My grandmother was truly one of a kind…you hear that statement bandied about a lot, but in this case it’s 100% applicable. She was the quintessential “Little Old Lady from Pasadena”, albeit in the south. Headstrong and proud and, man, could that lady spin a yarn. I hesitate to use the words ‘pathological liar’, because that makes her sound devious and unkind and nothing could be further from the truth. She just liked to entertain and be the center of attention, she never hurt anyone with it, it was just to liven the conversation up a bit. For instance, my mother and gram were both nurses working at the same hospital and one day my mom went in for her shift, going about her business as normal. But throughout the day her colleagues kept making comments about her cake recipe, saying they’d love to get that chocolate cake recipe since it sounded so good. Thoroughly confused, my mom finally figured out what the hell they were talking about. Apparently my gram had told everyone that my mom had made the most delectable, moist chocolate cake ever the night before, not a word of it true.

So the lies were small and just for entertainment, and entertain it did, but still uncomfortable for those of us around her who knew better. And the thing was, none of us called her out on her bullshit. Ever. We knew it was baloney, but we always went along with it because the entertainment value was worth it and because we adored her. No one told a more interesting story or was more glib…the sweetest teller of tall tales in the world.

My gram also fancied herself a bit of an ‘omniscient’ as well. She loved how all her neighborhood scouts would tell her of her daughters’ goings on (my gram and gramps had five girls, six actually, but she lost a daughter as an infant to pneumonia), sometimes calling her at work to tattle on their mischief. It never failed to utterly freak my mom and aunts out how she knew the things they were up to, and seemingly at a superhuman, lightening speed rate…my mom used to like to joke that my gram knew what they were doing even before they did it. Case in point...on a hot, blistering summer’s day, my mom and two of her sisters decided they would lay out and sunbath on the roof of their home…but they decided to do it topless. No sooner than they’d pulled their tops off the phone rings, it was my gram calling from work to tell them to “get the hell off of that goddamned roof naked”! Much to the chagrin and wonder of my mom and her sisters, they dutifully and meekly did as they were told and came inside.

Gram stayed in great shape way into middle age. I remember her astounding my friends when they were over at my house by doing all sorts of outdoor acrobatics…somersaults and handstands, just generally grandstanding and showboating for the punters. My friends all adored her too. They always wanted to come over to my house as they got such a kick out of her. Spunky and sprightly, cussed like a sailor, a barmaid wench didn’t have anything on my granny.   

Another thing she always did was to shoplift. Never anything big or expensive…and that was another thing we overlooked. For one thing, she and my grandfather were very, very poor. They lived on their pensions, which were paltry and barely gave them enough to make it by every month. Certainly there was never any money leftover for anything luxurious or “extra”. My gram had a strong penchant for crossword puzzles, she ferociously consumed them every chance she got. So it was little things she’d knick…crosswords and the like, a random candy bar or hair barrettes. I always kind of hated going 'shopping' with her though, she was ballsy as hell, she’d be blatant about doing it, not even trying to hide it…greatly embarrassing all of us.

She showed her fondness for you in ways that weren't what traditional grandmothers would do. A playful (but smarting!) pinch meant she loved you, "milking" your pinky would show that she cared. She was often quite self-conscious with displays of affection and played a good approximation of Billy Goat Gruff...but you always knew. She made it a point to send every one of us grandkids (12 of us!) a birthday card when our day rolled around, always with a $5 bill stuck inside. She taught me how to drive when I was 14 on back gravel roads in an old brown rusted out Ford car. She never ran out of patience when I weaved and bobbed all over the road.   

She always sang the most fascinating folk ballads. Cobbled together from all over…her German/Irish upbringing, the mountains, war-time…we were enthralled with every line she sang, utterly absorbed in the stories. She kept us entertained for hours at a time, regaling us grandkids with tales of lost love, murder, cheating and gambling…we sat in rapt, wide-eyed attention, hanging onto every line she sang…until she finally sang us to sleep with the sweetest, most soothing lullabies.

