I looked across the bright blue tablecloth the staff used for decoration and practicality. Behind the older lady sitting uncomfortably slouched in a wheelchair across from me, attempting to eat between coughs, I saw him standing there.
When I looked over the lady’s shoulder, he hadn’t been there three seconds before. He was an older man dressed impeccably in a dark green suit. His eyes were wrinkled yet sparkling. The tall windows behind him didn’t seem to add any illumination to his profile. I could see the sun shining brilliantly down between the wings of the care facility.
When my eyes met his, I didn’t need to be introduced to know who he was. He nodded and smiled, which, under different circumstances, might have made me uncomfortable.
I nodded back, but I didn’t return his smile. Only time softly converts the repeated truth of reality into recognition, if not acceptance.
The older man looked at the framed picture in front of me. “What was will once again be,” he said, although his lips did not move.
It didn’t surprise me that I heard him in my head.
“You’re not here for her, at least not yet,” I insisted.
“No, but I’m always here. I am everywhere to untie the bind when it’s time for each of them.”
“She needs a little more time,” I answered in my head.
He shook his head. “No. Once the mind opens and self-awareness occurs, every moment is borrowed. Do you see the sunlight behind me? Smell the food in front of you? Do you not feel it when you hug her?”
“Yes.” I already knew the point. It had periodically been hammered into me throughout my years. Many of my worst moments were when the lesson slipped from my mind.
“What was will once again be. Take the pleasure and the people around you, and let it be enough. Looking forward or listening to the sounds of the grains in the glass is folly. Just as looking backward too long focuses you on what’s lost. You are here. Now.”
I closed my eyes briefly and listened to the myriad voices around me.
When I opened them, I lifted the soup spoon and gingerly fed it to the woman I was visiting.
There would always only be this moment. A long succession of them experienced individually.
For some, more. For others, fewer.
The voices, the smells, and presence.
We are all the same story, written in different verses and distinct melodies.
It is enough.
When I looked toward the window, the man was gone. The windows were dimmer, but a piece of me felt brighter. Truth is its own luminescence if we let it shine even into the dark corners of our lives.
Even though the phrase “como agua para chocolate” (like water for chocolate) has a culinary meaning, I adopted and adapted it to my own meaning when I read the book in Spanish for the first time. Regardless of its intended meaning, which I understood, it anchored my frustration with the way we tend to accept poor substitutes for authentic living.
If we’re stressed or feeling floorless or unanchored, we distract ourselves. We fill our minutes with things that don’t satisfy us. It’s a series of late-night snacks with the door fridge held open. We know we’re not satisfying our cravings, yet we continue to eat pieces of cheese or anything visible. Ten pieces of cheese and a cold hot dog won’t satisfy us. But neither will another glass of wine or three seasons of our favorite binge show.
If we’re craving intimacy and connection, we accept poor substitutes that probably cause us more discomfort than simply being alone. We open bottles or cans and down the numbing contents. We light fires in our faces that flood our bodies with false dopamine. We focus our attention on tiny screens and large, hoping that the content gives us relief.
All of these things are distractions – and we know it when we’re doing it. But what’s the viable alternative? The gurus in life tell us to avoid anything that creates distance between us and the people and the world around us. It’s too much, though. And though days fly by, the individual minutes scream at us to be filled.
Chocolate itself was originally considered to be a gift from the gods. Now? We love it but also look at it as a mundane treat. We tend to devalue what’s readily available. Often, I catch myself thinking that we do the same thing with the people, places, and things around us.
It doesn’t matter how full your garage is. The things in it won’t add further happiness to your life, even though you continue to acquire, upgrade, or store the previous things that you obtained to be more satisfied.
When people wax nostalgic, most of the memories are comprised of moments with people from their past: eating, doing things together, and usually without distraction. For a brief moment, the focus is mindless and simply enjoying the experience.
If you’re making an authentic chocolate drink, you must be mindful of the boiling point of the water you’re using.
