Author: thegraymaniac

Spring Lizards and Summer Days- 2007 (re-edited today)

Nowadays at my age, the long hot summer days are just not as much fun as they used to be when I was a kid. Back then we really had nice long breaks from school. None of that six or seven weeks out, and then right back in the school building. Back in “the old days” we had three FULL months out for summer break.

None of that year round school for us old timers! May 31 rolled around, and it’s see ya’ later to the teachers until the first week of September….Yahooo!! Heck, that was so long, I forgot most of what I’d learned the year before in school! I think that’s why the first six weeks every school year back in the good old days were “review” weeks. “Reteaching” weeks for some pretty good school teachers. But, we made it through, and I wouldn’t take anything for the memories of those long, hot summer days back when I was young.

I tell you, spring and summers were the best back in the 50’s and 60s’.

I would go to the old wooden toy box back in my room, and starting digging down to the bottom, looking for my old worn out, smelly leather baseball glove with “Pee Wee” Reece’s name engraved in it. I don’t know how I ended up with Pee Wee, as I never played a lick of ball in the infield. I was always an outfielder.

I tried out for third base once, but after I had stopped the first four hard bouncer’s that came my way with my face instead of my glove, the coach thought it might be safer to put me in left field. I agree with his decision.

I liked left field. It was one of those positions where you could kind of day dream a little. Most everything that came out that way was either an easy pop fly, or a one bouncer. I was a cinch at catching those. None of that “hot corner” stuff for me.

I once was standing out in left field during a game and looking down at the ground trying to spot any four leaf clovers that might be growing there. I heard the loud crack of the bat, and looked up to see the baseball headed over my head. Way over my head. I didn’t want to look completely stupid, so I turned around and stuck my old glove out and ran as fast as I could towards the fence. The ball dropped right into the webbing of my glove. I never saw it until it did. I heard a cheer go up from the stands, and when we came in, I got more pats on the back, and attaboys then I had ever gotten before. I just said “I had it all the way”

I could never bring myself to disappoint all those people by telling them it was just pure luck.

The other great thing about warm weather was spring lizard and craw dad hunting at Grandpa’s and Grandma’s house. When warm weather hit, we would go up there a lot more often. It was difficult during the winter time, because there were only two bedrooms downstairs at their house, which meant the remainder of the guests, had to sleep upstairs. During the winter time, sleeping upstairs was just like sleeping outside. There was NO heat. I spent many a winter night with 10 quilts piled on top of me, unable to turn over, but desperately trying to conserve what little body heat was emanating from me in order to be alive the next morning. I always managed to do it somehow.

So, besides at Christmas, I didn’t like Winter time visiting at the old folk’s house!

But with spring and warm weather coming, there was the promise of fishing, and in order to fish there had to be bait. This meant my favorite activities of digging in the dirt for worms, and turning over the rocks down in the little fast running creek in front of the folk’s house for Spring lizards and Crawdads.

The only draw back to trying to catch a bucket full of these water dwelling creatures was that they were also favorites of the snakes that prowled the banks of that same creek. I was never really too afraid of snakes when I was a kid until after my Grandpa’s Uncle “Lark” Davenport killed a rattlesnake one day that he stretched across the old dirt road leading up to Grandpa’s house.

He stuck its head end in the bank on one side, and its tail end in the dirt bank on the other side. Now, that little old road was narrow, but I estimate it was at least 7 feet across, so my respect for the snakes in those parts increased tremendously after that. I asked Uncle “Lark” how he killed it, and told me he cut its head off with a hoe while he was out in his corn crib. Apparently the rattler was stocking up on some of the rats that always frequented that place. “If he hadn’t been a rattler I’d have let him be,” said Uncle Lark. I’d have let him be anyway, I think. He would have owned the corn crib after that. Rats and all.

Some of those spring lizards that we used to catch back then were as big as small snakes. Imagine turning over a big old rock, and seeing something black wiggling around that’s about a foot long. Would you stick your hand down in there and grab it? I sure did, and laughed about it the whole time. “If the bass don’t bite that,” I thought “then it might bite the bass!” Either way, we get the fish.

The crawdads were harder to catch then the spring lizards. Have you ever seen one of those little boogers take off? They are like a backwards rocket! I don’t know how they do it, but when they get scared they shoot water out their rear ends, start flapping their tails and away they go. You had to be good at estimating where they were GOING to be, not where they had been, in order to catch them. I never had the least idea that humans ate those things when I was a kid. The first time I went to Louisiana as an adult, and someone tried to serve me a dish made with Crawdads, I got kind of nauseated. After I tasted it though, it wasn’t half bad. I kind of like Etouffe’ now.