My gram coined terms, sayings of her own that, even to this day, I’m not sure the full extent of. No one had a more eclectic turn of phrase and cut of gib than did that lady. Some sayings and “grannyisms” as we would call them, still stick with me this day. Folks look at me when I say them as if I’m speaking some foreign, bizarre language none of them have ever heard.

I miss my gram...sometimes very acutely. She helped to shape the person that I am today in so many ways. I miss her faux crankiness and her 'sticky fingers' at the shops...miss her devilish grin and the mischievous twinkle in her eyes when she was being cheeky. Miss her cocky little hand on her swayed out hip when she got sassy, miss her dirty jokes, just miss her, period. There has never been another like her...and for her absence, the world is a little darker.     

Maybe things would have been different

had I never gone down that path.

But then again, most of me wouldn't have changed a thing.

Only the hidden, bitter parts I swallow deep down.

 

The parts that keep seeping out at the times

 I most want them to stay buried.

Maybe in the retelling I can make

the outcome somehow smoother, more polished.

Shellacked over like an antique armoire

newly finished, the scratches and nicks almost invisible.

 

Now the season you always loved so much is here.

Sweaters, cornucopias and pumpkins being carved into jack-O-lanterns.

I hardly notice. Life goes on all around me now in gunmetal gray, charcoal and slate.

 

But when I remember, it's always the colors…

pumpkin orange, cobalt blue, emerald green, Shesiedo red…

I remember the colors.   

She sat gazing out at the open window and wondered when he would return. Telltale signs of red were beginning to creep up over the horizon, and with a sigh she turned to complete the tasks at hand.

Even from where she stood, the mirror on the wall reflected the bruises that never seemed to fade. But she'd long grown indifferent to them. They, too, were just another part of the weariness that was her existence. Despondency had overshadowed any hope she might have, at one time, felt.

She gathered up the last of the items she'd so carefully laid out that morning; the shiny, gold wrapping paper, the birthday card that seemed to convey exactly what she wanted to say, the pretty metallic rope ribbon. She worked meticulously cutting and taping the paper into a perfect fit for the large box. She then did the same for the gift box-style lid that went tightly on top. She snaked the gold-roped ribbon through the lid top and made a knot at the top end, with the remaining slack dangling down into the box.

She taped the card on top of the lid. It read: 'I hope you never forget this birthday, I hope you are happy'.

She lined the box with a heavy garbage bag, crawled inside, pulled the lid down over the top and calmly put the end of the gun into her mouth.            

It is so strange how growing up in poverty clouds your thinking in some way or another forever. It is as if some circuitry were permanently hardwired to always be in 'insolvency' mode.

Mine was a poor farming family. We lived in a tiny town in Arkansas (population approx. 100) whose heyday had been sometime in the 50s and 60s. Back then it had a dance hall, hotel, thriving cotton gin and a train station that was a popular hot spot for people to hop off. When I grew up there in the 70s and 80s however, it only had a general store, post office, small cafe and garage left, a ghost of its former self.

We hunted small game in the nearby forests and grew vegetables in our postage-sized back yard. We made do on granny and grandpa's meager monthly pension (my grandfather was a WWII vet) which provided sundries such as staple goods and basic toiletries. We had very few luxuries; an occasional visit in the summer months to a neighboring town for a banana split at the local drive-in.

We lived in a small, box-like house, a shanty by most of today's standards, white clapboard with green painted shutters. Two tiny bedrooms and, for a good bit of our years there, no indoor bathroom...just a wooden outhouse in the back yard. A ringer type washing machine, no air-conditioning and, in the muggy southern summers, just a window fan to keep us cool. I remember many nights sitting on the screened-in front porch with my grandpa, swatting flies and mosquitoes, drinking iced sun tea and watching the sparse traffic drive by. The drivers always raised a hand in salutation to us, which we returned, our form of entertainment.

Most all of our clothes were either handmade, hand-me-downs passed on from generation to generation or thrift store bargains from the local yard sales that granny and I would frequent together.

