Persephone descending

It's a season of endings.  Glorious, brilliant departures.  The final burst before the drab, dreary Novembers of our souls.  The time in the South when we can revel in the softening sunlight that leaves our days too soon in darkness. In the monochromatic Mississippi winter, we'll look wistfully over the horizon for signs of the first hyacinth. 

Persephone, that goddess of spring, is about to descend into the underworld. This is my favorite time of year, warm with a bittersweet beauty all the more lovely because of its briefness.  Each tree vies with the next for brilliance, dropping their colors even as I stroll by.  

Soon, these flaming canopies will be anorexic arms stretched before a blank sky.  To me, winter is the invisible season:  the in-hiding season, the time of drawing to the fire and crossing your arms against the wind outside the door.  I enjoy this beauty today with the knowledge of its coming absence.

 It's the season I always turn to Gerard Manley Hopkins, who beautifully captured the tension of transience.

Spring and Fall

to a Young Child

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leaves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! as the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sorrow's springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

 

I wish I had a river

It's the 12th of November, but it seems to be coming on Christmas.  Or so the signs and non-seasonal decorations tell us.  Last night as I drove home in the post-Daylight Savings Time darkness, I noticed the local county co-op alight with wreaths, ornaments, and outdoor garlands.  It's the same everywhere I look.  It's been that way here in the nearly tropical South since sometime before Halloween, when I passed a fashionable home long after dark and noticed a fully decorated, brightly lit Christmas tree glowing in the living room.

What's going on here?  I'm feeling holiday compression.

Advent, to me, is a particular and very special time in the religious tradition I celebrate.  It's come, instead, to mean the Gold Rush of sales promotions, the stampede to living better materially. People actually get up at 2 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving to get those 5 a.m. WalMart promotions.  Me, I sleep in.

We're not in the Southern hempisphere, just the American South, for goodness' sake.  The heart of the Bible belt.  Please, please, please give me some breathing room to celebrate Thanksgiving and time to remember all for which I'm truly grateful.

Give me a river.  A Joni Mitchell blue one.

It's coming on Christmas

They're cutting down trees

They're putting up reindeer

And singing songs of joy and peace

Oh I wish I had a river

I could skate away on

But it don't snow here

It stays pretty green

I'm gonna make a lot of money

Then I'm going to quit this crazy scene. . .

Well, at least part of that is true.  And to all, I say, enjoy the fall while we have it.



What's your definition?

Thinking about the word ‘crisis’ today, because it gets thrown around a lot.

Economic crisis.  Crisis of confidence.  Health care crisis.  Environmental crisis. Crisis of leadership.  Personal crisis.  Identity crisis. Mid-life crisis.

What’s the opposite?  Because we don’t hear much about it. 

If crisis is “disaster,” is the opposite “prosperity”?  “Functioning”?  “All systems go?”

If crisis is “catastrophe,” is the opposite “doing just fine, thanks”?  “Status quo”?  “Issue-free”?

Interestingly, one of the definitions of crisis is “change,” which leads me to wonder if it’s accurate to say, “What we have here is a crisis of change”?  Or is that redundant?

At its heart, crisis is exactly that.  Change is immovably, irrevocably inevitable, as is our instinct to dig in and say, “But not to me.”  And when we face that change—or the necessity for us to change—what do we do?  Why, we declare a crisis.

Some circumstances merit the word.  A Katrina.  A Haiti.  Toxic sludge, toxic oil, genocide.

But what passes for a crisis these days is often a fear that our own circumstances might be affected.  We may have to get by with less.  We may have to do more.  We may have to do something beyond contemplate our next purchase or plan our next vacation.  Something may just grab hold of us and demand—because there’s no other choice—that we face some hard choices.  We may be required to act on principles that spew so easily from our mouths as insubstantial words.

There’s a word for that, too, equally abused.  It’s called character. 

What's the story here?

