Ralph Bland's Blog, page 2
May 25, 2018
A Little Something From Not So Long Ago
Since my 50th high school reunion is pending, here's a little something those ancient people may or may not be interested in.
Intoxicated Basketball and Scrumptious Splendiferous Fare-Thee-Wells
(A few words of wisdom from my fickle friend, the Summer Wind)
Back in the 80’s (that horrendous decade where culture took a nosedive and what was bad was suddenly deemed fairly good by people who had no notion of what was good in the first place) I spent a lot of afternoons after work (Kroger Company, 38 years on the ol’ rockpile) playing basketball in my driveway with a fellow who worked with me a lot of years and a guy who delivered Krispy Kreme doughnuts to our store three times a week. Danny (not his real name, but I’m trying to protect the innocent here, even though this fellow never qualified as innocent by any stretch) was a high school dropout who was a pretty smart dude underneath it all, even if he always tried to present himself as a first class dumbass to the world. I’d worked with Danny for years, since the day he got hired at age 16 and I got assigned to show him how to bag groceries. That was the day he told me he needed a job because he was getting married the next morning. His bride-to-be was as pregnant as a girl could get, he told me with a smile, so it looks like I need a job. Immediately, then, I knew he was crazy. This meeting was in the late sixties, so we flash forward a decade and a half to our after-work basketball days. Danny is now on wife #3, two kids toddling around he calls the dwarfs (the 3rd wife is of course Snow White) and things are not looking good domestically for him. He is having trouble with Snow White in the same manner he had trouble with wives #1 and #2. He is also having trouble with his girlfriend. And her husband. Danny always had girlfriends through all his marriages. His girlfriends always had husbands. There was always a lot of drama going on, which always seemed to make Danny smile and emit chuckles. He was so screwed up I couldn’t keep from smiling and chuckling either. It’s true I wasn’t exactly sane then either.
I never knew the Krispy Kreme salesman’s complete name—he was just Big Bill to me. Big Bill was about 6-7 and a few years younger than me (I was suddenly at the age where everyone I met was younger than me) and had once played basketball for one of the area high schools that maybe won the state tournament—my facts get muddled over time. Big Bill was also black, which tended to make my white neighbors look out their windows to see what the three of us, two honkies and one brother, might be up to in my back driveway on those afternoons.
What we were up to was shooting ball and drinking vodka and Irish whiskey until we couldn’t stand up anymore, then leaning up against the garage and laughing our posteriors off at the stories Danny would tell about his affairs and marriages, and then we’d discuss how many women Big Bill went to visit when he was supposed to be running his route, and then we’d talk about how my old half-breed hound walked sideways and looked like Fred MacMurray in the face. We would whistle the theme from “My Three Sons” every time he ambled by and collectively fall over in a heap like nothing in the world much mattered to us…which it didn’t.
I mention all this rigmarole because the other day I drove by my old house from those days and it didn’t look the same to me anymore. At least it didn’t look like I remembered it back in the day. It seemed like it was smaller, like it had shrunk or withered some, and I couldn’t imagine how some of those large strange puzzling wild events that had transpired there during my sojourn could have occurred in such a cramped space. I looked at the front door and couldn’t imagine Big Bill even being able to fit through, and the back driveway seemed way too small for three drunken men to shoot three pointers or chase after balls that bounded into the backyard where a creek ran and legions of black snakes wrapped around tree limbs and hid in the weeds. Intoxicated basketball, I remembered, always had its moments of dodging reptiles. Spirits and snakes had a way of mixing together and raising the old pulse rate.
I drove away down that historical street and pondered the shrinking of my old abode. It came to me then how my house and the current state of the world I found myself stumbling through were tied together in their own weird way and were one in the same if you cocked your head and looked at it at precisely the right angle. I thought about how for months now I’d been seeing places and buildings and items I’d once had memorized just up and pull the abracadabra change on me. I would come up on something from the way back when and suddenly get a little jolt for my eyes and other assorted brain matter. The building wasn’t there anymore, the business had closed, what used to be a store was now a condo. Churches my friends had attended had For Sale signs sitting at the front door, car lots had no cars, vacant fields suddenly had sprouted buildings. My high school looked like it had been bombed, but it was only new construction. I knew from the look of it with its holes and gaps and rubble it would be built back as something unrecognizable to me, so it might as well be it had never truly existed.
