Readers and writers blog

As I said last time, our 50-year high school reunion was great, but please excuse me for a moment while I pick a bone with my classmates:

You guys really pissed me off, you know. You all looked great. You were supposed to look like geezers in your late 60s, but noooo . . . Oh, I know, you said I looked great, too, but that was just polite lies. But you guys really did look great. Damn it. Well, you’re all too good-looking to stay mad at. So I guess you’re forgiven.

In fact, thanks to Patty and Al and all the others who organized the reunion. It was at The Oaks Golf Links in Somersworth, N.H., a fancy place with a fancy dining room — large banquet tables with linen tablecloths, tall crystal centerpieces and great food. (Are restaurants in general getting better, or am I just getting hungrier?)

Jean Anne, one of our more vivacious cheerleaders, was still jumping around like a teenager. (I still don’t believe your story about getting a knee replacement.)

Chuck and Marcia, sorry I missed you. I don’t know how it happened. I think that’s you in the left foreground of my terrible photo above. (You’d never believe that for many of my 38 years in the newspaper business, I also carried a camera and processed my own film and prints. But that was before digital cameras.)

Stan, we never did get a chance to discuss your latest oceanographic achievements, but since Lamont-Doherty’s headquarters are just south of us on the Hudson River, maybe we’ll get together there.

John, it really was great to see Christa, ha, ha . . . and you. Really, old buddy.

Cynthia, who went to the junior prom with me, you still are youthful enough to go to anyone’s junior prom, and so is your husband, the charming Richard.

Butch and Joy, our class couple, you have no right to look exactly — and I mean exactly — like your yearbook picture.

And now to Roger, Irene, Richard, Donald, Paul, Royal, Maurice, John, Laurel, Louie, Pete, Ruth, George, Peter, Carl, Dave, Bruce and Ronald, I miss you. We miss you. You died too soon.

Nearly 100 people came to the reunion. Some, of course, were spouses, but that’s not bad for a class of either 125 or 150, depending on my memory. Maybe some of our cohesiveness comes from the fact that we went to a great school. For those who missed the comments section of my Oct. 21 entry (and I’m sure no one did), I reprint a picture of Spaulding High School, Rochester, N.H.:

My wife, Bonnie, said she was struck by how nice everyone at the reunion was. Well, yes, they are nice. In New Hampshire, it’s the law: If you’re not nice, you have to leave the state. Which explains why I now live in New York.

Today’s new offerings in Works:

• Chapter 32: Hillsborough of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard, reunited with Melanie, goes to visit longtime friend Elliot in Hillsborough and finds him now completely insane. The next day, Elliot kills himself with the same revolver his father had used to commit suicide.

• Chapter 20 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess takes Brian back to her old town, back to the diner where the owner, a friend of her ex-husband, on the day of her divorce had called her a whore.

– Sid Leavitt

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UPDATE: Our 50-year class reunion was great, but I’m still trying to download some photos I took there. (All those years I spent developing and printing film have been made obsolete by a tiny digital camera.) So while I try to figure it all out, I offer the following dark thoughts:

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Thanks to the recent wave of hot, sticky weather, I’ve been spending more time than usual watching the daily stock market tickers on CNBC, one of my favorite pastimes, even though I own no stocks.

What’s the attraction? Best crime show on TV, that’s what.

Now, I have no objection to people with soft desk jobs. Thanks to advice given me long ago by my stepfather — he was a logger who told me “the only kind of wood you want to push around is the stuff they put in pencils” — I spent most of my adult life in soft desk jobs at various newspapers.

And I have no real objection to gambling with one’s own money, not even the kind of gambling my wife and I have been forced to do on next winter’s heating oil account. Thanks to the stock market — more specifically, oil futures — we’ve put down about $3,200 on a bet that heating oil won’t cost more than $4.70 a gallon through the winter.

But I don’t like the idea that some of these Wall Streeters and their colleagues around the world, all sitting behind their comfy desks, are manipulating us. I’m suspicious, for example, about the fact that crude oil recently has slipped more than $20 from its recent record of $145 a barrel, making it likely that our locked-in price of $4.70 for heating oil is going to cost us a few hundred extra dollars this winter.

