Some Reflections Today

As of recent date, I have just recently finished reading a book entitled Can't Make This Stuff Up by author Susannah B. Lewis.   In reading how she writes things, I was sort of inspired to begin to spontaneously write some off-the-wall stuff on my blog about my own experiences, which is why I started this whole thing in the first place.  Trying to do this is some major work though, as much goes on inside my own cranial chamber, and therefore I thought it best to just go with it and see what happens.  So, where do we begin today?

Yesterday was April 24th, which is a significant day of the year for me as it marks the commemoration of one of the greatest tragedies of the last century, that being the 1915 Genocide committed by the Turks against the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian peoples.  I inundated my Facebook page yesterday with posts about it, as awareness of this tragedy is something that needs to be emphasized, and also that our US government needs to formally recognize (which, as of yet, it has failed to do - despite the many good things Trump has done in his time in office, I am disappointed in him for this one).  One of the things I posted that captured my own attention was a very beautiful commissioned icon that was created to memorialize the Armenian victims of this atrocity, and I want to share that here now:

I really hope I can find a copy of this at some point on wood, as it is an icon that I need to have.  I have worked with Armenian and Assyrian people for over 32 years now, and the Genocide has become a pivotal issue with me - if you are stupid enough to downplay or deny it, you and I will have issues, I guarantee it!  Let us, therefore, remember the 3 million people who were massacred over 104 years ago in this atrocity, and it is my hope that articles like mine here will bring awareness of this to many people so that the memory of those innocents who were martyred will continue to live on.

On a less serious note though, let's talk about some things today.  Having grown up in rural northeastern West Virginia, I had one of those precocious childhoods in which I am remembered in amusing stories that are retold every time a group of my relatives gathers somewhere.  I was a rather unique child by many standards - I was a finicky eater, I loved to catch all sorts of critters and such from at least the time I was six, and I also had an imagination which proved to be a valuable ally during some rough times in my younger years.  The imagination, in particular, was fed by an avid appreciation for reading.  After all, I was the kid that many of my classmates remembered as reading an entire set of World Book Encyclopedias through at least 3 times when I was in 5th and 6th grades.  I was also the kid who, as early as 10 years old, was reading some hefty material - my mother had books on the Jonestown tragedy that happened around that time, as well as a book about the fact that Hitler was a mentally-ill psychopath (Robert G.L. Waite's book Adolf Hitler - The Psychopathic God, which was published in 1977), and a large cookbook entitled Cooking for Everyday Life that I inherited from my late step-grandmother when she passed on to her eternal reward in 1979.  I also got ideas to build forts from reading my grandfather's hunting books on duck blinds and such, and I would actually read my elementary school history textbooks for fun.  Add to that a ton of old magazines we managed to obtain from people who just gave them away, and I was able to enrich myself intellectually quite well at a young age.  Of course, in the small town of Kirby, WV, where I spent the latter half of my childhood as well as my early adolescence, there was not a lot to do, and compounded with the fact that we were poor (my mom raised me by herself, and we subsisted on about a hundred dollars monthly from my dad for child support as well as food stamps and the local Community Action taking care of our housing and utilities, so there was not much left to do anything leisurely), I had to find creative ways to occupy my time.  This reading, accentuated by tramping around in the woods near our house looking for all sorts of wild foraged things such as tiny small wild strawberries, huckleberries, wild garlic, and other such stuff, as well as my Sunday night radio listening when I started to develop my affinity for vintage big band recordings, rounded out my life in those simple times.   We didn't even have a television then, and this was a few years before even VCR technology caught on, so you made do with what you had.  And, that leads to a few further reflections.

When you reflect back on your past, there are two feelings that emerge simultaneously (at least they do for me).  One is this feeling of "how could I live like that??" which is a cross between revulsion and despair, and the other feeling is a fond recollection of certain things that are more specific.  The coming together of those two divergent states of mind can create a sort of mental (and even emotional) tornado that can at times be overwhelming.  It is dealing with that sort of thing that has led to my own interest in expressing myself in the written word, which I seem to do better than speaking aloud sometimes (although many of these meditations are often inspired by a session of self-directed speech - that is talking to yourself, for those not familiar - and over the years I admittedly have spent a lot of time doing that!).  As I write this now, one of those memories comes to light now that I probably have talked about before, but it is time to put it into a narrative perspective maybe for those who haven't heard me talk about it.

