To You All at Christmas

THE GLOUCESTERSHIRE WASSAIL Wassail! Wassail! All over the town, Our toast it is white and our ale it is brown, Our bowl it is made from the white maple tree, With the wassailing bowl, we’ll drink to thee. And here’s to our horse, and to his right ear, God send our master a happy new year: As happy new year as e’er he did see, With my wassailing bowl, we’ll drink to thee. So here is to Cherry and to his right cheek, Pray God send our master a good piece of beef: And a good piece of beef that we all may see; With the wassailing bowl, we’ll drink to thee. And here is to Dobbin and to his right eye, Pray God send our master a good Christmas pie, And a good Christmas pie that we all may see; With the wassailing bowl we’ll drink to thee. So here’s to Broad Mary and to her broad horn, may God send our master a good crop of corn And a good crop of corn that we all may see, With the wassailing bowl, we’ll drink to thee. And here is to Fillpail and to her left ear, Pray God send our master a happy New Year. And a happy New Year as e'er he did see, With the wassailing bowl, we'll drink to thee. And here is to Colly and to her long tail; Pray God send our master he never may fail. A bowl of strong beer! I pray you draw near, And our jolly wassail it's then you shall hear. Come , butler, come fill us a bowl of the best; Then we hope that your soul in heaven may rest; But if you do draw us a bowl of the small, Then down shall go butler, bowl and all. Then here's to the maid in the lily white smock, Who tripped to the door and slipped back the lock. Who tripped to the door and pulled back the pin, For to let these jolly wassailers in. ---Traditional English

Lancaster (PA) Craft Show 2008

Over Labor Day weekend, we visited the Long's Park Craft Fair in Lancaster, PA on a beautiful late-summer afternoon. Some of the exhibits were so clever and whimsical I couldn't resist photographing them. I felt like something of a freeloader in doing so, but our house has too much stuff in it already and could not hold any more (even if we could afford it). So, where there were no conspicuously-posted signs forbidding it, I snapped away and here are a few of the results.

My Beloved Anthracite Coal Region II

Here's another shot of the Reading Coal & Iron Company's Saint Nicholas Coal Breaker in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. This may well become a bit of history because, as you see, the destruction is already well under way.

My Beloved Anthracite Coal Region

Here are some views from the Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania Southern Anthracite Coal Field (as it looks today), which formed the setting for my novel series Up Home. This is the Old Saint Nicholas coal breaker, between Shenandoah and Mahanoy City. Compare it to Windstorm's wonderful cover art for Book One of my novel (look to your right). Here's another shot of Old Saint Nick: The Saint Nick was built in the 1930s by the Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company as a regional breaker, to process coal from a number of mines in the area. It's long-since out of operation, and may disappear before too much more time passes. So, you may be looking at a bit of history here. The Russians were only one of the numerous eastern European nationalities to immigrate to the Pennsylvania anthracite fields. They've left their imprint in the form of beautiful Russian Orthodox churches, such as the Church of the Ascension in Frackville: The old coal towns were famous for having a taproom on every corner that wasn't occupied by a church. Here's a typical street scene from Frackville:

Farewell, Sweetheart

I gave up my sweet little stand of Highland parlor pipes for adoption today. She's going to live in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, with a chap named Joe Jordan. I wish her many hours of lively music, now that I've released her from mothballed captivity in an old Samsonite briefcase in the back of my now-incrementally-less-cluttered closet.

Highland Smallpipes

It's time to say good-bye to an old friend. Here's a picture of the set of Scottish Highland Small-Pipes I've just put up for sale on eBay. The poor little thing has languished in the back of my closet for more years than I care to confess, and now I am trying to find her a more attentive home. If you're interested, please bid. She's a lovely girl, and deserves better than I've given her.

Reading, Pennsylvania

Here's a link to an August 27, 2008 article from The Reading Eagle Newspaper. This simply backs up and documents my prior post. It's sad to see a once-great city such as this go down the toilet to such an extent. I don't know the solution, except to suggest (a) that it will begin (if ever) in the homes and the schools, and (b) that it will take time -- measured in years if not generations. I'll be revisiting this subject in future postings. Article Link: http://www.readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=103762

