FLIGHTS OF PEGASUS

AMIT GOSWAMI AND EVOLUTION

2011-06-11T17:56:00.000-05:00

Is there a purposefulness in evolution? Could terms like "intelligent" and "creative" apply to evolution?

I recently learned of Amit Goswami and began reading his book "The Visionary Window - A Quantum Physicist's Guide to Enlightenment."

His initial basic point (as best I can summarize it) is that western science looks at the universe and all life in it as built up from objects with no consciousness, providing no explanation of where consciousness comes from, while eastern thought sees consciousness as the starting point for all being, with physical objects manifested from the universal consciousness. In other words, consciousness is the ground of all being; it is not the byproduct of a physical object like the brain.

Evolution was the topic that prompted this blog post, which is mostly a quotation from "The Visionary Window". I have always felt intuitively that there is some kind of creative and directing force in the evolution of life on earth, and that the astonishingly precise adaptations of living creatures to vastly different environments cannot be explained by mere chance. Despite the denials by Darwinists, I feel there is some kind of purposeful direction toward a goal involved, as in the flounder whose eyes migrate to one side of its head, or water creatures who develop lights because they live where no light can penetrate.

Goswami writes:

Science finds that "We are insignificant on the cosmic scale. . . . From [the initial creation by the Big Bang], the evolution of galaxies, star systems, planets, and life are all seen as the play of chance statistical fluctuation.

"Does the esoteric ontology -- conscious as the ground of all being -- offer a resolution of cosmologies as well? . . A number of coincidences in cosmology suggest that the universe evolves toward the manifestation of life and sentience . . .

"The gaps in the fossil record suggested to quite a few biologists that Darwinism is not the complete story of evolution . . . Creationism also does not make complete sense; though the Christian contention that God intervenes in the affairs of the world, even in biological evolution, to align the world with purposiveness, is credible in a science within consciousness. . . . But in science within consciousness, we can look at the fossil gaps as the signature of creative conscious intervention -- purpose enters evolution creatively."

ARE RULES RELIGION?

2011-05-17T10:14:00.000-05:00

Should laws governing social behavior be considered religion?

Here's how I arrived at this question: Having become distanced from Protestant beliefs by the time I was seventeen years old, I had a powerful insight that all existence was the manifestation of a mysterious spiritual Source. "Spirit" underlay all that we perceived.

That realization led me to a mystical attitude toward whatever it is we call "God". Rather than in the Bible, I found help in the Upanishads and other Vedantic writings, in Taoism, in the reports of mystics in all religions. For me religion became a matter of personal awakening and enlightenment aimed at comprehending more about our spiritual Source and living in harmony with it. I retained a strong sense of justice and fairness but it was unrelated to religious teachings.

When I said to my college philosophy professor, "I think it was a mistake when religion became equated with morality", he agreed.

A lawgiving God, particularly as described in the Old Testament of the Bible, will dispense rewards and punishments depending on how His laws are obeyed or disobeyed. When I look at the much-vaunted monotheistic religions, most of what I see mostly rules of social behavior, and mostly in the form of what not to do.

A person's behavior toward other beings is of course significant in forming that person's spiritual condition, but it is misguided to consider a system of social rules as "religion". The purportedly divine laws often emphasize restrictions on sexual behavior --masturbation, fornication, adultery, homosexuality -- but much more is included, such as laws concerning food and drink. In some Protestantism even a sip of beer considered almost fatal, dancing is prohibited, gambling is a sin (not just unwise), and even playing cards on a Sunday is a punishable offense. It is not a big jump from there to the Jewish tradition that even flipping a light switch on the Sabbath is a violation of Jehovah's law against working on that day.

The most famous set of supposedly God-given laws is probably the "Ten Commandments", presented as the foundation of Judaism and its offspring, Christianity. Those laws pertain almost entirely to human social conduct, although in the first commandment Jehovah talks about having brought the Jews out of Egypt (a myth rather than an actual event) and tells them to have no other god before him. This is essentially an ancient tribal god saying, "Don't put any of those other tribes' gods above me!" In the same vein is the prohibition against making images -- i.e. idols representing Jehovah's competitor gods. But most of the commandments are a code of interaction among humans, the likes of which could be drawn up by any committee of intelligent and well-meaning people.

I therefore suggest that the concept of religion is degraded when it is reduced to a set of laws, and that the concept of God is degraded by depicting the deity as greatly concerned with humans' sex lives, diet, and work schedules.

MORE FOREST MYSTERIES

2011-03-17T08:42:00.002-05:00

Here are three more photographs taken by Arthur Mather on his walks near Edinburgh. Please leave your opinion in a Comment.

Click on a picture to enlarge.

Ghostly Figures

Untitled. Look closely to see Arthur's dog beyond the strange light.

Mystery Glow

MYSTERIES IN THE FOREST

2011-03-16T11:31:00.004-05:00

My good friend Arthur Mather took this photograph while walking in the woods near his home outside Edinburgh, Scotland. I haven't been able to guess what the light is, and Arthur suggested that I post the picture on this blog. There are more, but I'll post them separately. Be sure to click on the picture to enlarge it.

Please click under this column to post a Comment. Thank you.

Flying Light

THE PHYSICAL BODY AS NECESSARY INSULATION

2010-09-04T10:55:00.002-05:00

'Origen did not, like many of his contemporaries, degrade the body to the status of an unwanted encrustation imprisoning the soul; for him, the body is a necessary principle of limitation, providing each soul with a unique identity. This is an important point for an understanding of Origen’s epistemology, which is based upon the idea that God educates each soul according to its inherent abilities, and that the abilities of each soul will determine the manner of its knowledge. We may say, then, that the uniqueness of the soul’s body is an image of its uniqueness of mind.'

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosopy, "Origen of Alexandria"

I have written about the body being a form of insulation (not Origen's word) necessary to give the soul individuality and focus by shutting out perceptions which would otherwise overwhelm it. I postulated that in a schizophrenic person this insulation has failed to some extent. http://flightsofpegasus.blogspot.com/2006/11/writings-of-schizophrenics.html

PRAYER AS RECEPTIVENESS

2010-07-14T06:30:00.003-05:00

The urge to pray seems instinctive in most humans. As an attempt to communicate with a being higher and more powerful than oneself, prayer generally devolves into requests for help and favors intermingled with flattering thanks designed to wheedle future gifts -- as a small child would beg a parent. That is certainly the way I was exposed to it in the United States.

I've written before about the evident uselessness of such begging prayers as far as their bringing special help from the Divine is concerned. I certainly cannot say that some kind of godly intervention never occurs as a result of a cry for help, but observation shows that most prayer requests are not granted. The pleasing results of those which seem to be granted may be explained more by chance, or by a focus of the individual's visualization and desire and belief, than to action by a deity.

Nevertheless, I have a persistent inclination to pray, to find some means of communication with the higher power or powers I sense exist and have helped and guided me. As I struggled one night with the question of how to pray, it came to me that prayer should consist of a receptive state rather than talk aimed at a beneficent deity. In other words, prayer should consist of listening rather than speaking.

Relax, eyes closed, with a listening and watchfully waiting attitude. Signal in some way that a prayer has begun. What follows is like meditation, in which one discourages the inner word-stream and tries to make the mind clear, perhaps using attention to one's breathing to drive mundane thoughts away. Concentrate on the dark screen before your eyes, watching expectantly for something to appear and be alert to anything resembling inspiration or thoughts coming from a higher source.

You are tuned to receive.

Taking Dictation from God

2010-07-05T17:16:00.002-05:00

One of Protestant Christianity's basic tenets -- at least among the more fundamentalist sects -- is that the Bible is the "word of God" and therefore all true, the ultimate authority on everything.

I ask myself increasingly what is the authority for that assertion. Having been dunked in the Southern Baptist church as a child, I was shown pictures of ancient men sitting at tables with pens in their hands while beams of light entered their heads from above. These were the Bible writers, obedient secretaries receiving dictation directly from God . . . of which every syllable was true. But I do not recall ever being told who said that the Bible was the infallible "Word of God", nor do I recall anything in the Bible itself which asserted that it was all written by God.

Considering how filled with contradictions and inconsistencies the Bible is, it seems that the Roman Catholic Church was very wise in not encouraging its believers to read it. By unleashing hordes of the generally unintelligent to read and interpret the Old and New Testaments for themselves, Protestantism deserved what it got -- a multitude of sects claiming to give the correct interpretation of a collection of writings which can only be considered, if not schizophrenic, fragmented with inconsistencies and outright contradictions.

Years ago I thought that by now the Christian churches would have dried up for the most part, but based on what I hear around me, and on what we read, the traditionalist churches remain a powerful force in the United States, not only ideologically but also politically. And the main pillar of their existence is that the Bible is all true.

This makes me feel about as comfortable as I would if one of those wild-eyed street preachers who scream at imaginary crowds on corners had been elected Governor on a platform of education reform.

AN ODD FACT

2010-04-18T07:36:00.000-05:00

Here is an odd fact probably uninteresting to anyone but me: As I was pushing a beach ball around on the surface of my swimming pool, I suddenly realized that I have never enjoyed a sport that uses a ball larger than a tennis ball. Tennis and golf I have loved, and I have enjoyed billiards, but other ball games I've never liked.

(Yes, a baseball is larger than a tennis ball.)

The greatest sport of all, however, uses no ball. It is sailboat racing. Being propelled over the water by the wind, and wind alone, is the closest a human can come to Harmony with Heaven.

BREAKING OUT OF THE EGGSHELL

2009-09-20T07:00:00.005-05:00

I was standing looking up at the blue dome of the morning sky above the oak trees, pondering questions of life and death, when I had the fleeting image of a baby bird pecking out of its eggshell. This came after I'd been mulling over the theories of what our life on earth is. A divinely designed testing ground for future reward or punishment? A semester in a cosmic educational system? A prison? A chemical accident? A beautifully landscaped hell? A scientific experiment whose instigators observe us in the way that human scientists observe a bacterial culture in a petri dish?

To me, the little bird breaking out of its shell and seeing the sky and sunshine for the first time was an analogy of what happens at the end of this life on earth, and a hint at our earth life's function.

SIMPLE REMEDIES

2009-09-18T07:44:00.002-05:00

Don't read this unless you are interested in remedies for physical problems that afflict old people. Yes, “old” people. Please never call me a “senior citizen” or, worse, a “senior.” I was a senior in high school. Let that word stay in high school where it belongs and not be one of those condescending euphemisms that has become almost mandatory in the United States.

First, don't go to a doctor except in extremis. The body has an amazing ability to heal itself. Like bureaucratic pests, bad things in the body will often go away if you ignore them for awhile. The exception would be if you find a lump growing somewhere.

Second, don't have surgery just because a doctor thinks it's a good idea, especially where the bones, joints, and connective tissues are involved. I once joked to my golf foursome, “I'm the only one here with real knees.” We had all experienced very painful knee problems. Why was I the only one with the knees I was born with? Because instead of hopping into a hospital gown I just waited until my knee eventually stopped hurting. Such joint problems take a very long time to heal even with treatment. Use a crutch if necessary, and common sense, and you probably won't need to go under a knife.

I learned as I got older that the way one holds and moves the body – posture in the broadest sense – is extremely important.

For lower back pain: Let the upper body hang forward from the waist. Simply relax and bend forward and let the arms dangle. Keep the legs straight. Don't try to touch the floor – just let gravity take over. Do this every day for at least 2 minutes. It completely cured me of terrible back pains after several doctors had been able to do nothing except run up large bills with tests, x-rays, and conflicting diagnoses, and consultations about exploratory surgery. One, who was obsessed with malpractice, wanted me to go to the Mayo Clinic. I healed myself completely by “dangling” for a few minutes each day while my coffee was brewing.

For spasms or blockage of the esophagus when eating: I'm not sure how to describe the inner mechanism, but for years I suffered an affliction which might hit me during a meal. The passageway through which I swallowed food became blocked so that I couldn't swallow, but at the same time I couldn't burp up the air which I felt pressing upward. . . as if two trucks had met on a one lane road. It was a frightening feeling, and it brought eating to a complete halt unless something happened to end the impasse . . . possibly vomiting. Dr. Malpractice said it could be very serious and that a journey to a Mayo Clinic was in order. A less frightened doctor told me to sip warm coffee or tea – but when this thing happened, I couldn't sip. When that doctor retired, my present doctor could offer no cure. And then one day at lunch I discovered what caused the affliction: Posture. I suddenly realized that when I ate I tended to slump forward, chin down toward my plate while my somewhat portly middle section pressed upward into my lower chest. Despite my rudimentary knowledge of anatomy, I concluded that I was crimping my esophagus, so that my food-swallowing tube was like a severely bent garden hose. As soon as I had this realization and began to sit up completely straight when eating (sometimes raising my chin toward the ceiling in the manner of a chicken), my embarrassing affliction was gone forever. It also helps, of course, to swallow food in moderate amounts rather than to gulp it ravenously.

To avoid falls: Between watching where you're going, and watching what your feet are going to encounter, favor keeping an eye on your feet. I feel sure that a lot more old-age falls are caused by tripping over things or kicking into things than by bumping into walls or doors because people weren't looking where they were going. Also, never stand on a ladder or stool.

To bring sleep: Take very deep, slow breaths. I certainly did not invent this technique, but it works. Relax in the bed, take one long, slow, very deep breath after another, and use the meditation method of paying attention to the breathing rather than letting the mind wander off into thoughts, plans, worries.

Above all, realize that you are as young as you were at the age of seven because only the body ages, not the soul or spirit. Your spirit can command the body.

MY BOATING ACCIDENT

2009-08-19T09:42:00.002-05:00

One fine winter day in Arlington, Virginia I attached my brand new Hobie Cat to the back of the Oldsmobile and set out with my almost brand new wife, Julia, on the thirteen hour drive to Gainesville, Florida. My mother, now widowed, was waiting to greet us at her cottage on Swan Lake, thirty minutes from her home in Gainesville.

I've titled this little narrative “My Boating Accident” in the singular because in spite of my being in love with boats for as long as I can remember, and acquiring sailboats from the smallest imaginable to larger and larger, I had never had an accident. I count the numerous times I ran sailboats harmlessly aground on submerged sand not as “accidents” but as part of the routine process of sailing.

When we parked in front of the lake house and saw the wind lashing the Spanish moss on the oak trees, it was obvious that we were going to have much more than enough wind to move the catamaran. Even though Swan Lake is probably no more than a mile across, it flashed frothy white caps like a stormy sea.

It was very cold for a Florida late morning –- in the Fahrenheit 40's -- and the warm glassed-in porch of the cozy little house was the closest a normal person would have wanted to come to the blustery outdoors. The weather radio warned, “Lake Wind Advisory”. But one of my primary and most disaster-provoking characteristics is impatience. The boat was new. We had sailed it only during an orientation provided by the dealer. I had owned a smaller catamaran, a Seacat, and had plenty of experience sailing. Therefore Mr. Impatience announced that it was time to release the Hobie Cat into its natural element.

My mother, bundled up to the chin with a sweater and scarf, stood in front of the house and looked down the slope to the water while Julia and I slid the boat into the lake (I could almost hear it sighing with happiness at being afloat), turned the bow into the wind, and raised the sail.

A catamaran is much more lively and responsive to the air than any other boat, and as soon as we were on board and I allowed the sail to catch some wind, we were riding a wild tiger. The Cat surged forward with speedier acceleration than I'd ever experienced on the water, bounding from wave to wave, throwing out a white wake like a speedboat. I tried to keep the bow as close to the wind as I could, to avoid extreme heeling of the craft which would raise one pontoon too high above the water.

We were on the other side of the lake in an incredibly short time, and I didn't look forward to coming about and sailing with the wind behind me to some degree or other. The worst thing about sailing on this small lake was that the wind constantly shifted direction. Had even a wind this strong wind held steady from one direction, the most dramatic part of this little story would not have occurred, but as soon as I'd try to sail before the wind, the wind would start coming from another direction and I'd have to adjust the sail and the course of the boat. At times the sail would flap loudly and pointlessly like a flag, and then suddenly it would billow out and we'd be off once more like a race horse out of the gate.

Shooting along more or less toward Mother's house, we were suddenly moving with greater speed than I imagined possible. As catastrophe struck, I had time to glimpse the tip of the starboard pontoon slip under the water. In a gasp I was high in the air, the world tumbling around me. Then I was in the water up to my neck, with Julia in the same situation a few yards from me, and only the bottoms of the two pontoon hulls showing above the icy water.

We had pitchpoled, which is the most undesirable event a sailor can suffer short of seeing his boat torn apart on rocks. The bow of the boat goes under water, the now-blocked motion brings the stern up into the air, and the boat does a somersault, stern over bow, and lands upside down.

I swam around the boat and helped Julia scramble onto a pontoon. I was all right, but she had been badly bruised when she was thrown high into the air and came down on some part of the boat. But at least we had a place to sit and contemplate the situation. We were approximately in the middle of the lake, and suddenly, in spite of the wind, everything seemed extremely quiet and still. . . and lonely. There were no other boats on the lake, and no signs of life around any of the houses scattered around the shores. They were summer cottages, perhaps all abandoned for the winter.

Well, we said, thank goodness we had that lesson on how to right the boat if it capsized. So we descended fully into the water again, took hold of the proper parts of the catamaran, and did as we had been taught. But nothing happened. It was like trying to turn over a dock. Were we doing something wrong? We kept trying, but the boat stayed exactly as it was.

We climbed back onto a pontoon to contemplate our fate, feeling colder and colder. I had the strength and ability to swim to the nearest shore, but I had read again and again, “Always stay with the boat.” Most boat accident drownings occur when people swim away from the boat, and I was going to risk that only as a desperate last resort. Surely somebody would see us. My mother would soon look and realize what had happened. What on earth was she doing?

As frigid, windy minutes went by, I had never felt more isolated. After awhile a unique thought entered my mind: I might die out here.

Finally the little figure of my mother emerged from the house and hurried down the to lakeside, waving. We waved back. There was no way voices could be heard. We made motions which we hoped looked helpless and pleading.

Mother turned and disappeared into the house. Soon after, we saw her car moving onto the dirt road that circled the lake. Clearly she was driving from house to house, seeking help. Minutes passed as we watched the car sporadically moving along the road, never stopping long enough to encourage a belief that she had found somebody to speak with.

Then came the dreary moment when the car had completed the circuit and Mother came down the slope, raising her arms in a gesture of failure. She then hurried back into the house. What seemed like another hour day passed – it was by then after noon – before a Sheriff's car drove up. Rescue couldn't be far away! The world was alerted to our plight.

The deputy went down to my brother's boat, which was under a shelter on the beach. Good, good. Now just start the outboard motor . . . The deputy suddenly jumped back from the motor as if electrified and scampered back up the slope. As we later learned, wasps had built a nest under the motor cowling and swarmed in a horde after the deputy when he opened it.

Freezing and disappointed, but comforted by the knowledge that the Sheriff's Department probably wouldn't leave us to die, we waited, and waited and waited.

Then dejection turned to elation as we saw a small boat heading out into the lake from one of the houses on the eastern side.

Does it see us? Yes!

The boat putted up to us, and an angel in the form of a middle-aged, heavily suntanned woman helped us clamber from the pontoons into her rocking little skiff. It turned out that my mother had stopped at her house, but that only the lady's disabled husband had been at home, unable to help us. As soon as our angel had come home and learned the story, she came out to rescue us.

In Mother's house, warmed, dryly clothed, and fed, we gazed out at the underside of the Hobie Cat for several more hours before a Sheriff's Department boat was launched and swiftly dispatched to the site of the pitchpole.

Then we learned why we had been unable to turn the capsized catamaran upright: The mast had plunged deep into the mud at the bottom of the lake. When, with the help of ropes and full power, the Sheriff's boat finally worked the point of the mast free, the boat bobbed up sharply and comically above the water like a cork released below the surface.

So, there is the story of my boating accident, complete with happy ending and the lesson learned, never sail on small lakes on windy days.

(I put this story in writing for my friend Adriana, who makes blogging seem worthwhile.)

I LEARN ABOUT GOD Memoirs of Fleming Lee, Chapter 8.

2009-04-27T18:38:00.010-05:00

After my early religious indoctrination, while I was in the early years of college, I asked myself if, had I grown up alone on an island and never been told anything by anybody, I would have conceived or discovered the idea of a God. My answer had to be “no”. I concluded that I, as a lone islander, would have felt that there was an awesome power responsible for Nature and my existence, but that I would not have come up with the idea of God as taught in church. The Power that created the ocean and trees and birds and fish and me would have been a great mystery, but not some kind of “person”, much less God in three persons.

Would I also have independently come up with the idea of “worship”? I don't think so. “Prayer”? I don't know. Maybe. To whom or to what? In what form? Is the impulse to communicate with invisible forces sparked by one's experience of reality, or is it taught?

As a university student trying to separate what I had been taught about God from what I might have found or invented on my own, I concluded that when the teachings of others were removed, what I felt and believed was that there was something – “spirit” was the best word I could think of – which underlay everything in the universe. Spirit was the source, the underpinning of everything. It was invisible to human eyes but was manifested in everything our senses could perceive.

What I was taught in earlier years was an entirely different thing.
In the time and place where I grew up, religion meant church and Sunday School. Daddy came from a Baptist family and Mother from a Methodist. It was because of strong feelings on Gramma’s part that we children were subjected to the Southern Baptist Church, which was generally regarded as the least sophisticated of the major brands offered in Gainesville – Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian – but also the most popular. The Roman Catholic Church was also represented in the town in a little white church the size of an ordinary home, but regarded by the great majority of the population as a tiny, strange, exotic, almost heathen denomination of idol-worshipers which had unnaturally survived and struggled on after the Protestant Reformation and was ruled by a foreign Pope from Rome.

From the beginning, my association with church and Sunday School was a disaster. My first experience was brief in the extreme. For a number of years it remained high in Daddy’s earliest list of complaints about me -- which included such offenses as carving my initials in the stepladder, spilling my drink on somebody at a football game, and aggravating a man in the seat in front of us when I was taken to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. When I was very young, Daddy took me to nursery class at a church to begin my journey to salvation. There I was deposited among a bunch of little children sitting around a table covered with paper and crayons, surrounded on the walls by pictures of foreign men in bathrobes, many with rings of light above their heads. After I declined to prolong the visit, I am bawling as Daddy angrily carries me down the stairs over his shoulder and back to the car. I think that it was because of his embarrassment that I was spared Sunday School for another year or more.

I think that although both my parents believed, by default, in the basic tenants of Protestant Christianity -- that Jesus was the Son of God sent to save us, and that the Bible was dictated by God -- they both seemed to feel that a person could establish an adequate relationship with the Deity without going to church. Neither discussed the subject much, certainly not with us children, who were best left to the experts, but my father spoke of being able to worship God as well in a fishing boat in the middle of a lake as in a church building, and he scorned people who went to church “every time the doors open.”

Of course it is an ultimate consequence of Protestantism that church becomes merely a place to socialize with those of like beliefs, and to listen to a moral message from a person who is no more divinely anointed than the congregation which is listening. Proper belief and prayer — and in my mother’s and her mother’s case, reading the more pleasant and optimistic parts of the Bible — were sufficient to satisfy God. On the other hand, one had to consider the threat of hell (known in our house as “the bad place”) and those words about, “wherever three or more gather together in my name,” and the phrase, “the house of God,” and so there might be extra credit for attending church.

I would have been much better off if I had been told about God solely by my parents than sentenced to serve time in the First Baptist Church of Gainesville, Florida, our spiritual headquarters.

This landmark in my life’s progress was located on the south side of University Avenue a few blocks north of the center of town, facing the State Theater – the facade of Christianity squared off against the temple of Hollywood, where it was my natural inclination to worship. The church was — is — a large red brick, three story building with something like the white front of the Parthenon embedded in the facade. The building is, I have read, in the Classical Revival style, and holds one thousand worshipers. Six white pillars across the facade alternate with two layers of tall windows. There may have been some rational motive for pasting columns onto the front wall of a brick building rather than having them actually hold something up — maybe to save the expense of genuine columns and a real portico. The entrance to the big sanctuary was from stairways on either side of the facade, rather than directly from the front. In the back part of the building was the warren of dim Sunday School rooms and offices.

Most of our Sundays during the period of my life from about the age of eight to sixteen began with Sunday School, which was followed by the main church service at eleven o’clock. Sunday School, as its name implies, smacked too much of school to be a welcome destination for a child on a weekend morning. It had grades and classes like regular school. The rooms smelled of chalk, crayons, books, deteriorating paper, and floor wax. There were inspirational pictures and mottoes on the walls, just as in real school, and one had the same dreary sense of captivity as when falling into the clutches of a home room teacher at eight in the morning on an otherwise beautiful day — brightened only by the fact that Sunday School lasted less than an hour.

The pictures on the assembly and classroom walls, by the way, are all that I can remember of my very earliest years at Sunday School, because I thought those garishly tinted men and women draped in curtains looked so strange and alien. There was always Jesus with children gathered around him, and The Good Shepherd holding a shepherd's crook, and the miracle worker walking on water while his disciples looked on with typical expressions of astonishment. In deference to Baptist sensibilities the miracle of turning water into wine was omitted in favor of the much more impressive scene of distribution of unlimited loaves and fishes to an admiring throng.
Sunday School began with general assemblies, followed by the smaller individual classes separated by age and gender. In the general assemblies we were treated to greetings, prayers, and announcements, and were expected to join in singing a hymn or two. “Jesus Loves Me” was a favorite, along with “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

“Jesus loves me, this I know,
For the Bible tells me so.”

“Stand up and sing,” the assembly leader said. “Jesus hung up on a cross for you. You can at least stand up and sing for him.” Even at a young age, I thought that was a tasteless and stupid statement.

My assembly leader for awhile was Judge McDonald, who had the misfortune to adopt a child who turned out to be a Holy Terror, as my father put it, and who frequently had to be expelled from the very Sunday School assembly over which his adoptive father was presiding. (I wonder if Judge McDonald ever had to recuse himself from sentencing his own adopted son to prison.) At one time my father was the leader of my assembly. He and Mother both served a term as Sunday School teachers, as did numerous other parents during the time their children were in their formative years.

The entertaining part of Sunday School occurred during the few minutes that might elapse between the arrival of us boys in the classroom and the entry of the teacher. Is it remarkable that there was no spontaneous manifestation of piety or discussion of religious issues? Is it possible that at the ages of 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 we would not have taken an interest in God and His plan for us if adults hadn't told us there was such a Person who demanded our attention, obedience, and devotion? Is it strange that our Bible lesson of the day didn't arouse intense interest in the improvement of our moral characters and the salvation of our souls, or at least some growing curiosity about the details of Jewish history? The unsupervised behavior in the Sunday School rooms indicated that we boys had no interest whatsoever in the chronicles and genealogy of the Hebrews or in the letters of the apostles. On the contrary, an objective observer would have concluded that we were interested only in learning about sex and telling jokes.

One of the few things I remember from Sunday School was R.L. Coleman's story about sex with his cousin. R.L. was a nice fat country boy who appeared older than the rest of us at the putative age of 11, and who was certainly who more worldly than the sons of white collar workers and professors and doctors and lawyers and who made up the large majority of his school companions. He always wore blue denim overalls to regular school, but on Sundays he dressed up in a short sleeved shirt and khaki trousers. He carried a pipe wherever he went, at an age when the rest of us were still several years away from trying our first cigarette.

“Last night,” he began, leaning back and crossing his legs with an air of imparting wisdom to the unsophisticated, “I went out to the barn to smoke my pipe. I wasn't wearing nothing but my underpants 'cause it was late. I was standing by the pig pen with my foot up on the fence, just looking at the stars and sucking on my pipe when I seen something white move in the dark, and it turns out it's my cousin Arlene. She comes up and stands next to me, and she ain't wearing nothing but her slip. She acts real sweet, and so after awhile I put my arm around her and squeeze one of her titties. Next thing I know, she's ahold of my peter and starts squeezing on it. So I stop smoking, knock out my pipe on the fence, and turn around and start kissing her. The next thing I know she's leaning back against the barn and she's pulling up her slip, and we're screwing standing up. Mmmm boy! I bet none of you all had so much fun last night.”

It was a safe bet, on odds of about a million to one. R.L. closed his eyes and smiled contemplatively while those of us who lived on wet dreams and hopes that a girl would someday let us put a hand inside her blouse gazed at the obese master in mesmerized wonder.

The only Sunday School teacher I remember by name was Mr. Ted Eubanks, who ran a Sinclair gas station. He was a sincere, lean man. Maybe the reason I remember him is (1) that he told us in great detail about his appendicitis attack, which sent him running out of his front door and rolling on the ground, and (2) that he proved the existence of God by pointing out that the light bulb burning above our heads would go out if the electricity were shut off. God, of course, was the electricity, the generator, and even though we could not see Him, He kept us alive. I was impressed by that analogy but baffled as I tried to pin down its exact implications.

In Sunday School and sermons we were taught all that really mattered about the universe. God had written the Bible — dictated it, actually, to men in long robes with neon lights around their heads, eyes rolled toward the sky, hands poised with quill pens waiting to take down the next sentence. Therefore every word in the Bible was absolutely true, even the contradictory parts. It all began with the Jews, whose many shenanigans made some entertaining stories, such as Samson and Delilah, and proceeded until God got tired of punishing them for their disobedience and sent his Son to save all humanity under a new contract.

God was a very big person who created the Earth in seven days, rested, then put a married couple on it, and even walked with them in the Garden of Eden for awhile until they made him mad by eating fruit off the wrong tree. It was downhill for the human race from then on. Downhill, that is, until God sent his only begotten son so that whosoever believeth on him shall have everlasting life. (We had to repeat John 3:16 so often that we knew it better than our own names.) Having become fed up with his chosen tribe’s devilry several times over, even after having destroyed all but a handful of them along with everybody else on earth for good measure, God gave us one last chance by sending his son to be born on earth and offer salvation.

Salvation from what? Saved from going to hell, and therefore going to heaven, where one would be greeted by relatives beside a river and have a happy time forever. All you had to do was accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, and God would take care of the rest.

It sounded a little too easy to me. And besides, how could God have a son? We had never been told about a Mrs. God, and we were also told by the more sagacious Sunday School teachers that God was not a man with a long white beard sitting on a cloud somewhere, but instead a super person who could do anything, who could make anything happen that He wanted to happen, and who was everywhere all the time, hearing and knowing everything that happened at every moment, even your thoughts. There was no way to hide from Him, even inside your mind, and He – like Santa Claus – was always taking notes so He could decide eventually how you would be judged and sent to Heaven or The Bad Place.

It seemed like a strange arrangement to me. If God was all-powerful, why didn’t He just make everything all right to start with? Why didn’t He create people good? Why did He let the Devil run around loose? Why didn’t He just create heaven and not hell? And what possible good could it do to send His son to earth to be murdered and then ask people to believe that His son was really His son in spite of having come to a bad end, and make that the ticket to heaven?

Such thoughts became very important to me as I got older and began to read philosophy and history, but at first I just had vague discomforts that got bounced from one specious answer to another like a volleyball.

One incident that stands out in my mind is when Dr. McCall, the minister who presided over the church, was indoctrinating a group of us young people in the finer points of theology preparatory to our graduating to a higher level of Sunday School.

Dr. McCall was a fine looking, pale, whitehaired man, tall and thin and dignified, with a wonderful Virginia accent which made him pronounce “about” as “aboot,” “house” as “hoose”, and “cards” as “kyards.” When preaching at the regular church service, he often wore an entirely white outfit — white suit, white shirt, white tie, white socks, white shoes. When I saw him raking leaves in his yard one day — in clothes other than the white suit — I could hardly believe he was the same person.

“Faith,” Dr. McCall told the candidates for baptism, “means absolute trust in the Lord. It means doing whatever Jesus wants you to do.” He gestured toward the open window with his long fingers. We were on the second floor of the church. “If Jesus stood down there on the sidewalk and called to you to jump out of that window and he would save you from harm, you would jump. If you have faith in Jesus, you would jump.”

My hand shot up.

“How would we know it was Jesus?”

“That’s what I mean: You must have faith, which can mean believing without proof.”

“But how would we know it was really Jesus?”

“You must have faith. If Jesus says, ‘I am your Lord. Jump!’, if you have the faith that’s taught in the Bible, you would jump, knowing you would not be hurt.”

“But what I mean is, how would we know it wasn’t just somebody saying he was Jesus?”

Dr. McCall cleared his throat and said something like, “Well, for the purpose of what we’re talking about, it really is Jesus, and I think you would know Jesus if you saw him.”

Thus my “But” was sidestepped, and I doubt that the dialogue continued, but I was left wondering from a practical point of view how I would know if God, or Jesus, was sending me messages — assuming any messages came — or if an impostor was at work. I can see now that this is a serious problem not only for me but for a lot of other people, some of whom have murdered even their own children in the belief that God had given them the order.

We were lucky to have Dr. McCall for our pastor. He was not of the fire and brimstone branch of the Southern Baptist Church. His sermons were serious and thoughtful, designed to instill belief in Jesus and to motivate good living according to Jesus’ teachings without scaring people half to death in the process. His references to hell were rather oblique, as I recall, although he did have his share of scare stories aimed at getting people to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior without delay. One was about a young man of dissolute ways whose mother pleaded with him to be baptized. He scorned her earnest admonishments and sank further into the sinful mire of kyards and dancing, and even tasted liquor. As he was leaving home to go to college, his mother stood by the side of the train and begged him at least to say that he would accept Jesus and be baptized as soon as possible. He refused.
“And, do you know?” Dr. McCall said. “As that poor boy stood in a doorway of the moving train, the train gathering high speed, the boy leaning out to wave to his mother in the distance, his head was caught by a wire and he was decapitated. Suddenly, an unbeliever and sinner who had been given the opportunity to be saved, he was cast into Eternity without salvation.”

Sincere tears glistened in Dr. McCall’s eyes. Even if he did not mention the word “hell,” the implications were clear enough, and an unusually large number of people went up to the front of the church to accept Jesus as their savior that morning.

The only other Dr. McCall story I remember was one from his seminary days. He told how, after studying for awhile to become a minister, something — maybe some doubt about his vocation — made him consider quitting his studies. He agonized about it, prayed, and asked God to tell him what to do. He was packing his suitcases when he placed his Bible on the bed and was moved to let it fall open. Before him was a page on which there was a verse which said, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” Dr. McCall unpacked his clothes and stayed. That event impressed me deeply. It exuded authenticity and something deeper than the command to believe this or that because the Bible says so.

The Sunday morning church services, which immediately followed Sunday School at 11 o'clock, were seemingly interminable periods of ennui in which prayers stretched on and on like parched deserts, and sermons were evaluated by me according to how many plodding minutes they consumed on the clock above the balcony at the rear of the church.

I preferred sitting up in one of the side balconies and looking down on the sea of ladies' Sunday hats, from which arose the scent of dusting powder. Many of the congregation held cardboard fans on wooden sticks. The brightly colored side of the fans depicted scenes from the life of Jesus, while the back side contained a funeral parlor ad – an appropriate reminder of the main reason one was in church in the first place.

Dr. McCall's prayers were long and methodical. They generally started with a request for a general blessing of this church and its congregation, then zoomed in on such people as Sarah Turnipseed, who was sick in the hospital, and the Jameson family, which needed strength in their time of loss, and then pulled back out to draw God’s attention to various other groups and categories who needed help or guidance — children and their parents and teachers, missionaries, our “black brethren” in their own churches, and also drunkards, kyard players, sinners generally — and finishing up with pleas that our president and our congressmen of both houses and both parties would receive wisdom in governing our great country, made strong by its Christian faith, and that the Holy Spirit would lead to the conversion of the heathen in all nations. Just when I thought there couldn’t possibly be anybody left to mention, and when I was passionately wondering why God, since he was all-knowing and perfect, couldn’t do all those things without being reminded, Dr. McCall would think of something else to draw to the Lord's attention, and the prayer would drag on for yet another mile.

