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The way I see a job is you just go do it. That's probably why I managed as a brick-layer. You come to the site on the first day and you see ten or twenty tons of bricks, all bailed up in one-ton cubes, and maybe there's a nice footing with lines tied up to corner posts, and maybe even some masonry nails driven into the footing plumb down from the X the lines make up there in the air somewhere (who am I kidding—I always did the plumbing down, and the pinning of the corners on the footing). If they've done the footing well, it's smooth enough that you can pop chalk lines off those pins. Then you have two references you can actually sight, lining up the string in the air with the chalk on the footing, which tells you if your layout is basically accurate. There's also the very good idea to measure up at various points, footing to lines, to see if the footing is fairly level, or where “hogging” has to happen (getting that first course level by splitting bricks here and there, or adding extra masonry if there are low spots). This is a nice beginning meditation. Nothing is yet set in stone. I have memories of quiet spring or fall mornings, no one around, just walking around the site, figuring this stuff out at my own pace.

Then there's the getting the bricks within reach, humping around with a barrow, making piles of bricks at the corners and so forth. On some sites they'd drop the cubes inside the perimeter of the building, which was normally quite the handy idea as long as there weren't going to be some cubes ending up on the wrong side of the building, marooned inside and ultimately underneath, which would never do. After a couple or three hours it'd be time to turn on the mixer and make some mortar, then start building those corners carefully, one at a time, with a lot of attention paid to the level and the lines, and be sure to count the bricks corner to corner so you know which way to turn the first one down, nothing much worse that meeting in the middle a couple of days hence and finding yourself with two halves, that definitely sucks, and almost as much as discovering that on one end you're on course 1, but on the other you're on course 0. (My very first solo job that happened and I had to tear out quite a few otherwise nicely laid bricks and start again, how embarrassing, but a fine lesson from reality.)

Anyways, that's what a job is to me. It's immersing and goes best if you don't be looking too far down the road except in the specific necessary ways I've just exampled above. And so as yesterday was my very last day at work, and the very last day the company was going to be operating as a retail business, I came to work as I always did and do, a tiny bit late because I had to stop to get an apple fritter from the Hess station that sells doughnuts as a sideline, because I was a little late leaving, because... Anyways I got there at five after or so, and started right in to my usual first task of the day, logging in the customers of the previous day, and after a while the first customer of the last day rolled onto the scale, and the day was commenced. When I got to lunch I found this in my lunch bag from Libby, who's made me great lunches nearly every day for the last eight years, and told me she had really enjoyed that connection, usually started after I was already asleep, and completed when I opened the lunch twelve hours later (unless we got a late customer, which happened now and again) and read the note she'd written in the deep night on the napkin. I saved this last one, it's so great:

I figured preserving it here on the blog is the best plan. It's really pretty hard to preserve a napkin for posterity. She'd put a thermos of Brunswick stew for the main course yesterday, her mom's great recipe of course. One of my employers, Joe, had also put a nice BoJangles sausage buscuit on my desk before I got in that five minutes late, so the whole fritter thing was quite unnecessary. I didn't starve my last day.

It got busier in the afternoon. The whole last week was much busier than it had been for months, which was why we were closing, and I wondered if we should have just done one of those “Going Out of Business” things a few months back, when scrap prices had fallen so low that people stopped bringing their steel to us, meaning we were in the red, the big scrap handing machines still burning diesel, the guys still getting paid. I think neither of the owners could stand to be tacky that way, but the past couple of weeks the place probably did get into the black again, week-to-week. It was still a big hole to climb out of, and particularly for two owners in their 70s.

