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Notes from the Southwest Corner: Potpourri and the weather

Notes from the Southwest Corner

As i noted on FaceBook, i am still working on getting this new website working the way i want it to work. This column was written last Tuesday, October 13, when it should have had a link to the Democrat’s publishing it, not today, as was done a bit earlier.

Oh, this is so confusing. i do plan to get better at it, but sometimes golf gets in the way.

SAN DIEGO  – I spent last week wondering what to write here.
No idea seemed suited for a complete column. When I became The Watertown (N.Y.) Daily Times sports editor in 1972, I announced there would not be a daily column, as my predecessor, Jack Case (who gave Raymond Robinson his nickname of “Sugar Ray”) had written for more than 40 years).  I believed there would be times (there were) when I would just be making up stuff.

Writing here for eight years has changed my opinion. There is always something to write about. Yet sometimes, there is nothing requiring a full column. If I were in Lebanon, I could certainly pursue a couple of topics included here, but alas, I’m not. So I must channel Fred Russell again and devote this column to potpourri, specifically weather-related potpourri.

Southwest Corner

We really do spend a lot of time talking about the weather.

I have spent the last quarter of a century boasting about Southwest corner weather, and now, I’m going to have to rein in such bragging.

It’s been almost two months of Tennessee August out here. High temperatures have hovered around 90 degrees, and the humidity has been higher than I can remember. Maureen and I are aware of this because we never put air-conditioning in our home of 25 years. Didn’t need it. Oh, there were a couple of days every year or so when a Santa Ana would come rolling through and it was a little bit warm. But the weather patterns have changed, and these past few months are different from the norm.

Surprisingly, we coped, confirming I prefer fresh air if at all possible.

Heights Homecomings

Meanwhile, it appears this weekend’s Castle Heights homecoming weather was like what I remember from mine as a cadet. I wish I could have been there this year. Autumn is only a charade in the Southwest corner. CHMA Homecoming autumn remains a pleasant memory.

The bordering trees on the drive up the hill were splendiferous in rust, red, and yellow. The football field was decked out fully. Cadet dates were splendid in their fall suits with the mums pinned on their jackets. The maroon and gold uniforms matched the autumn colors perfectly. I could smell autumn.

It was a special time in a special place. Sometimes I think my faulty memory has erred. It just couldn’t have been that wonderful.

homecoming 1
Homecoming, Castle Heights Military Academy, 1961: Alan McClellan, Sandy Colley, Sharry Baird, Mary Hugh Evans, and an unidentified cadet and his date. Sandy, from Hopkinsville, Kentucky, was my date for the weekend.

Inchon

During this weekend’s evenings, I watched the PGA President’s Cup golf tournament in Inchon, South Korea. The Americans won a nail biter, 15½ to 14½, great drama. Bill Haas needed to tie the hole for a USA win. If Bae Sang-moon won the hole, the Cup would be shared. Bae, a South Korean, was playing in his last PGA event for two years. The 29-year old will begin his required military service next month. The drama turned to sadness when he chunked his third shot, a chip, assuring the U.S. victory. I wanted the American team to win. I did not want the Internationals to lose…if that makes sense.

Equally impressive was the new Inchon in the backdrop. The last time I was in Inchon was 1975. It was a different place. The city was dirty and, in some places, squalid. I recall lots of small, dark and musty casinos. But of course, sailors migrated toward such environments on overseas liberty. The positive change to an amazingly modern and beautiful city was shocking.

Over the four-day, 30-match tournament when the cameras panned out to the Yellow Sea with commercial ships at anchorage, recollection of South Korea weather came flooding back. The tournament experienced 30-knot wind several days. Rain pelted everyone for almost the entire proceedings on day two. The announcers noted the apparent temperature was hovering around 40 degrees.

I’ve been there. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a colder, windier, wetter place than when entering Korean waters beyond the summer months, even October.

Not much to do about it

The unusual heat in the Southwest corner is dissipating. In a week, we should be back to our normal winter averages of mid-70 highs and mid-50 lows. But El Niño is predicted to bring lots of much needed rain soon. There’s not a great deal we can do about the weather.

But it would be nice to be at an October homecoming at Castle Heights.

A Pocket of Resistance: Chicken (a poem, sort of)

A Pocket of Resistance

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.

 

Notes from the Southwest Corner: Barber Shops – The Beginning of a Hairy Tale

Notes from the Southwest Corner

i wrote this column in December 2007. i no longer go to a barber shop. There’s no real need. i bought an electric razor, put on a number 2 blade, zip, zap, and Maureen cleans the results as best she can. It’s easier, cheaper, and nothing is really going to make me look better anymore. Still, i miss the camaraderie that exists in a barber shop.

