Monday, April 29, 2024

Hey, how about the clock?

 I was asked to speak to a local service club by a friend. 

“What do you want me to talk about?”

“Well, since all we’re giving you is breakfast and a complimentary ink pen, I suppose you could talk about anything you want.  But what I’d really like you to tell us is where you get ideas for your stories.”

I thought it over for about five seconds.  I know who’s in that club and like them all.

“OK, I’ll come talk to your club.  You still meeting terribly early at that church?”

“Yeah.  Be there at 7:00 if you want breakfast.  We try to get the speaker on by 7:30.”

“OK.  I’ll see what I can work up about my stories.”

My friend’s question is a cousin to another that comes up at times from people who hear about my blog.

“What’s your blog about?”

“Anything I want.”

They look puzzled.  Most blogs are written around a topic of some kind.  I’m expected to say that my blog is about the outdoors, cooking, music, travel, politics – some subject they might care about.

Instead, I write in the first person about things that happen in my life.  The only constant is that I write my blog in a shack in my backyard.  Thus, the blog’s name, Dave in the Shack.  But that offers readers no clue as to where ideas for my stories come from.  I would need to talk about something else.

These local clubs have changed considerably.  Breakfast is the same as forty years ago, but nearly half the members that morning were women.  They didn’t sing together from a club songbook and they skipped the prayer (said it was the club president’s prerogative).  Still said the pledge though, facing a tiny American flag. Here’s what I told the club members after a very early breakfast (ham, scrambled eggs, and tater tots).

 

“At the end of my career as the director of a not-for-profit agency, I developed some health problems that got me thinking about early retirement.  At that time, I was writing a weekly blog about the agency and its work that had a widespread and varied audience.  It was my favorite task as director.  That’s not true.  It was all I wanted to do. 

Before leaving the job, I took a weekly writing course at UIC Chicago called Creative Nonfiction. There I met a talented professor and writer, Brooke Bergan, and students like me who loved to write.  Sometimes you get lucky.  I found out creative nonfiction was what I’d been writing since I was a kid.

What is creative nonfiction?  It’s writing that uses creative ways to retell a true story.  Creative nonfiction writers don't just share accounts of life’s events, they use craft and technique to bring readers into their personal lives.  When it works readers hear the writer’s voice, imagine the settings they describe, and feel what the writer experiences.  Aside from opinion essays, my blog posts are rooted in things that really happen.  But I don’t limit myself only to what happens. 

For example, I write a lot of dialogue.  We can’t remember everything we say to others word for word or what others say to us.  So, I make the dialogue more interesting by writing what I think I had said, might have said, or wished I had said.  I also put words into the mouths of the real people in my stories.

We don’t talk like we write.  And we don’t always say interesting things in conversation that later read well.  So, I jazz it up to make the dialogue reveal more.

To explain where I get ideas for my stories, here’s a new story I got from a memory, sometimes shared orally with family but never written, until a few days ago.  It’s a farm story based on something that really happened within my family. 

I grew up on a small dairy farm between Bloomington and Pekin.  All around us were families living on small farms.  The men who worked those farms worked alone, or with family, except for jobs like shelling corn and baling hay when they traded labor with neighbors.  It was a pretty solitary life and perhaps because of that those farmers were often quiet guys.  Unlike their wives.  But that’s another story.

Farm families around Danvers in the 50’s and 60’s were conservative and church-going.  Where I lived they were mainly protestant.  Few of them drank alcohol, and if they did, they kept it to themselves.  Or in the barn.  There were farmwives in Danvers who bragged about never having beer in their refrigerators or whiskey in their cupboards.  Our neighbors hardly even swore.  I think of that life as the definition of clean living.  Hypocritical at times, polite to a fault, but clean all the same.

This story involves me playing basketball for Danvers High School, a small school attended by just over 100 kids.  We were playing at Armington, which had even less students than us.  At those little schools, if you had even one kid with a decent jump shot you had a chance to win.  I was not that kid.  My role was getting rebounds and giving the ball to my teammates who could score. 

Mom and Dad saw all my home games and some out of town when they weren’t so far away that they couldn’t milk the cows and still get to the game on time.  Armington was close, just past Waynesville, and my parents were there. 

Mom and Dad sat in the bleachers a few rows behind the scorer’s table.  There weren’t many rows of bleachers to begin with.  Those towns had tiny loud gyms and Armington’s was packed.