The day marched on, weight after weight, scrap receipt after scrap receipt. The money still had to be counted carefully, each customer had to be treated with friendliness. A couple of days back, one customer, who was perpetually at odds with everyone who waited on him and seemed to view the world as a consistent, uniformly hostile place, was finally banned from using our services when I found him circling an employee, both men with fists up and at the ready. We'd already told this guy, a few months back, any more smoke from his direction and he would own the fire, no further discussion required. I ran outside and yelled, pointing at him, “You're banned NOW.” How exciting for a last week. One owner said at the end of the day, “we should have called the law on him years ago.” Probably so. We had a lot of sympathy for him, truth be known. He spent his days rifling dumpsters and finding bits of metal that sometimes would be worth next to nothing, and seldom yielded him more that $20. That's a grim life in my book. Urban prospector, and with that job description comes "badges, we don't need no stinking badges." He drove an old heap that had once long ago been a sports car, it's back window now lost to some shaft of pipe that had poked it out hitting a bump. He could have had little daylight time for anything else beyond his rounds, and came nearly daily and sometimes more than once. Sad he couldn't make it through the last week, to the end of the show. As usual his problem on banning day was his own obvious misunderstanding, plus a tendency he had to dislike people on the basis of race and ethnicity, in other words a man weighted down with prejudice and stewing in his own bile, living an existence you could find in a book of 12th Century Norse curses, or Dante's wheel. If he's not a Trump voter no one is, but he's probably not registered, or his chariot won't start come November.

At about 4:20 a guy showed up with a big trailer full of gutted appliances. He used to come a whole lot, but we hadn't seen him in months and months, probably because of the metal prices. He was our last customer. Last year he'd brought in magnetic NASCAR calendars for our refrigerators, and I asked him if he had brought new ones. “They've not come in yet,” he said, “but I got regular calendars with my phone number on 'em. I'll bring you one in.” He was obviously pretty exhausted from the loading of the appliances, and had parked outside the gate because he knew we wanted to block it with a big I-beam to mark the end of things. I walked out to his truck with him to get the calendar so's he wouldn't have to trudge back to the office, and we talked a bit about the cranes and who might get them, and why we were closing. He said he really liked working with us. “Other places make you unload yourself, your cranes make it easy.” He also felt we were very honest.

So when I got back to the office a number of the guys were already gone, and I didn't get the chance to shake all the hands of some excellent guys I'd been working with for a long time, day in, day out. A lot of it made me think of that great Hunter-Garcia song, Black Peter:

See here how everything lead us to this day,
And it's just like any other day that, ever been.
Sun comin' up and then, the sun it goin' down.
Shine through my window, and my friends they come around.

That's how it is. You lay the last brick, and if you're lucky and it's not quite dark you can sit down on a sheet-rock pail and drink a Pepsi and look at all of it for a few minutes. Then it's time to go.

That's the office, with the scale.

And this is Andy, who worked in the non-ferrous section. I did get to shake his hand.

Easter 2016, Play "The Fields of Erin" Again, Tommy Boy

We're back at the tail-end of winter again today, with a cold hard rain that's eating some more driveway at the same moment that the dogwoods are leafing out and the grass down in the field is about ready for the first spring mowing, which means probably buying a new mower battery, since I didn't last year. There's not much to do outside today, but we might need a little fire in the stove eventually. Next Sunday we'll be up at Martinsville again, watching the colorful race cars go round and round again, soaking in the pure noise of it.

Unlike in past years, there will be no rush back to get to work on time, Monday morning, April 4. The place I've worked for a good while now decided last month to close permanently, the effect of a depressed world-wide scrap steel market showing no signs at all of rebound, a drop last year from $8.50 per hundred pounds for scrap steel down to $2.00 in November. About four-fifths of our customers thought that since the scrap steel they had wasn't going anywheres, they'd just wait the downturn out. Instead they waited the company out. People keep coming to the window--these are usually elderly folks--asking where they can sell their aluminum cans after we're gone. Damn if I know. It's another little blow to the life of being elderly and poor though. People figure they'll make little bits extra, here and there. Ten pounds of aluminum cans, that's worth a whole $3.50 right now, down from $5.00 but still something. You can take the cans to the county recycle center, but you don't get paid anything for that.

