GETTING ON DOWN THE ROAD

Remember the old ‘70s tee shirt – “So Many Men, So Little Time”.  Well.  There were all those men, mostly a waste of time.  And now I am left with stories, and very little time in which to tell them.  Write them down, my friend Juliet urges me, before they’re gone.  Which translates to, before I’M gone.  And that is a distinct possibility.  Day to day has all new dimensions to me now.  Here today, gone today.  Especially if I climb back on the motorcycle.  Another story for another day.

Tonight I wax nostalgic.  Missing my youth is an almost visceral sensation for me.  Perhaps youth is not the right word:  I was fully adult, entering my thirties, but THAT was my youth.  It’s when I, for some reason, was able to divest myself of the last real ties to my family, and just escape.  I actually was gone for over six months before they found me.  It would be nice if the story had a happy ending, but all was not forgiven, as it rarely is.  Really nasty crap rises to the surface of any family fight, starting with, “If you hadn’t …” whatever the hell I hadn’t have done, and it was same shit, different day.  But the intervening six months were the happiest of my life.  I had no responsibility to anyone or anything.  Just myself.  It sounds really selfish, but it was just me, wandering in the desert, wondering why the bushes were burning.  And finding out that I was perfectly capable of not only taking care of myself, but being relatively successful at it.  If this behavior seems positively archaic compared to that of the ‘60s, for instance, it was a huge step for me to break away from the poisonous hold my mother had on me.  For the first time in my life, I could make decisions about my life without being berated for my choices.  So I ran away to be a truck driver.  Well, I had sort of started learning, when a beautiful bad boy from the wilds of Ohio (!) scooped me up and carried me off into the sunset.  So then I became a driver.  And these are the stories that Juliet really likes. 

People ask me what driving a truck was like.  It was like nothing you’d ever imagine.  It was pure, unadulterated freedom between point A and point B.  It was like an airline pilot, only on the ground, long periods of mind-warping boredom punctuated by moments of abject terror.  It was seeing parts of America that 95% of the population never sees, and probably never would want to.  A meat packing plant on the lower East Side of New York is not a pretty place on a hot August morning, what with the offal barrels outside waiting pickup from the garbage brigade.  It will make you a vegan in a heartbeat.  And I’m talking 30 years ago, before everything got a whole lot dirtier. 

I loved everything about the road.  There is no way to describe Kansas (Nebraska is surely not much different), somewhere east of Wichita, middle of August, 3:0 a.m., hot, dark, and something moving in the air, soft and seductive.  Stopping in the middle of nowhere, just to listen to the corn grow.  And the lights, an endless line on the interstate, coming and going.  Those were the heyday of the C.B. radios, which put truckers in their own subset of blue collar workers.  With their own language, and their “handles” which usually were pretty good personality indicators.  So there were the voices, disparate and yet almost indistinguishable in form and cadence.  It was the music of the road, sung by The Intruder.  Golden Gears.  Cat House Mouse.  T.K. Special, Bedsprings and Billy The Kid.  Soup Spoon.  Dickie Bird, Monkey and Zeb, Gum Drop.  Sneaky Pete.  Mystery Man.  Secret Agent.  Omega Man.  Man In The Moon.  Pony Rider.  Stone Pony.  Solitary Man.  Wild Flower Child.  Coffee Bean.  Six degrees of separation flung out over radio frequencies.  I could go from the East Coast to the West Coast, and talk to someone I ‘knew’ every mile of the way.  For five minutes at a time.  The long turns, the slip-seats (swapping trucks with company drivers) at anonymous diners and pit stops stretched across the midpoints of major freightways, Dayton to Wheeling, Wheeling to Harrisburg, Harrisburg to Boston and back.  Chicago to Indianapolis to Chattanooga, to Knoxville.  Passing in the night.  Voices, hammering down 80,000 pounds of moving equipment, catch you later, outta here, toodle-ooski.  From the old bunch, who remembered radio licenses and call signs, 3s and 8s and a 33 and a third to your old victrola.  Gotta go now, gotta go bad.  Thrills, chills, pills and spills.  Six days on the road, and there damn sure ain’t no easy runs, that you, Dave Dudley, you, as they say in the vernacular, got that straight.  Seven hundred miles a day and more, keeping the whiskers (mold) off the strawberries by spraying them with 50/50 Clorox and water.  Praying that the beef doesn’t swing one more foot either left or right coming down Allegheny Mountain and that Snowshoe Mountain really isn’t.  Knowing that the Grapevine (L.A. to Fresno) really IS.  Running Route 66 in its final year of operation, and seeing Albuquerque from the last mountain pass east of the city at 2:00 a.m.  Rolling out of Oklahoma on the east side, rolling into Boston on the east.  Coasting into Atlanta and wondering why.  Bouncing into Chicago, and wondering the same thing.  Seeing Lake Superior in the fall, all brilliant sapphires and diamonds, Silver Bay, Minnesota, nothing but rocks.  Tuscaloosa, Alabama, nothing but rednecks.  Hunts Pont Market, New York, nothing but trouble.  Cross Bronx Expressway, nothing but holes.  West of Amarillo, Texas:  Nothing at all.

And I still haven’t really explained it.  Like the man said, “You hadda be there.” 