A typical day's worth of meals for me would usually be two fried eggs, two round pork sausage patties and buttered toast in the mornings for breakfast, a free school lunch and a dinner of some kind of homemade soup, usually consisting of beans of some kind or another...tasty and cheap, or a breaded, fried squirrel or rabbit that grandpa had shot that day and various vegetables from the garden as side dishes.

We drove an ancient, rusted out brown Ford car that puffed out black smoke upon starting up, ratty seats and a huge hard molded plastic steering wheel. Seatbelts were buried somewhere, hidden and forgotten, deep down in the cavernous cracks of the bench seats.

Grandma was a nurse and, as a lot of the townsfolk could not afford to go to a doctor, she tended to the ailing frequently...doling out advice and pain medication (typically penicillin shots when needed). She was glad to make house calls and did so regularly, even delivering babies on occasion. As a result of this we would quite often have gifts of deer meat, fruit, vegetables, canned jelly and jam, pickled goods, used books, etc. as payment.

Life was pretty simple and the knowledge that you were poor really did not hit you too hard, as everyone in the area was, more or less, at about the same social status as you. In school sometimes I would get teased about having holes in my shoes or not wearing the latest fashion styles, but that was pretty rare I seem to recall.

Now that I am squarely middle class (a fairly recent happenstance, relatively speaking) I still find myself thinking along the lines of how I grew up. This manifests itself in strange ways sometimes. Most notably...there is the case of the "saving" syndrome. The "saving" syndrome is where you have "good" things, usually clothing items (although it is not relegated to just clothing, dishes are another prime example of this), that you would not wear unless you were going somewhere special. We are not speaking of practical things anyone would do…such as not wearing a fancy ball gown to clean house in...it is way more fundamental and basic than that. 

Even something as trivial as a pair of socks...and even if you now had fifteen good pairs of socks instead of the two or three good ones that you used to have, you still find yourself reaching past them to the threadbare items instead. Afraid to wear them for fear you will not have them clean when you needed them, or that you will somehow damage or ruin them and they will no longer be usable for anything 'worthy' or 'special'. You get so used to doing without that you cannot get used to actually having. It is foreign and, being such, untrustworthy.

Another mindset too is the "waiting for the other shoe to drop" syndrome. This usually asserts itself when things are going particularly well...it is a pessimistic viewpoint, but one you learn to adapt to as a way of life when poor to stave off disappointment and manage your expectations. It is almost a figurative self-flagellation of sorts, fear that everything good in the world would not be happening to you, could not be happening to you without adverse recriminations or backlash.

Getting dressed for the day today, reaching into drawers for my underthings I was at once transported back to my youth, as I suppose I am subconsciously every morning. And although I now have more than a few pairs of perfectly good socks, I still found myself reaching for my stained white, bear-at-the-toe ones instead, and with a shake of my head and a quiet chuckle I wonder if it will always be so.

The Great Depression...in ways seems so romantic doesn’t it? Steinbeck, Dustbowl, Woodie Guthrie, traveling hobos, and I suppose it was to those that never lived through it. Times were hard as nails, dirty as tractor tires and as gritty as a gravel road...stories…my gramps could tell some stories. The world had never seen such a man. Not perfect by any means, before my time they say he’d had a temper, got right mean at times...but I never saw anything of that man they spoke of. Only maybe an occasional glimpse of a harmless remnant, a sparky flair that was quickly extinguished.

Gramps had to quit school when he was only in 3^rd grade. He had to help support his family. His coal miner father had fallen ill with black’s lung disease and the young’uns had to do their share. My grandpa’s saving grace was his love of reading…I don’t ever remember a time when he wasn’t reading something, he and granny both devoured books, a passion they passed on down to us kids…the love of the written word. Words strung together across a page were magic to us. They had the power to teleport you far away to other lands, other worlds even. We might not could have afforded to go there in the flesh, but how we did manage to go there in our minds was just as good, books were free. I remember countless, glorious hours spent in libraries.  My refuge, my haven for when things got tough. 

