Internet Fast Bite

Tasteless, ugly things creep in from the margins. Oh, we notice, and we shift uncomfortably, but it’s not the main event, so we ignore it.

I’ve taken an internet fast for slightly over a week. Big deal for me, a self-described news junkie. When I checked back in to various online news and information outlets this morning, I was jarred awake by all the small thumbnails of large cleavage, bizarre tales of twisted family relationships usually with a particularly sick and violent end, people who have accidentally backed over and killed their neighbor’s child, endless “one simple, weird trick” ads for everything from reducing the scourge of belly fat to selling your house. And then there are the animal stories: mostly saccharine, but some disturbing, like the chimp, Travis, a former television star who lived, ate and slept with his owner, then went bananas and  ripped a woman’s face off. God help me, I actually just went and looked at the Wikipedia details on that one.

This stuff has been around forever in some format. The Internet is tailor-made for the viral spread of coarse circuses.  A few days away made it stick out like a sore thumb when I clicked back on.

Clicking off again now. Headed for the woods! Hope you all find a piece of sunshine and a leafy oasis and have a lovely fresh-air day.

Good Reading: Mark Twain’s Collected Travels

I am delighting in armchair travel with a superb Kindle edition of The Collective Travels of Mark Twain. It includes Roughing It, The Innocents Abroad, A Tramp Abroad, and Following the Equator.

The first page of the preface of Roughing It had me hooked.

It is a record of several years of variegated vagabondizing, and its object is rather to help the resting reader while away an idle hour than afflict him with metaphysics, or goad him with science.

You might say I’m getting my mind right, even if my bags aren’t packed yet.

Boys and their Toys

There was a time, some 65 years ago in this rural part of northwest Florida, when two boys of 9 or 10 could ride their bicycles absolutely everywhere: from their moms’ and dads’ modest frame houses on the outskirts of town all the way to Escambia Bay. One of those boys was Buck. He had a big fur ball of a bad-ass half Chow dog named Jeff who would snarl and scrabble beside them all the way. Jeff was jumped on and half killed by a nasty piece of canine work when he was just a puppy, and it twisted his view of the universe. He grew up loyal as a river to his boy, but inventively cruel to other dogs along their bicycle route. Those who lived learned to slink under the porch and cower in the dirt whenever Jeff approached.

Buck’s friend from the cradle was Billy Bass. They fished the river, the bay and the bayous together, liberated watermelons to float them down at Jenny’s Hole in spring-fed Carpenter’s Creek, and many a morning sneaked into other people’s woods to hunt squirrels with their 22 rifles.

Oh, they were tough customers, all right. Still and all, they were just little boys on the day they came upon a whole pile of balloon-looking things deep in the woods. Looked like something fun to play with, so they grabbed up several and brought them home to Billy Bass’s yard. They took his mother’s hose, washed out the strange balloons, filled them with water, tied knots in the end, and were having a big time hitting each other over the head when Mrs. Bass came out of the house to see what was going on. She looked from the boys to the remaining still-sticky, shriveled-up balloons piled on the grass. The boys were too busy laughing and carrying on to notice that Mrs. Bass had gone red in the face.

“Billy Bass!” Mrs. Bass shouted. “You get in the house right now! And Buck Westmark? You get out of my yard  and don’t you never come back!”

It took the “boys” a while to figure out what they had done that made Mrs. Bass so durn mad. And I guess when they did, it signaled the end of one phase of their innocent young lives. No harm done, though, and the re-telling of the old yarn had a bunch of us in stitches when Bill hosted his annual Mullet Fry and Museum Tour at his place over on Avalon Beach.  It’s a gathering of Pensacola High School Class of 1954 alumni. Buck graduated in 1955, but has been officially adopted by the ’54 gang.

Despite that ignominious, hilarious boyhood incident, William Henry Bass grew up to be just about the busiest and best accountant in Pensacola. He’s also an amateur archeologist, raconteur, and collector of just about everything, most especially one of the country’s finest vintage Thunderbird collections. And I guess old Buck did all right, too.  I know he wishes his Dad could have lived to see him amount to something, from a working journalist (reporter, editor and publisher), to director of public affairs for a major corporation, to Chairman of a local bank board, and author. Both men are dads, granddads, and great-granddads. Bill’s been a widower for a long time, now, and Buck’s got me.

This sweet car has been in parades all over the county. It has all original parts, and is a real beauty. You can see some of the trophies and penants it’s won adorning the wall’s of the climate-controlled garage Bill had constructed for his babies.

There were close to a hundred people gathered up at Bill’s place on this Saturday afternoon. It was unseasonably hot, and the humidity was so thick you could cut it with a knife and spread it on a biscuit. The fish were fried in a huge cooker under a shelter. We all made it inside just in time before the rain broke loose. Lord, I’ve never seen so much food in my life. And I was raised a Southern Baptist with Mississippi relatives, so I know something about legendary covered dish meals. This one topped all the ones I waded through as a little girl.  Folks sat at folding tables set up all over the house. We took our plates out to the front porch, which provided a steady breeze and shelter from the straight-down curtain of rain.

Our good friends, Roy and Bette Helms, had driven up from Naples for the event. Here’s Bette with Elvis, the meet and greet guy at the door. Bill has collected a dizzying array of memorabilia from the 1950′s (mostly).  Take his “Marilyn” wall.  More like a shrine, really, don’t you think?