But much worse were the occasional prayers by one of the old men who sat together up front and to the left, and now and then intoned, “Amen!” when Dr. McCall would touch on damnation or make an uncharacteristically sharp attack on some particular category of miscreant. This would have been the vigorous “Amen corner” in some country churches, but loud vocal responses to sermons were looked upon as poor form in Gainesville. Anyway, if Brother Tom or Deacon Bob were invited to stand up and offer a prayer, just forget having that roast beef anywhere near 12:30 because not only were the speaker’s pet gripes all paraded out, one by one, for the Lord’s attention, usually including a few digs relating to church politics in the form of requests for enlightenment to the misguided, but the opportunity was also invariably seized to present an entire bonus sermon to the congregation in the guise of pleas to the Lord.

The regular church service also included, of course, the passing of big wooden plates for the deposit of offerings, and a plea for those who were moved to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior to come to the front of the church to the melody of “Almost persuaded. . . .” and sit in the front pew and be welcomed and prayed over. On some Sundays young people who felt a calling to missionary work received an invitation to come to the front of the church and be recognized and praised. Communion was not a weekly feature, but it was always welcome because jiggers of grape juice were passed down the pews on platters fitted with round holes. There wasn't much grape juice in a glass, but any deviation from routine was welcome.

When once or twice over the years we did have a fire and brimstone evangelist as a “revival” guest preacher, it was a relief even though it might give one nightmares for awhile afterward, because at least it was lively, and the sight of seeing a man leaping from one side of the platform to the other, shouting until he was hoarse, pounding on his Bible with his fist, drawing down vivid visions of a flaming and unending hell in which sinners writhed like worms on fishhooks, was a far cry from Dr. McCall anchored at his pulpit trying to reason quietly with people. I got the impression that a Baptist “revival meeting” was essentially a way to frighten a quiescent congregation back into avid belief and faithful tithing.

Some people, judging from the loudness of their vocal contributions, enjoy singing hymns. I discovered very early that, basically, I could not sing at all, and I merely moved my mouth to appear cooperative rather than risk an off-key squawk. In any case, I disliked all hymns, which I continue to feel are for the most part insipid music and worse words. When the Music Director enthusiastically called for “one more verse” I felt as if another stone was being added to those already bending my back. I later appreciated learning that the famous Christian convert C.S. Lewis disliked hymns as much as I did. He avoided church services that included music, and said, “I disliked very much their hymns, which I considered to be fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music.”
There were two exceptions to church music boredom. One was the fact that the organist for the First Baptist Church was Claude Murphree, the University of Florida organist, an excellent musician. A rotund homosexual man with a balding head, he played great and often rousing organ classics before and after the spoken parts of the service, and although my appreciation of music took time to develop, I would sometimes pause at the end of an aisle — after all that waiting to get home to the roast beef — just to listen to a little more Bach.

The other entertaining musical exception was at the opposite end of the spectrum from Claude Murphree's beautiful performances. It invoked laughter. There was always at least one song each Sunday by a soloist, and some of the soloists had mannerisms which were more comic than artistic. Some singers overreached in their effort to project piety, while some were just plain bad. One woman in particular invariably sent me and any children near me into spasms of laughter. When I saw this woman's name on the program I experienced a mixture of delighted anticipation and dread because, although laughing uncontrollably was a great treat, in church it was also a juvenile misdemeanor.

Her primary idiosyncrasy was to prolong the “s” on any word ending with “s”, and to do so with sudden explosive emphasis and volume, thus: “. . . eternal blissSSSSSSSSSSSSS”. Or “the love of JesusSSSSSSSSSS”. The accent on the beginning of the extra hiss was so violent that people jerked in their seats, perhaps jolted awake from a pleasant doze, and the sea of fans stopped waving for an instant before resuming their leisurely motion. I was literally on the floor under the pew by then, holding a hand over my mouth in a vain attempt to stifle the sound of my laughter. . . which was sent even more out of control by the “hee hee hees” and snorts coming from other children.

To make the hilarity more excruciating, this same woman had another vocal trick – putting a gratuitous “AAHHHH” on the end of an occasional word, so that “this blessed rock” at the end of a line became “this blessed rockahhhhhhhh.”

With tears wetting my cheeks, it would sometimes take me an entire ministerial prayer or set of announcements to recover from my fits of hilarity, and then I would sit upright again and watch the clock, waiting for noon, when we would drive home to our Sunday roast, whose aroma I could already smell.

Dr. McCall would at last walk to the entrance doors at the back of the congregation and turn and raise his arms. “The Lord bless and keep you, and cause His face to shine upon you.” Then the church would empty with solemn shuffling slowness, and the roast beef would have to wait yet longer on the line of unbelievably non-hungry people who shook the preacher's hand and praised his sermon.

Copyright 2009 Fleming Lee

THE BIGGEST DAYS OF THE YEAR Memoirs of Fleming Lee, Chapter 7

2009-04-11T17:23:00.014-05:00

In memories of childhood, holidays and other special days shine like beacons on mountaintops.

By the time I left J. J. Finley School after the sixth grade, the tides of the year were so familiar that they affected my moods for decades afterward. Classes began in September, a dismal imprisonment relieved by the certain hope of resurrection in June, when summer vacation would bring glorious freedom. In between, the captivity was made more bearable by the Thanksgiving-Christmas season, which was preceded for weeks by a psychological state akin to that of a racehorse straining against the starting gate.

But first came Halloween, a festival which must seem particularly odd to observers from other planets. Why would children become preoccupied with dead bodies, imaginary monsters, and scary old women in pointed hats, and look on that night at the end of October as a gala occasion? The main event was, of course, going around the neighborhood dressed as a pirate or a skeleton and collecting candy. And there were sometimes Halloween parties, which featured bobbing for apples (my technique, probably illegal, was to take the apple in my mouth straight down and pin it to the bottom of the bucket so my teeth could sink in, my head entirely under the water), or trying to bite into an apple suspended on a string.

LITTLE FLEMING'S ART

My most interesting memory of Halloween is a custom that I believe was originated by me within the world I knew. My brothers and I would write letters to The Halloween Witch — a sovereign hag of our own imaginations whom we occasionally reported glimpsing as a fast-moving black speck below the October clouds — and then build a bonfire in our back yard and send the letters on their way. Dropping our sheets of paper into the flames, we would raptly watch their magical transformation into smoke and flecks of soot which would rise above the crackling fire and spiral into the air until their verbal incense was caught on the breeze and disappeared across the sky. Before long, the content of the letters would reach The Witch on her distant mountain peak (we had never seen a mountain), and she would be greeted with such sentiments as, “Happy Halloween, please don’t scare us too much,” or “I hope we see you fly over our house on your broom,” or “Please write to me and tell me what it is like to be a witch, my address is. . .” After all, since witches don’t leave presents there was not a lot of material for correspondence.

In recalling the witch, it occurs to me that while children often treat imaginary beings as if they were real, it's so not much that they become convinced that any creature they are capable of visualizing really exists in solid form like a squirrel or a butterfly as it is that their minds have not yet built up a firm conceptual wall between “real” and “imaginary.” When they imagine elves or The Halloween Witch or Pegasus the flying horse, or say that when it rains God must be wee-weeing, they are playing, and in a way not really believing, but they also have the same ambivalent attitude toward what adults call “reality.” They do not really expect to encounter a giant around the corner, or a dragon in the vacant lot next door, but (if they are in Florida) they also have the same attitude about the Windsor Palace and the gondolas of Venice.

There was one personage, however, in whose solid existence I unequivocally believed, and that was Santa Claus.

MY CELLULOID SANTA AND SLEIGH (1930s, Japan) (Click to enlarge)

Christmas and summer vacation were antipodes, the highest points of the year on opposite ends of the calendar, generating equal amounts of ecstatic anticipation. I would get so excited about Christmas long before December 25th that everything else became microscopic in comparison. For awhile each day took a week to pass, and then each hour took a day to pass. Meanwhile the stores were blazing with lights and decorations — at least they waited until after Thanksgiving then — and various pseudo-Santa Clauses began to appear in stores and commerce-boosting parades. My parents responded to my puzzlement at this plethora of Saint Nicks by explaining that they were just his helpers — ordinary men dressed up in Santa Claus suits to hug children and relay Christmas lists to the real Santa Claus. This was, of course, the perfect explanation, for it left the true Santa Claus sacrosanct in his polar fastness, where he and his elves were busy preparing for the fabulous nocturnal trip.

Some of my friends said that their parents had told them that Santa Claus was a spirit, and that he couldn’t be seen — which helped explain how he could get around to all those houses all around the world in a single night, and which also spared a certain type of adult from the guilt of lying and promoting future disappointment. But I knew that Santa was a real, solid, fat, bearded person. The “spirit” story smacked of ignorance and Sunday School. After all, while lying awake on Christmas Eve nights, had I not myself heard his sleigh bells tinkling, and even the tapping of reindeer hooves on the roof?

Were not the fruit cake and Coca Cola left invitingly on the coffee table consumed by Christmas morning, only a few crumbs remaining as testimony of Santa’s living hands at work in our own house?

I do not remember — despite the eventual whispered doubts and brazen taunts of a few schoolmates — ever reaching a point at which I definitely lost my belief, and so I must still believe. Similarly, perhaps there were not unintelligent ancient Greeks who were able to believe somehow that Zeus and Minerva walked and lounged about on top of Mount Olympus, as real as grapes, when presumably a long hike would have revealed the contrary.
Of course I had to ask my usual questions: How could Santa Claus, being fat, get down our narrow chimney? (If necessary, he would come in through a window or door.) How could he go to so many houses in one night? (He’s magic, and time is a mystery anyway.) How could his sleigh possibly carry so many presents? (Don’t worry about it; it just does. Magic again?) Whatever the plausibility of the answers, the fact remained that Santa Claus came to our house each year and ate cake and brought presents, and the whole world would hardly have become so excited had he been only a myth or a case of mistaken identity.

We helped Mother make fruitcake before Christmas. Because that had to be done early so that the cake could develop its full flavor, sitting around the dining room table cutting up the candied fruit with sticky scissors was – along with decorations going up in the stores and around the town square – one of the earliest signs that the momentous season was underway.

Mother would say, “Christmas is just around the corner!,” and she would quote Mom Belle, who always said, “Christmas on the hill!”
With the fruitcake curing in a cupboard, about two weeks before Christmas we would drive to Blitchton to get our tree and gather holly and mistletoe. As we opened and closed gates and bounced slowly across fields, grass and brush scraping noisily against the underside of the car, Mother would recall how, when she was first married to Daddy, she was startled when he would just turn their car off the road and take off across a stretch of Blitchton countryside — stumps, stones, and all — as if they were on a Sunday drive. He knew the terrain so well that he could avoid the pitfalls and obstacles which would have ruined another car.
When we saw a particularly nice looking clump of mistletoe high in an oak tree (mistletoe always seems to grow very high, as if avoiding human clutches), Daddy would use his shotgun to shoot its stem from the tree, so that the whole cluster would come tumbling down, perhaps even into somebody’s arms. That might bring back other memories — as when Daddy first took Mother bird hunting, and left her behind some bushes with a light shotgun, telling her to shoot when she saw a dove or quail flying. When he later heard her gun let out a blast amid a flurry of wings, he hurried over and found her flat on her back where the shotgun’s kick had deposited her.

We would never, of course, be satisfied with the first well-shaped evergreen tree we found. This meant traveling back and forth over several bumpy fields to settle the question which of the favored two or three to take. We would ponder the decision while having our lunch around a fire which both heated our can of pork and beans and roasted our hotdogs. Finally we would make one last motorized foray into the wilds, and Daddy would take out his old handsaw and cut down the winner. With the tree sticking out of the trunk of the car, we would make one more stop to cut a few holly branches, rich with red berries, and then head for home.

My birthday was a week before December 25, and our tradition was that the Christmas tree was decorated by my birthday if not before. Unknown to us were such customs as waiting until Christmas Eve to decorate the tree, or, worse still, children going to bed on Christmas Eve without a Christmas tree, only to find one decorated when they got up Christmas morning. There was enough agonizing waiting to be done before Christmas without having to wait for the Christmas tree too.

On Christmas Eve, after supper we always had boiled custard and fruit cake as we sat around the fireplace and listened to Christmas carols. Then the children would be shepherded to bed with warnings that Santa Claus might not come if we stayed up too late. Much too excited to sleep, I would lie and listen intently, determined this time to hear some unmistakable sound of Santa Claus’s visit. It did not arouse my suspicions if soon after we went to bed I might detect bumps or rustlings from other parts of the house, because we knew that Mother and Daddy gave presents to us and to one another and had to get them under the tree before Santa Claus came.

Certainly Christmas Eve was the most sleepless night of the year. When I was very young, in St. Augustine, I had been caught on the stairs headed down to the livingroom at three in the morning, but before I was hauled back to my bed I had seen enough to shout, “He’s been here! He’s been here!” As far as I know, after that none of us violated the rule against wandering about the house, partly because it would have spoiled the precious moment of surprise when we all arrived under the tree at the same time.

No doubt I did fall asleep at some point on Christmas Eves, but my lifelong propensity for early awakening was greatly inflated on Christmas morning, and I would greet any hint of dawn’s light with loud coughing, and creaking of my bed, in hopes of encouraging the rest of the family to wake up. Each minute after darkness began to fade from the sky seemed endless, and I could not imagine why everyone else wasn’t also wide awake. The fact was that we always got up early on Christmas morning, and if I had slept as many hours as I usually did I would have had no waiting to do at all.

After brushing teeth and washing faces at a frantic tempo, we three brothers would gather at the top of the stairs in our pajamas and wait for the signal, crouched for the race. To lessen the chance of injury we were placed in order and required to run down the stairs in single file instead of all at once. The one who had gone first the preceding year would be at the back of the line this year — although it hardly mattered, since we would all arrive at the livingroom within half a second of one another.

“Merrrrrry Christmas!” my father’s voice would finally boom from below, and we three boys would avalanche down the stairway, skid through the turn in the front hall, and shove our way into the magical room. Then we were frozen for an instant by the spectacle of the presents under and around the tree, whose multicolored lights enhanced the mystical transformation.

If some special, large present was visible, there would be a cry of glee as we dove for the tree. To avoid territorial wars and confusion over which presents went to which child, on Christmas Eve we always used strips of ribbon or crepe paper like the spokes of a wheel to divide the area under the tree into three pie slices. When we went bed on Christmas Eve our territories were empty except for boxes received in the mail from grandparents and aunts and uncles. In the morning they were full of gala packages. Of course we insisted on each area being identified with a name written on a sheet of paper. Otherwise how would Santa Claus know which area belonged to which boy?

When I was still a spoiled only child in St. Augustine, my best presents were a Mickey Mouse rocking horse and a shiny little convertible automobile (things like that were metal, not plastic, in those days) that I could pedal up and down the sidewalk. Then, of course, my Lionel electric train for Christmas 1937, the Christmas gift that I enjoyed the most for the longest time -- with its track running through a landscape of cotton snow and mirror lakes. It emitted a scent of oil and ozone, while its whistle sounded above the rattle of the Pullman cars and boxcars and its headlight brightened miniature trees.

MY LIONEL ELECTRIC TRAIN LOCOMOTIVE, CHRISTMAS 1937

It seemed I had to wait forever for a bicycle, but when the Schwinn finally appeared gleaming next to a Christmas tree, it supplanted the electric train as the best present I’d ever had. Only the long-sought chemistry set, with which I produced real gunpowder, came near equaling it in later years.

Our grandparents and aunts and uncles always sent gifts. In my ungrateful childish opinion, the worst presents always came from my Aunt Legie, Daddy’s sister, who lived with her Scottish carpenter husband, Alex, in a house under an overpass in Ocala. They were poor, I'm sure. Each year I would open her soft and pliant gift and find two pairs of socks. Socks were bad enough — in fact all gifts of clothing were automatically and immediately thrown into a discard pile, from which they would be rescued and admiringly folded by Mother — but these socks were from a mysterious source which had fashioned them for something other than a human leg. Instead of stopping at a reasonable distance above the ankle, they climbed more than halfway to the knee, and as they had no elastic in them they would respond to gravity by sagging to the shoe tops as soon as they were hauled up to their full length and released. Even Mother could find no way for me to use them. Maybe she gave Legie a hint, because eventually she sent me a present that was even less welcome than socks: "Tom Brown’s School Days." School days in Tom Brown’s time were so different from mine that after two pages I put the book down and never picked it up again.

After all the presents had been opened, and all the candies and nuts had been shaken from the stockings — so fat with food and doodads that Santa Claus had to put them on the hearth instead of leaving them hanging from the mantel — we turned to cracking nuts and playing with presents, especially any toys which could be taken outdoors . . . and finally to thoughts of Christmas dinner, which we always had in the middle part of the day.

Sometimes we had the dinner at home, but more often we traveled to Blitchton and Ocala. The usual custom was to go first to Blitchton in the morning, and later travel the remaining thirteen miles to Ocala. We sometimes had midday Christmas dinner at Blitchton and sometimes at Mom Belle and Papa's, but we always visited both places on the Christmas trip.

I remember arriving at Blitchton late in the morning to find our cousins, Ann and Sim, being forced to wait until we got there before they could open their presents. What unimaginable torture! How stern was life on the farm. We from The University City, flushed with the joy of early-morning Christmas abundance, looked on our cousins as we might have looked on unfortunates in a penal institution for children. I felt sure they hoped we wouldn't come on the next Christmas so they could open their presents earlier.

I always had a feeling of something stiff and reserved about Christmas at Blitchton, in spite of the hugs and gifts and good food – somewhat like the old-fashioned wooden furniture in Gramma's parlor where we sat while presents were distributed – hard, uncomfortable, high-backed, fitted with white, lacy antimacassar. When possible, I would flee to the porch swing, a wooden bench suspended by light chains from the ceiling, where it was actually fun to sit.

In Ocala the atmosphere was more relaxed, more modern, more familiar. Whether we had Christmas dinner at Mom Belle and Papa’s house, or at Martha and Hugh’s, I felt more at home than on the farm. I don't know how to describe the difference, but an example would be the voice of Bing Crosby caroling through the warm house, which was furnished with comfortable, soft chairs and sofas and cushions reminiscent of Mom Belle's wonderfully enveloping perfumed hugs.

Once, at least, there was an effort to combine Blitchton and Ocala in a single holiday meal at Gramma’s house. I don't remember much about it, and I would assume it went fairly well, except that Mom Belle remarked afterward that Daddy’s mother was “quaint,” and Daddy complained angrily to Mother about the remark, “Who does she think she is?” It was one of the few occasions when I ever saw Mother with tears in her eyes.

Compared to Christmas, Thanksgiving was a mere prelude, and simply an excuse to eat prodigious quantities of turkey, bread stuffing, cornbread dressing, boats full of gravy, candied sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, corn pudding, green bean and almond casserole, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, and Mother's family's favorite, ambrosia (fresh orange slices mixed with coconut). . . a menu which would be repeated with a few variations on Christmas Day.

Then came the long, arduous climb over the barren rocky range of January, February, March, and April . . . until May brought June into sight in the distant valley below, and blood flowed faster at the prospect of a whole summer of freedom.

Photography by Julia and Fleming Lee.
Entire contents of this blog post copyright 2009

New Memoirs Ahead

2009-04-09T11:22:00.004-05:00

About three weeks ago I was amazed to see that the number of visits to FLIGHTS OF PEGASUS had suddenly increased from less than 10 per week to more than 80. Each week another surprising report came in -- numbers like 72, 60, 56. I have no idea why that has happened (I wish people would leave comments), but it has motivated me to take renewed interest in this dormant blog.

In addition, after feeling completely uninspired for a long time to write more of my memoirs I woke up yesterday morning with a strong desire to continue them. I don't know why that happened either. It was not based on any rationale. It came as a simple strong impulse -- a most welcome gift to one who has always thrived on periods consuming enthusiasm. I felt as if my becalmed sailing ship, drifting nowhere for weeks, had suddenly been brought to life as a hearty breeze filled its sails. So, I will soon be posting a fairly short chapter on childhood holidays, and then a more ambitious memoir of my introduction to religion.

"YOU WILL BE HEARD"

2009-01-15T11:38:00.003-05:00

Yesterday morning, in that half waking state which often brings unusual perceptions, I saw vividly the words: “You will be heard”, as if typed on the lower part of a piece of paper which had some sort of innocently pleasant images above. The message was accompanied by a strong feeling of electricity and great importance which startled me.

I immediately associated “You will be heard” with my efforts to pray before I fell asleep late that night.

Prayer – which might be defined as human efforts to communicate (often verbally) with a higher power – is a vexing subject, as many posts in this blog attest. If “giving orders to the universe” is a form of prayer (see my previous post), I am back on that subject again because my prayer these days is based on myself as a lens focusing the power of the Source to achieve desired results. My words and mental images form effects which the Source will create in the human world. . . or so I believe.

The unusual thing about the night whose morning brought the message was that I had struggled over the dilemma whether or not to include among my positive orders for the benefit of myself and others, any negative commands aimed at people who are creating pain and injustice in the world. I knew the spiritual teaching that I should never let anger and hatred or a desire for revenge affect my wishes, and that praying bad things on others will rebound to injure me.

But during these days of the unholy Israeli massacres in Gaza I couldn't help feeling outrage of the most extreme degree, and so a few days ago I decided to let myself go and try to focus the Source on the destruction of those who are killing many hundreds of people, a third of them children, inside a relatively defenseless enclave forced on its population by their Israeli occupiers. My anger extended not only to Israel and its supporters in the United States, but also to the idea that there was some biblical “God” who was allowing such a thing to happen.

So for several days I did my best to focus the Source on those horrible murderers and asked for and visualized their defeat and destruction. As a concession to certain spiritual teachings I also tried to replace the bloody carnage with images of peace and of people moving back to cultivate the lands which the Israelis had stolen from them. I also tried to see myself in the role of a dispassionate gardener who must cut off a diseased branch in order to save the tree. I tried not to feel any hatred. A surgeon who removes a leg so that the body can be relieved of pain and poison is not motivated by anger or a desire for revenge, but instead by a positive desire to bring health.

Be that as it may, the night before the morning message I realized that a nagging discomfort I felt was coming from my “negative prayers”. Apparently I could not focus a destructive design to rid the earth of a source of injustice and pain without polluting my own spirit with anger. So, with a sense of guilt because I felt I was abandoning a good cause, I decided to end my prayers for destruction. That was not because I felt sorry for the people I might hurt, but because of a spiritual principle.

I do not know which of my words will be heard, but I know that “You will be heard” came to me with authority and created a feeling of ecstatic happiness. I was in an elevated mood throughout that morning, feeling that I had been favored with communication of a very unusual kind even though I have only my intuition to interpret it.

Please note that I have written extensively about Israel and its supporters in the United States in my other blog, VIEW FROM THE MOON.

CLAY MEN WALKING

2009-01-06T12:51:00.005-05:00

These ideas came to me as I was thinking about the manifest inefficacy of prayer in the form of begging a deity to grant favors. Every year whole churches full of people are obliterated by storm or sea or earthquakes while earnestly beseeching their God to save them. Prayers for justice are answered by the victory of missiles and bombs. How many sick or dying people are not praying for relief as their condition worsens?

Spare me the arguments about “God's mysterious plan”. The fact is that in this life, on this planet, we see no evidence that a helpful deity is influenced by prayers to let one person succeed and another fail, or this tribe or army be victorious, because one person or group is better at praying than others.

I believe that our misguided concept of a potentially helpful God who is amenable to appeals to sympathy is related to the notion of a Creator molding man from clay scooped from a river bed. That widespread “mud” creation myth in different versions puts God in the place of a potter at his wheel, turning out creatures to populate the earth and then bringing them to life. This leads to the idea of a Master managing his creations. The general conclusion of such creation myths throughout the world is that the Creator was not merely creating robots to serve his needs, or to play with as toys, but instead that the Creator assumes a managerial role and is concerned with the welfare of his creatures. “The Lord is my shepherd.” And if this anthropomorphic Creator continues as a manager, some of his creatures may be able to get special favors if they play up to him in the right way, or fashion words or rituals to gain his approval and help.

A more accurate image of creation than the potter is that of a spring bubbling up from the earth to form a pool and overflow into as stream, or a fountain spraying water droplets into the air, or a fire throwing out sparks. An erupting volcano's lava populates the landscape with forms, but it is a spontaneous creative action rather than the planned art of a human potter.

When we conceive of the Source as a spring of being bringing potentialities into existence, rather than as a managing and judging superperson, we are on the path to looking to our own creative imaging and actions to form our condition and our destiny. You learn that instead of being a begging child you are a lens which can focus the brilliant power of the Source to achieve effects on ourselves, other people, and our universe. Thus I admired a poster I saw on the wall of an Olympic champion's room. A man stands looking up the vast expanse of the sky, saying “These are my orders for the Universe today.

Start them young! (From a Christian website.)

“DLTK's Bible Activities
Old Testament Bible Crafts for Kids

Creation Craft
Uses a gingerbread man to explain the creation of man!
Age 3+”

WHAT WE DO

2009-01-04T07:55:00.002-05:00

Once we realize that we can know nothing, and that nothing matters, the charge, “You're wasting your time” has no meaning.

The notion that what we do is “worthwhile” only if it meets certain criteria evaporates like morning fog in the incomprehensible vastness of the Universe and the insoluble mystery of Being. This brings a certain sense of freedom – as did my realization long ago, as I looked up into the sky for that judgmental God I had been told about, that “Nobody out there cares!”. We no longer have to feel guilty if we aren't doing something “useful”.

My Romanian friend, Adriana, does higher mathematics for her own entertainment, and she told me that she sometimes asks herself, “Why am I doing this?”, just as I ask myself why I am playing computer games and learning 3D modeling and animation instead of doing something “constructive”.

The standard of activities becomes what interests us and what gives us pleasure – particularly if it keeps us in Now and leads us not into the temptation of the past or the future. The idea that we must be accomplishing something like making money or getting published or preparing for an examination or performance no longer torments us. If a man wants to spend his life lying around on beaches and riding waves, more power to him. If I would rather play Super Mario Galaxy or build a palace in Second Life or learn about ancient astrology instead of doing something that qualifies for the mythical title “useful”, more power to me.

I'm not implying that I, personally, can dispense with all values, however arbitrary they may seem. I'm talking only about how we choose fill our time – and I say that you can tell much more about what a person really wants by how she chooses to spend her time than by what she says she wants. Witness the man who wants to be a great author but spends his time figuring horse racing systems.

Speaking for myself, it feels like a good thing to try to decrease the amount of pain in the world, even if governments like Israel and the United States devote themselves to increasing the amount of pain in the world. Justice feels better than injustice. Honesty feels better than dishonesty. And most people are happiest if they can arrange to create a comfortable, tidy, attractive environment. The relative desirability of activities might be measured by those kinds of feelings, but hopefully without any sense of “should” or guilt.

For me the greatest pleasures beyond food and sex come from learning and creating. For somebody else it might be training horses or learning Greek or sailing or fishing. But let none of us be chained to the galley bench of “useful” or “worthwhile”.

A Memory

2008-10-09T08:36:00.006-05:00

Emily Murphy recently posted the following comment on “Blitchton, Part 1”:

'Mr. Lee,
I'm a grad student in the University of Florida English Dept. and I'm currently working on a project with your papers. I was wondering if I might be able to ask you a few questions that would help me greatly in my work. If so I can be contacted at: . . .
Greatly enjoyed your memoirs. I laughed out loud several times :)'

She's referring to the collection of my papers in the archives of the University of Florida Library -- http://web.uflib.ufl.edu/spec/manuscript/guides/lee.htm

As we exchanged emails and I learned more about Emily's project, it occurred to me that she – working on her Master's degree in English – was sitting in some of the same classrooms where I sat when I was working on my Master's degree in English at the same university half a century ago. Carried on a wave of nostalgia, I remembered how I sat in those rooms at the age of 21 and dreamed that someday I would be a published writer. The image of my name on a book seemed as remote as an image of Jupiter in a telescope, but my conviction that I would be a published author stood up even against the kindly warnings of my professors that the odds against being a professional writer were millions to one, and that I should learn to look on writing as a hobby. More than once I was advised that even though I was a talented writer I should abandon the hope that I would someday see a book of mine on a bookstore shelf, simply because only a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of people who wanted to be authors would ever find a publisher.

It was about five years later that my first children's book was published and won a national award.

I know this is a boastful post, but the memories that Emily evoked are too meaningful for me to ignore . . . and there's a lesson in this for students who'll be told by their professors of English, or art, or drama, or music that their dreams of professional success are too farfetched to bring to reality, and that they should resign themselves to enjoying their passion as a hobby while they earn a living doing something they really don't want to do. Teaching English, maybe?

Thank you, Emily.

OCALA, Memoirs of Fleming Lee, Chapter 6

2008-07-23T11:06:00.017-05:00

Papa and the Blitch Boys, Ocala, 1941

When I was growing up in Gainesville, the outermost reaches of our world – except for the stars – were Jacksonville, on the Atlantic coast about 70 miles to the northeast, where we went to buy school clothes and Christmas presents, and Lake Weir, a couple of hours’ drive to the south, where we spent our family vacation each August. But by far the most important features of the gameboard onto which I had been placed were the pretty town of Ocala, where my mother’s family lived, and Blitchton, the ranch where my father had been born and raised – both less than an hour from our home even at Daddy's cautious driving speeds, and less than half an hour from one another.

As I began to write these memoirs from the perspective of decades it vividly came to me what very different places Ocala and Blitchton were, what striking contrasts there were the families who lived in them, how each of my parents was represented by one of these places, and how important my experience of them was in my own evolution.

At the time I’m remembering, the 1940's and early 50's, my father’s family had been in Florida for generations, well before the Civil War, and my father’s father, who was a doctor, had developed a big ranch and farm at Blitchton, southwest of Gainesville, about a dozen miles north of Ocala. There my father and his brother and sister were born and raised, never in their lives to dwell for long more than a few miles from the soil of their childhood.

My mother’s family, on the other hand, came from Kentucky and Tennessee. Mother’s father, William Henry Fleming, had brought his wife, Frances, and my mother, then three years old, from Mufreesboro, Tennessee to Jacksonville in 1912, where he prospered in a wholesale grocery business in partnership with his wife’s brothers. The family grew to four daughters while the war brought great prosperity to the Batey-Fleming Company. After going back to Tennessee for awhile after the First World War, Papa and Mom Belle moved back to Florida, to Ocala, with Mother, Martha, Lorraine, and Shirley.

During the early 1940's I thought of both Ocala and Blitchton as being far from Gainesville, not just because of Daddy’s tortoise-like driving on two lane roads, but also because visits were rare and communications were almost entirely by letter. Long distance phone calls over those 30 miles or so must have been expensive; even urgent news of a birth or death would most likely come by Western Union telegram. I remember that my mother and her mother (Mom Belle to me) began, as time went on, to telephone one another more frequently, but still at intervals measured by months rather than days. Probably my first exposure to psychic phenomena was that the receiver of the call, whether my mother or Mom Belle, had almost always been just on the verge of picking up the phone to call the caller when the phone rang. On the other hand, I don’t recall any long distance calls between Gainesville and Blitchton except when Otis died.

A trip to Ocala began with Mother and Daddy in the front seat and me and Riley and Gordon the back seat – usually after a couple of minutes’ delay while I had to get out of the car and run back into the house for one reason or another. I was notorious for that. It was just assumed that as the car was pulling out of the driveway, Fleming would need to run back into the house.

Then we’d make our way down University Avenue past the blocks of brick academic buildings and out of town south on Route 441. After we had crossed Paynes Prairie I felt as though we had left the known world behind and were exploring Oz or Africa. The excitement of the three children of course translated quickly into unseemly activity in the back seat, sometimes degenerating into shoves, shouts, accusations, and counter-accusations.

“He started it.”

“I did not. He’s sliding over on my part of the seat.”

“I am not. Gordon bit me!”

And from the front seat, “You all just settle down.”

“But Riley’s . . .”

“Don’t make me stop this car!” says my father eventually.

Whimpering: “But I didn’t do anything! Fleming started it.”

“Blessed are the peacemakers,” Mother says. “Look! There’s a white horse. Lick and stamp!”

My mother, like her mother always the pacifying spirit, would try to distract us with some game built on spotting license plates or billboards. Burma Shave advertising in particular, one small road sign following another to complete a verse, was a boon to parents.

Some of the sights and smells we experienced along the way – which was entirely rural except for a couple of tiny towns -- made such an impression on me that they are alive at this moment, monuments to the power of memory and imagination. The smell of freshly mown grass and of burning pine wood are the smells I most loved – and among the things most likely to lure me back for another incarnation. The dizzying sweet fragrance of cut grass might be generated in several ways fascinating to a child: A farmer mowing a pasture with spinning blades pulled behind his grumbling tractor. A State Road Department machine, its long arms of chattering pointed teeth spread like an airplane’s wings, would be trimming the right--of-way. Or, best of all, a gang of convicts in striped clothing would be felling roadside grass with slingers, each man chained at the ankles, one arm rhythmically swinging the wooden handle that split to hold the sharp horizontal blade, while lounging guards with shotguns lazily watched, swatting flies and nodding.

“Why are those men in jail?”

“Because they did bad things. If you break the law you get put in jail.”

“Gordon bit me. He oughta be out there with chains on.”

“I should not. Shut up!”

“Never say ‘shut up’ to anybody,” Mother says, reaching back to administer a gentle swat on whatever leg she happened to contact. She had formerly given us the biblical information that whoever calls his brother a fool goes to The Bad Place, but saying “shut up” was apparently less serious – in the realm of the impolite rather than the sinful. . . although in our family politeness (and what Daddy called courtesy) ran a close second to godliness.

Because of the convicts, Daddy might talk about his uncle who had been the warden of the Florida state penitentiary at Raiford, and might tell us again about the many reforms the warden had instituted, including a “trusty” system that let many prisoners out to work for the day without guards – a system that actually reduced the number of escapes. Daddy might also tell a story or two about our grandfather, who had been the state prison physician, in charge of the prison medical system, and in that role would tour facilities around Florida, including a trip to Miami by train when he took my father along with him. Daddy said that at that time you could see the entire town of Miami from the station platform.
“I could have bought half of what’s now downtown Miami for five hundred dollars.”

My father was always tantalizing us by mentioning real estate he could have bought for practically nothing which now would have made us millionaires -- including a strip of lots across University Avenue from the University of Florida later called “the Gold Coast”. Those tales did not enhance my opinion of his judgment and were one of the reasons I developed such scorn of his caution, his extreme avoidance of risk-taking. I interpreted what he told us as meaning that if he’d been willing to take a few chances when he was younger we’d be rich and own a movie camera and a big boat like Uncle Hugh Ray.

(I don’t think I knew at that time that Daddy had put a lot of inherited money into creating and selling lots in Lakeland during the Florida Boom in the 1920's, only to lose it when the bubble popped and people couldn’t make their payments. And only later did I come to fully appreciate that my father and his brother had greatly increased the size of Blitchton by buying hundreds and hundreds of acres of neighboring land at prices like two dollars an acre. The value increased by thousands of percent over the years, particularly after race horse breeders from Kentucky started a kind of gold rush to develop white-fenced race horse farms in the Ocala area that rivaled those of Lexington. By good fortune, the increase in Blitchton’s value was probably at its peak as my father reached retirement age, and sale of land there not only provided my parents with many comfortable years but also is now doing the same for me.)

