LENSING EFFECT OF DOWNTOWN MEMORIES

As with any illumination pattern, say the scientists,
some shine brighter than others.
The same with memory.


The lensing effect of light
reflected off a curved rim of any size
collects at a point on the surface--
of coffee in a cup or water in a pool
or even intergalactic rays
of spacetimelight
reflecting off the edge of a galaxy
and focuses and distorts in cusp-curve effect
onto predictable places in spacetime.
So it is with memory.


The relative dimness of some places
is precisely balanced out
by the relative luminosity of other places
with memory balancing the same way
in a Universal Memory Principle
in which some placetimes are recalled brightly
while others remain dimmed or uncollected.


When I think of my hometown
the memories traveling
as timethoughts
focus in lensing effect
on the once living downtown of the 1950s-’60s
concentrating memory rays there
when a vibrant downtown was filled
with the lifelight of people
traveling to town to do business
to ambulate, congregate,
recreate, inebriate
and drink coffee with timelight
in focus on their living surfaces
and bloviate with friends and strangers
on the corners of time
where few remember to stand today.


I might get a haircut and buy the latest comics:
Superman, Batman, Archie
or watch several movies at the State Theater:
Flash Gordon, Red Ryder, Hopalong Cassidy
and eat chess pie at Winnie’s Grill
and shop for toys at the five-and-dimes
and later, as a teen, play pool at Central Pool Hall
hiding from the supposed-to-have-been-working
at the small-town newspaper in my town
which had a real downtown
when its lifelight flourished
for a time.


And in the past-future time of now
my collected, luminous mind-images
of past-light not yet entirely passed
focus in lensing effect
on lifelight memories
flashing in from the edges of the galaxy
onto a downtown
yet remembered.

ROCKS IN THE MINDSCAPE

I have rocks all around where I live--inside! I have a rock from the volcanic sill behind my house from when I lived in the Santa Monica Mountains, California (1989-1993). I have a quartzite (crystal) rock I have been toting around since I lived in and around Lexington, Kentucky (1965-1979). I have rocks in the form of Native American arrowheads and axes from southern Kentucky, which are very approximately possibly 2,000 years old, that I have kept with me since the 1960s. 


Some people have quipped that they are here to remind me, in case of sudden-onslaught Alzheimer's, of who I am! Get it? (My surname is Stone.) 


One thing that pleases me about my imminent move to Nashville, Tennessee, is that there are actual outcroppings (the Nashville Dome) similar to the limestone outcroppings of the Inner Bluegrass--the Jessamine or Lexington Dome, which is geologically part of the Cincinnati Arch, so the stratigraphy is virtually the same. That will begin to feel closer to my sense of home (I am from Kentucky and lived in and around Lexington for 14 years). 


Here on the Mississippi Gulf Coast the bedrock is a few hundred feet below surface covered by coastal sediments. 


I need rocks in the landscape of my life, specially the 200-million-year-old limestones. 

SUBURBANIZATION--LARGE AND SMALL

It is difficult to imagine that the urban underclass would ever be pulled (or pushed) to the suburban fringe, due to the disadvantages of increasing energy costs and general lack of transportation infrastructure. Unless some begin to form "kitchen suburbs" and grow food out on the "Crabgrass Frontier" just to survive in some apocalyptic scenario, cheaper housing prices would not be sufficient enticement.

Small towns, too (about which there is little research) have experienced a type of suburbanization--in addition to the ex-urban spatial invasion by cities--in which tract subdivisions lying close-in have aided in obliterating downtowns in an empty-center doughnut effect. Instrumental in this, of course, was WalMartization--the big-box competition which boarded up mom-and-pop America--occurring as residents with the means to do so moved out to the edges. I speak from personal experience, when I say that small towns have, also, lost their walkability.

As in larger urban areas, housing stock in many small-town neighborhoods have become dilapidated. I was shocked to see that middle-class neighborhoods where I used to play in my small hometown in Kentucky have morphed into white ghettos.

MELTING-CUSTARD WORRIES DURING KENTUCKY CICADA SUMMERS

After slow Sunday-night church services

during 1950s' Kentucky cicada summers

and rolled-up rock-n-roll teen-jean jive,

my mom would drive us out for ice cream

twenty-five cents--15-cents for littler kids--

to get us a two-fisted frozen custard cone

too meltingly big for lickety-split small hands.

