Words & Music by . . .

On September 1, 1989, we didn’t have a wedding rehearsal. We opted, instead, for a cookout with our friends and family, which we held in the yard at the Reeves/Cody homeplace in Walnut. I won’t try to name everybody who was there, but we had a goodly crowd made up of folks from North Carolina, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan — maybe other places as well. We celebrated until past dark, at which point Leesa went home and I retired to my bedroom to finish our wedding song, which had its debut at just after 11:00 the next morning, Saturday the 2nd of September.

Phil Madeira, friend and music man from Nashville, played piano, and Leesa walked in to “Someone to Watch Over Me.” My uncle Cloice Plemmons later said that those old church walls had probably never heard the like. Then I played “Soul Mates,” the song completed less than twelve hours before. One funny problem that came up during the ceremony — a problem that a rehearsal might have fixed — was that when my uncle Mack, who officiated, asked for the rings, our older son Lane (just turned thirteen at the time) dropped four into Mack’s open palm. He stared at them for a moment, then said, “Usually at this point in the ceremony I have two rings, but now I have four. I don’t know what to do.” Everybody laughed. Leesa told him that three of the rings were hers and one was mine.

It was a great morning, followed by a great afternoon reception on Glory Ridge. Good memories of good folks and a good time. As I would later write in a wedding song for Lane,

This love has got people in it. Some are here and some are gone.

This love has got people in it. Some have stayed and some moved on.

“This Love” from the album Wonderful Life

All who’ve stayed here with us are loved. All who’ve moved on and gone are loved and missed.

Soul Mates

We have wandered across the years and miles
in search of a clear direction,
while some tangled memories maintained
a mysterious connection
to a corner of our hearts,
whether together or apart,
where love has waited patiently
from the first day of our history.
 
Soul mates,
sold out to fate—
what happens from now on
was planned before the dawn of time.
Soul mates,
so worth the wait—
each the other’s gift from heaven
like hand to glove or rhythm to rhyme.
 
Every true heart has the dream of flying
without fear of falling.
We stand on this ledge in answer
to love’s higher calling.
Gold to blue to gray
to black with night and rain—
it’s always the same big sky,
and every inch is ours to fly.
 
Soul mates,
sold out to fate—
what happens from now on
was planned before the dawn of time.
Soul mates,
so worth the wait—
each the other’s gift from heaven
like hand to glove or rhythm to rhyme.
 
When real life seems to steal the dream,
don’t let it break your heart,
though these bodies tight to this earth cling.
We can still lean back in laughter,
we can still take to the sky,
’cause these hearts have earned their wings.

I grew up in a room full of guns. The bedroom I shared with my brother in the Reeves/Cody homeplace in Walnut, North Carolina, had in it a ceramic pistol ashtray–for change and such pocket stuff:

One of the drawers in brother’s dresser held a BB pistol along the same design as the one on the ashtray. And above the twin bed in his corner, two racks held six rifles and shotguns. Often over the years when a situation called for describing the differences between him and me, I would use this description of his side of the room, contrasting it with my side, which was dominated–and characterized–by a blacklight environmental peace poster.

These days, I don’t know what my brother’s feelings are in regards to gun control, but I trusted him with his guns then and I trust him with them now. I would hope that he supports sensible measures to restrict access to guns — particularly assault rifles, which are essentially weapons of individual mass destruction — to those who are qualified to use them correctly and wisely.

And I don’t know what his feelings are about the National Rifle Association (NRA). For all I know, he’s a card-carrying member since whenever–if ever–the organization focused on what it believed to be sensible support of the 2nd Amendment. Back in the time of Charlton Heston maybe. But it’s clear to me that such support is no longer anything more than the public mask for the NRA. What it has become, I believe, beneath its mask, is little more than the puppet lobbying organization for gun manufacturers, who want no restrictions on access, not according to supposed support of 2nd Amendment rights, I believe, but according to their profits.

