Eight Years

"Eight Years"

By James Robert Smith

I need to say a few things up front, before I even start this story.

My mom was what she liked to call 'half Jewish'. Yeah, I know. Some people say that there’s no such thing. You either are a Jew, or you are a gentile. There is no half-measure to being a Jew. That said, it’s a common term and that’s what she said about herself and that’s good enough for me.

She was proud of that part of her heritage, even if it was mainly denied to her. She was raised around her Jewish aunts, uncles, and cousins and took things in through osmosis and not through being a member of the tribe. Her father had been raised in a very observant home, what some people refer to as an Orthodox Jew. But he lost a great deal of that identity when he married my gentile grandmother and his parents sat shiva on him. (He never saw them again. They were as serious as death on that point.)

Still and all, it was important to my mother and she loved her Jewish relatives and I always felt as if she was a person who really wanted to be Jewish. She seemed to be what I’ve heard some rabbis refer to as “a person with a Jewish soul”.

My dad was a white working class man from the Deep South. Born and raised in Georgia, mainly of Scots-Irish extraction. He was also an atheist since the age of twelve and very early in his life was attracted to left-wing ideology. He came of age around 1930 and rode the rails out of the state and to points north, searching for the impending revolution which, somehow, never came. Because of his brand of politics he befriended many Jews. His favorite writers and political thinkers were all Jews.

Frankly, if I had to venture a guess, I think he ended up in New York City in a search to find a Jewish wife. Instead, he discovered my mom and ended up with a half-Jewish wife. Eh.

So, now, forward many years. It was 1967. The FBI had come down like a ton of Bibles on the nascent American Leftist Revolution and my dad was a bookseller in Atlanta, Georgia. My mom was his business partner and a mother to their eight kids. By then, half of the children were gone, adults. So were almost all of my dad’s leftist thinker Jewish pals. They’d given up on the revolutionary movement and had turned their sights elsewhere—mainly to the State of Israel.

This bugged the shit out of my dad. I mean, it grated on his every last nerve. Why had they all abandoned the struggle so that they could instead focus their thoughts and efforts and donations on a country across the ocean in the Middle East? What kind of an American does that? He stewed.

My dad always enjoyed talking to any of his customers who wanted to discuss politics. Since the store was in a largely Jewish neighborhood, well, he conversed with a lot of Jews. He supported Palestine and those Jewish customers supported Israel. The slow simmer that had been heating at my dad’s passion began to boil.

There were two particular customers—a couple of young Jewish engineering students from Georgia Tech--who enjoyed coming into my dad’s store to bait him. They liked plucking at this old Georgia man who was exceedingly well read, but who didn’t even have a sixth-grade education, having left school before he was ten years old. They would come by to aggravate him and my dad would argue, but he never lost his temper. He just debated with the two assholes who I’d watch as they would team up on my old man and laugh at him.

Then: the Six Days War. The two kids—I saw them a few times and they couldn’t have been more than twenty years old—came in right after this event. They were brimming with confidence and contempt for my dad and decided to drop in on him and rub it in. I’m not sure what they said to him, but he snapped. He didn’t beat them senseless or anything, but they never came to his shop again. That was it. They’d skated a tad too close to the edge and knew well enough to back off.

But it was that moment, I truly feel, that my dad became a Jew-hater.

I’m talking full-bore hatred. As in they all need to go. That kind of hatred. He brought that stuff home.

To that point my parents never argued. Never. In fact, in my admittedly brief eight years of life I had never seen them argue. Not once. But one night after closing the bookshop my dad came in and one thing led to another and he announced that he’d arrived at the logical conclusion that all Jews were inherently evil. All of them. Without exception.

I had been listening to them debate from my bedroom where I had been dozing off for the night. But the debate had turned into an argument. Their voices had risen to yells.

It was raining outside. I recall that vividly and I could hear the rain coming down against my bedroom window as their argument became louder and louder. It was just muffled blasts of voices through the twin barriers of my door and theirs.

