “Will you help me get through this time without making that adjustment? You will? Thanks. Yes, I will do the same for you.”

           

At the time I must have thought such ongoing accommodation of others would be an unnecessary use of my mental and emotional energy. Whether it would have been or not, we will never know. Every meaningful relationship we have had since 1977 has been absorbed by both of us, never privately.

             

As the years go by it becomes more difficult to recall the earliest days of our marriage. The time around the wedding and honeymoon stand out and I can remember big things like part of the wedding cake falling, how long it took to open all our gifts, my family being late, how full and hot the church was, not getting you a wedding present, the Pinto being permanently painted, your mom’s Malibu, the Days Inn, the Best Western in Bardstown, the honeymoon suite in Caves City, playing put-put golf, and Long John Silver’s chicken planks.

           

The pictures we had are fading and scattered. I wonder where the audiotape is, the one you would listen to repeatedly to hear Raleigh hit the high note in the Lord’s Prayer, with the baby yelling. You even knew which baby that was, a baby who is now around 40 years old.

           

All these years of shared experience are so meaningless to anyone but us, so intense with emotion at the time but so easy to just let slide from our conversations these days. They even threaten to fall completely out of our minds. Looking back on them leads me to both nostalgia and the recognition that time makes fun of self-importance. It turns us into repositories of images and notions of the past, headed for a horizon over which our passage will be accorded little attention. But we were there and we are here now and holding our lives up to the light one more time seems useful, at least it does to me.

Music

Music has been important to us.  Our first song together was “I really want to see you tonight” by England Dan and John Ford-Coley. For a long time we were not sure whether they were saying “I’m not talking about Meridian” or “I’m not talking about moving in”. We admitted our uncertainty, stayed persistent and eventually figured it out together. It was a relief for us both to not feel pressure to understand every lyric to every song. Couples these days would just Google it.

It must have been the Spring of 1977 when we drove to Lexington to hear England Dan and John Ford-Coley and Neil Sedaka in Concert. Who knows how we had the money. Of course, concerts were not nearly as expensive back then. You kept the tickets to that and other things we did together for a long time. My inability to keep up with such things must have rubbed off on you.

           

Follow Me, The Wedding Song, Evergreen, The Lord’s Prayer, (did I leave one out?) we worked out this selection during the summer of 1977. I drove to Falmouth virtually every weekend that summer, once or twice bringing Earl along. At the beginning of the summer, when it appeared I would not have a job in the oil fields, I wound up at Tommy and Brenda’s and we talked late at night about the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire, both watching national news coverage of it.

           

Over the years we bought a couple of “borrowed” milk crates full of vinyl music albums. Some we had before we married, mostly things I had bought like Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan or Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen. Together we bought John Denver, Neil Sedaka, Neil Diamond, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Carol King. I realize, recounting these albums, that you did more listening than you did selecting. 

           

You loved music, you just never spent as much on it as I did, but then you did not have the money I did J. Cowsills, Johnny Rivers, and Strawberry Alarm Clock, you had their 45s. My 45s included: How can you mend a broken heart by the Bee Gees and Trying to Hold on to my woman by Lamont Dozier.

           

Concerts were everywhere. Over the years, after we married we saw John Denver, Kenny Rogers, The Righteous Brothers, Dan Fogelberg, James Taylor, Charlie McClain and even Andy Williams. 

Your favorite group while we lived in Indiana were Graham Russell and Air Supply. I liked Supertramp and their song “Take the long way home”, which played on the car radio the night I came to get you at Zales after having forgotten to pick you up from work five hours earlier. All the times I have recounted the fact that this was the song playing, you have never seemed to see the humor in it.

The Journey

When two people marry it is as if they are starting on a train trip from which they vow to be carried off.  No matter where or how many times the train stops to load or unload, they continue their conversation, planning the next time they will get up to visit the bathroom, or when they will walk to the meal car and get a box of food. 

           

Once the meal is eaten, the bathroom is out of the way, it’s back to the seat by the window and the view of the country side.  Out the window are sometimes parts of the world they have not seen before.  He nods in the direction of something interesting so she can see it too. That way they can later talk about what it was.