“You never want to go to jail,” Daddy said. “I was visiting Raiford and walking past a maximum security cell and this prisoner said to me, ‘See if you can help me! They keep me locked up like an animal, and I’ll be here all my life.’ I told him, you should have thought of that before you killed those people.”

This tale of confinement created a farfetched association in my mind.

"Mother, remember what Dr. White said when you called him when Riley bit me?”

Mother responded, “He said, put some iodine on Fleming and a muzzle on Riley.” Everybody laughed.

The scent of stinging iodine, which with aspirin and Campho Phenique was the core of my parents’ medical arsenal, momentarily drives other smells from my mind, but now the overpowering beauty of wild wood smoke returns me to 1943. Sometimes it came from a forest fire, sometimes from a smoking, sparking pile in a farmer’s field, but most persistently it came from the small cabins, usually the homes of Negroes, which were scattered along both sides of the road during much of the trip.

From those homes, even in the summer when fireplaces and chimneys were idle, there always came a smell of smoke – hickory, pine, and oak. The most conspicuous source was the burning logs which boiled laundry in the huge black iron cauldron behind the house, but there were also wood stoves used for cooking (my own grandmother at Blitchton had one until she went exclusively to kerosene), and I think that the very walls of the wooden homes themselves emitted the smell of smoke stored up over years, abetted by meals abundant in smoked ham and bacon and sausage.

Oh, and there is one more wonderful smell which, like those cabins and steaming cauldrons, would be a rare find on Florida highways today. That was the incredibly rich odor of tobacco leaves hung to cure in tall ventilated barns. Sometimes we would stop next to a tobacco barn which was near the road just so we could sniff the delicious air which the warm breeze carried from it, and get glimpses of the broad leaves through the slats. I have driven hundreds of miles through the South in later years without seeing a single tobacco barn or a cabin like those that were the main features of our drives to Ocala and Blitchton.

Built of graying boards, whose character and beauty were greater for never having been painted, the small homes were topped with metal roofs, each with a brick or field stone chimney pointed to the sky. The whole structure was separated from the ground by piles of the limestones or flint which abounded in the surrounding fields. The design was always basically the same: An open front porch sheltered by the outcropping of the tin roof; the porch furnished with two or more chairs, the porch railing supporting pots of geraniums or petunias. The sand walk leading to the porch steps was likely to have decorative borders of half buried tires or interesting stones. The front door was right in the middle of the house and was usually open so that one could see straight out through the open back door. On either side of that central passage were the mysterious dim rooms which we would never see except for tantalizing glimpses through the windows as we sped by at fifty miles an hour.

“Darn Yankee!” my father would mutter, glaring into the rear view mirror as a more reckless driver approached him from behind. “Those Yankees drive through those mountains to get down here, and when they get on these flat roads they think they’re on a race track.”

I always silently gloating if, when the proclaimed Yankee car finally zipped around us, it turned out to have a local license plate.

At last we entered Ocala – driving east past the courthouse square on the road that went to Silver Springs, passing the ivy covered Ritz Apartments and their Spanish tiled roof on our left as the last landmark before Mom Belle and Papa’s house.

Mom Belle had been born Fannie Belle Batey on December 4, 1880 in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and got her degree from Soule College as a music major, specializing in piano. For her whole life she spoke admiringly of her teacher, Professor Franz Josef Strohm. She also played on the college basketball team. After graduation she taught piano in her home and was organist at the Presbyterian church. During the summer season she would travel, chaperoned by a female relative or two, to stay at mountain resorts and provide their music. She even made such a performing trip to Chatauqua, New York.

Papa was born William Henry Fleming in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1883. He left school and started working in a grocery store when he was about twelve years old. The grocery business became his life. When he met Mom Belle, he owned a grocery store in Murfreesboro, in competition with his future wife’s father and brothers. During their courtship, young Henry and Fannie Belle went on picnics, and when violets were blooming Papa would pick a bouquet for Fannie Belle to pin to the scarf she wore when playing the church organ.

Feeling that Henry needed a little nudge, as my mother said, Fannie Belle suddenly said to Henry during one of those picnics, "When are we going to get married?" Henry's immediate reaction went undescribed, but the wedding took place in June 1907, and my mother, Jean, was born two years later.

The new family might have remained in Murfreesboro except for the wanderlust of one of Mom Belle’s brothers, the adventurous Uncle Buddy (Hal Batey), who preferred train travel to high school and in his youth ranged over much of the South in boxcars without bothering to buy tickets first. Uncle Buddy is a story in himself -- an unusual combination of jolly adventurer and hardworking businessman, who later became mayor of Gainesville, Florida (in the 1920's, I think) and lived there to be 101, a widower who fixed his own breakfast of sausage, eggs, and grits every morning and was fatter than a barrel. What I most remember best are his four chins and his wonderful laugh. Let him be an inspiration to all who believe that grease brings longevity, and that humor is more important than diet in promoting health and long life.

Anyway, young Hal returned from a railway excursion to Florida brimming with enthusiasm for the possibilities he saw there. He convinced his father and other family members – including Mom Belle and Papa – to move to Jacksonville during 1911-1912, where they set up a jointly owned wholesale grocery business, the Batey-Fleming Company. Mother’s sister Martha was born soon after the move, followed by Shirley and Lorraine.

The Fleming sisters at Jacksonville Beach -- Martha, Jean (standing), Shirley, Lorraine

My Mother told me that the First World War gave a big boost to the Batey-Fleming Company, and that Papa made a lot of money. She mentioned sugar and cigarettes as especially profitable. There’s a photograph of my mother from that time, expensively dressed, sitting in a big open car, looking the part of a little rich girl.

After the war was over, Mother’s parents decided they didn’t want to raise four girls in Jacksonville (my mother mentioned a large military camp nearby), and so in 1919 they moved back to Murfreesboro. But the Great Depression came early to Tennessee, while Florida was still doing all right economically, and so early in 1925 Papa moved his family back to Florida, where he preferred to become a salaried employee of Batey-Fleming Company rather than return as a co-owner. His mission was developing the business in Ocala.

It seems funny to me that although, according to my mother, Papa opposed anything that would cause his daughters to leave home – from marriage to having a job – Mother was married within two years after the move to Ocala, and three years later her sister Martha secretly eloped to Inverness and married Hugh Ray. It is amazing to me that Martha's marriage was kept secret from Papa for months; only Mom Belle knew. It goes without saying that Martha continued living at home for awhile after she married.

My father was the athletic coach and history teacher at Ocala High School. He was living at his parents’ home at Blitchton, where he had been born two days after Christmas in 1896. After periods of being away at school, voluntarily serving in the navy during the First World War, and developing real estate in Lakeland, Daddy had returned to where he needed to be to meet my mother.

As a newcomer (teased about her Tennessee accent, which is hard to imagine, considering what a 1920's Ocala, Florida accent must have been like), Jean Fleming was told by other high school girls that Coach Blitch was real cute, and so she should sign up for the basketball team. Thus began the swift undermining of Papa’s yearning to keep his girls at home, unmarried and unemployed.

Kodak photographs show Mother in her basketball uniform, with bobbed brown hair, posing prettily next to Daddy while his chaperone mother stands alongside like a gray granite obelisk, determined to enforce the most extreme requirements of Southern Baptist virtue.

I don’t know much about the courtship except for basketball trips and movie dates, and I also don’t know how my parents got around Papa’s objections, but in the summer of 1927 the wedding took place and the photograph albums are now filled with pictures of an attractive couple visiting places like Chimney Rock and Lake Lure in their long, angular car.

Newly Married Jean Fleming Blitch, Chimney Rock, September 1, 1927

By the time I knew Papa he no longer had a lot of money. He had been stricken by the two-headed dragon of the Great Depression and the chain stores. My mother, who rarely referred to anything negative, told us, “Papa hated the chain stores. He couldn’t compete with them and he won’t shop in them.”

Not only did Papa always do the grocery shopping for his household, but he also persisted in the grocery business in spite of Piggly Wiggly and A&P. For as long as I can remember, until not long before Papa went into a nursing home he owned a general store in Belleview, then a tiny town south of Ocala. It was called the Farmers’ Supply, and it sold everything from canned foods and overalls to milk, fresh meats , mule halters, pitchforks, seeds, and fertilizers.

When I was a little boy I spent a day there while Papa presided in a white apron, usually behind the glass-fronted meat display case at the back of the store with a helper or two alongside. The freshest meat in the store must have been chicken because the chickens were alive and running around outside the back door until a customer wanted one.

I liked exploring the walls and counters of the big store, tugging at tools and leather harnesses, stroking saddles, smelling the dry seed corn, feeling the coarse tough fabric of stiff new work clothes. More than anything else, though, I enjoyed the lunch: A bottle of ice cold chocolate milk and a wedge of sharp cheddar cheese sliced from a big round in the glass case, along with Saltine crackers and canned deviled ham and sardines.

I remember with equal sensual pleasure Papa’s black van, a Merita Bread truck in its previous incarnation, which he regularly drove to the west coast of Florida by way of Blitchton and Yankeetown to sell spices and coffee and tea and I don’t know what else in many places along the way. I loved to climb up in the back of that van and smell the hundred sweet and pungent smells -- cloves, black pepper, coffee beans, vanilla. . . that emanated from the bags and boxes and tins on the wooden shelves that filled both sides.

But I have left myself, my younger brothers, and my parents passing the Ritz Apartments, about to arrive at Mom Belle and Papa’s house on the next corner on the left.

It was a stucco, two-storied house on a double lot with a screened porch and a bay windowed sun room across the front; the livingroom preceded the dining room, with bedrooms and bath along the right side, and a stairway led up to the partially finished attic which was the dormitory for juvenile guests and the art gallery for my young aunts' pastels. The kitchen was at the back, with a view of the banana trees at the rear of the lot, and a garage apartment above a detached double garage, usually inhabited by a tenant.

It seems to me that every time we drove up the driveway into the porte au cochere on the right side of the house, Papa was outside pushing his lawn mower or raking leaves. He always wore khaki pants and a slightly beat up Stetson hat which must have been demoted from formal wear to yard wear as it aged and softened. If the weather was cool, he wore a zippered leather jacket. He was so lean and slender that his trousers were a bit baggy in the seat, and appeared on the brink of slipping down right past his hips.

Papa - William Henry Fleming, 1946

Maybe Papa looked a little stern in general, but on the occasions when I and my brothers were with him he was jovial and affectionate. He would hurry toward the car and hug, pick up, swat on the bottom, and pinch me and my brothers with such rough enthusiasm that I escaped as soon as possible with aching ribs and a stinging bottom. I don’t know where the pinching came from, but it hurt, and I told Mother that I wished she’d ask him not to do it.

Mom Belle, being heavier and less mobile than Papa, would greet us at the porch door. If Papa had a figure like a carving knife, Mombelle was just the opposite. She was very, very fat –- as round and soft as a cotton ball. In contrast to hugging Papa, hugging her was like hugging a big, sweet-smelling pillow.

Mom Belle, 1946

Mom Belle and Papa were different in other ways, too: As soon as we three boys arrived Papa would usually try to put us to work in some way – but Mom Belle – blissfully – would intervene and usually feed us. Papa would grumble about us being spoiled, and say that boys need to learn to work hard while they were young. Papa's gods were hard work and earning. Mom Belle's were food, poetry and music.

Entering the house, I always appreciated that even the interior walls of the home were sharp-edged stucco, like wind-whipped wavelets on the surface of water; I liked moving my finger across their edges and points. It was also curious that the ceiling lights were turned on and off with pairs of buttons on the wall rather than a single switch.

In my earliest visits to Ocala, Mother’s younger sisters, Lorraine and Shirley, still lived at home – Martha having by then revealed her elopement and moved to her own home a few blocks away. All four sisters were pretty. I remember Lo, the youngest, as a slim blond, and dark-haired Shirley as shorter and more filled out. To me Martha, a long-haired brunette, looked like a movie star and was glamorous in every way.

As I write this I find myself wondering what Lo and Shirley, girls in their late teens and beginning twenties, did all day after they'd finished high school and before they got married. When I asked Mother how her unmarried sisters spent their time, she hesitated before answering, "I never thought of that.” They didn't go to college, weren't allowed to have jobs (until Shirley, in Mother's words, "overruled Papa" and started working for the telephone company harvesting coins from pay phones), and probably didn't have many household chores except (in theory) making their beds.

In that world, even people with moderate income had a maid do the cleaning, and in families like Mom Belle’s it was considered bad practice to teach daughters to do housework because it implied they might be reduced someday to cleaning their own homes. Mom Belle refused to teach Mother to cook because she was brought up believing that genteel young ladies had servants to do that kind of thing.

Papa, on the other hand, was the self-appointed sole grocery shopper for the family, as well as the enthusiastic chef. Mom Belle was more keen on eating than cooking, but she had her own special recipes, most memorable of which for me were apple dumplings, which were immortalized in the following bit of history:

Once when we were all finishing a dinner at the Ocala dining room table, I – about 3 years old – asked, “Mom Belle, can I have another one of those apple dumpling things?” Why that would have been so humorous to the adults that they retold it in the family for years, I have no idea, but by now even I think it was funny.

Apple dumplings: peeled apples wrapped in crust open at the top, baked until apples soft and crust brown, sitting soaked in a pool of buttery sweet sauce.

Mom Belle and Papa's house always smelled of something good cooking. I recall breakfast and Papa as one: Hot biscuits (nobody ever heard of a biscuit from a can or mix in that house) with plenty of butter melted on them (and cane syrup to turn them into a sweet dish if one desired), sausages or bacon or both, sliced tomatoes, grits, mountains of scrambled eggs, damson plum preserves, and milk and orange juice and coffee. I particularly remember Papa and his coffee – which he drank at every meal unless there was iced tea – because of the hissing sipping sound he made as he sucked it from a full cup.

Biscuits sometimes gave rise to the story of the Yankee who was puzzled and therefore kept saying “no” when his Southern hostess offered him a “hotten”. Only later did he realize that he'd been offered a “hot one” from the latest batch of biscuits.

Speaking of Papa and breakfasts, my father recalled with an expression of appalled amusement that when “Mr. Fleming” went along to the Big Scrub (now part of the Ocala National Forest) with the Blitchton men on deer hunting/fishing trips (Otis would go in advance with a wagon loaded with tents, food, and other equipment) Papa would at dawn (with the essential coffee brewed over a campfire) eat cold, greasy, fried fish left in the frying pan from supper the night before.

Besides the huge breakfasts, the thing that comes to mind most often about eating at my grandparents' dining table was that I seemed to be fated to sit at Mom Belle's left hand, where she could prey on my plate. Yes, it's true. Unless I managed to empty my plate before she emptied hers – and she often ate at an eager pace, while I've always been a slow eater – her plump hand would dart over like a bird's quick beak and snatch tidbits of fried chicken or fish or steak or cake from under my nose. I don't even remember her asking, “Are you planning to eat that?” as some predators do.

Of course I wasn't allowed to go hungry. No one was. But we children were definitely at the mercy of adults in Ocala, as our plates were served by others, and the unfortunate who was seated next to Mom Belle might find his saved best last bite devoured by his grandmother just as he was about savor it.

Before Shirley and Lorraine married and moved to their own homes, here's what I remember: There was a lot of lolling on unmade beds and listening to phonograph records and talking about boys amid a tumult of stuffed animals and pillows and mirrors and perfumes and cosmetics. Loraine sang a song she had written about the boy she was eventually to marry: "Freddie, Freddie, he's the cutest boy in town. . ." A few years later, Lo and Freddie were married in that house, and we children watched through the screen doors as Freddie had to be supported among the flowers and potted palms by two friends lest he sag to the floor in a faint before the ceremony began.

Some of the records – 78 rpm -- particularly impressed me: “The Music Goes Round and Round,” volume turned up as loud as possible. (“I blow through here, the music goes round and round, whoa ho ho ho ho ho, and it comes out here.”) “A-Tisket, A-Tasket A green-and-yellow basket. . .” “Flat Foot Floogey” (I thought it went, “Flat Foot Floogey with the flawed jaw,” but the lyrics were actually even stranger, “The Flat Foot Floogey with the floy floy.”) “Jeepers Creepers, where’d you get those peepers?” “Three Little Fishies”, “Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny, Oh”, “Beer Barrel Polka”, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” Two songs I liked to hear often: “The tumblin’ tumbleweed,” and “Cool, clear water,” had been found in an alley.

A few songs from those days were still being played when I was in high school: “Deep Purple”, ” “Falling in Love with Love”, “And the Angels Sing”, “South of the Border”, “Blueberry Hill.”

It seemed that the unmarried Ocala daughters were always trying to “protect” Papa by hiding facts from him — which I eventually began to suspect meant trying to keep him from finding out about something which would make him angry at his daughters.

For example, when I was visiting Ocala once, Shirley and Lorraine took me in the family car to the Pig Stand, and then for some reason they wanted to look at a vacant house. Maybe Papa was buying it for rental. Anyway, we drove over there, and into the port-au-cocher, which, like the house, was very small. (It seemed that for some time before the 1940's every house in Ocala was built with a port-au-cocher, which was nothing more than an open, roofed area for sheltering a car next to a side door of a home.) In backing out, Shirley scraped a fender on one of the supporting posts. The immediate concern was not the car, but Papa.

“He’ll die if he finds out!”

“He might have a heart attack!”

On occasions like this I got the impression that Papa’s health must be very fragile, since any upset was expected to make his heart stop functioning, and yet he lived strong and healthy, except for deteriorating eyesight (he refused cataract treatment), well into his eighties.

Somehow the girls managed to charm an auto repair man into having the fender repaired before the end of the day when Papa got home from his general store in his van -- thus saving his life one more time.

At some point Papa bought the girls a roadster, a kind of sports car with just a front seat that held three people if the one in the middle didn't mind getting intimate with the round-knobbed gear shift lever. I think it was that car which had a little crank on the dashboard that raised and lowered an air vent on the hood just in front of the windshield, and in the rear, where the trunk would have been, was a rumble seat. I loved riding in the rumble seat, which gave the sensation of riding in a padded bucket completely exposed to the wind.

My aunts (who, like all my mother’s sisters, banned the word “aunt” because it made them sound old) always took me to two big destinations: The Pig Stand was a drive-in which had been the main Ocala hangout for teenagers even before my mother was married . At the Pig Stand I always had a cherry smash while Shirley and Lorraine drank “cherry dope” (dope being the old slang for Coca Cola).

Our other destination was the tourist attraction that put the town on the national map -- Silver Springs. Although a less crowded place in the 1930s and early '40s than today, it was much more famous than it is today. Florida had no Disney World, Sea World, or other big “attractions”. Orlando was a sleepy small town with oak-lined streets, sustained by orange groves and cattle ranches. Silver Springs and Daytona Beach – and around St. Augustine the Alligator and Ostrich Farm, and Marine Studios – were the full menu as far as most Florida tourists were concerned, except for the “Live Giant Gator” and “Live Rattlesnake” hidden by high board fences behind assorted filling stations along U.S. 1 and U.S. 27.

Martha and Lorraine (seated) at Silver Springs

In addition to the glass-bottomed boats, the Jungle Cruise, the Seminole Indian village with its bead-clad Seminoles and dug-out canoe, and Ross Allen's reptile farm (you could hardly ever go to the movies without seeing a “short subject” of Ross Allen wrestling an alligator or milking a rattlesnake), Silver Springs was the widely publicized setting of most of Johnny Weismuller's underwater Tarzan exploits.

At Silver Springs, a thick aroma of orange blossom perfume extended even to far reaches of the parking lot from dozens of scented candles, liquids, fabrics, and even pottery for sale in the crescent of gift shops that faced the water. The thrill of going to “the Springs” was vastly increased by the fact that it was fifty percent owned by the Ray family into which Martha had married, Hugh being the son of the founder. Where other visitors paid admission, we just walked in. Our pride was increased by the fact that the glass bottomed electric boats were named after members of the Ray family, so that we could watch the “Martha Ray” pulling silently away from the concrete docking area with a load of camera laden tourists.

At that time, for the locals, Silver Springs was for swimming rather than for shopping or sightseeing. It had a narrow white sandy beach and a terrifying tall high dive tower. (There was a separate beach and picnic grounds for black people nearby around a bend in the river.) The clear-as-air water that boiled up from huge fissures far below the surface felt ice cold year round, but that didn’t deter people from swimming out to bask on the square float, or my aunts from trying to teach me to swim. My mother said that the first time I saw the smooth, crystal surface of the water there, when I was a toddler, I ran back in fear because I was at ease only with the rolling green whitecaps of the Atlantic at St. Augustine beach.

This is beginning to sound like a travelogue, so I’ll just mention the main thing that made Silver Springs a monumental, mystical part of my memories -- swimming underwater. Gliding in 72 degree totally transparent water in the shallow areas near the shore I could admire the pure white sandy bottom just two or three feet below the surface, undulating with refracted light . . . but when the snowy bottom abruptly dropped to the boil of the springs many yards below I’d find myself over a deep canyon, like a bird soaring low over the land suddenly passing a cliff’s edge and seeing the bottom of the Grand Canyon in miniature hundreds of feet below.

Martha and Hugh were the only wealthy wing of the family. Their one-story red brick house in Ocala was not ostentatious or particularly big, but there was something rich and exciting about its furnishings — the awnings above the windows, the venetian blinds, the glider and matching furniture on the glassed-in porch, and the big oval blue mirror over the fireplace, which, along with the huge stuffed swordfish Hugh had caught -- turned the house into a magical place. Besides, Hugh had every kind of gadget before anybody else did. In the 1930's he had a home movie camera, and a phonograph that made many recordings of adults talking and children laughing and singing. He even had his den air conditioned years before most people even knew air conditioners existed, and on a 90 degree summer day we would creep respectfully into that refrigerated sanctum and marvel at its wintry coldness.

I also admired Hugh because he was the first man in the family whom I realized drank alcohol. It turned out that several of his generation did, including my father on occasion, but Hugh was the first one I learned about. The parents of my parents had such a horror of the very idea of drinking alcohol that it was kept secret (to Papa, even playing rummy on Sunday was verboten, and the thought of a son in law drinking Black & White scotch whisky might have brought on the much-anticipated cardiac arrest). Martha told people that the bottle of club soda in their refrigerator was there because Hugh found it refreshing.

I began to see my own immediate family, at least my father, as being restricted and smallminded, while I began to admire and emulate the liberated and adventurous Hugh Ray. My father would sit and politely listen to female relatives talk all afternoon, and later complain about it bitterly and make the rest of us share his discomfort, whereas Hugh would just walk out of the room, go off alone, and stay in a good mood. He was notorious for sitting in his Cadillac outside some wedding receptions and listening to the radio while others made small talk. Of course I realized as I grew up that it's much easier for rich people to be impolitely independent and outspoken than it is for those in less gilded surroundings.

Papa supplemented his Farmers' Supply income with rental property. Remember, the country was still in Depression in those years. At one time he rented out a house and several apartments (from one of which came the upright piano on which I learned to play). Except for grocery shopping and cooking, fishing, and listening to the radio, particularly to football and baseball games, I don’t think he did much but work, nor had much interest in anything but work and renting. If he had a vacancy, he would put a sign out in his front yard, right on the main road from Ocala to Silver Springs, and spend as much time as possible sitting outdoors in sight of the sign. Several times he was absent from family gatherings because he would go on no trip or visit until the vacant place was rented.

One thing that he said impressed me so much that it has always stayed with me. It came from his telling me and my brothers something that he and his friends had done recently. He referred to his friends as “the boys.” Gordon or Riley, much too young to be tactful, laughed and asked, “Why do you say ‘boys’ when you’re old?”

Papa answered, “Your body grows up and gets bigger and gets older, but you never change. You’re just the same inside when you get older as you were when you were young.”

That image of an never-aging being trapped in an aging body has had great truth and poignancy for me all my life.

Mom Belle was the exact opposite physical type from Papa. They both ate copiously, but Papa stayed lean and wiry, while Mom Belle just got fatter. And while Papa had devoted his life to work and money, and thought that we boys were treated much too indulgently, Mom Belle was a poetic, artistic soul. She loved sitting on the screened front porch, and my most persistent Mom Belle memory is of her sitting in her white, wicker rocking chair on the porch, fanning herself with a cardboard church fan – perhaps with a gaudy picture of Jesus walking on water – or with a palmetto fan she asked me to cut for her. Palmettos look like small palm trees, have no spines on their stems, and with knife and scissors one of their leaves is easily converted into a rounded fan with a smooth natural handle.

Copies of “The Upper Room” Methodist periodical resided on a table next to Mom Belle, while her rocking chair had a kind of narrow basket woven as part of one arm, for holding knitting materials. One of my privileges was to comb and brush Mom Belle's long, long hair down over the back of her rocker, and then to braid it into a pigtail that reached to her waist when she stood. I recall that learning to braid didn't come effortlessly to a five year old, but that the process was fun and the result gratifying.

It was on that porch that Mom Belle introduced me to poetry. These lines have stayed in my memory while others have faded:

"The stag at eve had drunk his fill,
Where danced the moon on Monan’s rill. . .”

Those were sweet hours with a relative I loved, before I was old enough to question and rebel and to be dulled by sophistication. I have her wicker chair with its knitting basket arm sitting not ten feet from me as I write this, and I try to invoke her presence because she is the soul departed from my family I most regret not having communicated with more and come to know better.

The emotion that rises from the proximity of her empty chair as I write of her sitting there whispers of some mystery here, and that I should be silent

BLITCHTON, Conclusion. Memoirs of Fleming Lee, Chapter 5, Part 2

2007-12-27T09:56:00.003-05:00

Otis Jackson, Blitchton, Florida

Looking for Otis, we boys hurried down the back steps from the kitchen, past the long-handled well pump at the wash stand, near the low dome of the cistern, and entered a place even more removed from the green lawns and manicured shrubs of Gainesville and Ocala than the dwelling house. We walked on hot, dry sand among weathered, never-painted wooden buildings, each of which had its own special use and smell and charm. There was no grass in the yard — just snowy sand which Otis swept free of leaves with a brush broom he made by binding twigs together. Dr. Blitch had always insisted that the yard have no grass growing, and no debris, in order to protect the house from possible wildfires.

THE "HOMEPLACE"

The first outbuilding was an open-fronted shed with a huge, iron cauldron set into a rough masonry base next to a long, deep shelf. All three of us boys could have climbed into that black iron vessel with room to spare. The pot played a role in the cleaning of pigs after slaughter — which reminds me that I once attended a hog killing at Blitchton, probably when I was ten or eleven years old. It was a cold morning. As always when something important was to be done, Negroes appeared from all quarters of the compass to help with the work. Their families had lived in the area, for the most part, since slavery days. Now they farmed their own land or lived as sharecroppers and made extra money – or sometimes got paid in meat or other edibles as Dr. Blitch had often been paid -- doing work for my family.
THE OLD BLITCHTON STORE

THE BLITCHTON SCHOOL

The plump, uneasy pig was in a large pen. People leaned or sat on the surrounding board fence, visible puffs of breath coming from their noses and mouths into the cold air. The pig probably expected food, but Landis – wearing, like my father, khaki pants tucked into high boots laced up the front -- went to the fence close to the animal, aimed a .22 rifle carefully at its head, and fired. The pig dropped instantly to the ground, rolling onto its side, senseless, legs quivering. In the same second, Lorraine, a young colored man who worked regularly at Blitchton, jumped from the top of the fence, a much-honed knife in his hand, and ran to the pig, plunging the knife into its throat and slashing. Blood poured from the gash onto the earth, and squirted up onto Lorraine’s arms and trousers. The Negroes on the fence laughed and hooted, while Lorraine danced backwards, shaking his hands and his head, cussing under his breath.

In spite of my empathy with all animals, the primitive spectacle fascinated me more than it appalled me. This was where our pork roasts and bacon and sausage came from. It had to be done so we could all eat, and it was less gruesome than when Daddy tied chickens by their feet to a bowed over sweetgum sapling in our back yard and cut off their heads with a butcher knife.

The dead hog was dragged from the pen, and the next thing I remember is its carcass being plunged into the hot water of the big black cauldron. Then it was put on a table and scraped free of bristles. The next phase would be skinning, and then butchering, at which point the pig began to look like food. There was a building where parts were ground up and seasoned with salt and pepper and sage and forced into sausage casings, except for the ground meat that would be used for fresh sausage patties. The sausages, belly, and hams, were taken to the fired-up smokehouse to hang until cured to smoky richness.

At the end of the day some meat was distributed, money was paid, and what in the morning had been a snuffling pig had become pork, and at nightfall its fragrance rose over many homes among the pine trees, oaks, and cabbage palms.

The slaughter of the pig was not the only such activity I saw at Blitchton. Once I watched Daddy and Landis kill a sheep, then hang it up by its hind legs and skin it. Blitchton had lots of sheep in those days. We had a sheepskin rug in our den, and lamb chops in our freezer.

Also on the unpleasant side was the branding of cattle, and the castration of calves and young pigs with giant pincers — all attended with a swirling of excited horses and dust and shouting men and squealing victims wrested to the ground. At least the pain in each case was momentary, and after the glowing brand had been pressed quickly to the hide, or the pincers snapped shut, the men would roll away or jump back and the animal would jump to its feet, shake its head, and run away, shake its head again, and soon behave as if nothing had happened.

As we boys continued our search for Otis, we looked up over to our right at the tower with a windmill on top which pumped water from a well for use in the house. Later it was blown over by a hurricane and never replaced. We peered into a small, low, sweet-smelling shed where chicken feed was stored. The chicken house itself was not far away, low, tin-roofed, walled in part with chicken wire. From inside came an unending low cackling and other tones of chicken talk, occasionally accentuated with loud squawking of irritation or alarm. Although the chicken house had its own fenced yard, probably to protect the chickens from hawks and foxes and wild dogs, there were always some chickens running loose all over the place. I remember Gramma, a container of chicken feed held to her waist, wading out into an excited, swirling, hopping sea of chickens, broadcasting seeds in every direction.
GRAMMA FEEDING THE CHICKENS - AROUND 1900

My favorite outbuilding was the smokehouse. Like most of the structures, its door was secured with a latch made of a short piece of smooth wood which swiveled on a nail, but unlike the other buildings scattered behind the main house it was thoroughly sealed. We would invariably open the door and peek inside. Even if the smokehouse were empty, its dark interior was impregnated with an incredibly wonderful smell which came from scores of years of smoldering hickory wood and darkening hams and bacon and links of sausage – the temple of a perfume so heavenly as to bring doubt into the mind of the most devout vegetarian.

By then we probably would have encountered Otis, but if not, we would go on toward the barn, which was vastly larger than the other buildings put together. Like the other buildings, it was built of rough, unpainted lumber roofed with rust covered corrugated metal. It combined stables for horses and mules with stalls for cows and a space for the shelter for farm machinery. A large fenced corral was overshadowed by a gigantic pecan tree whose nuts in season sprinkled the ground over a huge area.

In one part of the barn the milking was done. In another part great quantities of hay and dried corn were stored – so much loose hay that my cousins and I would leap from the ladder which led to the loft down into the soft, sweet-smelling hill of grass – and end up itching for a long time afterward. Up in the loft area there was a hand-operated device for stripping dried corn from the cob. A central passageway on the ground floor led along the stalls where horses and cows came up to their troughs to eat feed served up from a heavy wooden scoop. Much of the wood — the troughs, the scoop, the posts of the stalls, the door handles and latches, had been worn smooth and shiny over the years until it looked more like polished stone than something made from trees.

There were other buildings, further out. On the side of Gramma’s house opposite from Landis’s house was a big garage which held the tractor and other big machinery, as well as an impressive collection of license plates nailed to the wall, probably going back to the first automobile Dr. Blitch acquired.

Way out beyond the barn, on the other side of a pasture, was the place where cane syrup was made. From here come some of my favorite memories of Blitchton. In the autumn, a huge field of sugar cane would be cut and brought next to the syrup shed. As when animals were slaughtered, the occasion brought numerous colored people from their homes around the area to assist in the work. I gather that Gramma and Landis employed a few of them full time — for example to work as cowboys or to help with housework and cooking and laundry — but I think most of them got paid for helping with seasonal events like harvesting and the pig butchering.

Anyway, a lot of people turned out for cane grinding, including us who drove from Gainesville, and it was more like a festive holiday than a chore. The cane grinding mechanism consisted of two big upright steel rollers turned by a tractor engine linked to the machinery of the rollers by an endless belt. In older days or poorer farms the motive power was supplied by a mule walking in a large circle around and around rollers at the end of a long pole. The cane juice gushed from the rollers and was channeled into large galvanized metal tubs with a loose handle on each side. It would take two men to carry each tub over to the cooking vat in the mostly open shed. The vat was a long, bathtub-like container — only much longer than a bathtub — set into a bed of bricks and stone above a space for the wood fire which could be seen glowing and crackling brightly through the access hole at one end. The tubs of juice would be dumped into the vat until it was full, and the heat of the fire would very slowly simmer it down to the right consistency.
MOTHER AT A CANE GRINDING, 1927 (MY BROTHER RILEY TOLD ME THAT GRAMMA, EVEN THOUGH SHE WOULDN'T ALLOW ONE DROP OF ALCOHOL IN HER HOUSE, SOLD THE PRESSED CANE STALKS TO MOONSHINERS.)

Fresh squeezed sugar cane juice is almost sickeningly sweet. Pale, foamy, watery, it did not invite more than a sip — although my cousin, Sim, inadvertently took a bath in it when he backed into one of the tubs full of juice and sat down up to his neck in it. But once cooked down to a certain dark thickness it makes a most delicious syrup, as we would find by sticking pieces of cane stalk into the cooking vat and sampling the contents. I especially liked to collect the foam that rose to the top of the simmering syrup; it became thick, almost like candy, as it cooled on the piece of cane stalk. It was not, however, supposed to be part of the syrup, and men with wire skimmers kept clearing the top of the syrup of foam, bees, flies, and miscellaneous debris until it was time to drain the finished product from the vat. It ended up being funneled into bottles (some of which I think had begun as liquor or soft drink bottles), which were capped and for the most part labeled because they were to be sold to grocers. We always had unlabeled bottles at home. Everybody at the cane grinding took home syrup one way or another, and the rest went off to market. No pancake or waffle, or cornbread or biscuit for dessert would have been imaginable without that syrup. Daddy said that in the old days the black field workers would often bring their lunch in a bucket (called a syrup bucket — half a gallon or so in size, shiny metal, with an inset lid and a wire handle), with cane syrup in the bottom of the bucket, a drinking glass upside down in the syrup, and a piece of cornbread on top of the glass. Cane syrup, like sweet mixed pickles from Cairo (“Kayro”), Georgia, is something I’ve tried to have with me at all times, even when living in Washington State or England. I’ve always used cane syrup not only for pancakes and such, but also, along with catchup, mustard, and a little Worcester sauce, to improve canned pork and beans.

I feel compelled to explain to those unfortunate enough not to know the real thing that sugar cane syrup is not dark and strong like molasses, and bears no resemblance to the mixtures sold as “cane syrup” in supermarkets, and cannot be replaced by brown sugar. Molasses was to us was a strong-tasting, iron-flavored oddity from the north. The true cane syrup of Florida and Georgia is a little thinner than most honey but thick enough for fine control when pouring over a waffle. When you hold a good bottle up to the sky you see light through it. But it has to be the right amount of light. Little light or no light coming through the bottle means that the juice was cooked too long; too much light means that it is thin, cooked too little, or even adulterated with water or corn syrup. You can also tell a good batch by the way it moves about in the bottle when you tilt it back and forth: Leisurely, clinging to the glass, is good. Quickly means watery. Sluggishly means too thick and strong-tasting.