Each team had its own scorer.  With them at the table was the timekeeper who ran the game clock.  Timekeepers were usually hometown volunteers or a hometeam schoolteacher.  The score was close, time was running out in the fourth quarter, and Armington was just a few points behind.

Armington’s coach took a time out and when the referee put the ball back into play, the timekeeper forgot to start the game clock.  Or he did it on purpose to give Armington more time to score.  My Dad yelled at the timekeeper. 

“Hey, how about starting the clock?”

The timekeeper did start the clock, but then turned around and said this to my Dad.  

“Hey, how about kissing my ass?”

Dad didn’t respond.  I’m sure he was shocked anyone would say that, in public or otherwise, especially to a stranger.  And Dad was not good with witty comebacks.  He was deliberate and thoughtful.  I always figured that came with the job.  All those hours alone in the field on a tractor, back and forth, going over things in your mind, thinking everything through. 

I was in the game when all this happened and didn’t hear it. Mom and Dad told me all about it when I got home.  In small towns incidents like that became stories later told and retold in the barber shop and the beauty parlor.  Dad was either embarrassed, amused, or ashamed by the whole thing.  I couldn’t tell.  He didn’t let on.  But, a couple nights later, I heard him talking to himself. 

We had a big two-story farmhouse with an upstairs bathroom.  Mom and Dad slept downstairs, and the kids’ rooms were all on the second floor.  My room was right across from the bathroom with the head of my bed parallel to an open doorway. 

I was the baby of a blended family of seven kids.  By the time I was in fourth grade, all my siblings were out of the house.  It was just me up there. 

When Dad came upstairs to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, he was either smoking an unfiltered Camel cigarette as he climbed the steps or lit one while he sat on the toilet.  Sometimes the smell of the smoke woke me up.  Sometimes I heard his Zippo lighter click open, followed by the sound of the thumb wheel scraping the flint, and ending with a snap when the shiny case shut.    

I didn’t let him know I was awake.  He never turned on the light or shut the door.  If there was any moonlight at all and I opened one eye I could see the outline of his head above the vanity, sitting there on the stool, the sky behind him in the bathroom window.  If not, I saw only the tip of his cigarette glowing orange in the dark.  Either way, he thought he was alone.

That night I smelled cigarette smoke, then heard his voice.  He spoke softly, half whispering. 

“Hey, how about starting the clock?”

He was replaying the words he said to the timekeeper in Armington.  He didn’t repeat the timekeeper’s response, but this time, unlike that night at the game, he had a comeback to that startling request he couldn’t forget.

“Hey, how about doing your job and keeping your mouth shut?”

He paused. I saw the end of his Camel glow as he took a draw and then heard him exhale.  He thought of another response and tried it out in the dark. 

“Hey, how about you kiss MY ass buddy?”

My Dad would never say either of those things to a stranger in real life.  I wished he could have, but he was not that kind of man.  Alone though, in the middle of the night, he boldly imagined it. 

If he had been a writer of creative nonfiction he could have, if he wanted, gone beyond the actual dialogue to make it a whole exchange between him and the timekeeper.  It was a real event, it happened, and he remembered it vividly.  That night in the Armington bleachers there were things Dad might have said, things he wished he’d said, and things he could have written later that would have made his story more compelling.

But he didn’t.  And that is not going to happen now, because Dad was born in 1909 and would be 115 in December.  He lives on now only in his family’s memories and some of my stories.

So, the answer to where I get my stories is that I get them from real life and jazz them up, like I did this one.  My hope and my reward are that my readers enjoy them.  Thanks to my friend for asking.”  

Wednesday, April 10, 2024

Come Back Barbara Lewis

Do words, sounds and images enter your brain mysteriously and stay there?  Do you wonder where they come from?  And are you amazed at how long they stay?  I do.  It borders on creepy.   Here’s what happened Friday morning.

I was home minding my own business, doing the Chicago Tribune crossword puzzle at the kitchen counter and drinking coffee.  My smart speaker was off, my wife was sleeping, and it was a dead quiet morning when the notes of a John Prine tune popped into my head.  I had neither heard the song recently, read about it or John Prine, nor run across the lyrics or the theme they represent.

I had read the whole Tribune, cut out some articles, talked to my son on the phone, made myself breakfast, and settled into the crossword puzzle.  Nothing about that song was any part of my morning. 