           

Sometimes they sit headed forward and sometimes they head backwards.  If they have to change trains at a station, they may wind up sitting temporarily in separate seats, but their eyes remain connected and as soon as someone moves, they are back together again, talking quietly.

           

The train goes places and they get off together and explore, but eventually the time for sightseeing is over and they return to another train and its back across the wide-open spaces again, through the city, over the mountains and the rivers with their high bridges. 

           

One perspective on marriage is that it is a trap, a place where pathetic people become mired in an interminable day-to-day. The other extreme is that it is a haven, a place of sanctuary where love is the eternal bed. The truth lies somewhere in between.

           

Those who give up on marriage after a short while do so sometimes because they become something like claustrophobic, I would assume.  They need elbow room, something fresh and new.        

           

But one can never leave oneself and therefore nothing is ever completely fresh.  The sights I see tomorrow will be seen by the eyes I use today. When I look at the world, I don’t just see it psycho-perceptually, but I see it with perspective, my mind adds meaning to it.  The tendency to see the familiar as less attractive than the unfamiliar is not necessarily a part of the human condition, but rather something that reaches epidemic proportions in certain societies, in some people’s lives.

           

To continuously see the new and fresh with the same person may be the greatest delight of marriage.  It is indeed a sad marriage when neither is any longer capable of appreciating change or embracing new habits or taking on better ways of being together and alone.  It may be an even sadder marriage when only one is willing to continue investigating experiences.

           

It’s really this nimbleness, this openness to sharing more than the same old thing that allows two people to not just continue to live in the same house but to live in a way that is beneficial to both of their souls.

           

Anticipation of progress has been a theme in our life and to a certain extent we have seen it happen.  Our lives together remain open-ended.  We still look forward to what may be coming next year, even though we tend to know the containers it will be shipped in and who will be the supplier.  That is, we may visit the same restaurants next year that we do this, or we may still be spending our Friday evenings reading, but as long as we keep a youthful and expectant viewpoint, no two Friday evenings will be the same.

           

That show Mystery Science Theatre sort of sums up what I am talking about.  The character’s heads showed up on the bottom of the movie screen and they talked all the way through it, sometimes making fun of the plot or the actors, but always keeping the banter witty and light. 

           

I am reminded of Aunt May and Uncle Bill or Aunt Sylvie and Uncle Ivan. They were sort of like the Mystery Science Theatre troupe, sitting there watching the movie of their lives, making cute little comments and smiling at one another’s demonstration of defiance in the face of the threats of boredom or irrelevancy.  I say bring on the many days and evenings we have yet to share. I think we are up to it. What do you think?  Just a hint of a smile on your face is usually enough to reassure me things are okay. But, on occasion we may get greedy and laugh right out loud. And they said you were a saint for staying with me. Little did they know, right? Right?

August 6, 2013: Happy Anniversary, Tanga Bea Turner McCullough!!

Tomorrow marks 36 years of marriage for Tanga and me. Yes, you read that correctly, 36, as in three dozen or one-fourth of a gross. I know, we don’t even look 36 years old, let alone old enough to be married so long. I would not believe it either, had I not been there for the whole blooming thing. It turns out we got married on the 32^nd anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. If you find something funny in the connection between our marriage and that day, you have a warped sense of humor- and welcome to the club.

I don’t believe it would be an exaggeration to say there were 250 people at our wedding. It was held at Tanga’s home church and everyone in the general area must have felt sorry for her. Not very many made their way up from South Carolina or Beattyville, Kentucky, the places I had called home; only family and my best man. One of my groomsmen did not show up and I have not heard from him to this day. Our friendship was the only obvious casualty of my marriage.

Ten days later, after our honeymoon to Bardstown, Kentucky; to see the Stephen Foster story, the day we moved into our first apartment; I was standing at the sink doing something, maybe washing dishes with a radio beside me playing music, when they interrupted to say Elvis had died. There was something surreal about Elvis dying just as we got started in marriage. Again, any connection you might make between the death of the king and us moving into our first apartment would be in poor taste.

We lived in Kentucky two more years after our marriage, moved to Terre Haute, Indiana in August of 1979, and we have not lived in Kentucky since. I think it is a coincidence that Kentucky has struggled since we left. In 1978, Democrat Walter Dee Huddleston won 61% of the vote to the 37% won by Republican Louis Guenthner, in the U.S. Senate race for Kentucky. In 1980, Democrat Wendell Ford won the U.S. Senate seat in Kentucky with 65% of the vote to Republican Mary Foust’s 35%. I refuse to take the blame for the change that has occurred since.