And then—BAM!—they were screaming at one another. I had never heard my mom yell that way, her voice filled with complete and unrelenting rage. My dad was, of course, implying that her uncles were evil. That her aunts and cousins were vile. That her father was inherently a monster. And that all of the millions of Jews remaining on Earth that Hitler had not killed were bad news for everyone else. She could not sit there and take that. I then had the impression that something smashed against the floor or against the walls. But it wasn’t like that. It was just my impression of violence between my parents who had never had a cross word in my presence.

In short order, however, I did hear the front door slam. And then silence.

I got up and went out of my bedroom into the hall and entered the dining room where the lights were on. My dad was standing there.

“Where’s Mama?” I asked.

My dad was a big man. Six-foot-two. With a huge beer gut, solid black hair. He looked down at me.

“She went out.”

“But it’s raining,” I said. I had already started crying.

“Don’t worry,” he told me. “She just went out for a walk.”

Who walks in the rain? That made no damned sense whatsoever.

“Why would she do that? Why were you yelling at each other?”

“We were arguing. That’s all. We were just arguing.”

I could think of nothing they could argue about. I knew their store was doing well and that they were making good money. We had nice things and lived in a nice house and they drove a new car and they paid cash for that stuff. I didn’t know any other kids whose parents paid cash for a car, but my parents did. I would tag along when my mom would go in to bargain for a car. It was brutal. Sometimes I would end up feeling sorry for the car salesmen, she drove such a hard bargain.

I was, of course, distressed. Here was my dad standing like an idiot in the dining room doing nothing. My mom was out in the rain walking around. It was very dark. Of course I began to cry even harder.

My dad told me not to cry and that she would come back soon. That she just went for a walk to think. I was worried sick. How could he stand there while my mother was out in the rain? I headed toward the door and he told me not to go out and insisted that she would return very soon. He told me to go back to bed, and I did. Of course I could not sleep. I lay there and waited, listening.

In a while—I don’t know how long, but it seemed like hours--I heard the front door open and I leaped out of bed and ran into the dining room. There was my mom. Soaked to the skin. Her hair—which had been white since before she was thirty—was plastered to her skull. She looked horrible.

“Mama!” I yelled, relieved that she was home. I wanted to hug her but she told me to go back to bed. Again, I did as I was told.

The rest of the night was silent. I don’t think my parents spoke to one another. If they did, it was after I fell asleep. They certainly did not argue.

It was a few days later before I found out what this was all about. My dad hated all Jews? This made no sense to me. My dad hated no one over their race or nationality. How could this be: my father who was for civil rights, human rights; against all racism? Why would he suddenly hate Jews? My mother’s father had been a Jew. This made no sense to me whatsoever and I could only conclude that my dad had gone completely bats.

I’m not sure how they dealt with this development, but my parents never argued about it again. For years it was something that was there, sometimes unspoken, but also bubbling up through a Jew-hating rant from my dad (when my mom was not around).

The years passed. We moved and my parents opened more bookstores as they went elsewhere looking for capitalist wealth. Sometimes they did well, sometimes not so good. Macon. Columbus. Athens. Chattanooga. Finally, Brunswick. It was 1975. I had recently graduated high school. While my mom was disassembling our household to move our furnishings from the mountains of Ellijay to the flatlands of Brunswick, I helped my dad transport his shelves and books from one end of the state to the other. We worked and slept in the store—the building which my parents owned--while we hammered the wood and stocked the shelves. For a while I was my dad’s closest friend and confidant. Nearing the end of his life he had to make do with a 17-year-old son to talk to and to exchange ideas. My mom was several hundred miles away packing the household for the move. His friends were all gone. The bright book buyers whom he counted upon for intellectual inspiration were elsewhere.

As far as I knew—although we never spoke about it much—he still hated Jews. I figured he must, since I’d never heard him renounce it.

One day we were talking. The store had taken shape and was a day or two away from opening. Brunswick was not the kind of town I figured as a successful location for a bookstore. All of the other towns where he’d found profits had been larger population centers. I was worried things would completely fall apart and my parents would end up broke. But through all of this worry on my part we would sit and talk when we weren’t hammering shelves together or alphabetizing books by author.

That day, for some reason, my dad had been talking about Oscar Levant. He really liked that guy. I recall interrupting him.

“Oscar Levant? You like Oscar Levant?”

My dad nodded. “Yes.”

