Clinton is coming
(I hate to tell you but your slip is showing)
KIDS ON THE BLOCK
We had a real babysitter a few times. I don’t really remember them. It wasn’t fun. All summer Kala and Mina just watch us now while our mom and dad are at work. They’re not really babysitters. They’re mostly just our sisters. We’d be playing with them anyway. They live across the street. I am 8. They are 11 and 12. My sister is 5. I don’t know if my mom pays them but she probably does.
Sale of the Century is our first favorite show that comes on. Everything is so glamorous. We dream about the things that we would buy with our money if we were on there.
That’s when the day really begins
Press Your Luck. Alice. The Ropers.
Kiss my grits! Flo, the older waitress who is kinda like my aunt always says, and we laugh.
Alice is the mom, and she has one son who is a teenager. They sometimes have hard times but she is strong and always gets them through it.
Both the lady on The Ropers and Flo are always smoking cigarettes. And Mel.
Mel owns the diner where Alice and Flo works. He wears a cool hat on his head like a tough guy on a ship.
We just got a new chest freezer for the basement because our old one died last week. My mom was in a panic about how we were going to eat everything in time before it went bad. It came in a humongous cardboard box that is still out in our driveway. We wrote words on the side and hung up a sheet and it is our new clubhouse.
I am the president. Kala is the vice president. Mina is the treasurer. And my sister is the secretary.
We called our club The Kids on the Block. But then there was a show on about kids who had disabilities and the awesome things they did and it was called Kids on the Block too, and my mom said we had to change our name because they might sue us.
LIFE IS OUR FAVORITE GAME!!
When it’s too hot to catch crayfish or ride bikes we play Life all day and watch MTV. I always make my wife ride in the back in the car because I don’t want a lady sitting next to me
We don’t have MTV at our house but Kala and Mina do. And HBO and The Movie Channel. They have a fireplace with a brick ledge in front of it you can sit on. And a black leather couch. That smells like the smoke from when there is fire in it in the winter, like on Christmas Eve when my sister and I go over and Kala and Mina’s grandma Nana helps us make a Christmas present for our mom . This Christmas we made an apron for her, with four rectangles on the skirt part that were pictures that me and my sister drew. I drew one of all of us. My mom and dad and my sister and Scotty and Ginger and me. The apron is the one we’ve given her that made her smile the biggest. When she’s baking and has it on she always comes out and shows us. The fire is always going when Nana helps us make our present. Then she helps us wrap it, and put her finger to her mouth how it’s gonna be such a special surprise for our mom. When I put my jacket on the next day it will still smell like the fireplace. The black leather couch smells like that all of the time. And the jacket my uncle wore that died in a motorcycle crash.
We don’t have to stop playing when my mom gets home. She still has to make supper. When my dad gets home then she’ll call us, from the front door. If we don’t answer, then she’ll call on the phone.
On the last night before we go back to school my parents take Kala and Mina out to eat with us to Barneys to thank them for watching us. We get to eat as much pizza and have as many pitchers of soda as we want!! Only a little bit that sad will be in my stomach like it always is when something that has been my favorite thing is over.
The huge window that looks out onto their backyard has a brown wooden bench built into it. I stretch my legs out on it like a person relaxing on the beach and read comic books and play that game they have, that’s sort of like a little aquarium. With a red top and bottom. There’s white buttons you push with your thumbs that make the water WOOSH up and throws rings all up into the bubbles and you try to get it onto a thing. They have a magic 8 ball that can tell the future. I’ll sit there a long time staring outside while I try to think of things to ask it.
There is the big tree, with the wicker chair swing it that I love to sit on. And the back of the red brick house on the other side of the creek. A flat wooden small bridge that we always find the biggest crayfish under. In the shade. The water is a little cooler.
A clothesline that Kala and Mina’s mom has hung shirts and pants on, that will make shadows in the yard behind me at sunset when I’m straddling the creek, flipping over rocks.
There is a short cut you can take in Life where’s way more chances of bad things happening but if you make it through it it puts you way ahead. You have to decide when you get to it if you want to take the risk or not. My sister and Kala don’t ever take it. Mina takes it sometimes. I always do.
CLINTON IS COMING
I’ll scream out loud or in my head when I see his green truck coming around the circle. He does work for Dorothy Threesting who lives up the street. She has 3 little white shit zu type dogs that always have a ribbon in their hair and will claw you’re legs wanting to be petted. Her house smells sorta like them. She works at the University and doesn’t have a car. She rides the bus in the mornings and Clinton takes her to the grocery store and her doctor’s appointments. He cuts her grass and plants flowers.