Back to our arrival at Blitchton and search for Otis. (Do you detect that I’m easily distracted by food?) We would usually meet him long before we even got to the barn, much less clear out at the gate which separated the home area and its outbuildings from the pastures and syrup shed beyond. When he came into view we would shout, “Otis! Otis!” and run toward him. It seems to me he was always carrying a bucket in one hand, with his other hand held out from his body for counterbalance. The lower part of his wizened black face was covered with white frost of whiskers, and his head was topped with that crumpled, stained Stetson hat. Otis was about Gramma’s age, getting old, a little stooped, his cheeks and lips drawn if he weren’t wearing his false teeth. When he saw us he would smile and put down whatever he was carrying — and he was never not carrying something — and hug us when we ran up to him. Considering that we saw him only a few times a year, and then usually for one day at a time, we were as fond of him and as eager to see him as if we had lived with him for years, and he was said to be very fond of us. We were much more enthusiastic about visiting him than Gramma or our cousins next door, although we liked them too.

I’ll tell Otis’s history soon, but for now I’ll stay with our being with him.

I don’t remember much conversation with Otis. He was probably not much practiced in conversation. Mostly we just followed him around and watched him do things and, theoretically, helped him do them. Feeding chickens was fun, but going into the henhouse and collecting eggs was more interesting. There was something miraculous about finding fresh, warm eggs in the straw of the nests, and I was intrigued by the glistening white china eggs that were put in some of the nests. (As I recall, Gramma was often involved with the chickens, her other special area being a very large fenced garden of vegetables, flowers, and fruit trees across the rutted road from the windmill.) Other high points were feeding the cows and horses from inside the barn, and milking the cow, a skill I never acquired. The best part of that was when Otis (or my cousin Sim, who often did the milking) would point an udder toward the waiting cat and squirt milk in its mouth — more or less in its mouth, anyway.

At Gramma’s kitchen door was the slop bucket, where peelings, and scrapings from dinner plates, stale bread, and milk, and all manner of edible garbage were collected for the pigs which lived in the field across the paved road from the house. Otis would take up the pungent bucket in one hand, throw out his other arm, and trudge around the house to the road with a group of children in tow — usually cousins Ann and Sim would have joined us by now — who contributed by carrying corn on the cob and other fairly clean and dry forms of nourishment.

The main reason that feeding the pigs was so exhilarating was the extreme excitement of the pigs when Otis called them. Otis would shout, high-pitched, “Soo pig! Soo pig!” and from all over that field pigs would come galloping like bulky race horses, heeling to forty-five degree angles in the turns, bumping one another, squealing so loudly that it hurt my ears. Otis and would lean over the fence and dump the bucket into the trough and onto the heads of the crowding, nudging, grunting, shrilly shrieking diners, and the rest of us would happily toss in our bits.

I visited Otis’s little wooden house only a few times, and I wish I could remember more about it. I don’t want to fill in with imagination. A bed covered with a patchwork quilt took up a third of the space, I think, and there was a chair or two and a table. A sweater and a worn leather jacket hung on hooks. There was a mirror on the wall, and on a chest of drawers under it were a basin and a straight razor. Some of the cigars and candy we gave Otis for Christmas might be visible. Gordon remembers a collection of presidential campaign buttons, as well as other pins or badges. Under the bed Otis kept a lightning bolt he had found in a tree that had been struck in a storm. It protected against lightning. He said there was always a lightning bolt in or under a tree after lightning struck. The “bolts” he showed us were metal. He also sometimes saw blue lights in the woods at night and followed them, but never caught up with them.

How I wish now that I had learned more about Otis. I wonder what he did to pass his time when he was not working, what he thought, how he felt about things, whether he really had no friends outside my family, and if so, why. Otis’s story became much more important to me when I grew up and he was gone — buried in the Blitch family cemetery under a tombstone which read, “Well done, good and faithful servant” — than when I was a child and he was just a curious feature of my own life.

Otis Jackson was a black man with a small frame, bent with age, white-mustached, always wearing suspenders and, while working, a worn Stetson hat of the kind my father wore to go to church. Under the hat was a mostly bald head with sparse, tiny curls of gray hair. His destiny intersected that of my family at a turpentine camp many years before I ever saw him. My grandfather, as State Prison Physician, would tour the prisons and related facilities. Otis was a convict who had been leased by the State with others to work at the turpentine facility. The collection of pine tree sap for the manufacture of turpentine was a major industry in Florida at that time. Cups were attached to tree trunks for gathering the sticky sap that oozed from a slash in the bark. The sticky contents of the cups were collected and stored in wooden barrels to be processed into turpentine.

Anyway, Otis was working at a turpentine camp shortly after the turn of the century. He was young, imprisoned for killing a man. I think Daddy said that Otis had been working as a security guard when it happened. My mother said something about self-defense. Doctor Blitch found that Otis Jackson’s feet were in terrible shape, aggravated by walking in pine tree sap with inadequate shoes. That led to my grandfather having Otis released to his care.

And so Otis Jackson came to live at Blitchton when my father was a young boy — probably about 1906 or 1907 – and never left. My father said Otis was probably his best friend when Daddy was growing up. For some time Otis lived in a cabin on the outskirts of the collection of buildings that was the home area, and then, at some point before Mother married Daddy in 1927, he moved into “Liza’s house” not far behind and to the side of the Blitch home. Liza had been a cook, and when she was gone Otis inherited the house. If he was over seventy when we knew him, he’d been living alone in that cabin for half a century.

Otis lived in the room of the house which had a fireplace — the other room being used for storage. It was basically a place for sleeping. He ate all of his meals and did a lot of sitting in the large kitchen area of the Blitch house. I remember that when he was not sitting in there, and Gramma wanted him, she’d go onto the back porch and call in a loud, shrill voice, “O-tis! O-tis!” from the back porch, prolonging the “O”, accent on the “t”. His work was restricted to the areas immediately around the house — feeding chickens and livestock, milking the cow, sweeping the yard, cranking the corn machine, and things of that kind. When I knew him he did not do field work or other heavy labor, although in the past he had worked side by side with my father and others in the fields, sometimes wielding the “snake stick” to kill a rattler disturbed by the farm machinery. And of course he did no house work, which was the province of several women. Mother said that while he had jobs to do, he was “pretty much his own boss” in deciding what to do, and where to be, and when. If he was not working, eating, sleeping, or relaxing in his house or the kitchen, he was most likely to be hunting. Mother told me he’d always loved hunting, and that Dr. Blitch gave him a shotgun not long after Otis came to live at Blitchton.

DADDY WITH HIS DOGS

Once Otis took me with him squirrel hunting. We went down to a pond in the hammock woods, Otis cradling his venerable shotgun under his arm. He told me to lie down on my back and watch the treetops. He lay down next to me and told me to just stay still and wait. Which reminds me that I cannot specifically remember anything else that Otis ever said. That’s mostly due to lost memories, but probably also because there was not much conversation. We watched the boughs of the hickories and oaks until a squirrel appeared, and Otis quietly but quickly pointed his shotgun to the sky, braced it against his shoulder, and fired. A squirrel came tumbling down through the leaves and plopped limply onto the ground. Back at the house, Otis showed me how to skin a squirrel, like pulling a sweater off over its head.

Otis never showed any desire to leave Blitchton, even for trips, even after Doctor Blitch, to whom he was devoted, passed away. He apparently never became attached to anyone outside my family. While he would go up to the store to buy tobacco, he didn’t spend much time there. On Sunday mornings he would put on a tie and a suit and go to church, where the other Negroes always addressed him respectfully as “Mister Otis.”
THE BLITCHTON CHURCH

At Christmas we, and Landis’s family, and Gramma, would give him things like sweaters and tobacco. Almost everything he had — from quilts to shirts and overalls to his shotgun and rifle and ammunition — were bought and given to him, rather than bought with money paid to him. Otis was simply indifferent to money and to the outer world. It was absolutely impossible to picture him anywhere but at Blitchton. The idea of Otis working at a gas station, or as a janitor in some city building, or at Morrison’s cafeteria as a waiter, or as a porter on the Orange Blossom Special, or in any of the other jobs which black men tended to have in those days, was frightening. It was as if Blitchton itself were a bubble from a former century which had somehow survived past its time, floating on the surface of the Twentieth Century with Otis and his cabin and Gramma and her house protected inside, until finally the bubble popped and all was gone except for the tombstones in the sandy family cemetery, surrounded by an ancient rusting metal fence.

This concludes the Blitchton chapter, but there will be more about Blitchton and my relatives there in future chapters.

BLITCHTON Memoirs of Fleming Lee, Chapter 5, Part 1

2007-10-23T08:08:00.002-05:00

Blitchton is like a foundation stone which has to be put in place before the rest of this story can be built. In the constellation of places which marked the boundaries of my world — Gainesville, Blitchton, Ocala, Lake Weir, and, like farthest Thule, Jacksonville and Cohens Brothers department store — Blitchton was more than a point on the surface of the Florida peninsula. It had another dimension. It was the crystallized past. Not only did it preserve, in appearance and activity, the old Florida frontier of cattle and cracker cowboys -- but it was also always linked with stories of past generations and old wars.

Mother’s family and their homes in Ocala were, in my mind, “like us,” like my friends and their families in Gainesville, but Daddy’s country was from a different world, one which I am very glad that I got to see but where I was always like a fascinated foreigner in an old land populated by cows and sheep and horses and pigs and chickens, where metal-roofed houses rested on stacks of stones on lawns of raked white sand, and to use the telephone you had to turn a crank.

When I was a child Blitchton covered several thousand acres. It was part ranch, part farm, very much as it had been in the late 19th Century when Daddy was born there. After Mother and Daddy were married in 1927 (seven years after Daddy’s father died on January 30, 1920) they moved to Blitchton in 1928 from an Ocala apartment; they were going to make their living ranching and operating the new sawmill. Blitchton had long been a little community with its own school, white wooden church, a store or two, and my grandfather’s medical office. By the time I knew it, Blitchton was mostly a crossroads with a name (it’s still on the state map, though its name came to be misspelled “Blichton” in spite of family efforts to have it corrected). There was still the store built by Daddy and his brother at the meeting of State Road 326 and U.S. 27 (the stretch of U.S. 27 that runs the 13 miles from Ocala to Blitchton being known in Ocala as the “Blitchton Road”), and the remains of the abandoned old store and medical office.

Blitchton Store, 1932

A few hundred yards down a quiet, shady road from the crossroads was the old church next to a cemetery, the old store building of sagging dark lumber, and on the left side of the road, “the homeplace” where Gramma (grandmother Dollie Davis Blitch) lived and my father had grown up.

The town of Blitchton had been created by and around Dr. Simeon Hardee Blitch, my father’s father. Dr. Blitch’s father, James, had received wilderness land in that part of Florida after military service under General Andrew Jackson, under the “Armed Occupation Act”. By marking and fencing boundaries and successfully defending them from Indians, the family had earned ownership of this remote land of pine woods, palmettos, and the rich shady forests called hammocks – big verdant islands of oak, hickory, ironwood and myriad other trees in an ocean of white sand. The Indians that had been there long before left behind their mounds and many arrowheads and fragmented artifacts. The Spanish explorers had crossed there, leaving rumors of buried treasure chests. Otherwise the territory was untouched until my ancestors settled there in the 1830’s.

Dr. Blitch, as we heard him called by everyone from my Mother to the inhabitants of the Blitchton area, was legendary not just because he was dead but because was always recalled as an extraordinary person even in places far beyond Blitchton. Maybe that was not only because Florida had been a small world in the early 20th century, but also because my grandfather had been Florida’s state prison physician and a member of the state legislature for several terms in the late 1880s. Even at college age I was still meeting strangers as far away as Tampa who, when they heard my name, asked if I were related to “Dr. Blitch.”

The youngest of a large number of children in a family which lost many men in the War Between the States, he worked for awhile in a saloon in his youth and became disgusted by the effects of alcohol. He moved on to Cedar Key, ferrying mail to the offshore islands. Then my grandfather entered medical school at Louisville Medical College in Louisville, Kentucky. Not having enough money to pay his way, he persuaded the administration to let him pursue his medical degree in exchange for work as a janitor. His residence was the school’s furnace room. He became an outstanding student, earned his degree with distinction, and returned to Florida to practice medicine. Among several medals he received in academic recognition, we still possess a gold medal engraved, "Prize on Anatomy to S.H. Blitch from Prof. C. W. Kelley, L.M.C., Feb. 27/78", his freshman year.

He had offices at both Blitchton and Ocala, and until automobiles became available, he traveled the unpaved thirteen miles back and forth by horse and buggy. It is hard to imagine now, zipping along Route 27 at seventy miles an hour in a fleet of other vehicles, what it must have been like to travel alone that road at the pace of a horse’s trot, flanked by forests largely untouched, hearing nothing louder over the jingle of harness and the clopping of hooves than a bird’s cry, or a dog’s bark, or the lowing of a cow. My father recalled riding with his father to and from Ocala in that way, enjoying the incense of warm bread from the bakery on the journey home.

(My father, before he was married, received the contract to clear the path for a prospective paved road across Marion County to the Levy County line. Where his father had once driven a horse and buggy, and later bounced along in a model T Ford, Daddy and his crews cleared underbrush, cut down trees, and dynamited stumps to make way for the new, asphalt road — and for the new tourists from the North who contributed so much to his aggravation while driving. One of Daddy’s favorite stories was about a worker who put too much dynamite under a stump and blew it clear through the front door of a roadside “shotgun” house and out the back.)

In spite of living in a rural area which until later in his life was on the boundary of civilization, Dr. Blitch gained national fame because of a surgical procedure which he originated. A young black boy at Blitchton had a club foot, a condition then supposed to be untreatable. Dr. Blitch decided that there was a way to operate which would bring the foot much closer to normal. His surgery succeeded, and the boy was able to walk as if he had no affliction. Dr. Blitch was asked to come to New York to Columbia University Medical School to demonstrate the operation there, which he did. I wondered if this story had been exaggerated, but years later, in a university library, I searched out a report of it in an old medical journal and saw my grandfather’s name there, and an article about his innovation.

When he was elected to the Florida legislature for several terms, he named his daughter “Legie” for that reason. He was apparently captivated by “L’s” because he named my father “Loonis” and his brother “Landis.” My father was afflicted with his name because one of Dr. Blitch’s good friends was named “Loomis,” and Dr. Blitch wanted to name Daddy after him, but not quite. My father’s name was as often misspelled as correctly spelled.

Photographs show that my grandfather was a slender man with striking eyes, like the eyes of a hypnotist, under dark brows. His head was crowned by thick, wavy hair, and his mouth is mostly hidden by a full moustache which turns up to points at the ends about halfway across his cheeks, making his chin seem small in comparison. In some of the old photographs he has his arm around an attractive woman and looks quite pleased with the situation.

My father revered his father and always preserved his saddle bags, which held old medicines drying in their glass bottles which we still possess. Daddy also showed us the microscope from the Blitchton office, with which his father had impressed young Loonis with views of living germs scraped from a dog’s tongue, hoping to discourage the child from letting pets lick his mouth.

My grandfather left behind a wealth of land, but little money. At one time he owned most of what has become downtown Ocala, which would have made us all very rich, but he guaranteed a loan for a friend, and when the friend defaulted Dr. Blitch paid the debt and lost his Ocala real estate. I identified with him not only because of his lack of business sense but also because his predominant trait was said to be a one track mind. Unfortunately I did not also share the dedication and persistence which kept his career on one track.

My father’s mother was Mary Susan “Dollie” Davis before she got married. Her family fled from South Carolina after the South lost the war. Some of the men in the family had continued guerilla operations after Lee’s surrender, taking part in an ambush of Northern troops. They were also involved in the Ku Klux Klan. Some of the men of the family were caught and jailed, but one of their former slaves used a mule and rope to pull out the window bars so the prisoners could escape in the night. Our cousin Ann, who grew up on the farm next door to the Dr. Blitch residence, said that Dollie was in vitro as they traveled the escape route and was born after their arrival in Marion County.

They made their way south to Florida and traveled by boat down the St. Johns River and Oklawaha River to the Silver River, on which they journeyed on to Silver Springs, where they looked for a new place to settle down. So, my grandmother’s family saw Silver Springs when it was just a docking place for river craft, not yet decorated by those glass bottomed boats and souvenir shops by means of which, more than half a century later, Hugh Ray’s (my mother’s brother-in-law’s) father and his partner Davidson turned Silver Springs into a national tourist attraction.

My grandfather died of pneumonia at the age of 64, in 1920, exhausted from treating people during the great flu epidemic of 1918, and so Gramma had been a widow for a number of years by the time I first remember her, at the end of the 1930's. She looked the part of the frontier wife — thin, with stern, wrinkled features behind a pair of rimless spectacles, not much given to laughing, her gray hair parted down the middle and pulled hard back above her ears into a bun at the back of her head. She always wore heavy-looking black shoes, and her dresses hung on her thin body as if on a rack. Her clothes definitely had not been designed with glamour in mind, and fitted in with her stern Southern Baptist attitudes. (I could not even begin to imagine Dollie Davis as a girl until after my parents died, when I saw her girlhood scrapbook. Lots of flowers, and poetry almost entirely on the subject of marriage and getting married. There was not much variety in the scrapbook, whose colorful contents were almost all from cards given away with household purchases – probably a symptom of living far from the population and publication centers of 19th Century America.

Gramma was very strict as a mother, and my father complained about her harshness, of her making him go to school even when he was sick. Although she always had a lot of hired help from what she called “the darkies” (the polite term in her day) around Blitchton, I never saw her do anything but work . . . which most picturesquely included churning butter in a barrel between her legs.

Unlike the lavish oral history that commemorated her husband, Gramma generated few stories. The one I remember best is that she was out in a pasture with a small child when a bull charged the child. Gramma grabbed her sunbonnet and threw it over the bull’s face, so that she could run with the child to safety. Another story was that Gramma had gone to a lot of trouble to fix a big meal, and when all the food was on the dining table Dr. Blitch attacked a fly with a fly swatter and hit the chandelier, sending a shower of shattered glass down onto the dinner. “I don’t think I ever saw Mama so mad,” Daddy would laugh.

When we drove to Blitchton from Gainesville the game was, “Where does our land begin?” There was a lot of it. Daddy and his brother had added to the original with low-priced purchases while they were young. There was a pond on the right side of Route 27 which marked the beginning as we headed south from Williston, and all three children vied to make the announcement as it came in sight. We knew that everything from here on was “ours”. From that spot on, every tree, every fence, every squirrel or cow took on a special meaning.

We would watch for the state road sign, “BLITCHTON,” and shortly we would arrive at the crossroads store. The Blitchton Store had a metal roof in two levels which covered the main building and an open porch across the front, eternally occupied by a few loungers of both races. There was a gas pump or two. In the oldest days I can remember the pump had a glass tank at the top. The required amount of gas was pumped by hand up into the glass tank, marked with measurement lines, and then released down the hose into the waiting car or truck or tractor.

When we got out of our car to go inside, the omnipresent loiterers — seated in chairs or on the steps or propped against a railing — would stir. They all knew my parents.

“Hey, Loonis,” a beer bellied white man would say.

“Hey, Mr. Bleech,” a black man would say. “Good mornin’, Miz Bleech.”

(Every colored person in the area invariably pronounced the name as “Bleech” to rhyme with “bleach” instead of “Blitch” to rhyme with “itch” as every white person did. Why would that be?)

On the outside wall by the front door was a giant thermometer embodied in a rusting advertisement for Nehi sodas. Inside, the place was dim and fragrant, particularly with the scent of the tobacco of unsold cigars, snuff, and chewing tobacco. To the left was the counter with the cash register. In the front of the counter was a bullet hole, its edges worn smooth by inquisitive fingers, which a would-be robber had created when shooting at Landis during an unsuccessful hold-up. On the counter were big jars containing packets of Tom’s peanut butter crackers, and salted peanuts, candy bars, pickled sausages, and oversized dill pickles under mold-surfaced liquid. Facing the counter were slide-top coolers containing the soft drinks and beer, and the rest of the place was packed with merchandise of all kinds, with the emphasis on canned goods.

The most memorable thing about visiting the store was the sight of men opening their bottles of beer and then dumping salt into the bottles. As I remember, salt makes beer foam, and the drinker would have to clap his mouth over the opening to keep his brew from erupting onto the floor.

I don’t think there was another store within miles, probably not closer than Williston or Fellowship, and so the Blitchton Store was the gathering place for everybody, black and white, who lived or worked in the area. From morning until after dark, in addition to people of both sexes shopping or filling conveyances with gas, the lounging men were eating, drinking, spitting tobacco juice, and above all talking and laughing. The enterprising manager even projected movies on the white side of the building at night, and barbequed goats.

After we visited the store and got soft drinks, we would drive the few hundred yards down a shady road to the home place. The schoolhouse had once been on the right side of the road, and when I was very young the little church still stood nearby. But in almost all of my memories, only the cemetery remained, surrounded by a wire fence, entered through a little gate. The biggest tombstone belongs to Dr. Blitch. Daddy’s brother Lansing, who had died an infant, was buried there. So were numerous other people named “Blitch” and their relatives. Almost all the dates on the stones started with “18" instead of “19.”

The first home, on the left, a simple one storied place probably built in the 1930's, belonged to Uncle Landis and Aunt Mary and our cousins, Ann and Sim. Then, after a hundred yards or so, on the same side of the road, was the house in which Daddy had grown up, and where his mother and father had lived from the time they were married.

Gramma’s house had grown like a living thing — starting small, adding rooms as life developed. The heart of the rambling "homeplace" dated back to the 19th Century. Supported a foot or more above the sandy ground by foundation pillars of flat limestone rocks, and topped by a three gabled metal roof broken here and there by a chimney, the home place had no doubt started with a kitchen, dining room, bedroom and a sitting room, and then added breezy screened walkways, more bedrooms, bathrooms, a formal entrance parlor, and a partially screened porch which ran across the front and down both sides. On the right side was the self-contained apartment in which Mother and Daddy had lived when they were first married in 1927, until the Depression drove my father to a job in St. Augustine, and which Gramma now rented to someone. On the front porch was one of my favorite things — a porch swing big enough for four people, suspended by chains from the ceiling. It was much more comfortable than the rocking chairs, with their starched and ironed white back covers, and we had nothing like it at home.

When we arrived, Gramma would greet us on the front porch and hug us, smiling, showing bits of gold in her teeth, looking as if smiling was unfamiliar to her, yet full of pleasure at seeing us. We would quickly end up in the kitchen, where the original cooking stove burned wood, and the later one kerosene. Their scents, somehow very pleasant, combined with the lingering smell of steaming coffee and the buttery perfume of Gramma’s inimitable yellow cake with boiled white icing to give the kitchen a unique and indelible odor.

When I asked Mother why Gramma’s cakes smelled better than anyone else’s, she said it was a lot of “country butter.” As I’ve mentioned, Gramma churned the butter herself, using a big paddle to transform milk brought up from the barn still foamy. She would take out a ball of butter between her hands and squeeze and shape it on a plate. I didn’t like country butter because it was not salted, but I loved the things cooked with it.

After greeting Gramma, we children would race out onto the white sand of the back yard to find the main object of our interest — Otis.

(To be continued, with illustrations.)

LAKE WEIR: Memoirs of Fleming Lee Chapter 4

2007-09-30T07:01:00.001-05:00

I am posting a link to this chapter because I posted it out of order before I decided to post my Memoirs. So, please use the link to read Chapter 4, posted as "August Memoir".

Thanks!

MY FIRST WAR -- Memoirs of Fleming Lee, Chapter 3, Part 2

2007-09-17T10:22:00.000-05:00

Among other pointless wartime activities organized by Roosevelt’s government was airplane spotting. In a big clearing at the Blitchton crossroads, next to the white-painted wooden store that my father and his brother had built many years before, an official tower was erected. When you climbed the pine ladder and stepped onto the timber-supported platform your feet were at about the level of the store’s roof. From this frightening height, near tree top level, protected by railings and shaded by a high roof, you could see the sky all around.

Local civilians took turns manning the tower. Gramma (Daddy’s mother), as the matriarch of the community, was in charge of the whole operation, or at least I thought she was. During her watch she would sit, thin and straight, in gold-rimmed glasses, in her longish flower-print country dress, on a folding chair with binoculars around her neck and a log book and binder of aircraft silhouettes next to her on a little table.

She would shell blackeyed peas into a colander in her lap as she scanned the bright Florida sky for a miraculous materialization of Messerschmitts. When occasionally a plane would drone lazily into sight, and she would look at it through the binoculars and make a note in the log book. If the intruder had shown the profile of an enemy plane she would have made a phone call, but I'm sure she never made a phone call; all enemy planes were hopelessly separated from Blitchton by broad oceans and thousands of miles.

Unlike aircraft, German submarines could and did reach Florida, sinking merchant ships within sight of the beach. Sometimes members of the U-boat crews surreptitiously came ashore — for sightseeing purposes rather than to spy, but espionage stories abounded, as did tales that this or that pair of men who at some store or other had bought a bottle of milk and ice cream, or Coca Colas and a newspaper, were from German submarines. It was said that when a certain German submarine was disabled off the central Florida coast , a copy of the morning paper was on board.

When our dog, Nippy, who was almost a cocker spaniel, came whining slowly home one morning with blood on his black and white coat from what appeared to be a bullet wound in his neck skin, Daddy concluded that German spies had shot him. Why would German spies shoot a cocker spaniel? Because during his nightly ramblings Nippy found them spying in our neighborhood, and he started barking, and they shot him to shut him up. Luckily Nippy recovered. That German inflicted wound to a member of our family was the closest the war ever touched us personally.

A daily feature – several times a day, in fact -- during that period was Daddy listening to the war news on the radio. Those were protected moments with which nothing must interfere. “The war news is coming on,” meant keep quiet and stay out of the way. The correspondents and commentators would talk about this front and the other front, attacks, counterattacks and retreats by the enemy or strategic regroupings by the Americans, while Daddy listened intently and I waited for something more interesting to come on.

Once I asked him, “Will they still have news programs when the war is over?”

He laughed and answered, “Sure they will.”

“But what could they have on them? All the news is about the war.”

When we were not listening to the radio in the evening, Daddy would sit and read the newspaper. We had the Jacksonville 'Times Union' delivered in the morning and the much slimmer 'Gainesville Sun' in the afternoon. There was no television yet, and I don’t recall that we ever played phonograph records. In comparison with the audiovisual overload of evenings in later years it is hard for me to imagine now how everybody passed the time between our 6:30 supper and bedtime. Maybe that’s one reason I took to reading in such a big way.

During those war years (and in subsequent years as well) we never went out to eat except at the sedate Primrose Grill for a rare Sunday lunch, and I can recall only one time that we had company except when relatives came from Ocala on holidays. That was when a college friend of Daddy’s who had become a preacher was in Gainesville overnight to speak at the Baptist church. He and his wife ate at our dining room table, and we children listened in awe to the sonorous tones of this great man, about whose importance we’d been duly informed. He was by far the most prestigious person we had ever met. All I can remember is that he was very serious, and that he said he would not eat any bread before he preached. When I asked him why, he said something about digestion and Mother changed the subject.

The question returns to nag me, what in the world did everyone do in the evenings? As I recall, unless the radio was on, which it often was, the livingroom was very quiet. It was so quiet that what I remember best is the slight squeaking sound that Daddy absentmindedly made as his fingers rubbed the pages of the newspaper together while he absorbed column after column of war news. Occasionally he might comment.

“They have this new bum” — he pronounced “bomb” “bum” — “They have this new bum that’ll destroy a whole block. They call it a blockbuster.” He shook his head. “One bum that blows up all the houses in a block. Isn’t that terrible? But we have to do it.”

Mother might be looking at a different part of the newspaper, or a magazine like "Life" or "Colliers" or "The Saturday Evening Post.: I, of course, was usually reading, often up in my own room, although I might play with my metal toy soldiers on the livingroom floor, or get involved in a children’s board or card game with my mother and brothers. Mostly, though, I just remember how quiet and uneventful the evenings were — somewhat representative of our entire family history, where nothing big or unusual or dramatic ever happened, and during which I cannot recall my parents ever having a fight or raising their voices at one another.

One momentous night Mother and Daddy woke my brothers and me up before dawn and told us they wanted us to be able to remember an historic occasion.

Sirens were sounding outside in the Gainesville darkness. It was D Day. The invasion of Europe from England was taking place. We clustered around the radio and heard excited reports spoken from the decks of ships, the sounds of explosions and screaming airplane engines in the background. And then, none too sure what we had just experienced, we three boys went back to our beds.

I recall much more clearly a night when we were roused from sleep and brought out into the front yard to see one of the greatest meteor showers ever. It was definitely much more impressive than any I have ever seen since. Scarcely a second went by that at least one shooting star did not highlight the tracery of our pine trees and palm fronds. Often multiple streaks of fire illuminated the sky at the same time, illuminating our lawn. I wish I knew what year and month that was.

Another memorable wartime episode came on another night, but this time very early in the evening, before dinner as I recall. I was in the livingroom when I heard shouts in the dark street outside, that street whose thick pavement of pine needles normally muffled the sounds of passersby.

“Extra! Extra!”

We went to the front door, and in the dusk we could see two boys with bags of newspapers slung on their shoulders coming down either side of Fletcher Terrace.

“Extra! President Roosevelt dies! President Roosevelt is dead! Extra!”

We bought a "Gainesville Sun", and there were those gigantic black headlines one sees only in wartime taking up at least a third of the front page, and a big picture of F.D.R. In my family this was news to be treated with mixed emotions. Although Roosevelt was a Democrat, and nobody in the south, including my parents, could even have imagined voting Republican, he was considered by my father to have been the promoter of useless, ruinous, socialist schemes designed to end a Depression which would soon have ended itself through natural causes. Roosevelt, he said, had made government too big and too powerful, and had piled tormenting paperwork on county agents and others. Eleanor Roosevelt was worse than Franklin, even to the point of trying to upset the delicate balance between white and black in the South. At the same time, my parents were too nice and too Christian to express pleasure about anybody’s death, especially at the height of a war in which this president had been touted as a patriotic symbol. There was a somber air in our house as those old enough to read pored over the freshly ink-impregnated newsprint.

One time in our back yard, several children discussed the puzzling question, “How do wars start?”

I came up with the inspired answer: Two people started fighting, and just as on the school grounds everybody would run to watch. Then the friends of the two fighters began fighting on each side, and their friends joined in, until finally the battle grew so big that it was a war, with thousands of people fighting on each side.

“Then millions of people.”

“And then a trillion.”

“Then a million trillion.

“A million trillion trillion. . .”

“There aren’t that many people in the world!”

“Yes there are.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know.”

“No you don’t.”

“Hey, we might be starting a war right here!”

It was an exciting thought, but it didn’t develop. What did come out of that discussion was the idea that a war might have three or four groups fighting one another simultaneously. After I had learned a little more about history, in a moment of illumination I realized that none of the wars I knew about involved more than two sides. Why was that?

I do not remember the day in 1945 that Germany surrendered, but Japan’s surrender a few months later takes me to the place where we heard that news — Lake Weir – which in turn takes me to that small area of the planet outside Gainesville which completed my world.

(To be continued in Chapter 4.)

Copyright 2005 by Fleming Lee

MEMOIRS OF FLEMING LEE Chapter Three, Part 1

2007-09-12T07:33:00.000-05:00

MY FIRST WAR

While we were living in our little rented house after arriving in Gainesville, our main entertainment, other than my parents’ ritualistic reading of the daily newspaper, was the radio. Even before we left St. Augustine I had developed an addiction to afternoon serials like “The Lone Ranger”, his faithful Indian companion, Tonto, and his great horse Silver (“Hi ho, Silver!”); “Jack Armstrong, the All American Boy”; “The Johnson Family”; “The Shadow” — all of which, as I recall, were sources of trinkets such as rings that glowed in the dark (the excitement of opening the little package and going into the closet and seeing the mystic light in the blackness) and secret code wheels. There was also “The Whistler” and some character who investigated apparent supernatural phenomena and always uncovered some comforting natural explanation, such as proving that the howling ghost was only the wind in a chink in the lighthouse wall.

The after supper radio programs were aimed more at adult tastes, or what passed for adult tastes in the United States. There were musical programs, from Kate Smith and opera singers to the Grand Old Opry, as well as dramas, but for us children the best shows were clustered on Sunday night: Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Fibber Magee and Molly, and Edgar Bergen and Charley McCarthy were the much-anticipated high points. I also liked The Great Gildersleeve, Amos and Andy, and Henry Aldrich, although I’m not sure when they were broadcast. On Sunday nights the incomparable comedy lineup ended when “One Man’s Family” began.
One Sunday morning in December, not many months after moving from St. Augustine to Gainesville, we drove down to Blitchton, the farm where my father was born and raised. Our Blitchton land, which at that time consisted of 3000 acres or more, will have a chapter of its own, and so I will just say here that it was about thirty miles southwest of Gainesville, and that my father’s mother, and his brother and his wife and two children, lived there in adjacent houses near the crossroads of Route 27 and State Road 326, where the community of Blitchton had grown up around my then grandfather’s rural medical practice and other activities.
Several times each year we would go down to Blitchton for the day, sometimes not making our grandmother and uncle and cousins aware of our presence, and enjoy walking through the expanses of pine woods, hammocks, and grazing lands. Those who were old enough to bear the weight of a .22 rifle would shoot at tin cans and bottles lined up on a fence. We would visit a pond or two and admire the basking turtles and the occasional alligator, and on occasion launch a floating bottle to explode with rifle fire.
“Look at that boat. Watch the boat! Pow! I sank that boat!”

For lunch we would build a fire and open a can of pork and beans and stick it down in the coals next to the flames, turning it until all sides began to bubble. Meanwhile out came the inevitable picnic viands: Canned Vienna sausages, Underwood deviled ham, Saltine crackers, and cold hardboiled eggs with salt and pepper for dipping. Then, after stuffing ourselves, we would lie back on the cushion of pine needles and watch the clouds and the leisurely circling of black buzzards high, high in the sky.
We always went to Blitchton to get our Christmas tree, evergreen boughs and mistletoe. On the particular Sunday in December that I’m telling about we made our usual trek to find a tree — which was never a quick process, since we would find several candidates scattered through the woods, perhaps half a mile or more apart, and debate their merits, and then travel back and forth between them to refresh our memories before finally cutting one down. Along the way my father would skillfully use his shotgun to bring clumps of mistletoe down from high up in an oak tree without damaging the berried cluster, and my mother would supervise the cutting of the choicest boughs of wild holly.
Daddy had no fear of directing his automobile off across fields and woods unmarked by roads or trails – just as he had astonished my mother when they were first married. He knew the land so well that he was (usually) able to avoid tree stumps and boulders even in tall grass.

