Paul

Joe’s Dad, Mr. Paul to the citizens of Perry, Florida was a storyteller. He told true stories that showed  his life to be a wonderful adventure.   To listen to Paul's rich Georgian drawl - as family and friends sat around a campfire beneath a waxing southern moon with full throated cicadas and crickets chattering through the heavy loam laden air - was a treat I looked forward to every July when Joe and I visited north Florida. Some years Paul repeated stories practically word for word. But, it didn’t matter because the tales were like chapters in a classic novel or motion picture. As we recognized key phrases anticipation would spread from person to person sprawled beneath the tall cabbage palms in chairs and on blankets, flickering flames reflecting from the shinny depths of dilated pupils. Paul’s stories were like an instruction manual with anecdotes. If I had to give them a title, it would be, “How to Construct Meaning in Our Lives and in the Lives of Others.”



- I -

“In those days there were no paved roads in Perry.  In fact, most of interior Florida was more like the western frontier than the deep south. Would you believe there were cowboys and cattle rustlers?”

We would always gush something like, “really, in the 1930’s and 1940’s!”

“There were round-ups every spring, and there were actual gun-fights between rustlers and ranchers. Remember Florida was one of the last states to be thoroughly explored and settled. At the beginning of the century, Flagler took his railroad down the east coast of Florida, not through the center. So, in the 1930's and 40's cattle ranching was, and is still important to the state’s economy. But, back to Perry’s dirt roads.

In dry summer weather Cars, carts, and trucks stirred clouds of brown dust into the heat-heavy air. Everything and everyone was coated with a fine layer of powder that became caked mud in summer perspiration. We never felt clean, and of course there was no air conditioning so windows were open and housewives dusted constantly.  The Florida State Legislature had written a provision that allowed counties to attach state money for paving county “Farm to Market” roads, but the Taylor County commissioners had not seen fit to pave any of the county seat’s roads. Year after year our town council asked the county to pave Perry's dirt roads, but the county refused. We were told there were more important roads, and besides, Farm to Market didn’t cover roads inside the city limits. Finally, as a member of the Perry town council, I went to Tallahassee to my representative’s office for a personal talk about the Farm to Market Bill. I returned to Perry with a letter for the County Commissioners stating that the purpose of the bill was specifically to pave town roads for easy access to the market and stores in the various county seats. After that, the county paved 2 miles of roads within the city limits every year until all the roads were paved.

I've always been proud that I got those roads paved."

The Celestial Railroad, a Life

Preamble

I am born September 11, 1944 at Nazareth Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, one of a pair of identical twins, though my brother dies at birth. Thus, I am all the more appreciated as my parent’s only child. I spend my first five years in the tiny subdivision of Landreth Manor in Bristol, Pennsylvania. Our house, according to my parents, is based on the 1939-40 New York World Fair Dream Home, a small two story, with a field stone front first story and wood clapboard second story. The door opens into a tiny entry located between the dining and living rooms. To the left there is a maroon ground carpet with a taupe color curvilinear leafed pattern and large floral pattern couch in the living room. I also remember the two large over-stuffed chairs my parents sit in to read and listen to the radio. There are narrow stairs to the rear. At the top of those stairs my bedroom is to the front of the second floor, while my parent’s is across the hall in the back of the house. My grandmother stays in the third bedroom when she visits. Oh, and I recall mother’s wonderful sugarless molasses cookies though the Second World War is over during my first year.

There is also the somewhat cloying and unpleasant memory of Walt Disney’s Bambi. Mother and Father take me to see the Academy Award winning motion picture, and I cry inconsolably when Bambi’s mother dies. I have a spin-off Golden Book, and a 78 record album of the movie’s music in my bedroom. Another Bambi spin-off book has Thumper the rabbit on the cover, and his eye glows in the dark after being exposed to the light on my bedside table at night.

I remember watching mother whipping white margarine with the electric mixer as she slowly adds yellow dye. The kitchen is a bright yellow, like the margarine, with a chrome legged table, and the view out the sink window is fresh and crystal clear in my mind because mother bathes me there. The yard outside has 4 metal poles with clothesline, a garden filled with day lilies and phlox, 2 weeping willows toward the back, and woods behind. The window is small with 8 panes, and it has a white gauzy valence across the top, and an open café style curtain of the same material in the lower section. My mother squeezes the water from the cloth she is using to rinse the soap off my back. I have vague memory of nighttime dreams about the blue sky outside that window, the warm water on my back, and my mother humming to me. These are happy memories, but they also remind me of the large one-day-beauty hibiscus that explodes in pink splendor from the creamy ceramic hibiscus-sculpture vase on the kitchen bar this sunny and hot February day in 2008.

I am now sixty-three, an ageing retired educator and artist who happens also to be homosexual, which explains why I live with my male partner of 40 years. I don’t intend this to be a narrative of my diurnal existence from year one to the present because that would be extremely linear and tedious. Never the less, it is necessary to ground the text, and what better way to do that than to baste it to a secure beginning. The rest of my story will be a somewhat free form rambling tapestry of variously tangled imagery. Though I have begun this word-weaving as though it is to be autobiographical, I won’t always write about myself. Instead, I will examine the self. I will visit with the ancient Roman gods, and treat with the parochial history of a once remote chunk of South Florida landscape. I will tell some tales about myself and other ordinary people. Some will be fantastic, some plain, and I will leave it to you the reader to decide which is which. This cloth collage is to be multiply layered, tangentially related and serpentine, including separate pieces of material with different patterns, sewn together loosely with loopy stitches.

If this work as I describe it is overly ambitions, and proceeds like a runaway train carrying my raggedy script as freight, I shall hopefully discover it to be so, and apply the break.