Reading, Pennsylvania

Reading, Pennsylvania: It's the town I adopted as home over 30 years ago. I described it then to a law school classmate as a "little jewel set in a bend on the Schuylkill River in the capital of Pennsylvania Dutch country." True at the time, but, sadly, no more. In those days, several major banks, a global engineering firm, a leading auto-body manufacturer, a specialty steel company and any number of other energetic, profitable industries made their homes in this town. And, if you ever told someone from Philadelphia that you lived in Reading, you were likely to be asked: "Have you eaten at Joe's?" That was a legendary fine-dining restaurant which could challenge any of the world's best. This city was home to the literary likes of John Updike and Wallace Stevens, and any number of lesser literary lights -- including, I presume to say, myself. I was proud and happy to come to Reading. But the times have changed. Witness:Farewell to one friendly corner pub. Witness further: Farewell to a commuter rail line which, in its day, carried people from Philadelphia to Reading, with a number of stops in between, and all the way to Pottsville, once a hub of the Pennsylvania anthracite industry. I rode this line from Conshohocken to Reading for a number of months before I moved the family up here. The line closed in (as I recall) in1980. Now, some forward-thinking folks are wondering why the hell they ever did away with it, and looking for ways to bring it back. The Reading Railroad itself -- that creature of the coal, iron and transportation industries in this Commonwealth, was one of my father's principal clients when he worked in the steel-castings industry back in the 1950s and early '60s. He used to bring me up here with him from the Main Line on business trips in the summer. We'd come up to Reading, he'd make his business calls at the Reading shops on North Sixth Street, and then we'd visit the teeming farmers' market at Tenth and Penn Streets. Afterwards, if there was time, we'd visit local attractions such as Crystal Cave and Onyx Cave out in the countryside. Here's a hint of what's left: A railroad-crossing barrier control box at Seventh and Franklin Streets; An omega loop in a steam line which probably hasn't carried steam since the 1950s; A busted-out window in one of the machine shops where Herculean steam locomotives were maintained. Well, I suppose there's no point in getting all lugubrious about what once was. Still, it's good to at least try to remember, eh?

Urban Hieroglyphics

I live near, and work in, in a city (Reading, PA) which has a history dating back to Colonial times and which, in its day, was one of Pennsylvania's premier commercial, industrial and financial centers. At this point in history, however, dear old Reading is wandering in a wilderness of social and ethnic change. My work takes me through some of the rather sadly rundown parts of Reading where, among other things, there's a peculiarly archetypal form of local folk art which, like the cave-paintings of our prehistoric ancestors, seems to evoke something which language does not convey very well. So... Urban Hieroglyphics I: And Urban Hieroglyphics II: And Urban Hieroglyphics III: Don't ask me why, but I find these images arresting. The round one I take to be a male figure. In two of the three drawings, he's wearing something on his head -- some totemic symbol of dominance, perhaps. The teardrop-shaped figure I take to be a female symbol. I'd be interested to know if anyone visiting this blog has anything to add to my off-the-cuff and very incomplete interpretation. I've spent a lot of my life being full of baloney, and it won't kill me to go there yet again.

Lilliputnikskaya

Meet Lilliputnikskaya -- Lilli to you -- the latest addition to our household. She's charming, ferocious and friendly. Pocahontas, our other cat, is still pretty vigorously defending her seniority status, but Lilli spent the first few months of her life as the Alpha Female in a litter that lived under someone's house in the country. She's got plenty of street smarts and can take care of herself.