Things have gone a little better on the basketball front. Kentucky won a NCAA title in 1958 and 1978, while we were there. In the 34 years we have been gone, they have won three titles. In the 65 years since they won their first NCAA basketball title, Kentucky has won seven more, which comes to around one every nine years or so. The 2014 title will give them a total of nine in 67 seasons, or one every seven and a half years. Not bad for a state missing two of its biggest fans.

We have three couple friends – now with children, children-spouses and a few other friends- from college that I am pretty sure, not a single year has gone by without us seeing them at least once and for the last twenty-five years or so, at least twice; and in the last ten years or so, at least four times. We have joked about us possibly moving in together and starting our own commune, but that would probably not work, since Tanga and I are the only communists in the bunch.

Tanga and I had a daughter on the second-to-last day of 1981. She, like us, is not one to stay close to home. For the last three April-through-Septembers she has worked as a U.S. Park Ranger in Alaska, 2011 and 12 in Skagway and this year in Glacier Bay. Back in 2002 she traveled to the Normandy, France area for a travel study. In 2003, she went to London and saw something like 15 plays in 14 days, some of them at the Globe theater. In 2004 she spent the summer backpacking from Ireland to Rome and in 2004-5 she spent the school year teaching English in Manosque, France.

She and I got to travel to London and Paris in 2007 and Tanga and I were in Cambridge for 7-7-2005, when terrorists blew up the tube and a couple of busses. Tanga and I spent our thirtieth anniversary, in 2007, at Cancun, Mexico. That was the only time we actually took a trip for our anniversary.

Our marriage has lasted through Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama and hopefully will last at least through Clinton II, if not Clinton III – Chelsea. It has lasted through nothing but bleak years of Cincinnati Reds teams, except for 1990. We have watched nine Olympic games, including 1980 - the U.S. boycott year. We have watched 36 sets of Super Bowl commercials and halftimes, neither of us all that taken with the actual games.

We have lived through the Jonestown Massacre, John Lennon’s assassination, Reagan being shot, Hurricanes Hugo, Andrew, Katrina and Sandy – and a host of lesser ones, the first Gulf War, the roaring nineties, the tech bubble bursting, September 11^th, the Iraq War, the housing bubble bursting, the great recession, the election of the first African American to the White House and unfortunately, we are still living through whatever you call the mess in Afghanistan.

We have attended the funerals of her wonderful mother Edna, my wonderful father Paul, her 44 year-old brother Roger and her brother Roger’s wife, son and two grandsons; the weddings of a niece and nephew – my sister Cathy’s two; another niece – Brenda’s daughter and that of her brother and my brother as well.

We have lived in Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee, New Jersey, Tennessee again, North Carolina and back to Tennessee. We have probably driven around two million miles between us, a number inflated by the fact that she and I have lived 65 and 55 miles respectively, from our work, for the last nineteen years or so.

We have moved twelve times in 36 years, counting moving into Lewis number nine, the efficiency apartment at Morehead where we had just arrived when Elvis died. If our house, which is currently on the market, sells; that will be our thirteenth move.

Suffice it to say, a lot can happen in 36 years and it has, but we are still around and ready for what the next 36 might bring. No one can predict what will transpire in three-dozen years, but if we could, that would not be nearly as much fun, would it? Who knows, maybe nothing much will happen so that when I sit down to write about our second 36 years, the piece will be much shorter.

The easy way?

-->

Often when something is difficult or time consuming I find myself trying to devise an easier or quicker way to do it. When I buy beets for juicing - stems and leaves still on, I have a tendency to throw them in the refrigerator, until I need them only to find them in a disgusting state of decay from the humidity in the area of the frig where I laid them. I justify this because it would take time to get out the cutting board, separate them, cut them into juicable sized stems and leaves, put them in ziplock bags and then, in the refrigerator.

Even as I type these sentences I am thinking, how can I get this piece on doing things the easy way done a little easier, without poring over every word and without editing it after I am finished.