And if the powers that be had their way, we’d be gambling a lot more. Remember the recent plan to ‘privatize’ Social Security? In fact, remember an earlier plan — one that succeeded — called 401k? It did ‘privatize’ a lot of company pension programs by putting us in the stock market. Through luck, mine worked out fine because I got out four years ago. My wife’s plan, not so fine because she’s still in it.

As I’ve said before, I resent having to make complex financial decisions for which I have no expertise and no time to acquire it. For the same reasons, I don’t do my own dental work or brain surgery.

And I am outraged at what plainly has been manipulation by banks and other lenders that has victimized working-class and low-income people across the country. Check out this story in the New York Times. Or this report from Bill Moyers Journal.

The Moyers report quotes Jim Rokakis, a county treasurer in Ohio, talking about a Cleveland neighborhood where people on fixed incomes were lured into home-equity loans to maintain or repair their houses, only to have unforeseen increases in interest rates sink them into foreclosure:

Back in the old days, when there was no sheriff in town, people would rob the banks. Well, here we are in the modern-day era, there’s no sheriff in town, and the banks are robbing the people.

I get really annoyed at people who question my patriotism because I question the great American system of capitalism. Yes, this is the greatest country in the world, but please don’t tell me our system of greed-driven, free-market fundamentalism is something our children should emulate.

It’s not a coincidence that Christ threw the money-lenders out of the temple or that Dante put the usurers in the eighth circle of hell, just above Lucifer in the pit of the ninth.

Both recognized the forces of avarice, and those forces are still out there. It’s our duty as citizens — patriotic citizens — to elect governments that keep them in check. Otherwise, they’ll steal us blind.

Today’s new offerings in Works:

• Chapter 19 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess agrees reluctantly with Brian to watch her brother and sister-in-law’s baby while they get away for a night. It’s a touchy subject for Tess, who has vowed to have no children.

• Chapter 31: Sacramento of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard goes back to Melanie and professes his love for her, but she is now in love with heroin.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*Geryon is a demon from Greek mythology who in Dante’s Inferno becomes sort of a gatekeeper between the seventh and eighth circles of hell. The seventh circle is for violent offenders, the eighth (and more depraved) is for usurers. This woodcut by 19th century French artist and engraver Paul Gustave Doré gives Geryon his traditional ‘face of a saintly person’ but bat wings and a serpentine body that ends in a scorpion’s stinger.

I gave the welcoming address at my 20-year high school reunion, the first one I had attended, and I was duly impressed with the momentousness of the occasion. My address was weighted with the American and world history we had passed through.

Now that the 50-year reunion is here, I no longer feel that weight.

Not that the importance of the span between 1958 and 1978 has diminished. Imagine if you will:

• Humans had walked on the moon. And not just the first two, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, but eventually a dozen men, all Americans.

• The president who launched America’s space program, John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated.

• There had been another war, Vietnam, and its inglorious conclusion had made World War II and even Korea seem like lost history.

• Two apostles of hope, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, had been gunned down at the height of the 1960s, a decade of social change that many of us thought had been too long in coming.

• But what seemed equally important to me — and to many others of the class of 1958 of Spaulding High School, Rochester, N.H. — was that we were now more than twice as old as we were when we graduated. At least, that’s what we talked about a lot, in one way or another, at that 20-year reunion.

Age now seems so far down on the list. And so, for that matter, do events in American and world history.

My classmates and I are now about twice as old as we were at that 20-year reunion, and yet I think age may be more important to those who have less of it and increasingly irrelevant to those who have more. I know I used to worry a lot more about death when I was in my late 20s and early 30s than I have since.

And now personal history seems more important to me than that of the nation and the world. Here’s why:

My 50 post-high school years started promisingly with college, the Army and then a marriage to a woman I had long dreamed about with love. But I was an unfocused collegian, an unwilling soldier and an unworthy husband. So 22 years out of high school, I was alone and, most of the time, drunk.