Everything you see has a story, whether you stop to think about it or not.  I stopped in my tracks, if you will, when I spotted this inexplicably abandoned pair of work boots on a railroad track near a popular downtown restaurant. 

What disembodied, barefooted soul (or sole), left them here, as though literally walking out of them?  Did he have a getaway ride idling nearby in the night, or did he just get too darned hot in the 100-degree Mississippi summer and opt for the freedom of loamy grass between his bare toes? 

Perhaps the erstwhile walker was suddenly abducted by aliens, whisked away into the mysteries of deep space by invisible UFO forces that--for reasons only they know--suddenly abandoned Area 51.  Who knows the story?  What the facts are you see before you:  these boots don't look likely to walk again anytime soon.



Could this be part of the otherworldly contingent, come to collect the now-bootless, and, I'm guessing, vanished, walker?  These neon-glowing butterflies no doubt were the vanguard of larger, more substantial flying objects tracking their prey on a still Mississippi, moonless night.  What harmless creatures could possibly produce such unnatural colors with such persistent luminosity?

There surely are, to keep my punmanship going, more pedestrian explanations for both of these images.  But I so prefer the wild flights of imagination that everyday, taken-for-granted objects can inspire.  Don't you?

Through the Looking Glass

This is a photo of a mirror, reflecting a reflection in a window that's reflected in the mirror. 

Confused? 

Life can be like that.  What we perceive sometimes is nothing more than an illusion of something totally reversed, much as it is in Alice's through-the-looking-glass experience.  It's upside down, backwards, and totally inexplicable. 

Sometimes it's better just to accept that and not try to impose logic on an illogical situation.  Sorry, all you engineers and economists reading this. 

In this world, there's the possibility for dreams, for impossible possibilities such as a Red Queen, and for flights of creative fancy. 

What you don't see in this photo is the phantasm that has inhabited this space for at least the last 50 years, known through footfalls on hardwood floors with no one else in the house, or through music strangely filtering through empty rooms with no apparent source, or through unusual indentations on beds that haven't been used.

It's only recently that the logical, organized, show-me person in the household has casually mentioned seeing the, oh, shall we just be honest and call it a ghost?  Those of us who grew up in the household know the spirit, which we consider completely benign, but we've never actually had a sighting.

So the pragmatist among us says it's a female figure, nearly transparent, and floating quietly and quickly into obscurity, as though hiding. Who am I to say otherwise?

In this artwork, drawn by a talented young woman who spent a lot of time in our household--this very house--as a child, a young girl gazes into a mirror.  What does she see?  It's a mystery.  It's whatever we imagine that she sees.

So on a day of infinite possibilities, isn't it wonderful to imagine whatever world your heart desires?  And to wonder if perhaps there's a benign spirit watching, ever so discreetly and carefully, over you?  

Seeking silence

As the frantic activity of another school year begins, I find myself envisioning the calmness of a life in the eye, rather than the fury, of the storm.  Would it be a respite or simply a deadening coda?

The question made me think of a poem written in my 14-year-old youth, my first and last poem ever published.  It's long since lost, but I remember a couple of lines:

Silence is not practiced as much as it once was
This generation has never felt its soft breath or its heart throb

It's hard to imagine the great void of nothing that is silence, the "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is," in the beautiful words of Wallace Stevens.  We don't like silence.  We don't like to experience its weight and the creeping fear of being absorbed by just our own thoughts.  We go to great lengths to avoid being left with them.

So we engineer an orchestra of white noise and electronic distractions to keep ourselves occupied--I hesitate to say entertained--to fill every nook or cranny of brain space that a stray thought can suddenly find.  We overload our senses and deaden our sensibilities.  We've become noisy walking dead.

Only after reading Thomas Merton did I realize that silence is, in fact, a real practice.  It is an absence that is, paradoxically, the presence of something profoundly disquieting, if you'll pardon my choice of words.