While I agree with those who argue that background checks and licensing and buy-back programs will not prevent weapons from getting into hands that ought not wield them, I have a simple counterargument: every little bit helps. If our elected representatives want to label this a mental health issue, that’s fine. It is. The NRA and its paid and elected mouthpieces want to claim that if guns are criminalized then only criminals will have guns. Okay, that seems simple-mindedly obvious. I don’t believe, however, that restricting gun access will generate more criminals than we already have. Most individuals whose mental health isn’t stable enough to allow them to purchase weapons legally–given that sensible restrictions were in place–also don’t have the nefarious connections to get around the law to obtain guns illegally. Limiting access to guns might stop only one in ten of the USA’s many thousands of incidents of gun violence, I know. But if we had almost 40,000 shootings last year (2018) in our country, then wouldn’t stopping about 4,000 of those be worth it?

And now for some music.

Here’s a little video I shot for my song “Complaints.” It’s about the anxiety of modern life and of growing older. And it’s about where solace–if not answers–can be found. I put FOX News on in the background, because I personally hold the network responsible for much of our backward and wrong thinking and the fear that is in power these days. (I think it’s the president’s main source of his own thinking, which is just as well, given the low level thinking and thinkers he surrounds himself with and rightly ignores.) The second verse includes these lines:

I fuss and fret about the Great Unknown.
I spend these dangerous days afraid and alone,
And I’m worried – O Lord, I’m worried.
Where is the next monster with a gun?
Where will I hide? Where will I run?
Where will I land if I’m blown to kingdom come?

Just at the moment when I’m singing these words, look at the television, which is showing images from a California shooting. I didn’t plan it or time it. The coincidence between the lyric and the image was random . . . and haunting . . . and fortuitous.

On the 11th of August, I finished a new song titled “This Is not All.” It was a long time in the works. Even though I had probably 90% of the words and music written in 2015, I could never close the book on it. I had four verses and a chorus, but it never felt finished. It needed a bridge. Not long after the first drafting, I came up with the music for a bridge, then couldn’t find the words for it. So, I thought maybe it could be an instrumental break of some sort. But no, still not finished.

Of course, I didn’t work constantly on the song and its bridge over those four years, but every time I thought of the song and how much I liked it, I thought about the need for a bridge. The verses seemed complete, but here’s the question that nagged me: If this — whatever this is — is not all, then what is all? Phrases came to mind: “All you need is love”; “love is all that matters”; “God is love.” The words that flowed from these ideas into the bridge are simple, ending with echoing phrases: “love’s the root and height of all / The root and height of each.” The first lines of the bridge — “The means of control / Are more than out of our hands / They’re far beyond our reach” — connect to the chorus ideas that “Out there is more than we can own / More than we can protect” and “Out there is more than can be known / Always more than we expect.”

This Is not All
 
Not all the wonder along the trail
Is to be found in woods and sky
Look closer
It’s in the tiny frog hid in the clover
And that creature in the dust with a hundred legs or more
It’s in how I find my way home
And that flower I never noticed by the door
 
Not all the wonder along the way
Is waiting somewhere far ahead
Look closer
A little boy runs in cape and mask
Another stands shirtless in a barnyard banging a drum
A little girl learns to cartwheel
Another stands by the road and sticks out her thumb
 
This is not all, no, this is not all
Out there is more than we can own
More than we can protect
This is not all, no, this is not all
Out there is more than can be known
Always more than we expect
This is not all
 
Not all the evil in the world
Is in the terrorist and thief
Look closer
It’s in the thousand faces of ignorance
Political and corporate and religious
It’s in the hate and hunger
In the trumped-up fights that pit them against us
 
This is not all, no, this is not all. . . .
 
The means of control
Are more than out of our hands
They’re far beyond our reach
But we can love
And love’s the root and height of all
The root and height of each
 
Not all the goodness in the world
Is found within the church and child
Look closer
It’s in the unshackled hearts that lift us
High above the right or wrong or Right or Left
My friend’s warm hand in mine
And true emotion honestly expressed
 
This is not all, no, this is not all
Out there is more than we can own
More than we can protect
This is not all, no, this is not all
Out there is more than can be known
Always more than we expect
This is not all. . . .

Although the chorus remained the same from the song’s beginning, the verses have undergone some slight revisions, mostly in the phrasing rather than in the content or organization.