I'm elderly and at least not rich myself. It was in some ways great to have a steady job. You could go to the store and buy decent coffee and now and then a good six of IPA. You could keep a spare vehicle if you needed it, even if it was a '91 F-150. There's stuff about that one that's getting a little iffy, and I already paid once last year to fix some kind of gas leak, and now I'm smelling a little gas again, and the clutch fluid seems to be leaking somewheres as well. The days of just paying for it are closing fast, as Bishop Pike said to Ernest Borgnine. Time keeps on. Next Friday, April 1st, it's over. We need a banner. "That's all, Folks." They ran that on the marquee at the drive-in after it departed. This was before the new Food Lion.

Our state, my state all my life, has made international headlines this past week by passing a safe to be a prejudiced bigot law. The governor immediately signed it, after an "emergency" session of the Legislature jumped into action. Some approving lady was quoted on WRAL-TV as saying "God made men and women, period." It's just like climate change. You can "deny" anything. It's a human affliction: "we" can vote for Nader. Right now the far right has seized NC. They think they can make anything happen, including running time backwards to about 1954, but not including some President Eisenhower or his sensible tax-structure. Our poor voters even ratified a bond-issue supported by our current government, when it was obvious that anything they supported, anything at all, was a gift to the rich and connected no matter what the headlines made it out to be. The goal of these people is basically, no more public anything.

One of the worst parts of our current political situation is the utter and rank failure of the whole main-stream media, NPR and PBS included, to actually cover the election in any meaningful way. A fascist at least in spirit (he actually quotes Il Duce fer gawds sake) leads the field of Republicans, and the other guy is a racist, and no one says anything much. Perhaps, if Trump does manage to "win" the fall election, some salt and pepper guy in a black suit and shiny black wingtips will drop by and explain that, in fact, things are not and haven't been for a long time what they have seemed from the "outside." That would be a kind of optimistic conclusion, wouldn't it. We saw glimpses of this "truth," what has been called "deep politics," during the '60s. Everything isn't explained by "lone nuts," that's just a kind of place holder for "who knows?" This week Chris Matthews is to interview Mr. Trump. I might watch. Will it be a half-hour of incomplete sentences, back and forth? Can even Matthews, whose whole method involves talking over and interrupting, work with a man who is even more expert at the same method and adds the extra wrinkle of the never ending non sequitor? Matthews won't be bitch-slapping Jonathan Capehart, as he was last week when Capehart tried to defend something or other.

The good news is, every comments section I read is filled with lines like "Of course I'll vote for Hillary in the fall." I don't read comment sections in main stream media or right wing sites, there's that too. And I did see a comment worth wondering about. Why is it that here in the US "red" has become the color of the right, with blue meaning "sane." We used to call the deluded "reds," back in the day. Passing strange. Does the arc of history bend towards justice, or just keep bending left? One time long ago I drove around Indianapolis twice in the middle of the night, with the rest of the band asleep. We did get back to NC at the end of the trip. At that time Jesse Helms was our senator, and Jim Hunt was the governor. That might be a hopeful fact of history, although it was Jim Hunt and not Helms who invented the "super-delegate."

(P.S.) I had initially thought to center this feux on the absurd spectacle of Senator Lindsey Graham on the Trevor Noah show. Noah quoted Mr. Graham (the "Honorable") to Mr. Graham viz his recent remarks on Senator Cruz, that you could murder him on the Senate floor and not be convicted. True "party man," Graham just laughed. Surely, surely! there is at least one other choice for Mr. Graham. Mr. Cruz would be at least equally disastrous for the United States if he were elected, as Mr. Trump. There are actually reasonable arguments that he would be even worse. Yet Graham, senior senator from South Carolina, prosecutor long ago of Mr. Clinton, could only laugh and twitch. There was no courage in the man at all.

Mid-1950s, Ralston

Yesterday Libby and I embarked into the NC coastal plain to play a dance in New Bern, a beautiful old town on the Trent River, which once was the capital of colonial North Carolina and boasts a big house called Tryon's Palace, where the colonial governor resided at the time of the Revolution. The building burned at some point, and was restored on its original foundation in the 1950s. It was probably shortly after its restoration that my dad drove the family by the place, stopped and looked briefly at the front door, and kept going where ever we were going at the moment. I expect my mother had talked up such a visit in advance. We might have been at a big barbeque event in Kinston involving in some way the Danforth Foundation, which was part of Ralston-Purina, a big feed company based in Missouri which had given a good bit of money to N.C. State, where my dad taught. Indeed, for a time, during this period of my childhood, dad was intensely loyal to a hot breakfast cereal called "Ralston," which we ate nearly every morning at his behest until one day some weeks into the regime he suddenly grew very tired of the stuff and gruffly banished it, speaking harshly to my mother about the matter and causing my sister and I to raise our eyebrows at each other while he was otherwise occupied. Never again have I tasted Ralson, but my sis and I still take note of the incident at family meals.