“Wait…he’s Jewish.” Other than the name being a giveaway my mom was obsessed with informing me if a successful person was a Jew. It was her secret way of countering my father’s propaganda, I have always assumed.

My dad shrugged.

“Why would you like him if he’s a Jew?”

“The guy was funny. And smart. And witty. And talented.”

“And a Jew,” I added. “How can you like him if he was a Jew?”

“I just told you why.”

The puzzle of my dad never ceased to confuse me. “You were talking about Edward G. Robinson yesterday. You told me you liked him, too. And I know he was a Jew, also. Why do you like him”

I’ll never forget my dad smiling, then. He didn’t smile a lot. “I figure any guy that ugly who can become a major movie star has to be worth admiring.”

I laughed. “Okay.”

We talked about other things and that was that.

A couple of weeks later, though, the subject came up again. The store was open. It was producing income. We had been eating some lunch in the shop and my dad had begun to tell me of living in New York City when he had met my mom.

“Tell me something,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Mama’s father was a Jew. Was he inherently evil, too?” Charles Kurtz, I knew, had been a performer as a young man. In Vaudeville at one time, I was led to understand. He was an acrobat and worked with a partner. But he wasn’t just an acrobat—he was a singing acrobat. They would work their tumbling act and these two muscle-bound Jews would end the performance by singing to the audience. After that, he’d opened a small grocery store that he’d run before dying of cancer while still a relatively young man, leaving behind a wife and seven kids. “How could an acrobat who became a grocer be evil?”

My dad's back stiffened. I’d been sitting behind him on a stool when I had said this. He was in a chair and he half turned toward me, the sandwich in his right hand. “Your mother’s father was a good man. He was very sweet. Don’t ever, ever say anything bad about your grandfather.”

My dad didn’t live a lot longer after that. He neglected his health terribly, having grown up in a time and place where you didn’t go to see a doctor unless you were about to die. And he was about to die, but he didn’t get a chance to see a doctor before it happened. Hearts tend to fail like that, sometimes.

But one day we were there again, in the store, our heads together conversing like two old pals. My dad had been telling me of a book he’d just finished about Charlie Chaplin and some of the good things Chaplin had done in his life.

“I thought you didn’t like Chaplin,” I said. Chaplin apparently would often tell people he was a Jew, even though he wasn’t. Or the public would think it for some reason or another, my dad included.

“I didn’t like him for the past eight years because I thought he was a Jew,” my dad told me. “But he wasn’t a Jew, and I wasted eight years hating him because of that.”

I just stared at him. He sat there stoically looking down the long rows of his bookstore—the last bookstore he would ever own.

“So,  you don't think Jews aren’t evil,” I said.

“No.” The silence of the store around us, the dust, the smell of old pulp. “No, I do not.”

My mom's parents. From what I understand, around this time my grandfather was a performing--apparently a singing!--acrobat. Wish I knew more about that act.

Since our last move this is the only photo of my mom that is not packed away.

Same thing here. Photos of my mom's sisters are all packed up except for these two sent to me via Internet some months ago from a wedding many decades ago (1930s?). Here, my mom's sisters Florris, and Verna.

A Couple of Cats My Dad Knew

Now and again I'll look up people on the Internet who my dad knew in his youth, or later during my own youth. Some of these people would come around his bookstores or his house from time to time. Strangely to me, these folk I recall were regionally famous and a few of them even well known nationally.

One guy I never met--but whose poetry I would sometimes read in the personally inscribed volume of his poems that he gave to my father--was Don West. West was the author of the mentioned volume, CLODS OF SOUTHERN EARTH, which had sold something like 200,000 copies in its day. I don't think he made much--if any--money from it, but I suppose it brought cash to his publisher.

West was, like my dad, a leftist in the days of the Great Depression. He continued his leftist ways long after such movements had been quashed and destroyed. I recall that my dad mentioned once that West sought shelter at one of my parents' homes when he was running from both the KKK and the FBI. For good reason, I suppose, because some time later the KKK burned down West's house in Atlanta. Even the publisher of the Atlanta Constitution publicly called for West to be cast out of the city.