Even in a small town, there is the constant rattle of neighborhood noises:  the dogs that won't be quiet, the engines that won't be stilled, the lawnmowers that buzz and drone, the sirens that transport a crisis, the televisions that intrusively pacify.

In the countryside, I begin to find intimations of silence:  the great dome of the sky, the chilling cry of coyotes through a still night, the unimaginable open space that suggests you're alone.  And the knowledge that the vastness will continue, with or without you.  It takes courage to confront that silence.

Thomas Merton understood that.  His journals describe the most meaningful confrontation silence affords:  knowledge of and beyond ourselves.

Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin.  It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.

And so, I'm left with another question as I contemplate the demands of silence.  Do I dare? And, do I dare?

Smile when you call me that

One of my favorite classics is Owen Wister's western novel "The Virginian," a tale of a rugged, unpolished frontier cowboy and the softening effect a "civilized" school ma'arm has on him.  He is pitted against an Iago-like nemesis by the name of Trampas, who early in the book refers to the title character by a name that could be considered affectionate or contemptuous.

In a lethal voice, packing a gun loose in its holster, the Virginian tells him, "Smile when you call me that."

Indeed.  The contempt resonating in our labels can be polarizing and demeaning.

You can call me lithe; you can call me slim; but please don't call me skinny.  There's the fire of ridicule in at least one of those descriptions.

And so it is with words that, of themselves, suggest no more and no less than their meanings.  I'm a liberal arts major, for instance.  That means I've studied a broad range of courses in culture, language, literature, philosophy, and other subjects.

I'm pretty proud of being a liberal arts major.  It's a description I like. But the word 'liberal' itself is much maligned, I fear.

In its purest sense, liberal means tolerant of different viewpoints, open-minded, progressive politically or socially.  In its purest sense, conservative means favoring traditional values and customs, cautious and restrained, careful.  Depending on who you are, there's something to admire in either, whichever way your inclinations and beliefs lead you.  There's room for common ground if we happen to be of different minds.

But, I suggest, both terms have been co-opted and corrupted, serving whatever Pavlovian purposes their users intend.  They've been put in a "wrong" and a "right" category, depending on your viewpoints.  A "for" and "against"  A "me" and "you."  A "not on your life will I ever discuss this with you and really talk WITH you" corner.

Surely there's more room for dialog instead of diatribe.  Surely we all have, buried somehwere deep inside us, just a little of the liberal arts instinct to analyze, weigh evidence, and see the possibilities for more than one interpretation. 

But if not, I beg you this:  whatever label you affix to me, smile when you call me that. 

The middle of nowhere

This is a view from my car's GPS system.  It's from the county my father was born in, a county he traveled in another time as the sheriff.  He knew these roads without GPS and maps, in daylight and in the wee hours of the morning when there were domestic disturbances usually involving alcohol.

I live here now, traveling highways as familiar to me as the sound of a friend's voice on the phone.  In all my life, I've never heard the name "Vinton," which you'll see in the lower right-hand corner.  It's only 10 miles or so from my house, but I've somehow missed it in following just the well-known Highway 50.

We live, according to this map at any rate, in the middle of nowhere.  No congestion.  No air quality issues.  No long, frustratingly inching commutes. 

On the other side of that, we have few high-end restaurants, no movie theater, no mass transportation, no neighborhood groceries,, and certainly no international airport. 

What we do have is history.  We know each other and each other's parents and children.  We pull together in crisis, flocking to each other with casseroles and pies.  We take care of aging parents and ailing family members.  We share stories and triumphs.  We take pride in our parks and walking trails, the beauty of the space around us. 

It is not a pastoral utopia, by any stretch.  Even in the middle of nowhere there are crime and drugs, abuse and neglect, and there is loneliness.  There's the foul rag and bone shop of the heart beating strongly.

I've lived in much larger cities, but I choose here.  Here in the middle of nowhere I find there's much left to learn.