On that December Sunday we made a point to get home with our Christmas tree in time not to miss our favorite evening radio programs -- but only just in time. When I ran to the brown Gothic arch of the Philco and turned it on and turned the dial to the right number, we heard these words:
“We are interrupting our regular programming to bring you the latest news on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.”
Mother and Daddy looked shocked as I never seen them before, hurrying to stare at the radio at close range, but my only reaction was dismay that the unbelievable, the unthinkable had happened: A Sunday night without Charley McCarthy and Edgar Bergen’s dialogue with Mortimer Snerd! What possibly could be more important than that — or Allen’s Alley, with Mrs. Nussbaum, or the riotous opening of Fibber Magee’s closet, or Jack Benny trading gibes with rasping Rochester?
My parents’ efforts to explain the situation to a seven-year-old — much less to a four-year-old and a two-year-old — were futile. I was no more aware that a war had already started in Europe two years before than I was that I had been born in the depths of the Great Depression. I was beginning second grade, and the only links I had with Far Eastern affairs were picture books of “Children of the World,” in which young Japanese ran merrily about in kimonos, flying their dragon kites above cherry blossoms. But now that young Japanese were flying airplanes above American warships, the connection with the picture books was not obvious.

So began the Second World War for the Blitch family. My understanding of what it was all about did not really begin until considerably after it had ended when I was in the sixth or seventh grade. In fact I did not understand what it was really about until I was in college and beyond.
During the war years, which approximately spanned my sojourn at J. J. Finley Elementary School from first through sixth grade, I was impacted mainly by the incessant propaganda, the rationing, the collection drives, the air raid drills, and the radio war news to which my father attended religiously.
The construction of our new home would have been thwarted, but Mr. McLain told my parents that he could go ahead and build it with materials already on hand . . . though ours would be one of the last two houses he could build until after the war.
After Pearl Harbor it was impossible to get through a day without seeing posters of bucktoothed Japanese in thick glasses brandishing knives dripping blood from their blades. Franklin Roosevelt having achieved his goal of getting the United States into a war against Germany, the Japanese were joined by fanged Hitlers and Mussolinis waving handfuls of bombs, and evil-eyed German soldiers whose oversized boots marched across carpets of bloody women and children. I was most impressed by a poster of a giant octopus with three heads — Tojo, Hitler, and Mussolini. Its tentacles stretched around the world, threatening even the peace-loving United States.

Washington and Hollywood lost no time reinforcing the lessons as to who was good and who was evil. The demonic triumvirate of Tojo, Hitler, and Mussolini was balanced by the Twentieth Century’s leading saints -- Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and jovial Uncle Joe Stalin.
We children collected newspapers, crushed tin cans flat, made balls of the tinfoil wrappers of chewing gum and candy, and marshaled other items of questionable value to a military effort. We even put dented pots and pans in a bin on the courthouse square, where a poster showed a child looking up at an American bomber flying overhead and saying, “Look, Mom, there goes our frying pan!”
After I joined the Cub Scouts there was a contest to see which Cub could collect the most newspapers for the war effort and win a prize. The Den Mother exhorted us to patriotic action even though she was unable to explain how the newspapers would be used in the war. In addition to confiscating all the newsprint that came into our own house, I pestered the neighbors with an atypical display of aggressiveness,. Eventually I had a small mountain of papers stacked in our garage, and I easily won the prize . . . which turned out to be a Hershey Bar. My own disappointment was exceeded by my father’s outrage.
“A five cent Hershey Bar?” he said. “A Hershey bar for all the work?”
He was still upset about it forty years later, and would occasionally retell the story, with a rueful grin and shake of his head.

Next door to us, on the opposite side from the Hills, now lived the Fields family, whose house had been built soon after ours. Mrs. Fields, her son Peter (about my age), and her cute daughter-in-law, Patty, who was pregnant, lived there, while Colonel Fields and Patty’s husband were off at war. Colonel Fields came back with war souvenirs from Europe, some of which he gave to me: A large swastika flag from the schoolhouse at Aachen, its wooly material punctured by shrapnel and bullet holes. A German helmet with a man’s name and the city, “Munchen,” written on the leather lining with a pen. A heavy leather belt with “Gott mit uns” on the big buckle.
Rationing meant coupons for gas and tires and sugar and I don’t know what else. Butter was replaced by white blocks of margarine that came with little packets of yellow color that had to be kneaded into the lardlike glop. (I actually enjoyed doing that job for Mother, briefly.) We saw a lot of Velveeta and little cheddar -- cheddar and Philadelphia cream cheese being the two forms of cheese to which we’d been accustomed, along with the little glasses of Kraft spreads, pickle-pimento and pineapple.

We learned the word, “hoarding,” a bad thing. It was also unpatriotic to use your car any more than you absolutely had to. “Is this trip necessary?” Daddy had always been an excruciatingly slow driver, but now he drove slower than ever to save gas and wear. The rare thirty or forty mile drive to Blitchton or Ocala seemed to take hours, aggravated by the attitudes of other drivers who did not think that thirty-five miles an hour on the highway was appropriate even in wartime. Of course the roads were all two lane, and we would have accumulated a caravan of several automobiles by the time we came around a curve with a long, straight view ahead and the people behind us could finally sail past.
“Darn yankees!” my father would invariably say as they started around. “Get down here after driving in those mountains and think they can go seventy miles an hour.”
It mattered not (except to me, who kept score and listed it as one of those things I didn’t like about my father) that the license plates on the passing cars usually turned out to be from Florida or Georgia; the commentary on cursed yankees remained the same.

After my food-loving grandmother in Ocala (my mother’s mother) taught me to make fudge, I saved rationed sugar by not putting it in my iced tea until I had saved enough for a batch of candy. As for meat, we suffered no deprivation as many people did, because we had the cornucopia of Blitchton with its uninterrupted supply of chicken, beef, pork, and lamb. For awhile my parents rented a freezer locker to accommodate the Blitchton bounty. We would take a side of beef or a pig which had been slaughtered at the farm to be cut into steaks and roasts and stored it in the freezer room.
A visit to our freezer locker was a treat. We would enter through a massively thick wooden door and instantly be at the North Pole. When the big door boomed shut, a shiver of terror augmented the shivers of cold. What if it wouldn’t open? What if it stuck? What if somebody locked it from outside? We would go to our locker, put white-wrapped packages into our basket, and hurry back out into the suddenly incredibly hot, moisture-heavy Florida air. Later my parents bought a deep freeze, like a refrigerator on its side, in order to store the meat at home in the breakfast nook.
It was in the short, windowless hall between our home’s entrance hall and den that we huddled during air raid drills. A siren would disturb the night, and the citizenry were supposed to turn off all lights except in a light-proofed inner room. Air raid wardens would move through the dark streets blowing whistles at any moving object, and knocking on doors if there were any leakage of light. In our downstairs hallway, where the telephone (on a shelf in the wall) and the oil furnace alcove were located, we could close the door at each end and safely leave the light on without fear of alerting air raid wardens or German pilots.

Art Caged by Life

2007-09-09T08:35:00.000-05:00

This fascinating article, “Even in a Virtual World, ‘Stuff’ Matters”, is a discussion of ways in which people who have become residents of “Second Life” have slavishly imitated the consumerism and personal vanities of real life (“RL” to the initiated) rather than creating a truly brave new world. The emphasis of the article is on the mass craving for conspicuous consumption, and for spending money on things which are necessary in RL but completely unnecessary in Second Life (“SL”). It's a good study in human nature.

In short, most people are as depressing and unimaginative in SL as in RL because they’ve ignored an opportunity to break the bonds of social customs and pressures, not to mention gravity. It’s like what a spiritualist said to me about people’s spirits in the afterlife: “If they’ve been nasty here, they’re not suddenly going to become nice on the Other Side.” I hope that if we do design our own Heavens I don't keep running into other people's malls and wig shops as I do in SL.

The first thing that struck me along that line, when I’d been in SL only a few days, was the fact that much SL architecture imitates RL architecture even though the laws of SL physics provide much more freedom than those of RL.

THIS COULD BE NEW JERSEY

Things will stay where they are placed, whether above, on, or under the surface of the SL earth. SL structures, therefore, do not need the supporting, load-bearing elements used in the real world. . . and yet most SL structures are redundantly burdened with all the foundations, pilings, columns, and braces which have challenged RL architects for centuries.

THESE WOULD HAVE DONE JUST FINE WITHOUT THE PILINGS

Likewise, a door or other object in SL can be made “phantom”, meaning that one can simply walk through it like a ghost, and yet all the paraphernalia of house doors that have to be opened and closed are encountered throughout SL. True, a phantom door can’t be locked, but most people don’t lock doors in SL anyway. Stairs are generally unnecessary in SL because one can simply float up, and yet stairways abound in SL even though they are often difficult to negotiate.

THIS ONE IS MORE ADAPTED TO ITS ENVIRONMENT, BUT STILL STUCK WITH SUPERFLUOUS SUPPORTS

Everyone can fly, soar, and hover in SL, and yet helicopters and other aircraft are not uncommon. The climate is (as far as I know) pleasant short-sleeve weather all the time, with never a drop of rain and no insects, and yet windows are covered with “glass”, and some of the clothing would make an Eskimo keel over onto the Arctic ice from heat prostration.

It’s hard to say whether people who enter SL and want things done in exactly the same way they are done in RL are simply victims of habit, and inability to think outside the box, or whether the socially conditioned worry about seeming “different” keeps them in bondage in both worlds.

When I told my neighbor in SL – who has created a lush, lavish South Seas paradise on the slopes leading up from the sea, complete with lava-bubbling volcano – my criticisms of obeying RL physics when designing SL buildings, he disagreed with me. I said I felt the way Frank Lloyd Wright had felt about the use of Greco-Roman columns which held nothing up. My neighbor said he didn’t feel comfortable unless a structure looked as it would look in RL. The hotel he built could be a Florida Ramada Inn. A residence which mostly hovered beyond the edge of a cliff would drive him crazy, even though the view would be superb and the design would be free of unsightly pilings and struts. He has an imaginative tropical bar built around the steep peak of a mountain, but all the braces are there “to hold it up”.

The bird, freed from its cage, refuses to fly.

Creation

2007-09-02T07:06:00.000-05:00

When the Source first stirred the primordial soup, and Is folded back on itself to know itself – and there were two points where there had been a single point, creating space, and then the expanding, evolving plenitude of visions – it must have felt as I do in 'Second Life' when I stretch out my arm and materialize a sphere, make it rise into the air and float, expand it, turn it into stone and place it on a wall I’ve made.

Creation growing from imagination seems to me the most godlike activity of humans. The author who fantasizes people and places which he later holds in his hand as his book, a woman painting colors on canvas to portray her night’s dream, Mozart pouring out as sound the product of his genius, an architect seeing his incorporeal images move from mind to lines on paper to a breathtaking gleaming building, a computer programmer watching his fancied world coming into colorful being on a screen . . . those are people echoing the nature of God.

A person who follows a recipe to make a cake, or a carpenter who obeys a construction plan build a shed, are somewhat removed from that godlike activity but are nevertheless creating, while the person who merely amasses money, or whose ego feeds on humiliating or tormenting others, is far removed from the divinity of creation.

What about human imagination which does not go beyond an individual’s subjective experience – for example the self-proclaimed writer who always has a novel in progress but never writes anything? I’m sure there’s going to be disagreement about this, but I think that merely dreaming without more is not the equivalent of bringing a dream into some tangible form. We creatures and our surroundings may exist only in God’s dream, but for us the dream is obviously a reality, as much as the Taj Mahal is a reality which rose from an architect’s dream.

There are probably no humans more often accused of “wasting time” than those with imaginations reflective of God’s who are in the process of creation. It is difficult for some parents and teachers to realize that staring out the window at rain, or going for long aimless walks, are essential parts of creating the Taj Mahal or the Ring of the Nibelungen or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

My time spent creating and transforming objects in a computer world, and making more and more elaborate forms and structures from them, is undoubtedly a complete waste of time by some standards, but to me it is a thrill, an elation, because I feel in my experience the echo of God’s unbounded creativity. Yes, from an objective point of view it is a step below bringing a poem or a painting into the real life human world, but as a personal experience it is gratifying and exciting to see the fruits of my imagination grow in a visible computer world.

It occurs to me that there is one way in which my Second Life creation might satisfy the clods who always want practical results. Some presumably enlightened people tell us that we create our own heaven, that what we experience in an afterlife beyond this plane is fashioned entirely by our own desires and imaginings from a vast reservoir of possibilities. If so, then ‘Second Life’, with all its possibilities for realizing fantasies, is an excellent training ground for our creation of our next life. What could be more frightening to most of us than to bear the sole responsibility for deciding what we want to be and to experience? What a multitude of questions flood our thoughts when we accept that we are personally responsible for designing our future life! A little orientation and practice in ‘Second Life’ can’t hurt.

MEMOIRS OF FLEMING LEE Chapter 2, Part 2

2007-08-31T09:24:00.001-05:00

SUMMER 1941 -- IN FRONT OF OUR RENTED HOUSE

My first years of school flow in a river of muddled memories on whose surface occasionally float clearer recollections of playground activities, friends, enemies, and information recited by teachers and occasionally absorbed. Among the things I discovered early were that I could not sing, that I was not good at outdoor games, and that I did not like school generally.

To me, with rare exceptions, J. J. Finley School was a brick prison which kept me from the sweet safety of mother and my own room and back yard. That feeling grew, along with severe shyness and fearfulness, as I was compelled to be in contact with increasingly larger and bolder children. For whatever reason — sometimes I blame my father’s negative attitude toward the world, sometimes genetics, and, more recently, former lives — I felt completely vulnerable and defenseless. Seen from outside, my body looked normally firm and healthy, if skinny, but from inside I saw it as weak and vulnerable as a paper kite. For some reason I was sent into the world like a conch without its shell. Add to that an unusually extreme fear of being hurt, and you have the perfect recipe for flight rather than fight.

Despite my father’s exhortations, “Don’t let other boys push you around,” or, “If anybody hits you, you hit back,” it never occurred to me that I could overcome even the scrawniest male who might challenge me. I was also confused by the contradiction of my father’s words by what I was taught in the Sunday School he made me attend: Blessed are the meek; if someone hits you, turn the other cheek; if someone forces you to walk with him, walk further; if someone takes from you, give him more. I believed everything I was told, especially when the news was direct from God, and I was being told exact opposites by my earthly and heavenly fathers. It was easier to obey God than my father.

I was almost as afraid of hurtful words as of physical knocks.

“He’s too sensitive,” became the polite label applied by sympathetic adults.

In the classroom, with a grown woman up front to protect and reward me, just as Mother had at home, I was quick to put up my hand to answer questions and say clever things. All too quick. My hand kept bobbing up over the other children’s heads like a cork over waves. The classroom was my schoolday sanctuary, while the school playground was my nightmare.

My timidity came to painful focus in the games we were required to play during recess. As long as the games had been infantile — like the musical chairs, ring around the rosy, bean bags, or drop the handkerchief, that we played, laughing and squealing, in kindergarten and first grade — I was all right. But when the games progressed through dodge ball and Red Rover and became competitive team sports, my mind dissolved in dread and my body turned into an awkward assemblage of sticks just barely held together with flimsy thread instead of muscle. My lack of physical confidence, my anxiety about pain, and my conviction that I could not stand up to other boys ran amok on the playground.

The archetypical misery was “kick soccer” — a derivative of baseball played by kicking a soccer ball instead of hitting a baseball. I stand there on a chilly day at the vital point of the diamond to which the ball will be rolled by the pitcher, with the lines from first and third base converging on me like sharp spears. Bare knees cold in the winter wind, brown leather shoes dusty, I wait beneath naked oaks and shivering pines for the desperate moment when the ball will arrive at my feet. Everyone is looking at me without hope, without encouragement, despite a shout or two of, “Come on, Fleming!” or “Try to kick it this time!” The boy on my team who is waiting at third base looks despondent, while the fielders from the other team move closer in. I picture the disaster before it occurs. My foot connects feebly. The ball rolls gently to first base, and the usual groans go up as, once again “out”, I shuffle back to the sidelines.

It isn’t surprising that when two captains were choosing their teams for any sport I was always the last chosen, and there would even be arguments over who was going to be so unlucky as to have take me into his squad. Since I did not want to be on any team, it would have been more than fine with me sit under a tree and watch, but teachers were there to be sure that no inmate escaped recreation.

At J. J. Finley, part of the tactics in most team games was to keep Fleming from fumbling or otherwise dealing catastrophically with balls, even if it meant one of my teammates racing over out of position and grabbing a fly ball that should have been mine. In that way I had less and less opportunity to learn to correct my mistakes, and so I soon gave up and despised all athletics, salving my humiliation with the belief that people who excelled in sports were a lower life form than myself. I learned early to scorn boys who did physical things well which I could not do, the classic sadism of lowering others to make oneself feel higher.

But in spite of my misgivings, kick soccer evolved into softball, and then into baseball, and -- like a monstrous giant looming higher and higher over the horizon – tackle football. You’d think I might at least have endured basketball in a better spirit, since the opportunities for getting slammed to the ground or hit by hard objects were relatively limited, but I particularly hated basketball because it was so repetitive and because somebody was always leaping up and down in front of me waving his arms in my face. My lifelong dislike of basketball also stemmed from its being almost a body contact sport but not quite -- involving all kinds of fidgety and unnerving almost-touchings. When some kid wiggled in front me waving his hands in my face I just wanted shove him out of the way, not take part in a ridiculous ghost-dance.

I think that in retrospect I exaggerate my childhood dislike and fear of sports, even if I don’t exaggerate my lack of confidence. I actually enjoyed friendly games of vacant lot football, although it was embarrassing to be outplayed by Marjorie Gratz, who became a nun, and to be known more for dropping passes than for catching them. This in spite of my father (who had been a high school coach for every sport that there was, and who had introduced me very early to throwing and catching a baseball and football) having pronounced that I was very well coordinated and showed real talent for pitching a ball. I think that was true, and not just a biased expression of fatherly hope, because eventually I did well in tennis and golf.

Which leads to the suspicion that not only does my memory make the playground picture bleaker than it was, but more importantly that my real problem was entirely of the mind and not the body. My terror at the prospect of being hurt by a fist or a fast-flying baseball was not based on an abnormal sensitivity to pain. My pain threshold is actually higher than average. I was just convinced that pain was intolerable and in some indefinable way a major catastrophe. My propensity to kick and throw balls in the wrong direction, even to members of the wrong team, came as much from fear of criticism as from a conviction of my own ineptitude. Even shouts of encouragement from my own teammates had unnerving overtones, pregnant with the noise of disappointment that would rise up following my failure. I was so occupied with worrying about my poor performance that I went beyond predicting my own incompetence, thereby bringing it about, to losing all focus on the game itself.

Children seem to have an instinct to kill the weak, or, as a substitute, to stab them with recriminations. Bullies like Red Smith (can you guess the color of his hair?) scented scrumptious prey in my timid form. Luckily, bullying at J. J. Finley rarely progressed beyond a little pushing and shoving to the circling, lunging contests between the handful of brutish louts who had nothing better to do than pick fights with one another. Red Smith, Kenneth Celon, and Donald Askew were the worst, while Peeler Norton, a strong, decent, blond boy from the country who was always chosen first for every team, occasionally joined in. Donald Askew, small and wiry, foulmouthed and mean, bit John Springstead on the nose during a fight, and years later I read with gratification that the repulsive Askew was serving a long term in the state penitentiary.

Red Smith was the only one who picked on me with any regularity. One time it backfired when he elbowed me in the ribs while we were waiting in line outside the school building, and I instinctively returned the push and bounced the back of his no doubt exceptionally thick skull against the brick wall. To my astonishment this ogre of my nightmares began crying loudly. I had experienced an actual triumph in battle! But a teacher hurried over and scolded me and would not listen to an explanation. I was too elated to mind the unfair accusation at the time.

(A similar false accusation came when another child pushed me while we were in the cafeteria line. I pushed back and got blamed for attacking an innocent. Ever since those incidents I have had an extreme angry reaction to being falsely accused.)

The day that I thumped Red Smith’s head against the red bricks the word went around that he would be waiting “to get” me after school by the bicycle rack. My bravado evaporated. In the security of the classroom, my mind would not go beyond the horror that awaited me out there on the hard, dusty ground. I stayed in the school building after the final bell rang. It never occurred to me that I might have had another victory. I imagined Red Smith – miraculously expanded to the size of a mountain gorilla -- out there by the steel bars of the bicycle rack, pacing, fists clenched, anger-crimsoned face bright with freckles like hot sparks, surrounded by a bloodthirsty audience of 11-year-olds that would not leave until the inevitable slaughter had been accomplished.

But I knew that Red Smith was a bus child, and that the last school bus left at 3:30. We had two categories of pupils in Gainesville in the 1940's: “Bus children,” who lived out in the country and came to town on big yellow school buses, and the rest of us, who lived in town and had our own transportation, even if it were only feet. The bus children were almost always much poorer than the town children, sometimes wore overalls to school, sometimes brought only a cucumber for lunch, and were allowed to leave school briefly during harvest times.

So, knowing that Red Smith was a bus child, I hung around in our classroom after the others had left, finding reasons to talk to the teacher, watching the clock out in the hall, making myself inconspicuous, until finally the last bus had left. Even then not sure of safety, I slipped out a side door and made my way home in a roundabout way, suffering pangs about my cowardice.

Although I never talked to my parents about any such problems, as if I were ashamed or feared the consequences — criticism from my father because I had not defended myself — the next morning, remembering how I had to stay home from school when I had chicken pox, I pretended to be sick at my stomach, and by the time I returned to school after skipping a day Red Smith had lost his head of steam, and his limited brain was occupied with something other than me.

And so my fearfulness led to my discovery of the lovely effectiveness of lies. “I’m sick,” became the talisman which enabled me to escape from school and bullies and baseball, as well as arithmetic tests for which I wasn’t prepared. I think I was unwittingly helped in the evasion of school by my father, whose severe mother had forced him to go to the Blitchton schoolhouse even on days when he was truly ill. Daddy was therefore susceptible to my finely rendered simulations of sickness. In my portrayals of “not feeling good” I showed a natural talent for acting which for some reason I never thought of exploiting except to avoid going to school.

Another significant point in my development of strategies for coping with life came on a certain day when some older boy who liked scaring smaller kids was chasing me across the school grounds. He tackled me, and as we rolled across the crackling leaves I said something funny. Just as he was ready to lock an arm around my neck, I made him start laughing. The assailant was disarmed, haw-hawing. Laughing, we got up, the chase was forgotten, and my lesson was learned: I could turn away wrath with humor.

An extension of that was: If people like you, they will not hurt you. Do not
offend. Do not challenge. Be friendly. Be funny. “If everybody likes me, I’ll be safe.” Believe me, it works.

But the only truly solid safety in those days meant being at home with my mother. For some reason it developed very early that I was afraid of my father and uneasy about any conversation with him, although I realized after I grew up that he was a kind and well-meaning man. When I could manage to stay at home on a week day I waited with tense eagerness for Daddy finally to leave for work. It seemed to take forever for him to finish getting dressed, have his coffee and his corn flakes, and go through unexpected delays and his predictable complaining. I stayed out of his way, but the weight of his presence bore down on me so that I could hardly breathe as he grumbled about this and that, and proclaimed the martyrdom he would suffer at his office. When at last I heard the sound of the car pulling out of the driveway, the heavens opened, sunlight poured through the clouds, and I was comfortable and happy.

That may not be a fair or realistic picture of my father, but those were my feelings. I remember my young mother, at the other extreme, as good-humored, pleasant, and indulgent. The bright house, freed of the dark paternal cloud, smelled of vanilla and furniture polish and cookies baking. There were no bullies, no teachers scratching inexplicable number-pictures on blackboards, no balls hurtling at me — just everything as it was intended to be, as it had been in the beginning before there was school, before there were brothers.

When I was able to stay home on a school day I could play in my room, build things with Tinker Toys, set up battlefields with metal soldiers, apply crayons to a coloring book, connect puzzle dots with a pencil, or run my electric train. I could have Campbell’s soup and bologna sandwiches with Mother at noon, and glory in the peace of it all.

Later on any day when I played sick, when it was too late to hustle me off to school I might say I was “feeling better” (unless I was planning to be sick for two days), and I would go outside, affecting weakness, and watch beetles laboring through the grass, or position a magnifying glass over a dry sweetgum leaf and watch a magical wisp of smoke rise from the blinding dot of the focused sun, and then the smoldering pinpoint expand into a black-rimmed hole. I could expand the hole by working around its rim, or I could burn a narrow path right across the leaf and see it fall in half. Of course it was not long before I discovered that I could bring my death ray to bear on an ant and make it sizzle. I would never have done such a thing to a beetle or a worm, but ants seemed fair prey, maybe because they had bitten me quite a few times before it occurred to me to fry them.

My sadism toward ants seems especially strange since I was extremely tenderhearted toward all other living creatures. My parents said that they had to give away the dog they had when I was a toddler because I was so frightened for him when he went into the street. When Mother showed us how to tie a thread to a June bug’s leg and hold it tethered as it flew buzzing around our heads, all I could do was worry about the bug’s distress. When we children used to catch lightning bugs on summer nights (there were so many, many more then than now) and put them into jars with perforated lids and carry those living lanterns through the darkness, I was unhappy for fear that a lightning bug might die.

In one of those flashes of insight which stays with one, I wondered one summer night why I felt it was fine for me to capture fireflies, but very worrying to watch others doing the same thing. Enlightenment came: I knew that I would be careful with my captives and set them safely free, but I was not sure that the other children would be so kind. Somehow that seemed a bright revelation.

Unfortunately I could not stay home every day during the school year, but as a providential counterbalance to misery on the playground, I learned to read. That changed my life entirely, as if God had only then unveiled the full happy potential my personal universe. At first there was no special thrill in making out the pronunciation (our teachers used “phonics”), and what we read was definitely uninspiring: “See Dick run. See Jane Run. See Spot run. Who has the ball? Jane has the ball.”

We were restricted to that uneventful level of literature for months, and I thought, “If this is all there is to read, what’s the point?” The watery pabulum we read wasn’t nearly as exciting or funny as the stories my mother had read aloud to me. There were no thrills or laughs — just children who ran too much, were obsessed with balls, and whose items of clothing and their colors were of inordinate interest to the author. I complained vaguely to the teacher, struggling to grasp what was wrong, “Nothing ever happens.”

In another of those insights that I’ll always remember, well before I might have tossed reading into my mental trashcan along with sports and arithmetic, I woke up to the obvious fact that books had to exist which embodied those stories Mother had read to me. With the help of an understanding teacher, I went to the Finley school library and was introduced to books beyond my official reading level. Suddenly I discovered excitement, suspense, humor – even if only in the mild struggles of children and talking animals. From that moment I would withdraw from the world mentally as well as physically. I was entranced. I could not stop reading. I read at school, when I got home from school, when lying in bed at night (“Just one more page, please. . .”), and while pulling on my socks in the morning. My concerned parents began to try to put limits on my reading and force me to go outside the house and play with other children.

For many years I looked back approvingly on this reading frenzy — which continued right on through high school — as a sign of my exceptional intellect and general superiority over school’s athletic heroes. Only much later did I begin to question whether living in a world of books is a wholesome substitute for direct perception of the universe. But meanwhile, I read and read and read, and laughed out loud, cried if an animal died, shivered with fear, or rejoiced in relief, as I devoured “just one more page” under the bedsheet with the help of a flashlight.

What did I read in those early school years? My favorite was Frank Baum’s Oz series, best known for the Wizard of Oz. Guided to some extent by teachers and by my parents’ and grandparents’ memories of what they had enjoyed, I read all of the Hardy Boys books, the Bobbsy Twins books, 'Tom Sawyer', 'Huckleberry Finn', 'Penrod', 'Little Women', 'Little Men', 'Dr. Doolittle', 'The Arabian Nights', everything Jules Verne wrote, and eventually everything Edgar Rice Burroughs ever dreamed up, and scores more.

'Myths Every Child Should Know', which was given to me for Christmas one year, made a tremendous impression, especially the story of Pegasus and the tales of humans who entertained gods without knowing it -- when, for example, the humble but generous peasant couple found themselves with a pitcher of milk which was never empty.

Books about mistreated animals featured prominently in literature which was thought suitable for young people. 'Beautiful Joe' was a dog who had his ears cut off by a wicked owner. 'Black Beauty' had a wagon full of equine problems, and there was plenty of stimulation for the tear glands in 'My Friend Flicka', and 'Thunderhead'. While I managed to make my way through 'Alice in Wonderland', for some reason I had problems with 'Treasure Island' and started it twice before I finally finished it several years later. In other cases I just did not like trying to translate dialect, and so even though I had enjoyed 'Uncle Remus' when my mother read me the stories (she tells me she hated struggling with the dialect herself), I had a hard time appreciating it on my own. On the other hand, 'Green Pastures', a 19th Century Southern black preacher’s telling of Old Testament stories, made me howl with laughter as much as any book I’ve ever read.

Even now I feel elation and a glowing, intoxicating nostalgia as I write the names of those books. What wonderful hours I spent under many skies far from my Florida sky, in distant fields and forests, among many different fathers, different mothers, different friends . . . and a multitude of enemies, not one of whom could actually hurt me. My extraordinarily vivid and detailed imagination made those fictional worlds more intensely vivid than anything in the world to which I woke up each morning.

The greatest family event of that time was the building of our new home. In the beginning was The Lot. Although it seemed remote at that time, in fact it was no more than half a mile northwest of J. J. Finley School and our rented house (which was only a block or two west of the school). The lot faced north on Fletcher Terrace (later Northwest Third Place), a block-long street surfaced with crushed lime rock hidden under a thick bed of pine needles, two lanes divided by grassy islands planted with palms. It was in a heavily wooded and sparsely populated area, felt by my parents to be safely beyond an expansion of Gainesville even though it was only two or three blocks from the University of Florida football stadium, which was on the other side of University Avenue to the south. There were three other houses on the street at the time. Retired Senator Hill and his wife lived beyond a vacant lot to the west, while the Dowdells and the Coopers had adjacent homes facing ours. The rear of our lot merged into thick woods of several acres in whose recesses was a shallow stream.

We would walk around our quarter of an acre and Daddy would lovingly identify every tree that grew on the property — oak, pine, sweet gum, redbud, dogwood, ironwood, wild cherry. The lot had been selected as much for its trees as for any other reason. My parents loved plants and passed that love on to their children — one of their best gifts to me.

We went as a family to see Roscoe McLain, the contractor. He would spread out his big blueprints and I would stare at the mystic patterns of white lines on the blue background and try to transform them into the image of a house which did not yet exist. My parents largely designed the house themselves, and Mr. McLain provided the necessary details and supervised construction.

Houses were built more slowly in the 1940s days than now, maybe because there was a less prefabrication and more care. After the foundation was poured and cured, the fireplace and chimney began to take shape under the canopy of trees, and then the brick walls, and finally the whole house was there — two stories of white-painted brick in the colonial style facing north.

OUR NEW HOME

A few steps brought one to the front door, which was crowned by a small ornamental portico. Turning right from the entrance hall, walking over gleaming hardwood floors, we would pass through the dining room to the kitchen and breakfast nook and a door to the back yard. To the left from the entrance hall we would enter the livingroom, the only single storied area of the home, and from there, looking out on the back yard, the sun room. Between the sun room and the kitchen was a wood-paneled den with built-in bookshelves above cabinets making up one wall. On second floor, split from front to back by a hall with a bathroom at the end, were the bedrooms and a storage room.

That was where I lived until I graduated from college. My room on the southeast corner -- with one window looking out over the trees and shrubs of the back yard and the woods beyond, the other looking to sunrises over the livingroom roof – became my castle tower from which I looked out over the beautiful, ominous world while my books took me to other lands, other universes.

MEMOIRS OF FLEMING LEE Chapter Two, Part 1

2007-08-28T09:51:00.001-05:00

BEGINNING IN GAINESVILLE

We moved from St. Augustine to Gainesville in the spring of 1941. The seventy mile or so drive from the Florida coast to an inland town couldn’t have taken more than two hours, even on narrow roads at my father’s careful pace, but in my life story it was my first crossing of the I Ching’s great river. Behind me lay the only place I had known well during my six years on earth, “the Oldest City” in my personal mythology as well as in the tourist brochures.

Behind me were the glittering bay, the net-winged shrimp boats, the white mountain ranges of dunes, the foaming breakers rolling in from the green sea, the great marble lions of the bridge, the fort and the kite flying and Easter egg hunts on its sloping green, every friend and landmark that I had ever known. Gone too was Irene, my second and most indulgent mother. My parents had asked her to move to Gainesville with us, but because of her own aged mother she decided to stay in St. Augustine.

On the brighter side, gone too were any enemies. I recall that for some reason -- related to a lost comic book, I think – just before we left St. Augustine I was afraid to face a neighborhood boy. I pictured him perpetually waiting out on the sidewalk to get me if I went out in front of our house. This is probably the first clear recollection I have of the shyness and fearfulness which I tried so hard over the years to overcome -- though I also remember from an earlier year a little boy hitting me in the nose as he hung upside down by his legs from a tree limb, and my father demanding, “Why didn’t you hit him back?” when I ran home crying. Typically, when threatened by the comic book bully I cowered inside, counting the hours until, flanked by my parents, we would get into our car and drive away from that place forever.

Speaking of anxiety, the pants-wetting incident in St. Augustine first grade was probably the reason I asked my mother, “Will the school in Gainesville would have bathrooms?” Unfortunately, little knowing the seed of doubt she was planting, instead of an unqualified “yes” she gave an offhand, “I’m sure they must.” Having already developed symptoms of an anxious obsessiveness, I interpreted “I’m sure they must” as, “I’m really not sure.” By nightfall, “I’m not really sure” became “I doubt it,” and later, more positive, parental assertions could never eliminate my fear. Not until I actually stood in front of a door at J. J. Finley School with “BOYS” written on it did my worries melt.

We moved into a little rented house in the middle of a row of similar houses in northwest Gainesville. My parents planned to build our own home, but in the meantime we greeted our new town from a neat little wooden box with a yard the size of a large livingroom rug, soon brightened by petunias that I helped my mother plant along the front of the house. Workmen were still putting on the finishing touches after we moved in, and the place smelled like sawdust and fresh paint for days.

In writing about this period I’m given poor assistance by my very selective memory, which tends to fade out anything which is not (a) fairly recent or (b) very important to me. My brain apparently says, “If you can’t use it, forget it.” Of many years I retain mere flashes and fragments — faces without names, names without faces, events without identifiable characters. An example of that sometimes embarrassing trait is that when about 30 years old, or maybe 20 (see what I mean?), I was standing by a stream in a wooded, undeveloped part of Gainesville for some reason I no longer remember, when, announced by some preliminary thrashing in the bushes, a surveyor came into sight through the undergrowth, tripod in hand. To me this tall, blond man was a complete stranger, but the moment his eyes lit on me he smiled and cried, “Fleming!” and seemed ready to squeeze me with his arms.

While I pretended to recognize him, I desperately tried to fish up his image from the deepest archives of my mind. Meanwhile he overflowed with a torrent of recollections of people we had known and things we had done together, which you would think would have brought on the longed-for identification. As far as I could put together, we had been part of the same crowd, maybe sometime around the eighth or ninth grade, and had shared many fascinating experiences. I put on the best act I could, faking recollections, until finally my unknown chum disappeared into the woods in a new direction.

Within hours after we moved into the little rented house in Gainesville, children appeared on the sidewalk out front, riding bicycles or tricycles very, very slowly, or walking even more slowly, taking long glances at our house. Had my parents had no children, the scouts would have spread the word and the place would have been ignored, but as it was, within a couple of days, after the first cautious approaches carried out in ways known only to children, I had playmates who began my orientation in the neighborhood.

The one person from those first weeks in Gainesville who made enough of an impression to stay in my memory was a girl a little older than me who lived down the block on the other side of the street in a house whose lawn was conspicuous for lack of weeding and mowing. At that age children are innocent of class and culture, but I imagine that my parents were none too thrilled with the origins of my new friend, who told me that her father was a professional wrestler as well as something to do with pipes.