One reason my dad moved us to Gilmer County in Georgia (where he had purchased 120 acres where he built us a house) was that West was born and raised there. So my dad assumed that there would be other people like Don West around those mountains, hills, and hollows. Alas, we soon discovered that Gilmer County and Ellijay were inhabited by people even worse than those to which we were accustomed--racism, hatred, and ignorance the likes of which it is almost impossible to believe.

Unlike West, who spent his life in a struggle against racism, the rest of the county's residents were basically monsters, or nearly so. It's no wonder that James Dickey's visits to Gilmer County resulted in his creation of the novel DELIVERANCE which illustrated the area as it was then with complete and utter perfection.

As my dad was coming to the realization that he was not going to find the "good mountain men" he thought were present, he discovered that West had relocated to West Virginia where he was trying to operate a school teaching the history and common skills of the people of Appalachia. My dad planned to ride up to make a surprise visit, but for whatever reason he never did. 

(A bit of information here--Don West's daughter, Hedy West, wrote the universally famous folk song "500 Miles".)

Don West.

Another dude that I recall visiting my dad's store, and even our home, was Bud Foote, a professor at Georgia Tech. I vividly recall him stopping by the shop relatively often to converse with my father. I remember that he was funny in a very cynical way and that I enjoyed listening to him. And  he would stop by our home on Mead Road in Decatur, sometimes in the company of other professors from Tech. It was on one such visit where I first heard of plate tectonics and continental drift which was, at that time, considered heresy and lunacy. I don't recall if it was Foote or one of the other professors, but the guy showed me a Mercator map of the Earth that my dad had on a shelf and indicated how each continent "fit" together.

On a trip to see Foote at his own place closer to downtown Atlanta, he showed me a science-fiction magazine in which he had a story. I don't recall which of them it was, but I remember being impressed, because even as a kid of only nine years of age I knew that I wanted to be a published author some day. After we moved away from Atlanta my dad lost touch with Foote, as the common ground between the Princeton-educated professor and my working class dad had been my father's bookstore, and nothing else.

Bud Foote.

At any rate, I think of some of these characters from time to time and wonder about what happened to them and when they died. Foote seems to have led the good life of an Ivy League graduate who collected many friends and admirers over the years. West, although a graduate of Vanderbilt, led the much harder life of a man who actually acted to fight injustice rather than sitting at his desk and penning mild accusations against the system.

Back in the Day.

When I was a kid my dad gave me a book about the history of Stone Mountain, Georgia (the mountain, not the town). I ignored most of the book because it was obsessed with the fucking carving that now blights it. But what I did like about it were the many photos of the mountain before it was violated by that stinking carved monument.

Somewhere along the way I lost that book, and I wish I still had it just to see those photos. Because the mountain was beautiful in those days. I recall there was a series of photos showing the initial dynamite charges being set off to straighten out the bulge of the cliff face to facilitate the obscene picture that now mars the mountainside. Even as a kid those photos made me want to vomit.

I don't know why the mountain became a center for Klan activity and white nationalism. Maybe it was because the man who owned the property was also a piece of shit and invited them in. I sincerely don't know (and don't care).

At any rate, it's hard these days to find photos of the mountain pre-carving.

Here are a couple for those of you who might be interested.

I vividly recall the first time I went to see Stone Mountain. They were still working on that goddamned carving. My dad and I were standing at a viewing platform below looking up at the schmucks carving rock. I turned to my dad and asked, "Who are those three guys in the carving?"

And my dad answered, "Just three goddamned assholes who don't amount to a pile of cow shit."

Some nearby people glared at my dad but didn't say jack shit.

One of the largest granite monoliths on Earth. Almost 900 feet from base to summit.

When They're Gone.

About two weeks after my dad died I was hiking home from visiting a friend. I was passing an old wooded canal that had once been important to the Atlantic Richfield Company many, many decades before, but which is now just a lazy waterway shaded by enormous live oaks. As I was standing there, looking at the water I saw a movement. Something was really making waves in the murky water. I edged out onto one of those live oaks until I could get a good look and was amazed to see an otter. Either playing or hunting. I could not tell which. I watched that otter living life like mad until a tiny bit of bark came loose and fell into the canal. That otter instantly stopped, lifted his head out of the water and immediately spied me. Then he vanished soundlessly and did not come back.