The beauty of 'beauty' parlors

In the South, they never were--nor will they ever be--'salons.' They're beauty parlors.  Salon sounds just a tad, oh, stuffy and pretentious.

But call it what you will, we don't really go there in search of beauty.  In these chairs, there's therapy and conversation, shared dramas and shared recipes, women who feel secure in letting someone see them at their absolute worst, and yes, the hope that we'll leave looking at least respectable.

Here, you're among friends who don't care that you're sitting right there in public with Saran Wrap matted to a wet head or have a plastic cap tied securely under your chin with just enough hair sticking through tiny holes to make you look like a scurvy survivor.

Here, you can expose your ugly feet for a pedicure, you can burst into sobs five weeks after a hysterectomy and wail, "I'm never going to get better," and no one blinks an eye.  They've seen every mystery hair that sprouts on an aging, ever-sagging face.  They're tender with longstanding customers who arrive on walkers, unsteady and not quite sure they recognize old friends.  They discreetly disguise the thinning patches of once-thick tresses.

Sure, there's every known elixir for hair or face here, and we optimistically cart them home with us.  But that's only a cover for the real reason we keep standing appointments at the beauty parlor.

Their talents are with us through every passage.  The tense piano recitals, the magic of first proms, the graduations, engagements, weddings, and parties.  And there comes a day when you have to pick up the phone and ask, with tears in your voice, "Can you please do my mom's hair for her funeral?"  They'll go on a Sunday for that sad, final hairdo.

Especially then you realize the difference in a parlor and a salon.  One's an image-maker.  The other's with you right up until the end. 

Drawn to the Delta

Why would anyone love it here?  It's flat, it's hot, and it harbors mosquitoes the size of a baseball mitt.  Historically, and now perhaps even more than ever, it harbors poverty juxtaposed by sometimes extravagant wealth.  It is a land of unforgiving extremes.

My mother's family migrated here long before my memory.  Down through Appalachia, down through the foothills of Alabama, where they settled for a while near Mentone, into the anonymity of a small bayou community called Pace.  They scratched a living by being salesmen and homemakers, contracting tuberculosis in the case of one grandparent, and mothering 12 children in the case of the other.  My mother was one of the 12, born in the year of the Great Flood of 1927.

The older ones--of which there were many--shared their resources and their love with the younger ones.  They took each other in.  They took nieces and nephews in.  They worked hard.  They studied hard, valuing the benefits of a hard-fought education then denied to many.   They passed on a musical talent that runs through generations, a reverence for education and industry, and a strong pride of family.

The two youngest of the 12 are now approaching 80, the cousins have scattered, and the third and fourth generations in many cases are strangers to each other.  Our lives are busy, but we decided on a whim to convene as many cousins as we could.  It was time to reunite.

And so to the Delta I went.  A cotton boll towers over the landscape, but the fields now are just as likely to be full of rice, often guarded by the hovering skeletons of irrigation systems designed to thwart the blasting temperatures.  There are more vacant buildings and more abandoned, once-thriving roadside businesses.  There's less activity than I remember.

The Delta is now also home to a chemical industry, a high-end manufacturer of commercial-grade cooking appliances, at least two institutions of higher learning, and, a casino.  "The Help," a best-selling novel set in Mississippi, will be filmed in Greenwood beginning this summer.  None of these places, however, are in the wide open spaces between towns that are shrinking to no more than a couple of convenience stores.

But family is there, shrinking to only a very few of the original 12.  So we gathered to reconnect, meet the children--and sometimes grandchildren--of cousins, tell stories, share our music, remember our past. 

There, in the middle of it, were the "babies" of the original 12, reveling in the cacophony of voices and laughter and discovery.  Here's the life of the party, who will be 80 on her next birthday. 

So much has changed.  But so much continues through what they all gave to us.  We are a rich family beyond measure.  And from California, Texas, Missouri, Iowa, and points around Mississippi, the Delta draws us, always, back. 

