I bought a copy of Whose Boat Is This Boat? and contributed to helping people and areas hit hard by Hurricanes Florence and Michael. The creators and publisher of the book are donating 100% of the proceeds via the various organizations working with hurricane victims and devastated areas: Foundation for the Carolinas, One SC Relief Fund, North Carolina Disaster Relief Fund, World Central Kitchen, and Florida Disaster Relief Fund.
This week, Stephen Colbert made a big announcement about how much purchasers of the book have contributed to the relief cause in this fun way:
I thought I’d wander back through diaries that I kept on and off for several years and see what I could find with today’s date, 6 December. I found a couple: one from 1977 and one from 1981. Both are back in my Trekkie days, which were, admittedly, not fanatically so. I liked the show but didn’t let it take over my life. I called my diary Captain’s Log and used a few different dating systems, both of which are translated with the transcriptions below. I’m going to try not to edit the writing, so that my mistakes in spelling and grammar stand.
Captain’s Log: 120.677 [December 6, 1977]
It’s 8:00 AM and snowing. It really looks good. I told Phil on Saturday that it was gonna snow today. I hope to pass all of my tests and go to ballgame tonight. At the ballgame I hope to see Madison beat Reynolds and Leesa. . . . Lord, be my guide this day
Captain’s Log: Supplimental
Today has ended rather boring, but well. I made 84 on my Math 110 test so I’m out of there with an 87.
It continued snowing and freezing the rest of the day so the games were called (I didn’t get to see Leesa). We all sat around tonight listening to music then watching “Houston, We’ve Got a Problem” . . . . God be praised!!!
My Mars Hill College ID Card
Okay, so I was a first-semester freshman music major (flute) at Mars Hill College when I wrote this. I was living on campus in Spilman Hall. My roommate was Johnny Sawyer, with whom I’d grown up in Walnut. He was hardly ever there, so it was like having a private room. The Phil mentioned is Phil Shuford, who lived across the hall with his roommate Yogi Something. I don’t know where Yogi is, but Phil lives in Ozark, Missouri. We’re friends on Facebook. The math course I reference was an early computer course, in which we learned to create those punched cards that were the apps of 1977. And in those MHC days, Leesa was in my heart and mind but not with me. She’d begun her career at Creative Hair Design in Asheville and was working hard to build a clientele and support herself and Lane, who was seventeen months old at the time.
Captain’s Log Stardate 8112.06 [December 6, 1981]
As seems almost usual for me on Sunday morning, I woke up ill at the world. The Lord knows how hard it is for me to get up before 11 AM. I almost decided not to go to church, like every Sunday, thinking that I got nothing from the small, country service. Then I realised, as always, that they are my people and, even though I may get nothing from the service but seeing them and feeling their friendship, that is enough. Then I also come face-to-face with the fact that the singing I dread with such passion is for them and not for me, and that, being graciously given the gift from God, it is my duty to sing for them. It should also be my desire to do so. Well, Allen met me at the door asking if what he heard about me signing with Capitol was true and he was followed closely by Butch asking the same. I quickly gave them my practiced explanation about Townhouse but they were still pleased. When time for me to sing came around, as I was getting my guitar, Raymond spoke up about my struggles with my music and my witness for the church and my hopefully impending record deal. Then totally unexpectedly he suggested a standing ovation for me and I was overwhelmed. If it is not the Lord’s will for me that this all go through all right, He sure is planning to teach me a great lesson in disappointment. Even at that, though, this morning was a great blessing, and I am very thankful for all those people there.
As far as my music and my career go, I am constantly trying to ask with a sincere heart that the Father’s Will be done and not my own. I could live with losing this deal but not with going against His plans for me.
Oh, in church I sang “A SONG FOR CAROLINA” and “DEAR MOTHER”.
The rest of the day was the usual big chicken dinner and lazy Sunday afternoon. I did, however, add music to and edit some lyrics I wrote last night called “DO YOU EVER MISS ME”
We practiced for the Christmas program this evening then I returned home to watch “YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN” on the tube.
As always it is quite late as I write this so I’ll sign off for now…MC…”Dear Mother, I know He’ll come again”
I’d left Mars Hill College two years before, December 1979, in the middle of my junior year, and transferred to Belmont College in Nashville for the spring semester of 1980, to study music business. But it was too much business and not enough music, so I stayed only one semester before transferring to UNC-Asheville–as an English major–for half the fall semester of that year before quitting altogether. I lived at home in Walnut, writing songs and playing solo at different events and venues around the area. I had a manager named Ron Weathers, who worked out of Asheville, and we’d spent some time in Nashville, where Earl Richards recorded my songs for his publishing and production companies. Earl had cut a deal with Townhouse Records, which was distributed by Capitol Records, and my first album was in the works.
The Townhouse/Capitol thing eventually fell through. Although I probably still have the lyric somewhere, I don’t remember anything about “Do You Ever Miss Me”; most likely it was a Leesa lyric. I remember singing “A Song for Carolina” at a couple of big events, one of which was the ceremony in Raleigh, North Carolina, celebrating Liston B. Ramsey’s ascension to Speaker of the state’s House of Representatives, but again, I remember little about it. “Dear Mother” I still perform now and then.
