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Warning…long post…

Our life is nothing but memory, as I have often said. Sometimes my mind is so closed, I cannot remember what I want to remember.

Last night I had one of the weirdest dreams ever…I was awake during part of it. Or at least I was semi awake. Every time I opened my eyes, I saw geometric patterns. Patterns from where I lay…almost out to eternity. There were wave patterns, there were geometric patterns of all kinds. It was so strange. I thought I was going blind, or something bad was wrong with my eyes. I finally got totally awake and put some eye drops into my eye. The patterns stopped. Was it the drops, or was it because I was totally awake. I really do not know. I told my wife today that I hope these strange dreams don’t herald some change in me. It’s a secret fear of mine…really not so secret.

In any case, while I can remember, I want to share some important memories. Before they fade away… For my family in particular…but for anyone who wishes to read them. It’s a pretty long post. You have been warned….

Circa 1972….

I drive our little Green Ford ‘Pinto’ station wagon down the old dirt “Snake Nation” Road towards my Grandma and Grandpa Stewart’s house. It’s an old two story clapboard house with wooden shingles on the roof. There are still a few bee hives sitting around the house. Grandpa has been a beekeeper and honey gatherer all his life. He is in his early 80’s, but still fairly fit. Grandma is in her 70’s, and can still walk further up and down the mountain roads than I can. She probably could walk 20 miles if she needed to. I am bringing my first child, their Great granddaughter, to spend the night. I see Grandma waiting out on the front porch. She always hears the cars coming, always.

We sit out on the front porch that evening in the roughhewn swing and rock out and back. The chains make sort of a musical “Squeak” in rhythm with the “Katy-dids” as they rub their legs together calling out to each other in the night. Grandma had fixed us dinner the first thing as soon as we got there. There is no turning her down when it comes to that. If you come to her house, you get a meal. I still smell the fried chicken sizzling on the stove and the fresh hand rolled biscuits cooking in the oven. Grandma made everything perfectly, and never, ever owned a measuring cup or spoon. She just would pour out whatever she was adding into her hand and put in in the pot. All of this takes place in the first hour after we get there. As I turn to Grandma to give her a hug….she fades away.

Circa 1970….

St. Mary’s Hospital, Athens Georgia. September 2, 1970. My first daughter is born. My wife has had a very difficult pregnancy, and this is the culmination. At 7:14 p.m., the Dr. comes out and tells me “It’s a Girl” I excitedly run to the pay phones down stairs and call my parents. My Mother in law is there with us. My father in law is in California, and she gives him a call. The pediatrician, a stoic looking Chinese born Dr., comes out and tells us that the baby is in perfect condition and will be brought out to the nursery in a few minutes. I pace nervously and have a cigarette. “I really need to quit this,” I think. It will be hard on the baby. About fifteen minutes later they bring her out to the nursery. What a beauty she is, with mounds and loads of dark black hair and eyes so dark, they are like the night sky when there are no stars. I put my face up next to the nursery window and puff on it. She is right under me, and I stand there and watch her blink, and stuff her tiny fist in her mouth. I think of all the things that we are going to do, she is the first granddaughter on both sides, and will be spoiled to death….I turn to talk to my Mother in law and she starts to fade away…. On September 4th, in the wee hours of the morning, my baby Karrie Lynn Bowers dies. They could never figure out what went wrong. I only wish that they had been as liberal back the about nursery policies as they are today….I never got to hold her, or touch her…and my heart still breaks.

Circa 1962

I had waited until my last year of eligibility to play little league ball. I was big for my age, and all the other kid’s teased me about my size. “Man, you gotta be at least 16” they would say. The opposing team parents would “naa-naa” too, but I had my birth certificate! I had started off hot in practices, losing all the coaches baseballs by knocking them over the fence into the river. I had some power during practices. But,. I had a case of nerves when it came to real games. I was in a slump, a really bad slump through the first three games I didn’t have a hit.

It was the ninth inning against the “Yankees” Old Russel Fox was pitching and we were behind 7-4. The bases were loaded, and I was up. I felt that tightening in my stomach that I always got…almost sick to the point of throwing up. I came up to bat and the ump called the first one: “Strike one” right down the middle. Russell grinned at me, and everyone jeered. The next pitch was too far in, and hit my HARD on the elbow. I wasn’t then and never have been one to show emotion, so I didn’t let anyone know how bad it hurt. But I was seeing RED. I was so pissed I could have killed him, because I knew he did it on purpose. He wound up for the next pitch, and threw his fast ball straight down the middle. I put it so far over the right field fence that it is still floating down the Chattooga River! As I trot around the bases with the world’s biggest and silliest grin on my face…the baseline fades away… I hit 4 more home runs that year after the ice was broken.