So, images for the first verse: I spotted the tiny frog in the yard outside the front door of my son Lane, who lives in Durham, North Carolina; the many-legged creature in the dust was crossing a trail I hiked near Gatlinburg; the flower by the door references an image in Emily Dickinson’s “This was a Poet”:

This was a Poet –
It is That
Distills amazing sense
From Ordinary Meanings –
And Attar so immense

From the familiar species
That perished by the Door –
We wonder it was not Ourselves
Arrested it – before – . . .

Dickinson’s poem 446 (Franklin numbering)

I think the overall idea for this verse, which led to the overall direction of the song, came to me on another hike up toward the fire tower above Unicoi. I ran out of time and didn’t make it to the top, but I got far enough for the sense of this song to find me there.

And images for the second verse. The little boy in the cape and mask is my son Raleigh as he was at anytime between learning to walk and, let’s say, ten years old. The boy with the drum I saw alongside I-64 in southern Indiana. But he wasn’t playing a marching snare, as might be imagined by the line I wrote; instead, he was sitting at a full kit set up between a barn and a farmhouse. In the distance, a storm approached across the cornfields behind him. (This remembered image always brings to mind the band Rush, for some reason.) The girls in the verse are born of imagination and contrast and might have something of my granddaughters in them.

Verses three and four are what they are. The evil and the good. The last line in verse three for a long time referenced “the endless fights that pit them against us.” But since I wrote the line in 2015, a lot has happened, and although I cringe at invoking the hobgoblin of the Tweeter in Chief, the false but pervasive construction us-against-them in this so-called democracy has certainly become trumped up. (To “trump something up” is to “invent a false accusation or excuse” or, in this case, the fights that we have over race and nationality and immigration and religion, the fights between the wealthy and the poor and the Left and Right and on and on and on and on. I also think it appropriate in this context to consider “trumped up” synonymous with fucked up.)

That verse four tries to define and celebrate some things that are good suggests, I hope, that to end on a positive note is to have faith that goodness exists and can ultimately prevail. This is not game-show, rah-rah-yay-yay feeling goodness but a goodness that is rich and deeply felt. It’s the love and friendship between us, and it’s transcendent Truth. Yet even as all-encompassing as these things are, they still are not all. As Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13:13, “Now faith, hope, and love remain—these three things—and the greatest of these is love.”

This — whatever this you are (or I am) in at the moment — is not all.

P.S. When the opportunity comes along, I’ll record this song — just my guitar and me — and post it. And, by the way, the scripture reference is spoken as “First Corinthians” and not “One Corinthians.” (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

In the wake of the 249th and 250th mass shooting events of 2019 in the United States of America, I’ve been hearing references to the “dark corners of the internet” where extremists — particularly white supremacists — gather to share their evil misunderstandings of life on Earth and cheer each other on in their shared neuroses and brutal insanity and twisted sins.

This, of course, put me in mind of “Dark Corners,” a song I wrote back in the 1980s before the internet made these evil spaces so widely available.

Dark Corners

You can know your heart—
you can know your mind—
know yourself as wise and kind,
and still be shocked by the things you find
          in dark corners.
 
You can know your husband—
you can know your wife—
know somebody for all your life,
and still never know the things they hide
          in dark corners . . .
 
. . . where the rattling bones
mark the danger zones—
dark corners—
we’ve all got ’em.
 
You can know your neighbor—
you can know your street—
know the cop who guards your beat,
and still be frightened of things you meet
          on dark corners.
 
You can know the state—
you can know the church—
know how it all is supposed to work,
but even our leaders have things that lurk
          in dark corners . . .
 
. . . where the rattling bones
mark the danger zones—
dark corners—
we’ve all got ’em.
 
Behind some genteel Southern manners
there’s a monster on the move.
And its kind runs rampant around the world—
fearing only love and truth they hide
          in dark corners . . .
 
. . . where the rattling bones
mark the danger zones—
dark corners—
we’ve all got ’em.
 

Words by Michael Cody
Music by Michael Cody, Mark H. Chesshir, Gene Ford, Steve Grossman
Publishers: Window on the West / SCL Music / Aslan’s Den

This remains true, I think, but I didn’t realize at that time how dark and dangerous those dark corners could really be.

Although the glass doesn’t allow the picture to come through clearly, I still find this image haunting . . .