If you’re looking for peace and satisfaction, you have to enjoy the process and bother of taking the time to enjoy the things you’re doing.
The joy of a brand-new seventy-inch TV will fade. The foods you love will soon enough oversaturate you and fade into the background.
What am I trying to say?
You tell me.
I’m just another among billions, secretly wondering why I can’t avoid the false dopamine and poor substitutes for what matters.
“Cicadas are gross,” she said. That’s because she didn’t experience the magical connection of hearing them out in the wide fields of Monroe County during her formative years. The insects of that area are already formidable and should be considered true citizens, counting in the billions. Anyone who has driven on the county roads in the evening knows the folly of attempting to use windshield wipers to remove them. I don’t recall which year I happened to be with my Grandpa and Grandma to experience the cicadas. It was deafening at night because we slept with the windows open, surrounded by fields filled with them. Hearing the cicadas now evokes buried memories, all tied to wonder and childhood experiences.
I have the same reaction upon smelling creosote, especially when it heats up. It reminds me of things I can’t quite remember. Diesel and gas are inextricably tied to my dad’s attempts at operating a gas station on Highway 49. Or my Grandpa, who insisted that the smell warded off the torrent of mosquitoes. The trains humming in the distance. The area of my early childhood owed its existence to railroads. Brinkley was once called Lick Skillet, a name that should have been preserved. The topography conspires to have the train horns and rattling metal echo for miles. Those who’ve not lived in the flatlands don’t understand why people refer to it as haunting. Grandma’s house in Brinkley on Shumard Street was close to the railroad. My apartment is less than 50 yards from one, too.
Years ago, I drove in the late evening on Highway 70 from Little Rock to Brinkley. There were millions of small frogs. They coated the road and the low Geo Prism, so much so that the uneven road became slick and hazardous. My deceased wife, a native South Dakotan, was initially horrified but soon fell quiet in awe of the spectacle. She later told the story to her family. They were convinced she was exaggerating. Had we chosen the quicker route of the parallel interstate, we wouldn’t have had the moment.
Since I’m being nostalgic, yesterday I got out of one of my bottles of burned seasoning. It’s a delicious mix I make myself, but that’s another story for another day. Dabbing it on my tongue, I felt like I was tasting Grandma’s salt pork again. Salt pork is the antithesis of what I normally would prefer to eat. Because of my upbringing, I tended to avoid eating most meat. My dad’s proclivity toward forcing me to eat vile things almost at gunpoint soured me considerably. But if time travel were possible, it is what I would like to return to first. Opening the screen door of Grandma’s house and smell the aroma of her cooking bacon and salt pork. A wall of memory.
Since this post is titled, “All Over The Place,” something that I’ve mentioned before seems much more significant now. I never concealed that I wet the bed much too often when I was younger. When I started therapy, I did a workbook online. I didn’t know that most people barely write a page. I wrote at least fifty pages. I rarely wet the bed at Grandma’s. Of course, I now know that it wasn’t because laundry was much more of a chore for her. It was because I felt safe. Don’t get me wrong. Grandma could be stern. But she never once arbitrarily shouted at me or threatened to box my jaws off unless I wasn’t listening. While not actually boxing my jaws, I knew better than to tempt her. I did not, in fact, ever want for her to follow through on her promise to snatch me bald-headed, either.
Sometimes, Grandpa would tell me not to fear things in the dark or glinting eyes through the screens on the windows. He told me often that the only real danger was things walking on two legs. As mean as he was when he was younger, by the time he had me to call him Grandpa, he protected me. Quite often those who needed a reminder were the two people who came to pick me up at the end of the summer.
In a few short minutes, the train will speed by me on the other side of the road. I’ll be on the landing, cicadas buzzing. And if I were so inclined, I could walk over and touch my hand to the rails. They are connected, reaching the fields of Monroe County.