I have known people who dropped out of college because of a math class, an English class or in one case, “because I could tell I had nothing in common with the professor”, only to find life without college quite tough - with jobs harder to come by and the ones available not what they would prefer. I wonder if they ever think that the easier way, not finishing college, actually turned out to be the hard way; the way I think when I see my beet stems and leaves rotting in the refrigerator and I have to throw them away. Maybe I should start processing my veggies as soon as I get them home, the way I did this afternoon, because I knew I was going to be writing this piece on not always taking the easy way out.

This past spring I tried to run a marathon without putting in enough training miles per week and I wound up walking much of the second half and finishing thirty minutes slower than my previous marathon time. But I start thinking of easy alternatives even when the thing I am doing is not nearly as hard as training for a marathon. I do it if I am replacing a ceiling fan or a light switch, writing an essay or an email, making a speech or just chit-chatting with someone. I am always looking to cut corners on big things or on small ones.

I suspect a psychologist would tell me this tendency is a sign I am ADHD, which I bet I was when I was little, although they did not have the diagnosis back then; and which I bet I still am. But it would not surprise me if a lot of people would not say they did the same thing. In fact, finding easy ways of doing things is sort of like what engineers do for a living, so it cannot be all bad, right?

It is probably not that big of a problem if I cut corners to save time, money or energy; when the matter is not life or death for me or a loved one, or when it does not mean I compromise my performance on an important project or shortchange the quality of my future life, in some way. The only problem is, I not only do it on unimportant things; I do it on big ones too.

I did it as a high school student, where I did not work my hardest. I did it my first year of college and I am not sure I did not do it on my Ph.D. dissertation, which honestly, I was never all that proud of as an accomplishment. It got me my degree, but I do not believe I came close to giving it everything I had. By that time, I just wanted to be done with the degree and move on with the rest of my life, instead of taking pride in the process and product.

I have known people who have given up on relationships, on members of their family, even on their state of residence – moving to another state in hopes that the new state would fix their problems. I knew one couple that gave up on keeping their money in banks because the bank was always hassling them about writing bad checks. When they told anyone they kept their money at home instead of a bank, they made it sound like the bank had done them wrong – actually that several banks in succession had done them wrong and so they finally gave up on banks.

It is easier to take supplements than to eat the proper foods, easier to sit sweating twenty minutes in a sauna than to spend that time on an elliptical, and in general it appears to be easier to take a hand full of pills than to either eat right or exercise. It gets worse, when it comes to health. Apparently, a lot of people think it is easier to have multiple by-pass surgeries than it is to take care of their health by not eating cholesterol-filled animal products and dairy.

Clearly lying in bed an extra hour is easier than getting out of bed and running three miles, or getting on an exercise bike, right? I mean, you have to put on your clothes, stretch, run-which is no fun - and then come back home and shower, then put on other clothes, whereas if you stayed in bed, all you had to do was find one outfit after you showered and just slip on your clothes.

But lying in bed day after day and year after year without doing work on your body only seems easier. At some point, the “difficulties” of living that way start to become obvious. You wind up in poor health, in the hospital, taking all kinds of pills, hurting all over, having headaches, stomach problems, thinking problems, problems getting around, not being able to go on a hike, not being able ultimately, to easily get out of the bed you so easily chose to lie in all those mornings, instead of getting up and doing the more difficult thing, taking care of the only body you will ever have.

I know, I am a big one to talk, but the next time you succumb to the temptation to take the easy way out, ask yourself, where is the hidden difficulty in that “so-called” easier way? I am going to try myself, although it sure is a lot easier to just write an essay on the subject.

Do we really have a choice?

-->

Should I stay home or go out, talk to a friend or read a good book, walk in nature or write down my thoughts? None of these are mutually exclusive, of course, I could do them all in the same day or I could do none. The one that gives me the least choice is staying home, since if I find myself at home, there are two options: stay or leave. But the way I posed the question is intended to suggest that I have these two ways of spending time, luxuriating around the house or luxuriating around in my car or something like that. Since I set the options up in the series that I did, it sounds like I am one lucky cuss and that any way I turn, I have time on my hands and I am in harmony with life, always faced with choices far less than life or death ones - nice choices to have. But, I could have said it another way.

