Yard, Spring of 2019.

I forgot to post photos of the yard for this Spring. The azaleas and the dogwoods were nice. Not the best I've ever seen them, but pretty darned good. Some of the azaleas are dying and we need to plant new ones. It has been three years since Carole and I took the effort to replace the older azaleas in some of the beds. So we'll have to tackle that task this year. In addition, a few of the more mature dogwoods are also dying off. A few new dogwoods were nice enough to appear on their own over the past five years, but we'll have to target some spaces in the yard with transplanted trees. That's another task we'll have to take on this year.

At any rate, here are photos of this Spring's show.

The front yard.

One of the dozen azalea beds in the back yard. (Things still don't look right to us since the property owner behind us harvested the hardwood forest back there.)

Azaleas and dogwoods on the left side, back yard.

Another of the twelve beds in the back.

Dogwood branches in full bloom.

Our travel trailer. I took this today after getting the Casita all scrubbed for our upcoming vacation.

It took an awful lot of elbow grease to get the Casita cleaned up this time. She was really, really dirty.

Goodbye Faulty Stabilizers!

Now that I'm pretty much retired (I'm going to keep a part-time job because it never hurts to have extra money for traveling) Carole and I are planning quite a few trips. Most of the rest of this year it will be camping trips, but next year we may finally head to Italy.

At any rate, I spent the money for a new truck and camper shell. Then we turned our economic attention to our aging Casita travel trailer. It's still a good unit, but to get it up to standards I've had to spend some money on the plumbing (which needed work) and the wheel bearings and brakes.

One of the very few things about our Casita that I never have liked were the stabilizer jacks on the rear of the trailer. The design of the things just aren't something I have liked. It has always been a bit of a pain to lower and lock them into place, and to retract and secure them when it's time to leave. To me, they were just not very good. It didn't help that the trailer manufacturer welds them to the frame rather than bolting them on so that they can be more easily replaced or repaired.

Last year I bent one of them because I frankly screwed up and didn't secure it properly when it was time to move the trailer. My fault, all on me. Then, recently, the second one was bent when, in backing the trailer into its spot on our parking lot in the yard, it disengaged on its own, partially lowered, and was damaged.

Faced with two broken jacks instead of one I was getting ready to head to a shop to have someone use a torch to cut them off. One of my wife's friends mentioned it to her husband (Frank Shue) who figured he could come over and cut them off for me. So he brought over a simple cutting tool and went to work. In no time at all he had both jacks sliced off the frame and now I can travel down the road knowing I don't have two faulty jacks at risk of coming loose.

When we get back from our current trip I'm going to install new stabilizer jacks, of a completely different design from the old ones. Other improvements on the trailer this year will be to replace the subfloor and put in wooden flooring (instead of carpet), do a fix to give the trailer a high-lift axle so that I can add 15-inch tires instead of the current 14-inch, replace the old TV antenna, and then add solar panels for recharging the battery and producing energy when we're boondocking (instead of relying exclusively on our excellent Honda generator).

Over the next two years we'll be using the Casita a lot. More than we ever have before, since my working responsibilities are now a fraction of what they have been most of my life. Retirement, baby.

I never did like these jacks. Not only an uncomfortable design, but a pain to use.

Frank Shue cutting them off. Much appreciated!!

Now she's pretty much ready for our next vacation!

Marlin

This is from my current project. An historical novel set in West Virginia.

MARLIN

by

James Robert Smith

The school teacher came up the mountain from the abandoned rail that had once run to the town of Thurmond. These days there wasn’t much left of Thurmond. Just enough of the place so that you could understand that once it had been a thriving small city of some importance. It was vacant and empty now, like all of the other spots in the gorge that had once run rich with the spoils of coal and timber.

And if Thurmond was only a ghost town of empty buildings and no humans, the place the man now wandered in was even less. The structures were gone. Even the coke ovens and machine houses. These days there were merely strings of bricks scattered in the leaf litter and small chunks of concrete foundations fading into the soil, eaten away by the tart chemistry of slightly acidic rain.