And then out of nowhere I started whistling the tune, both verse and chorus.   It was Come Back to Us Barbara Lewis, Hare Krishna, Beauregard.   As I whistled, I could hear John Prine’s voice inside my head, and the lyrics line by line, word for word.  Not only that, I pictured the album cover the song was on, Common Sense.  I have it in the shack.

I tried to keep my mind on the puzzle.  It was an annoyingly difficult crossword. The puzzles get increasingly harder each day.  Monday’s is the easiest and Saturday’s can take most of the day if you let it.  As I pondered clues like “with diffidence” (answer: shyly) and “divination” (augury) John Prine’s 1975 song pushed the April 5, 2024 puzzle right out of my head.

A song, mind you, that played only in my head in a kitchen perfectly quiet except for my whistling.  The reasons for it invading my thoughts are unknown.  The song starts with Prine painting a portrait of a troubled woman, Barbara Lewis, in the first verse.  I could see her clearly.  Strung out perhaps.  Or mentally ill. Maybe both. 

The last time that I saw her
She was standing in the rain
With her overcoat under her arm
Leaning on a horsehead cane

She said, "Carl, take all the money"
She called everybody Carl
My spirit's broke, my mind's a joke
And getting up's real hard

 

I was traveling in Europe, then North Africa, and Europe again in 1975.  I probably encountered more new and different people that year, some call them strangers, than any other year of my life.  The 60’s weren’t far behind us.  Characters like Barbara Lewis, both men and women, crossed my path often.

 I call these persons characters as if they are on a stage or depicted in a novel.  Trouble is, they are real people living their lives, however difficult or jumbled that life might be.  When face to face with those living on the edge I was fascinated, a little fearful, and at the time worried for them.  They may not have wanted my concern, but it was there all the same.  Prine was concerned too.  The chorus he wrote tells us that. 

 

Don't you know her when you see her?
She grew up in your backyard
Come back to us
Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregard

 

The confused and disheveled woman you see now?  With the horsehead cane that calls everyone Carl?  She was a girl you knew when you were a kid.  Maybe your friend.  Prine wanted that girl back, as she used to be.  Maybe you know a girl like that too.

 I had reserved a lap lane at the Ottawa YMCA for early afternoon.  While swimming a nonstop half mile the lyrics and music surrounding Barbara Lewis kept going through my head.  Lap swimmers can be antisocial.  In fairness, swimmers can’t talk when inhaling through their mouth and exhaling underwater through their nose.  It is a great time to think, though.  John Prine and Barbara Lewis soaked up my entire forty-minute swim and five-minute cool down. 

Remember the 1977 Spielberg movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind?  Richard Dreyfus plays electrician Roy Neary, an ordinary guy investigating unusual power outages at night for the power company near his home near Muncie, Indiana.  While pulled over on a blacktop road checking power lines three brightly lit aircraft fly over his pickup truck.  He becomes convinced the pilots are extra-terrestrials in UFO’s.  After that, Roy Neary appears very distracted to those who know him best.

 That wouldn’t have been so bad, but as strange things begin to happen in both Muncie and other communities on the national news, he develops an obsession with a particular shape.  One night at dinner with his family he used his fork to fashion his mashed potatoes and what was left in the bowl into a small model of a mountain.  Attempts to ask him what he was doing went unanswered.  His family was concerned.

 The next day he hauled a huge pile of dirt into the family room and constructed a giant model of the same mountain with even more detail.  By then he was ignoring his family, talking to himself, and acting truly crazy. His wife gathered the kids and fled their home. 

 Before you know it, Roy Neary is speeding northwest nonstop on the interstate.  He ends up outside Hulett, Wyoming where he skids his truck to a sudden stop. 

 Looming before him is Devils Tower National Monument where a majestic lava butte rises out of the western plain.  It’s famous. You’ve seen it.  Devil’s Tower matches the shape he first created with his mashed potatoes.  It was as if that mountain drew him to Wyoming against his will.  Roy Neary was totally controlled by a force outside himself that wouldn’t let him think of anything else.  You probably know what happened next and may even be hearing the five notes of the movie’s title song in your head right now.

 I continued thinking about John Prine and his song about Barbara Lewis as the day went on, but I wasn’t nearly as absorbed as Roy Neury was by Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  I’m OK.  Don’t worry about me.  Retired people can do these things.

 After my swim at the Ottawa Y, I stopped at the Northside Kroger to pick up a few things off the shopping list.  As I was hunting for Thomas’ English Muffins a young woman stocking shelves atop a step stool spoke to me.