Yep, that’s how I feel today with all this heat in the air. I remember how cold that creek water was, even on the hottest of June, July and August days. I remember how I would even dare to reach down and bring a handful of that pungent water up to my mouth and drink it in deeply.

My blood is partially made from that creek water, and my soul is partially lodged in that mountain land.

That little old creek is still there, but I don’t know what the new owners of the land would think about an old man tromping down the middle of their creek with a Styrofoam bucket and yelling yahoo every time he came up with a lizard.

I wonder if there are even any left?

A Fathers Day Message.

I hear what the religious leaders say…about families, about Mothers and Fathers…And what the old testament said. But…it is the old testament. I know a Father’s love is necessary if at all possible. I also know sometimes Fathers totally mess up their kids. I’m glad my Dad was good to me, and I have tried my best to be good to my children. My wish is that all children have good role models, tight families, but most of all that children have parents…People…who love them, and show them so, and tell them so.

I know also that when his disciples told Jesus there were 5000 hungry people following him, some of them sick…he first went among them and healed them, and then he took a small amount of food and blessed it, and fed them all…with baskets full of food left over.

He did not “qualify” these people, nor did he care what class they were, what color their skins were, what their sins were, what country they were from, or who they loved and why. He didn’t even preach to them at that point…simply ministered to their physical needs and sent them away. He wasn’t mad because they senselessly followed him far away from civilization. He dealt with them all equally. He was good at that.

If your a Christian, or if you are some other religion, or no religion at all…It’s good to remember to treat all people with love and respect. Jesus did not put himself above anyone…except for that one last time.

It is so hot. I walked a little spell with Kirsten and Stacy this evening, and the sun was like an oven whose object seemed to be to cook my head! I should have worn a hat. I know that, but was just too caught up in immediately setting out that I didn’t plan things out well. It was kind of a spur of the moment thing. Something which wouldn’t have occurred to me to even care about in the least…before the turn of the century. That’s a statement which gives me an odd feeling. To be a child of two different centuries.

I do have to start planning better though. I never thought when I was a kid that I’d ever live this long. In the 1960’s the 21st century was just a shadow, looming long out ahead. It wasn’t real, didn’t seem real, didn’t seem possible to comprehend. Oh, a lot of writers and seers were thinking about it and predicting what it would be like. None of them got it exactly right. Not Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, or Jeanne Dixon. Not H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, or George Orwell. None exactly right. Predicting the future is a job I wouldn’t want. That, or a weatherman. But now it’s here, and 65 is on the horizon if I make it to October. With this heat, I will be glad when it gets to be October. Granny said never to wish your life away, but dang it I can’t help it.

I’ve got to start remembering my hat, my sunblock, my vitamins, my eye drops, my skin lotion, and my fiber. I have absolutely got to keep my mind on my driving, and go to my scheduled Drs. appointments. I have to do these things because no matter that my mind tells me I am still 18, my body tells me the truth. Oh, I’m in pretty good shape for the shape I’m in…heck I just climbed one of them three story rock walls last weekend. Couldn’t sit up from a prone position til today though…who knew you used your abdominal muscles to do that?

We are not promised tomorrow, as many will say and having lived this long I must agree. I would like to stick around for a while longer though, because I have unfinished business. So if you see me walking around in the blazing sun with no hat on, you have my permission to verbally reprimand me.

How I wish I could find a genie in a bottle to give me three wishes, or perhaps a magic wand. Maybe even just one of the “little people”. Anything magical I can find to make this world a better place. But alas there is no magic in the earth to help us heal ourselves.

We will have to do it with hard work, cooperation, understanding, compromise, and empathy.

We will have to get rid of our own inhibitions and learn logic, common sense and practicality.

Some people will have to go, and some ideas of what’s right and what’s wrong will have to be turned upside down. Topsy turvy. That is, unless I find that damn lamp or magic wand.

In that case I’ll just fix it all myself.

Without a doubt, much of what we think we know if false. Even being as “smart” as we humans think we are we don’t even know everything about our own bodies! When we move out from there, into the world around us, and eventually into the Universe that surrounds us, our knowledge becomes exponentially less and less.

There are SO many theories on how the Universe started, where it’s headed and how it’s going to end. Some of them are theological in nature, and some are scientific. None of them are right, probably not even near right. I’m talking all the way from St. Stephen, to Stephen King, to Stephen Hawking here.

I shudder when I think about how little I know. I have to take most things I do every day on faith. I have faith when I plug in the coffee machine that it is going to make me a cup of coffee. If it didn’t, I don’t have the knowledge to tear it apart and remake it so that it would. If I put my key in the car, and turn the switch and it doesn’t start, most of the time I wouldn’t know what to do. When I had my heart attack, I couldn’t fix my arteries. Of course there are people who DO know how to fix these things, and it’s a good thing too! Otherwise, most of us would be in a heap of trouble.

