Sensuality and Weather

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In the late 1950s I sang in the Methodist church choir.  Wednesday night was choir practice night, a night when Tobby Burklow, Edd Hust, Edna Earl Vilines, and others would get together to practice songs for Sunday’s service. I was the youngest singer, and under the tutelage of Tobby Burklow learned to sing church tenor. This was my social life on Wednesday nights.

Choir practice never lasted more than an hour and a half.  But what frequently happened afterward became much more important, and memorable to me over time. The night that greeted me on these nights was inviting and demanded my attention. I remember these winter nights being cold and dark, the air thick with humidity, driving rain and sleet.

In those days my winter coats were never a match for the winters they faced, a result of my lack of money to buy good heavy coats, and my teenage need to look better than I thought cheap weather-efficient coats offered. I also owned one pair of shoes, bought for looks rather than service.

So generally I was not prepared to exchange the warmth of the softly-lit church for the darkness and damp that awaited me.

Rather than being put off by the weather, however, I remember embracing it, being in no hurry to walk home. The rain and sleet caressed my face, dripped off my nose, crept up my pant legs,  and soaked my feet. Shivers greeted my body and joined with the tenor line to “Holy, holy, holy” (number one song in the old Methodist Hymnal) rolling around in my mind.

At my house, when it got dark, my daddy went to bed. When my daddy went to bed, everyone in the house went to bed as well. In the winter, darkness came as early as 5:00. So, when I got home on those cold Wednesday nights my momma and daddy were asleep, the coal stove banked for the night hours earlier, the un-insulated three room house wrapped up on the outside with a coating of ice.

I remember opening the front door as quietly as possible, the task made easier by the fact that we never locked the door. One did not make noise in my house. If Big John were awakened, I was in trouble.

Dripping and shivering, still enjoying the feeling, I would quietly make my way through the living room to the kitchen, where I slept.

We didn’t use sheets when I was growing up. I slept between heavy blankets. My bed sat against a window. I would quietly open the window just an inch or so and slip between the blankets. The sound of the rain outside, but at my fingertips, complemented the experience of my shivers warming the bed, and consequently me, as I lay in my dry warm nest.

This was pure innocent sensuality. And it has shaped me considerably over the years.

I own several pairs of good shoes now and my winter coats are well made for the weather in which I find myself. My house is warm and comfortable. I sleep in a bedroom.

But when it is cold and rainy and dark, as it was one night last week, I will grab a drink and a blanket and go sit on my deck and feel the damp cold creep into my consciousness, welcome the shivers, feel the water drip off my nose, and wallow in my now not-so-innocent sensuality. Occasionally, the tenor line from that first song in the Methodist Hymnal will join me.

I wonder at the early sensual experiences that shape our lives.

Santa Claus

In the early 1950s my father lost his last job in the mines. He was in his early 50s and unable to find work. He picked up odd jobs here and there, and that, plus money my mother earned in a factory, kept a roof over our head (we did have a few holes in the walls and windows) and basic food on the table.

Money was hard to come by.

For several Christmases during that time, around the first of December, my daddy would say, “Well, things are really tight this year; if Santa Claus don’t come, we won’t have Christmas.” He said this seriously. I took him seriously. I was ready to get nothing. It was OK. The Methodist Church provided me the songs and festivities, and the religious trappings were emotionally and spiritually stimulating. I can still smell the pine and candle, and can still feel what it was like to put on white robes and sing Christmas songs with the choir.

My parents did not go to church so we did not share these experiences. My parents did like Christmas, though, and we had a tree, decorated with old trimmings that brought tears to my momma’s eyes as she remembered Christmas with her parents and brothers and sisters and with my two older sisters.

But money was always a problem, and Santa Claus was always seen as the answer to the problem.

Every year, sometime around December 23 or 24, my father would go to Household Finance and borrow money. Every year he’d go to a bootlegger and buy a couple of half-pints of whiskey for his own spirits and our entertainment—I’ll leave that to another day. Every year he’d tell my sister to figure out what it was that I wanted (as well as her two kids, Karen and George), take the HFC money, and go buy the Santa presents, or as close as possible, given money constraints.

It never was much, but I still appreciate the idea, even though I understand that my father spent the next year paying back the money he had borrowed, resulting in him and my momma having to scrimp on other things.

Every year Santa Claus came to my house, and to Karen and George’s house. And it was always magical.

So, I never admitted to “not believing” in Santa Claus until I was about 10 years old.

As these memories come to mind, I’m wondering about Santa Claus.

Last Saturday I attached a pillow around my waist (pillow gets smaller each year), donned the famous red suit, hair, beard, boots, belt, hat, glasses and attitude and went to Zahn Financial Services in Golden, Colorado. I have been Santa there every year for the past five years or so. There are a few kids who have shown up each year, so I’ve watched them grow over that time. Each time I dress in that costume and sit by the decorated tree handing out small gifts, I see the magic expressed in the eyes of the young kids, and the very real desire of the nine and ten year olds to bring back the magic.

I wonder if most of us who grew up as I did have spent their lives trying to recreate the magic brought on by Santa Claus.