The teacher was looking, as he always seemed to be doing, for bits of history of his native state. If you’d asked him why he sought out the ghost towns and forgotten communities marked only by toppled chimneys and weed-grown cemeteries perched on perilous slopes crumbling inexorably into the river, he wouldn’t have quite been able to tell you. It was just a mania he had to be able to verify the stories he heard told on the lawns of church homecomings on summer evenings by old men and older women—people who might have actually seen those faded villages in the days when they’d still clung to the steep Appalachian mountainside, made rich from hardwoods as they were felled by the timber barons; or by the rich, black coal sucked out of the rocky matrix like hot marrow from giant bones.

Sometimes he would take some little bits of the vast store of knowledge he’d collected and he would dole them out to one or another of his students. He taught kids, mainly 13-year olds in the Beckley Middle School. Sometimes he’d encounter a youth who seemed bright enough and curious enough concerning their shared county and he’d mention one of the places he’d found due to a description from an old-timer, or had visited because of a curious dot on a faded quadrangle map. Mainly, though, he kept it all to himself.

It was summer—moist and hot and green; but his feet made the leaves crunch beneath his tread as his boots took him through poison ivy and doghobble and young heath plants vying for space beneath a canopy of trees that had reappeared in the seventy-five years since the last of the land’s resource thieves had robbed the place. All the people having fled, having gone, that land had restored itself to a semblance of the wilderness it had been, doing its best to hide the scars that had been inflicted upon it.

He was searching for a spot where he’d been told you could still find the foundations and some of the twisted iron wreckage of an abandoned coal tipple halfway up the face of the gorge. If you knew where to look you would find it where four hundred feet below you the New River flowed inexorably toward the sea; and six hundred feet above you that same gorge raised sheer cliffs a hundred feet tall, pale and stark against the sky, where today young people from Midwest cities ventured into this West Virginia patch of poverty to pit their muscles against the vertical rock in contests of skill—themselves against gravity and physics.

Ahead, he looked up and saw a vast sprawl of giant boulders. It was a place where one of those sheer faces had peeled away under the inexorable onslaught of rain and ice and the pull of the center of the Earth. Pausing, he drew a faded black leather notebook from the pocket of his shirt of yellow and brown flannel and he lovingly folded back the cover and the soft, tattered pages and he stopped when he came to six lines he’d scrawled as he’d listened intently to one Cornelius Keener, a retired lineman eighty-nine years of age who had a sharp memory of what the gorge had been like in the fading days of coal baron commerce.

Keener had even been able to describe the toss of giant rocks that had fallen and tumbled, wrecking the tipple and leaving it as a mass of shattered metal walls and twisted iron legs. The verbal description had been so intense that the sketch the words had inspired him to illustrate were strikingly similar to the scene that faced him as he craned his neck to take it in.

“Spot on,” he said to the wind. Because there was no one else there in this place among the trees and the rocks.

Taking a deep breath he headed up again, this time tackling the slope straight on and not bothering to walk careful switchbacks that made for more steps but fewer gasps of warm air wadded like mist beneath the overarching limbs of oaks and ashes and hickories.

Sure enough, just as he’d been told, he saw what was left of the tipple going to flaky rust and smashed by the hand of time, being pulled relentlessly into the embrace of Mother Earth. He put his foot on a vast sheet of iron pierced with no fewer than six windows, now gaping glassless and empty, showing only rotting leaves going from brown to black. He wondered where the steel had been produced, where the ore that spilled it had been dug, from how far it had been brought to be part of the vast machinery that had itself torn coal out of the belly of the ground only to be shipped away to create the heat to turn more iron ore into steel to be shipped somewhere else—perhaps back here, even!