But, even those people who are “technologically” smart, don’t have all the answers. Every few years or so, a new theory comes out about how the Universe began. Of course, all religions would acknowledge that it was ‘created’ if you will, by God. A thinking consciousness started the ball rolling and made us what we are today. Makes sense to us as humans, because WE are conscious thinking creatures. That’s what separates us from the rest of the creatures….at least so we “think” (I am not so sure sometimes, when my little dog plays me for a sucker that she is not “thinking” about what she is doing) I guess there is all different levels of thinking, and I am SURE that we are not in ANY way close to the “thinking” if that is what it is, of a consciousness so powerful it could create the Universe.

Now scientists also have a hard time trying to explain how something like the Universe started on it’s on. I read somewhere a few weeks back that they think all the “matter” that it took to get the Universe started, could be compressed down into a ball the size of a basketball, but that it would weigh some astronomically heavy weight. Some basketball! When this thing decided to explode and start the Universe, it continually spread from a central point and made us what we are today. The scientists can look at light coming in from outside our Galaxy that took billions of years to get here. That’s cool. When we look up in the sky at night, and see the stars, we are not really seeing what is happening at the moment we are looking, but what happened years and sometimes hundreds or thousands of years ago and is just now reaching us. For all we know, some of those stars could be, and probably are, gone. Mind boggling ain’t it?

Well, I just don’t believe that either group has ALL the right answers. I personally believe the Universe was created, and didn’t just happen, but I don’t even PRETEND to understand the type of intellect it would take to do it.

I know that we have had books and bibles, and documents from the beginning of the time that man learned how to write, with all the theories about how things happened. All of those came from the minds of man, and have been shaped by the mind of man down through the centuries. None of them are totally accurate. I don’t think that we know accurate.

Now, don’t go all funny on me, and think I am being sacrilegious. I’m not. I don’t go around telling people what to believe, OR that what they believe isn’t right. I don’t have the right to do that, and neither does anyone else. There are, however, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, etc. who would disagree with me. All of those religions consider that they have been given the innate approval, by the being that created the Universe to tell everyone that their way of thinking is the only one that is correct. I happen to disagree with them. There may be some correctness in all of them. Being a type of Christian, I personally believe in that philosophy and some may think it is a conflict of teaching that I would state I don’t believe in telling OTHER people what to believe, but I don’t. Everyone has to decide for themselves, and I think on that particular point that the being that created us, God if you will, has been totally succinct. You choose for yourself whether to be good or bad, light or dark. This choice is yours no matter what your religion or philosophy.

It’s my personal opinion that we will all find out one day, of course. I think that God would be totally unfair to just leaving us hanging about the answer to things. Of course, I could be wrong about that too. We may go to Heaven, or we may lay unconscious of the passing of time until we come back around in the endless cycle of the Universes coming and going. We MAY know nothing, and that’s that. At least there would be peace in that, wouldn’t there? I highly doubt this to be the case, but….

I thought today about some of the things I believe, and about some of the things I have believed but have forsaken.

I thought about the idealism of youth and how easily it is lost in the shuffle of the “mission creep” of aging. (Oh how I love the invention of that phrase!) I thought about how aging itself affects the human psyche.. particularly my own.

My memory is becoming weird. On some things I’m razor sharp, on others I’m blunt as a brick. My mind is like a block of unsliced Swiss cheese, sitting where a good aged gouda should reside. Very holey at times, and unexpectedly dense.

So, my thinking process takes unusual paths. But it still functions.

I find I believe that happiness requires a personal commitment and cannot be handed to us by other individuals, or groups of people pushing any certain philosophy. I have waited practically all my life to have the secret of true happiness revealed to me, when all this time I have had it packed away inside.

I have been an irritant and a pest many times. I have alienated some, and confused many others. In my understanding about what passes for conformity I have become a non conformist. I’m sure I often baffle those closest to me with my actions. For that I am so sorry.

Tomorrow is a new day and I’m certain I will not be perfect. I will try harder to be happy though. Even though I hold very little in worldly goods or riches. Even though I fight daily battles with my body, and as I have stated, with my mind. Even though I realize I have fewer and fewer dawns coming. Even with the world in turmoil. Even with all these things…I am happy with the people with whom I share this journey, and these daily challenges. By having the people I am richer than a king, and by having the daily challenges I know I’m still alive and still necessary.

May the creator of all things be with you.