There was the Brown Derby chain

of frozen-custard stands, available in
my Cold-War hot-summer countryside

which dipped the cold cream-in-the-cone

in liquid chocolate, making a thin tectonic skin

that fractured and slid off creating a delightful
problem--Jim Dandy to the rescue!--
for a jively baseball-capped kid

while the grown-ups were fracturing themselves

over nuclear-custard Sputnik worries
of air raids, bomb shelters, and McCarthy Red-ism
 --The Warden said, hey, buddy,
don't you be no square!--
and spindly TVs and polio and the devilry
of hip-swiveling rock-n-roll--Be-bop-a-lula!--
but the jively baseball-capped kids
wanted Beethoven to roll over to make memories
for those dipped-chocolate frozen-custard
Kentucky cicada summer Sundays






 


 

CROWSCAPES OF HOME

During an era of impressionist living
I would drive out to the Bluegrass countryside
in deepest snows
and traipse alone for many hours
through chiaroscurist black/white
snowscapes of hills and fields
descending deeply incised valleys
in that karst topography
deeply incised in my brain folds
and walk alone in icy streams
and talk to crows
and sit alone under rock overhangs
never wanting to return
to whatever one must eventually return to
except perhaps I have never
really returned from wherever I was
when conversing (never really alone)
with the crowscapes and snowscapes
of Home.

HEADSTONE EDITORIAL

This poem is about my father, Larry L. Stone, who was editor of the Central City, Kentucky, Times-Argus, from 1949 to 1993.

Laconic is a word you taught me
telling me the story of its origins
in Laconia where Spartans
were people of few words
and men of action soldiers
who needed few words to kill.

You wrote your brief epitaph
and summed up a life
as Editor, Soldier, Miner
but a life edited in three words
is written only as an editorial
by an epitaphic editor of headstones.

As a miner your underground stint
before marching off to college
was as concise as your self-definition
but at that time you would not know
about the other two parts of yourself
that would appear in headstone headline.

As soldier during that European war
you bivouacked at the castle with wine keg
so large with dance floor on top
on your way to become soldier-editor
of the Army newspaper
writing terse headlines of battles.

Returned from war you were verbose
as stressed soldier and toasting editor
spewing linotype words of molten metal
not to be proofed until later
when a short life was editorialized
in three-word headstone headline.

As miner of words editorializing soldiers
as soldier battling word demons
but in the end as epitaphic editor
you had the last line
writing your own headline
of stone

GONE TO HEARTS EVERYWHERE

Can anyone here tell me what happened to my ol' friend John?

John lived from 1917 to 22 November 1963 with a great deal of verve and humor and intelligence. I had read his book, Profiles in Courage, in early high school, so I knew that he was an intellectual force, or rather that he himself respected intelligence and the courageous belief that the human mind could devise solutions to problems. John had courage.

He also introduced me, because he read them, to a new author, Ian Fleming and his fictional British spy, James Bond. John had style.

I can tell you where I was that afternoon at around 1 p.m. on a Friday when our school principal announced that John was dead. I was in the Central City [Kentucky] High School library with my girlfriend, Diann Wright. She can tell you that I presciently said to her that we would always remember where we were at that laden moment. Because at that instant, the world changed and we changed. We had to live thereafter in a heavier world feeling vacant without John. John had presence.

Can you tell me where he's gone?

John has gone to hearts everywhere. Those hearts, some of whom cried today, can only hope to emulate his courage, style, and presence.

STILL TEACHING?

"When you going to retire?"--some people ask, as if I have been hanging around too long already. At age 61 and in my eighteenth year of teaching, some think that I couldn't have much else to say, nothing to add pedagogically to our collective education, and can't possibly continue to guide the moral lives of young people. Perhaps this is true. But after lately living awash in too much Weltschmerz--despondency caused by the seemingly ubiquitous lying, urban-legend emails (the actual state of the world) spread about Sen. Barak Obama compared to the reality of his unique background (the truth as the ideal state of the world)--I could use some levity for a topic to think about. So, this anecdote.