It was over thoughts such as that—the silliness of the human crawl across the globe—that he felt he might actually understand the urges that brought him to record his discoveries onto the pages of his little notebooks and to file them away in his inquisitive brittle mind only rarely to share with others. He rarely met anyone who would even give a damn should he bother to relate his findings.

“Howdy,” a voice said to him.

The man looked up to where he thought the words came and saw nothing but a particularly giant boulder—roughly the size of his own house, he figured. Someone had spoken to him, greeted him. He folded his notebook and put it back in his shirt pocket and turned, looking for the one who’d greeted him.

“What air ye a-lookin’ fer,” the voice addressed him again. And this time, after he’d turned 360 degrees, he looked up and saw the owner of those low, bass tones.

The man was a fellow dressed in overalls of stiff, blue cloth. Not denim, exactly, but something like it. His feet were bare. No boots. No shoes. The soles of his feet were clean, pale, and there was only dirt on his heels—as if he’d been lying down, napping in the forest loam, and had only just stirred to acknowledge company. The other wore a wide-brimmed hat that was once red but now gone to dull rust like iron clay. It was felt, obviously, and not cloth or leather; and it could not hide the spray of pale, wild, wiry hair that sprouted out from under its roof, tinged with some indications of the blackness that had once adorned the other’s elderly, wrinkled, bearded face. That beard was of those same wild dimensions, having seemingly never felt the touch of razor or scissor.

“Hello,” he said back to his audience. His first thought was that this man was perhaps as old as Keener, who’d given him the directions, and maybe as knowledgeable of the history of this locale. The curious fellow certainly looked the part.

“I cain’t tell ye nothin’,” he said. “I’m sleepin’,” he continued, seeming both prescient and nonsensical.

“You don’t appear to be sleeping,” the teacher said to the curious man sitting high above him on the edge of the enormous boulder that had tumbled and rolled four hundred vertical feet from where it had perched for perhaps 10,000 years, waiting to be pried loose by thawing and expanding ice.

The stranger for the first time peered directly down at the man. His eyes were dark and hidden beneath the shadows cast by the brim of his felt cap. “Come on up closer so I kin talk to ye.” When there was only a pause, he added, “Come on, son. I won’t cut ye.” And then he laughed, a small cackle.

The teacher peered intently at the old-timer. He noted the relatively tall frame, but sparseness of the fellow’s mass. He could detect no gun, no weapon that might threaten him. Feeling a little foolish for his suspicion, he pressed on, walking up and veering to the left until he was threading his way among the boulders. In a couple of minutes he was stepping up to the stranger, seeing no weapon, no bulge of steel hiding in the copious folds of the other’s overalls. There was nowhere on the bare rock to conceal a gun or a blade. So he felt confident.

“Ye came up here to see the coal tipple,” the elder stated.

“Yes.”

“When did it come down?”

The teacher sat on a shard of rock opposed to the stranger so that they could face one another, eye to eye unless you counted the fact that because of the hat he could not see the other man’s eyes. “I don’t know,” he answered. “I talked to a man who only told me where it was, not when it fell.” He looked around at the forest, as if it might be some kind of time-gauge that could give him a clue. “If I had to guess, I’d say 1920 or so. When the coal was first beginning to play out.”

“No, not 1920. I come right here to this spot in nineteen and thirty-seven and it was still here. Still standin’ and still processin’ coal.” A thin right arm, weathered and angular with the bone beneath that thin layer of crude matter around it, pointed to a spot a hundred yards away. The teacher saw that the speaker’s hands were fine, the fingers long and thin, the nails in need of trimming but clean, almost polished. “Cables run up here from the river and the shovels passed coal down to the rail yonder at the bottom and dumped the sorted stuff right in cars.”

He peered at the old man, trying to figure his age. There was no way he was more than eighty-five or so. That meant that in 1937 he’d have been two or three years old. The teacher could not hide his smile. He was at a loss for something to say, because the first things that occurred to him would be to laugh or to accuse the other of being confused (at best) or a liar.