Another Festival in the Bonnie Glen

This is another lighthearted romp in the peculiar world of Scottish pipe band competition. If you're an insider to this world, enjoy the humor. If you're not -- well -- enjoy it anyway. With a glass of your favorite spirits. HISTORY HAS recorded that the events of the Second Annual Auchmountain's Bonnie Glen Yuletide International Invitational Grade 7 Extra-Loud Pipe Band Extravaganza and Highland Revue left our home galaxy changed forever. Seismologists the world around reported a cataclysmc event somewhere in Scotland; somewhat farther afield, a fleet of Zygorthian space invaders from the Beta Cassiopeiae star system turned their attack ships aside in mid-passage and high-tailed it for home at twice the speed of light. The story didn't end there, however. Now, on the eve of the Third Annual Auchmountain's Bonnie Glen Yuletide International Invitational Grade 7 Extra-Loud Pipe Band Extravaganza and Highland Revue, Dr. Les Blowhard and Drum Major Jesus Hamish Gonzalez, late of Mexico's Popocatepetl Highlanders, mellowed over sips of Laphroaig and Jose Cuervo and reviewed the extraordinary developments of the past year. Gonzalez's Volcanic Magma Hot Sauce did it, of course. After the Doctor recovered from his epic sneezing fit at the 1996 ceilidh, he craved Mexican food the way a weed craves sunlight; so he offered Gonzalez a year's tuition in playing the Great Highland Bagpipe badly, in exchange for a year's tuition from Gonzalez in preparing Mexican food badly. The result was a business venture, Espaldas Mojadas, Ltd., which on April Fools' Day opened a chain of "Tachum Bell" Scottish fast-food Mexican restaurantes. La Hacienda de Haggis, Gonzalez called it. "Your average Scot doesn't know the difference between gourmet cuisine and a Forfar bridie with HP Sauce," the Doctor said. "This business should take off like a scared rabbit." And so it happened. After opening "High Road to Garlic," a modest tapas bar in a condemned building half a block from the College of Piping in Glasgow (where the Doctor had received numerous honorary degrees), the Doctor and Gonzalez went into big-time production. "Our food does for your stomach what our piping does for your eardrums," the Doctor boasted in an interview on the BBC Scots Entrepreneurs program. The slogan caught on, and won an award from the Scottish Advertising Council. Hungry aficionados from Land's End to John O'Groats, from Orkney to Dover, flocked to ticky-tacky Tachum Bell shops which seemed to pop up at every major crossroads like poisonous toadstools after a spring rain. Brightly lit roadside signs and billboards featured a stylized portrait of the Doctor and Gonzalez, wearing chefs' toques and holding practice chanters the way a terrorist holds a semi-automatic weapon. They hired scores of young people, arrayed them in kilts, sombreros and red sashes, and taught them to prepare a daunting array of corrosive delicacies. They purchased grain in hides and corn in sacks, and fashioned Taorluath Tortillas, the staple elements of a menu which grew to include such house specialties as Red Speckled Burritos, Green Hills Guacamole, Redcastle's Refried Beans, Crunluath-A-Nachos, Jaggis con Jalapenos, and, of course, the Strathspey de Salsas: strong, weak, medium or weak -- your choice. IN SHORT, the Doctor put pipe-majoring on the back burner. In January he had left the Auchmountain Highlanders in the interim charge of Pipe Sergeant Johnny W. T. Bandylegs. And all year long Johnny taught pipers to read music and play gracenotes and doublings, to true up chanter scales and tune drones. He brought in a talented young drummer and patiently introduced the hitherto utterly foreign concepts of rhythm and playing to a beat. Locals were stunned to find themselves coming about to give a listen as the band struck up in rehearsal at the Royal Auchmountain's Bonnie Glen Military Academy. Small furry creatures popped out of their burrows and chirped in appreciation. "Well, mi amigo." The Doctor wiped his moustache with the back of his hand and grinned at Gonzalez. "Tomorrow's the big day, eh?" The Doctor had spent several months cultivating a Mexican-Canadian manner of speaking. "Once again we bring oot the pipes and tickle the sensibilities of music-lovers the world around, eh?" "Ay caramba, laddie," Gonzalez said. He had spent several months cultivating a Scottish-Mexican manner of speaking. "Eet weel be a wee braw bonny bit o' the Auld Nick." AND NOW, in the final rehearsal before the big event, the Doctor blew the dust off his pipe case and pulled out the long-suffering instrument. When Johnny offered to help him with tuning, he stared for a moment as if the daft man had just dropped a snowball down the front of his kilt. "Tune?" the Doctor said. “Tune?? Tune, shmune. Since when did we ever tune pipes around here? Next you'll be telling me to pay attention to dotted rhythms or some such nonsense. It's lucky I'm back in charge of this outfit. Tuning! How ridiculous can you get?" "Weel, Doc," Johnny said, "ye'll be hearin' a few surprises, I'll be bound." The Doctor harrumphed, adjusted the hearing aid in his good ear, gripped the blowstick in his teeth and mumbled out the cadence. The drummers executed two crisp three-beat rolls. The Doctor's pipes bleated and squealed during the first roll as usual, but all the other pipers struck up in perfect synchronization, perfectly tuned, and played a flawless march, strathspey and reel. A look of horror came over the Doctor's face as the music echoed about the Bonnie Glen. The Auchmountain Highlanders didn't have an iceberg's chance in Hades in tomorrow's contest, he realized. Why, the fools were playing on the beat! In unison! It sounded like music! There was no way, even with his formidable talents, that the Doctor could undo all the harm Johnny and his henchmen had done. Why had he trusted that two-faced sawed-off bowlegged ring-tailed illegitimate son of a tinker? The band came to the end of its set, and every pipe except the Doctor's cut off as if controlled by a switch. The Doctor's pipes gargled into asthmatic silence. He gripped the hilt of his dirk and marched up to Johnny, squared his jaw, and rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. "This is a joke, right?" he fumed. "Och, lighten up, Doc," Johnny said. "The lads and lasses and I decided tae try something different. Ye'll get used tae it.