After another five years and a number of relationships, two of them ending in mercifully short marriages, I was living not in a house but in a small truck. You can read all about it in Adrift in America, a book found in the nonfiction category of our Works section.

Ironically, through all of this, my work as a reporter and eventually editor never suffered. And it was this work — I should say, work environment — that finally saved me.

In 1989, I visited a small daily newspaper in Kingston, N.Y., where I had worked in the 1970s, and I was captivated by a woman who now worked there. Actually, I was captivated first by her writing. In the paper that day was a story about a local Holstein farm that began with a description of black-and-white magnets on a farmhouse refrigerator.

I took a job again at the newspaper but didn’t stay long. I was still on the road and headed for more misadventures. But I never forgot that woman, and I got to know her better when I returned to work there in 1992, this time to stay.

Bonnie and I were married in 1997, and in the 11 years since, I have thought frequently about what a lucky bastard I have been — a bastard often in the past and now just plain lucky.

Bonnie and I will be traveling to New Hampshire on Friday for that 50-year reunion. It’ll be my third since the 20th. I didn’t give any speeches at the 35th and 40th. The 20th taught me that people just wanted to talk about themselves.

I think I will give a speech this time, but a personal one.

Today’s new offerings in Works

• Chapter 30: Manitou Springs of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Melanie no longer believes anything Gerard says or does, so he leaves her and her daughter, Wendy, and goes to Colorado to be with Ginny again. But that doesn’t work, either.

• Chapter 18 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. For the first time in the months since their divorce, Tess is visited by her ex-husband, Jason, a meeting of tumultuous emotions for both of them. And now that there is no longer Jason-and-Tess, she feels it’s also just a matter of time before there’s no longer Brian-and-Tess.

– Sid Leavitt

I’ve been watching the price of crude oil bob up and down like a bungee jumper, and I’m wondering how long it’s going to take us to cut the cord. Because continuing the way we are makes no sense.

What’s astonishing to me is how many people don’t see that it makes no sense.

I was talking the other day to a guy from our local electric utility, and he was trying to tell me why America isn’t trying to switch away from fossil fuels:

“It makes no sense,” he said.

What? Well, here’s how he saw it: Solar and wind technology are too expensive, and there’s really no shortage of oil, just a lack of initiative in finding it. As for global warming, he doesn’t believe it.

Granted, this guy isn’t a policy maker at the utility, just a field technician trying to determine whether we’re close enough to one of its natural gas lines to hook in for a tankless water heater.

It’s some of his beliefs that bother me — beliefs that a lot of Americans seem to hold.

For one thing, most of the science I read says we’re past the peak of the world’s oil supply. Most of the science I read also says our atmosphere is warming because our use of fossil fuels is pumping too much carbon dioxide into it.

And solar and wind are too expensive? Compared to what? Summers of 110 degrees and New York City under water?

Frankly, I’m glad we’re running out of oil. Because if the utility guy were right and we were gushing in oil again, a lot of people would be right back in those Hummers and SUVs, driving the kids everywhere to and from their McMansions instead of making the little fatties walk somewhere.

Does that make sense?

You know, I still haven’t forgiven Al Gore for losing to George Bush in 2000. Gore as a candidate was so stiff that he reminded me of a big popsicle stick. But he said something Thursday that sums up our current energy situation:

We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that’s got to change.

It was his speech challenging the United States to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.*

A couple of other things Gore said:

(E)nough solar energy falls on the surface of the earth every 40 minutes to meet 100 percent of the entire world’s energy needs for a full year. Tapping just a small portion of this solar energy could provide all of the electricity America uses.

And enough wind power blows through the Midwest corridor every day to also meet 100 percent of U.S. electricity demand.

Is it a daunting challenge? Yes, and so was John F. Kennedy’s program to put us on the moon in 10 years.

Gore’s challenge still would leave us using oil, but in far smaller quantities — for example, for aircraft and hybrid cars. But we would get rid of those nasty coal-fired plants that now generate more than half our electricity.