But hey, I’m a big boy. I’ve learned a few things in my time. I know nothing lasts forever. I know how eventually change has got to happen, even if I am an old dinosaur and I’m not really appreciative of that comet circling overhead that’s heading my way. A person has got to accept these things, I tell myself. A fellow—even an old relic recently on Medicare like me—has to adapt. This is nothing unusual, I think. It’s just like a lot of things in life. You’ve got to learn to go with the flow. Heck of a river this is lately, though. It’s hard enough paddling through all these dark waters without all those lurking monsters and demons of the deep circling the ship and waiting on the opportune moment to jump into the boat.
Still, I probably wouldn’t have voiced too much protest if this matter of altering shapes and disappearing landmarks had only confined itself to inanimate objects, but like it seems in the day to day grand pageant of life, circumstances and events soon began to tackle matters of real import, like life and death and love and the lack of it and all that jazz.
Folks started expiring, dropping out of the Big Parade like cicadas in the swelter of summer. First, it was an acquaintance from high school (cancer); then the Doom Express persuaded an old pal to fall off a tractor and have it run over him, which was certainly proof enough that accidents do happen and a fellow can check out just like that with no fanfare at all. Then a guy, who once was a best friend but had disappeared just like that way back when within himself via drugs and personal woes and tragedies and just a general descent into an existence which was not really life or death but a puzzling combination of both, decided to forego the art of breathing too. I found myself on the funeral circuit all at once with a bad case of the Bye Byes, a visitation here, a burial there, so much so my social calendar seemed to teem with signing registers and viewing the remains of people I knew while noticing how odd and strange the hue of death looked on them.
I did a lot of viewing and listening and watching and thinking during those celebratory grieving days and nights devoted to the departed. It came to me during one of those visitations how these excursions to funeral homes and drives to graveyards and daily consultations with the obituaries were beginning to have an effect on how I was looking at things here still above ground.
The Dead Game, I call it—it’s where I start alphabetically and look at last names in the morning paper and see if any of them ring a bell. Do I know any of these people? Are they related to somebody? If I know them or they’re related, it’s a point for me. If they’re strangers it’s a point for the other side. Lately I seem to be winning the daily Dead Game, knowing more dead people or dead relations than perfect strangers, which is a little unsettling.
I studied my pals and their poses in their caskets and decided they didn’t look a bit like their old selves but mainly resembled crap and ruin and the beginnings of decay which was not the least bit attractive on them or to have to look at either. I arrived late for one visitation and found myself alone with the deceased. We’d been tight back in the day, but that night I found we had little to say to each other. Those days were gone. So I busied myself studying the register out front to see who’d come by earlier I had missed, old friends male and female I’d grown up with back when there were phone booths and gas was about a quarter a gallon. Not too many people had shown up I saw, but I told myself it was a holiday weekend. I figured they’d all come for the funeral the next morning. I was wrong. During the service I could count everybody on two hands and have a couple of fingers left to scratch my noggin and wonder why.
This sort of stuff just kept on happening. Folks ceased to be, nobody took much notice, life went on, Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da. I was all of a sudden beginning to get accustomed to it.
The last engagement on my social calendar came a couple of weeks ago as a visitation and funeral doubleheader. I had tickets to see the Reds and the Tigers in Cincinnati during that time, but the rains came and washed out my plans, and I had no excuse but to attend another ceremony. This time it was my long lost best friend from early childhood, who had stopped being my best friend four and a half decades before when drugs, alcohol, marriage, and a general form of madness led us down different paths.