I guess growing up in poverty does make you appreciate things more and make you a smite bit more humble than the next fellow. If not, I guess you didn’t learn a damned thing from it and the shame is all yours. No shame in the actual experiencing of it though, some folks just have to be the unlucky ones, it’s how life works. As long as shame doesn’t turn to bitterness you’re alright.

Gramps was a farmer by trade….hot, dirty work that offered no quarter. He’d sweat and toil, baking in the blistering sun all day and half the night, exhausted…cursing the long hours, the meager money. Then he’d go off to the boondocks afterwards, the Black River Bottoms, for a pint of illegal corn liquor with his buddies. He got mean when he drank, incidentally a trait my mother inherited from him. And drank he did…I suppose it was to escape, for a moment, the brutality that life had handed him…isn’t that why anyone drinks themselves into the ground? To escape reality, even for a few hours.      

He came home a changed man after the war. He didn’t like to talk about it much. I could tell it greatly upset him. I remember sometimes drinking buddies of his would come over and on very, very rare occasions they’d talk about their experiences in WWII. One time I sneaked into the living room and hid by the end of the couch while he was telling a story…I caught it almost from the very beginning. He’d had a far away, glassy look in his eyes with the telling. He recalled being separated from his platoon and having to bury himself under the cold, wet snow to evade the Germans, terrified that he’d sneeze or cough and give himself away.

After being away from his family in Germany for over a year he came home…harder, less kind, quick to anger. My mother remembers one night at the supper table he and my grandma were arguing about something, I believe it was over one of the kids. Gramps just kept getting madder and madder and finally he threw his plate of food across the room and smashed it into the opposite wall.

Another occasion had him trying to fix the wood stove in the middle of winter, cold and aggravated, he just couldn’t get it to working. So instead he beat it with a hammer all the way through the house and out the front door into the yard.

And yet another time out in a wheat field during the middle of a blazin’, hot summer day. His tractor gave out and he couldn’t get it running again, so he kicked the steel tire as hard as he could and broke his foot.

The man I remember had calmed down and settled into his own skin and mind by the time I was born. He’d somehow seemed to make peace with himself and the way his life had turned out. He was still bitter at times towards the government for abandoning him and his fellow veterans and I’m sure he was haunted by his memories of the war until his dying day. But he managed an air of tranquility in later years. He still nipped into the whiskey ever so often, but the end result wasn’t a lot of cussin’ and swearin’ and violence. There was more joking and story telling and playing on his harmonica…mimicking ’a train coming for his baby’…me.

I remember summer twilights swinging on the front porch together, trying to get a breeze rustled up to cool us off. Even after an evening bath I still felt muggy, my nightdress would cling to me, in defiance, refusing to leave the heat of the day behind.

Days of old money hunting with him…we’d go off in search of burnt down homesteads, of which there were plenty in the tri-county area. He’d bring his metal detector…a magical device to me, like the water divining rod, or ’willow witching’ as we sometimes referred to it. I couldn’t have been more impressed with his knowledge and skills if he’d of pulled a wand out and started conjuring up mythical beasts out of thin air.

Grandpa was a god to me, firmly perched on an unshakable pedestal. He was the only father I’d ever known and the things he taught me in this life were invaluable. He taught me to be proud of who I am. He taught me that no one was better than I was, and that no amount of education in their fancy classrooms would make that so. That as long as I always kept learning, in whatever capacity that was…I would always be valid and merited. He imparted upon me a blueprint for everything I was to become in later years. Proud, kind, intelligent, witty and wise…a complicated, multifaceted man, a born storyteller with a mischievous gleam in his eye…that’s the man I remember.

I spent two of the more surreal months of my life when I was about 10 years old at a commune in the woods of Tennessee (near to Nashville) that my mother, brother and I hitchhiked to one late spring day in 1979. 