You know, there’s almost a religious fervor not to believe in global warming and the need for alternative energy sources. Well, apologies to my religious friends, but it’s actually safer not to believe in God than not to believe in global warming.

If you die and there’s no God, you haven’t wasted a lot of your life trying to believe. If there is a God, then he has to be the kind of deity who would find it perfectly reasonable not to believe in him. If he isn’t that kind of deity, then I’d just as soon go to hell.

But if you don’t believe in global warming and it turns out not to happen, you’ve still got the energy mess we’re in today. And if it does turn out to be true, then you’ve got hell right here on earth.

Today’s new offerings in Works

• Chapter 17 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess spends a day talking with Brian’s troubled younger sister and is somewhat reassured that Rachel will survive her relationship with Tim, a drug dealer.

• Chapter 29: Burlingame of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard and Melanie spend an evening with Ginny and Elliot, and it turns out as badly as Gerard had feared. Melanie punches Ginny, and all four get arrested. (Update: Whoa, to my chagrin, I am corrected by Gerard [see comments]. Only he and Melanie get arrested. Apologies, G.)

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*Thanks to fellow blogger Ted Knerr at Art-spirit for sending us the speech, which you can see or read here. If you watch the video, push the ‘play’ slider over to 2:20 to get past the introductions.

Thhhaaaaah crush-ER.

It was a weekend of crushers for my wife and me, one that ranged from humorous to horrendous.

Bonnie, who works at the local daily newspaper where I retired four years ago, asked me Friday night for ideas for a story she’s doing on area people with unusual occupations. One of my suggestions was someone who runs a car crusher at a local scrapyard.

Little did I realize we’d be visiting not one but two crushers the next day.

Jesus, it was a nightmare. Like something from Apocalypse Now — remember that scene where Martin Sheen’s patrol boat, traveling upriver to find Marlon Brando, motors beneath the tail section of a crashed B-52 bomber towering high above the tiny boat?

So there we were Saturday, sitting in our rental truck on a narrow dirt road between mountains of crushed metal at a local scrapyard. Towering high above us on the left was a pile of crushed cars being made higher by a huge crawler excavator dropping a nasty looking four-tooth grapple into the engine of a wrecked car, then lifting it by its innards onto other dead vehicles. That last bite punctured what appeared to be an air conditioning reservoir, sending a stream of refrigerant onto our windshield. On our right, not quite as high, was a pile of old appliances and other scrap metal being chewed on by another excavator, this one equipped with an enormous shear that looked like the mouth of a tyrannosaurus rex. Behind us, more trucks waited to feed the monsters.

We hurriedly pushed our offerings off the back of our truck — an old washer and dryer set that had been in storage for years and that we wanted to recycle. Those once-elegant appliances had hardly crashed to the ground when we jumped back into the truck and lurched out of the scrapyard, not stopping to collect the few dollars our metal would have brought.

Meanwhile, this whole subject had revived the humor we shared from an old Bugs Bunny cartoon about a wrestling match. The villain of ‘Bunny Hugged’ (1951) is an overmuscled but not-too-bright wrestler named the Crusher. The funniest thing to me is not the action, which is funny, but the way the wrestler is introduced.

Like most cartoons from the golden days of Warner Bros., “Bunny Hugged” has its caricatures drawn from real life. Crusher’s opponent, before Bugs gets involved, is Ravishing Ronald, a takeoff on an old West Coast wrestler named Gorgeous George. And the ring announcer is the cartoon version of a longtime Madison Square Garden announcer whose name escapes me.

What the announcer does with the introduction never fails to crack me up. And the best imitation of that introduction I’ve ever heard is done by a talented writer and funny guy named Ron Rosner, sports editor at the newspaper where Bonnie works.

What the ring announcer does with the introduction is done by people who give the same speech over and over — tour guides, for example. They give a different inflection to words that are all too familiar to them. In this case, the Crusher has pulverized so many opponents, his name is all too familiar to the fans.