Back to my teaching career: I will continue to teach as long as it is (relatively) fun and I think I have something to contribute. Since I grew up as a printer's devil at my father's newspaper office, in Central City, Kentucky, a job that I began around age six, and one that kept me covered in ink--anything after that would be seen as a better way to work for a living. I remember being smeared nearly completely over my adolescent body with black, greasy, probably poisonous, large and small streaks of newsprint ink. Back then, in the era of "dirty news-type," I was the Dickensian picture of a blackened child-laborer, who crawled under the large rumbling, hissing news press to gather up any pieces of ink-covered newsprint that had fallen there. All work after that would be considered a relief. I think I'll continue teaching.

I also have had jobs shoveling asphalt onto summer heat-shimmering roads and dead dogs off them in Muhlenberg County, Ky.; laying sod while yanking fingernails in Louisville, Ky.; selling men's apparel to surly customers at a clothing store in Lexington, Ky.; building houses as a general laborer in Napa Valley, Calif.; gathering Douglas fir cones from the tops of very tall swaying trees near Mt. Shasta, Calif.; landscaping and harvesting avocados in San Luis Obispo, Calif.; child-caring for two brats of a music-industry executive in Malibu, Calif.; and schlepping luggage as a bellman at a hotel in Biloxi, Miss. I also caught fierce, non-cooperative NASA rhesus monkeys, injecting them with knock-out sedatives, in order to clean their wounds in a basement of the Chandler Medical Center in Lexington, Ky.

So, you see that after all these grievous jobs, teaching is a relief. Eating newsprint ink, sodding, hammering, shoveling fetid dead dogs, and injecting fanged monkeys were never considered as vocations. I'll keep on teaching.

DIASPORIC VOICE OF HOME

Living in fragrant Jamaica
I would settle at night
in tropical moonlight
on the stone porch
of my nonelectrified
one-room isolated house
on craggy rocky goat hill
and tune in Cats' games
on nostalgia-powered radio
wistfully tuning the dial
finding Cawood Ledford's
rocky craggy yet soothingly
familiar home-grown drawl
on the far Kentucky station
whose signal fast-breaking
through the ionosphere
was my sole nexus
to my Big Blue home.

MARBLES, ORTHOGRAPHY, AND ARROGANCE

She cheated. She must have. Perhaps Mrs. Belcher, our 4th-grade teacher, in an act of premature feminist activism, slipped Bonnie Belle the contested words the night before the 1956-57 Central City [KY] Grade School Spelling Bee. Surely I was sick at home, so the competition was down. Cousin Kirk Stone, later a PhD, and political editor of the Fort Wayne, IN, daily newspaper and later on the U.S. Senate staff of Sen. John Glenn and now professor of communications at Charleston College, came in second. He never forgave Bonnie Belle her luck. Not even Charles Frank Winkler, who would become an oncologist and surgeon, could beat the advantaged competition that day. He must have been preoccupied with his Elvis the Pelvis imitations.

Fifty years later, Bonnie Belle stills gloats over her triumph. Not that I care, but when I saw her last, I wanted to test her orthographic acumen by quizzing her on the word “charlatan.”

One reason I did not win the Spelling Bee was that I was concentrating on the highly coveted school marbles championship. The mental discipline it requires to devise on-the-spot winning marbles strategies is suited for only the most superior exemplars of humanity. Marbles is a cerebral sport. It’s gruelingly physical, too. The kneeling and crawling on the Good Earth and pacing around the marble ring eyeing and calculating all possible trajectories, collisions, and caroms—not to speak of tactics to psyche the competition—is part Zen walking meditation and part bullfight, with the only weapons the brain and opposable thumb and curled index and middle fingers. Marbles is a masculine primal sport.

I won that day and went on to finish runner-up in the county marbles tournament to a boy who went on to win the State championship, in Louisville. I know because my father was in charge of the county championship, for the American Legion, and took the winner to State and then to the Nationals, where the boy finished fourth. In my losing to a marbler who finished fourth in the Nationals--those were my glory days.

I know my loss to a champion marbler at the county championships was due to my concentration wavering that day under Sputnik skies, not for fear of the Russians, but because of the eerie prescience I experienced of one day standing before Bonnie Belle half a century in the future and hearing her declare that spelling is a patrician contest not for those plebeian marblers who sport soiled knees. I want to ask her whether she can spell “haughtiness.”

Mrs. Belcher always liked Bonnie Belle better. I’ll take my marbles and go home.