Thomas Merton wrote the following on 22 July 1963, and I believe it to be as true — to me — today as it was — to him — then

How true it is that the great obligation of the Christian, especially now, is to prove himself a disciple of Christ by hating no one, that is to say, by condemning no one, rejecting no one. And how true that the impatience that fumes at others and damns them (especially whole classes, races, nations) is a sign of the weakness that is still unliberated, still not tracked by the Blood of Christ, and is still a stranger to the Cross.

A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals; reading for July 24.

I find “hating no one” to be a challenge. I’m pretty good at it in the categories of “races, nations,” but I struggle with the “whole classes” bit. If classes are upper, middle, and lower, I can say with a relative confidence that I don’t hate anyone because of their status. But I struggle with the stubborn ignorance, the grasping, self-absorbed greed that seems inherent at all social levels. This probably means that it’s human and takes conscious effort and hard work to overcome.

Recently a couple of Facebook friends — one a beloved cousin — sent me a link to a song titled “Here in America” or “In God We Still Trust” or maybe “Here in America, in God We Still Trust.” My cousin asked me to forward it “if so led,” but I can’t in good conscience do so. The lyrics of the song are flat and clichéd (worse even in this trait than Lee Greenwood’s career-killing “God Bless the U.S.A.”), and the images in the accompanying video are saccharine patriotic and religious sentiment.

The song is American Christianity at its most sappy and, I believe, despite the pretty music, at its worst — the putting of America before (or at least equal to) Christ.

The older I become, the crankier I become about religion. Not about faith, the teachings of Christ, and the attempt to walk in his way, but about American Christianity as empty religiosity laying claim to an all-but-forgotten Christ who has — absolutely against his will and the life he lived — become just another icon of American mythology.

In what remains of the summer, which for me is that space of time between the ending of spring semester and the beginning of fall, I’m going to try and blog more often. Maybe come up with some regular types of posts–a version of throw-back Thursday or a Mondays with Merton or some such ideas as these.

I read a lot, so I think I might try to come up with some posts focused on that reading. This is the first of those posts, not all of which will be as long as what follows.

My friend Vallory recently shared an article about Christian mission trips that included these words:

Why do we want to go on mission trips to Honduras or El Salvador and help those poor children but we don’t want to let those same children fleeing for their lives come into our country?

Here’s my answer: letting them come in, live near us, become citizens, and share in our resources requires more than a narrow, circumscribed version of acting good. We feel great about ourselves when we send out Samaritan’s Purse boxes. We helped feed hungry kids! But what happens when the hungry kids come to us? What happens when they have no way to support themselves but their parents have chosen to flee here so that they don’t starve or get murdered? A box isn’t going to do it.

Why So Many Christians Want to Go On Mission Trips to Help Kids But Don’t Want Them Here

We should, indeed, “feel great about ourselves when we send out Samaritan’s Purse boxes” (apart from the fact that the organization is connected to Franklin Graham, in whom his fathers — earthly and heavenly — would, in my opinion, would be sorely disappointed). But it can’t stop there. Jesus didn’t say, “Hey, John, give this box of healing to that woman over there, who can take it to that other guy around the corner, who might not mind getting it to the leper colony.” Jesus went to the lepers himself. And, perhaps, more importantly, he welcomed the lepers to come to him.

Vallory also shared a post from John Pavlovitz and his blog, Stuff That Needs to Be Said. Here’s my favorite excerpt:

No, Donald Trump wasn’t anointed by God.
He isn’t an instrument of Divine will.
He isn’t Biblically hastening Armageddon or Jesus’ return.

He’s just a hateful, indecent, predatory fraud who is destroying the environment, stripping people of their human rights, and making America a global laughing-stock.

His ascension is not prophetic but pathetic, the result of:

Russian interference,
fake news,
gerrymandering,
voter suppression,
Hillary hatred,
Obama resentment,
Fox News brainwashing,
Democratic stumbles,
the votes of bigoted Evangelicals, whites terrified of losing market share, and third-party voters—and the inaction of 100 million Americans who couldn’t be bothered to participate in one of the greatest responsibilities of living here.

That’s it.

No Providence.
No Divine messages.
No Biblical prophecies.
No spiritual movements.

Just ordinary human beings who chose really, really poorly when they should have known better.

