Some Random Thoughts

 As I write this, it is a rainy April day (I guess Al Jolson was right about "April Showers," yes?).  It is also a Saturday, which means no work and I am at home.  My usual Saturday routine is laundry and catching up on things I need to catch up on that I get to busy to do during the week, but I felt the need to just write down some thoughts.  My mind is a crazy maze of thoughts right now that needed to get out, so this is one way to show them an exit ramp.  Let's dive in and see where this goes.

For dinner today, I decided upon a sort of stew beef and gravy dish that I made up with Barbara's help on the spot.  I used a slow cooker, and after cooking the beef in a stock with onions that I later thickened after cooking it 4 hours into a gravy,  I spooned some on rice and it turned out to be a filling meal.  Eating it reminded me of Southern cuisine, something we don't see as much of here in Baltimore anymore.  Sure, there are these "soul food shacks" all over the city that are the trademark of the large Black population here, but it is not the same as the home cooking I recall from places like Fred's in Florida - I did a restaurant review on Fred's Southern Kitchen back in 2013, and just to give a little recap on it, the restaurant was started in the 1940s I believe in Plant City by the Johnson family, and it actually sprouted two franchises.  The larger one, Buddy Freddy's, was also a decent buffet but is now defunct.  The founder of that, Buddy Johnson, also created a good cookbook of the place I would love to get my hands on but it is no longer that easy to find.  The second and more local restaurant, Fred's Southern Kitchen, was founded by another Johnson brother, Fred.  That one ended up with eventually a dozen locations across central Florida, although at this juncture I think there are four of them left.  The food at Fred's was comforting, and perhaps some of the most authentic Southern cuisine I had ever eaten - they were noted for their delicious fried chicken, as well as the best fried green tomatoes, but they also had another dish I was crazy about - the smoked sirloin.  The cooking method for that was in a large smokehouse, where a whole sirloin of beef was slow-roasted and then sliced thin in an au jus type stock, and it was delicious, especially over white rice.  The beef dish today made me think of that for some reason, which is why I felt like talking about it.  It is that type of "stick to your ribs" food that satisfies and just gives a good feeling to eat, especially on a rainy day like it is today outside here.  I miss that sometimes, as I used to cook a lot more than I do now - the place I currently live in is very temporary and I don't feel as at ease in the kitchen as I did our old place years ago.  I need to get back to cooking again, especially the creation of good recipes that I come up with from the top of my head - I am planning soon to publish those in a book once everything really settles, and I now just want to talk about that good kitchen feeling.

Back years ago, my dream kitchen was one where I lived in a house with a wraparound porch, and in that kitchen which I imagined painted in lemon-yellow inside I imagined also good food - fried chicken, yellow cake with chocolate icing, and just a place that smelled so good that it was inviting.  I imagined a radio playing my favorite music in that kitchen, and cooking with my wife some sumptuous meals in it.  That was the dream, and it was based on a number of cobbled memories I had - my granny's house when I was a kid, movies like Fried Green Tomatoes, and the Florida Cracker culture I was so interested in at the time. I guess to some degree at heart I have a Southern soul, but just don't admit it - I am, after all, half-Southern as that was my dad's roots, and I guess that sort of carried with me even today.  However, the Appalachian culture I grew up around was similar in many respects as well, and I wanted to talk about that now.

A few years back, I came across a young man in Virginia named Caleb Campbell.  Caleb was a remarkable and very intelligent kid, and when he was in his early teens he decided to build his own little church in the woods in behind his parents' house near Rose Hill, VA.  Now a young man in his early 20s, Caleb has become quite the genealogist, and has even published two of his own books - that is pretty impressive for his age in all honesty, and I gotta admit that I am both proud and envious of him at the same time.  Recently, he also has a YouTube channel, and he is doing some very interesting videos about his family's ancestral home, which I believe he is starting to restore - it is actually quite fascinating to watch, and to see how lovingly and thoroughly he details his own roots is perhaps one of the most inspirational things I have seen in a long time.  Caleb is also going to college now if I remember right, and he is a very intelligent young man with a stellar work ethic and he will go far I believe.  I look at Caleb, with whom I have also had the privilege to talk to on occasion, and he is the son I wish I would have had myself - his parents though are good, godly people too, and they raised him well, and I have gotten to know them a little too.  People like the Campbells are the backbone of a region, and the world needs more like them too. Caleb's video work is one of the reasons why I am writing today, because he sort of touched something inside me I haven't felt in a while, and that I really missed.  When I look at him, I see the kid I was when I was 22 years old, just prior to being married, and I perhaps have more in common with him than probably both of us realize.  And, that leads me to a couple of other observations.