Walking home from the bus stop I can be having the greatest day of all time. Like I kicked a home run over the fence to win the game in kickball. Or Encyclopedia Brown when he solves a mystery. Skipping. And when I come around the corner and see Clinton out in Dorothy Threesting’s yard it is like one million lightning bugs lighting up all at the same time and the day is EVEN better.
He is small, and walks like a cowboy. His pants have patches all different neat colors down the front of them. He always wears a small cap, that he takes off sometimes to wipe away sweat. His head is bald and shiny. His skin is darker than my friend Gerry’s.
If he is mowing the grass, as soon as he sees me coming, he will turn it off. And he will smile and wave at me. A grin on my face, I’ll wave back, and walk a little faster. When I get there, he’ll walk out into the road to meet me and shake my hand. He has a very teeny mustache. His eyes are yellow and watery and whenever we shakes hands his yellow watery eyes SPARKLE SO BRIGHTLY. Gerry’s eyes do that too.
She is my favorite person. She used to work with my mom, and she and my mom became best friends. She is retired now. She never got married and she never had kids. She had a boyfriend that she loved and he died in the war. When my mom had me she just decided that she would love me forever. She would come over and play with me all of the time when I was little. If I wanted to be a dinosaur she’d be a dinosaur with me. If I wanted to be a lion she’d be a lion with me. We’d all go on picnics to the park. Before my sister was born. Me and my mom and Dad and Gerry. She’d ride on the merry go round with me. She lives an hour away in a town that’s all black people. She has different channels on her TV that I watch when we go visit. We play with all the kids on her street. Sometimes Gerry has popsicles for all of us.
Clinton always asks me about my day. He listens to all my stories. He laughs really hard at all the funny things I tell him.
My dad and Kala and Mina’s dad both tell me all the time how Old Clinton is the best fisherman in the entire world. And that he used to work for the famous millionaire that used to live here. We don’t ever talk about fishing. We talk about lots of other things.
He can’t wave as big when Dorothy Threesting is in the truck with him but it is still nice to see the two of them on the seat together. She has silver hair and has always lived by herself. I visit her sometimes to see her dogs and to thank her when she gives us a Christmas card with money in it. I like talking to her but we can’t stay very long because the smell in her house is usually too strong. She and Clinton are best friends I think. He is her only real friend besides her dogs.
Her backyard has sculptures and huge bushes carved into shapes and brick and stone pathways. Like Rome or Greece. Or like another time when there’s castles. When my mom visits with her on the back porch I get to walk through it alone and get lost.
I LOVE TV.
Love LOVE love it.
When my mom is home we can only watch it for one hour at night. And one hour of cartoons. When she’s gone we can watch whatever we want. When the car pulls in we turn it off and she doesn’t ask if we’ve been watching it. She just asks how our day was and we tell her all the other things we did. My sister and Kala play ‘school’ all the time. We have some old textbooks that we got in dumpster, and they do assignments and they learn things. Mina and I just watch TV.
The spot on the end of the couch is always mine. I am sucked in all the way to anything that is on that we are watching. Imagining I am there. But I also always have one eye looking out the window. Just in case Clinton’s green truck is coming. Slowly towards the circle.
We always go to the Dogwood carnival on the night where you can buy a wristband and ride as many rides as you want all night long. We race from ride to ride. When there’s no line we’ll just run to the top of the huge slide, and go down in those burlap bags that are so scratchy. Just because we can. We’ll get to go on so many that sometimes I’ll just wander to the other part of the park. Where the jet is. It is a whole actual silver jet. That used to fly places. A big one. You can climb up in and explore. The steering wheel and seats up front are still there, but there’s no other seats in there. You can pretend you’re up in the sky, going some place else. When there’s not lots of people in there. When there’s other people in there I don’t like it as much. It makes the walls and ceiling and floor feel like they’re starting to scrunch in on me. It’s already so small in there. Cotton candy. that i try to eat each different way. to make it dissolve on my tongue with just the right tingle. Knowing I can ride the Scrambler twenty times in a row if I want to. Riding the ferris wheel in between, if I’m too dizzy. When it stops and I’m just there, at the almost very top. Rocking back and forth. Staring out across the flashing light bulbs seeing if I can spot any of my friends. It’s too hazy. Once a year, the week after the Dogwood Parade, I get that one. Where I am the happiest I’ve ever been like on a Sunday night Disney movie where something really good happens. Like anytime I see Clinton.
That is always my best best day. To get to wave at him, and us both smile at each other.
