i should be writing my column for next Tuesday’s edition of The Lebanon Democrat. As usual, especially in the last year, everything i think about writing i find i have already written there, or i cannot think of anything until sometime late Sunday, so i can start Sunday evening, get tired, go to bed, wake up in the middle of the night, cannot sleep thinking of the column, and get up and get to it, completing the column and the article before the midday Monday deadline, way too late to make Jared Felkins, the editor, feel comfortable even though he’s never complained. But with all of that going on in my mind, i had the urge to write about an event, actually two, that occurred to me today.

As i get closer to seventy-two, yet another milestone of no particular real significance except for it meaning i am older, i have recommitted to some physical well-being. In the last month or so, i have slackened off of my already light workouts and disregarded dietary discipline in the best state of disregarding. i love to eat and love to drink. i can no longer afford to do that at the same consumption rate of my past, but i forget and still try. Someone my age who has my history needs to be a bit more circumspect unless they are ready to go, and i may be a lot of things, but i am not ready to go.

So when the blood pressure monitor suggested i was imbibing and digesting too much, i decided (Again and again; why do i feel like i’m in that movie “Groundhog Day?”) to recommit to physical excellence, or at least what remnants of physical respectability i might attain and maintain.

i vowed to cut back on the booze and the victuals: very moderate success so far, but i am pretty well off because my gourmet chef wife cooks healthy even though i wander off that path whenever i am on my own.

i joined Maureen’s gym where she does yoga four times a week nearly every week. i ain’t into yoga because i discovered early on, there are a whole lot of poses i cannot do and a whole lot more that make me feel stupid. So i went to use all the apparatuses (can someone please tell me why the plural is not “apparati?”) and the weights and especially the rowing machine.

In addition, i decided to resume my early morning sort of aerobic workout. i began running regularly in the final year at Texas A&M NROTC. i had run at several other commands, especially the USS Anchorage, but never kept it up. After i began running almost daily, i was never fast, but from 1979 until the early 1990’s, i would run at least six miles almost every day when not at sea. After work while the Okinawa was in overhaul, in 1982-83, i would frequently run a fourteen-mile course to the Coronado Bridge and back to JD Waits and my condo in the Coronado Cays.

But those days are gone. Sporadically, i do a fartlek, power walk, or some kind of run/walk up our hill to the Catholic Church and up a gradual hill to a convenient turnaround, a distance about 3.2 miles. This practice had fallen into disuse for the last several months.

This morning i resumed the event. Waking at my usual pre-5:00 a.m., i performed my morning ablutions, took the necessary stretching, about quintuple the amount i used to perform before a run, and took off. i decided i would only do a power walk as i knew i needed to build up to running again.

It was dark when i started, giving me the sensation of a morning watch (0400-0800) on the bridge. It was quiet. i was surprised to see a couple of other walkers or runners. The most dedicated of this type go down to Rohr Park at the bottom of our hill and run the perimeter.

Mostly, except for the occasional headlights of a car headed to someone’s work, i was alone in the night. When i reached the apex and turnaround of my journey, this mariner’s eye and soul detected first light, one of the most peaceful times of any day.

Then, as i headed down the hill, i caught sight of something to my right. It looked like a lighting bug flashing once in the middle of the road. i turned my head but saw no more light and no flying bug. i discarded it as a reflection and returned to my task.

About a quarter of a mile further down the hill,  the light flashed again on the periphery of my vision. This time i stopped to look: Nothing.

i have never heard of lightening bugs in California, especially the Southwest corner. Yes, it was most likely two similar reflections. They could have been reflections in my brain.

Lightening bugs are not as plentiful, even scarce back home nowadays. The mosquito spray does not only minimize those nasty critters. i was always disappointed when i could not share one of my Lebanon childhood joys of lightening bugs with my daughters.

But there still were a few back home in the summer but none, none in the Southwest corner.

I am now convinced those two bug lights were an illusion or a reflection, a refraction of light of the moment or in my mind.

Still the remainder of the walk was easy. i thought of the jars with the holes we poked in the top; of running and jumping around that backyard, barefoot in the summer nights, catching bunches of those lightening bugs in the jar and covering with the cap; watching them for what seemed endlessly but was truly only until we had to go in and get ready for bed…and how we would awake to find the lightening bugs in the jar pretty much wiped out.

It was a long time ago, but i still remember the lesson those lightening bugs taught me.

This is the north side of Lebanon High School on East High before it burned down in 1937 (i’m pretty sure it’s the north side, and i think it was 1937 as my uncle, Bill Prichard, the youngest of the Prichard children began school going to multiple shops and homes because of the school had been destroyed and i believe he was a freshman in 1937). The high school was located on the site where Highland Heights Elementary stood for many years. This photo is from  a post card in my parents’ memorabilia.

Other than my uncle not going there, the old building has some family history.

After my grandfather,  Culley Jewell lost part of his hand in the portable sawmill he and my Uncle Jesse constructed from a steam engine they bought in 1918, he became the custodian for Lebanon High School and McClain Elementary. In the 1920’s and 30’s, my father was my grandfather’s primary helper, cleaning the schools after classes each weekday and firing up the boilers for heat early each morning in the colder months.

After one afternoon cleaning the high school in the early 1930’s, Jimmy Jewell was walking home down North Cumberland on the way to his home on West Spring. Estelle Prichard was visiting her mother in a home on North Cumberland where Granny was a 24-7 caregiver. My mother urged my grandmother to the porch to show her the lean young man with a fine mane of hair walking down the street in the bib jeans he wore while cleaning the schools.

Estelle announced to her mother, she was going to marry that young man.

