Burying The Past Before It's Dead

What I did to impress my father that I was following in his footsteps didn't work out so well. I became the kind of person he wanted to help, but he didn't want his own son to be one of the ones he saved from what had been in store for him.

I just wrote about the Magazine Street Mission story in an e-mail I just composed. The frequency that it comes up in my writing implies that it has an extraordinary place of importance in my dream time.

I wrote about how I sat in the front corner pew of the Mission's rude chapel so I could watch the faces of the other bums and drunks seeking refuge from a night on the streets of New Orleans. The religious service we had to attend was the price of admission for an inside place to be. The cops in New Orleans were scarier than the crooks. That was then. I can't imagine anything has changed because of the hurricane. Why would it?

What impressed me about the descriptions I conjured for the e-mail response this morning was that what I saw when I looked back to watch those bewildered faces made me wanna find a way to communicate with them in a language they would listen to with some interest.

Learning what it would take to reframe my lexicon to one that might penetrate the effects of chronic fatigue seemed like an original challenge to me, but in reflection it may have been what my father intended all along. Maybe he tricked me with misdirection. Maybe not. He's been dead for well over a decade now. I can't ask him. I doubt he would offer me a digestible answer in any case.

My father's mission may have been the direct result of America's Civil War. Maybe even one of America's wars before even that. The story I'm most familiar with (and a lotta these hand-me-down stories haven't panned out) is that the reason my father's ancestors lived in the Alabama/Mississippi area down near Mobile was that the land they developed into a cotton plantation was a federal land grant given to veterans of this earlier war as a reward for their service to the country.

My father had a habit of telling a story about how some of the significant others in or about his natal family had a habit of referring to his obsession to formally educate himself with a condescending label of "Poor Bill". He was the first and only child in his family (he was the youngest) who completed the seventh grade, much less get a college degree. In other words, they thought he had gone bonkers to do without and sacrifice to get a head.

My father's fondest wish for me, before he turned to my younger brothers to satisfy his thoughts and aims, was that I would get a head too. It pissed him off to no end for me to attempt to convince him that I was born with a head, and since such was a fait accompli his ambitions for me were not appealing. He never forgave me. Considering what I became to defy him, I don't blame him. It is only important to me that I forgive him. I don't know how I would gnow if I had.

One of the habits or rituals I'd definitely have to work on is forgiving him for bringing his job home with him, and continuing to treat me as his student rather than his own son when school hours were over. He punished me by holding me up to the standards his best students achieved, and used his students to render most of the punishment. I was extremely jealous of the time my father spent with his favorite students.

His favorite students were carbon copies of Poor Bill. He believed in them the way he was himself ignored. He made up for what was missing in their life by providing himself as a model for his students to emulate as a replacement for their own fathers, who were Poor Bill's too.

After the Civil War came the cotton bollweevils, and then the Great Depression. There were real reasons why the economy of the Southeastern U.S. was in shambles. My father's grandfather died after he returned from fighting in the Civil War only to die of chronic fatigue and shell-shock. The ravages of the reconstruction years were deep and personal in every Southern family. They lost the war, and most of the working aged men who know how to make a living. Only the Southern woman carried the day.

There were a lotta men around when my father immigrated here specifically to teach agriculture who had not been raised by a progressive culture whose social activities were organized by beneficent leaders. They were killed or despoiled by the aftermath of man-made and natural disasters or they just left the South for greener pastures because it was such a sad place to be. The Southern states didn't get federal funds alloted like it was to most states until World War Two came and passed, even though they paid as much taxes as they could. War might be Hell, but losing a war is even more hellish.

For the most part my father's efforts to replace the inured Poor Bills were applauded by the real fathers and the community in general too. He had grassroots power for trying to make the brighter children of the poor farmers and even poorer tenant farmers and sometimes rich farmers better men than they could themselves.

It was the State of North Carolina that was responsible for bringing in professional help to get their agrarian economic engine in better working condition. They hired at least forty college graduate agriculture teachers from Mississippi alone, and a lot more from other states.

The farmers in North Carolina were so beat down by what happened to their economic system that they were reduced to just copying the behaviors of the wealthier farmers, and plowed when they plowed, planted when they planted, and harvested when the rich folk harvested too. The rebellious ones followed the Almanacs and planted by the cycles of the Moon.

the personality of my father couldn't have walked into a more auspicious situation. Even according to him it was love at first sight. The State really backed up their decision to educate it's farmers so they could lift themselves up by their own bootstraps by adopting an aggressive system for paving the farm roads to help them bring their farm products to the market. My father was living a dream. He didn't have much time for me except when he couldn't find somebody to fill up with his missionary zeal for bettering the world. By the time I was a teenager I wasn't listening anymore, and that cut him to the quick.

It saddens me to no end that my own children will not be able to sit down at their computers when they get old like me and write about their experiences with their father when they were young. I wasn't there. I left my first wife and child when my first child was a baby, and my second-wife left me when our two girls were only three and five years old. They know the people they work with better than they do their own father. Why would they not resent me every time they see their friends hug their father? They're barely curious about me now, as if an afterthought they soon ignore. No blame.

If I live long enough (and since it's written that the good die young, why would I not), then the time will come when I won't know who anybody is anymore. Both my mother and my father didn't rightly know precisely who me or my siblings were for years before they finally croaked. We took care of them anyway.

For me, if I live long enough, all the people who encounter me will not only be strangers to me because I'm demented, they really will be strangers who can't possibly know whether I was any particular kind of person at all. I'm only praying I can finally learn to get off sexually on pain. If that happens I'll know immediately because of the arthritis.