“He takes a razor blade in the ring,” Becky said. “He sticks it inside his trunks to hide it. He says if somebody pins him down and starts really hurting him, he’s gonna cut’m.”

She confided that she was going to be a nurse when she grew up, but after I told her I was going to be the pilot of a China Clipper she thought it over and decided to be an airline stewardess on the same plane with me. At a later age such talk might have progressed to romance, but this first grade relationship never went beyond sitting in swings speculating about our futures, and playing hide-and-seek or kick the can with other children.

One other occurrence on that street that I recall vividly was a solar eclipse, in preparation for which my parents used matches to smoke glass to that we could look at the sun without being blinded.

Although my memories of ages seven to ten are sparse, the mind-file containing my first years in Gainesville bears the general label, “School”, because I was plunged fully into that insulated and regulated world into which our society stuffs us after infancy and confines us until we have suffered through sexual awakening and are theoretically old enough to survive without our parents. My consciousness having been squirted into a miniature body on this planet with no instructions other than the Two Basic Commandments, “Do what feels good and avoid what hurts,” my concept of where I was and what I was doing there was worse than vague — a situation which hasn’t improved much over the years.

From my parents I had learned to use toilet paper, spoons and forks, to fasten shirt buttons and to tie shoes, to whistle (it took me ages to get beyond labored puffs of soundless air), and to speak a Southern version of the English language which combined my mother’s unspoiled Tennessee accent with my father’s family’s frontier “Florida cracker” speech, which in my father’s case had been spruced up by his years in college. (Floridians had begun to be called “Florida crackers” in the old day because of the loud cracks of the cowboys’ whips. Florida was a bigger cattle ranching state than Texas at one time.) I pronounced “rice” as “rass”, “thing” to rhyme with “hang”, said “hey” instead of “hi”, and knew the midday meal only as “dinner” and the evening meal as “supper.” But home learning and kindergarten -- heavily weighted toward crayons, scissors, graham crackers and playtime -- was officially over. Now I had reached the educational big time, to be taught everything from reading and writing all the words that there were, to multiplying numbers all the way up through the nines.

J. J. Finley School, grades 1 through 6, was only a long block or so from our rented house and just a few more blocks from the home my parents soon built. J. J. Finley was a red brick, one story building whose classrooms had big high windows -- fully opened with long poles during warm days, giving entrance to the occasional distracting wasp, and from which imprisoned youth could gaze longingly at drifting clouds and the upper reaches of oak trees and pines while inhaling chalk dust and knowledge. The decor featured American flags, children’s crayon drawings displayed on corkboards, and that ubiquitous unfinished portrait of George Washington so beloved by the American school system.

During those grammar school years each grade spent every day with one teacher in one room studying all different subjects, except for going to the auditorium for music class or assembly, or outdoors for playground periods, or, most blissfully, eating lunch. From the paradisiacal Irene-pampered, pie filled idleness of my St. Augustine days, this became my climate: A summer of blissful freedom, overshadowed toward its end by the dreaded approach of September; the confused excitement, apprehension, and discovery of the first day of school; imprisonment through fall, winter, and spring; and then finally once more the great day of freedom. “Have a nice summer, boys and girls.”

The pupils at J. J. Finley were all white, of course -- I had graduated college before the earthquake of desegregation struck the South -- and almost all were of Southern ancestry. The most exotic persons were two pretty, dark-haired sisters who had lived in Hawaii and had grass skirts which they showed off performing a hula in front of the third grade class. A Yankee – most likely the transplanted child of a professor at the University of Florida, which, though tiny in comparison with its later size, was already Gainesville’s main feature -- was such a rarity that derision and minor persecution were inevitable. Larry Smith, the only Yankee I can actually recall knowing while in elementary school, pled, “It’s not my fault I’m from Illinois.” But Larry called dinner “lunch”, and supper “dinner”, and was called home for “dinner” an hour before the rest of us, and such things as that, along with his ludicrous accent, marked him as a permanent oddity.

As for my elementary school teachers, I’ve since realized that many of them – as well as many of my high school teachers -- were absolute dodos when compared with intelligent and educated individuals, but in those days they were goddesses of wisdom. Not all looked like goddesses, of course — but Miss Crane did . . . my beautiful and attentive fifth grade teacher, with whom I fell precociously and dizzily in love. More commonplace was the kindly sternness of steel-haired Miss Cannon of the Third Grade, or the barrel-like form of bun-topped Mrs. McGinnis who presided over the Sixth Grade.

Although Miss Crane -- hair of light brown, always in a pretty dress, always sweet with perfume -- was in the awesome category of “grownup” she was probably no more than twenty-one. I took the incredible step of voluntarily sitting in the front row so that I could smell the sweetness wafting from her skirt and hair as she floated to and fro in front of the blackboard. I shivered and blushed if she accidentally touched my hand when returning a marked paper to me, and I would try to create that experience each time she handed me anything. It was just as well that, like all goddesses, she was unattainable, because at the age of eleven I had no idea what I wanted of her except her perpetual nearness.

Love. My worship of women actually predated Miss Crane by two years. In the third grade, as inexplicably as these things usually happen, I developed an overwhelming attachment to the Queen of the May, Anne Saunders. Slim and pretty, with light brown hair, she was to the undiscerning just one of the girls in the third grade picking her awkward way between the cuteness of little girls and the burgeoning beauty of adolescence, but to me she became the center of the universe.

I feel uncomfortable writing that. Perhaps because it brings to mind other episodes — agonizing, shattering, wonderful, ridiculous — of which this was the archetype.

Why did Anne Saunders, Queen of the May that year, become the center of my universe? Why should skinny legs, bony little knees, a turned up nose, and brown hair in twin pigtails suck me into a vortex of helpless adoration? If I knew the answer I would know the answers to many other mysteries in my life. All I know is that the annual May Pole was set up in a clearing among the pines and sweet gum trees and oaks that surrounded the red brick school, and that my lifetime devotion to Venus began there.

Long, wide ribbons of various bright colors hung from the top of the May Pole, undulating gently in the summer breeze. Anne appeared in a frilly white dress which stood out starchily from her legs. Upon her soft hair was placed a wreath of flowers. She took one of the ribbons. Other children took up the other ribbons, and we moved as far away from the pole as we could. Then, to music from a piano which had been wheeled out to the top of the steps at the school’s main entrance, we began that ancient, weaving dance around and around the wooden pole which gradually cloaked it in mulicolored ribbons from top to bottom. Of the historic phallic significance, we were innocently unaware -- but how appropriate to my story, I now see.

Laughing, ducking, bumping into one another, stumbling, we went round and round until only bits of ribbon at the bottom remained free, and then we stepped back to admire that gaily colored column we had woven.

The music teacher continued playing the piano — a strangely feeble, tinkling voice away from its home in the auditorium, out here beneath the sky and trees, as if nature, centered on our May Pole, mocked the tenuous power of humans and their music – as we consumed celebratory cupcakes and fruit punch.
From then on I did not want to be anywhere except as close as I could get to Anne Saunders. I wanted to sit or stand next to her, to hear her voice, breathe the incense of her hair and skin, and if possible to touch her, or at least to be brushed by her dress. Just a near miss by her skirt thrilled me. I worshiped her laugh, the way she spoke, her walk, the color of her blue eyes. I even looked forward to going to school on Monday mornings so that I could revel in the intoxication again. When I was away from her I was like a planet of eccentric orbit out at the dark and frigid farthest reaches from its sun, and when I was near her I was that planet thawed to glowing warmth and spring.

What words did we exchange? Nothing personal, I’m sure. Most exchanges between boys and girls in the third grade consisted of quips, taunts, and teasing, not conversations or declarations of love. I was probably never alone with her. So what was the goal of my infatuation? I was not yet conscious of sexual desire. I no more had a purpose than did one of my paper boats when I put it into a rain-made river which carried it bouncing and bobbing down the gutter along the edge of the street. At that time I probably had not even asked myself seriously why there were boys and girls instead of just one model to fit all. It had not escaped my notice that we dressed differently, but there are always so many novel things in the life of an eight year old that I expected to be confused much of the time.

It seems that my desire was to achieve some kind of identity with her. I doted on any similarity I could find between us. If we both used the same phrase, or thought the same thing was funny, it was like discovering diamonds. If she had a ham sandwich for lunch, I wanted a ham sandwich for lunch. If she expressed a love of chocolate cake, I loved chocolate cake, even though until then I had liked pie better than cake.

But the satisfaction of finding similarities was limited by inexpressible boundaries. Maybe what I yearned for could be called unity. If two people are similar enough to be almost identical, that is about as close to unity as they can come without the presumably impossible feat of occupying the same space at the same time. Plato’s idea that souls are split into two before incarnation, and that the halves must find one another on earth, comes to mind. Actual unity being impossible, and sexual acts being unknown, the closest I could get to my goal was similarity — and as much momentary touching of the two bodies as I could get away with.

Of course the result of being enthralled by a goal which was as unattainable as it was indefinable was eventual frustration and fading passion. I imagine that summer vacation intervened and my garden of adoration could not grow unwatered from June until September while I saw only the children in my immediate neighborhood. I wonder if Anne Saunders — if she remembered me at all after she grew up — remembers me as the skinny, and slightly bucktoothed boy in short pants who had a crush on her in the third grade. Most likely she never noticed. It’s an interesting thought – that people very important to us in the past may not remember us at all, while we have forgotten people to whom we were monuments along the road of life.

(To be continued.)

Copyright 2005 Fleming Lee

MEMOIRS OF FLEMING LEE

2007-08-22T16:44:00.000-05:00

Chapter One

ST. AUGUSTINE

The soft rustling of palm fronds in the sea breeze. My first memory of the planet Earth.

What my mother remembers best is the milkman whistling Christmas carols beneath her second story hospital window as his bottles rattled in their metal baskets early in the morning. "Hark, the herald angels sing..."

For I had been ejected into independent existence during a happy season -- on December 19, 1933, at about 5:20 in the afternoon, in Flagler Hospital, in St. Augustine, Florida, with the sun in Sagittarius and Gemini ascending. As the first child of Jean Fleming Blitch and Loonis Blitch, I was the cause for special celebration during the Christmas and New Year festivities.

Later I would know that I had been presented to an old Florida family -- on my father's side, at least -- in the oldest city in the United States, on the eastern edge of a subtropical peninsula pointing down into the Caribbean Sea. Later I would learn that I was born in the midst of a depression, when my father put cardboard inside his shoes to cover the holes in the soles, and that Adolf Hitler and Franklin Roosevelt had been elected to office during the year of my birth, both pledged to cure their countries of economic paralysis.

Just before Christmas, 1933, however, within the stucco walls of Flagler Hospital beside the bay, I simply wondered at the rustling sounds of the tops of palm trees just outside my mother's windows, while I lay snuggled against her in her bed.

For the first six years of my life we lived in St. Augustine, and those years, of which I have more vivid memories than of many later years, have always had a paradisiacal quality in my life's mythology. I had no responsibilities. My wants were satisfied without charge or obligation. I did not yet grapple with the desires and anxieties of puberty. There was not even a sibling to contend with for the first three years. Best of all, there was no puzzling over why I was here and what it was all about, and no fear of its ending. Also, my parents were very glad to have me, and in spite of the Great Depression (of which I was unaware), we lived well, though simply.

Before I go any farther into the pleasant aspects of our circumstances, I need to squelch any suspicion that my father was one of those fortunate few who during the Depression had wealth or a high income position. As a matter of fact, he always talked of that period as one of anxiety, when there was real shortage and struggle and debt. Indeed, the Depression was the reason I was born in St. Augustine instead of Ocala, almost a hundred miles to the southwest, where my parents had met and had been married in 1927. My father had given up his job as history teacher and coach at Ocala High School and in 1928 had taken his very young bride to Blitchton, a little rural community a dozen miles north, where his family’s big, thriving, farm and ranch, with its new sawmill, would provide a bountiful living.

Then the Great Depression came – the Depression whose early shadows had moved my mother’s father to bring his wife and four daughters from Tennessee to Ocala just a couple of years before my parents married. As prices of livestock and crops went over the waterfall of deflation, the expectation that Blitchton would continue to provide a good income shriveled like fruit on a dead vine. Wholesalers either did not buy at all, or offered prices so low that a sale would have been pointless. There was food, but there was no money, or very little of it, and when a friend with the right connections told my father about a job opening for County Agricultural Agent in St. Johns County, my father instantly said,
“I’ll take it.”

“But I haven’t even told you what the salary is.”

“I don’t care what it pays. I’ll take it.”

And so my parents moved to St. Augustine in 1931 and gained an income, and in 1933 a baby.

At the time I was born they lived in the lower floor of a two story house, 164 Marine Street, just across a beautiful park from Flagler Hospital, on the edge of Matanzas Bay. Soon after I came along they rented a full sized house and hired a full time maid who became as important to me as my parents. In fact, of those first six years of my life, I recall at least as much about Irene as I do about my mother or father.

So it is that after the whispering of palm trees, I remember Irene, the old fort, the little railroad station at the end of our street, the shrimp boats in Matanzas Bay, the Bridge of Lions, the Plaza de San Marcos, the Ponce de Leon Hotel.

THE BRIDGE OF LIONS

Irene was the person who generally took me to enjoy all those other things when I was a small child. She was a colored woman (as black people wanted to be called in those days) who was at our house from before breakfast until after dinner at night. She lived with her aged mother in a two story wooden house with an open porches on the ground floor and a large balconies extending across the second floors, supplied of course with rocking chairs and hanging plants. St. Augustine was so small that I could walk with Irene from my house to her house, and there I remember two things: smoky smells, and above all the upright piano, where I first brought forth sounds from a keyboard.

In my memory it seems as if most people had maids, and that they were at least as involved with taking care of children as with domestic chores. The maid in Donny Maitine’s household across the street from us probably went farther than any other in child caring. Donny was very skinny. They said that meat made him nauseated. So, to keep him from wasting away, the Maitine's maid was assigned to sit outside near wherever Donny was playing with his five-year-old friends and call him over from time to time and feed him spoonfuls of Ovaltine.

Each day maids like Irene would converge on the Plaza de San Marcos pushing baby carriages and baby strollers, or leading toddlers by the hand, and trying to hold children of four and five in check with entreaties, threats, promises and an occasional open-handed whack on the seat of the pants or skirt. Maids wore uniforms then. Today it would be rare to see a maid in a middle class neighborhood, and the cleaning women who might be spotted would be wearing blue jeans or shorts. But in the 1930's, in the midst of the Great Depression, the maids of the small town middle class wore uniforms.

Although Fort Marion was the center of everything for me, the Plaza was the real center of the town. To the east was Matanzas Bay, separated from the ocean by a string of islands linked to the town by the Bridge of Lions. The bridge was named for the two huge white marble lions which faced the town where the bridge met the mainland. I always insisted on being helped up to touch their big paws and the round stone ball on which a front paw rested.

The lions looked down the Plaza, a long, rectangular, shady park with the Slave Market at the east end and the ornate Ponce de Leon hotel across the street at the west end. There many benches where the maids could sit among ancient cannons and pyramids of ancient cannon balls, gossip, and perhaps occasionally contemplate the fact that their ancestors might have involuntarily begun occupations in the New World on the very spot called the Slave Market, where old men, black and white, now played checkers in a spacious tile-roofed pavilion.

THE SLAVE MARKET

Later I wondered whether the maids, if they had the inclination to think about their forebears, were pleased they had ended up where they were, or if they would rather have been living in some African village. But at the time Irene began taking me to the Plaza I was too infantile to wonder much of anything other than where my rattle had disappeared within my wicker baby carriage, and whether I would soon get some more of that delicious sweet frozen milky stuff that Irene let me lick from a wooden stick in her dark hand.

One feature of the Plaza area that I never wanted to miss was the display window of The Neptune Grill, which in my memory was St. Augustine’s only restaurant. From the sidewalk one could look through the sweating plate glass at an expanse of crushed ice on which was arranged a beautiful display of fish just as they had come from the water that morning – a kind of seafood bouquet whose centerpiece might be a big grouper surrounded by red snappers, the design completed by sea bass, pompano, crabs, and giant shrimp.

By the time we left St. Augustine when I was seven years old I had never been into a restaurant except Morrison’s Cafeteria in Jacksonville, and so the glimpses I could get into the dim interior of The Neptune Grill when the door opened and closed were like glimpses into some mysterious, luxurious, storybook grotto.

Even when I was an adult I amused people with my stubborn recollection that The Neptune Grill was, if not St. Augustine’s only restaurant, certainly its major one, when in fact the tourist-trampled town had in subsequent years sprouted more restaurants than there had been fish and shrimp on ice at The Neptune Grill . . . which became extinct at some point without my even knowing it.

Speaking of shrimp, Mother recalls that she and my father used to go down to the docks and buy shrimp off the net-festooned boats for a nickel a pound.

ST. AUGUSTINE SHRIMP BOATS

One of the major economic changes during my lifetime, much greater than the general tides of inflation, has been the rising price of seafood, which, even starting the sample long after those Depression lows, has gone from being far cheaper than red meat to being more expensive. In the present day, ocean fish which were considered inedible, or at least too unattractive or poor in flavor to sell, are given fancy new names and hawked as the latest delicacy. But soon even those nouveau fish become so popular because of their price that their cost goes up and they join the piscatorial elite.

Being the first born, I got disproportionate coverage in my baby book compared to my later-arriving brothers, and those cards and letters and photographs and newspaper clippings record many more things than I can remember: In one picture I stand by a little mahogany table by a birthday cake with one candle on it -- outdoors because my parents' bellows-folding Kodak camera couldn’t deal with indoor lighting. Those were the days in which the amateur photographer took a roll of black and white Kodak pictures in bright sunlight and hoped that most of them would "come out".

My baby book, with its padded satin cover on which an angelic infant reclines, also shows me dressed up for Easter, holding my stuffed Easter bunny, and at Christmas I am seen seated on the front sidewalk with my new beach ball, teddy bear, and drum major's hat.

I also ride a rocking horse which is not a horse but a round-eared Mickey Mouse.

I pedal a sporty metal roadster (our world knew nothing of plastic, though little figures were made of celluloid), stand beside it in a snowsuit of questionable utility, and in short pants strut with my plumed cardboard drum major's hat on, pretending to pound away at the toy bass drum suspended by a braided cord around my neck. Pretending because the folding Kodak had a shutter speed that would cause a rambling snail to blur, and all photographs had to be taken with the subjects rigid.

A look at my baby book – which covered a few years past my actual babyhood – reveals that children’s birthday parties were big news in tiny St. Augustine. The newspaper articles which Mother cut out and pasted indicate that respectable parents would as soon have let their pre-school offspring go to kindergarten without shoes as let a birthday pass without a party involving at least a fifteen guests, and often more.

The local newspaper dutifully printed all the details of each party beneath a front-lawn group photograph of the partygoers in fancy, festooned hats. Ice cream and cake were of course essential, along with hats and party favors. The favor I liked best produced a loud bang and the smell of gunpowder when a ribbon at each end was pulled. Second to that I liked the one that unrolled and whistled when I blew into the mouthpiece. Pin the tail on the donkey was the most popular game, followed by Blind Man’s Bluff and Hide and Seek. One little boy who lived a few houses down from us took advantage of Hide and Seek to disappear from his own birthday party. He was found alone in our back yard, pensively swinging on our swing.

The scrapbooks which I myself created, apparently with great zeal, were obviously an early way of keeping me occupied: The first one is filled largely with pieces of magazine pictures cut in all kinds of outlandish shapes, pasted down without regard to whether the page had a top or a bottom. Those pictures give the impression that Shirley Temple and Walt Disney's three little pigs and big bad wolf were by far the most important things on Earth, but I was also attracted to lavish desserts with cherries on top, to beautiful women in lovely surroundings, and to long, luxurious Packard cars,-- interests (except for the cars), which would not abandon me as life proceeded.

The second scrapbook which I created in my infancy was much better laid out and more varied -- children flying kites in the March wind, whimsical tramps roasting wieners on sticks at an open fire, a poor child being forced to eat spinach before he could have his ice cream, robins and dogs and cute little kittens dressed in human clothes doing human things -- but my memories of those years in St. Augustine take the form not of the second scrapbook but of the first -- fragmentary, disordered, full of bright colors:

Sitting on the massive, low swung chains that marked the boundary of the Ponce de Leon hotel. Watching stone frogs spew water from their mouths into the hotel's Spanish-tiled courtyard fountain.

PONCE DE LEON HOTEL

The municipal Easter egg hunt on the fort green -- with a wave of children charging up the hill like invading Vikings. Most of the participants were older than me, and I was lucky to find one egg, hidden by the grass in a small hole.

THE FORT

Slouching by the window during a downpour, watching raindrops chase one another down the glass. I loved rain, and if there was lightning and house-rattling thunder, all the better. Some drops of water would hesitate and hang on the glass, while others would slide quickly; one might run down into a hesitant one and merge into it, start it rolling, and that enlarged drop would join with others, and help form a wriggling stream among other streams running down to the bottom of the pane. And then, as the rain ended, running out to the street to send paper boats, or just a big leaf, down the rapids in the gutter beside the sidewalk.

Cleaning my teddy bear with corn meal. One of my early Christmas presents was a blond teddy bear. When he had been held and pulled around the house long enough to get grimy, Mother would say it was time to give him a bath. She would spread newspapers on the floor, and we would put my teddy bear on his back and massage him with corn meal from a bag in the kitchen. Then he’d lie on his stomach and we’d rub corn meal into the rest of his fur. When the meal was brushed out he would look considerably brighter. I wanted to know why Mother couldn't wash my hair with corn meal instead of the much-dreaded shampoo which stung my eyes, and I never got a satisfactory answer.

Going to Mr. Caruso's barber shop on for haircuts. I know from photographs that for the first few years of my life I had long blond hair, large curls down to my shoulders. Mr. Caruso eventually ended that. I sat on a smoothly worn wooden board across the arms of the barber's chair, a little tense at being elevated into the stratosphere by Mr. Caruso's lever, but soon totally absorbed in the endless corridor of receding reflections created by the mirrored walls in front of and behind me. Peering into the mirror I was drawn away from Mr. Caruso's barber shop, from my father standing nearby, and from St. Augustine, by the infinite procession of ever shrinking images of myself in the throne-like chair, until finally I was in a world too far away to be seen, and yet where the images must go on and on and on.

Going to Mr. Wolfe's photography studio to have my picture taken. Mr. Wolfe was on the same street as the barber shop -- a street now “restored” and closed to vehicles in order to attract tourists to restaurants, bakeries, and all the kinds of shops that are found in such places from Savannah to Charleston to California.

Like a sorcerer's den, Mr. Wolfe’s inner sanctum was dim, strange smelling, draped with dark fabrics and filled with strange apparatus. Mr. Wolfe, however, was jolly, though as thin as a walking stick. He let me stand on a stool so I could look at the big ground glass plate at the rear of his giant bellows camera; magically, I could see the world going in and out of focus ... upside down . . . rivaling even Mr. Caruso's infinite mirror images. Then Mr. Wolfe would arrange me in some endearing pose in front of the gleaming lens, get on the far side of the massive tripod, slide a black frame into the camera, and draw a great dark cloth over his head and most of the camera. One of his hands held a rubber bulb while the other stuck up from under his tent waving a brightly feathered bird on a stick. Then his fingers would squeeze the bulb and the grotto would fill with blinding light.

(Which reminds me of a similar bird we got at some kind of boardwalk at Jacksonville Beach when we went to visit Mother's aunts. Tied by a length of string to a stick, the bird would chirp and whistle shrilly, and its tail would spin, when I whipped the stick round and round over my head. I remember playing with it all the way home in the back seat of the car. It is an isolated memory, connected with nothing, like a soap bubble against a blue sky, and just as pleasant.)

The best thing of all about Mr. Wolfe was that he gave me a kite for being such a good boy. Like the chirping bird from the beach, the kite was probably made in Japan in those days when Japan was a quaint and elegant subject for picture books rather than wartime enemy. "Children of other lands", such as little Japanese boys in silk kimonos flying exotic kites, Hans in wooden shoes, and Ahmed in Bedouin robes next to his camel, figured prominently in my childhood picture books -- I suspect more so than in the 21st Century, when little Japanese boys wear pants and shirts, Hans wears blue jeans, and Ahmed wears tennis shoes and t-shirts and rides a sports car instead of a camel.

Mr. Wolfe's gift led to my pretty mother and me flying kites on the fort green while Daddy was at work -- one of my most vivid memories.

First, we put the kite together and tore strips off an old white sheet to make the tail. I would hold the roll of string and run, and Mother would hold the diamond-shaped kite, which eventually rose into the sky while the string tugged at my hand like a living creature. Other kites followed the demise of my first on a telephone wire. All tended to end their days (or minutes) in such unspectacular and frustrating ways, hung up in trees or stepped on, but on one occasion the loss of the kite was more satisfying than retrieval. The taut, vibrant string broke and fell gently, lifeless, back toward me, and my dragon-faced kite escaped, quivering in the strong wind, leaping upward, flying higher and higher inland from the fort on Matanzas Bay toward the middle of the town. Mother and I ran after it down the grassy hill until we reached the street and saw that it was above treetop and power line level. Then we moved back up the slope of the green to get a better view, and saw it, like a distant bird, fly southwest toward the far end of the plaza, where -- miraculis mirabuli -- its tail caught on the top of the highest spire of the Catholic cathedral...and there it remained, flapping and bobbing, like the flag of the town.

THE CATHEDRAL

As I've said, my father was the county agricultural agent, a job he had taken when the Depression ended his and Mother's efforts to make a living on the family farm at Blitchton. I loved to visit Daddy's office, on the second floor of the post office building, near the cathedral. Those were the days when the government built post offices that looked like post offices and not like quick-stop food stores. They were monumental stone edifices with echoing marble floors and sculpture on the facades. Even the little doors of the post office boxes were beautifully sculpted of brass. In the lobby were long, massive tables made of pecky cypress covered with thick glass. My father would lift me up so that I could tirelessly inspect the beautiful pocketed wood.

THE POST OFFICE

In Daddy's actual office the main attraction on the second floor was the water cooler with its inverted glass bottle, where you held a little Dixie cup under the spout and pushed the button and lo, if you were lucky, the thing would emit a gigantic belch and a huge bubble or two would rise in the jug. If you were not lucky, and there was neither bubble nor belch, you had -- like a slot machine addict -- to keep drinking water and refilling until the grand eruption occurred.
The office smelled of some fluid used in the mimeograph machine, which was the second greatest attraction, because when you turned a crank freshly printed papers shot out into a wire basket. Apparently I liked the typewriters too, even during the earliest visits, because there is a picture of me, in diapers, sitting on a table while earnestly pecking away at the typewriter's keys. One of Mr. Wolfe’s works, I assume.

I don't remember the people at that office, although I remember my father complaining to my mother that because the secretaries were Catholic (like most people around there, where the country churches were Catholic instead of Baptist because of the long established Minorcan population) they would brag about "doing whatever they wanted every weekend" because all they had to do was go to church and be forgiven. My father was always darkly fascinated by other people's sexual misdeeds (even though neither he nor my mother ever admitted to us children that there was any such thing as sex) and he was still repeating his indictment of Catholic secretaries years later when I was old enough to understand it.

Once each year the circus -- Barnum, Bailey, Ringling Brothers -- arrived in St. Augustine in its own train and publicized the great event with a parade through town. We would go down to the tracks to watch the horses and camels and elephants walk down ramps from their railroad cars to the ground, and then we would wait for the parade, which luckily passed directly beneath the balcony of my father's office. We fortunate ones would clutch the wrought iron balustrade and peer down at tumblers, staggering clowns, glittering girls on caparisoned horses, and elephants holding one another's tails. Lions and tigers came by in gilded cages drawn by huge heavy-footed horses, while the sound of the gilded calliope dominated it all.

My mother would take me to watch the Big Top being set up in a huge field, where elephants and horses helped men raise stupendous poles and haul incredible expanses of canvas high into the air, until where there had been nothing in the morning there was now a city of lofty tents, ornate red and gold wagons, and fluttering banners like an picture from a book of fairy tales.

The three ring circus performances themselves, being like circus performances everywhere, have become generalized in my mind except for the clowns and the trapeze artists, and I otherwise I remember mostly the opening procession, especially the bandwagon, and visiting the menagerie -- for which a separate ticket was required -- and seeing the animals close up. Also vivid is the time my little four year old blonde friend, Christine Smith, who was sitting between me and her mother in the bleachers, was suddenly not there anymore. A piece of circus magic? No -- guided by her wails we quickly discovered that she had fallen between seat and footrest onto the sawdust five feet below.

I remember, too, that the boulevard from the ticket wagon to the big top was flanked by the sideshows, with their big, garishly illustrated canvas signs. Of course I always wanted to see those shows, especially the freaks, but Mother said there were strange, ugly things in those tents that we wouldn't enjoy seeing. That may really have meant that we couldn't afford the extra expense, but most likely it was an expression of my mother's discomfort with anything that was not guaranteed to be cheerful and uplifting -- for my mother's major characteristic, passed down by her mother -- is to avoid noticing or even recognizing the existence of anything ugly or depressing, and to speak only of what is bright and beautiful. "Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof," she would say, or "Whatsoever things be beautiful, think on those things." This attitude has its obvious pitfalls, but Mother has been lucky in leading a life that never managed to shatter her philosophy, and it makes her such a pleasure to be around that even in her old age she is extremely popular with her contemporaries and much younger people. Even of the Depression she says, “We didn’t realize we were so bad off because everybody else was in the same boat.”

Another good use of my father's office balcony came at annual Fiesta time, when for several days the town celebrated Ponce de Leon's first landing, which was reenacted by local politicians and members of the Chamber of Commerce dressed as conquistadors who ceremoniously disembarked from a long open boat near the Bridge of Lions. We could stand on my father's balcony and look down along the plaza, where churches, clubs, and civic organizations had set up booths. There was all kinds of food for sale, and throngs of people, many in costume, jostled one another while guitars and trumpets played Spanish music and the cathedral bells tolled.

Once off the balcony and in the narrow streets during the Fiesta, all I could see were legs. Much of my view of life then was legs, and my main ambition was to be tall enough to see something else. Legs in trousers, legs in overalls, legs in boots, legs in stockings ... except for the omnipresent nuns of this cathedral town, who had no visible legs but nevertheless walked in pairs or larger groups in full length black skirts swinging about the tops of high black shoes. Long strands of ebony beads swung from farther up, and when I was distant enough, the view included the women's fantastic headgear of starched white and draped black. My mother said nuns had queer beliefs and never married, but since I did not know what "married" meant I just thought of nuns as one more phenomena in a world flooding me with new, but somehow not new, things -- intense things, startling things: nuns, dragon flies, locomotives, lizards, lightning, cat eyes, hippos, horses, doodle-bug holes, net-draped shrimp boats, shrieking seagulls swooping for bread by the sea.

On the crowded Fiesta streets, bounced this way and that by conquistadors, I was startled when my eyes started traveling up the trouser legs just in front of me and when they should have reached the belt line kept traveling farther and farther until I gradually realized that I was looking at a giant. Where his head should have been was his waist, and from there he just went on and on. Mother and Daddy -- whose principle function in life, I had come to realize, was answering my questions -- explained that the giant was a regular man standing on stilts hidden underneath his trousers. What are stilts? My father made me a pair, two-by-fours with wedges for footrests, on which I, and later my brothers, would lurch around our yard like ostriches.

The Age of Legs is linked in my mind with being in the post office lobby with my father, grasping the fabric of his trouser leg at the knee to keep from getting separated, and looking up and discovering that I was not holding on to my father, but to some man had never seen before.

Which in turn takes me to the post office lobby when my father introduced me to a real, live G-man, a government secret agent who opened his business suit jacket to show me his hidden pistol in a shiny black holster.

Leaving my personal perspective aside, by far the biggest event in the St. Augustine area during the six years I lived there was the creation and opening of Marine Studios. It was, I think, the first giant oceanarium in the world, the first place in which gigantic tanks of seawater allowed marine life from sharks to little tropical fish to live together in spacious natural conditions.

From 1937 until 1938 construction proceeded eighteen miles south of St. Augustine between the inland waterway and the Atlantic Ocean, and then on June 23, 1938, came the grand opening. Although I vividly remember Marine Studios, I’m not sure that I saw it on that first day even though my parents tried to get us there. My mother rolls her eyes at the thought of the traffic that was on the road. Here is a description from a current Web site:

“Of the twenty thousand people who descended that single day upon the narrow coastal road south of St. Augustine, only the early ones managed to reach the oceanarium. Swarming through the passageways with their cameras, they stood transfixed for hours at every available window space. As they stared and were stared at by giant groupers and by thousands of other specimens, up the road for miles cars stood bumper to bumper unable to move.”

Whether I saw it on that first day or soon after, Marine Studios remains a magical part of my early childhood. There was something almost supernatural about standing at a glass window far below the surface of ocean water and looking eye-to-eye with a shark or a huge jewfish just inches away, while brilliantly colored reef-dwellers, octopi, and eels were seen in and around the wreckage of a sunken ship down in the middle of the tank. At intervals a deep sea diver in a ponderous helmet, linked to the surface by a hose, would descend and walk the sandy bottom dispensing chopped fish from a basket. He would be at times completely hidden by the swarms of feeders that swirled around him. But the liveliest place of all was the tank where the porpoises were fed, their sleek shiny bodies breaking the surface to fly high in the air to snatch a fish from a human hand. Now that there are many oceanariums, and more performing porpoises than performing dogs, Marine Studios may seem unimpressive, but from our perspective in the 1930's, it was a wonder of the world.

Other memories of St. Augustine are simply nostalgic. Like catching crabs behind our rented house on St. George Street, whose back yard ran down to Maria Sanchez Lake -- a shallow salt tidal lake retained by a low dam at one end and a ground-level wall all around. We would tie chicken necks on a piece of string, lower them into the water, and later pull the crabs up to the air and sunlight when they had fastened their claws onto the meat. Once the tides were so inflated by the passage of a hurricane that the water came up into our back yard onto our little screened porch behind the kitchen, and standing on the porch barefooted we could see fish swimming among the submerged grass blades of our lawn just outside the door, darting fish suspended a few inches above the green grass where the day before we had run in dusty shoes.

Next door to that house on St. George Street lived Mrs. Meginnis, who cured sauerkraut in big jars under her house. You could smell the sauerkraut when the breeze was right. Like many Florida frame houses, the Meginnis home rested on high foundation columns which created an accessible area beneath the floor enclosed by latticework -- an excellent place for children like me to crawl in and hide and inspect doodle bug funnels in the fine sand and risk, as our mothers constantly warned, being bitten by spiders, snakes, and scorpions. Once there was a big stir when a neighborhood boy disappeared, and after hours of searching he was found lollygagging behind the latticework right under his frantic parents' feet.

In the back yard between Mrs. Meginnis's house and Maria Sanchez Lake was a little cottage where a dark-haired lady artist and her small daughter came from the North to spend the winters. I hardly remember the daughter, but the Yankee artist made a great impression. She was much more abrupt than the other females I had encountered, and she talked with a strange hurried accent, but she let me look closely at her brightly colored palette and her squashed, smeared tubes of oil paint, like so many toothpaste tubes in a long box. I loved to smell the paint and turpentine as she brushed swathes of color onto a canvas. Once, after asking Mother's permission, she set up her easel in our backyard and painted a picture of our clothesline with our clothes hanging on it. Mother always said she hoped the artist would give us that painting, but she didn't.