As I walked away from that tree I was moving at double-speed because my dad loved that kind of thing and I could not WAIT to get back home to tell him.

And, of course, it hit me. I had no one to tell. No one who would appreciate the experience. And so I just became that much tougher.

I was on the creek behind this cemetery when I saw the otter.

A Little Mitzvah.

My dad and I were once up on a mountain in Alabama called Wade Mountain. All covered in limestone boulders. A movement on the rocks caught my dad's eye and he saw a snail moving quite faster than he'd ever seen a snail travel. He pointed it out and we both went over, knelt down, and watched what was going on.

The snail was being attacked by this very colorful predator bug that I've only ever seen on Wade Mountain. The bug was built low to the ground, had many legs (far more than six) and had a shiny, segmented carapace of bright red, and brown, and yellow. It obviously was trying to kill and eat the snail.

And the snail was employing several methods of defense: It was moving along, as I said, faster than you would think a snail could ever go. Just exuding slime. But the bug was faster and kept darting around--front-back-side, over and over relentlessly, trying to bite the snail.

But another thing the snail was doing was making this shield of thick, viscous bubbles. The bug could get through them, but only after biting and biting and never quite reaching flesh before more bubbles would be produced.

We continued to watch as the snail made a really big bath of these bubbles and came to a halt as the bug attacked from one side. At that point the snail's shell leaned heavily to the left. The bug was trying to bite through the last of the bubbles. We couldn't figure out why the snail was leaning over so far.

And then the snail SNAPPED to the right and knocked the holy shit out of the bug, sending it backward a little.

But...it didn't really injure the bug and as soon as it recovered from the shock it came right back. We figured it was curtains for the brave snail.

So my dad took a stick and flicked the bug off the boulder on which we were all crouching, sending the predatory little bastard about twenty feet down to the forest floor where it wandered around and vanished into the leaf litter.

Talk about yer deus ex machina.

One of the spots on Wade Mountain where we used to hike.The entire mountain is like this...limestone rock everywhere and packed with all sorts of fossils.

The snail we saw was similar to this one.

This is a millipede. And most millipedes are herbivores, but in my kid's memory, the bug doing the attacking looked a lot like this. Not sure if it was a millipede like this one, but it sure did look very similar.

Tom Mix!

Once again I find myself buying a back issue I don't normally collect. The reason I grabbed it? The price. Perhaps I'll use it as part of a trade deal at some later date to get a book that really is high on my want list.

Back when I was a collectibles dealer I would run into roughly one Golden Age collection each year. Some years were dry, but then I'd land two or three big Golden Age deals in one twelve-month span. One of the biggest Golden Age comic collections I ever found was back in the 80s and it consisted of thousands of issues, mainly old westerns and Fawcett Captain Marvel books. In that one I purchased so many westerns that I had never seen. I can't say for sure, but I think TOM MIX #2 must have been in there. They didn't stay in my possession for long. Golden Age comics never did hang around for more than a few weeks after I purchased them because there were just so many fans willing to shell out the dough for these genuinely rare items.

Oh, yeah. Tom Mix wasn't just a comic book character. He was a real guy. One of the first hugely popular western stars. People today have forgotten just how huge some of these guys' careers were. Although the Mix's popularity went back far before I was born, I knew about him as a kid because my dad liked him. Not sure why my dad liked him, but he did. I always lumped Tom Mix in with various actors and performers that my father liked for reasons that were never quite clear to me; among them being Edward G Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, Oscar Levant, Jerry Lewis...the list was really weird and disparate.

My copy of TOM MIX #2.

Trails

There's probably something at work in my own mind and personality that makes me want to go trekking off into the forests and to enjoy the works of Mother Nature. But there's also something of nurture in the makeup of every person that has just as much influence on us all. And so I'm left to conclude that my dad's often strange desire to follow oblique paths into the unknown is a part of what makes me work.

When I think of my dad, one of the things that is foremost in my mind is his penchant for taking off down unmarked roads to explore. Fuck maps. He'd mainly have a map in the truck somewhere, but he'd only refer to it when he found a posted landmark and needed to make his way back homeward.

