It is a Tuesday afternoon in May in the Southwest corner. i am sitting in my habitual spot on our patio. The sky is perfectly cloudless, a pure sky blue. It is a perfect 68 degrees with a very slight on shore breeze. i just watched two hummingbirds (eat your heart out, Jim Hicks) light on the larger coral tree. It appeared one was standing on the head of the other, but i’m guessing it was an illusion. They were surrounded by the bright red blooms that will soon fade when the leaves begin to fill out the tree for about eight months.

There is a Navy helicopter passing overhead, noisy things. i remember flying (clumsily) one when Bob Parker, the USS Okinawa’s operations officer asked me to be his “qualified observer” for a flight to give him needed flight hours to retain his qualifications. It was well over 40 years ago, and the development explosion here was high desert scrub brush then. He gave me the controls several times, the last of which was somewhere over where i’m sitting. We were near an aviation beacon in the high desert when he directed me to “hover.” Hah! i did it for about a minute, wondering all the time when i was going to screw it up and kill us and the crewman.

The helicopter is gone. It is quiet. i return to my music: Nancy Wilson, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and Nina Simone. It is a jazz kind of afternoon.

i will go in soon for another scrumptious dinner from Maureen. We will watch a ballgame. i’m thinking i may climb up the slope to the chairs by our flag and look out on the ships moored at the Naval Base, the city skyline, and the dark of the Pacific.

i will not include photos. i couldn’t capture this peace in a photo. i wish one or two of many, many friends were sharing this with me.

The world is the screwy world. People are out to reek havoc on others in fear or hate created by fear. It is the way it is. It is the way it has always been. It is likely to be the way it will be in the future. i’m not optimistic.

But i am beyond that. i am me with years and years of memories, good music, in a peaceful place. i would like to share that with you, wherever you are.

In a land far away long ago that no longer exists, there was a wonderful place for a young boy, nine years old to be exact about his age, who experienced youth at its best. He grew up in a small country town about an hour from the capitol of Tennessee. He walked to school. He rode his bike everywhere. And in the fantastical summer of 1954, he played baseball in the first organized youth baseball league as he recalls.

They called it the “Pony League.” He doesn’t remember the team’s name.

They had matching tee shirts with pockets, or at least some of them had them, and a few had matching hats. They played on the field at the back of the McClain Elementary School. He rode his bike just over a half mile to practices and games. He was selected to be the catcher, and that became one of his most frequent positions when he played from then until he finally stopped in an “Over 33 League” when he was 46 years old. In looking at the one home movie showing him playing he still thinks he didn’t look very athletic.

The next year, the town’s Kiwanis Club sponsored the first “Little League” at the new ball park just shy of two miles from his home. His mother or father would drive him to practices and games.

He did well in Little League, Babe Ruth League, high school, and American Legion ball, never the star but he held his own.

He doesn’t remember most of that first season. After all, it was seventy-one years ago. But he does remember loving it and will love it for the rest of his life: the smell of the glove, the feel of the ash wood bat, the sound of his bat hitting a ball, the dust, the awkward feel of wearing shin guards, chest protector and the catcher’s mask that never stayed put.

The photo below is one his mother saved. She wrote on the back the names of the players and coaches she knew:

“Top Row: 1&2 unknown, 3 Joel Martin.” The fourth one she named “Bucky Hesson,” but i’m pretty sure it was Bucky’s older brother, Bobby Hesson. “5 unknown, 6 Cullen Collingsworth, 7 unknown.

“Bottom Row: Coach unknown, 2 unknown, 3 Jim Jewell, 4,5,6,7 unknown, Coach Dennis Sircy.”

Can any of my Lebanon friends provide any of the other names for me. i would like to know who shared that field of dreams with me.

In the earlier part of the week, Maureen, as she is prone to do, wandered through magazines and web sites with the idea of finding another place to dine. Not that we don’t have only a few places we like for dining. In fact, i bet we could go to a different place we like every night for at least two, if not three weeks. But she has come up with some dandies. i appreciate her research.

So Friday, she came up with the diner in the Lafayette Hotel on El Cajon Boulevard in uptown San Diego. i was leery. Before i got here, in the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s, El Cajon Boulevard was a hot spot with proper dance halls, hotels, and dining. But somewhere along the way, it went downhill and at one time was a trolling place for prostitutes, drug dealers, and gangs. It has been cleaned up. We have a previous neighbor that opened up an art studio there. Still, it is seedy on the fringes, and i had my concerns.

Maureen noted the hotel had just been renovated. i remained a bit skeptical, but i trust and love her and said, “Let’s go.” We parked around the corner and walked to the hotel.

When we walked into the lobby, i was blown away. i had just walked into a world long gone.

We proceeded through the lobby that was once graced by Bob Hope,  Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, Katherine Hepburn, and Bing Crosby. i continued to gawk as we entered the bar with the diner entrance on the left side.

Now folks, there are times i can get downright nostalgic. i have had drinks in the bar in the front of the third deck on the HMS Queen Mary three times. Now that kind of nostalgia can make me giddy. In the bar of the Lafayette Hotel, i was just as giddy.

This is a place where those fancy drinks should be downed, although a martini or a brandy would work just as well.

We turned and walked into the diner. Bam, wham, thank you, Ma’am. i was back in lore ville. The diner was flat perfect. Maureen had the “Chicken Schnitzel Sandwich.” Admittedly, my Waygu French Dip was a bit modern — i could relate to Kobe beef as the past but not Waygu. Still it was delicious. i did wonder what kind of beer might have been available here, say, in the 1950’s as i drank my IPA. It did not matter. i was in the wonderland of yesteryear.