There were also things I don't remember, but which I seem to remember because of hearing about them so often, or seeing pictures of them: My father and his brother, Landis, going fishing and filling the whole sidewalk from our front door to the street when they laid out their catch. My parents taking me, as a baby, fishing with them on Pelicier Creek, where they let me grip the rod and reel; at other times I stayed on the river bank in the shade with Irene while Mother and Daddy went fishing. Daddy told how, when he and Mother first moved to St. Augustine, never having lived by the ocean before, he bought a rowboat and a kicker (which is what we called an outboard motor), and left the boat tied to the downtown pier, where he came back hours later and found it dangling in the air because the tide had gone out.

Irene was my constant companion. One of my favorite walks with her was to the railroad station, which was only a few blocks from one of the succession of houses we lived in. (I have no idea why we moved so often, but it may have expressed some restless characteristic of my parents, who in other aspects of their lives seemed as fixed as oak trees; later in life, when they owned their own home and their children had left, they went on moving from house to house every few years, even designing two homes themselves.) As I recall, the little railway station was Spanish-looking, like most public buildings in St. Augustine, with a red tiled roof. We would just sit around or stroll, and sometimes I was given a penny to put on the track when the train was heard approaching. Squatting and peering excitedly under the monster as it roared and rattled by, I would go and retrieve the smoothly flattened copper from the hot gray gravel between the railroad ties.

I loved to walk on the rails, pretending to be a circus tightrope walker, and to feel the vibrations in the steel ahead of an arriving train. I'm not sure when "streamliners" (which were heavily represented in my scrapbooks) became universal, but at that time there were still engines which burned coal and discharged satisfying billows of smoke from stacks and loud bursts of steam from their sides. I particularly liked to watch the trains go through the stately ritual of preparing to move after letting off and taking on passengers and baggage. First, the conductor called, "All aboard!", and picked up his mounting stool from the hot cement and casually hopped with it onto the metal steps of the train. He would push the stool into the mysterious sanctum behind him and casually, holding a bright steel vertical bar with one hand, swing out to look to the rear along the side of the train and then to the front. His arm would signal, and my breath became barricaded in my throat as I waited for the first hiss, the first barely perceptible silent movement of a burnished wheel-- a movement that would sometimes end, accompanied by a soft bumps and creaks, after only a fraction of a rotation, and the suspense would begin again. But eventually the wheels would begin soundlessly to rotate, and after a few creeping turns would begin to move faster. There would be faint sighs and creaks, then vibrations, then jingles, rattles and bumps as speed gradually increased, until finally the details of the sides of the wheels would be lost in their spinning, and an accelerating rhythm of clanks and bumps would smooth all the natural sounds of train into a single continuum which, by the time the caboose sped by and diminished into the distance, had reached the same reckless roar that had come to my ears before the train had entered the depot and squealed to a halt.

In our small but famous coastal town, those tracks stretching off to north and south, and the trains which traveled them, were by far our most prominent links with the greater world – a world of which I had very little conception at the age of four or five, but whose existence I could sense from the boxes and suitcases that were moved on and off the trains, and from the smells which came from the open doors when the train was stopped, from the faces peering down at me from the windows of the passenger cars, and from the proud superiority of the conductor, who had been far from me that morning and would be far from me that night.

On one special winter day word spread down our palm-fringed street – who knows how – that a train was about to arrive which had snow on it. We ran over to the station and watched the southbound train pull in, its rooftops glistening with a melting white crust which, when the train had stopped, dripped like rain onto the gravel below. Magical. Snow, which we knew only in picture books, really did exist, and we could catch in our hands the icy water which had fallen from the sky in delicate flakes. It would be fifteen years before I saw snow again.

Second to my birth, the major event of my St. Augustine years was the coming of kindergarten. In the first event I was thrust from the warm perfect universe of the womb into a noisy world of bright hospital lights and unfriendly cold air, and with the second event I was thrust from the warm dependency of home, Mother, and Irene, into Mrs. Joyce's kindergarten. If I had comprehended that this was just the beginning of a seemingly interminable sentence of confinement in classrooms I would have felt much worse than I did, but as it was I ample grief for the occasion.
Mrs. Joyce's house was only a few blocks from ours, but at the time it seemed the other end of the world. The day my mother first drove me there I was in a tearful panic. She parked in front of the place, which looked like any other home on the street except for an extensive glassed-in porch on the side, and tried, as always, to show me the brighter side of things. She pointed to the big windows.

"Look at that boy. See how much fun he's having?"

The fact that this other child was sitting at a table looking out a window without actually squalling did not in the least reduce my anxiety. I was being cut loose into the unknown, and would be separated, possibly forever, from everything I cherished. But I was not given a choice. I was taken up to the front door and deposited with Mrs. Joyce, a very nice, slender lady who wore her graying hair in a bun. I don't remember what happened next, except that I stopped crying and merely quavered after taking my place at a painted table with crayons and paper in front of me.

The boy Mother had pointed out through the window was John Randolph Frazer, whose father had made a lot of money inventing the proximity fuse or something, and who was mayor for awhile. John Randolph became my first and best friend during that time, and there were fabulous birthday parties at his house, with pony rides and once even a merry-go-round. At Mrs. Joyce's I also met Christine Smith, my first girlfriend as our mothers jokingly put it, who fell through the bleachers at the circus.

I really enjoyed Mrs. Joyce's kindergarten soon after the first day or so. We children sat on little painted wooden chairs at little painted wooden tables and covered paper with crayon pictures, learned the use of blunt-nosed scissors and thick white paste, and gradually mastered the alphabet, the days of the week, the names and order of the months. Before long we could even print our names.

MRS. JOYCE'S KINDERGARTEN CLASS

The four seasons played a prominent role in our activities. We cut paper leaves, colored them with autumn hues, and hung them on strings to festoon our rooms. We drew or otherwise fashioned apples, pumpkins, arch-backed black cats, witches, Christmas trees, Santa Clauses, American flags, George Washington (but not Abraham Lincoln), Valentine hearts, and Easter bunnies. It was first discovered that I was red-green colorblind when I crayoned the green-labeled balloon the wrong color and made my apple green and my pumpkin orange. But I got high marks for scissors work.
We also played games, of course, and took part in skits. My first dramatic role was as Jack, who was nimble and quick and jumped successfully over his candle stick. Musical chairs must have been our favorite activity, because it stands out happily in my memory above ring-around-the-rosy and everything else we did. Mrs. Joyce would play the piano, and each time she stopped there would be a mad scramble with boys, girls, and little chairs falling all over the place. And then we would lie down on our pallets and take naps, for which we would be rewarded with graham crackers and milk. What could be better? No wonder I resented much that came in the future.

Only two other things come to mind from Mrs. Joyce's. One is the Japanese plum tree beside her back steps, where we would pick the fuzzy-skinned loquats, chew the sweetness from the flesh, and suck the slippery black seeds..

The other memory is of one afternoon when my mother did not come to pick me up on time, and Mrs. Joyce took me into the kitchen with her while she made cookies for the next day. She let me scoop some sweet, gingery raw cookie dough onto one finger to taste, but told me it would make me drunk if I had more. I did not know what “drunk” was, but even after I found out I've always wondered how cookie dough could have that effect.

THE ST. AUGUSTINE ALLIGATOR FARM

My biggest ambition during that period was to get to be seven years old so that I would be grown up and sophisticated like the seven-year-old boy down the block -- who, by virtue of his maturity and parents’ relative prosperity in this Depression time, had an Erector Set, whereas I had Tinker Toys. My second big ambition was to join the children who passed my front yard every day going to and from school -- real school, not kindergarten. I would stand at the gate of our home and watch them walking by in their sweaters, carrying their lunch boxes, and I was so impressed by the sophisticates who walked backwards down the sidewalk without even looking over their shoulders that I could hardly stand to wait any longer to join them.

Meanwhile two very significant events had occurred. First, my brother Riley was born in the summer of 1937, but I don't remember the event. I only realize, in retrospect, that my era as an only child, the unchallenged darling of the house, had ended with a jolt. Then, one morning when Riley was two years old and I was almost six, we were up much earlier than usual one morning. It was still dark outside. I thought somebody was sick. By then I knew about colds and flu.

Standing on the stairs, I asked, “What’s wrong? Where’s Mother?”

"She’s gone to the hospital to have a baby," my father said.

"Another one?" I asked incredulously.

When we were in the hospital lobby on the day my mother was ready to come home, she was carrying the new baby, Gordon, while my father paid the bill, and I asked her where babies came from.

"Go ask that doctor and he'll tell you," my mother said, but I was very shy from the beginning and not about to cross the lobby and accost the big man in the long white coat.

Speaking of doctors, when I was five years old I underwent surgery to remove my tonsils. I certainly hope it was necessary because the experience gave me a permanent phobia about anesthetics. All that I recall is being wheeled away from my mother into an operating room where overhead lights blazed into my eyes, and where a nurse spoke reassuring words as someone put over my nose and mouth a kitchen sieve lined with a cloth soaked with some blinding, suffocating liquid. The ether put out the light, and I can remember only the moment just before that, and then lying in a hospital bed with a sore throat drinking apricot juice. The nurses joked with my parents that I had completely used up Flagler Hospital’s supply of apricot juice.

Finally the time came when I could glimpse on the horizon that long-anticipated September when I would be starting First Grade -- real school! In late summer we drove up to Jacksonville to buy my school clothes, but when my parents took me to the school to register they learned, incredulous, that because I’d been born in December I could not begin school until the next September. Returning to Mrs. Joyce’s kindergarten was definitely an anticlimax.

That winter and the following year dissolve into memories of Irene and her pies (no longer just for me), Irene dragging me out onto the back porch and calling to the children there, “You all want to see a BAD boy?”, and more seasonal creations at kindergarten.

I just don’t remember starting First Grade, and I don’t remember much about those first months in school except some speculation on the playground that Jack Armstrong, the All American Boy (a radio character), must have strong arms. I also recall sitting around long tables with other children drinking milk and at one point wetting my pants because the teacher just wouldn’t believe I really had to go.

Maybe the reason I remember so little about First Grade in St. Augustine is that when I was about halfway through it there was a revolutionary change: My father was to become the County Agent in Alachua County, and we would be moving those seventy miles or so to Gainesville in the spring.

Copyright 2005 Fleming Lee

Reading and Writing and . . . Uh, What Was That?

2007-08-19T11:07:00.002-05:00

Harking back to my posts of August 11 and 15, which were about mathematics, I want to express some thoughts about math and me, and the teaching of math in general.

Pardon me for saying so, but I was an exceptionally intelligent child, and yet almost from the beginning I became apprehensive when numbers were mentioned in a classroom. If the chalk squeaked on the blackboard and words appeared, I perked up, but if the chalk formed numbers, I cringed. I might be able to explain that better if I could remember the very first experiences, but I can’t.

Try as my arithmetic teachers might to make numbers interesting, I was a lost cause. One problem was that I’ve always needed to understand the foundation, the most basic principles, of anything I set out to learn. While a teacher was setting us to memorize multiplication tables, I was still asking questions like, “What is a number?” I didn’t really know how to formulate the questions, but I felt that I was being thrown into the middle of a chaotic mystery rather than starting to build from the electrons, protons, atoms, and molecules.

Whether not the need to begin with basic principles is a defect in my thinking I don’t know, but it’s there, and very insistent. . . and in my first twelve years of school, very inconvenient. I suspect that it was related to my dislike of hypothetical practical applications.

One way the schoolbooks of the 1940’s and 50’s tried to interest students in math was to pose “problems” in everyday practical terms. “If a farmer has twelve bushels of wheat. . .” “If train A leaves station A at 11:12 a.m. and travels at 60 miles an hour, and if train B. . .” “You have $12.10 in your pocket, and you . . .” Even at this moment I can feel my stomach shrink as I write those words. Why is that?

Oddly enough, I begged to have number manipulation taught to me in abstract terms, for the numbers’ own sake so to speak, and for the interest that resulted in wondering what would happen if this or that mathematical operation were applied. I literally pleaded for abstraction, but my feeling was that the teacher didn’t comprehend what I was talking about and didn’t know how to answer me. The result was that I took almost no mathematics courses.

Leaving my attitude aside, it makes sense that most children will be more interested in something they can use than in something they’re just required to memorize and parrot back, but practical applications arising from a farmer’s truckload of produce or a train schedule were not things we needed to know then. What I have learned in suffering from my ignorance of math in “Second Life” (“SL”) today is that the motivation to learn about numbers (if an exciting abstract approach isn’t taken) comes from a present desire to do something which one really wants to do out of personal enthusiasm, and cannot do without knowledge of mathematics.

To take a simple example which reveals my abysmal ignorance: The basic size of a parcel of land in SL is 512 square meters. If the parcel of land is square, how long will the boundary lines be in meters? I have no idea, but I need to know, now, because I’m looking into buying a piece of land today. How do I even estimate the boundary lines of a rectangular piece of land of 3320 sq. meters? It’s not an activity that sounds fun, but it is necessary in light of my enthusiasm.

And if I want to put a roof on an SL house whose frontal width is 9.3 meters, using two pieces of roof which will rest on the existing house sides and meet in the center, how long and wide should those roof sections be? Even I soon recognized that it depends in part on the angle of the roof, which gave rise to many interesting abstract questions in addition to the practical ones.

See what I mean? As far as practical applications are concerned, a present need to know, based on personal enthusiasm for accomplishing something now, seems to me the key to motivation in learning math.

It's All a Game

2007-08-16T07:47:00.000-05:00

Ordinarily I avoid posting what is already being widely publicized, but how could I not write about the interview with an Oxford professor whose opinion is that we may very well be a computer simulation – that we are, in effect, creations within a computer game?

SCENE FROM 'SECOND LIFE' by KRISTY FLANAGAN

I wanted to say, ‘I told you so!’, but I didn’t realize until I had almost finished this post that Dr. NICK BOSTROM, Department of Philosophy, Oxford University, had published his article, ‘ARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?’ in Philosophical Quarterly in 2003. The current publicity which grabbed my attention comes from a New York Times article about Dr. Bostrom that appeared just two days ago. I am too lazy to rewrite my post from the viewpoint of Dr. Bostrom’s article, but after publishing this I’m going to read his paper carefully.

Unaware of Dr. Bostrom’s ideas, I have written at least twice in FLIGHTS OF PEGASUS on closely related themes:

‘Creation as Play’
(Jan. 2, 2007).
[A reader comment reminded me of] ‘a favorite notion that I want to mention right away.

‘It is the theory that the universe was created by the Divine, the Source, in the spirit of play, in the spirit of a game.

‘When I first read that idea from the ancient Hindu tradition (I wish I knew where), it immediately rang true and has stayed with me ever since.

‘I just did a little research online, with few results. “Lila” is said to mean “Cosmic Play” (play in the sense of an activity for fun rather than a stage play), an attitude that regards the universe as arising from the joyous play and creative adventures of the Divine. Lila explains the universe as a cosmic playground for the gods. A Wikipedia article says that Lila literally means "play," but that in religious texts refers to "purposeless play" - life as a spontaneous game. . . . What a welcome contrast to the idea that the universe was created as an educational or judicial system.’

Then, in “Reality? Happy Hunting!” (Feb. 17, 2007), I wrote,

‘I’ve written in this blog that we might compare our state to a person who becomes so immersed in a virtual reality computer game that she forgets there is anything else. Her 3-D perceptions of the game, and herself as the seeing participant in the game, become reality to her. Without memory of sitting down and hooking up the game apparatus, without memory of herself as a person who is playing a game, she has no means of finding her game reality secondary to a “higher reality”. If someone in the game asks her about “other realities” she might say scornfully, pleased with her down-to-earth common sense, “This is obviously reality, and it’s all there is.” She’s going to be quite surprised when the game ends and the goggles come off.

What if we’re in a similar situation?’

Here are some excerpts from the NYT article on Dr. Bostrom’s ideas:

‘It is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.’ Unlike the situation in the movie, The Matrix, ‘you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.’

‘Future humans, by means of what we today would call supercomputers, would create ‘virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.
‘There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. ‘

The author of the NYT article, John Tierney, says, ‘ it’s highly likely that civilization could endure to produce those supercomputers. And if owners of the computers were anything like the millions of people immersed in virtual worlds like Second Life, SimCity and World of Warcraft, they’d be running simulations just to get a chance to control history. . .’

This one comment in Mr. Tierney’s article particularly tickled me: ‘Or maybe, as suggested by Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, you should try to be as interesting as possible, on the theory that the designer is more likely to keep you around for the next simulation.’

All of these ideas raise a multitude of interesting questions – perhaps foremost, ‘How do computer sims become conscious?” My personal intuition is that consciousness cannot be created, not by the brain or anything else, and therefore is inherent in everything. Dr. Bostrom states, ‘Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct)’, but does not identify the philosophy of mind he is talking about. Can anyone tell me?

A Surprise from the Neverending Web

2007-08-15T07:58:00.001-05:00

Something happened as a result of my writing the previous post which astonishes me in a way I find hard to express. The amazement comes from the fact that my scribbling about mathematics had a significant effect on someone I didn’t even know existed.

This comment from Kristy Flanagan was the first hint:

‘I'm a math teacher exploring Second Life and just wanted you to know that I truly enjoyed this post. It came at a very good time, in fact. My blog features an open letter to you in response to your SL experience.
Feel free to contact me in SL. I'm Kristy Flanagan. I have a math center on EduIsland II and if you visit, I will show you my Bumble Bee project.’

I went to her blog, Math Playground, subtitled ‘Second Life Math’, and read this, addressed to me as an open letter:

‘Have you ever felt it was time to give up on something only to have an encounter that completely reverses your course of action?

You see, I've been struggling recently to find ways that Second Life, my virtual world of choice, can make math more understandable, more engaging, and more relevant to my students. While my SL Logo project seems to meet these goals, I haven’t been able to imagine other math projects that would benefit from or even require a three dimensional virtual learning environment. I began to think that without viable project ideas perhaps Second Life was not worth pursuing as an educational platform.
Then serendipity struck and I was led to your blog. You recently discovered Second Life and have been spending your time there very creatively, learning to build. And in your quest to perfect your building, you, a self-described mathphobe, discovered both the necessity and joy of mathematics.

In your words:

"I now have a different meaning for "second life". In learning how to create objects and to build things in the game, I am being given a second chance in life. I am now devouring mathematical formulae as if they were chocolate cake, and for the first time I’m experiencing the joys of geometry."

"So, I approached creation of objects in Second Life with not one day of education in geometry or trigonometry, and almost no knowledge of other mathematics. Now I eagerly run to Google for the meaning of "chord" and "circle of latitude". I feel the joy of the sun breaking through clouds when I suddenly comprehend some mathematical formula or see how different shapes interact. I’m as happy as a child on a Christmas morning full of new toys."

In my search for the perfect project, I overlooked the play factor in learning and teaching math. You did not come to Second Life to learn trig functions or area formulas. You came to play. And to make your play time as fulfilling and engaging as possible, you needed new math skills. In your quest to build more complex objects, you embraced a subject that had been both irrelevant and difficult for you in the absence of purpose.

I now understand that I need to focus less on projects that will work in Second Life and, instead, apply what I’ve discovered about learning to the teaching of my students now. How can I recreate the positive aspects of Second Life’s educational environment in my own classroom? How can I help my students take charge of their learning, to seek out the information and skills they need, to see its value and relevance? How can I make math more meaningful with the tools that are readily available to me? To help answer those questions, Second Life will be my learning environment and not my students'.

So thank you for coming to Second Life and sharing your experience so eloquently. You have broadened my perspective and renewed my purpose. I'm setting the bar high but just imagine my reward when students "feel the joy of the sun breaking through clouds" or the quiet pleasure when they "devour mathematical formulas as if they were chocolate cake." ‘

The lady, who has given permission for me to use her real name, Colleen King, later wrote to me, ‘Isn't it amazing how such a simple act can lead to an exciting chain of events?’ Nothing could express my own feelings better.

Yesterday I had a tour of Kristy Flanagan’s Math Playground in Second Life.

It was most impressive, especially her Bumble Bee project, which features a bee she has designed and programmed to carry out commands and create forms and patterns of various kinds. I want add that I’ve never met anyone more dedicated to anything than Colleen is to improving the teaching of mathematics. She has that admirable quality of “one pointedness” -- the difference between the penetrating power of a spear and a mallet. While I have flitted from subject to subject, she is able to stay completely focused. That is the difference between a dilettante and a creative professional. It makes me happy to be told that I have had a beneficial effect on such an admirable person.

Yes, I’m sure that if she had taught me arithmetic and more advanced math when I was in school I would have not only learned but loved it. I intend to write more about that soon.

A Second Life in More Ways than One

2007-08-11T08:34:00.000-05:00

The online world Second Life is so named because its residents can lead a second life alongside their real one. Thus you can have two (or more) homes, and two wives or husbands, without going broke or to jail for bigamy. And in that second world everybody is young and all the women and all the homes are pretty – or as pretty as their creators can make them.

I now have a different meaning for “second life”. In learning how to create objects and to build things in the game, I am being given a second chance in life. I am now devouring mathematical formulae as if they were chocolate cake, and for the first time I’m experiencing the joys of geometry.

I hated dealing with numbers from the time they were first forced on me by a schoolteacher. I was a reader, a person whose aptitudes ran to the arts and philosophy, and my brain reacted to numbers as if they were poison. I devised ingenuous ways of avoiding required classes in mathematics and of getting through the courses I was forced to take without impeding my advancement to the next grade. I’ve never cheated, but strange things are possible. For example, I was totally lost during my one semester of high school algebra, and flunked the mid-term exam. My friend Everett Yon, who was bound for West Point and never made less than an “A” in mathematics, spend the better part of a day before the algebra final exam with me, drilling me on all the things I had totally ignored throughout the semester. Suddenly it made sense, and I actually scored an “A” on my final. . . after which all recollection of algebra faded away within a few weeks. Years later, after I had taken an IQ test I realized that I had invented, improvised, a kind of algebra to answer some of the questions – and I’m sure that Everett’s forgotten teachings played a role. I cannot take full credit for having invented algebra.

So, I approached creation of objects in Second Life with not one day of education in geometry or trigonometry, and almost no knowledge of other mathematics. Now I eagerly run to Google for the meaning of “chord” and “circle of latitude”. I feel the joy of the sun breaking through clouds when I suddenly comprehend some mathematical formula or see how different shapes interact. I’m as happy as a child on a Christmas morning full of new toys.

This kind of mental activity is said to be good for (I hate to say it) an older person, so you can’t accuse me of wasting my time. But even if you did accuse me of wasting my time, it would be nothing new to me. People have been accusing me of that most of my life. I was a writer, after all, and a hedonist, a person who thought that love and freedom were more important than any job.

Pegasus and I believe that you are never wasting your time if you’re doing something you really enjoy. Pegasus wants me to study and practice so that someday I may be able create him in Second Life and let him soar through new skies.

Blossoms Photographed from Our Front Lawn in the Past 3 Days

2007-08-10T08:34:00.000-05:00

SKY BLOSSOM (SPACE SHUTTLE LAUNCH)

PASSION FLOWER BLOSSOMS

PHOTOS and PASSION FLOWER VINE by JULIA

Thoughts That Made Me Smile This Morning

2007-08-09T09:05:00.000-05:00

One of the advantages of being retired is that I can say, “I’ll do that tomorrow” and really mean it. Of course whether it gets done or not is an entirely different matter.

A disadvantage of being retired is that nothing much happens unless one makes it happen, thus depriving the blogger of filler material in the nature of “What I did yesterday.” One can make only so many stories from sleeping, eating, grocery shopping, cats, and wandering in computer games. But I can see that when one is old enough to have been retired for a few years, nothing new is preferable to a lot of the alternatives.

A couple of my favorite really rustic Southernisms:

“I knewn I know’d you!” (On confirming that someone is an old acquaintance.)

“I ain’t done tucken none off yet.” (Way up in the North Carolina mountains we saw a sign on a cabin, “HONEY FOR SALE”. Having been warned not just to walk up to one of those rickety wooden homes, whose residents owned rifles and were perpetually suspicious of strangers, my father called from a distance below, “We’d like to buy some honey.” The mountaineer who was lounging in a rocking chair on the front porch called back, “I ain’t done tucken none off yet. Come back tomorry.” My father returned every day for the rest of our 5-day vacation and got the same answer from the rocking chair every time, “I ain’t done tucken none off yet.”

I may have told the following story, but here it is:

My father grew up on a ranch/farm on the Florida frontier at the beginning of the 20th Century. The noon meal, “dinner”, was the big feast of the day. The men would come in from the fields after working since dawn and join the women and other family members at a long table groaning with roast beef, ham, fried chicken, perhaps leg of lamb or pork chops, bowls of vegetables, corn bread, gravy, and pies.

WHERE MY FATHER GREW UP, AND WHERE THE DINNERS WERE SERVED (Click to enlarge)

Old Man Folks, with his white beard, was too old to plow or herd cows, but his famous skill as a trencherman was undiminished by age. He ate amazing quantities, and at the end of every dinner he would say the same thing as he pushed back his chair and raised his napkin to his lips for a final wipe,

“I enjoyed them few mouthfuls as much as if I’d et a hearty meal.”

Which makes me smile, but may have worn a little thin on my grandmother.

After a special repast he wanted to compliment the hostess and said, “That was a delicious dinner . . . what there was of it.” Realizing his faux pas he added, “And there was plenty of it, such as it was.”

Old Man Folks lives on because rarely a day goes by that I don’t say jokingly about something, “what there was of it . . . such as it was.” Amazingly useful and versatile phrases.

August Memoir

2007-08-06T05:11:00.000-05:00

During my childhood and early teens, August meant one thing: The family vacation trip to Lake Weir. As August arrived this year, my nostalgia for thost Augusts spent at the lake during and after the Second World War period persuaded me to post this fourth chapter from "memoirs" I began writing a few years ago. The only introduction needed is that I was born and grew up in Florida.

LAKE WEIR

by Fleming Lee

GORDON, FLEMING, AND RILEY, READY FOR THE PLUNGE

During my childhood and adolescence, our explored universe had four major points: Gainesville, where we lived; Blitchton, about 30 miles to the southwest, the family ranch where Daddy had been born and raised and where most of his relatives still lived; Ocala, forty miles south of Gainesville, thirteen miles south of Blitchton, where Mother’s father and mother and three sisters lived; Lake Weir, south of Ocala, where we went for our summer vacation each August for as far back as I can remember; Jacksonville, where we traveled about twice a year to buy clothes and Christmas gifts.
I’ll write about Lake Weir now because I associate it with the day the Second World War ended.
Mother and my brothers and I stayed at Lake Weir for the whole month of August even though Daddy had only a two week vacation. Daddy joined us on the weekends during the weeks he had to work.
No matter how I describe Lake Weir to you, it will be impossible for you to feel with me the delight that those memories still bring. The joyful excitement we felt on the morning of departure still resonates through the years with an intensity equaled only by Christmas Eve and the last hours of school before summer vacation.

Of course we had been preparing for days, with emotional emphasis on bathing suits, towels, and fishing tackle. In addition to those more inspiring items, Mother had to think of everything from soap and toothpaste and suntan lotion to salt and pepper and sugar and dog food. The trunk of the car was packed with suitcases and cardboard boxes of canned goods, bottles, towels, books, board games, puzzles, and decks of cards.
Daddy was exceptionally carefully organized in everything he did, and, insisting on loading the car all by himself, he would first place all the suitcases, boxes, and everything else on the ground around the rear of the car, then form a three dimensional mental picture of the finished design, and finally put everything into place, leaving not one inch of wasted space – which is just as well, since the 1940's automobile had to accommodate five people and a dog in addition to all the supplies.

On that August morning I would wake up well before sunrise — actually, not only on the day of departure but even on the preceding day. I had long manifested an unusually high degree of excitability, and even the anticipation of starting an ordinary day would have me awake an hour or so before anybody else in the family. At the age of ten or eleven I might just read while others slept, or go out with Nippy into the back yard. A few years earlier I sometimes crawled around under large pieces of furniture such as the dining room table, enjoying the novel perspective and the strange, dim, silent emptiness of the house. I might take a ball of string, tie it to the leg of a chair, and from that starting point — climbing up onto things as necessary — take the string from table to lamp to mantle to overheard light fixture to more chairs and tables, until the whole room seemed filled with giant spider webs.
On the morning of going to the lake, I didn’t know what to do with myself except find ways to make enough accidental noise in order to get everybody else moving. Having to sit through the ritual of corn flakes and bacon and toast and grape jelly was agonizing. Why didn’t we just get on with it? (I was never much of a breakfast eater except when it came to pancakes or waffles, and through many later years got through the morning on nothing but coffee.) There would be the inevitable complaints from my father about this, that, or the other not having been done right, or forgotten, and then the final round of checking light switches and the knobs on the gas range. Problems finding Nippy would have occurred early, after which he would have been tied in the garage to await our departure.
Once everything and everybody was in the car, including Nippy’s water and food bowl, I would supply the final touch as the car moved out of the driveway by having to go back into the house for some reason, most likely to use the bathroom, but maybe because I had forgotten something. It was a permanent family joke that we could start out for anywhere without Fleming having to call the car to a halt and run back into the house.

Underway at last, with three boys in the back seat and Nippy leaping from one window to another to get different views of the passing scene, we made our way carefully around the university campus and headed south on route 441 out of Gainesville. When we reached Payne’s Prairie did we began to feel we were really venturing into the wide, exciting world. Payne’s Prairie is an almost treeless plain about two miles across and bigger from end to end. Many years before it had been a lake crossed by a ferry; then a sinkhole opened near one end and all the water drained down into the earth, leaving fish flopping in the mud to be scooped up in bushel baskets — or so our father told us.
From there we entered what in Florida passes for hilly country, sometimes with orange groves on either side of the road, tinted with late summer fruit; sometimes with the crops of small farms; sometimes with the big oaks and undergrowth of the hammocks.
When we passed some farmer’s tall tobacco barn near the road, with the long bundles of tobacco hanging to dry, visible through the openings in the barns, we might slow down just so we could smell the keen, sweet aroma. In addition to the tobacco barns, as I recall our rides through our native countryside the most poignant feelings are evoked by two memories: The sharp smell of burning fat pine wood, and the sweet scent of new-mown grass.

The burning pine smoke might come from a smoldering forest fire, or from a burning pile of uprooted stumps and trimmed limbs. The same delicious smell was provided by fires at the Negro cabins (“Negro” was the approved polite term) which were scattered along either side of the highway, where there was almost always a big, black iron cauldron in the side yard sitting over a pile of smoking wood, usually attended by a woman stirring clothes in the steaming pot with a broom handle.
Those the Negro cabins, always marked by an open front porch and a tin roof and a chimney, and usually with a central passageway straight from front to back which was wide open in summer, became more plentiful, as did the elderly persons of both sexes rocking on the porches. Their yards were raked sand rather than grass (just at our grandmother’s house at Blitchton), sometimes with halves of tires planted lining the sides of the front walk for decoration, always with geraniums and other hanging potted plants decorating the porch.
The perfume of fresh cut grass could come from many sources, but the most exciting for us were the crews of uniformed convicts, sometimes with chains on their ankles, nonchalantly slinging blades to trim the grass along the sides of the road. (We called the tool a slinger. Its handle split into a Y at the bottom, with the blade attached across the fork of the Y.) The prison truck which had brought the men out to the job would be parked nearby with a perspiring keg of water on the back, and a couple of guards with shotguns would be lounging in the shade if shade were available, looking as if they had reached the most extreme state of relaxation attained in the history of the human species. The sweating prisoners always looked a lot leaner and stronger than their keepers.

Of course I would ask why people went to jail and if the guards ever shot the prisoners, and was told that they were bad men and that the guards would shoot at them only if they tried to run away. We would not end up like that if we were good and not break any laws.
After Payne’s Prairie, we passed the tiny town of Micanopy, watched the shiny expanse of Orange Lake slide by on our left, and by the time we had reached the handful of nice old buildings that was Macintosh, about forty minutes had passed and boredom was setting in. The only real town on the trip, Ocala, became the goal which promised a stop at a filling station for soft drinks.
By the time we reached the outskirts of Ocala, where billboards told tourists that Silver Springs and its glass bottomed boats was only a few miles away, we would have been overtaken by several discourteous Yankees who turned out to be Floridians, a fact which only the youngest, Gordon, had the nerve to point out to Daddy, who told Gordon not to sass his parents. Gordon and Riley began shoving one another, I was trying to lose myself in a book, and Nippy was riding with his head poked out of the back window, nose to the wind, long black and white ears flapping in the wind.

One difference which children of later years would quickly notice if they were transported back to that region of Florida the 1940's was the absence of fast food. Except for the Pig Stand in Ocala, they did not exist. No instant hamburgers or fried chicken or gelatinous roast beef sandwiches. The rare opportunities for food on the road consisted of the occasional dilapidated looking establishment called something like “Sarah’s Kuntry Kitchen”, or simply, “EAT” . . . or even worse, “John’s Place, LIQUOR, FOOD” with no windows.
In any case, my father was persuaded that all restaurants aggravated their bloated costliness with a determination to cheat their customers, and if any child mentioned the possibility of stopping for food Daddy would tell one of his stories about being overcharged or shortchanged and insulted to boot. Those incidents had to have occurred before we were born because the only time Mother and Daddy ever went out in our recollection was once each year, to Kiwanis Ladies’ Night, when Nina Strickland came to babysit. So any nourishment on the road either was brought along from home or was purchased at a filling station.
Near Ocala, then, we stopped at a Sinclair station — because it had a dinosaur on the sign — and pulled some little packets of peanut butter crackers and Tom’s Peanuts from big jars on the counter, and took some soft drinks from a red metal cooler whose top folded up in two parts. I always had a Nehi orange drink. My parents usually had Coca Colas. We drank them at the station because otherwise we would have to pay a deposit on the bottles. It was not unheard of to pour some peanuts from their small bag into a soft drink and get a few mouthfuls of the combined contents toward the bottom of the bottle.

Refreshed, and after a forced march to the bathroom, we continued on our way past Ocala and south to tiny Belleview, where Mother’s father had his general store. Belleview was the turning point where impatience and exasperation began to transmute into eager anticipation. By then an hour and a half must have passed, and there was nothing between us and the lake except a relatively few miles and a lot of hills. We would be led in our vacation song by Mother, to the tune from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves:
Hi ho, hi ho,
It’s off to the lake we go.
We’ll dive and swim
and fish for bream.
Hi ho, hi ho, hi ho, hi ho!
We sang the song again, and excitedly began to point out familiar landmarks until we recognized that our car was making the long climb up the final high hill from whose crest we would get our first glimpse of Lake Weir. There could not have been greater excitement had we been on the deck of the first sailing ship to see the coast of Florida. We in the back seat stretched our necks and got as far forward as possible, jostling and elbowing for position. The competition was to be the first to see the lake. At the crest of the last and highest hill, a silver sunny gleam flashed from the valley miles ahead, and the more or less simultaneous shout would go up, “I see it! I see it!”

Then, as we went downhill and the view of the lake was lost behind lower hills, the cries would be, “I saw it first! I saw it first!” Mother, always the peacemaker, would try to resolve the argument by announcing that everybody had seen it at the same, and with each child inwardly satisfied that he was the winner, a new argument arose.
“I’ll be the first one in the water.”
“No, you won’t. I will.”
“Nobody’s going in the water until you carry your things in from the car,” Daddy would say.
“Awww!”
“And walk, don’t run. We don’t want any cut knees like we had last year.”
That meant that by the time we got to our destination we would all have our personal belongings hugged to our bodies, ready for the dash to the house and then to the water. We knew we were almost there when the highway began to take us past the entrances to private drives marked with little wooden signs — “The Blalocks”, “Strickland”, “Wettstein.” Turn your car into one of those unpaved roads, and in less than a minute you would be at the shore of the lake. Straining for glimpses of the water through the trees, we reached the hamlet of Ocklawaha, which was about midway down the north side of the lake — and then, at last, the side road that would take us to our goal.