I undoubtedly awoke with all this on my mind because before going to sleep last night, I stood at my kitchen window, listening to the roar of the cicadas. I dreamed of fields and imaginary stories. Waking, I recalled none of them. Just the tendrils of fading geography and bygones.
I did a small thing for someone who didn’t ask for it. His reaction was beyond gracious. I wish I could describe how big his smile was. And how small and selfish I felt a couple of minutes before. Driving away, the disparity must have triggered something in my head. Tears came to my eyes out of nowhere. I stopped randomly to enjoy the outdoors. It turned out to be the complete opposite of random. The moment and place spanned backward in a huge arc, traversing almost 40 years. I’m not sure if I’m crazy or the world is. Since I’m a part of it, there might be no difference, much in the same way that colors on the opposite end of the spectrum are an illusion of optics and nerve endings.
I remember my 5th birthday, a plain white cake with white frosting. My grandma made it for me, the one cake that embodied practical love. My cousin Michael Wayne sat excitedly at the table with me. Because I have to reconstruct the tangents of memories, I know he was only three years and two months old at the time.
My mom never made a cake for me, at least not that I can remember. If I had one on subsequent birthdays, it would have involved my Aunt Ardith. So much of my childhood came from her generosity. She spoiled my cousin Jimmy on his birthdays and those cakes were more than enough to satisfy my cravings for cake. I don’t look back with sepia memory about my birthdays, but I also don’t remember with animosity. Mom had her own issues to contend with. That almost all of them were the result of her choices is irrelevant. The realization of my own hypocrisy prevents me from judging her like I once did. Having said that, if I were to hear her say, “I am what I am” one more time, I’d use her hair spray to light her bee bonnet hairdo on fire. My brother Mike grew to turn his hatred for our mom’s mantra of “I am what I am” into a series of brilliant jokes, often rendered in the voice of Popeye.
When I think about my fifth birthday, I also love to frame it in the context of the fact that an entire secret life was already gestating inside a stranger’s body. My birthday is in March. As my cousin and I sat in a shotgun house’s kitchen devouring cake, my sister still had two months to wait before she’d come into the world.
It wasn’t until a few short years ago that she and I reconstructed why my dad broke his vow to never again leave Monroe County. After being in Indiana and prison, he returned to his stomping grounds, insistent that he’d die in his boots in the dirt of his birthplace. Despite his promise, it wasn’t long after that my family suddenly fled to Northwest Arkansas. It wasn’t until New Year’s Day in 2021 that I met my sister for the first time. We accidentally discovered that my dad fled Monroe County to escape his secrets. My sister was at the fulcrum. Dad died in 1993, 28 years before I’d met my sister.
I love that my obstinacy regarding genealogy and DNA gave me answers I KNEW were there – and that the same stubbornness on my part to accept the family’s malevolent veneer of family honor gave my sister answers. I ripped the truth out of their hands.
When I dream, I often think of zooming down from the sky, rapidly approaching the tin roof of the little house on the hill that bookmarks my childhood. I end up sitting on the porch. Because of technology, I can “see” the overlay of memory. Though it’s been five decades, the two trees in the front are still standing. This amazes me. The house is long gone, the driveway was expanded for a nearby house, and even the ditch banks gave way to gentle slopes. But under the picture is the template of tar paper, storm cellars, creosote railroad ties, mosquitoes, and screen doors that had better not be slammed. These things are the ghosts that are more real to me than what my eyes see on Google Maps.
Time moves ten times slower there. Even when I sit outside here, listening to the cicadas, I’m hearing them from my childhood, out in the fields. The roar of insects in the middle of expansive fields and heat is something that I wish everyone could experience. It’s the background static of the universe if you live in a place to grow things. The night is truly night in those places.
People wax nostalgic about those times, to return to simplicity. It wasn’t simpler. It’s just that we gloss and filter, remembering the terrible valleys and also the green fields and the people who sat with us when we witnessed them.