 “So, it was you doing the whistling!  What is that song?”

 I was embarrassed.  Sometimes I don’t realize I’m whistling.  And sometimes I’m loud.

 “It’s an old John Prine song, probably before your time.”

 “Try me.  What’s the name of it?”

 “Come Back to us, Barbara Lewis, Hare Krishna, Beauregard.”

 “Oh…yeah, I don’t know that one.”

 I spotted my English muffins and headed quietly to the next aisle.

 “Don’t stop whistling because of me,” she said.

 I did.  The lyrics that matched the tune going through my head, silently after being called out by the Kroger girl stocking shelves, were these two verses:

 

Selling Bibles at the airports
Buying Quaaludes on the phone
Hey, you talk about a paper route
She's a shut-in without a home

God save her, please, she's nailed her knees
To some drugstore parking lot
Hey, Mr. Brown, turn the volume down
I believe this evening's shot

 

Prine goes from describing Barbara’s appearance and demeanor to pointing out her behavior.  I never sold books in airports, nor bought Quaaludes, but I encountered people who did.  They were my age and younger, on the tail end of the hippie movement, possibly exploited, and appeared to be lost.  I could have been wrong, and they may not have welcomed my pity, but I felt sad when I saw people in those situations.  I wanted to help them find better ways to live their lives, but I didn’t know how. 

 I worked temp jobs through a government funded agency called Manpower in Bloomington-Normal during my senior year at ISU.  The day labor jobs they offered came mostly from moving company drivers needing last-minute help unloading the belongings of newly transferred families from a semi into their new homes.  I had to cut class to take those jobs and didn’t do it often.

 But when I did, I was often paired to work with alcoholics from the Home Sweet Home Mission.  Those able to work loved Manpower because it was close to the mission, and they always paid out at the end of each day.  I had a car.  When the job was over and I was leaving the Manpower office with my day’s wages, those guys I worked with would almost always ask me for a ride to the nearest liquor store.  I can see their faces still.

 It was that same earn and immediately spend economy that Prine described as selling Bibles for Quaaludes; bust your ass moving furniture into a newly built tri-level in the morning, buy a fifth of Old Thompson and a couple bottles of Thunderbird wine for the afternoon while living in a homeless shelter. 

 As for Barbara’s doings on her knees in that parking lot, I always shared John’s plea for a higher power, or anyone else, to rescue sex workers from their fate.  “God save her please” or him, or them.  Please.

 And in this verse, John Prine delivers one of his famous hooks, that line in each song that stands out to the listener because it rings so very true.  It’s italicized below.

 

Can’t you picture her next Thursday?  Can you picture her at all?

At the Hotel Boulderado, at the dark end of the hall

I gotta shake myself and wonder, why she even bothers me
For
if heartaches were commercials, we'd all be on TV

The Hotel Boulderado, built in 1909, is still in business, no doubt updated since 1973.  Today on their website you can get a room with a king bed for somewhere around $350.  I hope they put some lighting in the dark end of that hall where John Prine caught a glimpse of Barbara Lewis.

 Prine claims not to know why Barbara Lewis bothers him, acknowledging his own troubles, but we all know why.  John Prine was able to feel and explain the pain of others in his songs.  That’s what made him great. 

 He applied that ability to so many songs and characters: Sam Stone, Donald and Lydia, the old couple in Hello in There, himself the jilted boyfriend in Far From Me, the beautiful and tragic song at the end of his career Summer’s End.  He made a career out of describing the compassion he felt for real life pain. His lyrics helped us see and feel that pain and be compassionate too.

 Unless you saw John Prine live and heard him introduce his songs, you didn’t get to know where they came from or how they came about.  We have the benefit of reading his thoughts about the song Come Back to Us, Barbara Lewis…in the liner notes of John Prine Live, released in 1988.  He explained that he began working on the song in the summer of ’73 during a tour of Colorado ski towns with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.  “What I had in mind was this girl who left home, did drugs, did religion, did husbands, and ended up doing diddley.”

 John Prine was taken from us by Covid in April of 2020 during the pandemic.  We lost something when he died that I don’t think has been replaced, an American minstrel poet who sows understanding and concern for others in ways that we cannot help but acknowledge.  We need artists like him that help us find acceptance and understanding of one another.  If you hear of one, let me know.