Pavlovitz, John, “God Has Nothing to Do with Trump Being President,” John Pavlovitz: Stuff That Needs to Be Said. Accessed 13 June 2019.

One thing that has become continually clearer to me over my years of reading and teaching American literature from early indigenous materials to Columbus, from John Winthrop to Emily Dickinson, is that “America” is in a perpetual state of decay. (I’ll write more on this later, as it’s something I’ve been tracking through the literature.) And the struggles the USA faces today are in one sense or another the same struggles the country has faced since its inception.

I’ll provide a handful of quotations below from thinkers and writers whose work sees behind the curtain of American mythology. First, Trappist monk Thomas Merton gives his take on what lies beneath the nation’s pimpled skin:

. . . I have undergone my dose of exposure to American society in the ’60s. . . . I love the people I run into, but I pity them for having to live as they do, and I think the world of U.S.A. in 1967 is a world of crass, blind, overstimulated, phony, lying stupidity. . . . The temper of the country is one of blindness, fat, self-satisfied, ruthless, mindless corruption. A lot of people are uneasy about it but helpless to do anything against it. The rest are perfectly content with the rat race as it is, and with its competitive, acquisitive, hurtling, souped-up drive into nowhere. A massively aimless, baseless, shrewd cockiness that simply exalts itself without purpose. The mindless orgasm, in which there is no satisfaction, only spasm.

Merton, Thomas, “May 28: On America in the Sixties,” A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals. (Merton wrote this on 27 May 1967.)

So writes Merton in 1967, but this shade of the American character is, in part, the reeking residue of the rotten practice of slavery. Here’s Frederick Douglass, a self-freed man, speaking on 5 July 1852 to a mixed-race group continuing their Independence Day celebration in Rochester, New York. The feelings of whites hearing this can easily be imagined, but I wonder about the freed or self-freed or free-born blacks, particularly those who were — perhaps mindlessly — caught up in the celebration. Douglass’s final paragraph should knock all of us to our knees and bears quoting in its entirety:

What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless: your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgiving, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy–a thin veil to cover up crimes that would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States at this very hour.

Douglass, Frederick, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

“But slavery is over,” we might argue, and we would be technically correct. The racism, prejudice, and greed that supported the institution, however, remain with us. I know a white Christian woman who recently pointed to a magazine focused on a black audience and asked, “Why do they have to have their own magazine?” “Why not?” I’m sorry to admit I was unable to ask. How long has the black community in the USA had a public voice in comparison to the white community?

Similarly, John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, recently said this on The World and Everything in It:

If there’s a group right now whose expansion of rights—even beyond rights into privileges—is most evident, it’s the LGBT community. There’s not a systemic set of persecutions or dehumanizations against this group of people. It’s remarkable, in fact, whatever essentially it seems they want to claim, they can have.

“Culture Friday: Unalienable Rights and Stranger Things,” The World and Everything in It, 12 July 2019.

Likewise, how long has this group had any access to rights and privileges? If LGBTQ folks are excited and emboldened by the recent level acceptance in the public sphere, then where’s the blame? I’m sure Protestants did the same in the wake of the Reformation. I’m sure white American males did the same in the wake of the Revolution. The mistake — if I may be so bold as to describe it thus — this Christian woman and man make in their comments regarding race and gender is to be blinded by labels to the humanity behind the labels. To paraphrase Thoreau from “Resistance to Civil Government,” we should be humans first, and only afterward, if absolutely necessary, citizens of this country or that / adherents of this religion or that or none / members of this political party or that or none / persons of one race or ethnicity or age or gender or sexual preference or economic bracket, etc.

Our endless pitting of “us” against “them” — however “us” and “them” are defined — demands labels to identify the sides. But identity labels limit and undermine humanity; that is, labels are dehumanizing. Again, however, our politics and economics and religion work only in the context of labeling, which, I believe, works only in the context of dehumanization.

I’ll end this rant with a couple of quotations from Margaret Fuller’s 1845 essay, “Fourth of July”:

Much has been achieved since the first Declaration of Independence. America is rich and strong; she has shown great talent and energy; vast prospects of aggrandizement open before her. But the noble sentiment which she expressed in her early youth is tarnished; she has shown that righteousness is not her chief desire, and her name is no longer a watch-word for the highest hopes to the rest of the world. She knows this, but takes it very easily; she feels she is growing richer and more powerful, and that seems to suffice her.