It was a strange gathering, this visitation and funeral, strange in the sense that this person I had known so well so many years before now rested before me as an utter and complete stranger. I thought about how many times I spent the night at either his house or he at mine, the bicycle rides we took as kids all over creation and East Nashville, swimming, playing basketball, smoking our first cigarettes together on a school playground. I looked at him reposed there and I didn’t know him either in the real world or in an imaginary one, and I knew that wherever he was and from whatever venue he was watching from that moment he didn’t know me either. We were strangers, he and I, but it didn’t stop with us. All the old faces I saw shuffling through to view him were in the same boat, glancing at him, noticing me, nodding to each other. Words were said and stories were told, and sometimes there were smiles and instances of recognition and memory.
But not really.
The thing of it is we remember so little. We forget so much.
The next morning that room for the funeral was maybe half full. I sat in the back and tried to determine who I knew and who I didn’t. Something about a person here and there looked familiar, but I didn’t know their names. They were so few. The people I would have known from the days of youth and shared moments were not there, not present. A few had wandered in the night before to pay respects, out of decency or obligation or maybe even curiosity—who knew? They were absent for the funeral that day though, gone back to the lives they lived now, no more akin to the past and the way time swallows lives up and makes them unrecognizable, indescribable, foreign, as if what went on in that lost time before had never truly happened at all. I listened to a preacher describe the life that had passed. It came to me the preacher didn’t know this man either, like I didn’t know him, like any of us don’t know anybody else when it all comes down and the curtain falls.
I drove home the long way after that funeral. I thought about how I had been this man’s first best friend when he was a boy, and I thought about how I, as his first best friend, had a few moments before been his last best friend who had come to say goodbye. I thought how that sort of fact ought to mean something, but it didn’t. I was just another stranger he had encountered along the way. In the end it hadn’t made any difference whether I had made an appearance or not. I kept remembering that line in The Great Gatsby when Jay Gatsby got buried and nobody showed up.
I shifted gears and said it out into the air. It just seemed to fit with everything in my sound and sight these strange no one remembers your name days.
“‘The poor son-of-a-bitch,’” I told the sky. I wasn’t sure the sky was listening.
Intoxicated Basketball and Scrumptious Splendiferous Fare-Thee-Wells
(A few words of wisdom from my fickle friend, the Summer Wind)
Back in the 80’s (that horrendous decade where culture took a nosedive and what was bad was suddenly deemed fairly good by people who had no notion of what was good in the first place) I spent a lot of afternoons after work (Kroger Company, 38 years on the ol’ rockpile) playing basketball in my driveway with a fellow who worked with me a lot of years and a guy who delivered Krispy Kreme doughnuts to our store three times a week. Danny (not his real name, but I’m trying to protect the innocent here, even though this fellow never qualified as innocent by any stretch) was a high school dropout who was a pretty smart dude underneath it all, even if he always tried to present himself as a first class dumbass to the world. I’d worked with Danny for years, since the day he got hired at age 16 and I got assigned to show him how to bag groceries. That was the day he told me he needed a job because he was getting married the next morning. His bride-to-be was as pregnant as a girl could get, he told me with a smile, so it looks like I need a job. Immediately, then, I knew he was crazy. This meeting was in the late sixties, so we flash forward a decade and a half to our after-work basketball days. Danny is now on wife #3, two kids toddling around he calls the dwarfs (the 3rd wife is of course Snow White) and things are not looking good domestically for him. He is having trouble with Snow White in the same manner he had trouble with wives #1 and #2. He is also having trouble with his girlfriend. And her husband. Danny always had girlfriends through all his marriages. His girlfriends always had husbands. There was always a lot of drama going on, which always seemed to make Danny smile and emit chuckles. He was so screwed up I couldn’t keep from smiling and chuckling either. It’s true I wasn’t exactly sane then either.
I never knew the Krispy Kreme salesman’s complete name—he was just Big Bill to me. Big Bill was about 6-7 and a few years younger than me (I was suddenly at the age where everyone I met was younger than me) and had once played basketball for one of the area high schools that maybe won the state tournament—my facts get muddled over time. Big Bill was also black, which tended to make my white neighbors look out their windows to see what the three of us, two honkies and one brother, might be up to in my back driveway on those afternoons.