“I can see that I don’t know how long I been sleepin’,” he said.

The teacher shook his sleeve free of his watch and peered at the face. “It’s only noon,” he said. “What time did you fall asleep?”

There was a sigh. It almost sounded like a snore. “I told ye I’m sleepin’ now,” he said.

“You don’t look asleep.”

The old man stared hard at the teacher, his eyes still hidden by that annoying shadow.

“Whar air ye from?”

“Beckley,” the teacher said. “I’m a teacher there. Eighth grade biology. But I like history. It’s my hobby. Which is why I’m out here climbing up to see what’s left of this old coal tipple.”

The wind blew, rattling new oak leaves, one against the other, millions of them.

“Beckley. I remember that place. Went there onct. With my friend, Art. Didn’t like it. Not a bit.”

“I like it okay,” he replied.

“What about Turkey Know?”

The teacher didn’t answer for a second or two. The pause seemed to upset the stranger.

“It’s gone, ain’t it?”

The teacher could not quite recall the last time he’d even heard anyone mention the odd name of that ghost town.“Turkey Know was one of the first towns to be abandoned when the coal and timber played out,” he said. “Last family was gone by 1939, from what I’ve read. Nothing left of it now, unless you count a few house foundations and the odd pipe sticking out of the ground here and there.”

“Should o’ knowed,” the old man sighed. “They was a girl there that I thought was fire. She made my heart sang like a harp. I wisht I could o’ kept her with me, but she wudn’t mine to keep,” he added. “But she were a fire girl, for certain.”

The teacher smiled. He rarely met anyone who spoke that pure Elizabethan Appalachian dialect anymore. Fair was pronounced fire. Where was said as war. And so on. Only a few like this man, who grew up in the most isolated coves seemed to speak it as purely as this, these days.

“No one left in Turkey Know, and nothing really even left of the place,” he informed the man in the overalls. “Finally, he asked. What’s your name?”

A bit of a smile played across the other man’s lips. Or seemed to beneath the cover of wiry gray hair sprinkled with those few lingering lines of darkest black. “Marlin,” he said. “My name is Marlin.”

Because

When I was a little kid someone told me that I always needed to start a letter with the following two sentences:

How are you? I am fine.

So, for years, beginning at about age six, I would start all of my letters to friends and relatives that way. However, one day I looked at the latest letter I was writing and said to myself: "That is fucked up. I need to stop that shit."

I think I was 38.

Potato Knob, Black Mountains of NC. (Why? Because.)

Facebook and Lazy Bastards.

I generally enjoy Facebook. But I can't really speak my mind there. Initially things weren't that bad. You could say what you pretty much wanted to say without much in the way of repercussion. But in more recent years a certain subset of members (along with corporate policy) have made it increasingly difficult to engage in conversation or commentary on the platform.

Last year I spent about half (maybe more) of the time banned from Facebook. This cut me off from communicating with my various Facebook friends and even with my family members (via FB). After the fourth time of being banned (for saying something negative about the government of Saudi Arabia) I figured I'd just stay away. But, since I do have so many actual friends there, I returned.

Well, it didn't last. Once again I found myself banned for making a single negative comment about police brutality. I didn't even use profanity. Still, the brief sentence was flagged and I found myself once more banned from Herr Zuckerberg's domain.

This time I did follow through and deleted the program from my desktop and various electronic devices. When my prison sentence is ended I don't think I'll go back this time. I think it's for the best. I've found that I produce more work when I'm not on Facebook than when I am there. The professional writing networking I once enjoyed there had collapsed anyway, so it wasn't any good for that.

Oh, well.

It reminds me of the situation I had with a trio of former friends. These three guys were all about my same age, all fairly creative in one way or another, and all three of them had found a way to lead an existence without working. Instead of holding down an honest job, they stayed at home all day long doing a little cleaning, but mainly lounging about performing very little to nothing in the way of honest labor.