A CHRISTMAS CEILIDH IN THE BONNIE GLEN

(This is a lighthearted romp into the rather silly world of Scottish Highland bagpipe band contests. If you're anything of a piper or a piping aficionado, see how many tunes you can recognize from the names. The rest of you ... well ... just take it wi' a grain o'haggis -- or a large single-malt.) IT HARDLY SEEMED possible a year had passed. The Second Annual Auchmountain’s Bonnie Glen Yuletide International Invitational Grand Championship Grade 7 Extra-Loud Pipe Band Extravaganza and Highland Revue was now history. All creation, like a dowager countess loosening her corsets, sighed with relief. It had been, quite literally, a resounding triumph -- not, as some Philistines had hinted, gross noise pollution. Dr. Les Blowhard, pipe-major of the Auchmountain Highlanders, had hand-picked a blue-ribbon panel of expert judges -- Baird of Auchmedden, Bob Pekaar and Angus MacKinnon -- and, with the help of industrial grade ear plugs, they had borne up bravely under the onslaught of the loudest in out-of-tune pipe-band music from around the world. Best of all, however, Auchmountain’s Bonnie Glen was now rid of mice, rats, lawyers, pigeons and other vermin for another year. “It’s a brilliant pest-control strategy,” a visitor said to the Doctor, “but what about the animals you don’t want to drive away -- livestock and domestic pets?” “Not a problem,” the Doctor said, turning up the volume on the hearing aid in his good ear so he could understand the question. “We take them to an underground bunker five miles outside of town the day before the competition -- except for the ass in the graveyard. What a lovely beast. He likes our music. He sings along. He’s quite good, really.” The Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Auchmountain’s Bonnie Glen Volunteer Fire Brigade, under the leadership of Mrs. Una MacIntyre, had organized a gala post-competition ceilidh in the Fire Brigade Social Hall. In the adjoining taproom, free-flowing ale, wine and single-malt whisky soothed many a frayed nerve-ending after the day’s excitement. Competitors, friends, families and camp-followers crowded into the hall, where tables groaned under the weight of delicacies brought from around the world. Even the local gentry -- most notably Rose of Kelvingrove and Lady MacKenzie of Fairburn -- had turned out in all their finery to celebrate the blessed return of silence to the Bonnie Glen for another year. Campbell had left Redcastle for a few days; and a talented fiddler had come from Inverness. When the fiddler took the stage and struck up a strathspey, the Doctor fiddled with his hearing aid for a moment, then interrupted the performance with a stentorian shout: “No, no, NO! Your rhythm’s inconsistent. First it’s strong, then it’s weak, then it’s medium, then it’s weak again. That’s not the way to play a strathspey. You’ve got to make up your mind. Here, let me show you.” The Doctor picked up his pipes and folks began edging nervously toward the door to the bar. As he began to play, the exodus became a stampede. “You call that a strathspey?” the fiddler said after the Doctor’s pipes had wheezed into silence and people began peering around the corner to see if it was safe to re-enter the room. “That sounds more like foot-shufflin’ soft-shoe.” “Nonsense, my boy,” the Doctor said. “Remember, I’m a Doctor of Just About Everything and you’re only a fiddler from Inverness. What could you possibly know about music?” The fiddler shrugged, put his instrument back in its case, then went to the bar and ordered a double Tobermory, neat. “An idiot with a red sash is still an idiot,” he muttered to the bartender. Meanwhile, Jesus Hamish Gonzalez, drum major of the Popocatepetl Highlanders -- Mexico’s loudest -- passed with a big tray of tortilla chips, jalapeño peppers and his special Volcanic Magma Hot Sauce. Seeing free food on the hoof, the Doctor lunged at the tray and helped himself to as much as he could stuff into his beard before Gonzalez, resplendent in sombrero, feathers, red silk sash and jingling spurs, snatched the tray away in alarm. What followed is destined to become legend in Auchmountain’s Bonnie Glen. As the story goes, the Doctor’s eyes lit up, his nose exploded, his tam o’shanter popped three feet into the air, and his sporran orbited his waist like a hula-hoop seven times. It became known as the Mother of All Sneezing Fits. “Scots wha HAE!” the Doctor sneezed. “Wha HAE! Wha HAE!!” “Gesundheit, señor,” said Gonzalez, wiping his face with a corner of his dress MacLeod serape. “Must have been that hot sauce,” the Doctor said. “I must compose a tune in its honor.” “Make it a strathspey,” the fiddler called from the adjoining room. “You’re so good at those.”

Requiem for a Village

Припять, Украйна 26 Апреля 1986 г. В 1:23:58 часов Pripyat, Ukraine 26 April 1986 At 1:23:58 A.M.