So it’s not the CRUSH-er. It’s thhhhaaaah crush-ER. Cracks me up. Every time.

Today’s new offerings in Works

• Chapter 28: The Garden of Eden of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard encourages Melanie to have sex with other men so that she’ll eventually agree to move in with Ginny and their friend Elliot. When the four of them finally get together, as Gerard says, “that was when the shit hit the fan.”

• Chapter 16 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess meets Brian’s father, and it’s an encounter that ends in violence. Brian’s father wants to make amends for years of cheating on his wife and ignoring his children. When he mentions having visited Brian’s troubled sister, Rachel, Brian beats him bloody.

– Sid Leavitt

The Swellmobile is back. After 14 days and $1,323* to fix its transmission, I have been reunited with my car, which I have given an elegant nickname because it is one of the last few indulgences in my otherwise frugal life.

Oh, I’ve indulged myself before. Back in my salad days of the late 1970s, I bought myself a tuxedo. Tailor-made. Silk lapels, leg stripe, cummerbund and tie (not a clip-on, please). What I paid for it then would be about $1,000 today.

I reasoned that I needed the tuxedo — I’d been to a half dozen weddings where formal attire was required, and renting tuxedos already had cost me nearly half what buying one would — but it really was an indulgence.

What I didn’t realize, of course, was that weddings are about the only place a man needs a tuxedo, and even then, he’s often mistaken for a member of the wedding party, if not the groom. And try going to a restaurant in a tuxedo. People will ask you for a table. Or if it’s a party, they will expect you to be carrying a tray of hors d’ouevres.

And there were other indulgences. In the mid-1980s, when I was divorced, out of a job and living on the road in a small truck (again, see it here), I used some of the few dollars left over from the sale of our house to buy a portable VCR (they were expensive then). And, oh yes, six pieces of stemmed crystal glassware that hung under one of the cabinets in the truck’s living area, right across from the small closet where I kept the tuxedo, never to be worn again.

I came from a family of modest means (some might say poor), and the tuxedo, VCR and stemmed glasses were totems of a lifestyle I thought I wanted before I returned to frugality.

The last piece of stemware was broken years ago, but the VCR continued to function until two years ago, and I donated the tuxedo to a social-service thrift shop just last year. You know, I was a little annoyed when one of the thrift-shop volunteers put on the coat and laughed that she should wear it to a costume party. Hell, that tuxedo was still in perfect condition and might have helped some poor guy get a waiter’s job.

Ah well, I digress.

Being without my car for two weeks hasn’t been a great deprivation, but it has kept me away from Kingston, N.Y., about seven miles away, and the supermarket where I do my weekly shopping. (Yes, Kingston still has a supermarket right in town.)

My wife, Bonnie, and I split the shopping, but my part includes such bulk items as cat food and litter. (The cats have been eyeing me suspiciously of late, even though I know they can’t see into the closet where they’re down to less than one small bag of food.)

And in case you haven’t noticed from the photo above (or, like me, can’t tell one car from another), the Swellmobile is a 1994 Ford Taurus — yes, 14 years old. The reason it’s ’swell’ is that it has plush velour upholstery, a split-bench front seat, drop-down dual armrests and four power windows, three of which still work. It still has most of its paint — a rich burgundy — although my father-in-law, Glenn, has touched up a few rust spots with some orange paint he had lying around. I bought the car from him and my mother-in-law, Virginia, when they gave up their seasonal trailer in Texas and brought the spare car here.

It was certainly no extravagance — they gave me a good price — but the reason it’s an indulgence is that its six-cylinder engine barely averages 20 miles per gallon. Even though I drive it only about 20 miles a week, it’s wasteful.

You know, I would rather have an electric car or some kind of hybrid, but I can’t afford it. What’s sad is that there are some people who could — but wouldn’t.

Today’s new offerings in Works

• Chapter 15 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess, who supports herself as a cleaning lady, meets a trophy wife in one of the new gentry’s homes, then runs afoul of one of Brian’s trophy ex-girlfriends in a local bar.