Libby and I decided that renting a car was a good plan for this excursion, and found a very comfy Dodge Dart in Apex at the rental place, and easily managed to fit the keyboard and our instruments and miscellaneous gear in the trunk and back seat (hey, those drop down rear seats are a fine idea for musicians on the fly). We switched over and left the brave little Toyota Tacoma with 250 K and counting in the parking lot, with reassurances that we'd return, same as we'd told the cats earlier, and we were off to New Bern. Ms Garmin got us safely through the Raleigh labyrinth and out onto US 70 East. Half way down, now on the upper coastal plain, we came to Goldsboro and although the roads had somewhat changed since our last trip, we found at the east end of town "Wilbur's," which is as good a barbeque joint as exists in North Carolina. We both chose the barbequed chicken, having many years ago agreed that there was none better. The Dart got us on down to New Bern with plenty of time to set up, and as a bonus a great parking place just across the street from the venue, which was on Middle Street, not far at all from the Palace itself.

All the stuff worked, and we got the piano and fiddle balanced in the speakers as people drifted in. This was part of a good sized folk music festival being tossed by the Down East Folkarts Society. We'd played a dance for them some years back. Great folks. They'd hoped we could come down Friday night and catch our old bandmates Unknown Tongues Cajun-Zydeco, but sadly the cats forbade that extravagance. Anyways, just as we were setting up a man with a little white goatee and a twinkle came up and asked if he could film some of the dance for his local access tv show, which is called "Billy and Sandra Stinson's Folk Seen," and we said sure, why not. He worked unobtrusively while we got the first dance going. Somewhere in there I had an old flash of memory.

I lived on Vanderbilt Avenue in Raleigh, just across from the NC State campus where my dad taught. Vanderbilt ran into Horne Street, and just north of where it intersected was a yellow-brick house wherein lived a short little blond kid named Billy Stinson, who could possibly have grown into this photographer. I called him over at the break between dances and damn if he wasn't the very same guy! We'd not seen nor heard of each other in sixty odd years, but back then I'm pretty sure I had appeared with him and some other guy in a little Kingston-Trio type of combo, on a local afternoon TV show, where we performed "They Call the Wind Mariah" with me on bongos. My first band, if you don't count the school orchestras I was in.

Billy and I recalled a few things in common, such as climbing up on the old Man-Mur Bowling Alley roof from my back yard--a vast tarred expanse that was like a weird desert. Later on that building burned down and all the neighbors sprayed their garages with water to keep them from catching, and the next day the building was a ruin, with twisted I-beams and smoking floors. The bowling balls somehow survived. I still have one somewhere, or at least kept it for decades.

Billy has his own story of course. Here's some of it:

https://www.ourstate.com/stinsons-ranch/

And more:

https://www.facebook.com/BillyAndSandraStinson/

He and Sandra describe their music as related to the work of the Kingston Trio, thus corroborating my flickering memories. The dance was excellent, and wrapped up at about 6:30 PM, and we repacked the Dart and headed back up the road, getting back home to the slightly worried kitties just in time to see the last half of the Carolina/Providence game. Carolina won, and make it today to the "Sweet Sixteen." Libby and I have ridden many a night with the Heels on the radio, cheering them on. It was all in all a sweet day together. Today spring has arrived with rain and chill, and there's a late fire in the stove, and little green shoots on the dogwoods. Two more weeks on my job and the business folds, a casualty of depressed scrap steel prices, resulting low product, and perhaps the fact that the owners are my age and now see retirement as a possible happy adventure. We all, employees and employers alike, push off into the pond week after next, April Fool's being the last day, and no joke about it. The next day is the NCAA semi-finals. Hopefully the Heels will be there.