I shouldn’t begin with the punchline to this story, but it’s popped into my mind more than once in the past few months as this perceived-to-be-significant birthday has been on the horizon. I was in Nashville, hanging out at Bullet Recording Studio with Earl Richards, jb, and a band called Dreamer. Earl was stripping my vocals and some of the instrumentation from my “Thunder and Lightning” and adding steel guitar and a couple of other countrified additions to go with Dreamer’s vocals, remaking the song into a country record. It was the wee hours, maybe two o’clock in the morning, and Dreamer was hungry. Earl thought up an order and asked me to go down to Krystal on West End for some cheap eats.
So, I made the short trip and walked up to the counter, where a short woman, probably in her 30s awaited my order. She wore the company headgear of those days (which might not be the same as pictured here). Her black hair was escaping whatever means she was using to try and contain it. And when she smiled her welcome, she was missing her two top front teeth.
“Can I help you?” she asked, at the ready to take my order.
“Yeah, I’d like sixty Krystals, ple–“
“Thixty!?!” she exclaimed, squinting up at me.
It’s a funny memory, and I’ve often shared it with friends over the years. Her expression has faded somewhat now, but I can still hear the way she said — or sprayed — sixty. And as I’ve been approaching my 60th birthday, I’ve heard that funny exclamation often, and I find myself thinking it–not only in relation to that number of the little gut bombs but also to my years on Earth–with something of the same surprise and shock she must’ve felt when I started my order.
November 25, 1958, 1:57 AM, the hospital at Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter, South Carolina.
We lived in Sumter for a couple of years, I think, before moving to Fayetteville, North Carolina, for a couple more and then “home” to Walnut.
From zero to sixty in ever accelerating years . . .
November is a problematic month for me. I lost both my father and father-in-law in separate Novembers. But at least it has Thanksgiving, perhaps the best and least commercialized of the major holidays in these United States of America. And November has my birthday, although I’m finding that increasingly problematic as well.
As my computer counts down to 1:57 AM on November 25, 2918, I’m in South Carolina again. In Charleston this time, the Holy City, with Leesa. Nothing could be finer.
I’m sure I thought I would write a lot more than this on such a momentous occasion, but it’s practically two o’clock in the morning, for crying out loud! And I’m now sixty years old!
So, it’s late on Sunday, 11 November 2018, Veteran’s Day in the United States of America. The most important veteran that I celebrate today is my father, Plumer Jean Cody, who served in the Air Force from early in the 1950s — maybe even from ’48 or ’49 — into the early 1960s. His service was probably the most significant individual experience in his life, and before he, at sixty-five years old, walked on into the next world on 7 November 1996, twenty-two years ago, he and Mom had begun attending reunions of the 602nd Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron, Birkenfeld, Germany. He was really enjoying those reunions.
On the twenty-second anniversary of his leaving us, I was reading the 7 November entry from A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals. That day’s reading is titled “Working for Peace.” Here’s what Merton wrote on 12 November 1961, less than two weeks before I turned three years old and sometime near the period when Dad retired from the Air Force and we moved our mobile home from Trailer Town in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to the end of the long yard at the Reeves homeplace in Walnut:
I must pray more and more for courage, as I certainly have neither the courage nor the strength to follow the path that is certainly my duty now.
With the fears and rages that possess so many confused people, if I say things that seem to threaten their interests or conflict with obsessions, then I will surely get it.
It is shocking that so many are convinced that the Communists are about to invade or destroy America: “Christians” who think the only remedy is to destroy them first. Who thinks seriously of disarming? For whom is it more than a pious wish, beyond the bounds of practicality?
I need patience to listen, to learn, to try to understand, and courage to take all the consequences and be really faithful. This alone is a full-time job. I dread it, but it must be done, and I don’t quite know how. To save my soul by trying to be one of those who spoke and worked for peace, not for madness and destruction.
November 12, 1961, IV.179
Although I didn’t write in Gabriel’s Songbook about a military man like my dad, I’ve begun to adapt rumors, legends, and stories heard about Dad’s time in the Air Force into other pieces I’m writing. Although I’m not a poet, here are the closing lines from a poem I wrote about him:
That night he shed his life like Wednesday’s dirty clothes
On Tuesday the 16th of October, I posted a challenge of Facebook, and it looked like this:
I agreed with Thom Kirkpatrick when he wrote, “I wish 1000 people would respond to this.” But just a few stepped up. I appreciated them for doing so, because I was interested in how the choices would turn out.
I guess the results are, in one way, not surprising — given that many on my list of friends tend to be more liberal. (I was surprised, however, that only a couple of my closest followers responded at all.) I made a quick count of the results: three for A; four for B; nineteen for C; and a handful who made alternate choices, typically between B and C.
I thought that those who responded would like to know where the three choices came from, if they didn’t know already.
Choice A is paraphrased from the GOP’s web site, specifically here.