• Chapter 27: Sutro Heights of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Things begin to fall apart between Gerard and Melanie when she realizes he still loves Ginny and wants the two of them to move in with Ginny and her current paramour Elliot.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*No complaint about the repair cost. It was on the low end of what my Google research showed was a national average of $1,300 to $1,900 for repairing a 1990-95 Ford Taurus transmission. It also was on the low end of the estimate of $1,300 to $1,500 given me by the local repair shop. So thank you, Paramount Garage & Transmission of Kingston, N.Y., a shop run by Anthony and Frank Naccarato — two guys who keep their word. (See? There are guys like that in New York.)

The sultry air of a July evening envelops me, caresses me, sedates me into an indolence where I do not seek but merely play host to questions that visit me:

• Why am I refreshed after four hours of sleep but still sleepy after eight? I slept today from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., and now, as the sun slips into the orange horizon, I want to curl up again and doze.

I went to sleep last night at 10 p.m. and awoke at 2 a.m., my usual four hours, and I was wide awake. I balanced the family accounts, read our blogroll, walked on the treadmill, watched the stock market futures, even though I don’t own any stocks, then had a bowl of Wheaties with watered-down soymilk. Drifted off at 8 a.m. I should have been awake again before noon.

After three or four hours in bed, pain sets into my back, hips and other joints, some of them damaged by football in my youth and others just generally arthritic.

My doctor says it’s normal for someone in their late 60s to sleep in three- or four-hour segments. Mine usually are in the early morning and early afternoon, usually adding up to six hours or so. She says that’s fine, and all things considered, that I seem pretty healthy.

• Dreams? I had one last night where I was having trouble walking because, of all things, my shoulders hurt. Then I turned around and saw my mother standing there. I asked if I could lean on her to relieve the pain. She said yes, I did, and the pain went away.

I frequently have dreams where I am walking, jogging, sometimes bicycling long distances over routes that I remember only from other dreams. When I lived on the road for seven years back in the 1980s and ’90s, I walked four to six miles a day along local routes — but none of them that I travel in my dreams.

My mother died two years ago. She was 85, but it still was a shock and a terrible loss to me. I was always close to her, but especially so in the late 1940s after my father died. Maybe I’m still saying goodbye to her.

• Why does our dog Emily’s grave in our backyard seem so comforting to me? It’s in a shady corner, marked only by a wide hardwood stake to which her food dish, her leash and some plastic flowers have been attached. After Emily died of lymphoma last summer, my wife Bonnie and I buried her in a deep hole we had dug. Emily was wrapped in a quilt she had burrowed into so many times before settling down to a nap that it was in tatters.

Grass now grows on top of Emily and her tattered quilt. And even though I can still see them as I last saw them at the bottom of that hole, it’s . . . comforting. Maybe because I know that someday, perhaps not too long from now, I’ll be in a similar situation. And we’ll both be contributing ourselves back to the earth that gave us life.

It’s raining lightly outside now, and cool air is coming in the window behind me.

Today’s new offerings in our Works section

• Chapter 26: Cole Street of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard meets Melanie, a voluptuous 19-year-old who is nothing like Ginny, and they move in together with Melanie’s 4-year-old daughter. Gerard thinks he is getting over Ginny — until he hears that she and friend Elliot are now living together.

• Chapter 14 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. A July 4th family gathering at Tess’ apartment reignites her painful relationship with her mother, who makes it clear that she not only resents but dislikes her daughter. Brian comes to Tess’ defense, soothing the hurt and reinforcing her aspirations as an artist.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

Bobby boyd is a contributor to the website Category Five, a blog from the National Weather Service in Old Hickory, Tenn.

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Today in Works: a new chapter
of Disconnected. See below.

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I was reading a blog entry the other day about chickens, Kentucky Fried Chicken and PETA. The consensus among the author and most of the commenters was that chickens are stupid and/or soulless, that KFC is being unfairly criticized for its choice of chicken slaughterers and that PETA is “crazy.”