By the time the car actually stopped, and the doors flew open, and we brothers could look out across miles of bright, smooth water, we could hardly breathe. Nippy was at least as excited as anybody else, leaving no doubt that dogs have good memories. He would jump out of the car, glance quickly from side to side for orientation, and then run as fast as he could down to the water’s edge. As we hauled our armfuls of stuff to the house we could see him making his way into the water, now walking slowly instead of running, lapping from the surface as he went, until his cocker spaniel ears were floating straight out from his head and only a little of the wavy hair on his back was still dry. Then he would launch himself to swim in a broad semicircle away from the beach and back again, paddling hard, black nose in the air.
Within seconds, we boys were in our bathing suits and in the warm water with Nippy . . . and the great summer adventure had begun.

There was some inexhaustible attraction about being in the water of Lake Weir -- which lay about eight miles long from east to west and three miles across from north to south. We spent most of August in that liquid when we weren’t asleep. And just being near the water made everything better than at home. Food tasted finer at the lake than when eaten anywhere else, and there was the excitement of change — different scenes and different people — but the water was the center of everything -- clear water always warm enough not to cause the slightest shiver, growing warmer as each day went on. The bottom was white sand, sloping so gently that a child might walk a hundred feet or more out into the lake before only his head showed above surface. On a really hot, still day, the water nearest the shore would sometimes become as warm as a hot bath, and we would bypass the beach and jump in from the end of the dock.

In that wonderful water we would jump, cannonball, swim, splash, or float about on fat, black inner tubes. I most enjoyed swimming under water, with the sense of flying like a bird, doing somersaults and other gymnastic feats unattainable above the surface, seeing how far I could swim without coming up for breath, gliding to a gentle landing on the bottom, studying the shapes of bubbles rising -- not round, but like mushroom caps.
In spite of my childhood athletic inhibitions, I almost always outlasted everyone else when it came to distance swimming under water. Maybe I had unusual endurance. The only happy sports memory I have of my school days was one time in physical education class when we had to do a really long race that took many minutes to complete — and to my amazement I saw one after another of the more athletic boys fall back, and found myself well ahead at the end. In the hundred yard dash or other short races I was used to being near the back of the pack, but now I was actually a winner.

The white sandy bottom of the lake was dotted with the tips of the black shells of mussels. We could uproot them with our toes, or dive and dredge them from the sand with our fingers and watch them dig their way back in again. Apparently nobody who frequented the lake had ever thought of eating mussels. Only years later did I discover that Italians and Chinese turned them into a delicious food. Mother told us that some people ate mussels, but it was in the same way that she might say that colored people ate pig’s tails or chicken feet.
The first couple of Augusts we went to Lake Weir we stayed in one of a row of four or five rental cottages not far from the casino pier -- a misleadingly grandiose title. Then we stayed in what my mother calls “the Mayo house, with a nice screen porch, shade, and a dock,” which I don’t remember in detail. Later, Mother’s father bought a two-story stone house on the same side of the lake. We stayed at Papa’s “rock house” for the rest of our Augusts except for one summer when we stayed at a more modern house which my aunt and uncle Martha and Hugh Ray had bought.
Papa’s house had one especially interesting feature: It was separated by one or two houses from the house where the Ma Barker gang was attacked by G-men -- some of sneaked up to the beach in boats. Bullets from the furious gun battle (according to old movies, tommy guns were the weapon on choice) sank lead slugs in the stones of Papa’s house, and we children found it enthralling to search for the pockmarks filled with lead. After the Ma Barker and her boys were demolished, Papa saw pictures of them in the newspaper and realized that they had shopped at his store in Belleview.

The rental cottages of the first years each had a screened front porch which looked out on the lake and the shared dock. Among the few specifics which I recall about the cottage era, two involved the female body, and one involved a fish. When we were vacationing at the Mayo house there were two sisters of about 8 and 5 years at one of the neighboring cottages. The girls and I were on our screened porch sitting on a sofa bed of some kind (it was common for children to sleep on screened porches in those pre-air-conditioning days) when the elder sister suggested that we play “nurse.”
“How do you play that?”
“I’ll be the nurse and Linda can be the patient. You can be the doctor. Lie down, Linda.”
Linda, tawny-haired and small, wearing a yellow dress, lay down on her back and giggled as her sister and I pretended to use stethoscopes on her chest. Then the elder sister said, “We’d better do a complete examination,” and pulled up Linda’s skirt and started tugging her panties down her legs. I got a glimpse of her private area, but for some reason it all ended right there, and I was left with just the vague impression of a hairless triangle of pink flesh. I don’t know when I first definitely learned that girls and boys were not the same between their legs, but if I didn’t know before examining Linda, I learned it then.
The other female body episode occurred when a bunch of us were standing around in the water near the dock, whiling away the latter part of a morning. Two elderly ladies who lived in a house a little way behind the cottages were there. One of them, in a black bathing suit, was in water about up to rib level, smoothly moving her wrinkled arms back and forth on the surface of the water while she held forth about snecks.
“I seen more snecks this year than you would believe. It’s jist different than it ever was before.”

Snecks? From the context I soon figured the word out.
“As long as they’s black snecks or king snecks, I don’t mind, but rattlesnecks and moccasins is another thing. Live and let live is all right, but if I see a rattlesneck I’ll take a hoe to it. And you jist don’t know when you’re standing here if a water moccasin might be swimming right up by your legs.”
What happened then was that one of the old lady’s shoulder straps slid down her arm, and one of her breasts was completely uncovered, nipple and all. She didn’t realize it.
“Water moccasins is real scary, but they’s so many people around this area now, and the grass ain’t growing in the water so much no more, that we hardly ever see any water snecks these days.”
I kept sneaking glances at the flaccid little white balloon protruding from her chest, not because there was anything attractive about the view, but because I had never seen one of those mysterious female bulges uncovered before. They were always carefully hidden, whereas men went around with their shirts off. I was about ten years old then, and I asked myself why that was. I knew better than to ask my parents. They had already let me know that they were as ignorant about any differences between male and female anatomy as they were about the origin of babies. My efforts to find out where puppies or calves came from had been no more successful than my investigation into my own mysterious appearance on Earth.

The fish. I don’t like thinking about it, but I’ve thought about it many times, and so it is important enough to write down. The cottages were next to a fish camp which had a covered dock parallel to the shore. I was down there with some of the other children, exploring, watching boats come and go, when a boy of about thirteen showed us a bass in a big bucket full of water. The fish would soon be killed and eaten, but in the meantime the boy had cut off the right fin behind the gills. We all watched it try awkwardly to swim.
“It’s kind of cruel, “ the boy said, “but it’s interesting. It’s a scientific experiment. He only swims in that direction now.”
As I’ve said, I had already found myself to be much more sensitive about any harm to animals and even insects than other children I knew, and it was horribly painful for me to watch the mutilated fish. I pictured him whole again, swimming away along the bottom of the lake. I pictured myself kicking the bucket over and spilling him back into the water, but I felt it was already too late, and in any case I would have been afraid of challenging the bigger boy. When I saw that he had a slimy pocket knife and was going to perform other experiments, I left and suffered over the incident for days and years to come.

But fishing was one of the things we did at the lake. Usually we caught bream from the end of the dock in early morning or early evening, using bread balls on small hooks, and for supper we would eat the bony little things fried with a corn meal coating. My empathy did not keep me from fishing for food.

All those years we spent at the lake we never owned a boat, although Daddy had a well broken-in Johnson five horsepower kicker. (Outboard motors were called kickers; we didn’t know them by any other name.) When we started staying at the house Papa bought, our uncle Hugh Ray --whose family owned Silver Springs and who was married to my mother’s most beautiful sister, Martha -- left a dinghy there which we named “Peanut Shell” because of its small size, rotund proportions, and floating characteristics. Its varnished planking looked very fine, but when rowed, it tended to wallow more than to move forward, and it was too small for an outboard motor. I believe it had belonged with Hugh’s yacht, which he donated to the Coast Guard when the war began at about the time we began going to Lake Weir in the summers. In fact Hugh joined the Coast Guard, and he and Martha and their son and daughter, Walter and Molly, had moved from Ocala to Cedar Key — on Florida’s Gulf Coast west of Gainesville — which had been turned from a fishing village into a Coast Guard base. We visited them there early in the war, and I remember a great big bell, and little baby Molly sitting in her high chair rubbing Gerber’s mashed spinach all over her naked upper body, and me chewing on a weed as I walked along a dirt path and getting a sharp tiny piece of it stuck in my throat and thinking, “I’m going to have to live with this stuck down there for the rest of my life.” Maybe it’s still there for all I know, but I felt it for only a few hours. The flesh has ways of expelling things much more effectively than the mind.
Maybe I have digressed to Martha and Hugh for a good reason. I associate them with feelings of envy -- my own feelings of envy -- and I think it was at Lake Weir that I most often experienced envy. Martha and Hugh were the rich members of the family. Martha, with her long brown hair either hanging down or done up sleek in braids against her head, looked like a movie star, and she certainly deserved a rich husband. Daddy frequently complained that Hugh had never worked a day in his life, which I’ve since been told wasn’t true, but that only made me admire Hugh more and want to be like him, while it made me think that Daddy was meanspirited to begrudge somebody else his good fortune. Besides, Hugh — a tall, pleasant, babyfaced man — was like me in that when relatives were around, he wanted to get away by himself. I suppose it aggravated the rest of the grownups that when they were in the livingroom talking for hours he would retreat to his room and read Life magazine, or that he might go sit in his car during a long wedding reception, but I saw it as an invigorating sign of independence. I also suspected that it was easier to get away with nonconformist behavior when one was independently wealthy.

Envy at the lake was based on our lack of a boat. It seemed that everybody else there had one, and we had to do without except for Hugh’s wallowing “Peanut Shell” until Papa bought a rowboat. Even then, Daddy’s five horsepower kicker would push the rowboat along only at a very slow speed, leaving a low, decorous wake in the water behind us, while other boats hummed past us with ten horsepower motors or better (pretty powerful in those days), leaving us rocking in their wake.

The only boat slower than ours was an incredibly overloaded boat full of a dozen or more Negroes which occasionally putted along the shore, slow as a turtle, every inch of sitting space occupied -- a black child straddling the bow like a ship’s figurehead -- with only one inch of the sides of the boat showing above water.
As Augusts went by, my greatest envy was aroused by Chris Crafts, those beautiful, sleek, streamlined, shiny, natural-wood boats with powerful inboard motors. Mara Lovett, a slender, short-haired blonde girl I got to know at the casino when I was fourteen or so, had a Chris Craft. She would coming roaring up to our dock at Papa’s house spewing plumes of water from her stern, then suddenly slow down and burble slowly to the edge of the dock to pick me and maybe others up, and we would roar away at unbelievable speed, heeling at breathtaking angles as we skidded through turns. I had to endure this for several years, while we continued to putt-putt around in a rowboat with a feeble horsepower kicker on the back.

Mara Lovett takes me back to the ways we passed our time at the lake. Besides swimming, fishing, and getting seriously sunburned, we would sometimes go up to the venerable drugstore in Ocklawaha with the coins of our meager allowances in our pockets and sit at one of the round tables in antiquated wrought iron chairs and eat bowls of ice cream — or, if we were really well supplied with coin, a banana split. The place was more of a soda fountain than a drugstore, but it had a chronic medicinal smell – as did the old, pale, stiff man in a long white apron who was the sole custodian of the place. He moved so slowly that you could count on spending half an hour there just to enjoy a sundae or a chocolate soda. It was not that he seemed too infirm to go faster; it was just that he had chosen to move through life with great deliberation. Watching him walk, barely lifting his feet, across the black and white tiled floor was like watching a boat slowly approach from the far side of the lake. And then, when he was working behind the marble topped counter, you could study each movement of each joint in his arms, wrists, and fingers as he maneuvered containers and excavated scoops of ice cream, as you might watch a praying mantic making its way hesitantly across a large leaf.
Another thing we did when we were not submerged in water was go to the casino, a roughly finished building at the end of a pier not far from the cabins where we first stayed at the lake. We usually went there in the evening. On entering the big, dim, wooden room you would see tables around a dance floor, a juke box, a counter where food and beverages were dispensed, and most importantly, Shoot the Bear. Maybe that wasn’t its name, but it sounds right. On a machine at the back of the room a bear paraded back and forth in a forest. Having put a coin in a slot, one stood quite a distance away with a rifle which shot a beam of light. If the light hit a shiny round lens on the bear’s side, the beast would stand up on his hind legs and roar. I could not get enough of that.

Another good thing to do at night was just sit on the front porch and watch the beams of searchlights moving slowly back and forth in the night sky beyond the far side of the lake like phosphorescent tentacles of some deep sea organism. There was a military air training base over there, and during the war we could sometimes hear the sounds of explosions far away. Once we found a dummy bomb floating near the end of our dock and rowed out and retrieved it. It was several feet long, and its dark metal shape and fins looked just like the bombs we had seen in pictures, but it was hollow, with a cap screwed on to the nose like the cap of a gas can. For years it stayed around our house. I wonder what became of it.

We enjoyed the lake even when it rained, which it often does in Florida on summer afternoons. I enjoyed it especially when the storm approached a direction which allowed us to watch it travel more or less directly toward us across the wide expanse of water. Those August rains generally come in the form of lone, scattered, fast-moving thunderstorms rather than as widespread fronts. Of course sometimes there were mild little clouds without thunder, the kind which will drop gentle rain on one steamy side of the street while you stand in the sunshine and watch, dry, on the other side. (Mother told us that when she was a girl they said when the sun was out during rain, the devil was beating his wife. She said if you stick a twig in the ground and put your ear against it, you can heard the hissing of the devil’s switch.) But usually the August rains came from cumulus thunderheads which built up during the hot afternoons and grew into tall, sprawling, cumulus giants which throb with flashing electricity. We could watch them coming toward us across the lake, casting a dark, cool shadow on the stirred surface of the water, bombarding lower creatures with lightning and rain.
When we were younger we used to explain rain fancifully as we looked out of the entrance of our garage at the street filling up with water, saying that God must be weeweeing. But the view across Lake Weir provided a more accurate perspective on where the water really came from, although it was still easy to imagine each towering thunderhead as a sentient god. I felt, and feel, that thunderheads are in some sense living beings.
When a rainstorm was coming from the south we could tell it was on the way long before it reached the far shore. While the sky above us was still bright, and contained nothing that looked more threatening than tufts of cotton candy, we could make out the sunlit tops of the storm clouds on the horizon beyond the far side of the lake, which itself was so far away that we could barely make out individual buildings among the dark line which was the trees that separated lake and sky.

On the southeastern shore of the lake, somewhat to our left across the lake as we looked from our front porch -- there were three unusually large oak trees which stood above everything else on the horizon. We called them the Big Three — a journalistic term we constantly heard applied to Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill, the Holy Trinity of World War II. Being so far away, those three big oaks were inconspicuous except when a line of rain came up from the south and overtook the southern shore and grayed it out as an artist’s eraser might smear away a long, curving, dark line. The Big Three were always the last objects we could see as rain moved over the lake, their dark shapes becoming lighter and lighter as the storm enveloped them, until finally they too were gone.
Usually by that time our parents had shouted us in from the lake or the dock. “Get in here right now! Look at that lightning! Get right in here! If I have to tell you one more time!” We would watch from the still-sunlit porch the rain advancing toward us like a miles-wide attack of cavalry accompanied by the flashes and booms of cannon. Ahead of the advancing wall of rain the bright, usually smooth, surface of the lake would be stirred and lightly roughed, and as the wind grew stronger we could see the flurry of choppy water, and flashes of white foam. White caps on our lake, just like the ocean! Little waves which curled and broke on our usually so placid sandy beach. As Mombelle liked to say, “The lake has many moods,” and this was its most turbulent.

If it rained long enough for us to get bored indoors, we would play games, as we did at night or on days when we were feeling sunburned enough that we did not want to go outside until the afternoon cooled down. Board and card games were an indispensable part of vacation at Lake Weir, and could go on for hours. The favorite by far was Monopoly, which could take most of a day if there were enough arguments, or enough neighbor children or visiting cousins involved, but I also remember Parcheesi and Chinese checkers and Slapjack. The latter, like Pit, could become so raucous and even violent as to evoke parental insistence on a quieter pastime.
For some reason the games are more vivid in my memory, more sensuously detailed, than many other things from that time. I sense, for example, the exhilarating smell of a deck of playing cards, carried on air fanned by the shuffling. I can still feel the little metal Monopoly tokens in my hand, the excitement of placing wooden houses on the lots, and the boredom of sorting all the play money back into order after a game was over.
I have never been good at checkers-type games, but I still recall the thrill of that initial charge of pieces (especially the marbles in Chinese checkers) onto the freshly set up board, full of hope before the hopping obliteration began. Papa, Mother’s father, was a skilled player of traditional checkers, and showed no mercy on children. In fact I seem to recall that he became quite agitated when one of my brothers beat him.

The subject of games brings to mind the saga of my younger two aunts’ efforts to teach me to play bridge. Sometimes during our August vacations – mostly during the years we stayed at Papa’s rock house -- Mother’s parents and three sisters from nearby Ocala, and any husbands and children who had been acquired by that time, would come out for a day, or maybe even overnight, which meant children spending the night on the upstairs “sleeping porch.” My aunts’ misguided campaign to teach me to play bridge resulted from Shirley, Lorraine, and Mother needing a fourth player, and my being the only available candidate. Daddy had played bridge . . . once. According to a story he told every few years, he and Mother had long ago gone to a bridge party where Daddy was partnered with a woman who criticized a play he made, and he would therefore never sit at a bridge table again — somewhat like the spring onion which made him sick when he was a child and thus deprived our household of an essential pungent vegetable for many years.

Anyway, although I was only eleven or twelve I was considered very smart, and so the victim in a desperate situation. I immediately showed an inaptitude for bridge which was worse than my performance at checkers, and possibly even more appalling than my lack of ability to grasp mathematics. Come to think of it, maybe the problems were partly due to a lack of aptitude for teaching on the part of my instructors both in bridge and arithmetic. I never even grasped the goal of bridge because it was never explained to me understandably, and so I had no idea why I was doing anything. In learning any subject I always had to know “why”, to comprehend the underlying principles, before I could proceed to make sense of the parts and procedures. Most of my teachers seemed to teach from the top down, so to speak – starting out with various techniques rather than the ultimate basics, something like teaching a dog tricks – and those teachers appeared at a loss when asked to clarify what they were doing by explaining the foundation principles. This was not only in arithmetic and math; I remember my high school Latin teacher’s consternation at my efforts to understand what declensions were by trying to engage her in a metaphysical dialogue on the subject.
“Yes,” Shirley would say, becoming a little impatient. “It’s two different things. First you bid and then you play the hand.”
“You’re not playing when you bid?”
“Yes. You have to bid so your partner can try to figure out what you have in your hand, and so you can figure out what she has in her hand. So -- listen this time -- you count the value of your hand like we told you, and then you bid by looking first at. . .”
As they laid down the rules of bidding I got confused.
“And why am I doing that?”
“So you and your partner can come up with a contract.”
“Contract,” I said vaguely. “I’m still not sure what that is.”
“It’s the number of tricks you agree you can take.”
“Tricks?”
“I told you! When you play the hand everybody puts cards down and people take tricks. We talked about trumps, and high cards, and reneging?”
“Yes, but. . .”

I finally grasped a few rudiments of playing the hand, but I never could quite put it together with the bidding that had gone before. I have a feeling that my density was so discouraging that no single teaching experiment lasted long enough to bear fruit, and that my aunts abandoned the effort each year just before I might have gained true enlightenment. As with many things in my life, it was more impatience and excessive analysis, and not inability, which interfered with success.
When we had company at the lake, with all those hands in the kitchen we ate unusually well. We often had the same main dishes, of which no one ever tired: Shrimp salad and potato salad for lunch (Martha was considered the champion potato salad maker), and chicken perleau for dinner — although there might be ham, or somebody would demonstrate an improved way of cooking fried chicken and gravy
For whatever reason, chicken perleau, as we called it – a variant of pilau, or pilaf – was the all-time favorite for family get-togethers. Florida perleau was not spicy or complex like its more exotic cousins in the Middle East or Louisiana. It was simply rice cooked in salted and peppered chicken broth, to which deboned boiled chicken meat was added toward the end of the cooking. Despite its simplicity, I still remember it as delicious.

Somehow my reveries about Lake Weir want to end in the summer of 1945, when I was twelve years old, although we continued to go to the lake after that. In the August of that year Daddy arrived at the lake from Gainesville one weekend with a newspaper that carried tremendous news whose horror I was too young to comprehend. Our country had dropped some kind of super bomb on Japan. The front pages of the Times-Union and the Gainesville Sun were covered with large headlines and diagrams dedicated to teaching the common man about atomic physics. Although great devastation was announced, the view of Hiroshima at this time was from a great distance, from across the Pacific Ocean. The awful details would come later. For now, it was all physics and awe and hope that the war would soon end.
I began to spend more time by the radio and less time in the water as news bulletins began to discussed peace negotiations more than battles. I hated to leave the radio even long enough to go fishing, but Papa was there one day took some children in his boat several miles down to the east end of the lake to go fishing. As we motored back, I lay drowsily curled up in my favorite spot with my head under the bow cover, and feeling the vibration of the wooden hull and the bump of little waves against the bottom of the bow right next to my ear.
“What’s going on?” somebody exclaimed.
I sat up. The sound of a siren reached us across the water, and from another direction a church bell began ringing, and we could hear, diminished by the distance, from every direction, the sound of car horns and sirens and bells.
“The war’s over!” I said.

Somehow that moment seems the final curtain on my Lake Weir days, even though I’m sure it was not. Even my Mother doesn’t remember the year of the last family vacation to Lake Weir, but I whenever they ended, they left me with pungent memories from those heady Augusts, when chicken perleau and sweet mixed pickles and shrimp salad tasted better than anywhere else in the world, where I learned the sensation of flying like a bird in slow motion under transparent water as warm as a bath, and from which I still bring up the memory – when I want to feel peace – of lying on a sleeping porch on hot nights listening to the distant drone of an outboard motor far out on the lake.

Copyright 2005 Fleming Lee

Second Life

2007-07-28T10:11:00.000-05:00

I had planned to write a description of “Second Life” this morning, but then I discovered that Freyashawk has already posted a wonderful description and discussion . Of course her approach to the “game” is different from mine, but before I write my essay on “Second Life” I recommend that you read the one on "Thoughts from Freyashawk".

MY FIRST CREATION, THE UPSIDE-DOWN PYRAMID WITH OBJECTS ON TOP . . . LIKE MY FIRST DAY AT KINDERGARTEN

Freyashawk and I agree that “Second Life” is not a game. It is another world largely created by its inhabitants (I suppose we should consider the original creators/owners of the game its gods). The inhabitants/members are visually represented there in the form of the “avatars” they choose. The most difficult thing for me to remember when exploring “Second Life” is that every person on the screen -- walking or flying, creating things, dancing, talking via typed chat to other people nearby -- is a real person sitting at a computer somewhere in the real world at that moment.

To me the most remarkable and interesting thing about “Second Life” is not anything in it, but the fact that it exists – that such a fantastically complex and coordinated virtual world can exist, and how it can exist.

Reality and I

2007-07-24T08:41:00.000-05:00

A few mornings ago I had the strong feeling of how strange it felt to be in this body, this fuel-absorbing tube held up by a rigid frame which was capable of motion, how strange to look out through something we call “air” at incredibly complex arrangements called “trees”, and beyond that, lights moving slowly above in periods of darkness and daylight, lights which I’m told are balls moving in nothingness.

Imagine that you raised your hands right now and saw large lobster claws instead of hands. To me it felt about the same to see ten fingers as you would feel seeing lobster claws.

I know from blog comments as well as from published accounts that some people share my sense that there is something strange or unreal about “reality”, while others are convinced that the body and what we call the material world is all there is. That such differences can exist among humans who are presumably experiencing the same universe is in itself interesting. How can it be that our perceptions tell us to disagree on such profound questions as whether we are spiritual beings inhabiting bodies, or simply physical bodies and nothing more? Or whether there is more to the universe than insentient building blocks tossed about by something called “chance”?

Which brings me back to a conclusion I’ve expressed here before – that we understand absolutely nothing, and that one person’s reality is another person’s illusion, maya.

Which brings me to the subject of computer games. I was a game addict for months before blogging captured my attention and enthusiasm. I played some Nintendo games with console and TV screen -- "Tetris", various Super Marios, “Harvest Moon”, “Animal Crossing”, “Legend of Zelda”, etc. – but many of the games resided on my computer – the “Age of Empires” series, “Pirates”, “Roller Coaster Tycoon”, “The Sims”, “Flight Simulator”, etc.

Maybe my circuit breaker flipped from overload, but at the time I began this blog I was nervous and uncomfortable about computer games. After I had been away from them awhile I felt real unease about returning to them.

Then a few days ago a friend persuaded me to try a free download (which like many “games” isn’t’ a game at all) called “Fish Tycoon”. At about the same time a repairman told me how he and his wife had become addicted to the online games “Everquest” and “World of Warcraft” and had made a meaningful amount of money through them, even thought it meant spending so much time online that they had to give up their children (almost).

Thus the gaming world’s gravity drew me subtly back into orbit. “Fish Tycoon” is a beautiful virtual aquarium. Harmless, relaxing. Nothing to worry about there. Right.

Evidence of the fragile nature of “reality” as I know it is shown in my experience at a pet shop a couple of days ago, where I found myself looking at a display of aquarium plants and thinking, “I’ll buy one of those for my fish tank.” It took maybe one second to recall that my fish are make-believe, but the proof that the brain (or at least my brain) has trouble distinguishing between imagination and “reality” had been established.

With the repairman’s stories in mind, I urged my perennially over-budget friend who had lured me into the aquarium to try making money with online games like “Everquest”. She is, I should add, a computer game expert to the degree that she writes published guides, but she had not played “massively multiplayer” games before. She quickly found something called “Second Life”, and once more I heard the Siren sweetly call: “Try it, Fleming, it’s free and there’s no stress.”

I slipped as easily into “Second Life” as a lobster into a baited trap, and for three days I’ve had trouble concentrating on blogging. I’ve neglected my friends’ blogs and done little with my own. After all, there’s a whole new world out there to be explored, a new body to learn to move and use, new ways of seeing to be perfected. . .

SCENE FROM "SECOND LIFE"

Precognition?

2007-07-21T11:50:00.000-05:00

Last night as I was watching news video on television, Hilary Clinton came down some steps toward the camera, looking fit and smiling. I was suddenly hit with a premonition that she has, or will have, a physical problem that will prevent her from completing a term as President of the United States. The area that I sensed would be the focus of the problem was her mid-body, generally from the lower rib cage to the thighs.

It was quite a strong feeling, accompanied by the psychic "electrical shock" that I've experienced with valid precognition in the past. I was completely unprepared for it, but it was my immediate interpretation that, "This woman will never finish a term as president."

I hestitated to post this, but I'm doing so, just for the record.

Afterword on "The Impeachment of Jehovah"

2007-07-16T17:33:00.000-05:00

This essay relates to my infamous and much misunderstood post of July 2, ”The Impeachment of Jehovah”.

Among the things I’ve learned through blogging – in addition to the fact that it actually is cold in Brazil and Australia when it’s hot in the US, and that more people have multiple personalities than I realized – is that I know a lot less about national differences in attitudes toward religion than I thought I did.

Obviously I have no real feel for what it is like to be brought up in a Chinese or Japanese or Hindu or Islamic milieu, but I did have the simplistic idea that in the English-speaking nations (among which I hesitantly include the United States) the religious indoctrination was probably quite similar. I’ve noticed, however, that my friends who were offended by “The Impeachment of Jehovah” were separated from me by the Pacific or Atlantic Oceans, while those who agreed with me were not. Coincidence? Probably, but it made me wonder.

My reason for publishing my opinions about “Jehovah” was not to offend those who believe that the Old Testament is the word of God and that the Jehovah described and quoted there is the one true God, but instead to help lift a burden from myself and others who do not share those beliefs and feel oppressed by much that is in the Old Testament, although uplifted by some of the beautiful passages, as from “Psalms” and “Song of Solomon”.

My purpose now is to improve intercultural understanding with these personal, impressionistic notes on Jehovah and the Bible in America.

I was born and raised in the southeastern United States, where most people I knew were Protestants – although the Florida town where I was born, St. Augustine, was predominately Roman Catholic because it is the earliest surviving Spanish settlement in America, and there remain many people of Minorcan descent. It’s the only area in Florida I know where the little country churches are mostly Catholic rather than Baptist.

My mother’s family was Methodist, my father’s Baptist. My father’s mother prevailed, and so I was taken to the First Baptist Church to learn about God and the Bible. In a sign of things to come, I put up such a loud protest when I was first dragged to the Age 5-6 Sunday School that my father had to carry me down the stairs over his shoulder, vowing, “Never again.”

But that was not the end of it, and most Sunday mornings of my formative years were spent at the church with crayons and a Bible coloring book, where I was supposed to render in brilliant color such scenes Moses in the bulrushes, Moses carrying the Ten Commandments down the mountain, Jesus gathering the little children to him, Noah completing the loading of his Ark as his neighbors began to drown, Jesus walking on water, and David killing Goliath with a much better shot from his sling than I ever got with my slingshot made from a tree fork and a heavy rubber band.

The walls of the rooms in which we children created our art works were populated by old bearded men in bathrobes and sandals -- some holding shepherd’s crooks, some with their eyes rolled heavenward, some cowering before a burning bush or a glowing cloud or an angel – many with circles of light above their heads. I have never been able to remove those alien old men from the inner walls of my skull, and so I’m condemned to carry around, in lithographic splendor, characters dreamed up by Jews thousands of years ago.

We learned that Jesus was our Savior, the son of the Old Testament Jehovah, the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, and that if we loved Jesus and behaved ourselves we would go to heaven instead of what my mother called, “The Bad Place”.

We had only a vague understanding of the different Protestant denominations to which we variously belonged and which we sometimes visited. We didn’t think there was really much difference, and most of our parents were not that interested in the theological distinctions either. All the congregations dressed up in best clothes on Sunday mornings and looked the same; all the congregations smelled of bath powder and perfume; the sermons and prayers and hymns sounded about the same. We knew the Baptists believed in total immersion and the Presbyterians were supposed to believe in predestination, while nobody was sure what the Methodists or the Episcopalians believed. I was nervous about visiting the Episcopal Church because I got confused about when to stand up and when to sit down. In the Baptist Church we sat down most of the time except when ordered to stand and sing (or in my case, mouth) endless verses of hymns.

As for the Roman Catholic Church, it was small, mysterious, and unsuitable for informal visiting except on Christmas Eve, when the Catholic and Episcopal churches became popular with sneak-ins, because of their midnight services. We Protestants were told that Catholics didn’t read the Bible and so were missing the whole point of religion. My father, with ill conceived envy, complained that the Catholic secretaries in his office in St. Augustine went out and did “immoral things” on the weekends because they could always be forgiven at confession, and my mother remembered that her best friend would walk with her to school carrying on a conversation while saying her rosary. In other words, Catholics went through more motions than we did, but with less meaning. That was the myth.

There were only three or four Jewish children in school, all from old local families, and we looked on them just as people who went to another church, although they never invited us to visit it. I learned almost nothing about modern day Jews until I was in college. They were almost never mentioned. When I asked my mother about them she said only that they were “clannish” and kept to themselves, and my father, a County Agricultural Agent, complained that “Jews from Jacksonville” had rented all the government-subsidized farmer’s market booths (meant to help farmers survive the Depression) and then rented them at higher rates to the actual farmers.

If I learned nothing about contemporary Jews, I learned plenty about biblical Jews. And remember, the whole Bible was the word of God, absolutely and literally true. All those Bible stories we learned were about real people and events: Noah and his ark, Moses, Joseph and his Coat of Many Colors, the Red Sea parting for the Jews and drowning their enemies, David and Goliath, Lot’s wife turning to salt, Samson and Delilah, Balaam and his talking donkey, Job and his boils, Joshua trumpeting down the walls of Jericho. My wife says she was especially frightened by the story of Shadrack, Meshack and Abednego in the fiery furnace. I was frightened by the plagues Jehovah visited on Egypt, but I liked the Moses’ magic tricks for the Pharaoh, and the spectacles which led him toward the Promised Land, and the idea of manna falling from the sky to feed the Children of Israel.

'6 1/2" x 10" Foam Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego Craft Kit. (makes 12) Item Number: IN-48/2526
http://www.ebibleteacher.com/children/lessons/OT/Captivity/Shadrach_text.html'

Those stories, and all the contents of the Old Testament, are alive and energetic in America today. Children still get gold stars in Sunday School for memorizing the names of the books of the Old Testament and reciting them in order. You’ll find references to those ancient Hebrew tales in everything from sermons and Sunday School lessons to cartoons, and documentaries such as the perennial “Search for Noah’s Ark”. It interests me how often a children’s animated film about Noah and the animals, or a movie like “The Ten Commandments”, will turn up on television on the unlikely occasion of a Christian holy day like Easter or Christmas.

The Old Testament is especially problematic in America today because it is used as the justification for the Zionist colonization of Palestine, and the United States has contributed much more than any other country to financing and politically protecting Israel, as well as a lot to its leadership and population too. Any alleged moral right of Israel to the property which it occupies or keeps under military control is based solely on the words of Jehovah in the Old Testament. If you are not an American, you would be amazed at the number of “I Love Israel” bumper stickers on the roads. Those are usually Christian bumper stickers – and the rationale is the Old Testament.

From Christianshirts.net: “The Land of Israel Necklace - Designed by Israeli Soldiers and handmade by Israeli artisans; The Land of Israel Necklace displays beautifully layered earth from her holiest sites and is truly a way to keep Israel close to your heart.”

As an adult, I feel it is bizarre that we in the United States learn Jewish myth rather than the myths of our European heritage. The Norse, Teutons, Celts, Romans and Greeks left us a wealth of myths, with gods and tales at least as colorful as those of the Old Testament, and more relevant to people descended from European stock than ancient Hebrew myths.

Why more relevant? This passage helps explain:

‘Unlike the gods of the Greeks and Romans, a major function for Israelite theology was not to interpret the workings of nature or to bring good fortune in various endeavors, but rather to represent the kinship group through historical time. . . Israelite theology is intimately bound up with Israelite history. . . . There is a general lack of interest in cosmogony and anthropogeny, but “the history of man serves as a background for the still more significant history of Israel.” . . . In a very real sense one may say that the Jewish god is really neither more nor less than Ezra’s “holy seed” [Ezra 9] – the genetic material of the upper-class Israelites. . . “It is not Creation that is the most important event in early Hebrew history, but rather the Exodus, in which the Israelites successfully flee from Egypt after a successful sojourn as a minority in a foreign land.”' A PEOPLE THAT SHALL DWELL ALONE, Prof. Kevin MacDonald (Praeger 1994), p. 45.

The Ultimate Feline "American Gothic"?

2007-07-13T08:26:00.000-05:00

This was sent from Ann of "In the Mind's Eye", who took the pictures from my July 7 post, applied some Photoshop magic to them, and . . . voila! Very clever. Very funny!

In Honor of Those Who Commented on the Last Post

2007-07-12T10:40:00.000-05:00

HARMONY

Photo by Fleming