Right about now, I long for October. I don’t like to wish time away, and I do love fresh tomatoes, squash and okra….but…

It’s not just the Fall itself, but the things that it brings with it. It seems as October rolls in, families become closer. When the leaves start to turn, and the air turns cool and fresh, pumpkin pies, and jack o lanterns are not long off. Turkey smells, and dressing delights are around the corner. December and Christmas loom in the near future.

I will be 68 this October if all is well. Fifty years since I turned 18, fifty years since I moved off down to West Georgia, fifty years since I met my wife. Fifty years already since Martin and Bobby were killed. Fifty years since Vietnam was in full swing. Fifty years since I dreamed of so many things that have not come true, but have lived through fifty years of joys and sorrows which have been the substance of my life.

Fifty Autumns come this October if my luck and my health hold out. Fifty years and life is so different now than it was then, that it seems like an alien world now sometimes. I feel lost in it sometimes. Much more so than in 1968. I felt at home back then, in those days…in my time, and the time of my fellow boomers.

So when the first Autumn winds start to blow, these memories will blow in with them, and though I will continue to live in the moment, nostalgia will at the same time transport me back in time occasionally. I don’t think there’s any harm in it as long as we do not let the past rule us and ruin our present.

Fifty years from now, we’re going to be in somebody else’s nostalgia trip memories, and I can only hope theirs will give them as much pleasure as mine do for me. I so very, very much hope that.

I was looking at a little sterling silver ring that I have which has Amber on the top as the gemstone. I like Amber. It’s one of only a few things that humans use in jewelry that once was a part of another living thing. In this case it is tree sap, which dates anywhere from 150 million to 300 million years old, which has hardened and fossilized into gorgeous hues of color ranging from bright orange to a warm honeyed brown. Sometimes, and rarely, the more recent pieces of Amber have some type of insect trapped inside. They landed on the tree sap when it was sticky, got trapped, and ended up totally incased in the sap, which then hardened around it.

These rare pieces of Amber with the insects inside have been the subject of many fictional works. They were the entire basis for how dinosaurs were recreated in Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park”. A “Dragonfly in Amber” was a book by Diana Gabaldon which she used as a representation of something of great beauty which is preserved, and exists out of its proper time….in the case of this novel it was one of Gabaldon’s characters who represented the dragonfly.

Many human beings are interested in these types of things. To me, they represent something tangible which I can hold in my hand that has such great age that I can barely comprehend it. Here is something which has existed for thousands of a human’s lifetime, and within it is contained a once living creature who’s life ended by the chance of landing on something from which it could not escape.

Time also fascinates me. The age of our planet is almost beyond my comprehension. The fact that a creature which has been spawned by this planet could evolve to the point where he or she could consider that vast amount of time amazes me.

As a student in Geology classes, we learned all the ages, that are used to classify the passage of time of our home planet. We learned how life developed slowly over long periods of that time. Out of our planets 4.5 billion year age, most complex life has developed only in the last 500 million year, and humans only in last 200 thousand years, with written human history only being a recent 5,000 years beginning with the Sumerians….or thereabouts. We’re really newcomers on this planet. The dinosaurs were around hundreds of times longer than we.

I’m sorry, I regress and blabber.

There’s really not much of a point to this post. I’m not trying to teach, nor am I trying to preach. I only know as I looked at that piece of Amber this morning I tried to reach back into it’s past and I felt comforted to know even a little bit of it’s history. As I turned away and tried to project my thoughts towards the future, and what we humans might one day be, I could not find a situation in my thoughts which made sense, given where we are now.

I could only think of that dragonfly which accidentally landed on the sticky sap that ended up becoming Amber. How that was totally random and unplanned. The dragonfly certainly could not comprehend the danger he was in. He didn’t have much of a brain.

We humans do.

A short time back, when I was 12 years old, I would look up at the adults surrounding me and think to myself “it will take forever for me to be that old…I have so much time!” And I did have time.

There were days that dragged by. Especially those 12 hour night shifts. There were weeks that seemed to take forever to pass, especially those weeks in December as a child. But pass they did. The days that were dragging by drug faster than I could have imagined. Life happened. I watched it, I lived it, and it has brought me where I am today.

None of you would ever imagine the depth of nostalgia which seems to surround me now. I know I should live for the day, because it is all we are. That movement of time from one second of the present, to many years of the past, in the tic of that clock, in the unexplainable measurement of the passing of our lives which we have invented to total up the sum of our existence, is nefarious and unstoppable.

So we all have more past than we will ever have present, and I long for some of those lost minutes and hours. I realize it’s a waste of the ever ticking clock to yearn for the trail we have left behind, but I don’t care. They are my seconds and I’ll use some of them reliving what has gone before if I wish.