He shakes my hand very gently when I see him cutting the grass and he turns off his mower and comes over to me. My mouth is already turned up real big and you can see my teeth. His eyes are doing that thing where I always say to myself “that’s exactly how I’d draw the way I think my eyes look - every time I see him”. The same way I feel my eyes look when I see my friend Gerry. And the way hers look, whenever she looks at me. Right before the movie starts, and Tinkerbell flies across the screen as the song ends… the sort of yellow twinkles that trail out behind her. Mine and Gerry’s eyes when we get to be together. My eyes and Clinton’s.
GRANDPA’S FANCY EARRINGS
The six year old nephew is sitting on my lap in the kitchen of my parents’ house. On the table is a photo album, full of pictures from when I was pre school age. We are flipping through all the pages, and occasionally I point a picture out to him. Many of these photos I haven’t seen in decades. My mind is racing with happy memories.
Midway through we come to a picture that fills me with such sunshine I can hardly contain it. It is a picture of Gerry and my mom and me, sitting on a blanket, having a picnic in the park. There are so many things I want to tell the nephew about Gerry. But I don’t even know where to start.
For the first 19 years of my life Gerry Cabell was my favorite person in the world. The love of her life died in the war when she was young, and she never married and she never had kids. When I was born, Gerry just decided that she would love me and dote on me forever.
She worked at the sanitorium with my mom. She was at the tail end of her working career and my mom was just beginning hers, but they became quick friends. Gerry was short with dark skin, and short coarse black hair. She had two cars - a big long Cadillac, and a tan VW bug like Herbie The Love Bug.
She was my favorite playmate. We’d play in my room for hours. She’d sit right down on the floor with me and would come along to every single world I was playing in. If I wanted to be a dragon, she’d be a dragon with me. If I wanted to be a dinosaur, we’d both be dinosaurs. She always smiled so big at me. Her eyes reflected the wonder and magic I felt whenever I saw her.
We’d go to the park and Gerry would ride on the merry go round with me. The fast metal merry go rounds, not the weighted down kinds like they have now. She’d stand and hold onto the metal bars and go in circles with me. I’d watch her and smile. I always felt a warm fuzzy feeling inside me whenever I was with her.
My mom said in the first years after I was born she didn’t know how we’d get by. She said they were barely making ends meet with two incomes, and now they were down to just one, and had an additional mouth to feed. She said every time Gerry showed up to play with me she always brought along a bag of groceries. My mom said there were often times when she was so stressed about how they’d possibly be able to cover the bills the next week. And then Gerry would always appear, at just the right time.
Gerry lived an hour south of town in a neighborhood that was all African Americans. We’d go visit her on weekends. My sister and I would play with all the kids on the street, and then my mom would call us inside and Gerry would make a meal for us. Sometimes my sister and I would help her make dessert.
She wore cool pants and cool shirts. There’s that scene in The Blues Brothers where everyone is dancing out in front of Ray’s Music Exchange, shaking it in the street. Gerry looked like she could have been in that scene.
Gerry had different channels on her TV than we did at our house. I was always excited to watch regional NWA wrestling on the television in Gerry’s guest bedroom. The Rock and Roll Express and The Road Warriors, and Jimmy Valiant, the Boogie Woogie man. There was a faded brown and white picture on the shelf above the television of a light skinned African American man in uniform. He had a mustache and was wearing a military hat. I’d stare at it when no one was around.
Gerry’s bathroom was tiled blue, like it was an ocean, and the soap had a strong smell to it. The toilet paper cover that sat on the back of the tank was crocheted pink with a little design on it.
Gerry would always have drinks and snacks for us. She was always so happy to see us. We never used the front door at her house. We’d knock on the door that was just off the carport, that opened into the kitchen. I’d hear her shuffling across the floor and I’d feel that warm feeling building inside me. Her eyes would be twinkling and she’d be smiling a gigantic smile when she opened the door.
We’d step into her 1970s kitchen, and we’d each give her a hug. I was growing taller and she was shrinking a little bit each time. I used to barely come up to her armpit. Now she barely came up to mine. We’d stand in the middle of the floor and she’d joke and laugh about how she was getting shorter.
We’d all move to the living room, and she and I would sit on the couch together and she’d smile and pat my leg and make me feel important. Then I’d go watch TV while she visited with my parents. My mom said Gerry had experienced horrible unspeakable acts of racism and prejudice in her life. That made me so sad.
Freshman year of college, my best friend Chris convinced me to drive him and I to the women’s college 90 minutes away to meet two girls he knew. Almost to the college we passed the town where Gerry lived. I’d never driven there on my own, only with my parents, but I asked Chris if it would be ok if we tried to find her house real quick. I told him all about her, and that she’d be happy to see us. In the days before GPS, trying to find a place for the first time on your own was often so much harder than you thought it’d be. Everything looked so familiar though. I found it on the second try. We parked on the street and walked up the driveway and knocked on the side door.