Now I come from a family of farmers, and I hold no brief for chickens. I had a pet chicken once, and he was stupid, not to mention the most unaffectionate pet I ever had.¹ And I certainly hold no brief for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which I think could use much of its time more wisely and effectively.

But I cannot disagree with its purposes. All animals, humans included, deserve to be treated as kindly as possible, and I said so in my comment. You know, I’ve previously corresponded quite cordially with some of the people whose thoughts were in that blog entry, and I have great respect for them. So I want them to understand why I feel as I do — and have for some years.

I wrote about it nearly two decades ago:²

Charleston, South Carolina. January 22, 1989.

North of Charleston, where Route 17 expands to four lanes again, the highway is divided by a greenbelt that rolls wide and gentle like a golf course fairway. Except that here, the divots are caused by empty cans, bottles and any other detritus that was smaller than an open car window. One of the things I have learned from walking the highways of America is that roadside trash has become not only a permanent part of our landscape but apparently a permanent part of our consciousness. As motorists, we have become so accustomed to litter along our highways that we notice it only when it is not there. In fact, it’s not so much a matter of noticing it as it is a vague feeling that there is something different about a clean roadside. What’s different is that there is so damned little of it. That’s especially apparent when you walk rather than drive along our nation’s highways. There is no movement to blur the roadside into the landscape. Every piece of trash is there, fixed clearly in your vision.

This section of Route 17 skims between the Intracoastal Waterway and the Francis Marion National Forest, two of the most beautiful assets of South Carolina. Yet here, on their fringe, the trash spreads away from the highway and invades their wilderness, a wilderness that in the past three years has become part of my yard.

These bastards are trashing my yard. Just who the hell do they think is going to pick up their shit?

A final indignity: On the way back to the truck, in a narrow clearing at the edge of the Francis Marion National Forest, I find the mangled remains of a deer squashed into a garbage bag. It was apparently a small animal, and most of it seems to be here, but I can’t tell its gender. There are no antlers, although they may have been cut off, and the internal organs seem to have been gutted. A roadway accident victim? Maybe. But there’s also the other possibility.

I’m so tired of arguing with hunters. Sorry, boys, there just isn’t any sport in killing an animal at the height of its vitality and freedom. The hunters, of course, always counter with the argument that I eat meat that also has to be killed. Yes, I do, and too much of it at that.

Maybe we should reinstitute mealtime prayers by saying thanks not to some deity but to the animals we are eating. And to the fish we take from the sea and the plants we take from the earth.

Expressing gratitude and respect to the living things we put to death would force us to examine our reasons for killing them. Maybe we would eat less meat. And maybe we would raise the animals we do eat on farms that would treat them not like livestock but like demigods, ending their lives mercifully, sacrificially. Maybe we would stop poisoning our crops with chemicals. You don’t think this could happen? It could if we made farms rather than churches tax-exempt.

We could say thanks to the trees that give us air. And to the earth that gives us trees and crops and fish and animals.

Saying thanks seems so little, but as I look at the rotting deer and see the beauty that still shows through its gnarled corpse, I am grateful it has lived. And I realize that after I’m dead, the best I can hope for is that someone will thank me, in spirit if not by name, for having lived.

I pull the garbage bag away from the shoulder of the road until I find a hollow in the grass. I empty the deer’s remains into the hollow and cover them with pine boughs. The dripping, foul-smelling bag I drag away with me.

Within sight of the truck, I find a cluster of empty beer bottles and pick up one. With the beer bottle in one hand and the bag in the other, I return to where I have been parked since last night and deposit my totems in a nearby garbage can.

In the years ahead, I will rarely go for a daily walk without returning with a piece of litter in each hand. And I will never find a two-mile stretch of roadside America where there aren’t at least two pieces of trash. In fact, I will find many stretches where there is so much trash that hundreds of walkers like me couldn’t make a dent in it.

I suppose it’s like a religious ceremony. I know it’s virtually meaningless, but it makes me feel better.