Near the close of her essay, Fuller tries to imagine the individual — in the gendered language of her time — who would serve as a savior from all of this lecherous seeking and grabbing and hoarding that is such a big part of American life these days:

We know not where to look for an example of all or many of the virtues we would seek from the man who is to begin the new dynasty that is needed of Fathers of the Country. The Country needs to be born again; she is polluted with the lust of power, the lust of gain. She needs Fathers good enough to be God-fathers–men who will stand sponsors at the baptism with all they possess, with all the goodness they can cherish, and all the wisdom they can win, to lead this child the way she should go, and never one step in another.

Well, for one thing, I aged ten years in the spaces between and on either end of those dots. In 1979, I turned 21; in 2019, I’ll turn 61. Forty years of good life in those spaces, with very little to complain about–personally speaking, of course.

I’ve thought a lot about 1979 lately, the summer of that year especially. In the spring, I was a music major at Mars Hill College, and I’d just qualified to enter the performance track. So, the fall semester would be a lot to look forward to. And it would be a lot of work. I’m not sure exactly when I realized that I didn’t have the dexterity to be a great flute player, but in the compressed timetable of memory, the realization probably came close behind the success of making the cut for a focus on performance.

Meanwhile, back at the homeplace in Walnut, my folks sold my uncle some pastureland. I’m not sure how much they received for it, but I know they set aside $5,000 to divide between my brother and me. He took his and used it to set himself up with a place to live when he graduated from NC State. I decided that I wanted to take mine early, like the proverbial Prodigal Son, and go to Europe, so I signed up for a MHC study-abroad summer program that would have me studying somewhere in England for six weeks or so, after which I would have another two weeks to travel some on my own.

But sometime in the middle of that spring semester, somebody from Brevard College came through putting up posters for tours conducted by a company called American-European Student Union, Inc. (AESU). Their tours were just short of eight weeks long promised to take me to seventeen countries. No study, just travel.

“That’s what I want to do,” I said. And that’s what I did.

I left home in the middle of June and joined AESU 616 (so named because our tour began on June 16) in London, England. Between then and the first days in August, we traveled on a Mercedes bus–some forty-eight college students, an Austrian tour guide not much older than we were, and an Italian bus driver.

This summer of 2019, about a dozen from the ’79 tour celebrated our 40th year of friendship in Sicily, about which I will have more to say in the next few weeks — and more to show with lovely pictures. I’ve long thought that the trip — with the reunion added — would make a good novel, so I’m some forty-five pages into such a beast. More on that later as well.

For now, I’m just going to point out that the summer of 1979 was when President Jimmy Carter recognized a “crisis of confidence” in the American people and described two possible paths for America. One was “the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves.” I feel certain that he wholeheartedly believed that we Americans would rise to the occasion, as we had done so often in the nation’s history.

But we didn’t. We disappointed President Carter and ourselves by taking the other path, which, in a speech given on 15 July 1979, he described this way:

One is a path . . . leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.

“A Crisis of Confidence”

Doesn’t that description seem unfortunately like the behavior that has brought us to July 2019 after culminating in results of the 2016 presidential election? (If interested, see Susan Delacourt’s “How Jimmy Carter Predicted Donald Trump — in 1979”).

The long downward slide from 1979 to 2019 began with Carter’s defeat and the election of a B-movie actor, then hit what I hope is rock bottom with the election of an ignorant and arrogant reality TV star and 3rd-rate stand-up-comedian wannabe. Compare, if you dare, President Carter’s speech referenced above to Trump’s attempt to commemorate Independence Day on 4 July 2019:

The Continental Army suffered a bitter winter of Valley Forge, found glory across the waters of the Delaware and seized victory from Cornwallis at Yorktown. Our Army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over airports, it did everything it had to do and at Ft. McHenry under the rocket’s red glare had nothing but victory. When dawn came, the star-spangled banner waved defiant.

Check out the cogent analysis of how the above might have come about.