HOUSING KENTUCKY MEMORIES

I always wanted the top rungs, high above the floor in the seven-bent tobacco barns, the last worker in the vertical column of young housers, where all I had to do was balance with spread legs, each on a rung, grab the heavy wooden sticks with spiked burley leaves and shake them out and fight the spiders and keep from falling, hoping all the while that the stifling heat and mixture of tetrahydrocannabinol and alcohol oozing out my pores would not make me dizzy or inattentive to my footing. On those liquid amber-hued autumn Bluegrass days, we housed burley for Jack.

Jack lives in a mansion. His 450-acre cattle and tobacco farm sits across from Claiborne Horse Farm, outside Paris, Bourbon County, Kentucky, where the likes of Secretariat were kept in stud and buried. Jack is the scion of a family who has all died of alcoholism. There's no good estimate of how many millions his farm is worth. It keeps him supplied with bourbon and herb and blues recordings and cruises to the West Indies. But I housed burley for him for about six years in the 1970s, in the fall, when Bluegrass nights became cool and it was tobacco harvest time. We partied hard with Jack.

Being a recognized good burley houser, I learned the Warrior way of mind: Overcome fear high up in the barn--and pass up the burley!

I now know that it was not only burley I housed; I was also housing Kentucky memories of amber-hued autumn afternoons.

CARTOGRAPHIC SUBTERFUGES ON THE MINESCAPE

When I worked as Inspector of surface (strip) coal mines for the Kentucky Dept. of Natural Resources, in the Appalachia part of eastern Kentucky, in (bloody) Harlan and Leslie counties, the job consisted largely of interpreting maps. The Operators (mining companies) submitted plans on large-scale maps and my job was to determine how the plans fit reality, as depicted on 7.5x7.5 USGS quad maps and the existing landscape, which was rugged in the extreme. As the actual mining progressed, I was responsible for determining whether the operation stayed within the parameters of their plans and Kentucky surface mine laws. (Generally, the legacy of mining in Appalachia is one of severe environmental destruction. I, in my environmentalist idealism, went there to “save the hills” and the Kentucky River which flows through my beloved Inner Bluegrass.)

There were map details galore to observe, such as property lines, contour lines, placement of access roads, placement of overburden and its angle of repose, and construction of dams and catch basins (I was a certified dam inspector). I was responsible, also, for watching out for “wildcat” mines in my area. (I was “the Law;” it’s a wonder I didn’t get shot!) I spent hundreds of hours tromping the hills, many times with U.S. Forest Service Rangers, cautious for rattlesnakes and avoiding “hollers” that had empty corn bags lying at their entrances, indicating that moonshiners were at work up-holler. (Leslie County [county seat: Hyden, population 600] got its first road to the outside world in the early 1960s. The federal highway through parts of the county measured 30 feet wide and was unpaved in parts.)

Back to maps: the mining Inspector’s relation to the Operator was adversarial (even though I amiably sipped coffee with them in their trucks) in that I was trying to catch them at their cartographic subterfuges. I interpreted maps in the office (in Hazard), standing on the mountainous minescape, in my vehicle, and even in the Operator’s trucks. It was a contest--worth a whole heap of expense to the Operator--between the State (represented by me) and the Operator, of who could best interpret cartographic truth and fiction.

MY HERBICIDAL BROTHER

One summer, sometime in the early 1970s, when I rented a farmhouse from Farmer Young, out a few miles from Lexington, Kentucky, deep in the Bluegrass region, I went out West for a few weeks and let my younger brother Joseph live there free, out of the grace of my heart. That proved to be a mistake.

Brother Joseph, who was five-sixths the size of my farmhouse bathroom, decides that using indoor toilet facilities was a bit inconvenient, since he needed to enter sideways and in consideration that he is not the most fastidious person when it comes to cleaning domiciliary interiors. He thinks that a good solution would be to urinate off the front porch, always mindful, of course, of Farmer Young, whose house was a bit more off the narrow county road and up the hill; and watchful of cars coming down the hill in that direction and cars coming around a curve in the other. Somehow, though, Brother Joseph, being the athlete with good sense of timing and mindful of the tempo of traffic on DeLong Road, manages the application of concentrated nitrogen to my turf and prized flowers directly off the front porch. He evidently was also trying to set new records for human urination distance, as my stout bluegrass turf was thoroughly withered a distance of 11 feet from the front porch. Brother Joseph assures me he never walked out to the yard for the liquid fertilizer applications. His thoughtful explanation was why walk an inconvenient few feet, when you can gain a better vantage from a height to watch the golden parabola.