Come to think of it, if it was 1957 that I made my teevee debut, what goes around comes around. That was the year Frank McGuire and some skinny kids from New York took the Heels to the NCAA finals, where they beat Wilt Chamberlain and the Jayhawks and went 32-0. If we make it past Indiana and the rest of the gauntlet, the Jayhawks are what we're aiming for this time around too.

Update: Kansas lost a week after I wrote this, and UNC faces Syracuse in the semi-finals.

Summer, 1950

We were going through some old family photographs. Part of the larger effort to liberate the upstairs bedroom from it's current plight as a storage area. I still remember when we slept up there, and the neat little fireplace that sits in the north gable wall, unused except for the odd bat or flying squirrel that ventures down that interesting hole from the roof, only to find cats waiting for a bit of fun. There were quite a number of photos I should scan. This one, however, was different. It spoke to me like a high hard fast one, or an oncoming car in an oncoming curve, in my lane.

Where did this amazing photo come from. Who took it? The composition is remarkable, and I don't think there's another photograph in all the family photos--thousands of them surely, since these days we take photos at the drop of a hat--that has this sort of content. The cow on the left is the family milk cow, for this was the end of the days of the farm as a family sustaining place rather than a business that produced some money for going to the store, buying gas, paying taxes. I milked that cow once or twice, sitting beside my aunt, who sits next to the cow with her calf in her lap. Aunt Jenny (or possibly it was grandmother Ora) showed me how to milk. I wasn't much good at it, but I think I did get a stream going into the white, porcelained pail. I'm thinking maybe in the end momma kicked the pail over, and Jenny took the job over. I do know Ora showed me, probably around this time, the way to butcher a fresh chicken, cutting open the craw, showing me the recently eaten corn, then tossing the corn back out into the side yard for the ranging chickens to eat yet again. This is just how birds eat, the mechanics of it. The grain is not chewed for they have no teeth.

Behind Jenny and the two cows is my grandfather, James Thomas. He was born on that farm around 1867. His father Dr. William Hicks completed building the T-style farm house in 1872. This was of course just after the Civil War. Dr. Hicks had been in the war, as a doctor. He tried to save lives. After the war he built the farm house. He'd been born in another house on the place. It was a pretty big tobacco farm. There were slaves, and slave graves. The old system, after the war, was readjusted. Black people did much of the farming as share-croppers. They got a place to live and could grow their food. A "hand," according to Jenny, made $10 a month when she was a child. My dad and Jenny and the other children were tended by a black "mammy" when they were small. She was the wife of a share-cropper. Jenny spoke frequently of her, and how much they loved her. Her framed picture was displayed on a shelf in the farm house.

My great-grandfather William had a doctor's office in the parlor of the house, but eventually, by the time James Thomas got into his late teens, times got better. James Thomas went to NC State in Raleigh to study scientific farming. Perhaps even before college he'd learned to play the fiddle. I ended up with that instrument after he died. When James Thomas returned from his studies he took over the farm, married, settled into the farm house his dad had build. Dr. William moved into Durham with another son and established medical practice there. My dad grew up on the farm. He taught himself to drive when he was 12 years old. Later he flew biplanes in the Army Air Force, but was just barely too young to go to Europe and get shot down. He attended NC State as well, studied engineering, then went on to graduate school where he took a Masters in Divinity. He then came back to State, in Raleigh, coached wrestling, taught marriage and family living, founded the Philosophy and Religion Department at what was then an entirely technical college after arguing successfully to the higher ups that even engineers and architects needed some grounding in the so-called humanities and liberal arts.