And I do feel better. I guess I have decided there isn’t much difference between a person who throws trash out of a car and a person who stands on the roadside bitching about it.

Today’s new offerings in Works:

• Chapter Four of Jeri Cafesin’s novel Disconnected. Rachel joins family members for a Thanksgiving dinner that reopens old wounds and brings back the tensions and grievances that have alienated her from them.

• Chapter 13 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. As their weeks of living together progress, Tess and Brian begin bumping elbows and working out the more mundane aspects of their romance. But it is still there, its flames transforming into a glow.

• Chapter 25: Kentfield of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard and his friend Elliot move in together in mid-1968, and Ginny spends most of her time with them. But her old demons find her before Christmas, and they all go their separate ways, Ginny eventually into a hospital.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

1. You know, old Cluckity was just doing the best he could, surrounded as he was by humans who eventually ate him. I’d had chicken dinners before, and I’ve had them since, but that one was different.

2. The excerpt is from Chapter 65 of Adrift in America, a book found in the nonfiction section of Works. The truck I lived in was camouflaged to look like a sanitation vehicle.

I love working for Uncle.

As with a lot of government jobs, I don’t do too much (well, I do support my local economy) and he pays me once a month, just like clockwork.

You might say I’m secure . . . socially secure.

True, my Social Security income, even though it’s near the maximum benefit, is only about half what my job was paying before I retired. On the other hand, I don’t have to drive to work every day, buy a lunch somewhere, drink overpriced beverages from vending machines, buy coworkers overpriced drinks when the pressure of the day is over — or wear clothes more expensive than the cheap sweatsuits I lounge around in while writing this deathless prose (you know the joke — deathless because it never lived).

The only money withheld from Social Security is for Medicare (no, it’s not free if you sign up for Part B for outpatient care, and you’d be an idiot not to), and that’s a lot less than I was paying for company insurance that wasn’t as good. Also, I no longer pay union dues. Also — and this is a big one — Social Security benefits aren’t taxed as high as private-sector income.

So, I watch my nickels, dimes and dollars (pennies aren’t worth watching any more) and live a fairly comfortable life that, while it may have no frills, is pretty much the no-frills life I lived before I retired.

Now listen, you Gen Xers, Yers and Zers, I don’t want to hear you complain about having to pay into Social Security so that I can live my modest life. I paid into that system for 40 years, so don’t whine at me until you’re in your 60s and have done the same.

Besides, I just found out I’m going to have to pay 2,000 bucks to fix the transmission in my 14-year-old car while you’re driving around in models from the 21st century.

And don’t listen to those who say you won’t have any benefits by the time you retire. Social Security will be just fine, and those who predict its demise are capitalist fat cats who want to get your contributions into the stock market so they can steal them legally. We could have fixed Social Security a hundred times in the past eight years with the money our current government has wasted just on its war, one that’s enriching all its friends.

We have a government that doesn’t believe in government. I do. But it has to be good government — in other words, one that isn’t run by them.

I’m grateful for my current life of relative comfort. And I’m grateful to the relative — a red, white and blue Uncle symbolizing generations of believers in good government — who made it possible.

An update

I wrote last week about losing the link to Mike’s Circular File, but I have now reconnected. It turns out that if you use our blogroll page to link to its listings, you never lost the connection. The reason I did is that I keep a separate blogroll listing to avoid opening our website more than I have to. Mike’s address on this separate listing was an old link to Comcast that he has now dropped.

Glad to be back with you, Mike. Unfortunately, the other link I wrote about — Robert Lashley’s The literary thug — is still missing. I hope Robert is well.

Today in our Works section

• Chapter 24: Speedway Meadows of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard wanders into a rock concert where he runs into Ginny, who then gets into another drunken incident with the police. Her father’s lawyer gets her out of jail and cleared of an assault charge.

• Chapter 12 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess learns from a phone call in the middle of the night that her former mother-in-law has died — a woman who introduced her to the beauty of art, a woman she loved. But Tess cannot go to the funeral because there she would face a man she loved, her ex-husband.

– Sid Leavitt