The year was 1981, and it is summer in the little town of Kirby, WV.  It is also around 10 PM on a Sunday night, and I am sitting at our kitchen table in our mobile home.  Our little mobile home faced our landlord's corn patch to the north, and our kitchen window was on the north end of the little blue-and-white mobile home we lived in for about 6 years.  Summers were rather nice in that area, and on that particular Sunday night I have both kitchen windows (one faced north and the other east) opened, and a light breeze is blowing through that is both comforting and invigorating.  At our kitchen table, I am sitting there with a book listening to Henry Boggan start his Sunday night radio show on WBT-AM out of Charlotte, NC, and the only light in the kitchen is the light over our gas range.  Mom has long gone to bed, having been sedated from the six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon she consumed some hours earlier, and I am at the table nibbling on a bag of Utz Sour Cream and Onion Chips while sipping on a warm cup of sugar-laden instant coffee lightened with Carnation creamer.  Coffee is something I have actually been drinking since I was about five years old, and at almost 50 I still enjoy a good cup to this day, although now it is flavored with one of those specialty non-dairy creamers you can get readily at the supermarket (I am partial to blueberry flavored or Italian sweet cream, although the cup I had earlier this morning had Reese's Peanut Butter Cup flavored creamer, which is actually quite good despite the imagery).  At one point when I was in 4th grade, I even got in trouble at lunchtime for carrying coffee in my thermos.  At some point in Henry's program, he plays a song I like - it was either Stan Kenton's 1946 recording of Artistry Jumps, or Sinatra's stellar rendition of "I've Got You Under My Skin," with Count Basie's orchestra swinging nicely in that classic 1967 concert Sinatra and Basie made at the Sands in Las Vegas, or maybe it was that landmark Benny Goodman recording of Moonlight on the Ganges (the late 1940's Eddie Sauter arrangement) that turned me onto this music in the first place.  As I sit here thinking about that now, the lyrics of another Sinatra classic sum up that night well for me, the song being The Summer Wind:

The summer wind, comes blowing in, from across the sea;

It lingered there, to touch your hair, and walk with me;

All summer long we sang a song and then we strolled that golden sand;

Two sweethearts and the summer wind.

That same feeling would come again in the summer of 1989, when I graduated high school and was spending that summer at my dad's in Brunswick, GA.  The reason it inspired me then was that I often got to spend evenings fishing on the pier at St. Simon's Island and those were fun times as well.  The haunting chords of that organ in the original Sinatra recording along with the smooth Nelson Riddle orchestra in the background creates a mood - it literally speaks summer.  And, for some reason, when I think summer, I think about that old trailer kitchen in Kirby, WV, sitting at our table illumined by the diminutive light of that stove lamp, listening to classic big band recordings interspersed with Henry Boggan's voice while sipping overly-sugared instant coffee and munching on Utz potato chips.  It was a time when we were poor, but life was simpler and good to a degree.  It is these type of things that are brought to mind while I write this now, and that leads me down yet another rabbit trail.

In my adult years, life has gotten overly complicated - I have to deal with work, earning a doctoral degree, and also making sure I interact with my wife to whom I have been married now almost 27 years.  The reflection time I once had no longer exists, but there are days I long for it.  It would be nice to listen to either Henry Boggan or to Chuck Cecil and his Swingin' Years program, while just sitting there at a cozy kitchen table sipping coffee and either reading or doing something creative.  A part of me misses that luxury honestly.  When I started to amass a huge record collection in my early teens (thanks to 25-cent old LP's I could pick up at the Rio Mall in the nearby town of Rio then - the place is still open today incidentally, and still has quarter records!) I would often take other nights of the week to listen to whole albums while in my room, and that could be an all-night adventure if I got a new one of those Reader's Digest boxed sets in the mail!  I still have a lot of those old LP's today, and my extensive CD collection has most of their content on a more upgraded technology now.  I really do miss those days, and they are not something I can even share with Barbara because honestly (and God love her) she doesn't have the attention span or perspective to appreciate it.  On occasion when I try to introduce her to that world, she is fussing, talking off-topic, and other stuff, and it proves to be distracting as well as killing the mood.  Some things are better enjoyed by oneself, in other words, and even our beloved spouses cannot fully grasp their significance to our own lives, as it is generally a part of our lives that precedes them so they cannot relate well with it.  Luckily, I can still have those moments on occasion, and they are deeply savored. 

I hope to share more stuff like this in the coming months, as it is time I do so.  Thanks to Susannah Lewis and her top-notch writing, it has challenged me to explore that myself.  And, it is time I start trying to creatively articulate these old memories and thoughts in such a way as they can be endearing to others (or aggravating, depending upon who reads this stuff!).  I hope to do more of these forays down memory lane in the near future and hope you will indulge me to read these ramblings as I share them.  Thanks again, and hope to see you again soon.