We slept with windows open that night, Our lovely land exhaling scents of pine and earth. The twins – Yurochka and Annushka – had played For hours in the sandy soil and now murmured softly in their sleep. Next week would be easy – Workers’ International Solidarity Days Would give Thursday and Friday as gifts of feasting and fishing. At sunrise today, we’d go catch small fry Where the power plant outflow pours into the cooling pond A mile from the Chornobyl No. 4 electric power station. We’d use the small fish to bait our hooks When we went after perch and pike on the Pripyat River During the holidays. The waters teemed with life. And so our little world glided happily along in delicious spring. We were as children skipping through the woods With no inkling of perils we could not see, hear, touch, taste. Two sharp detonations from Chornobyl No. 4 Stopped the clock for our poor village For the next twenty-five thousand years, Although for many the grace period was much shorter. We stared at the pyrotechnics several miles away, Like mice caught in the stare of Gadyuka, the viper, While isotopes of death gathered in our hair, On our clothes, in our childrens’ thyroid glands. Did you know ionizing radiation can give you an all-over tan, Even if you’re wearing clothes?

Another Thank-You

Adding to the Gratitude List: Thanks to Kathy Matisko for her kind words about my book on Amazon. Anyone who's experienced Kathy's narrative virtuosity would know that praises from that quarter are rare and precious gems indeed.

My thanks to Nathaniel Thomas, Wes Loder, Steve Page, Doug Arnold, Dennis Murphy, Frank Mulligan and Don Zeiter, for your kind reviews of Up Home on Amazon.com. Your encouragement is what keeps the sometimes reluctant pen moving across the page -- the laxative that keeps the vowels moving, if you please. I am most grateful.

I Speak Only Few Words of English

Я Говорю Несколко Слов По-анлиский Yes, I speak to you few words of English, my friend. Hell of language you have there, if I may say so. Academic commissars took eight-year-old girl in State school, Filled her head with strange alphabet, words said Not at all like written. And your grammar! Свяатой Бог! – Who can say I do that correct? (Так правильно? Не знаю!). Yes, yes, yours is language of Shakespeare and All his followers. God knoweth I stumble through Much of that in University, dictionary at my right – and Аспирин at left. But, friend, do you know Pushkin In original tongue? No matter. My English Is schoolgirl’s English; your Russian is schoolboy’s. But still – you see? – we communicate. Прекрасно! Clem Page 12.VIII.2005 На Ваёмиссинг, Пеннсилвании

A Sunny Day in Coal-Cracker Country

I've been neglecting my blogging practice, I'm afraid. Put it down to the chores of making a living and trying to market a first novel. I know, I know. Excuses, excuses, excuses.... Anyway, speaking of marketing a first novel, Eve and I took a very pleasant little sun-drenched book tour through the Pennsylvania anthracite country this afternoon. We made stops in Lansford, at the No. 9 Mine and Museum, Jim Thorpe (Old Mauch Chunk), and Eckley Miners' Village near Hazleton. I hawked the book with all my might, and confirmed a reading and book-signing date in Eckley on Sunday May 4. If you're in the neighborhood, you'd be most welcome to sit in. With the advent of daylight saving time and a brilliant, breezy afternoon, we came home happy to have put a perfect capstone on the weekend.

Political Correctness

----- Original Message -----

From: Bob Erskine

To: Don Edwards ; Peter R. Davis ; Bob Simonson ; David Sproul ; Jim Haggerty ; Don Egan ; Ed Cashin ; Megan O. Erskine ; Ron Erskine

Sent: Monday, February 18, 2008 8:40 PM

Subject: Definition

Political Correctness > > The following is the 2007 winning entry from an annual contest at Texas > A&M University calling for the most appropriate definition of a > contemporary term. This year's term was Political Correctness. The > winner wrote, "Political Correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a > delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous > mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely > possible to pick up a turd by the clean end." >