How did they do this? How did they get the money to pay for that roof over their heads, the clothes on their worthless backs, and the food they stuffed into their selfish gobs?

They had--all three of them--married women who were willing to demean themselves by working while their worthless husbands sat in the domicile. Sure, a couple of those guys learned to vacuum, and fold the clothes, and wash the kids. But by and large they spent their leech days just puttering around, driving to see locals pals, smoking their tobacco, and living safe knowing that their wives were bringing home the bacon so that they could be lazy, worthless bastards.

I don't see any of those guys anymore. One of them was just far too stupid for me to talk to. One turned out to be psychotic. And the last of them became a neo-Nazi.

I deleted them all. Not the same way that I deleted Facebook, but just as effectively.

My biggest question remains: Where did they find women who had so little self-respect that they kept those scumbags around??!!

Krigstein

Today I happened upon the only photograph I have ever seen of Bernard (Bernie) Krigstein. He was one of the most talented artists who ever worked in the US comics field. To my way of thinking, he was easily the most skilled pure artist who published in the format of four-color, periodical American comic books.

In many ways, Krigstein was too good for the industry. I say that not to make light of the art form we call comic books, but to separate the vision of comics books that Krigstein seemed to have from that of the other artists who toiled in creating sequential art.

The first time I ever saw his work was in a coverless EC comic book I happened upon while digging through the giant stacks of old comics in one of my dad's used bookstores. I recall Jim Steranko was really popular at the time, so it must have been around 1966 or 1967. Maybe as late as 1968. The story dealt with an indigenous South American Indian who took revenge on his white employer who had unknowingly killed the Indian's parents. The afflicted man took his revenge by placing a school of ravenous piranha in his master's bath--the fish eating the evil man from the waist down.

This was powerful stuff for a kid of nine or ten years old to see--from a comic that was then only fourteen or fifteen years old. If I'd known such stuff had been banned by the Comics Code Authority, I'd have cursed them. The story was brilliantly illustrated and the moral of it must have appealed in some way to Krigstein who had--I later discovered--tried to form a union for comic book artists in the very early 50s.

He ended up working mainly for EC Comics--specifically for William Gaines, because Gaines paid the very highest rates among the then many comic book publishers. And those page rates showed in the stunning quality of the work his stable of artists turned in for the various suspense, crime, horror, and science fiction titles that Gaines published.

The next time I stumbled upon a Krigstein story was his work "The Master Race", in a copy of IMPACT #1, also in my dad's vast inventory of old comics. That one impressed me even more than the piranha yarn. Here I was as a kid, seeing what is probably still likely the most brilliant visually conceived comics story I have encountered. If anyone has done anything close to it for sheer power and brilliance I have not seen it.

Krigstein's comic book career didn't seem to last very far beyond the demise of EC Comics (shut down by the Comics Code limitations). He drifted off into more traditional artistic venues and rarely seemed to look back.

At any rate, here is the photo of Mr. Krigstein who so impressed me when I was still a very little kid. It's fitting that he had such striking features. He was almost like one of the distinctive Asian characters that he lovingly illustrated from time to time.

Bernard Krigstein.

All of These Things are Just Like the Others.

A long time ago I got sick of the wave of post-apocalyptic horror and thriller novels. Like the endless vampire novels that preceded them, I kept waiting for the fad to vanish, but somehow it hasn't quite done that. As with the vampire novels, these apocalypse-inspired things are all now almost exactly the same as the ones that lumbered out before them. They do seem to appeal to an audience that is obviously addicted to them and the mainly politically Fascist crowd who absorb each, one after the other. So they keep the idiot neo-Nazis happy and reaffirm their almost mindless beliefs.

So here is a fill-in-the-blank form that can serve as blurbs for any such novels that seem to endlessly sprout out of the right wing scumpile. Have fun.