I could have said: should I hunker down in my house or flee, phone a friend or see if my lawyer can find a loophole in the warrant they have for my arrest, run through the back alleys or pen a suicide note? Those choices do not sound as good, do they? I have spent most of my life much closer to the first set of choices than the second, in fact, I don’t think I have ever been too close to the latter, not to say I will never be. Those who are on the lam or being literally or figuratively hunted down are in what might be the least enviable position of all human beings. I would not want to be Edward Snowden, right now, hanging out in Russian airports – although I do think he is more hero than villain – these days, he is someone without good options.

We like to set up our time away from work as a series of choices, and some of us are even fortunate enough to do it at work; at least to some extent. If I get up on Saturday during the warm months, I have a choice of meditating for 45 minutes when I get out of bed or not, going for a run or not, at some point writing 1000 words or not, going with my wife to the farmer’s market or not, going to the gym for my 26-station workout or not, eating three meals or not, juicing beets, carrots and other veggies at some point during the day or not, going to bed between 10 and 11 or not, getting the car oil changed or not, eating one of those meals out or not, going to Memphis or not, listening to music while I write or not, and maybe a few other possibilities. But really, if my oil needs changing and it is not coming some sort of fierce storm, I will do all of the things on the left side of those sentences, the things before the not, except for going to Memphis, which only happens occasionally and every now and then not listening to music while I write because I am too lazy to think of putting my earbuds in my phone before I sit down. In other words, it is not as if I really have much choice of how I spend my “day off”.

Most of my days are the same, but you won’t hear me complaining. I don’t feel like screaming or they don’t need to come and get me in a van with padded walls. I am content with my life of non-choice choices. The truth is, if my back is hurting or I have pulled a hamstring recently, or if it is stupid hot, I may not run on a given Saturday. Instead, I might do an hour on the elliptical, but most likely I will exercise, not because I feel compelled, well maybe a little bit because of that; but mainly because I like the way it feels to get the usual stuff done. I do those things because those are the things I do.

Earlier in my life, say when I was in graduate school, my days were terribly different. I might choose between heading to the library first thing on Saturday morning or studying in our apartment. We might choose to drive to the mall and walk around or not, walk the bike path for a few minutes or not, watch a little TV before we went to bed or not. As you can see, at any given time in my life, my discretionary time has really been a matter of a handful of choices and not real choices at that, just doing or not doing the same things from a short list; when I am not being told what to do by a work schedule or some other type of schedule - like the you have when a loved one is in the hospital and you visit that person three times a day for three straight days, in a town far from your house.

I wonder if there are people who live differently from that? Are there people for whom every Saturday is unique from all the others, with the possible exception of getting up, eating three meals, and going to bed? If so, I wonder if they are happy? On Saturday number one she might do yoga with friend one, have lunch with friend two, go to a movie with friend two, have dinner with friend three, take a bike ride with friends four, five and six. Then on Saturday number two she might lie in bed until noon, skipping breakfast, drinking a juice instead of having lunch, reading a book during the afternoon and going to bed early. On Saturday three she might fly to the coast and spend the entire weekend there – I don’t know, let’s say- all alone. On Saturday four she might get up early and cut down a few trees before eating lunch at the soup kitchen where she is volunteering, after which she tries to immolate herself on her patio before someone puts her out, so she lives to see another Saturday and so on like that.

I know there must be people with more predictability in their life than I have, trappist monks come to mind, but I wonder how those with little predictability like it. I am guessing those with the least predictability are the ones whose jobs are quite varied and who work all the time. Within the confines of their job, they do lots of different things, but it’s all work. I suppose there are also socialites and party animals who are flitting and flying hither and yon and never seem to have any pattern to their days, but can that be sustainable? Would your body and mind not eventually just fall apart? Are lots of true and actual choices really all that common and really even, desirable?

A few thoughts on my dad: Paul Asters McCullough ((Dec 9, 1928 - May 14, 2006)

Another father’s day is here, my eighth without a living father, since he died on mother’s day in 2006. It would be cliché to say I love him as much today as I did when he was alive, but it would not be all that inaccurate; only I must admit to having forgotten a lot of the details. How did his voice sound? I can conjure it up, but it is not automatic. How did his face look, that is a little easier and does not take much effort.