The afternoon had all the earmarks of a hurricane party. No hurricane, but the trees bending low in the wind blowing off the bay, and the sometimes sideways rain sure gave a good imitation. When it slacked off for a few minutes, I grabbed my empty baked bean casserole dish and we took our shot and ran for the car.

The three in the foreground are Buck, Bill and Roy , three guys who have made it from childhood running buddies to lifelong close friends. Grand men, these. Grand.

The Way Life Unfolds

“It’s so different when we are children; when we can’t imagine any of this will happen, the way life will unfold.”

A thin young woman slumps in a wooden porch swing in the darkness of very early morning. She wears a long, midnight navy sheath dress. Two not-young, not-old men sit nearby in chairs pulled close to the swing.  They look up at the sound of my voice. I carry a full-to-the-brim martini. Two giant stuffed olives in it roll around, props on the wrong set. I put it down and move toward the young woman. A headlight strobes the porch. She lifts her head. The glitter of tears stops me.

Later, a van delivers an ornate crystal basket full of impossibly fresh yellow daisies.

Some dreams stay with you long past sunrise.

Sunrise at the Gate

This morning’s walk to the gate felt like an injection of spiritual stem cells.

I was mesmerized by the shadow of the open gate and the sunlight on the tree trunk  as it rose through the branches, changing darkness into light.

Thanks to writer Richard Gilbert, who posted an excellent, thought-provoking series called Christopher Hitchens, God & me earlier this year. It was in that series that I first heard Joan Osborne sing the iconic One of Us. Not surprising, really, to think of it this morning. Enjoy.

Man of Mine (a travel trailer saga)

It’s been one of those days where it’s only Friday but feels like Saturday because it’s Good Friday: no stock market to watch, just writing, wandering by the stream in the soft breeze, watching the young hawks watch me back, and now the time out of time evening with ear buds delivering a mix of vintage Van Morrison, Patti Griffin, Jackson Browne, U-2, Santana, and my old buddy Bob Dylan. There’s a small circle of light in the dark study. It’s illuminating my hands. I love the click of keyboard as words appear. Sometimes the love of words is so overpowering I lose control of conscious thought. That’s when the magic happens. You know it. If you’re reading this, you’ve most likely been there.

I haven’t told you about our travel trailer saga. That Santana song stops me cold, but I’ll try anyway. It’s kind of a mundane tale with an interesting ending. Buck is two rooms away working on his book. I can almost see the black ink filling yellow legal pad pages, and it’s a sensual trail vastly more enticing than bread crumbs.

I think this waiting game with the county and the road and feeling like we’ve always been in control and now we’re not quite, led us to a certain impulsiveness, a feeling  of damn, let’s just haul off and do something, even if it’s off-kilter and outside the circle.  Who knows why? We took a big flying vicarious leap into the recreational vehicle sub-culture. We learned about the gargantuan Class A motorcoach, the Class B dolled-up camper van, Class C campers/mini-motorhomes, daunting 5th wheelers with cherry wood cabinets fitted with washers and dryers, and travel trailers of all sizes, descriptions and personalities.

We made the rounds of local dealers and even ventured to a Camping World across the state line in Robertsdale, Alabama. Ran into a super finance and sales guy there named Jim Richards who gave us a tour of their units. He rode us around in a golf cart. Jim’s a good guy, knows his product, and is smart as a tree full of owls. We both agreed. If we were to ever buy one, it would be from him.

We came close, we sure did. Buck did his research, even drew out a floorplan for his idea of the perfect travel trailer. I lurked on a couple of owner forums, joined the Good Sam RV club, and bought a Woodall’s Campground Directory. We had this idea of trailing our own Residence Inn room all over the country. What made it tempting is that we have a 2004 conversion van, 4-wheel drive with a V-8 engine and a towing package. We bought it back when we thought we needed such a contraption to go back and forth from Pensacola to our place in Western North Carolina. That was a few months before the coyotes attacked and killed our pup and we put the mountain house up for sale and high-tailed it back to the flatlands where there are plenty of coyotes but the ground is level and we can see them coming.

Anyway. We have this great silver gas hog with navy blue leather captain’s chairs that seemed to have been born to drag a portable Residence Inn room around.

We researched ourselves blind. We narrowed the field to three models. We learned all the lingo. We got pretty heated up over the whole deal.

And then, Sunday morning two weeks ago, Buck and I walked down to the gate to get the morning paper. We started talking about campgrounds, how it would probably be really nice, to pull in, unhook, plug in, engage the automatic awning, put out a couple of folding chairs, pour a drink, sit down, relax, and “Hi, folks! I’m Stan! Nice to meet you. Where are you from? I’ll go get Barb. The potluck’s tonight. Newcomers don’t have to bring anything. Come on over. Barb? I’m over here!  Yeah, bring my drink over. You come, too.”

I stopped my running imaginary monologue. Buck stopped in the middle of the path and stared at me. I stared back.

“Huh,” he said.

Then we broke into grins, shook our heads, and moved off toward the gate in a slow jog.

So, we don’t know yet what our next act will be. Whatever it is, we’ll have a good time, I can tell you that. When Buck Westmark gets up to something, a girl can have some fun.

Yellowfin Tuna with Grilled Onions and Spinach

Sometimes a day just comes together and comes out even in a delightful way: a morning of writing on a new fiction short story that had my pen flying across the yellow legal pad with an excitement for writing I haven’t felt for a while, a veggie lunch with Buck, a self-indulgent hair appointment, a fly-by in the grocery store for tuna, spinach, potatoes and a mild onion, dinner, and fragrant clean sheets on our bed.

Night all. Sweet dreams.