In the photo he's kneeling, with me on one side and my sis on the other. He's about 49 years old, a strong, powerful man in his prime. Look at his arms. Behind us is the old barn. They kept the cow in there, and a mule or two. There was another mule barn down a path and up a hill to where there were also tobacco curing barns, a pack house, and two tenant houses. One day about this time someone put me on a mule's back. I knew nothing of mules and riding. When the mule, who's name was Rhody I think, realized he was in the charge of a duffer, he decided to go back to the barn up that hill. I pulled back on the rope rein and said "whoa." Rhody laughed and kept going until my Dad walked over and turned his head. Rhody knew immediately he was still under control, and stopped. I was plucked off his back. My sister watched all this and in a very few years was riding jumping horses in hunts, and winning prizes in rings. She's always "gotten" animals, and these days trains Staffordshire Terriers and wins agility trials. In earlier years she did the same with Rotweillers, brilliant animals who need training of the sort she can give them. Notice how she's looking at those cows.

The white dog was a fixture on the farm. I'm thinking his name was Skip. There are other pictures that include him. He was a sweet dog who ran free. We'd give him bits of chicken under the Sunday dinner table. The road by the farm, called Fish Dam Road when it was dirt, but changed to Mineral Springs Road and paved a few years after the photo was taken, took him. I was shocked that he had been caught unawares by some car. It was very sad. Sis says it was probably a second car following closely on the first, which Skip didn't see--he was good with the road. Jenny had other pet dogs, always Great Danes, all named "Daney." They stayed behind a big white fence on her little place which was across the road from the farm house, a converted tenant house she lived in with her husband Junius Beard. She taught primary school up the road. Junius was a teller at a Durham bank, until one day the bank decided to get rid of the men tellers and hire only young women for the job, at a lower salary. This corporate decision broke Junius's spirit for a time, although he eventually recovered. I understood little of this, from the distance of Raleigh and my childhood perceptions.

My grandfather James Thomas died in 1953. He was 86 years old. My dad died twenty years later, in '73, age 72. He'd been a life-long smoker. James Thomas never smoked, though he did chew and grew the weed, and annoyed my mother by spitting tobacco juice on the floor boards of our automobile. James Thomas was very taciturn, which you can perhaps see even in the photo. His most notable remark was his never changing Sunday dinner blessing. "Thank God for Dinner." I probably remembered that blessing when I was attracted to learning Tommy Jarrell's "John Brown's Dream" in 1970 or so, when I was learning so much about fiddling from Mr Jarrell, who was the same age as my dad. "Soon be time, soon be time, soon be time to sit and eat again."

I find the current ads featuring "the settlers" obnoxious. It makes fun of real life, of survival. I remember people plowing small garden plots with horses and mules in various NC towns when I was growing up. It is nearly as obnoxious as our current political cavalcade. Mrs. Clinton needs, and quickly, to quell her desperation. She will otherwise lose the nomination to Mr. Sanders, or worse, lose the general election to someone (take your pick) who has no conception at all of what is at stake. As has been said and many times, the Republicans can never run on what they stand for. The bright young people who are making "the settlers" ads will probably decide the current election. That should send a chill down your spine.

Who took the photo at the top? There is no record. Junius Beard was a photographer at a younger time in his life. He took the following notable photo, of elephants parading in downtown Durham, around 1920:

I'll leave you with another photo, which I took after Jenny died, in 1991. Someone had sorted through some of the few remaining things in the farm house, where she'd lived since the '70s. The window faces out on the field where the picture that starts this reminiscence was taken. You could see the old barn from this, the dining room window. Until the old barn was knocked down as a danger in the '80s.

If I had to guess I'd pick Ed Massengill as the photographer, my Aunt Libby's husband, Jenny's little sister. He did take some home movies of the farm during this period of time. I never saw Junius with a camera and only found his photos much later on. Aunt Libby got me started with music. She played piano, even owning a grand piano which dominated her living room. She tried piano lessons on me, but they didn't really take, and the bass clef still looks like mirror writing. The fiddle was my instrument as it turned out. Ed sold class rings for a living, and always drove a new Oldsmobile. He had a motor boat at Kerr Lake. Later on in the '50s the family would take excursions up there for the day. By then I was listening to Elvis Presley, and calling my dad "my old man" when he wasn't around.

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A relevant link: https://oakgrovenc.wordpress.com/2014/12/10/is-there-a-doctor-in-the-house/