My other sister’s birthday is Monday. She will be 21,917 days old. That’s 60 years for those of us mundane enough to celebrate the wrong milestones. We don’t live in years. We wake up to the sunrise with the ability to start over. She started over a few short years ago. And because life is a series of lightning bolts, she recently started over again. When my sister talks, the Monroe County inside her oozes through her with a drawling Southern accent. I think she is wise enough now to see that the birthday isn’t the thing she should be happy about. Birthdays require no nod and come to us relentlessly if we are lucky. I hope she celebrates the 21.917 days instead. Monday will be just another day, one she’s waking up to. I ask her to dive into memory and recall what it felt like to sit in the back of a pickup for endless hours over mountains, seeing the house on the hill finally come into view. Knowing that Grandma would be inside.
For me, I’m going to sit and think about white cake and cicadas. And secrets that should have never been secrets. One of them was a person, an entire universe of life that was kept hidden.
For all of you out there who sometimes need a song blasting on the way to work… Find “A Symptom Of Being Human” by Shinedown. I’ve listened to this song multiple times with a critical ear, trying to pinpoint what exactly this song embodies that provokes an emotional reaction in me. The closest I can come Is that it invokes a nostalgic feeling without being tied to a specific time period. It’s a song about mental health and having empathy for every human soul who crosses your path. Even toxic bastards, managers, baseball fans, and registered voters. It’s Thursday which means you’ve made the mistake of delineating your days as if one has more importance than any other.
I sat to write words of memory this afternoon. No matter how I tried, I kept returning to the places surrounding the person who departed Monroe County, Arkansas, yesterday. Though she lived in Memphis for a time, she came back to Holly Grove and lived a long life. She had the iron in her bones to outlive her husband, Poor Bob. She shared that almost indomitable spirit with my Grandma Nellie. I could write a volume about how much I misunderstood my aunt when I was younger. My childhood was both an enclave and a firestorm. When I was very young, she stood ready to voice her opinions loudly. Her gaze unnerved me. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized how fierce her sense of humor was. She needed it to do battle with my mom. My aunt was a hard worker and had iron in her hands that my mom didn’t.
Monroe County no longer exists, but it’s still on the map. Citizens still dot the places within with their presence. But it is a place largely holding its breath and studiously peering away from its dwindling ranks. From 2010 until 2022, it lost 19.3% of its population. In that same time frame, it lost 1/3 of its 35-49 age group. Brinkley, Roe, Clarendon, Fargo, Holly Grove, Indian Bay, Blackton, Smales, Pine Ridge, Dixon, and Keevil; all these places sit in careful silence, awaiting their turn to be memories and names of places once filled with people living their lives. They’ll survive as census notes. I’ve learned more about them as an adult than I ever did as a child living there or as an adult returning to visit.
I did not appreciate the beauty of those small places until much later. To me, Monroe County was where my grandparents lived. Truthfully, Monroe County could have been almost anywhere in the delta, on either side of the Great River. Most of the places share a similar heartbeat and footprint. The odd asphalt roads, the infinite number of dusty dirt roads, miles of telephone wire stretching lazily across the flat land, interrupted by crops, mosquitoes, swamps, and irrigation ditches. Community was everywhere, regardless of the distance between neighbors.
Although I better understand it now, the prejudices seemed disconnected. I didn’t know that the same small town that held my aunt in its embrace was also the crucible for a sister that I hadn’t known for almost five decades. Now, Monroe County has a citizenship rate of almost 100% and no household reported being secondarily English-speaking. Monroe is not a place to go to; rather, it is a place to leave or retire and await one’s fate. For those who love the places of Monroe County, they feel it in their bones and wish their bones to rest there.
I cannot observe a storm without recalling the austere beauty of watching the weather move in across the open spaces, the towers of lightning and clouds visible for miles. I cannot sit on a swing without remembering summer nights. Nostalgia mostly erases the agony and buzz of mosquitoes.
Now? The last of those in my family who followed the beacon of Monroe County have gone to visit other places, ones to which we cannot tread. Not yet, anyway.