Circa 1958….

It’s Christmas day 1958. I had never seen a White Christmas. After all this IS Georgia and Mr. Heat Miser has sway down here! I went to bed that night with all the visions of a new baseball bat, and glove in my mind. Maybe some new comic books. It’s seven o’clock the next morning and Mom says: “Larry, wake up and come and look outside” I go look out our big old picture window at the black cherry tree in the front yard. It has snowed! It snowed on Christmas morning!! I can’t go out in it until we open our presents though, so I start to tear into them.

There’s some new “Scrooge McDuck” comics. Darn stingy old Scrooge is my favorite. There’s a box of tinker toys, and a wooden puzzle of the United States. But…that’s all. I am a little disappointed, and then from the dining room I hear a “hoot, HOOT” I go running in there, and there sit’s my Dad with a TRAIN going around the tracks. A real Lionel with smoke belching out the top! He already has the track together and is sitting there laughing as hard as I am, because he is enjoying it just as much as me! I sit down on the floor and play with the train for a while. Then I remember the snow. I want to make a snowman, and NOW! Mom wraps me up in my coat, puts on gloves, and as I start out the door…..the snow starts to fade away. There was a snowman built that day, but I didn’t name him Frosty….

The holiday season is a double edged sword. Oh how I love these days between now and the new year. These are times of the gatherings of family. These are the times of great meals and food…familiar dishes and recipes send wonderful, memory jogging smells through the air.

They pick me up and take me back once more, to the place in time where old memories are stored.

I’m at Grandma and Grandpa’s old clapboard house, and Granny has the table ready. Most of the Aunts, Uncles and cousins are already there, but there’s always a late comer or two. It might be Uncle Jack, and Aunt Kay and their boys this year….but everyone finally makes it there. We all gather round that big old wooden table…so many of us. All scattered now, and so many gone, but the memory lives.

Then I think of the days when my family was young. I had never heard of stuffing a turkey before Paula and I got married, but oh how delicious that stuffing was…and is still. I like a pan of cornbread dressing too, but I can’t wait for that delicious stuffing…my dear mother in laws recipe….I cannot believe she has been gone so many years now. It doesn’t seem possible…

I think of the times with Mom and Dad, not particularly the days when Mike and I were kids, but their very last Thanksgiving meal with us, over there in their own house on 7th street in 2009. We had moved into their house and they were in Assisted living. We went up and brought them down for the meal. Momma kept asking where their stuff was. She couldn’t understand that things had not been left the same as when they had moved out. She was always planning on coming back! Daddy just ate like he was starving, and asking for more sweet tea. Then 2010 came and we lost them.

And so there is the bittersweet of this time of year. Time passes by and people pass on, as the old Kathy Mattea song says.

So as my wife and I walk through this 65th year’s holiday season I will rejoice in all that we share together, my wonderful family and good friends! Let’s eat some turkey, and open some presents and pass the love around and back again. Let’s make some great memories together. After all that is what makes us who we are.

The “Camp” fire in Southern California which is the predominant fire that was so deadly in terms of damage and loss of life, occurred almost entirely on private land, which was mainly shrub land. The shrub and brush in these areas is left in place due to the fact that winter rains would cause massive mudslides without it. When the Santa Anna winds blow into these areas, it’s like blow drying your hair. The shrubs get totally dried out and any sparking, such as the impetus of this particular fire, which was started by a PG&E malfunction, is like striking a match to dry cotton.

Hundreds of people have lost their lives here, with hundreds more missing, and many thousands with permanently disrupted lives. It’s easy for people who are not there to say: “well they should have done this or that to prevent it”. It’s easy to make a political football of other people’s lives when it’s not something in which we are personally involved. That includes me and whatever I have to say.

The breakdown of forest management is, as far as I can tell from researching: the federal government manages just over 57% of the land in California, 39% is privately owned, and only 2% is owned or managed by the state of California.

This post is strictly informational, and not meant as a statement for or against any person or group of people.

I hope that everyone continues to remember the people who have been affected by these tragedies, and others this year, such as Hurricane Michael. All these people could probably use any help we can give them, and prayers if you’re so inclined.

I dreamed a strange dream a few nights ago. Paula and I were in the “hereafter” so to speak. We were both young again, and we were in this huge empty house. Paula was sitting around playing the guitar and singing! “When did you learn to play and sing like that?” I asked. She replied, “Do you think I watched and listened to you for fifty years without learning something?” “I guess not” I said.