What we were up to was shooting ball and drinking vodka and Irish whiskey until we couldn’t stand up anymore, then leaning up against the garage and laughing our posteriors off at the stories Danny would tell about his affairs and marriages, and then we’d discuss how many women Big Bill went to visit when he was supposed to be running his route, and then we’d talk about how my old half-breed hound walked sideways and looked like Fred MacMurray in the face. We would whistle the theme from “My Three Sons” every time he ambled by and collectively fall over in a heap like nothing in the world much mattered to us…which it didn’t.
I mention all this rigmarole because the other day I drove by my old house from those days and it didn’t look the same to me anymore. At least it didn’t look like I remembered it back in the day. It seemed like it was smaller, like it had shrunk or withered some, and I couldn’t imagine how some of those large strange puzzling wild events that had transpired there during my sojourn could have occurred in such a cramped space. I looked at the front door and couldn’t imagine Big Bill even being able to fit through, and the back driveway seemed way too small for three drunken men to shoot three pointers or chase after balls that bounded into the backyard where a creek ran and legions of black snakes wrapped around tree limbs and hid in the weeds. Intoxicated basketball, I remembered, always had its moments of dodging reptiles. Spirits and snakes had a way of mixing together and raising the old pulse rate.
I drove away down that historical street and pondered the shrinking of my old abode. It came to me then how my house and the current state of the world I found myself stumbling through were tied together in their own weird way and were one in the same if you cocked your head and looked at it at precisely the right angle. I thought about how for months now I’d been seeing places and buildings and items I’d once had memorized just up and pull the abracadabra change on me. I would come up on something from the way back when and suddenly get a little jolt for my eyes and other assorted brain matter. The building wasn’t there anymore, the business had closed, what used to be a store was now a condo. Churches my friends had attended had For Sale signs sitting at the front door, car lots had no cars, vacant fields suddenly had sprouted buildings. My high school looked like it had been bombed, but it was only new construction. I knew from the look of it with its holes and gaps and rubble it would be built back as something unrecognizable to me, so it might as well be it had never truly existed.
But hey, I’m a big boy. I’ve learned a few things in my time. I know nothing lasts forever. I know how eventually change has got to happen, even if I am an old dinosaur and I’m not really appreciative of that comet circling overhead that’s heading my way. A person has got to accept these things, I tell myself. A fellow—even an old relic recently on Medicare like me—has to adapt. This is nothing unusual, I think. It’s just like a lot of things in life. You’ve got to learn to go with the flow. Heck of a river this is lately, though. It’s hard enough paddling through all these dark waters without all those lurking monsters and demons of the deep circling the ship and waiting on the opportune moment to jump into the boat.
Still, I probably wouldn’t have voiced too much protest if this matter of altering shapes and disappearing landmarks had only confined itself to inanimate objects, but like it seems in the day to day grand pageant of life, circumstances and events soon began to tackle matters of real import, like life and death and love and the lack of it and all that jazz.
Folks started expiring, dropping out of the Big Parade like cicadas in the swelter of summer. First, it was an acquaintance from high school (cancer); then the Doom Express persuaded an old pal to fall off a tractor and have it run over him, which was certainly proof enough that accidents do happen and a fellow can check out just like that with no fanfare at all. Then a guy, who once was a best friend but had disappeared just like that way back when within himself via drugs and personal woes and tragedies and just a general descent into an existence which was not really life or death but a puzzling combination of both, decided to forego the art of breathing too. I found myself on the funeral circuit all at once with a bad case of the Bye Byes, a visitation here, a burial there, so much so my social calendar seemed to teem with signing registers and viewing the remains of people I knew while noticing how odd and strange the hue of death looked on them.