An Incident at the Hoe-Cake Cafe, Chapter IV

"You ladies from the Continental, ain't you?" Caldonius continued to smile as Annie sauntered up until her face was just inches from his. "Come on in, if you ain't too proud. Hot flapjacks. Pork chops. Bacon. Coffee so black it shine like coal. Come on in." Annie turned and faced the rest of the Valkyries. "How about it, girls? Do we eat or do we push this joint in the river? Or do we eat and then push this joint in the river?" "Ah, give the nigger a break, Annie. He's a war hero. Ain't you, honey?" Queenie Quinlan was a high-yellow octoroon whose father was rumored to be a full professor of comparative literature and belles-lettres at Columbia University. She had nothing in her possession that would confirm the rumor, but she didn't discourage it. "Well, I got work to do, ladies. You welcome to step inside for a bite to eat. If not, good day to you." Caldonius turned and walked toward the river side of the Café , to check on the waterworks and the food wheel machinery. After he'd gone a few yards, he turned to see if anyone was following. He saw Annie and Queenie and the others huddled in a tight circle. He heard a Babel of arguing. He shrugged and went around the corner of the building. When he pulled the mallet out of his apron pocket, he was surprised to notice his hand shaking. He went to his workbench, picked up the oil can and headed for the water wheel. The thump-thump of the machinery made a comforting pedal note to the high-pitched anxiety beginning to build up in Caldonius's mind. It's after midnight, but it might as well be broad daylight on the main street of hell. The rolling artillery barrage rumbles on in the distance like the thunder of a receding storm. Star shells and parachute flares overhead make crazy shadows on the ground, all plowed up and stinking like a latrine. I'm running like hell, with the zip and zing of bullets like low-country mosquitoes all around my head, searching for me, finding some of my friends, the muzzle flashes from the Maxim guns out there in the distance. So far to go. So far. Got to run faster. Got to run smarter. Jump the coils of barbed wire. Dodge the bullets. Getting closer now. Over the parapet. Into the trench. Damn! Look at these boys. They eight feet tall. No time to work the bolt on this rifle. Use the bayonet! Bayonet? Yeah! Like you was taught in basic. Stab and twist. Stab and twist. Man, that was easy. Like butcherin' a hog back home. I think we gonna be all right. For today, anyway.

An Incident at the Hoe-Cake Cafe, Chapter III

Anne Boleyn Jones had grown into a big woman. Now in her late twenties, she stood at six feet one inch and weighed a well-proportioned one hundred fifty pounds. When she was a little girl, she'd been fiercely competitive in all endeavors -- a tomboy. Her teachers in school had nicknamed her Up-And-At-'Em Annie. Her father, Nick Jones, lived in a falling-down farmhouse just outside Alfalfa Junction, where State Highway 452 met the River Road. Old man Jones smoked, got drunk, collected firearms and ate canned corned beef hash because it reminded him of the tinned bully beef for which he'd cultivated a taste during his Army days. He collected a modest veteran's pension for undistinguished service during the Spanish-American War and supplemented his income by selling night crawlers and bloodworms to the fishermen who fished the Susquehannica and its tributaries. "Reason God made guns is so white men can shoot niggers," old Jonesy said one night at Sam Pardee's speakeasy in Alfalfa Junction. Sarah Jones, Annie's mother, shielded her daughter for as long as she could, deflecting and often absorbing the impact of Nick Jones's alcoholic rages. But one night, after the old man had chased her a quarter-mile down the River Road, waving his Army-issue revolver and threatening to blow her goddamn head off, Sarah Anne Jones took cover in a patch of woods and waited until the old man had stumbled back to the house and passed out. Then she crept back, collected her five-year-old daughter and one carpet bag containing her important possessions, blew out the pilot light, opened all the valves on the gas stove and set fire to a pile of oily rags in the basement. Explosions and fire lit the night sky behind them as Sarah and Annie walked up the road to Alfalfa Junction. Sarah's older sister, Emma James, proprietress and owner of the Grand Continental Hotel., took them in as long-term guests. The Grand Continental was neither grand nor continental, and was a hotel only in the sense that it provided living quarters for a dozen or so unmarried young women and temporary recreational lodgings for traveling salesmen with cash in their pockets. Sarah and Annie settled in and Sarah earned room and board by cooking, cleaning and tending to the endless female problems of the working girls.

Orders from Windstorm Creative

Dear Readers... A number of you have told me you're not receiving books you ordered from my publisher, Windstorm Creative. I need to get to the bottom of this quickly. If you are one of the above, please e-mail me at clemson.page@verizon.net with the following information: 1. When you placed your order. 2. How you placed your order: phone? e-mail? Other? 3. Where did you send your order? 4. Did you receive confirmation? 5. Did you make payment by credit card or otherwise? I am considerably embarrassed at hearing these reports, and I'd really appreciate your help in my investigation. Thanks. Clem.

Why "Son of a Curmudgeon"? (Reprise)

Over the years, people have called me a son of many things, most of them based on my supposed relationship to female dogs. But why a Son of a Curmudgeon? It started one winter day, just before Christmas, in the early 1960s. Our family was gathered in the living room. My brothers and I were taking bets on whether or not the Christmas tree would remain standing under the onslaught of Mom’s relentless tinkering with the ornaments and placement of the lights. Everyone was in a festive poisonous humor. The language was quite inappropriate for the season. We decided to take a break for family photos. What a great idea! I can’t remember which moron came up with it, but at least it promised to sidetrack momentarily the strife over the tree. We started with Dad. We sat him in a straight-backed chair, handed him a walking stick, and told him to look as crusty and disagreeable as he could -- not a difficult assignment under the circumstances -- while one of us took the picture. I wish I could show you the result, but it's lost to posterity, more's the pity. Pop looked like one of those sourpussed elderly gentlemen you sometimes see in old studio photographs, their necks clamped in steel and celluloid to prevent the slightest appearance of comfort or relaxation. From the day it came back from the photo shop to the day it vanished into the ether, that portrait was titled “Curmudgeon.” Dad decided he enjoyed the role and refined it considerably during the remainder of his life. Happily, he could toggle it on and off at will, and never lost his capacity to enjoy or share a good joke or a conversation. As the years go by, I find myself wondering if curmudgeonliness might not be an inherited trait. When I see current photographs of myself (see above), I seem to want to growl at someone.