What is easiest to remember are the things he would say, such as Yello for hello; or Yaman, for Amen; or I heard you when you drove up, for I know what you are talking about; and so on. He had a million sayings he had either made up or had picked up from others across the years.

He liked to say: it’s better to burn out for the lord than to rust out for the devil; and I feel so good I could climb five trees backwards – I think he made that one up. Get thee behind me Satan. This is a day that the lord has made, I will rejoice and be exceedingly glad. I am going to fight the devil until I die, I’m going to kick him, hit him, scratch him, claw him, bite him and when I lose my teeth, I’m gonna gum him. Or, he would say: as long as Jesus has my hand I would walk on a rotten corn stalk across hell.

Dad did not spend much time thinking on material or earthly things. He thought mostly of the next life, of God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. He had read the Bible completely through, over 100 times. For years he prayed at least three hours a day. He had callouses on his knees that made them look more like pine knots. That was another thing he would say: “I’m tougher than a pine knot.”

Many of the things he would say are so deep within me, I find myself saying them at least under my breath at random times. They seem to be in the ancient, early-evolved rear of my brain and require conscious inhibition by the front of my brain. Sometimes, though, there is no stopping them, they just flow out.

Most of the conversations he and I had after I left home and would return for a weekend or a holiday, took place with him holding his index finger on the passage he was currently reading in the scripture. If we arrived with him praying, we may have to wait a while for him to get done or he would leave us on our own and go in the other room and pray for a long time, no doubt praying for us.

He worked for twenty-one and a half years in a cotton mill, until he was around 38 years old, but then he stopped working altogether and became a “home missionary” to eastern Kentucky from South Carolina. His job for the last forty years or so of his life was: soul winner.

His right hand, withered –pieced back together, actually- from where his brother Richard had cut it in two with an axe when he was three years old; was not usually the one he would extend to shake. If a person did offer the right hand though, he would put his withered hand in theirs and I honestly believe that bothered him right into his old age. He never got over being ashamed of his right hand.

We still have a bunch of cassette tapes of him preaching at his church on the Lee/Owsley county line in Kentucky, Pine Grove Baptist – which was actually not in Pine Grove but retained the name after a location switch. I listened to a little of the tapes right after he died, but I no longer have a cassette player and I am not sure I would want to hear them now anyway. Which makes me wonder how long anyone will be interested in the things I leave behind, once I am gone. I think for the first time, I realized, after my father’s death; that when you die, you are genuinely gone. The grip you had over people, the place you held in their thoughts and conversation, it really is gone. The most they will do is conjure memories of you ever so often, maybe on father’s day.

I still love him, it’s just that I also love life and it does not slow down. When people die, others are born to replace them, as much as what happened yesterday is supplanted by what is happening now; and of course, what is going on now will give way to tomorrow.

My father was enormously important in who I became, no doubt more than any other person; but even that influence gets folded into all the other influences and pretty soon it is not simple to figure exactly whom to credit or to blame. At first I think I tried to be like him but at the end of my teens, sort of like Elvis did for a lot of people before he died, dad became uncool for me and stayed that way for many years, during which time I tried to be as little like him as possible, but of course, as many people have pointed out; I wound up being a lot like him, just in my own way. I do not hold many of his religious or political views, but the views I have, I hold with the same level of conviction as he did his views.

In the end, I think what is most clear is that there is a basic part of us on which the less basic parts are built. The most basic part of me, I owe to Paul Asters McCullough, Pastor of Pine Grove Baptist Church, but mostly – father to me and my two wonderful sisters and one brother.

Let Me Tell You About My Mom

Recent days gone by in the hospital

The nurse comes in mom’s room, looks at the chart and asks two questions:

Nurse: What’s your name?

Mom: Joyce McCullough.

Nurse: When were you born?

Mom: January 14, 1934

Nurse: Good, that’s right.

The nurse can then proceed with what she came to do, administer the 20 or so pills mom takes in the morning, put pain medication in the pic line that runs from mom’s right arm to the left side of her chest, give her a breathing treatment that smokes like dry ice, or shift her in bed because mom has complained she is not comfortable.

Mom’s skin looks and feels like the outer layer of an onion. Her hair, always high atop her head in years gone by, now looks like the fur on her toy poodle. Recently, she looked at me with uncomprehending eyes, as if questioning why I was in her room; or maybe worse, that I was someone who had done her wrong.