The eye of the beholder

H.L. Mencken may have called the South the Sahara of the Bozart, but we beg to differ.

Where others see a weathered brick wall, we see the possibilities for a pebbly palette.  Art can spring from even the driest wells, as Faulkner brilliantly proved.  In our town, built around trains that long since left the station, creativity springs from the familiar and commonplace.

And we didn't need a marketing firm to survey, develop graphs, and give us the plan.  Some enterprising, anonymous paintbrush thought for itself.

The Coca-Cola mural has been a part of my landscape for so long I don't remember why it's there. Not to advertise the business on whose wall it resides.  There once was a grocery store on that corner, and it perhaps dates from a time when groceries were, in fact, within walking distance and not a five-mile drive to the nearest Wal-Mart.

Lest you not feel welcome as you enter our small community, we've also got the art to tell you how happy we are to see you.  And, by the way, you can park in the rear for a commercial enterprise that no longer exists.  

Making efficient use of the space, we also advertise the annual Labor Day arts festival, letting no one forget we're an oasis of the bozart.

But perhaps my favorite wall mural in our town is one I can't really explain.  My cloudy and possibly faulty memory recalls that a class of high school arts students used their talents to give us these images, ostensibly capturing the symbols of our life in small town Mississippi.  Make of it what you will. 

I see the windmill that has become a city trademark; a blues guitar that no dobut represents one of our city's most famous citizens, Howlin' Wolf; children pointing in wonder at something far beyond my ken. 

The fact that I don't understand it is of no concern.  That, too, is a symbol for life in our town. 

Endangered Receipts

There was a time when salads almost always started with gelatin. Lime, orange, strawberry, or just plain.

You could top with whipped cream and nuts if you were really extravagant. If you didn't use gelatin, the next choice usually had something to do with fruit cocktail and mayonnaise.

We've come a long way to arugula.

This is on my mind today because I've been cooking all weekend, and because I've just stumbled on an old cookbook hiding amongst the Cooking Lights.

The pages are brown, and the edges flake when I turn it. In its fragile pages are handwritten recipes my mom wanted to keep: a white cake recipe with three tablespoons of B.P. I take that to mean baking powder, something we rarely use today if we can get a self-rising mix. There's a congealed salad recipe that starts with orange jello, also written in her hand. And in the hand of Aunt Lou, long dead, a recipe for Mama Finch's chocolate pie.

My mother was a wonderful cook, and I've inherited her love of food, if not her talent and time. This well-used paperback cookbook, now without its covers, reminds me of the smells and industry of her busy kitchen as she cleverly--and economically--whipped up meals for five hungry kids.

For the young who read this post, who vaguely remember a time before Iron Chef and Hell's Kitchen, here's an ironic reminder of the past. I leave you with a recipe from this venerable book:

To serve 100 guests (by special request)

Three and a half pounds of coffee

Six gallons cocoa made from three gallons each of milk and water and one pound cocoa

Four pounds of loaf sugar

Five gallons of oysters

260 sandwiches made from 16 loaves bread and four pounds butter

30 pounds ham to boil and slice

10 medium-sized cabbages for cold slaw

20 pies

18 quarts ice cream

10 four-pound chickens and 30 heads of celery for salad

Five quarts of dressing for salad

Bon appetit!

What can you do with an English major?

Good question, liberal arts fans.

You can teach. If you have patience. Plenty of patience. Tried it. Not a calling.

You can work in publishing. Tried it. Worked for two regional magazines. Loved both, but moved on.

You can hit the political trail. Very few people, it seems, can read and write. Tried it. Loved it. My candidate lost and I was left jobless.

You can become an adult student. Tried it. Loved it, but never finished the Ph.D. (of course, in English). And I so wanted to be hooded. For some reason, people kept thinking I was a lawyer.

You can work for universities or a nonprofit. Tried it. At this point, I think it's pretty much stuck.