The high school I work at is part of a network of schools that focus on inner-city minority youth who are also lower-income.  While that is good, there are some things I think about with this which draw upon my own experience from when I was a lower-income son of a single mother.  Many of these networks tend to focus on inner-city youth - nothing wrong with that - but they often just forget that there are also poor underprivileged rural kids who would probably appreciate certain opportunities like a work-study program even more.  It seems like today while everyone likes crying "racism" over things that may not actually be racist, the only acceptable group it seems to get racial slurs and stereotypes are poor mountain Whites.  The small towns of the Appalachians and Ozarks are perhaps some of the most underserved communities in the country, and when there is some outreach effort, it is often conducted by individuals who want to belittle and shame the local people as being somehow "stupid" or "slow" for preserving their own folkways.  The late Appalachian scholar Dr. Loyal Jones, a man I consider to be a great influence on me, called such "crusaders" by another name - "agents of uplift."  Though it sounds like a noble label, it is not meant to be - the term is roughly equivalent to the "carpetbagger" of the post-Civil War South in that they are not there to improve lives, but rather to replace culture. The very bad liberties some of these same activists allow for Blacks and others (for instance, they say that Blacks calling each other the n-word is a "cultural thing," although I don't know of any positive cultural trait that encourages a person to be a jackass) are not even considered for the Appalachian communities - indeed, it is a form of leftist colonialism disguised as "humanitarian," and the inconsistency of the attitudes of such people is not lost on many Appalachian people themselves - they can see right through it.  Imagine if these same activists tried to impose "civilized culture" on the Black communities in Baltimore - it would cause a civil war!  Yet, it seems OK to denigrate and belittle rural people for some reason, especially in the Appalachian region.  I am reminded of a line in the movie called Sweet Home Alabama, in which Josh Lucas's character Jake tells his citified estranged wife the following line - "Just because we talk slow down here don't mean we're stupid."  Indeed, a little "country" drawl is not an intellectual handicap - I admittedly talk with one myself, and it has been noted here too in the city.  Some of the best and brightest people in recent history were people who talked with that "country accent," one of note being the esteemed Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana.  Senator Kennedy is someone I both enjoy listening to but at the same time I highly respect.  His folksy approach is like a camouflaged rattlesnake - it looks cute and harmless, but it has a bite!  If you ever watch his Senate hearings, often when he questions someone he can be utterly disarming - he often opens an inquiry with a line like you'd hear in a casual conversation in a general store - "How ya doin' today sir?  The weather been good in your neck of the woods?"  After he disarms the person he is questioning, then he lines up the kill shot with amazing accuracy, and the unsuspecting person to whom the question is directed doesn't know what hit them!  You have to appreciate and love that, because it is brilliant and masterful strategy.  Again, the lesson here is don't mistake a slow country drawl for idiocy - you may regret that later.  I also think of "redneck comedy" like Larry the Cable Guy and Bill Engvall (and of course legends like Jeff Foxworthy and Lewis Grizzard). The Bill Engvall "Here's Your Sign" shtick is perhaps one of the most clever comedic routines out there, because it highlights the fact that often if you try to "act sophisticated" you end up looking like a fool (the "sign" referred to in Engvall's monologues is a "Stupid" sign).  It's some pretty simple stuff too, and its wit will make you actually think "ohh yeah!! I get it now!"  The lesson here?  Never underestimate those of us who come from the "hills and hollers" of Appalachia or elsewhere - we're not as dumb as you think!  

As we end the school year and I see the inner-city kids who are about to graduate at the school where I teach, I know many of them because they were my students last year when they were juniors.  Being I know them, I can say this - there are some bright stars among them, but there are also a lot of kids that probably should not be graduating either.  Many of them, as seniors in high school, don't have the grade-level written and oratory skills they should have, and it is the way they are taught unfortunately.  Many of them are passed just because they are disruptive and the teachers don't want the headaches anymore of dealing with them - that is a horrible situation to be in for a teacher too.   Then, I think back to what I was learning in high school when I was a senior almost 40 years ago now in a small West Virginia town - my senior year coursework included 3rd-year German, 1st-year Latin, college-prep English, algebra, and half a semester each of Humanities and Driver's Ed.  I did very well in my final semester in all honesty, and I still use that knowledge today.  The seniors today at the school where I teach are not so fortunate - many of the AP classes are even dumbed-down to the point where you would almost have to be completely lazy not to pass, yet many still fail.  This is hard to compute for me in all honesty, and I also see that in the public schools in Baltimore as well - this is not good.  We are raising a generation of self-absorbed, functionally illiterate inner-city kids, and many of them will get acceptance letters to colleges, but few of them will successfully complete a higher degree.  It is tragic, and it also contributes to another type of urban blight - that of shiftless young people getting ensnared by drugs, and many young Black men ending up with a host of "baby mamas" who have offspring they don't take responsibility for.  If they kept certain things in their pants and used their brains more, it would be of great benefit to the cities in this country.  I see this, and then have to chuckle at the fact that many of the "experts" in education think that Appalachian small-town kids are dumb, but then they ignore this.  I have some more to say on that I will tackle later, as I have a future article I am gearing up for, but we'll do that at another time.

I think that gets some of the mental clutter organized in my mind for today, so thanks for enduring the ramblings of an aging Gen-Xer who also happens to be a proud Appalachian-American with a Ph.D. title after my name.  See you next time.