Many were the days when my dad would walk into a room where I'd be reading or watching television and say, "Let's go for a ride." Now, to most people, "a ride" meant a short jaunt down to the shopping center, or a cruise through town. Not so with my dad. Such an announcement might mean a two-hour journey into the rural areas of Middle Georgia where we'd look to spot white-tailed deer or little flocks of quail.

And sometimes it meant a trip of two days or more. Seriously. Sometimes after a couple of hours of driving I'd say, "Where are we going?" And I'd be informed that he'd suddenly decided to drive to Florida to visit his brother, so we'd have to stop and buy a couple of toothbrushes and some new underwear. Or across the state to see the mountains. Or to Tifton to take a look at the area where he'd been born. Then, mission accomplished, we'd go back home.

I just never knew.

Another thing is that he'd sometimes see a dirt track leading off whatever gravel road we happened to be traveling and he'd say, "I wonder what's down there?". Then he'd hang a sharp left or right and we'd go tearing down some overgrown travesty of a pair of ruts leading off into piney woods, the limbs and briars tearing at the metal sides of his half-ton Chevy pickup truck. This kind of sudden decision meant nothing to him. He wanted to know where the abandoned road led, and by Jove he was going to find out.

We'd go flying down the path that perhaps had not been driven in years. Maybe it had been a logging road. Perhaps it had once been a driveway leading to an abandoned home site far in the forest. The truck would flatten pine saplings and young sassafras trees and send blackberry brambles into green bits. Away we'd go.

Sometimes, when I'm driving with my wife down some National Forest roadway, graveled and graded and well-maintained, we'll see a faint path intersecting with it and I will slow down, sometimes come to a complete stop, the motor purring, rumbling, waiting for my command. And I will turn to her and say:

"If my dad were driving, he'd turn here and take us down that path and we'd see where it leads."

"Don't you dare!"

And so I push on, taking the safe road, destination known.

Until, of course, I go hiking.

This isn't my dad's 1963 Chevy half-ton pickup, but it's the same basic model.

I recall hooking up the chains to secure the back many a time.

"Seat belts? What the hell are 'seat belts'?!"

My dad's pickup had the same wooden bed.

"Let's go see what's down there!"

Literature and Me

My parents always had books around. Tons of them. Even before they became booksellers there was always ample reading material around for me. My initial memories are of comic books.

 Here, then, are the literary influences that stuck in my brain throughout my life. Not necessarily the most important influences for me, but the ones that made initial impressions. Starting from as far back as I can remember.

The first comic that I can recall reading was the Jesse Marsh version of JOHN CARTER OF MARS from Dell Comics. I couldn't have been older than four or so when it was given to me. The next comic that I read was FANTASTIC FOUR #4. Again, I must have been five...it was before I entered first grade.

By the time I was eight I had discovered Hugh Lofting's DR. DOOLITTLE books. My mom watched me consume those and she gave me a copy of Bradbury's THE ILLUSTRATED MAN. Scared the shit out of me, and cemented a life-long love of horror. Then I discovered Ernest Thompson Seton and learned a respect for wild animals and later, I developed a love for our fellow creatures.

My dad gave me a copy of Darwin's VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE when I was nine. That began a love of science and learning and initiated a constant thirst for knowledge and kindled what I can only call a hatred for religion.

After that, of course, it was one discovery after another without any direction from my parents. I was too busy finding my own works to read. And of course it never stops. I'm always searching for the next writer to engage my imagination and to inspire my sense of wonder.

 

True Fate

When I was a kid just out of high school I worked in my dad's used bookstore. Around the time I was attending the local junior college I would come home from classes and then run the shop.

Some of the weirder folk would only drop in for specific items. One crazy old shirtless guy would ride his bike down the street. I could always see him zooming toward the store from a few blocks away. He'd zip along at a pretty good clip. He had a little dog that would blaze beside him, following the bike or running tandem.

The crazy old guy would park the bike, come in and buy the local newspaper. I don't ever recall that he wore anything but a pair of slacks. Not even any shoes. The dog would wait for him at the door. Paper bought, he'd tuck it into his back pocket and off they'd zoom back to wherever the hell it was he lived with his dog.

Another fellow would come in to buy only one item:

FATE Magazine.