Monroe County now has one less to claim as a citizen.
But if you tally her voice and character, it lost something precious in her that is hard to define. People might be easy to come by, but there are so few remaining who, upon hearing them speak, evoke in us the spine and vitality of the places that are becoming shadows.
I can’t return to my hometown of Brinkley or Monroe County, which holds a place in my head. The same winds blow, and the same crops withstand the blistering sun. There is some wisdom that only older age can provide. Among that knowledge is that you carry some places so deeply inside you that you can’t quite identify what’s missing until you take the place of your ancestors, remembering what once was.
You can return and stand next to a recently plowed field. Or up to your knees in growing cotton. The only thing that has changed is everything.
One less.
With some, we lose more than one with their passing.
It wasn’t until today that I realized I was proud of my mom for at least one thing. She received her GED when she was quite old, and she didn’t do it to achieve a better career. The Brinkley School District employed her in environmental services. She is yet another person who proves that readers have an advantage over those who don’t.
She died younger than she needed to. Along those lines, I’ll pull out one of my favorite jokes and mention that after I told her congratulations for the GED, I asked her if she got angry when the photographer told her she couldn’t smoke while having the picture taken. If you’ve ever seen an industrial smokestack, you can join me in appreciating that she was a Chuck-Norris-level expert when smoking and cursing were involved, often simultaneously. Legend has it that she may have been a consultant to the dad on “A Christmas Story” to prepare for his role.
My sister Marsha, who is almost 60, posted about a newfound interest in perhaps taking some college courses. Those of you who know me know what I told her. In her post, someone I don’t know wrote, “Don’t waste your money.” That floored me. It’s the opposite of love or encouragement. Marsha had a tough life, hobbled by bad choices. But she finally gained sobriety, something that I was convinced was out of reach for her. I’m not proud to say that, but it’s best to water the garden of stories with truth and respect. Many in my family not only embrace addiction but make it their sole dance partner. Recently, Marsha talked about wanting to see the ocean. I couldn’t help but comment on her adult wish to fly, a wish she was granted when she started her journey into sobriety. Maybe she didn’t know it then because failure paints with a bitter brush and often washes away our ability even to try to stand up again.
Education is seldom wasted. Nor is self-discovery. Age does not magically wipe away the joy of discovering new things – especially about oneself. A person who expands their mind ignores the calendar. It’s more important than ever in our morphing world.
If someone expresses an interest in learning or discovery, no matter their age, it should be obvious that it is our job to enthusiastically encourage them at every opportunity.
Last night I dreamed of Grandpa. The storm had passed and the air smelled of earth and bean plants. Grandma was inside nervously attempting to watch the grainy picture on the small living room TV, her ears tuned to the weather. It scared her to have the TV plugged in and connected to the tall antenna on the side of the house. Grandpa and me sat on the porch swing facing the fields. It was past bedtime. I held a very small cup of coffee, warmed up from the morning. Grandma put pet milk in it, even though I would have preferred black coffee. She ascribed to the idea that somehow heavy milk canceled out the caffeine. We didn’t talk as we sat on the porch swing. The blizzard of unseen insects slowly returned to normal following the storm. Though Grandpa enjoyed TV, he loved the porch after a storm. Not just because the heat had temporarily lost the war against the cooling winds. It was his living room, one facing the immense fields of Monroe County around the small house. I don’t remember many of my dreams, possibly because I don’t sleep long enough to process them. This morning I woke up with a piece of me lingering in the nostalgia of 50 years ago.
NSFW due to a wild mix of subject matter and personal commentary…
My brother Mike died without fulfilling my desire that he write a book. He absorbed the false honor narrative of some of my family members. He was a big man, my brother. I took these rules from conversations that Mike and I had on the phone when he was winding down. I’ve shared pieces of them before. My brother Mike had an interesting life. He was a great writer. We both recognized that between the two of us, we might be able to capture the horror, dark humor, and insights that we experienced. Of all the things that piss me off about the way he went out, it’s that he didn’t have enough clarity to see that he should pull up and find a way to live a few more years. Had he chosen to find a way, the resulting book we would have written would have been an irreverent mixture of Pat Conroy and Stephen King.