The house was huge and beautiful, but empty. I seemed to sense instinctively though, that it had once been full and joyful…and that it would be again one day.

It’s strange what our minds come up with in dreams.

During this time of the year we all see the beginnings, and the endings. The firsts and the lasts. The first Thanksgiving and Christmas for some little ones, and the last for some. Some perhaps expected, some unexpected. “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get.”

I get emotionally caught up in this vortex of life we all have going on around us constantly, and often forget what I should be all about. I get sidetracked by the everyday humdrum racket of Social Media going’s on, and jump out there with stuff I should just keep “in my heart”. I gotta watch it.

There are firsts and lasts happening this year. There are holes in the fabric of Joy we naively weave around the holiday season left by those whose last, was last season. We fill those as best we can with those tiny, beautiful “firsts” who have come into our lives. We gotta do that. We also need to look around us this year very closely, and tell those around us that we love them. It’s easy for me in some cases, but a little harder in others, although it should not be. It should be unconditional. It’s my burden to bear that I cannot be as kind as I should be, that I cannot be as forgiving as I need to be. I thought about that very thing this morning while I was walking, but then ran off the track before the day had ended. Ah, the nature of humanity constantly wars against our need to be more loving. My fifth grade teacher used to punish us by making us write a particular sentence by longhand either 500 or 1000 times on paper, and turn it in to her. I need to write “I will be a better man” 1000 times by tomorrow and turn it in to God….Maybe then it would stick.

Having now rambled on far too long, I have said all of that to say this: love those around you this year. Be kind to them, and enjoy your time together. Most of us will be able to do that, but there are many out there for whom the holidays are a toil. Children get abused…cruelty runs rampant. If you find any way to help someone for whom the holidays are not a fun time, please do it.

As for me, I’m practicing more on my guitar starting tomorrow because in my dream of “heaven” Paula was playing and singing a lot better than me.

On November 22nd, 50 years ago I went out from school at lunchtime and tried to jump from one big rock to another over at the river. I landed short, with my right leg jamming up against a sharp nodule in the limestone rock and puncturing a hole in my shin bone. Mr Couey didn’t like the looks of it, and sent me home for my Mom to decide whether or not for me to go to the Dr. My Aunt Shirley and my Grandmother Stewart were spending the week with us, and Mom was pouring peroxide on my wound when Cronkite came on TV saying the President had been shot. My Mom dropped the peroxide bottle, and my Aunt started to cry. I didn’t get to go to the Dr. that day and I still have that scar on my shin. I call it my Kennedy scar. I got another scar that day too…the scar that occurs when you are hit hard by the realities of life at 13. Things would never be the same for the rest of the 60’s. I loved that decade, and those wonderful youthful years, but there was always a seed of caution resting in the back of my brain somewhere, just waiting for some dire announcement to cause it to germinate into full blown cynicism at the world in which I lived.

Don’t let what others say about you rule your life. Don’t let how other people act towards you make you bitter.

Don’t let what other people think about things make you change your ethics or your beliefs. No matter what your belief, it is just as valid as any other.

Stand up for yourself even when other people won’t.

Don’t be afraid to take on the whole world if it’s for a good cause.

Believe in yourself.

Don’t always choose to be a follower when you get the chance to lead. The world needs more leaders with the values to change things for the better of all people…not just the elite few.

It’s blustery, gray and quite cold this morning, so I guess my walking will have to wait until this afternoon. I’m somewhat tired anyway, after a night of vivid dreams, some disturbing….some more docile and sweet.

I don’t claim to know much about the mind. In truth, I think I don’t know too much at all in reality. Our human knowledge is limited, and although we think we are constantly expanded it, I wonder if our expansion of said knowledge is in the wrong direction. For the most part, we are always looking outward with our research and development. I think we should be looking inward. After all, we do not even know what it is inside of us which leaves us at some point, and causes us to become inanimate objects instead of animate living things.

For sure, science has their own explanations, but for me they are incomplete. I just have this nagging and unexplainable feeling that we are missing something about life which is right there in front of our face, but which we cannot quite grasp, or quite explain.

Sometimes I even wonder if dreams are our actual reality, and what we live in our “waking” hours is something else entirely.

Silly isn’t it?

Well, it’s just a thought.

Hal 9000, the super computer, asks Dave in “2001: A Space Odyssey” right before he turns him off: “Will I dream”?? It’s an honest question.

I wonder if we will when we are turned off?

I wrote this a few years back….and this years going to be the year it really happens.