My mother had probably heard about the community from either High Times Magazine (A monthly publication about the culture, politics, uses and cultivation of cannabis and marijuana) or The Whole Earth Catalog (a twice yearly catalog that came out in the late 60s/early 70s and contained a world of self-empowering knowledge, a paper forerunner to the internet)…she liked its ethos and decided to strike out for it and see what it was all about for herself.    

My mom has always been a free wheeling sort of spirit who dances to her own tune, strong-willed and independent. We had been on the lam from her second husband, a high-tempered, pill-popping mortician and she figured that was one place where he would never find us. It would give her time to get her head together and it would, hopefully, be a peaceful environment for her and us kids.

We set off on the trip with three Greyhound bus tickets that my mom had managed to scrim and scrape up the money for in the previous months to go from the sleepy Arkansas town we lived in to a bus station in Nashville. I believe things had come to a fever pitch point that day during one of the many vicious arguments my mom and stepfather so often had and so, because of that, we had to leave that same day after coming home from school with next to no money in our pockets, something like .38 cents that my brother and I had between us; leftover lunch money.

I remember being scared of what would happen, although by then I was used to volatility and never being able to count on things being the way they should. In those days things were never on an even keel, never stable or dependable. It seemed like I had just settled into a routine at my school, just made friends, and now I wasn't even going to be able to say goodbye.

So we left the house that day with not much more than the clothes on our backs. The bus ride was a bit disconcerting I seem to recall, just a bunch of 'down and outs' really, riding along with us. We were a bit ragged around the edges when we finally pulled in to the bus stop in Nashville. My mother had gotten as far with her planning as to get us to the station, but she didn't have a clue about what to do after that. So she finally just decided that we would hitchhike the rest of the way out to the commune, and that's what we did.

One man who picked us up ran a little roadside café several miles out of Nashville between the bus station and where we were going. He lived in a mobile home out in the back of the café. He brought us back there and fed us a meal of eggs and sausage and gave us cots to sleep on for the night. We eventually struck off again the next morning and this time we were brought in the rest of the way to our destination uneventfully by a kindly trucker.

At the first sight of the commune I knew this was going to be a place that was unlike anything I'd ever seen before. It is called The Farm (and it still exists today as an Ecovillage/Permaculture, albeit in a much smaller, lower key incarnation than when I was there). Located in Summertown, TN. the village was founded in 1971 by Stephen Gaskin (a sort of spiritual guru) and 320 other hippies from California as a spiritual, earth-based community. They traveled in a caravan of 60 buses, vans and tracks on a speaking tour across the country until they decided on Tennessee as the place they wanted to settle down. So they bought several hundred acres out in the middle of nowhere and did just that.

Back when we lived there it was still in its thriving stages with probably near to a 1000 people living there. Today I believe it only has a population of a little over 300. From a distance it was hard to tell the girls from the boys and men from women as everyone sported long hair. 

The place was self-contained and self-sustaining and included a tofu plant, a mill, a clinic, a midwifery service, bakery, laundromat, school and even an outdoor theater. I remember the first time I ever saw Stars Wars was on The Farm with several other commune children. We walked across the dark fields at night to get to the theater, which was located in the middle of another vast field. Walking home wasn't as much fun since I was scared of Chewbacca and expected him to leap put of a ditch at me in the darkness. I didn't care that he was supposed to be a "good guy". He was hairy and ugly and made guttural noises that freaked me out.

Some of the families there lived in old school buses that were refurbished, but we were lucky…the house that my family and I stayed in was an old farmhouse that belonged to a couple named David and Joan. They had a couple of kids of their own and we all managed the space the best we could. Morning meals were usually made up of homemade tortillas and beans as The Farm residents were strictly vegetarians. Dinner was normally some sort of tofu dish.

There was a Sweet Potato festival one day in the summer in an open field and it was a huge celebration…people dancing all around and gorging on sweet potato pie. Us kids were climbing all around an old pile of lumber and I stepped down hard on a board with a rusty nail and ended up in the commune's emergency room getting a tetanus shot that night.