After the _________ apocalypse, join _________ as he/she travels across ________ in a desperate journey against ________ to rescue his/her ________. Will he/she find the ______ to battle against the _______ and reach his/her ________?

Find out in Wanky McWankerface’s latest novel, __________!

(Wanky McWankerface was a ______ who served in the ________, and is now a ______ when not writing novels about _______.)

Fill in the blank.

Listen

I never realized it until I started compiling the stories that I wanted to include in A CONFEDERACY OF HORRORS, but to that date I had written quite a lot of ghost stories. It didn't hit me just how many I had created until I began to sift through the sold and unsold manuscripts and found that a plurality of them were ghost yarns.

One always has favorites. This is they way of things. I have favorite stories among the ones I have penned, and among the four or so of the ones at the top is a story that I wrote for an anthology edited by Stephen Mark Rainey. It's called "Listen".

When I think of the concept of ghosts and the supernatural I see them as forces, influences, things that cannot quite be touched--but which can touch you. It was with this thought foremost in my mind as I sat down before my keyboard to create this tale.

Recently a woman I had not previously known friended me on Facebook. She did so because she wanted to adapt "Listen" to an audio format for a YouTube video (how's that for a mixing of concepts?). I didn't know her, did not know her work, but was frankly flattered that she'd picked one of my favorite tales to adapt and that she'd been kind enough to make friends with me so that she could ask for that permission.

I didn't really think about it. I just granted the request with--I must admit--some humility. And, of course, I hoped that she would do a decent job of it.

Today she sent me the link to her adaptation. To say that I was pleased is a massive understatement. I've had a novel adapted to audio, and comic book scripts adapted to graphic art, and one novel turned into a screenplay. Julia Morgan's audio adaptation of "Listen" is the best transformation of one of my fictions that I've witnessed. She completely understands everything I was thinking when I wrote it. It is flawless. It is amazing.

And so...listen.

Scary!

When I was a kid my dad owned used bookstores. He had hundreds of thousands of old comic books. I could read any comic books I wanted and would bring them home by the armload. This was back in the mid-60s, so you can imagine the amazing stuff I would bring home. 

At some point I decided that I liked horror comics. Probably because I was heavily influenced by horror movies and TV shows. Soon after the titles hit the stands I discovered Creepy and Eerie Magazines. One day in my dad's warehouse I saw a copy of Eerie #13. The cover utterly horrified me. In fact, it scared me so much that I almost didn't bring it home. But I did. I took it into my bedroom with the other stacks of comic books that I was reading--everything from Hot Stuff the Little Devil, to Ditko's Amazing Spider-Man, and Kirby's Fantastic Four, and Wonder Woman by Ross Andru, and Magnus Robot Fighter by Russ Manning...well, there was no shortage of comic book titles in those days.

For some reason I waited until it was dark before opening the cover to Eerie #13. These days I cannot recall the contents of that issue, but I vividly remember the cover art. It wasn't by any of the artists whose styles I had learned to identify. This was something that I didn't find particularly intriguing or inspiring--it was just pure, nihilist horror. It was also the only copy of a Warren magazine that I can remember having a word balloon on the cover.

But that cover utterly gave me the creeps. I was afraid to allow the cover art to touch my fingers and I ended up folding the page carefully back to keep that from happening. I do remember reading the contents and then initially putting the magazine at the foot of my bed with the cover down. Eventually I turned out the light and fell to sleep.

Sometime in the dark hours I was awakened. I immediately knew why I had come awake. There had been a sound in the night. A 'PLOP' sound. As of something having slid insidiously off of my bed to land loudly upon the floor, perhaps in an effort to get away, or to hide, or to sneak up on me.

I turned on the bedside lamp. I looked down at the foot of my bed and there were the comics I'd been reading--Richie Rich and Stumbo the Giant and Classics Illustrated and Spider-Man, Mystery In Space, etc. etc.