I wonder how much money Christian zealots have made trying to convince us that they have the keys to this magic.

And I wonder how much money fathers and mothers have borrowed and spent trying to keep the magic alive.

But mainly, at this time of the year, particularly, even as I wonder about these things, I am grateful to my parents, and my sister, for showing me the magic of Santa Claus, and the gift of giving that embodies  the season of Christmas.

Put the Damn Blog Down and Do Something

When I was a young teenager in the 1950s, I spent a lot of time reading. I was, and still am, an introvert. My daddy would frequently worry about me, and would tell me to “put the damn book down and go do something.”

I have found this to be good advice on several counts, not the least of which is that reading is dangerous. For example, I actually have read Ayn Rand’s novels and articles. They “scared the pee wadding” out of me. Now I see that other people have read her as well and have built empires in this country, having been born-again into her religion. I have read the works of her disciples, leaders in the political arena, and see that they are serious and espouse a philosophy that is absolutely foreign to everything I’ve been taught in books and church during the last 68 years about what it means to be human. That is beyond pee-wadding fear.

Also, I have actually read the Bible (Old and New Testaments in several translations) and, having been in similar situations a time or two, can relate to the acid trip John experiences in his “Revelation”.  But I also have read the writings of the prominent leaders of the Catholic, Protestant, and Mormon religions, and can’t relate to these Christians (sic) who have made careers out of the worship and evangelism of hate, self-aggrandizement, money, and power.

I’ve read too much I think.

The second count upon which I think my daddy’s advice was good is that reading leads to writing, which is even more dangerous. Putting one’s words out into the marketplace of words (I would say ideas, but they are in short supply these days) is to invite either disapproval or condemnation. Or worse yet, promises of “I’ll pray for you”.  Or worst, silence.

I may have written too much.

Of course my father also meant that I should be actively out in the world as opposed to what he saw as being passive—sitting in my back yard reading. At the time I thought this was good advice, so I moved out of the back yard and into church, school, and the world. I was still an introvert, but an engaged one.

I’m heading to Kentucky next week to commemorate my 50^th high school reunion. In a month, I’ll be celebrating my 68^th birthday. In honor of these two events, I’ve decided to once again take my daddy’s advice. This introvert is leaving the back yard of my books and blogs and going back out into the world to do something.

I’ll be back when I have done whatever it is that I will have done.

I wish all y’all peace, love, and the presence of good people in your lives who are not out to shoot you for disagreeing with them (or knocking on their doors, or walking in their gated communities).

And the absence of Ayn Rand evangelists and dangerous Christian fanatics disguised as leaders of the faith.

Rich People and Dirty Boots

My daddy used to frequently remark that you could tell the folks who actually had money from those who wanted to have money but weren’t there yet by listening and looking. If they bragged about their money, they didn’t have any. If they had shit on their boots, they probably had a bit of money, but wouldn’t go round bragging about it. As a kid, I found this observation fascinating and wise.

I’ve been reading the Holy Bible and Aristotle’s The Rhetoric this week, thinking about my daddy, and wondering about rich people.

Where and when I grew up, it seems to me the people who had more money than most of us went to some length not to rub our noses in it. For example, the folks who paid for me to go to summer church camp did it without fanfare.  Christmas baskets were put together for the poor and delivered matter-of-factly and neighborly, without explicit or implicit judgments made toward the giver or receiver.

Of course, we all know what Jesus is noted to have said on the subject of money and wealth—"the love of money is the root of all evils"l (1 Timothy 6:10), and “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:24) remind us of two passages.

Jesus was a kind and gentle soul. Aristotle was not. On most subjects, Aristotle, most certainly not a Christian (Christianity had not been founded yet), held positions that were about as far away from Jesus’ as could be. However, in The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle, as he talks about what one needs to know about wealthy people in order to persuade them, what he has to say is strong:

Wealthy men are insolent and arrogant; their possession of wealth affects their understanding; they feel as if they had every good thing that exists; wealth becomes a sort of standard of value for everything else, and therefore there is nothing it can’t buy.… Rich men also consider themselves worthy to hold public office; for they consider they already have the things that give them a claim to office. In a word, the type of character produced by wealth is that of a prosperous fool. There is indeed one difference between the type of the newly-enriched and those who have long been rich: the newly-enriched have all the bad qualities mentioned in an exaggerated and worse form—to be newly-enriched means, so to speak, no education in riches. The wrongs they do other are not meant to injure their victims, but spring from insolence or self-indulgence, e.g., those that end in assault or in adultery. (pp.127-28)

The people of means that I remember in Providence, Kentucky, those from “old money” and from “new money” did not fit Aristotle’s description. For that I am thankful.

But I sure as hell see evidence to support his view today in the U.S.

Despite our Western Cultural religious and philosophical traditions and underpinnings, I wonder what happened to us, and why it is that today we have come to worship wealth and wealthy people? Especially when they flaunt their wealth and rub our noses in it.

I hear rich folks bragging about their money and possessions, but despite my best attempts to find it, I ain’t seen no shit on any of their boots yet.

Wonder if today’s world is making Aristotle look like an even more brilliant man.

And making my daddy’s wisdom obsolete.