I never read it and don't know much about it, except that it focuses on the supernatural and the "true" weird. And that it's still around (at least as an e-mag). But this guy apparently lived for them. He never spoke much and never, apparently, felt the need to talk about the things he read in the pages of Fate. At least not to me.

The fellow was tall--probably at least six feet three. Lanky. At the time I thought he was an older fellow, but probably he was no more than 35 or 40. And he always wore a cloth aviator cap. No matter the weather or the temperature. And this was in south Georgia where a normal summer day is in the mid-90s and it can hit the upper 80s even in winter and no one thinks it's remarkable. But he'd have that horrible aviator cap on even if it was sweltering.

The only time he ever spoke was when he heard me talking about ramps (a kind of wild onion) with one of my friends who had stopped by the store. He came to the counter and explained that he often had trouble with his sinuses and had read that possibly ramps could fix the problem. Since he'd heard me say that I had harvested them when I lived in the mountains he asked if I could get some for him. He needed them intact, with the leaves, so that he could try to grow them in his garden. I explained to him that they were wild and that as far as I had been able to acknowledge, they couldn't be farmed. Also, they flourished in the higher altitudes of the mountains and I didn't think they would thrive in the low country. Still, he wanted to get his hands on some live ramps and I told him I'd see what I could do.

My plan was to get one of my high school pals to harvest a dozen or so and send them to me by post. Alas, each of my old pals were all fled to college and the military. Try as I might, I could find no one to do me the favor. The fellow would ask from time to time about progress on procuring the wild onions when he came in for his copies of Fate Magazine. I explained that I had been unable to to find anyone to grab some of the plants and suggested that he travel to the north Georgia mountains to nab some himself.

Alas, he seemed to be as trapped in that hell-hole of a town as firmly as I was.

Eventually, he exhausted our stock of back issues of Fate Magazine and stopped visiting the store.

No matter the heat.

Contrast

My dad was--to put it mildly--a grouch. He was a bitter man who thought in his youth that the world would see the beginnings of a socialist utopia. Of course it never happened and it never will. So like the guy expecting to see the return of Christ before the end of his own life, he was a frustrated man.

But strangely enough, he kept a copy of this poem in his wallet. As far as I know, it was in his wallet up til the day he died. He found it printed on a card in an old volume he'd bought for one of his bookshops. He read it, apparently liked the message, folded it carefully and placed it in that wallet. Said wallet going through tough times with few dollar bills, and better times with lots of big Franklins as companions, and back to a couple dollars again.

Keep On Keepin' On

by Anonymous

 

If the day looks kinder gloomy
And your chances kinder slim,
If the situation's puzzlin'
And the prospect's awful grim,
If perplexities keep pressin'
Till hope is nearly gone,
Just bristle up and grit your teeth
And keep on keepin' on.

Frettin' never wins a fight
And fumin' never pays;
There ain't no use in broodin'
In these pessimistic ways;
Smile just kinder cheerfully
Though hope is nearly gone,
And bristle up and grit your teeth
And keep on keepin' on.

There ain't no use in growlin'
And grumblin' all the time,
When music's ringin' everywhere
And everything's a rhyme.
Just keep on smilin' cheerfully
If hope is nearly gone,
And bristle up and grit your teeth
And keep on keepin' on.

He'd take that poem out and read that crude little rhyme. Keep in mind that Mark Smith was no idiot--my dad could recite The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by heart, beginning to end. I can remember his favorite verse. It was this one:

 And fear not lest Existence closing your
 Account, and mine, should know the like no more;
   The Eternal Saki from that Bowl has pour'd
 Millions of Bubbles like us, and will pour.


He was a curious critter, my dad. When I think of this working class intellectual (yeah, he really was one of the last of those), sour, mean, but somehow hopeful to the end. I would wonder how a guy who would recognize the beauty and intensity of Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubaiyat could also admire a silly anonymous poem like "Keep on Keepin' On". I think it was those two lines of refrain:

And bristle up and grit your teeth
And keep on keepin' on.

Aye, I reckon there's something to be said for that.
 

My mom and dad. I think this was taken at Pemaquid Point in Maine in the early 1960s.