But that copy of Eerie #13 was gone.

My heart froze.

Where was that damned cover art?! I'd put it face down because I didn't want to see it again. And now it was gone.

It had intentionally crept away!

Shit.

I sat up in bed and looked down at my good comics. I have an image in my head right now of Magnus, Robot Fighter breaking a robot's metal neck with his steely hand. I had to know where that goddamned copy of Eerie #13 was! So I sat up, crawled out from under the covers, and looked at the floor at the foot of the bed.

The magazine was not there.

I looked a little farther, toward the dresser, and I still couldn't see it! 

Knowing I'd have to lean over the side of the bed into the unprotected zone where monsters could reach up and grab children and drag them into whatever dimension they used to appear under our beds, I began to build up my stupid kid's courage. The magazine couldn't be anywhere but right at the foot of the bed on the side below my window. If it hadn't slipped straight off, then my foot must have knocked it to the left.

I looked down. It wasn't there.

Holy shit.

Now I was more curious than frightened, so I leaned my entire head and shoulders over the side of the mattress and leaned waaaaaaaaaay over and looked down where the copy of Eerie #13 could not possibly be.

And that red-eyed skull face was staring straight back up at me!

My nine-year-old eyes bugged out. My throat constricted so much that not only couldn't I scream, I couldn't even choke on my own fear.

Using what courage I could manage, I hopped out of bed, grabbed a big dictionary that I kept on my dresser and I turned that copy of Eerie Magazine face down and covered it with that heavy Webster's hardback dictionary and weighted that oversized offering of horror pulp to the floor with the help of matter and Mr. Gravity!

There, you damned revenant! Try to get out from  under 10,000 years of language!

Strangely mollified by the thought of the big book covering the illustrated horror tales, I climbed back into bed, turned off the light, and managed to go right back to sleep. Zombie out of sight, out of mind.

Over the next couple of weeks I actually forgot all about the copy of Eerie #13 under my bed. I didn't look to check. Even my mom forget to come in and sweep under there. Then one day I needed my dictionary to look something up (this being the 1960s and not 2019 when you can look up anything on a cell phone or a wifi computer.) I recalled that my Webster's was under the bed holding down the offending horror magazine which was, I reminded myself, face down. So I reached under with the bright, yellow sunlight streaming through the window and I pushed away the dust bunnies and brushed off the grey layer on the book and picked it up, knowing I'd only see some advertisement on the back of the magazine.

But of course that blood-chilling artwork was staring up at me, those crimson eyeballs staring right into mine.

I rolled up that magazine, put it into a bag with some other comics, and walked into the front of the house where my mom was reading.

"Here," I said. "I've read these. You can take them back to the store and sell them."

And it worked. I never saw that copy again.

Scared the crap out o' me!

Relocating An Old Hiking Destination.

I relocated an old hiking destination. See video posts for details.

Hiking up to find the old, lost location.

Hanging out on the isolated cliff, then hiking back down.

Junior Officers

Lately I've read a couple of books about Imperial Japanese forces during World War II. And one thing that struck me from both of these sources is that the command never knew exactly if the junior officers would obey direct orders when they were issued. Apparently the lowest echelons of officers were moderately unreliable and tended to do what they wanted, even when issued direct, detailed orders. They may follow the orders to the letter; or they might alter them a bit; or they could just as easily ignore the orders and take what they thought was the best course of action. Supreme Command could only give the orders and hope for the best.

So far, neither source has mentioned why this strange order of conduct was in effect. So I'll have to read more material to see if the first sources are wrong. If it was an accurate recording of how things were done on the Japanese side, I want to read more about why it was so.

Kwantung Army surrendered en masse to the Soviet Red Army.

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.

If You Build It...

I will tear it down.

I hike to see Mother Nature. Not your stinking rock "art".

Under the Dripping Cliffs.