We only stayed there for a couple of months I seem to recall. I'm not sure why we left really, except maybe that my mom went back to my stepfather or, as a smoker, she couldn't deal with the fact that they didn't allow tobacco on the farm, or maybe, as a lifelong carnivore she missed her meat since they were vegetarians, but I do remember back on my time there fondly.

I've since learned that The Farm holds an important place in history by being the most famous and longest running commune the US has ever had. It feels important somehow to have been a part of that history in some small way. I did agree with a lot of the creeds and mottos they lived by, although I do remember upon leaving the first thing we did was  hit up a Kentucky Fried Chicken and proceed to eat the hugest portion of fried chicken legs ever!

We went to see Built To Spill in Notthingham last night...

First of all, let me state for the record that Nottingham is evil incarnate. I abhor that place with a passion unrivaled. We get to the city to, yep!, you guessed it, promptly proceed to get lost. Not only did we get lost, but we almost got killed twice and almost killed once! Please allow me to explain...

The place is like a labyrinth, so convoluted that I firmly believe even cyborgs with homing chips implanted in their cerebral cortexs would have gotten confused and flustered trying to navigate that damned place. So, we drive and turn and twist and drive and never find the g'damn place we're aiming for. At one point this old Indian man walked smack dab out in front of us past this parked lorry. He's lucky I was quick on the draw with my brakes or he would have been road toast. He jerked his head up real fast with a look of terror and disbelief at our car barrelling down on him. So that was near miss one, but the fun just keeps on coming...wait for it...

So now we get back into the city centre for something like the 3rd time and I miss what we imagine to be our turn, so I turn down a side alley and try to hit the road we want, only some effing dumbass on the road committee decides it'd probably be amusing to exclude a sign cluing me in that I'm about to turn down the wrong way on a one way street with 4 lanes of traffic hurling toward me at a breakneck pace...so I'm on said four lane road going the wrong way when I happen to see this guy flashing his lights at me like a maniac and pointing the opposite direction, so, once again my quick reflexes are to the rescue...I see shitloads of traffic head-oning towards us and so I slam my gears in reverse and race backwards into the little side street that was, thank god, right behind and to the left of me, just in time for traffic to rush past us shaking their heads, no doubt cursing the stupid American.

So then we're driving again and come out on a merge, we happen to be in a lane that wasn't marked as having to merge in any way shape or form before you're actually in the lane of oncoming traffic, ah, the good old road crew again...they love me! So, the slamming on of brakes commenced a split second before pulling right out in front of tons of fast moving cars.

Did I mention I hate that city?

Well, by then I was a nervous wreck and we weren't anywhere closer to our destination, so we said 'fuck it'...we're just going to park in a city centre parking garage and get a cab from there...so that's exactly what we did.

One thing really made my night though...before the show started I saw Doug Martsch, lead singer and guitarist for Built To Spill...so I went over (like the cheeky monkey that y'all know I am)...and talked to him for awhile. They've been one of my favorite bands for 10 years, no way was I gonna see him standing there and NOT say hello. So we talked for probably 5 minutes or so. I didn't have anything earth shatteringly cool to say to him or anything (didn't really have time to formulate anything) and he's a bit shy, so we just basically shot the shit about England (he thinks the food is bland, so I told him to try some steak and ale pie and some sticky toffee pudding). I told him about our band and he wanted to know the name of it. Just stuff like that really. He was an extremely cool guy and I even got a hug afterwards!! It really did make my night, it was strange to meet someone in the flesh that's meant a lot to me musically for all these years. 

For some reason the opening band didn't show up! Go figure...and so one of the guitarists for Built To Spill came out and did a couple of songs. Then the band came on and just owned the stage. The are so, so amazing.

We've determined that from now on we're going to do what we did yesterday and just go straight to a car park and cab it in to wherever we're going there. Yeah, so it cost us a tenner round trip, but it was worth it not to deal with all the stress. Amazing, amazing musicians...the just leave your mouth hanging open...every one of them...three guitarists, a bassist and drummer. We got right up front. It was worth all the bullshit we had to go through beforehand.