An Incident at the Hoe-Cake Cafe, Chapter II

Everything was calm at the Hoe-Cake Café until the day young Up-And-At-'Em Annie showed up. It was a Sunday in October 1933, just after the repeal of Prohibition. She rolled onto the cindered side lot astride a red Indian motorcycle with half a dozen other girls from Ma James's ... well, establishment ... in Alfalfa Junction, all of them on red Indian motorcycles, too. One with a taste for Wagnerian music and Teutonic legend might have called it a latter-day Ride of the Valkyries. Caldonius came out to meet them, wiping his hands on one of little Lizzie's diapers -- a clean one. They came in handy as rags in his workshop, and Lizzie didn't hardly need them no more. The water wheel was turning and the Café was thump-thumping its heartbeat over the thrum of the motorcycle engines. "Hey, nigger. Shine mah shoes." Annie swung off the Indian and shoved an engineer-booted foot at Caldonius. He regarded it for a moment without comment, then raised his eyes and met Annie's stare. The other girls stood in a loose circle around the two. Several of them struck wooden matches on the seats of their dungaree britches and lit Lucky Strikes which they then pasted to their lower lips with spit so they hung insolently from the corners of their mouths. "Well, now, ma'am, I ain't what you'd call a proper bootblack, so I can't oblige you with a shoeshine." Caldonius stuffed the diaper in his back pocket and fingered the handle of the wooden mallet in his apron pouch. During the Depression years, the rural portions of the Susquehannica valley, along the River Road from Alfalfa Junction to Dixon's Ferry, were a string of somnolent hamlets in a neutral zone between the virulent racial hatreds of the South and the more subtle prejudices of the North. People had called Caldonius a nigger all his life, so the word had lost – never really had – any power to shock or offend him. On the other hand, he'd carried a rifle in the mud of France and fought alongside troops of all the Allied nations and had come to believe it should not be any black man's lot in life to look at his feet and mumble "Yassuh" whenever a white man chose to call him a nigger. He'd fought alongside the best and the worst of them. The bullets and the gas and the shrapnel and the enemy bayonets had not discriminated in winnowing the ranks. It didn't matter whether he'd fought well or was just lucky – most likely, it was a bit of both – Caldonius Chisholm from Ashepoo, South Carolina, had lived to participate in the triumph of the forces which had fought to end all wars. By the time he was mustered out of the 341st Infantry Battalion at Camp Dix in 1921, he was no longer willing to think of himself as a nigger, nig, nigra, coon, shine, darky, spade, jig, jigaboo or any of the myriad other names some people seemed to have bestowed upon others because of differences in skin pigmentation. Caldonius smiled at Annie. "No, ma'am. I can't shine your shoes. But my wife's cookin' up some mighty fine flapjacks inside. You and your friends be most welcome to join the folks eatin' 'em." MORE TO COME

A Good Day at the Chateau

I’m pleased to report that we sold 44 copies of my book today at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Sinking Spring, PA. The proceeds have gone to the parish building fund. Just a small way of thanking the Creator for the gift of words and storytelling. I’m even more pleased to report that my first granddaughter, Nora Jeanne Molyneaux. was born today in Boston to my daughter Lindsay and her husband Brad. It’s been a good day and I’m grateful.