Choice B is paraphrased from the DNC’s web site, specifically here.
my reading of late, particularly in and about the middle of the nineteenth century, suggests to me that our country has been just as seriously divided — if not more so — at other times as it is now. But I must say that we have never been under the influence of a man so ignorant, arrogant, and self-absorbed as our forty-fifth president.
I really liked this book, which my aunt gave me for either birthday or Christmas a couple of years ago. She saw the phrase “SOUTHERN GOTHIC THRILLER” on the back and thought I’d enjoy it. She was right.
I enjoy reading works set in the area where I grew up. Madison County in western North Carolina has a rich history and is an interesting socio-cultural stew today, and writers can do a lot with it. Terry Roberts has done a lot with it. The representation of Barnard resonates well with my memories of many trips there via bicycle and car from my ancestral home in Walnut. Big Pine and Hot Springs and the wooded MadCo hollers are also so familiar that I found myself easily able to be present with the characters.
And I enjoyed those characters, particularly the women, May June Washington and Sarah Freeman, both of whom come alive in the reading imagination. Jacob Ballard has an engaging voice and, like many Madison County voices, tells a fine story. The parade of interesting mountain folk was vivid and reminded me, in a good way, of those who come and go throughout Fred Chappell’s wonderful I AM ONE OF YOU FOREVER.
But Roberts’s story is his own in THAT BRIGHT LAND. It’s a good mystery, a touching love story, and a well-imagined historical fiction.
I’ve been reading from A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals, which is filled with beautiful, contemplative, sometimes playful writing. But just now I ran across something typically brilliant and insightful but unexpectedly blunt. He wrote the following on 9 September 1961:
I fear the ignorance and power of the United States. And the fact that it has quite suddenly become one of the most decadent societies on the face of the earth. The body of a great, dead, candied child. Yet not dead: full of immense, uncontrolled power. Crazy.
If somebody doesn’t understand the United State pretty soon–and communicate some of that understanding to the United States–the results will be terrible. It is no accident that the United States endowed the world with the Bomb.
The mixture of immaturity, size, apparent indulgence and depravity, with occasional spasms of guilt, power, self-hate, pugnacity, lapsing into wildness and then apathy, hopped up and wild-eyed, inarticulate and wanting to be popular. You need a doctor, Uncle!
The exasperation of the other nations of the world who know the United States thinks them jealous–for what they don’t want and yet what fascinates them. Exasperation that such fools should be momentarily kings of the world. Exasperation at them for missing their great chance–this everyone finds unforgivable, including America itself. And yet what held the United States back was a spasm of that vestigial organ called conscience. Unfortunately not a sufficiently educated conscience. The conscience of a ten-year-old boy, unsure of his parents’ standards–not knowing where approval or disapproval might come from!
I think Merton probably wrote this in response to the news of 4 September 1961, when the U.S. founded its Agency for International Development (USAID). Certainly it doesn’t sound like such a bad thing. And I’m sure that it seemed like a good idea at the time. Ultimately, this agency intended to reduce poverty and grow economies in impoverished parts of the world. This seems like a really nice thing to do, except for the fact that it wasn’t an altruistic drive. The idea was not foremost to help those countries to realize their own social, political, and economic aspirations but to replicate U.S. social, political, and economic entities in order, on the one hand, to create markets for U.S. exports and, on the other hand, to cockblock the U.S.S.R. and the spread of communism.
The reality, however, is probably that USAID actions, while doing some good on the surface, I’m sure, ultimately interacted with the ghosts of European imperialism and colonialism to inspire levels of resentment, at least in some areas, that played a significant role in the development of extremism that roared at the U.S. with the voices of weaponized airplanes on 11 September 2001.
To Merton’s “mixture” of ailments that leave Uncle Sam in need of a doctor, I would add the dangerous mixture of arrogance and ignorance.
11 September 2001 was a Tuesday. So is 11 September 2018. But the sky in 2001 was striking in its blueness. Such a beautiful, deep blue. We felt no oppressive sense of foreboding like we feel beneath gray skies while Hurricane Florence churns off the coast of the Carolinas, threatening our family and friends who live within its powerful reach. We know Florence is there, know what such a storm is capable of, know her every move as she makes it and can predict — with reasonable accuracy — what each move might lead to. But in and beneath the blue September skies of 2001, only those sitting terrified in the planes or curiously, suspiciously watching them as blips on a screen noticed the moves made, and none could predict what those moves would lead to from that day to now.
Burke briefly turns aside from his detective/mystery genre to lend his terrific prose style to a story of the Civil War (with some of his family history, I think, thrown in as well). His large cast of characters include a Southern planter, his mulatto daughter, a Massachusetts abolitionist, an Irish immigrant (Willie Burke) living in New Iberia and fighting as a Southerner, several white trash Southerners (Ku Klux Klan types), and so on. Burke manages the large cast expertly and manages to bring them all to vivid and visceral life. One of the best things about this novel is how well the time after Lee’s surrender is handled. Those post-war days were dangerous, and Burke brings that danger to life while making haunting suggestions about how life could become in the Trump-era and post-Trump-era USA.