These hospital scenes were from late last year and early this year when mom had pneumonia, congestive heart failure and a urinary-tract infection, just after having had her second surgery to replace disks in her lower back, since the hope was she would be able to walk without a walker again and continue to live independently, but now the hope is she lives without pain or infection and can enjoy visitors to her room at the nursing home.

Back in the day

When she was manic she would sing of a donkey, "He walled his eyes and switched his tail and went eyonsi-yonsi-yonsi", but as a depressive she would barricade in the bedroom away from dad and us children. Sometimes in church she would cry tears of joy and raise a kleenex-filled hand to the sky, walking and weeping. Among the feelings you get as a boy of 10 watching your mother take to the sawdust trail at a brush arbor camp meeting in Greer, South Carolina, are pride, humiliation and bewilderment.

           

Like her mother before her and like my oldest sister, mom married and began having children too early. Born January 14, 1934, she married February 12, 1949 at 15, had Brenda Joyce on September 15, 1950; Cathy three years later, at 19, me October 1, 1956, at 22 and John Earl on March 10, 1961, at 27.  Her childbearing years ended a year later when she had a complete hysterectomy.

           

Her mothering years ran from 1950 to 1964, years that also covered the Korean Conflict, Mickey Mantle's 1956 Triple Crown –won the day I was born, the ‘55 and '57 Chevy, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. But the most significant events for her were when dad was “born again” in 1952 and surrendered to preach in 1957.  These changes ushered in the 24/7 365 world of religion and out - everything else.

           

Her father had been a cotton farmer and a house painter whose own life swung back and forth between preaching and backsliding, the Bible and the bottle.  He died backslidden in 1972, at age 69. Her mother Lula Ivadell, lived with her sister Lula May, in Columbia, South Carolina - dying in early 1998, at age 86. She got height and looks from her daddy and piss and vinegar from her momma.

Mom worked in a factory called Dunean, in Easley, South Carolina when I was a little boy, and during this time, she and dad hired a black woman, Alberta Adeline, from down the road, to stay with us children and keep the house clean. I guess as poor as we were, there were people poorer still – to serve as maid and nanny.

           

Mom has spent most of her life dealing with physical problems. When her tonsils were removed as a newly wed, she nearly bled to death. Her early hysterectomy was followed by a number of other operations, including the removal of her gall bladder and a malignant uterine tumor. But as she grew older, there were positive signs that she might live a long life, since she and dad would walk about every day and her attitude toward life grew more consistently positive.

           

On countless Mother’s Days and other Sundays, during the post-child rearing years, she and dad would get out of bed and she would complain of a headache or some other ailment and decide at the last possible moment whether or not to walk down the hill to church with him. Most of the time she would go to church and for his part, dad would request prayer for her, which would make his life easier that coming week, since he had shown a measure of compassion. There would be 12 to 14 people in the service, including mom and dad. They would sing one of about 30 songs as a congregation and mom and one of the other ladies would sing a duet or two solos.

           

After church she would get some pork chops or hamburger out of the freezer they had in one of the church Sunday School rooms. She would fry this and fix "cream potatoes," macaroni and cheese, and larded-up green beans. Then dad would get his Bible while she laid down for a Sunday afternoon nap. Then early in the evening her internal debate would begin again as to whether she felt well enough to go to church again. It would be a close call, but ultimately she would usually go, although she may or may not stay for the entire service.

After church she would be light-hearted and goofy, singing "On top of Smokey" or "Yankee doodle dandy," making up a song or telling dad a story about her daddy or the time she met the snake in the road and gave it “the right of way.”  Or together they would reflect on the years when we children were home and end the night declaring they would not trade their children for any in the world.

More recent days in the nursing home

I visited her this past week in the nursing-home. She has a view of the courtyard where squirrels, ducks and birds provide her entertainment. She sang a song she made up based on her hours of looking out the window. The tune sounded like a church hymn and although I cannot remember all the words, the story in the song included hawks preying on small birds – the way the devil had been trying to kill her; and ended with her singing: “Now I can see the tops of the trees.”