An Incident at the Hoe-Cake Cafe, Chapter I

When the food wheel turned at the Hoe-Cake Café on River Road in the Susquehannica River valley, music played and the food came up from the griddles, steaming and delicious. A Little Black Sambo doll sashayed and cakewalked and hallelujahed while a pair of ceramic tigers chased each other around a real miniature coconut palm tree on the highboy in the middle of the dining room. Nobody could remember what the food wheel was supposed to signify, if anything. It was a miniature ship's wheel of the type used aboard the flat-bottomed stern-wheelers that had plied the Susquehannica in fleets and squadrons around the turn of the century. It came with the place when Caldonius and Sassie-Marie Chisholm bought it in 1921 and renamed it the Hoe-Cake Café . Now, when the food wheel turned, powered by a water wheel and a system of shafts, cogs and gears, it made a rhythmic double thump that sounded for all the world like a human heartbeat. Rigging the system had been a sort of therapy for Caldonius Chisholm. The Meuse-Argonne offensive in 1918 had left him a hollow-eyed wreck, and he'd seemed to derive great comfort from harnessing the Susquehannica for his playful and not-so-playful purposes at the Hoe-Cake Café on the River Road between Alfalfa Junction and Port Coghlan. When the food wheel turned, the Hoe-Cake Café was alive. Its heartbeat reverberated from the high cliffs on both sides of the river. The Café perched, about half a bubble off plumb, on the east shore. A system of wooden sluices, gates and valves which Caldonius had made with hand tools brought water from the Susquehannica to the six-foot red-painted overshot water wheel that put life and mettle into the heels of Little Black Sambo and ran the ceramic tigers around the palm tree until they were a blur of yellow. The butter, however, came from the Upland Farms Dairy, and Sassie-Marie kept it in the kitchen icebox. At the top of the cliff on the western shore of the river, the terrain was flat and grassy. It fell away in a sheer drop of five hundred feet to the twin tracks of the Susquehannica-Havre de Grace Rail Road, which brought grain and produce from the heartland farms to the barges on the Chesapeake that carried it all to market. From the top of the cliff, the Hoe-Cake Café, with its fretwork of watercourses and its big red turning water wheel, looked like a one-of-a-kind toy some doting old Gepetto might build out of scrap lumber to enchant his grandchildren on Christmas morning. When he was busy with the never-ceasing care and adjustment of the water wheel (which also milled the buckwheat flour for Sassie-Marie's incomparable flapjacks), Caldonius Chisholm wore a striped denim engineer's cap and carried a long-spouted oil can. He oiled the bearings of the water wheel twice a day. The wheel turned quiet as a bat wing across the face of the moon. In his apron he carried a wooden mallet and pieces of oakum. Whenever he found a water leak in one of the wooden sluices, he pounded strips of oakum into the cracks, and the water stayed more or less within its appointed boundaries. And so the heartbeat of the Hoe-Cake Café double-thumped through the valley. And Little Black Sambo danced, the tigers chased each other around the palm tree on the highboy, and Sassie-Marie served heaping plates of buckwheat flapjacks to the customers who filled the gingham-covered tables from dawn to noon every day of the week. MORE TO COME

Shipping Misinformation from Amazon.com

Dear Readers... If you happen to want to purchase a copy of Up Home: Stedman 1903-1909, and you visit Amazon.com to make the purchase, you may see their ridiculous notation that the book "usually ships in 1 to 3 months" if you order it from Amazon. If you see that stupid notation, please don't laugh until cappuccino spurts from your nose. Just contact me, via this blog, and I'll see that you get a copy in a fraction of Amazon's ridiculous time frame. Those morons must think the book is being written in longhand, one copy at a time, by monks cloistered somewhere in the Hindu Kush, and shipped via slow boat from China. As you may have gathered, Amazon.com presently holds a high ranking position on my personal fecal roster. NOT THAT THEY BLOODY WELL CARE. They'll just blunder on like a nearsighted elephant, damning their authors to literary perdition by stupid listings of the type I'm bitching about here. Do you suppose the bitching will help? Please cast your votes.

A New Year's Greeting

THE CURMUDGEON’S SON SITS IN THE SUNSHINE ON NEW YEAR'S DAY AND GRIPES ABOUT THE HUMAN CONDITION

ON THIS DAY of resolutions and good intentions to reinvent our lives, it’s interesting to ponder why this impulse tends to strike only once a year. It’s like opening the windows on the first balmy, breezy day in the spring and letting in something to lighten the stale air we've been breathing all winter. The Solstice is past. The days begin to lengthen, however imperceptibly. The urge to shake off the shackles of the past peeks out like the sun from behind a dark cloud. Freedom! Why are we so afraid of it? Why do others get so anxious and disapproving when we talk about it – or, God forbid, actually practice it? In every social environment I’ve ever occupied, it’s been the same: whether they’ll admit it or not, people don’t want other people to start acting too free. I think it’s why New Year’s Day is a day off for so many of us. It’s how society lets us get this “I’m free” nonsense out of our systems for a day, before we slip back into the warm bath of mediocrity and self-imposed bondage in which we’ll soak for the next 364 days – unless death or insanity grabs us first. That’s more than just a little gloomy, isn’t it? You’ll have to decide for yourself whether you find a kernel of truth in it. This New Year’s Day of 2008, my take on it is that freedom is for the very young, the very old and the very crazy. So have a crazy new year! I certainly intend give it my best shot. Or so I say today, and here highly resolve. But I suspect the warm bath will be waiting tomorrow. Clem.