I’m paraphrasing my dad: “You’re going to get punched in the f mouth. There’s no doubt about it.”
My brother Mike saw a few fights that I didn’t. While I did witness my dad getting his ass whipped, Mike saw a few more of these than I did. Dad had whiskey courage. He read a few too many Westerns and got the wrong lesson out of most of the movies.
Take them for what you will. My dad was a walking contradiction. I despise a lot of what he did. But I understand it a hell of a lot better as I get older.
Rules:
If you’re going to drink in a bar, you’re going to need to be deaf or have a thick skull.
If your buddy is getting his ass whipped, you have to get your ass whipped too.
If someone threatens you… There are no rules, no warning. Do not think about it. Start hitting.
If someone says they’re going to whip your ass, don’t wait for them to prove it.
If they’re close enough to hit you, hit them first. Don’t stop hitting until they’re down.
The most dangerous man is never the loudest.
Don’t punch them more than you need to. But if they are intent on killing you, don’t walk away when they’re on the ground.
If they dress like a dandy, they will not want to get dirty. If they wear a tight shirt, it’s a sure sign that their muscles are for show. Except if they have dirty, scruffed-up boots. You don’t mess around with people who work hard for a living.
Nuts, throat, nose. If those don’t work, bite anything that gets near your mouth.
There’s no such thing as fighting dirty. If they are coming for you, everything in the room is fair game.
If you deserve to get punched, let them hit you in the face. If they attempt to give you more than what you’ve got coming, remind them that you’re a dirty bastard.
Once you’re done fighting, men have a drink. If you can’t have a drink with a man you just fought with, you’re not worth the hat that sits on your head.
… Dad tried to make a man out of me. Whatever that means. He had his demons. A great deal of his alleged teaching resulted in me choosing the opposite. I never could get my head around that kind of violence. But if you ask me if I understand it, the answer is yes. Especially so when the universe fails or when people fail to honor the fact that violence should never be out of proportion to what caused it. Dad scrambled my brains a few times, but one thing that came out of it was that I learned that many fights come out of nowhere. And a few people who should have scared me didn’t. That’s a part of the Bobby Dean legacy that fills me with contradiction.
I’m forgetting a few of his rules. Despite some of the negative things I have to say about him, he surprised my brother and me many times with how he phrased things. I sometimes forget that he was smart. I would snarkily mention that he often failed to incorporate his intelligence into his behavior. But I’m tired of getting hit by a bolt of hypocritical lightning.
I’ve confessed before that my brother and I actively thought about killing my dad more than once. I’m not proud of it. But if Dad had survived a few more years, he would have appreciated the dark humor of this truth a lot more. Mike realized when we got older that it probably would have been me who would have done it because I experienced and witnessed a lot more of the violence. When my brother Mike got older, Dad looked at him much differently. Mike would have hurled him through the kitchen window like firewood.
Knowing them both, I am 100% certain that one of them would have pulled out the whiskey bottle and poured the other a shot.
They were the kind of men I did not aspire to become. Whatever dark streak ran through them has luckily remained mostly dormant in me. I’d love to have the devilish prankster spirit. I wouldn’t tie someone to a hunting camp tree stump and light it, but I would enjoy making someone think it could happen. There is a fine line between lunacy and free-spiritedness.
I’m sharing this because it’s supposed to be a tip of the hat. It’s not an accusation. The history is there, written as fact in my mind. One of the crazy lessons of ambivalence is that you can witness a tornado but fall in love with how the lightning looks across the sky. Life can be appreciated similarly, even if you would rather flip the light switch off for some moments.
P.S. Parenthetically Speaking 