Peerless Book Store

Saturday, after we left Michele and Jeff for their trip to the mountains, we did a little shopping in an antique mall in Decatur, then headed over to Peerless Book Store for my signing. Carole met up with an old friend who had moved there and they also headed up to the mountains to visit a winery. So I settled in to my space for the singing event and waited for the customers.

Peerless Book Store is a brand new store. I arrived just in time for the first week mark. In fact, the shop is not even 100% set up, but was neat and clean and functional for my arrival. Best of all, they already have a good customer base, with many seemingly already loyal readers popping in to say hello and buy some books all during my time there.

I mainly do signings at the big box stores. And of course those are being reduced by the anemic economy and the results of years of competition between mass retailers. While I enjoy signing at all shops, I especially like to do events at smaller, independent shops like Peerless Book Store. I find the staff to be especially helpful and friendly, and eager to work hard to make a book sell better. Peerless Books was just such a place.

Sign at the entrance of the store.

The storefront of Peerless Book Store.

Am I famous yet?

I'm not? Those are copies of THE FLOCK in that window!!!

Some of the friendly folk at Peerless.

The author rests at the signature table.

The great publicity folk at Tor Books sent Peerless this cool foam board standee.

Carole's friend Michele who moved from the Charlotte area to the Atlanta area. She was kind enough to buy an autographed copy of the novel.

I hadn't seen my niece Leslie in many, many years. So she came to the signing and brought her aptly named son Chase and her sweet daughter Megan to the shop.

After the signing event we drove toward Kennesaw where Leslie lives and hooked up with them to eat dinner at Carabba's. I got to meet her husband, Mark Harris, whom I'd never met. Everyone was great!

Not Quite Gone

Every once in a while in my hikes around the southern Appalachians I'll happen upon a tree that I suspect is an American chestnut. Contrary to popular belief, the species is not quite extinct. Occasionally one will be found in some isolated place. This was one that I found near in the Pisgah National Forest along the crest of a high mountain--somewhere between 4,500 and 5,000 feet above sea level. The photo of the seed burr was on a part of the tree that was dead...but not because of blight, but because a bit of the tree had been snapped partially off either in a high wind or when a large branch fell from another tree and broke it. The main part of the tree was full and healthy.

Since my tree knowledge is horrible, I'm not always sure what I'm looking at. I could remedy this by taking a few classes at a local college or finding a study partner. My own ability to learn this stuff is a lost cause. Outside of my writing, I don't have the discipline to teach myself such things--my mind constantly wanders. It's at times like finding this tree that I regret not paying attention to my dad when we'd go hiking in the woods when I was a kid. He knew every tree we'd see. It didn't matter if we were in the low country or in the mountains--he knew them all. He'd point out a tree, tell me how to identify it, and the information would go into one ear and quickly out the other.

Alas.

Seed burr on part of the tree that had snapped off some time before.

Shot of the leaves on the majority of the tree that was intact and, apparently, healthy.

The Mark Harris Smith Sr. Meteor Crater

I know this doesn't look like much. But it's one corner of the county park that sat across the street from the first house I lived in as a child. The name of the place is Orange Park. Full of live oaks and loblolly pines, it has a tennis/basketball court and that's about it. Once upon a time it had all sorts of infrastructure for outdoor activities, but the city of Brunswick pretty much took it apart after racial integration. The swimming pool is gone. The water fountains are gone. The shed that held croquet sets, tennis rackets, balls, etc. is long gone, along with the shed's contents. I suppose you could still shoot a few hoops there if you bring your own basketballs.

The Mark H. Smith Sr. Meteor Crater?

At any rate, this photo is, as I said, one small corner of the park. As you may be able to notice, the photo indicates a low area in the center of the picture surrounded by relatively high terrain all around. My dad was convinced that this was a meteor crater. No, it's not much when compared to a major meteor site, but he may have been right. The other possibility is that it's the remains of a sinkhole, but I've seen old sinkholes in the low country, and this doesn't resemble those. And most sinkholes are underlain by limestone and this is not. This is all sand and soil with the saltwater marsh being less than a quarter of a mile east.

Very rough outline. The central (black) line shows the low area. This fills up with water during heavy downpours. The red line indicates the raised area where debris would have piled up after the impact. Or so my dad theorized.