I did a lot of viewing and listening and watching and thinking during those celebratory grieving days and nights devoted to the departed. It came to me during one of those visitations how these excursions to funeral homes and drives to graveyards and daily consultations with the obituaries were beginning to have an effect on how I was looking at things here still above ground.
The Dead Game, I call it—it’s where I start alphabetically and look at last names in the morning paper and see if any of them ring a bell. Do I know any of these people? Are they related to somebody? If I know them or they’re related, it’s a point for me. If they’re strangers it’s a point for the other side. Lately I seem to be winning the daily Dead Game, knowing more dead people or dead relations than perfect strangers, which is a little unsettling.
I studied my pals and their poses in their caskets and decided they didn’t look a bit like their old selves but mainly resembled crap and ruin and the beginnings of decay which was not the least bit attractive on them or to have to look at either. I arrived late for one visitation and found myself alone with the deceased. We’d been tight back in the day, but that night I found we had little to say to each other. Those days were gone. So I busied myself studying the register out front to see who’d come by earlier I had missed, old friends male and female I’d grown up with back when there were phone booths and gas was about a quarter a gallon. Not too many people had shown up I saw, but I told myself it was a holiday weekend. I figured they’d all come for the funeral the next morning. I was wrong. During the service I could count everybody on two hands and have a couple of fingers left to scratch my noggin and wonder why.
This sort of stuff just kept on happening. Folks ceased to be, nobody took much notice, life went on, Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da. I was all of a sudden beginning to get accustomed to it.
The last engagement on my social calendar came a couple of weeks ago as a visitation and funeral doubleheader. I had tickets to see the Reds and the Tigers in Cincinnati during that time, but the rains came and washed out my plans, and I had no excuse but to attend another ceremony. This time it was my long lost best friend from early childhood, who had stopped being my best friend four and a half decades before when drugs, alcohol, marriage, and a general form of madness led us down different paths.
It was a strange gathering, this visitation and funeral, strange in the sense that this person I had known so well so many years before now rested before me as an utter and complete stranger. I thought about how many times I spent the night at either his house or he at mine, the bicycle rides we took as kids all over creation and East Nashville, swimming, playing basketball, smoking our first cigarettes together on a school playground. I looked at him reposed there and I didn’t know him either in the real world or in an imaginary one, and I knew that wherever he was and from whatever venue he was watching from that moment he didn’t know me either. We were strangers, he and I, but it didn’t stop with us. All the old faces I saw shuffling through to view him were in the same boat, glancing at him, noticing me, nodding to each other. Words were said and stories were told, and sometimes there were smiles and instances of recognition and memory.
But not really.
The thing of it is we remember so little. We forget so much.
The next morning that room for the funeral was maybe half full. I sat in the back and tried to determine who I knew and who I didn’t. Something about a person here and there looked familiar, but I didn’t know their names. They were so few. The people I would have known from the days of youth and shared moments were not there, not present. A few had wandered in the night before to pay respects, out of decency or obligation or maybe even curiosity—who knew? They were absent for the funeral that day though, gone back to the lives they lived now, no more akin to the past and the way time swallows lives up and makes them unrecognizable, indescribable, foreign, as if what went on in that lost time before had never truly happened at all. I listened to a preacher describe the life that had passed. It came to me the preacher didn’t know this man either, like I didn’t know him, like any of us don’t know anybody else when it all comes down and the curtain falls.
I drove home the long way after that funeral. I thought about how I had been this man’s first best friend when he was a boy, and I thought about how I, as his first best friend, had a few moments before been his last best friend who had come to say goodbye. I thought how that sort of fact ought to mean something, but it didn’t. I was just another stranger he had encountered along the way. In the end it hadn’t made any difference whether I had made an appearance or not. I kept remembering that line in The Great Gatsby when Jay Gatsby got buried and nobody showed up.
I shifted gears and said it out into the air. It just seemed to fit with everything in my sound and sight these strange no one remembers your name days.
“‘The poor son-of-a-bitch,’” I told the sky. I wasn’t sure the sky was listening.