So the next time you buy strawberries from California, and marvel at their color and freshness, remember the Clorox water.  And that’s no lie.

GIRL AND CHICKEN

Before we go any further down this road, it would probably serve the process to begin with some background of my beginning years, way back in the last century.  I've read somewhere that the formative years are those before the age of seven.  The die is cast, and the rest will follow whatever path has been mapped out by things that happen in those first critical seven years.  Here's a picture of me six years into the process.

“Girl And Chicken” … a mid-twentieth century early black-and-white photograph, circa. 1948, probably taken with a commonly used “Brownie”.  Cost a buck-ninety eight, film was what, 35 cents or something … 

Anyway, here I am with my first pet … a rooster, one of those Woolworth’s Easter peeps that refused to die.  He was tame, I kid you not.  He knew his name, which is way more than I am prepared to say about his owner at that same time.  Can you imagine?  A CHICKEN???  His name was Wacky.  Don’t ask.  He used to ride on the handlebars of my bicycle.  There we'd go, up and down the sidewalk on my street.  He never even pooped on me, unlike a number of seagulls I have known over the years.  Which are, come to think of it, not unlike a lot of the men I’ve known.  But I digress.  Another story for another time.

A chicken.  Jeezuz.  What kind of a mother gets her kid a chicken??  I mean, a hamster, goldfish, even a rabbit … but a CHICKEN?  I was fucked from the get-go.

Okay, so I got this chicken.  He was dyed pink, which means someone really screwed up, but whatever, I don’t think his sexuality was threatened in the least, considering he crowed like a sonofabitch every morning between 4:30 and 5:00 a.m.  See, my Grandpa, who was a farmer at heart, built him a wonderful chicken cage right beside our house in the side yard.  Wacky grew up into a big honking white leghorn, and became the neighborhood nuisance.  I believe someone blew the whistle on poor Wacky.

I came home from school one fateful day, only to discover that my beloved pet had been taken “out in the country, to a farm, where he’ll be happy.”  Uh-huh.  Okey-dokey.  And we’re having WHAT for dinner??  Don’t think so, check, please. 

So:  Upon careful consideration of the facts as set forth above, I’ve decided that this little episode on the bumpy road of life is exactly what is meant by the saying, “Bought the farm.”  Wacky went to a farm.  Nope.  Wacky bought the farm. 

Requiescat in pacem, Wacky.  You were a good chicken.

Still Crazy After All These Years

For those of you who have followed me on Crone Henge, thank you and welcome to my very own blog.  Actually, I used to have a blog here (Geriatric Anarchist Blues) but due to a move here and an e-mail change there, I can no longer access it.  Who remembers old e-mail addresses?  At this stage of the game, I struggle to remember lunch.  Today.  

So, having spent the best part of the last hour fighting technology and Google+, here I am.  I think.  Or.  I think.  Therefore I am.  Argh, as Snoopy used to say.  

Now I've re-dipped my oar into these waters, I find I have nothing much to say tonight.  Having made it into the boat and pushed away from the dock is its own reward for now.

As introduction (or reminder to those who know me), I am Orb Weaver, follower of Arachne, consummate lover of all things fiber.  It has been a lifetime obsession, this love of warp and weft, of silk and wool and fine cottons, honing my skills, paying attention to details such as matching plaids or stripes, insuring a drape on the bias falls gracefully, naturally.  Think of old movie stars in luxury gowns ... Lauren Bacall, Bette Davis, Rita Hayworth ... then think of designers ... Edith Head, Orry-Kelly, Travis Banton.  

When other little girls were dressing Barbie, I was drawing dresses.  When my peers raided the local department store for the latest Bobbie Brooks sweaters or Pendleton wool skirts, I was cutting into my newest piece of fabric, making something I was sure no one else would have.  When I entered the working world, I could wear a different outfit every day for a month or more, every piece a product of late nights and a smokin' hot Singer.  The money I saved on off-the-rack went into shoes and bags.  There is nothing ... repeat, nothing ... like the smell of new leather.  Unless it's the feel of uncut silk and wool, surrendering to my pinking shears and pins, reborn from bolt to boutique.

Now I'm retired, and have no use for a wardrobe.  I still subscribe to Vogue to get my monthly fix of fashion.  I lust after Lauren, drool over Dior, and wish fervently I could still wear pencil skirts and silk shirts without looking like something out of a Sondheim musical.  

The need to create never quite goes away, so these past years I have turned my thimble to quilting.  Yes, that thing your grandmother did.  The ridiculous process of taking a perfectly good, large piece of material, cutting it up into small pieces, and then putting the pieces together (with those from other perfectly good, large pieces of material, cut up into small pieces) and ending up with a perfectly good, large piece of material called a quilt.  Go figure.

This is, I believe, what life is: the cutting up of big things into smaller, more manageable pieces, shuffling them around and creating something better, or at least, something beautiful.  We are constantly shifting, matching, choosing, discarding, and ultimately choosing what makes us happy.  It is the bed our mothers warned us about, in which we are forced to lie, for better or for worse.  Or not.

And in the meantime, I'll be haunting fabric stores, cruising web sites in the dark of night, dreaming my dreams, weaving my tales.  Join me.  We'll have fun.