I will now close my eyes and think of Sicily.

twilight: the light from the sky between full night and sunrise or between sunset and full night. . . .; an intermediate state that is not clearly defined; a period of decline

reel: a flanged spool for photographic materials, especially one for motion pictures; to turn or move round and round, to be in a whirl; to behave in a violent disorderly manner; to waver or fall back (as from a blow); to walk or move unsteadily; a lively Scottish-Highland [or Irish] dance, also the music for this dance

On May 3, 2019, I finished the first draft of the final piece of a short story collection, tentatively titled “A Twilight Reel.” I’ve been working on it for more years than I care to mention. If any of you have read — or even heard of — my first novel Gabriel’s Songbook, then you probably know that Gabriel comes from a little (mostly fictional) place known as Runion, which is located where the Laurel River joins the French Broad River in Madison County, North Carolina. I’d say that at least a third if not half of the novel takes place there. (See my previous post on Runion for more about it.)

The whole of “A Twilight Reel” takes place in Runion and the surrounding area. Each story takes place in a different month of a single year. I think the first two pieces written for the collection were the January and March stories, but without looking it up in my curriculum vitae or checking the journals on my shelf, I can’t remember which was written first. (My guess is that March came first.) The year in which all twelve stories are set wasn’t finally settled on until the final story — final both in the sequence (it’s the December story) and in the creation. As that story developed, the year was obviously 1999.

This arrangement allowed me to portray lots of different kinds of people who live in Runion and also display the character of the Appalachian mountains through the course of their four beautiful seasons. But 1999 also suggests other changes. By that time a number of different kinds of people began to call the mountains of western North Carolina home. Even though the Y2K event fell far short of the fear it generated, it still hinted at significant transformations to come — bringing us Barak Obama and Donald Trump. In the creation of Runion and some of its stories, I deepened my understanding of this imagined community. (You can get a small sense of how I’ve arranged and kept track of the history and people and places here.)

I won’t say more about the collection at this time beyond giving you the titles and any brief descriptions I can think of.

• “The Wine of Astonishment” (January): the title is taken from Psalm 60:3 (KJV) — [O God, . . .] Thou hast shewed thy people hard things: thou has made us to drink the wine of astonishment.
• “The Loves of Misty Sprinkle” (February): this young woman works at Eliza’s Runion hair salon; she’s a romantic sensualist, who considers Valentine’s Day a religious holiday in much the same way that American pseudo-Christian zealots celebrate Independence Day.
• “Overwinter” (March): a blizzard hits the mountains just as the wife of a professor at Runion State University is preparing to leave him; she’s snowbound with him, but he’s more concerned with trying to keep the old woman up the hill from freezing to death.
• “The Flutist” (April): a popular flute professor dies in the middle of his spring concert, and the RSU music faculty has to find a replacement before the next school year.
• “Decoration Day” (May): three stories take place at once here — 1) a Decoration Day in a family cemetery across the river from Runion; 2) a Civil War reenactment at a local historical site; 3) a man’s attempt to avenge the death of a loved one in the Shelton Laurel Massacre of 1863.
• “Conversion” (June): a preacher in the Lonesome Mountain American Christian Church has run off with the church’s money and a member’s wife, and the building has been bought by the local Muslim community for its mosque.
• “The Invisible World Around Them” (July): a local legend and fiddle champion returns home to Runion to die.
• “Grist for the Mill” (August): a Runion neighborhood keeps an eye on a stranger who has just moved into a house on their street.
• “A Poster of Marilyn Monroe” (September): with his wife dead, an elderly man renews his obsession with Marilyn Monroe.
• “A Fiddle and a Twilight Reel” (October): local meanness erupts in response to unsettling changes, and another man dies while making music.
• “Two Floors Above the Dead” (November): when their older brother dies of cancer, two unmarried and estranged siblings have to imagine a way forward.
• “Witness Tree” (December): a middle-aged woman works in the RSU library and dreads the arrival of the winter holidays to be spent with her husband’s family and their Y2K fears.

These are certainly twilight days in our world, and the Appalachia in which I grew up is not exempted from the obscurity and ambiguity, even though many people think that their traditional home lives and religious practices safeguard them against change. We reel under the uncertainty as to whether this twilight world is that between evening and night or between night and morning.