And if none of that works, you can become a pretty good sign-holder. For engineering, where there are altogether different opportunities.

Season of wishful thinking

The calla lililes are blooming in our side flower bed, pure and elegant in their simplicity. They're spreading this year. They give me hope.

We're on the cusp of a very hot summer, with spring fast becoming a tantalizing memory. The temps are creeping into the mid-90s. Summer is bearing down on us with its noxious, humid breath, its squishy arms ready to soak the sap out of plants, animals, and especially humans.

But we start the spring with much greater optimism. Blooms 'n Blossoms, the county co-op, Wal-Mart, and Lowe's have all of us lined up with buggies of ambitious plantings. In those very few days when the humidity is low and the sun still slants across the horizon, we convince ourselves that a botantic garden is within our reach.

Spring is a time of great plans. This summer, I will read more books. I will visit my Delta relatives. I will spend more time with family and less time at work. I will plan a real vacation. Isn't that what summers are for?

Instead, greedy time gobbles up the days in front of it , the calla lilies fade, my brave spring plants droop. Before I even calculate it, another summer is nearly past.

The calla lilies remind me to enjoy the fragile beauty while I can.

The lost are found

There's nothing like a happy ending.

Ethel went missing yesterday and created a mystery.

We left for an hour to run errands. The house was locked, as always. The gates to our fenced yard were locked. We double-checked, as always, to assure ourselves all was secure.

Our six-month Boston terrier pups, accustomed to these human forays into the unknown, eyed us nonchanlalantly as we departed. They know the routine. Use the doggy door; enjoy the freedoms of fenced-in yard while the humans are away.

But only one puppy greeted us on our return.

We searched the house, high and low. We searched the yard for possible escape routes. With the help of our neighbors, we canvassed the surrounding streets and interviewed everyone we met. We called our local police department.

No Ethel. We played with Lucy, her sister, and wondered. What had happened? How did she disappear ? Where in our small town could she possibly be?

Over coffee early this morning, we discussed the wording of a "lost puppy" ad in our local paper. We scoured the great outdoors once again, just to be sure there hadn't been a miraculous return. We walked through an empty house, calling her name.

And then, just as our thoughts turned to the business of a new week, when our attention was distracted by intruding realities, suddenly there were two. Both standing together, as though they'd never been apart. As though Ethel materialized out of thin air.

I wish dogs could talk. But since they can't, I'm sure there's a parable here somewhere.

What's the definition of immortality?

We had a big debate at book group last night about "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," the book by University of Memphis prof Rebecca Skloot.

The scientists among us argued that it wasn't, in fact, Henrietta--unwittingly the source of a replicating cell culture known as HeLa--who was immortal. It was her cells. Therefore, she wasn't immortal at all, the inference being that the premise of the book was somehow flawed.

And, they asked, what were the ethical issues of taking a cell culture from the African-American woman who, in 1951, was dying of cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins, a hospital established to treat the poor? It was routinely done at the time, long before anyone ever heard of informed consent. It is routinely done today, when we often sign medical forms without reading or questioning the documents.

And what, after all, did the family deserve as a result of her famous cells? Wouldn't their lives have been essentially the same even if her contributions had been known?

Probably the greatest ethical issue of the book, a social scientist argued, was the breach of confidentiality in identifying Henrietta. Her family discovered it only when her name became public, and they struggled to understand what "immortal" meant. Was their mother cloned?

Others saw the ironies. Henrietta, by virtue of her "immortal" cells, was the source of medical advancements, even breakthroughs, and the HeLa cells are around even today. Yet her family couldn't afford medical care. Wasn't the book really about putting a human face on the research by telling Henrietta's story? A commentary on the profound differences in treatment according to race and class? A view of the cultural and economic chasms that still exist in medical care?

Wasn't it a well-told story of how one simple act can lead to a exponentially complex web of consequences?

I urge you to read the book and decide for yourself.