It must have been great fun. Never mind that the boards at the base of the house showed advanced urinary rotting; never mind that visitors complained of burning nostrils from ammonia fumes when walking down the stone paving near the front porch; never mind that half my yard was prematurely yellowed.

Yes, a great life lesson was learned and I will now always be cautious. One never knows when a relative will turn out to be a killer, both herbicidal and maniacally ammoniacal.

BOYHOOD BRAVADO

I can only resort to movie images, like West Side Story, to access any schema in which to relate to male adolescence in New York City. I'll have to imagine taking the fast elevator to the observation deck of the Empire State Building, as I have daydreamed since childhood, to look out upon any New York boyhood cityscape of doing and daring. An adolescence in Brooklyn, or in any large American city, was a world away from mine.

Or, was it? Actually, it's archetypically similar: boyhood games of hard-fought competition and daring, whether in the street or field; running/cruising the city or town until near collapse; fights, friendships, and so on. Small town or big city, we were still prototypical American boys with much the same influences and responses--no matter the locale--and the essential characteristics of a boyish and, yes, puerile nature.

Did I tell about the time several of us boys were sitting on the eave of the barn behind ole Mrs. Shelton's house, like a line of crows, gazing down at the distant ground wondering what it would be like to jump off the tall roof? Wasn't this a productive way to spend some boyhood morning? We were having a vigorous Heckle-and-Jeckle discussion about this important topic when my feet suddenly slipped quite cleanly out from under me and I hurtled to the ground and made a perfect, uninjured, landing--by accident! Acting totally self-assured and stouthearted, as if it had all been planned, I swaggered and looked up at the others, who were both amazed and aghast at my apparent bravery, and I called out, "What's keeping you little chickens from jumping?" I played it like I was the most courageous boy since ancient Sparta. I was the Philistine warrior challenging and humiliating the Israelites (before Boy David appeared and Goliath was felled), calling each boy by name--"Pat Franklin, jump, you little chicken!"

This became part of my local reputation--Lee the Daring--even if it came by accident. I wasn't about to say otherwise.

WAR BABIES/WAR DANCES

My grandfather and I were both war babies. He, Robert Lee Durham, born just after the War Between the States, in 1867, was named after General Robert E. Lee. I, Lee Durham Stone, born 80 years later, in 1947, just after the Second World War, was named after that same grandfather who died two weeks before my birth. He, if alive today, would be in his 141th year.

His father, my great-grandfather, jumped off a Union prisoner-of-war boat traveling down (up?) the Ohio River and--as it has been passed down to us--kept the flame dancing in his pipe while he swam ashore. But, I'm certain, it was no dance to travel home undercover to Kentucky during war time.

My father "fought" in WW II and spent some time in a German castle during the war emptying the gigantic wine keg that was so large the top formed a dance floor on the castle floor above. Immediately after the war, as assistant editor of the German edition of the Stars and Stripes, the U.S. Army newspaper, he visited Hitler's personal compound, Berghof, near Berchtesgaden, when Allied occupation troops were looting the complex which lay in ruins after the Royal Air Force bombed it on 25 April 1945. I remember as a boy the piece of marble paving stone he took from the complex. Perhaps Eva and Adolph watched village children perform Bavarian folk dances on it?

INNER/OUTER LANDSCAPES

When I worked in Appalachian Kentucky, deep in the folded, forested mountains of bloody Harlan County, there were people who expressed to me their perceived need to have the closeness of the mountain slopes next to them. I, from the rolling hills of flatlands Midwest Kentucky, felt a bit claustrophobic and closed in, when I could not gaze out on any meaningful horizon.

In either case, it's our individual cognitive constructs interpreting the environments and landscapes around us. In some sense, we are formed by the environment/landscape in which we live, not in any deterministic way, but in dynamic interaction. There is interplay between our inner space and our sense of place--its environment and landscape. Each helps form the other.

STARRY-EYED DEEPNESS

Growing up in a small town in western Kentucky, we used to sit out at night under the starry sky as a family to watch "shooting stars." With this juvenile understanding, I would focus intently on a single star hoping that would be the one to take off and streak across the sky. It never happened that way and I felt a bit deflated when we retired indoors for the night.

However, it just might have sharpened my powers of concentration. I can gaze deeply into Nothingness for no good reason.

I still scan the sky for my lucky star to take off without prior notice.