When I got to the park I took a look at the various trails. I have hiked most of them in the past, but not for a number of years. After taking a look I decided on the Pinnacle Trail which would take me from the park nature center to the summit of Pinnacle Mountain and back down.

Originally I had planned to hike a side trail to see a major waterfall on the mountain, but it was closed due to damage from a severe forest fire. So I had to forego that part of the hike and just hit the summit and come back down.

As I stated in my previous blog post, it has been quite some time since I have been on anything approaching a serious hike. This is because I took a job last year that put me working full time and which has kept me from hitting the trails as much as I'd like. In addition, every time I have planned a hiking or backpacking trip to coincide with a day or two off I have been faced with heavy rains. I have hiked and backpacked in rain before, but it's not my favorite thing to do (to put it mildly) so I cancelled all of those hiking trips.

Thus, my legs especially are in bad shape. Walking around the neighborhood just doesn't give me the kind of exercise to keep my muscles and tendons in good condition. So, the almost nine-mile hike I took to the top of the mountain and back to the cabin put a lot of stress on those mushy muscles and tendons. Ouch.

But it had to be done. Weather for my next day off (Monday) calls for sun and cool temperatures so I have a hike planned. Hopefully I'll be able to do more mountain hikes and keep my legs in better shape.

Here then is a brief video concentrating on the bands of low cliffs I passed under on my way to the top of the mountain. Because of all of the rainfall this year, the overhangs had become drizzling waterfalls and the route sent me under the overhangs to avoid getting soaked.

Enjoy.

This is normally just a dry wash. Saturday it was a waterfall.

One of the first extensive bands of cliffs you see on the climb.

The trail takes you under some of these rocky overhangs.

I had to edge in close to the mountain here to avoid getting soaked by this ephemeral waterfall.

You are there.

Hike!

I actually got to hike this past weekend. I say this because this has been the rainiest year in my memory. Every time I get a day or two off and plan to go hiking or backpacking a weather system moves through and hammers us with rain. I will sometimes hike in the rain, but I have my limitations. And not in the kind of downpours we have suffered this year on a regular basis.

At any rate, we went to spend two nights at Table Rock State Park near Pickens, South Carolina and I finally got in some serious hiking. However, I am so out of shape that I paid for the almost nine miles I put in on the first day. By the time I got back to the cabin my thighs and hamstrings were all cramping and I was in total agony off and on for about four hours.

But...it was worth it just to be able to hike in my southern Appalachian mountains. With any luck the weather will cooperate on my next day off and I can get in some more hiking then.

We'll see.

Just after we arrived at the park to stay in Cabin #7.

The view from the side yard of the cabin. YOW!

At Bald Knob just after hitting the summit of Pinnacle Mountain.

Table Rock and The Stool (right) from Bald Knob.

More, later.

Contrast

I like this old photo because of the contrasts I saw and heard here at this spot. This was taken from near the summit of Sams Knob, one of North Carolina's 6000-foot peaks. I took this image on the way back from an overnight backpacking trip into the Middle Prong Wilderness. The day I passed through headed to my campsite, the large empty meadow below had been packed with dozens of loud hippies walking around, banging on leather drums, blowing on flutes, and generally making a complete nuisance of themselves while camped all over the field and in the verges of the forest. None of them, I was happy to note, were on the top of the mountain where I went to take in the views. I intentionally did not take any photos of the meadow packed with humans, but later I wished that I had, just for the contrast.

On the way back to my truck (parked on the ridge along the road you can see), I returned to the top to take in the view. I can never resist the hike to the top of that mountain. Looking down I could spot no one else (it was a Monday and the multitudes who had filled the meadow on the weekend were gone back to Asheville). Best of all, the place was silent. Completely quiet. I couldn't hear a single human voice, no flutes piping away, and no damned annoying drums. Just the wind and some bird song.

At any rate, I always think of the contrast when I look at this old photo. What a huge difference a couple of days can make.

The meadow devoid of humans and noise.