I will fondly remember as much as I can of the good times, and the bad….as I try and drift away to sleep tonight. Sometimes I chuckle, and sometimes tears fill my eyes. I miss the people mostly. Those who I have loved, and even some I didn’t. I see with utter clarity the mistakes I stupidly made. I see a few successes I stumbled into. I see how I could have easily been a better man. It’s like watching a movie you are both the main character and the producer of, and each blaming each other for how things turned out.

Then hopefully I will wake up to a new day, polish my clock, and try to make every one of these remaining seconds count for the good. I know it’s futile, because I know me to well. I’ll find some way to muck up some of that time. Maybe not too much of it though!! Seriously, there are not too many people I can look at now and think “I have a long time left before I get THAT old!” I’d have to visit the nursing home.

Fifty years. That’s a long time. Its actually a lifetime.

I have been wondering what has been up with me this week. I just haven’t been normal. Well, I’m not really ever normal anyway, but I I’ll say what passes for normal with me.

I finally figured it out tonight. I had a premonition. Something which never, ever happens to me. But…as I was taking a photo of the sunset….round, huge and pink tonight… I felt a pang and a pain deep inside. It was as if I had seen this view before. This exact view. It touched me as a sadness, almost as a real physical push as I watched the sun sink all the way down into the ocean. I will never see this again. Perhaps I deduced why.

I had been here, on this beach, near this exact spot, fifty years ago almost to the week…perhaps even to the week, watching the sun sink into the Gulf of Mexico. It was my first trip ever to the ocean in June 1966…

School had let out the last part of May. Daddy and Tom Brown had decided to get together with our two families and go to Panama City beach. They had gotten out the maps and plotted the course down old highway 27.

My cousin Judy had never been to the beach either, so she came along with us.

I don’t remember much about the ride except that it was long. The service stations were few and far between, and if you drank too much coke or water and had to pee…well you just had to hold it. So my brother Mike and I did. Hold it, that is.

We stayed at the “Sea Breeze” motel. It was a run down kind of place. They had a “kitchenette” in the place, and when Momma found roaches in it, both she and Daddy hit the ceiling. Daddy went to the front desk and raised t mortal hell with the manager, who immediately sent us down to a little hamburger joint at his expense, while he fumigated the room. It smelled bad when we got back, but there were no more cockroaches. I gotta tell you that’s one thing Florida was famous for back then…the three inch roaches, and there were plenty of them…just not in our room anymore.

With that problem solved, things seemed to go OK from there on out. We stayed five days as I recall.

I was in awe of the ocean. I still am. I couldn’t get over it at first. I finally took my eyes off of it long enough to go to check out the local “game” spot with my buddy Michael Brown. We both bought t shirts with our beach money, which said “Budweiser” across the front. With those shirts on, and with both of us being quite large for our age..we passed ourselves off to the girls who were there as High School seniors. That’s another story for another day….

On the deep sea fishing trip that my Daddy and Mr. Brown had been planning for ages, we caught a mess of red snapper, and I snagged a 33 pound Red grouper which won the “dollar pot” for the largest fish. Forty six dollars! I went and bought a hat and another t-shirt! It was a great trip. I could write a book about that trip…that summer. But the happiness faded. Mom and Dad got into an awful fight when we got home, over of all things…those damn frozen red snapper. I don’t remember the exacts…but it was a bad one.

We never went back to the beach again as a “nuclear” family…just the four of us, although there were plenty of trips in later years after the grandchildren came along.

The next time I went to the ocean, was after I was married. It was in the spring of 1972, when Paula and and I went with some friends to St. Augustine. That was the year Kirsten was born..in August.

So, June of 1966 to June of 2016. Fifty years give or take a few days. I’ve got the pictures from sixty-six to prove I was here. One in the Budweiser shirt. One with the fish. One by the ocean. Got some goofy photos of Mike that he made in one of those fifty cent photo booths. Got a postcard of the “Seabreeze” motel,..minus cockroaches. Don’t have all the people left though.

All the Brown family are gone. Tom, Tommi, Lynn, Michael B. Mom and Dad…Gaines and Evie. That makes six out of the nine who came, and I have transformed from fifteen to sixty five in the blink of an eye………

Except when I was shooting that sunset earlier tonight and I felt my Dad “push” me like he would do back then. That little playful shove…and then go into his little boxing crouch, like “whatcha gonna do about it”. That’s when I remembered where I was, and when I had been here before. And I had the feeling that when I leave here this time, I will not be back to this magical spot again. Not this same spot.

Fifty years is a long time. It’s a lifetime really.