Lending library

My aimless curiosity owes a lot to Andrew Carnegie, the great philanthropist.
He gave extraordinary amounts of money in his day--$350 million, to be exact—for libraries, church organs, and organizations such as the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

All of these are close to my heart, but none more so than the Carnegie Library pictured above.

With $10,000 of the Carnegie wealth, this became my town’s library in 1913, one of only 11 Carnegie libraries in Mississippi. Today, it houses the local economic development agency.

In my day, it housed magic.

During the unforgiving Southern summers, this was our Terabithia, an adventure into the yet-to-be-known. Up the steps through the double doors we raced, into the book smells, swimming into the high-ceilinged, calm stillness stirred with hands that fluttered against interesting, colorful spines and titles. Into the mystery of books.
We came home with treasures and hours of entertainment. We came to return our books with knowledge and a thirst for more books.

Our futures in many ways were formed in that library, which outgrew the Carnegie structure about the time many of us moved into bellbottoms and tie-dyed skirts.

In 1978, thanks to the generosity of a local benefactor, the library moved into a new structure.

With the move came computer workstations, a children’s reading room, membership in a regional library consortium with access to university resources, and a vital community space for lectures, exhibits, meetings, recitals, and other events.

And with it came the need for resources to maintain, expand, and continue to provide service for about 30,000 patron visits a year. Sadly, it’s struggling.

Despite community fundraisers, declines in state funding have meant a series of cuts. Staff has been reduced by about half. Hours of operation have been reduced—no more Saturdays poring over the latest acquisitions. The library no longer opens then. Local book-lovers are alarmed.

Andrew Carnegie believed the rich are trustees of their wealth and have an obligation to use it for the benefit of others. More than 2,500 communities received tangible evidence of his generosity and were better for it.

How I wish for an Andrew Carnegie today.

Second thoughts

There's a piano in this story, but you have to bear with me.

Think of the seconds that come to mind.

Second helping. Second chance. Split second. Second chapter. Second time around. Second to none.

And then there's second place. Second rate. Second class. Second best.

I'm the second child, but only by a freak accident of timing. My twin sister beat me by a mere 15 minutes, and bequeathed to me the eternal grade-school memory of being labeled by substitute teachers as "Walker No. 2."

It could ruin a person psychologically. I've thought of that many times since first seeing the great movie Amadeus. It's hard to empathize with the tortured but somewhat smarmy Salieri, who aspired to be Mozart. He, with some poetic justice, was condemned to be just himself.

And my poetic justice is that also. Despite my mother's dream that I become a serious pianist, I am a competent amateur. I am not a professional, nor was I meant to be. I will do to swell a chorus or two, no stage lights, please.

Anne Tyler has said that she writes as though no one will ever read it. I play as though no one will ever hear it. I play for the beauty of the instrument and the sounds it's capable of making. I play for myself.

There's great freedom in the number two. It liberates you from the anxiety of having, always, to be first.

What do we see in the landscape we pass every day?

Finding the simple life

From my view on Main Street, our small 12,000-resident community teems with activity, even at 6:30 a.m. Life should be simpler in this rural enclave. It rarely is.

Dump trucks thunder down our street, rattling the quiet and cracking the streets. Our sidewalks tend to flood during a heavy rain, and there's a bridge further down the street that has caved in. You may cross one tentative, temporary lane at your own risk, or detour.

We're full of detours. We detour around the streets that spider away from Main Street into murky arteries sometimes clogged with furtive drug deals. We detour around the thousands of folks now unemployed since our main industry closed its doors and left a cavernous concrete parking lot to sprout weeds. The hungry are hidden from us, though our local food pantry thrives.

Once a year, we collect money, food, and gifts for hundreds of Adopt-a-Family candidates, but we tend to forget them in the Christmas hangover of bills and work realities. It's too easy to be caught up in our own realities.

Life is not simple here. We just tend to simplify it to give ourselves the comforting possibility that we, after all, are all right.