Happy Mother’s Day Mom

Luxury Concerns

A few minutes ago, my wife texted me that she had tracked our daughter, Stephanie, who is flying on an Alaskan Airlines – Delta operated Flight, as currently flying over Memphis, Tennessee, going from Atlanta to Seattle. Stephanie had texted her that she – Stephanie, had only slept about an hour and a half last night, leaving her hotel for the airport at 4:15 am and flying from Nashville to Atlanta leaving at 5:30 am. My thought after I learned she was over Memphis, was, I hope she is able to sleep.

On Monday of this week, Bill Richard, upon finishing the Boston Marathon, hugged his family briefly and then began to make his way through the other runners to get his medal. If he is like me when I have just finished a marathon, he was thinking of his aching legs and feet, how he wants to lie down, or of the wave of nausea started now he is no longer running. When he hugged his two children and wife, he had no way of knowing they would walk away from him into the blast of a pressure-cooker bomb sending ball bearings and nails into their flesh.

It’s best that we do not always imagine the worst. I send up good vibes for my daughter, that she might be able to sleep over Memphis, but we all know the real concern, the quite normal concern for someone flying at 500 miles per hour seven miles above the earth in a metal tube. But Bill Richard would have had no reason for serious concern over his family in the safety of the crowd at a Marathon finish line. They would have justifiably more reasons to be concerned for him, might he have an injury, or, his wife might have suppressed some thought such as – is he like his cousin with a previously undetected heart issue made deadly by a marathon distance?

I don’t know about you, but I spend most of my time trying to keep nagging doubt and worry from my mind. Yes, there is a bed of deep doubt, that death could strike out of the blue – a car could pull into my lane and send me down an embankment into a fiery crash – and after the footage from Siberia of a few weeks ago, that an asteroid might land on my house – but most of the concerns I am suppressing if you see me with a furrowed brow, will be more on the order of – is my nagging hip pain getting better or worse, am I going to be fresh and lively for my next class or will I be dull and lifeless, will the Cincinnati Reds come to their senses and fire their current manager?

In other words, I seem to live in a world of what might be called, luxury concerns; concerns, to be sure, but only for someone whose life is going well.

My wife’s father died suddenly at his work when she was nine – her aunt picking her up at school and driving her home to her mom. After that, she recalls not being able to join in when other kids were giddy or lighthearted, when they laughed at the slightest thing, acted dumb, goofed off; or otherwise cavorted around in a carefree spirit. She describes a seriousness that sounds like she was thinking of the worst that might happen, while the other kids were oblivious to the worst and perhaps only mildly concerned with something such as whether or not they could get second helpings of ice cream or whether or not a friend liked the new haircut.

Those of us who were not directly affected by the Boston Marathon blasts on Monday, continue to live in a world of luxury concerns, but we have been reminded that there are those jolted into the world of genuine concern.

I spent Monday afternoon fielding questions from friends and family asking if I was in Boston, since they knew I had been aspiring to qualify last year, but had not heard I had been unable to do so - missing by a mere 45 seconds. Two nieces and a nephew called, another niece texted my wife – in case I did happen to be running and had not heard news of the blast yet, how sensitive was that? One of my sisters texted, hoping I had not been there. A coworker emailed to see if I was okay. Several friends on facebook posted on my wall, asking if I was there or not or expressing gratitude, after I had announced I was not there. Another friend said a friend with whom I have lost touch, was wondering if I was running Boston- so she texted on their behalves, to learn my status. They all had temporarily suspended their luxury-concern minds and allowed their genuine-concern minds to take over.

Terrorists understand this notion of luxury concern and how it can be interrupted. Apparently they believe causing people to fear the worst, in crowds, at work, on planes, in high-rise buildings or stadiums; will cause those who live in the realm of luxury concern to feel a little more for those people on the earth who live in fear of their life – or perhaps they simply want us to remember their organization’s name or their cause, and understand the pain they experience that causes them to believe so much in their cause.

What they apparently do not understand, however, is: when our bubble of luxury concern is busted, we may spend more time imagining doomsday scenarios, grieving losses, or simply being depressed – however, most of us, upon learning of a heinous crime, will be reminded of the fleeting pleasure that is our existence and how we need to not only be on the lookout for the worst, but resolve to spend more time appreciating the best.