We had fun with our waitress, paid our tab, and proceeded back through the past. Walking out the front and heading to our car, we passed an annex to the hotel. It was a dance hall, specifically, Lou Lou’s dance hall. i am absolutely positive it wasn’t by that name years ago, but it was a dance hall, a ballroom dance hall. Maureen’s mother and father, Pat and Ray Boggs, went there frequently to dance the night away. i don’t know what kind of dances they do there now, but if it is still ballroom, i would like to take Maureen there one night. i don’t think she’s too keen on that idea.

Sometimes, i just flat love living in the Southwest corner.

My passport needed to be renewed. i finally made a responsible effort and went up the hill to the Postal Annex store, which can make it happen.

The son of the owners of the place was efficient, and pleasant. He even laughed at my jokes. He took the photo, completed the forms on the computer and mailed the input to the Department of State. i was pleased.

Then he gave me the other copy of the photo.

i’m thinking i’m going to ask him to take all my photographs. Not bad for an old man:

The Legend of Vicey Shavers

This poem is a salute to my favorite poem ever, “The Ballad of Billie Potts” and its author, my favorite author, Robert Penn Warren. The roots of this poem come from a number of a stories from where i grew up. The integration of those stories make this work completely fictitious, veering off the path of any of those individual stories.

It is dedicated to the woman also named Vicey Shavers. She is not the character in the poem, even though the main character bears her name and resembles her. i chose her name to honor her memory.

Vicey was in the beginning of my conscious thought. My mother worked for several companies and individuals after i was born in 1944. She hired Vicey to clean house and take care of me and my siblings while she was at work. Vicey continued to clean our home until i was in my mid-teens. i can still see her washing the lunch dishes (her lunches, as i remember them, were perfect for a little boy). Washing those lunch dishes, she stood at the sink in the long narrow kitchen, looking out the kitchen window and occasionally down at me. As 12:30 p.m. approached, she turned on the small green radio on the kitchen counter. She would turn the dial until she found WSM radio (i remember it as WSM, the famous home of the Grand Ole Opry). That’s when the Sons of the Pioneers had a program where only their western songs were played. Vicey and i would listen to the entire program.

Vicey was kind and loving to me and no doubt impacted my lifelong belief in equality should exist for everyone. In case you haven’t figured it out yet. Vicey was what folks now call black. I am now called white. Neither term is correct. Neither should be viewed as above or below the other.

She was wiry thin, skin as dark as
the cast iron cooking pot she used
for making magic food;
her arms and hands were veined
from aging in hard labor;
her black hair was plaited,
curled tightly on her skull;
her smile revealed two missing teeth;
but
she loved and persevered,
that Vicey Shavers, she did.

Vicey’s mama’s mama Beulah was a slave
in Alabama where she was the cook plus
housemaid in the big house,
better than Vicey’s mama’s papa Alphonse
who worked the cotton fields,
only to be sold to a man in Louisiana
to be lost forever in the family annals;

Her mama Mabel met a man in Alabama
who married her and moved her to Tennessee
with the promise of making a lot of money
with a nightclub for their kind outside the small country town,
only to give her two sons and two daughters, one Vicey,
before heading to Chicago alone
to never be heard from again.

Time in the dark of prejudice moved on,
plodding through the sultry summer heat
with change only in Time
as fear and hate marched in step
and
the crawdads sang at night
and
the mockingbird trilled its song
and
the hound dogs howled at the moon.

The younger sister Ethel passed early
with one of the diseases that roamed
the South and the world in those moments;
the younger brother Leviticus went to Chicago
to look for his daddy with no luck,
no luck,
went to work in the slaughter houses,
never to come home again;

Vicey’s older brother Meshach stayed put
along with Vicey, even after Mabel
was laid to rest in Eubanks Garden Memorial Park
on a hill outside of town, a place for their kind
that had passed on:
the big war came and Mesach volunteered,
assigned to a Negro logisitics battalion
in the steaming, screaming heat of Luzon,
worse than the heat in the South,
loading and unloading the trucks`
until the war ended;
Mesach rode a troop ship back,
caught a train home from San Francisco
where he wanted to stay
but
yearned to be with his sister and her man
and
he got a job changing tires in a gas station
until one night in that night club
his papa had started and failed,
then was reborn under new owners,
a gang from the big city up the road;
Mesach got into an argument with this stranger
who pulled out a razor blade,
cutting Mesach’s throat:
they put him in the ground
beside Mama Mabel and sister Ethel
on that hill with a stone that noted
he served in the big war.

The skin and bones turn to dust
as Time keeps on marching to that drum
most can’t hear and no one can see;
the old pine boxes rot;
the graves sink a bit
to be filled with dirt until there are mounds again
only to repeat until the graves are abandoned
with weeds taking over
until the stones nor the mounds visible,
just a field untended in Time.

Vicey married a barber, Bocephus Shavers
who also worked part time digging graves
in Eubanks Garden Memorial Park
while Vicey began cleaning homes,
keeping children for the white folks
until one day Bocephus was hit with a pick
in an argument with another grave digger;
he was laid to rest alongside his in-laws
in the self-same cemetery where he dug.

Vicey kept working hard
while cooking magic in her cast iron pot
in the tar papered and slate tiled house
painted green with grass creeping
through the cracked and sagging concrete front porch,
cleaning houses, taking care of white folks’ children
until Vicey Shavers didn’t come around anymore;
they found her in the kitchen by her cast iron pot,
then buried her in Eubanks Garden Memorial Park
by Bocephus and her kin;
a bunch of folks showed up for her interment,
even many of the white folks of the small country town;
they all found it fitting
that the lone maple on the hill
cast shade on Vicey in her rest.