My grandfather was involved with providing a gym for that high school (i do not know where the high school had played basketball previously). He installed the wood floor for the gym in the basement of that high school building. It was where my mother played when she set the season and single game scoring records which stood for a quarter of a century before they were broken by Ann Lucas (1960?) i regret not asking how high the gym’s ceiling was because i always had a hard time understanding how a gym could be in the basement.

But the high school was an impressive structure.

i have not made many entries this past week: been a little down; still haven’t figured out this not-working thing, but i’m getting better. And this made me feel good. 

Sometime around 1942, Jimmy and Estelle Jewell bought a coffee table to go in the living room of the house they had just bought on Castle Heights Avenue. It was one of two adjacent homes just recently built. They were the last two houses on the block between West Main and West Spring. There was no other homes to the south until one reached a farm house or two past Leeville Pike (as i remember my father telling me).

The table was not a very large piece of furniture with an oval top twenty-eight inches in length, eighteen inches wide, and eighteen inches high. The top was glass, rimmed with a wood frame. The bottom had carved legs. It wasn’t very ornate, but it was pretty, and more importantly, it was serviceable.

It was replaced sometime in the 1950’s i believe. Mother had a local carpenter make her a much larger table with matching end tables. They had marble inlaid tops and were much more elegant and more serviceable.

i am trying to recall where they moved the old table, and they may have moved it into the attic off the upstairs bedrooms. i can no longer call my mother and researcher extraordinaire to set me straight. Now, i call Martha and Joe, my younger sister and brother because they may not have the incredible memory our mother had, but they remember a lot more than me. But it’s late here in the Southwest Corner, and it’s three hours later in Chattanooga, Tennessee and Queechee, Vermont, so i will have to rely on my faulty recall.

Regardless, when Mother died sixteen months ago, the three siblings and their families closed down the Jewell estate accumulated over more than three-quarters of a century. Somehow, i ended up with that small coffee table.

The cane which had held the glass top in place in the frame had broken into pieces, and the wood (i am not a furniture guy, so it’s a guess, but i think it might be cherry) had gathered some scratches and quite a bit of dirt.

i considered stripping it by getting someone to dip it. i have refinished several pieces of furniture in my past, but the stripping agents now are not as powerful, thank you, EPA, and my latest attempts to strip something myself has not turned out well. Finally this weekend, i went out in the workshop side of the garage, pulled out the table, did a jury rig on the cane to hold the glass in place, did a thorough cleaning, and finally used a furniture restorer.

The table will eventually need a more professional makeover. i decided i wanted to try and get it back to its original state as closely as i could.

Prior to this weekend, my chair in the family room had a glass and metal stand about ten-inches square. This was to hold the television remote control, my glass, my phone, my reading glasses, my book or magazine currently being read, and any snacks, cookies, etc.

Now, my parents’ coffee table is sitting by my chair. As it once was, it is serviceable.

i kind of like it.

Sometimes in the strangest of places and the strangest of times, i start thinking of a moment many years before, something sticking in my mind suddenly coming to the fore on its own, and i marvel at how it surfaced in my mind unprovoked.

Two nights ago as i just sat and watched a baseball game, this thought about my grandmother wringing a chicken’s neck came unannounced into my head. Oh, my sister and i have talked about the event several times in the past, but it just popped up with the score tied, two men on base, and a 1-1 count, and i was amazed.

When Maureen read this poem at breakfast this morning, she said she remembered her dad wringing the neck of a chicken in their home in Lemon Grove, a suburban neighborhood east of downtown San Diego. i wondered how many days in jail my grandmother and father-in-law would have spent had PETA been around back then. Probably some children protection agency would have gone after them too.

Crazy.

Chicken

i suppose it happened several times,
perhaps many,
certainly many times in the years before
the beginning of me;
but in the only time i remember
was when i was wanting to be seven,
the event was vivid to me,
can see it in my mind today
when Granny was fixin’ chicken for dinner.

i do not know where Granny got that chicken
but
suspect her brother-in-law
brought it in from his farm’s henhouse
where his wife gathered the eggs each morning around sunrise
for fixin’ breakfast of
eggs and bacon and grits and biscuits and buttermilk
from the early morning henhouse gathering,
the larder where they kept the cured bacon from their hogs,
the goods under the white linen cloths on the screened-in porch table,
and the churn;
and him a carrying that ill-fated chicken
in the former rumble seat of his Model A
which he used to haul his produce to the farmer’s market
and
where his carried his fox hounds to the hunts in the woods around the county,
where his cadre of “hunters”
would loose the hounds, calling them with their horns,
literally horns of their former cows,
and
sipped whiskey by the fire while they listened to their hounds on the trail;

but
the one time i saw this oft-repeated event of yore
Granny weighed in just shy of ninety pounds
but
it was a feisty, no-nonsense, loving with all of her heart, kind of ninety pounds;
and
she took that chicken, tucked firmly under her arm
where it could not get loose and run away,
down the back porch steps into the yard;
it was a task for her,
fixin’ dinner,
that’s all;

and
we kids out there playing barefoot in shorts
gathered round with curiosity,
before
Granny grabbed that chicken by the neck
and
snapped its head off
like Lash Larue snapping his whip for the good of western folks,
or
the fly fisherman whipping his rod to soar the fly into the shallows,
or
the Ninja slashing his enemy’s throat with his fine-honed blade,
but then,
we children watched in amazement
as the decapitated chicken ran around the yard,
flipping and flopping,
a body’s unfeeling response to a violent death;
being children we laughed in amazement;

later,
i helped pluck the dead bird,
and may, though thankfully i don’t remember,
have dug in and tossed out the gizzard and guts,
and
that night for dinner,
we had some of the best fried chicken, i’ve ever eaten:

sometimes i feel like i’m much like that decapitated chicken
from seventy years ago,
running around flipping and flopping,
a response with no thought,
yeah, no head, no brains;
i know a lot of people who act like that.