It’s going to be an Old Fashioned Christmas this year….everyone is getting a paper bag filled with penny candies, oranges, apples, peppermint candy and nuts…..I used to enjoy these when I was a kid, but I suppose that was a “lifetime” ago.

I remember sitting at the foot of a Christmas tree which was just a spruce that my Grandparents had cut down, and opening a few presents…but I still loved that ol’ “brown bag” of goodies that the “Old Zion” Baptist Church used to give all the kids. Christmas seems to be so much more complicated nowadays, what with “Black Friday” and all the emphasis on shopping and gifting.

I always enjoy the “kick off” being the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade and watching “Miracle on 34th St.” NOT, Halloween and “It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown” We can’t seem to see the forest for the trees anymore… As for me, I’ll take good health this year….and oh…a brown paper bag of goodies…that’s about it.

When you get older, you develop cracks in your spiritual self. People you love grow up and “grow away” from you. Its a natural part of life, but it leaves cracks.

People that you love, both family and friends, die…and that leaves cracks. Never to hear those voices again. That’s the thing which gets me. If the eyes are the window to the soul, the voice is the soul’s connection to others. I miss the voices of my loved ones who are gone so much. I miss their touch.

Of course we can spackle some of the cracks with new relationships, new friends. Beautiful little grandchildren. New interests. And of course we can still cultivate the garden of love we have already growing with those who love us, and whom we love. Every garden needs a little fertilizer and water, and it’s up to all of us to provide it. If a move needs to be made to shore up a relationship, be the first one to make it. Don’t wait. If an apology is in order, don’t be the prideful one, be the humble one. Do it. If somebody needs help, do it without expecting anything in return. Do the hard things that need to be done to help, don’t just pick and choose the easy stuff.

Life is not about money, or fame, or being right all the time. Life is about relationships. Good relationships put fuel in your soul’s tank. Loving and being loved is what makes life worth living.

I saw some friends today I went to school with. Most of us for the entire 12 years. It reminded me that I learned how to care about other people by being close to these classmates. It set me up mentally to prepare for life’s permanent relationships by relating to them. Plus, I still care very much for all of them.

In closing I’d just like to say I think my cracks…the empty spots which have been left by life’s inevitable flow have been pretty well filled, and will continue to be, as long as I keep an open heart to change.

Our Fathers, and some of our Mothers went off to World War II, and then came home and created us. The baby boomers.

Our parents had hopes and dreams that we, their precious children, could change the world to be a better place. That we could change the world to be a world with no more war. That we could change the world to be more accepting. That we could change the world to be a happier place. That we could enrich the world with the knowledge and science that comes with a college degree….one which most of them did not have a chance to get.

Most of our parents, being children of the depression, wanted more for us then they we’re able to have. So they gave things to us. Our Christmases were like Ralphie’s in “A Christmas Story”. We had our ball gloves and our baseball games. Football became a major force in America during our lifetimes. Hell, all sports did for that matter. We concentrated more on being good athletes, than we did being good citizens.

We were expected to get good grades in school, and to be polite. We did….we were.

We owed it to our Moms and Dads to succeed in our quest to change the world. It has been changed, but we have not changed it for the good.

Instead, we became the “me” generation. We became the “lost” generation. We became the generation who’s motto was “make love and not war”. We were the generation who protested the “Vietnam” war.

We created wonderful music. We wrote great books. But in the space of all this time between the “then” of our birth and the “now” of today, we became divided. We diverged in the late 60’s onto two separate paths. Some remained liberal children of the flower power movement , while others made a choice to move on to more conservative norms.

I don’t pretend to be able to reduce all the complicated reasons we are where we are now into a few paragraphs. It’s impossible. But the gist of what I am trying to say is that my generation was many. We were the majority of voters at one time in this country…and we failed. We failed to do all the things we were supposed to do for our Moms and dads.

We failed to heal. We failed to unite, and we failed to erase hatred and prejudice. Now it is too late for us. Our time to effect change has been lost like the long hair we used to wear.

All I can say is “Dad and Mom…I’m so damned sorry I failed you, I am so terribly, awfully sorry”. I did not realize that my civic duty was more important than “feeling good”. By the time I have realized it……..

There’s millions more out there, Baby Boomers….who owe their folks the same apology. We let the chance to change the world into a better place for our children and grandchildren, slip away like sand through the hourglass of our era.

Now we reap what we sow….or more appropriately, what we failed to sow. We deserve what we get for betraying the sacred mission with which our parents entrusted us.

Make the world a better place to live. Leave more than you found.