SAN DIEGO, CA – When I started writing for The Democrat, I planned to write from ideas saved over the years with a focus on connecting and comparing my Southwest corner to Middle Tennessee.

Then events seem to keep popping up, demanding I write about them. This week, nothing has interrupted my original intentions.

Barber shops are an interesting study of human nature. I am not referring to the franchise stores but the locally owned shops which have been existence since the barber gave up doing dental work out here when the West was young and dentists were in short supply.

For about a dozen years after I moved to this neck of the woods south of San Diego, I got my hair cut at Alberto’s, located in a strip mall across from Southwest College on a mesa, about four miles from the Mexican border as the crow flies.

In many ways, Alberto’s reminds me of the Modern Barber Shop where I received my first haircut just off the square on West Main Street in Lebanon. Growing up, my haircuts were mostly administered by “Pop” at the Modern Barber Shop and later his own place in the Dick’s Food Mart mall.

As I moved into my teenage years, my father and I went to Edwards Barbershop, located across from the end of University Avenue on South Maple. It was a one-chair shop.

Alberto’s looks very similar to both and even smells the same, a pleasant, somewhat musty aroma. There is a clock running backwards so it will read correctly if you are looking at it through the mirrors back of the chairs. It would have fit in the Modern Barber Shop, Pop’s, or Edward’s.

I first started going to Alberto’s in the mid-1980’s after spotting John Sweatt in a chair. John was commissioned as a Navy officer about three or four years before me. He had been a strong supporter for me on the Castle Heights football team when he was a senior and I was a sophomore. Later, he gave me some hope I might actually complete Navy Officer Candidate School when he visited me in my barracks, resplendent and fearful (to my senior officer candidate tormentors) in his lieutenant junior grade (LTJG) dress blues.

I decided Alberto’s would be good for me as well.

Alberto is a small man with salt and pepper hair and a thin, neatly trimmed mustache. Although his five children are spread from Alaska to San Diego, he still lives in Tijuana and remains a Mexican citizen. His English and my Southern don’t always mix well, but we communicate adequately. He always cuts my hair the way I ask and trims my mustache at no charge.

Alberto reminds me of Pop, although I probably would have been banned from the city limits had I tried to grow a mustache in Lebanon in the 1950’s and 1960’s. The strongest tie is not their barber skills. Alberto’s ethics growing up in a middle class Mexican neighborhood are very much akin to Pop’s. Giving a great service for a reasonable price; they were proud of their work, enjoyed their customers; and in turn, their customers enjoyed them.

Bob is the second in command at Alberto’s. He knows everyone by name. Curiously, Bob always looked like he needs a haircut with a long, untamed mane.

Still he gave me one of my favorite barber shop stories:

A couple of years ago, a recently retired man came into the shop while I was waiting.

Bob stated, rather than asked, “Been retired about six months, haven’t you, George?”

George affirmed and Bob followed, “How’s it going at home with you and the little lady?”

George replied “It’s going great.”

“You and your missus don’t get in each other’s way?” Bob prodded.

George, pleased with himself, turned eloquent, “Nah, she’s very precise and keeps a weekly calendar on the refrigerator.

“So on Sunday, I check her calendar. When she is scheduled to be out, I stay at home and work on my projects.

“Then when she is scheduled to be at home, I go play golf.

“It’s working just fine.”

When this occurred, I thought, “At the core, there is not much difference between barber shops in the Southwest corner and in Middle Tennessee.”

And there is an unlimited supply of barbershop stories in both places.

A Pocket of Resistance: tired

A Pocket of Resistance

i wrote this at the end of my degree chasing at Middle Tennessee. It was certainly inspired by, if not homage to e.e. cummings.

tired.
shot all to hell
like a riddled card
against the tree
attacked
by Wild Bill’s six-shooter;
weather abates:
sultry heat,
hazy skies
demand rain.
but when will it fall
down
in pellets,
which riddle
the lawn like that gunshot
penetrated
pasteboard?

A Pocket of Resistance: e.e. cummings

A Pocket of Resistance

Yesterday was e.e. cummings’ 101st birthday. i learned that from yesterday’s “Writer’s Almanac” and checked a quote from him on the “Brooklyn Arden” website. i discovered his poem “Buffalo Bill” in a literature class at Middle Tennessee. i have admired his work ever since and read his poems frequently for inspiration. The quote i checked is below. i think i like him even more having read this:

The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople—it’s no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. . . . You and I are human beings; mostpeople are snobs. – e.e. cummings

…and that poem:

Buffalo Bill ’s
defunct
               who used to
               ride a watersmooth-silver
                                                                  stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
                                                                                                     Jesus

 

he was a handsome man
                                                  and what i want to know is
how do you like your blue-eyed boy
Mister Death