I knocked a few times before she came. For the first time ever, waiting for her, I felt nervous. When she opened the door, I wasn’t sure if she knew who I was. “Hi Gerry,” I said, “it’s me, Chad. This is my friend Chris. We were driving to the college over there, and I wanted to stop by and visit with you for a little.” She got a giant smile on her face and gave me a big hug, and invited us in to sit on her couch. She was so small and frail. She was beaming the entire time. She patted my leg and offered us Wild Turkey every ten minutes or so. We would laugh and decline. “We don’t need anything Gerry,” I told her, “we’re just here to see you.”
For years after that, Chris would say that we should have just stayed there and drank Wild Turkey and visited with her all night. He said that was the best part of our trip.
At Gerry’s funeral my family and I were the only white people there. Her sisters came over and talked to us after the service. And then, one by one, people in the church started coming over to us. We didn’t know any of them, but they all shook our hands and introduced themselves. An older couple came up to us, and said they just wanted to say hi, and they talked to us for several minutes. “Can I ask you,” my mom said, “how does everyone know who we are?”
“We’ve heard so much about Gerry’s white family for all these years,” the man said, “it’s so nice to finally meet you.”
I didn’t go see her at the end, when she was in the hospital. I told myself I didn’t want to remember her like that, that I wanted my memory of her to be all of our happy times. I didn’t know how to process grief and sadness then, and wouldn’t for many years. I know my brain was trying to protect me. But I should have been there.
When I was born, Gerry just decided that she would love me forever, and she did. And I her, with all the capacity as I was capable of. I didn’t really understand what love was when I was 19. I just knew how I felt whenever I was with her. How I felt when I looked at her face. I just knew how I felt whenever I thought about her back then - How I feel when I think about her now
In the picture I am three years old. My mom is so young, with long dark hair, and pregnant with my sister. “Look how different Grandma and I look,” I say to the nephew, and he peers in to look closer. “Grandpa looks different too,” I add as I point to Gerry.
“His skin looks a lot darker,” the nephew says.
“Yeah it does,” I tell him, trying not to laugh.
“It looks like he’s wearing earrings,” he says, and I lean in and study the photograph.
“Hmm...it does look like that,” I say, “Go ask him about it.”
Carrying the open photo album out to the living room, climbing up in the recliner with my dad, leaning back against his chest. Pointing his little kid finger at the page, “Are you wearing earrings in this picture Grandpa? he asks
“Boy! That’s not Grandpa!” My dad says. “That’s Gerry. She was your uncle’s favorite person in the world.”
I hate to tell you but your slip is showing
Human - Molly Sarle
Right Down the Line - Lucius
Massacre - Hard Working Americans
Trail of Seasons (demo) - Drivin n Cryin
Look on Down from the Bridge - Mazzy Star
Back, Baby - Jessica Pratt
Carry Me Ohio - Sun Kil Moon
Lingering - Allegra Krieger
The Number 3 - Khruangbin
Another good year for the roses - Kurt Vile
Rubin and Cherise - Bonnie Prince Billy
Chasing the Night - Ramones
Sandusky - Uncle Tupelo
For All the Wrong Reasons - The Bellamy Brothers
Are You Kissing Anyone? Saturday Looks Good to Me
Don’t Ask Me - Megan Hamilton
Spiral (demo) - The Connells
Massacre (purple) - Todd Snider
A Good Year for the Roses - George Jones, Alan Jackson
Still is still moving - Willie Nelson
Swimming Song - Kate & Anna McGarrigle
(Crazy Horse) - Mark Erelli, Jeffrey Foucault
90 minute red and white Memorex
The pop up show at Red Wing Roots Festival was a real treat. We had never tried to do it in the wild. Thank you to my friends Phil King and Brian Tierney for playing it, and to Jeff and Diane Huss for hosting, and to the house band - Chris and Darren and Jeff for helping me pull it all off.
For the first time I got to put a Tom T. Hall song in my show. Thank you to everyone that came to see it.
“Grandpa’s Fancy Earrings” and “His Fragile Hopes (with thanks to David Childers)” are from my book JEANNETTE, which AMZN currently has marked down to $9.62 for a limited time. I still get full royalties even on sale price books, so if you have free shipping Amazon loses money on the deal. If you haven’t bought a copy for yourself yet, or would like to buy one for someone who might like it, now is a great time. Buy it here. (I don’t get any royalties from used copies, fyi)
I’ll be doing another pop up show July 19th in Charlottesville in the Belmont neighborhood. Space is limited and close to at capacity. For more information, reply to this email. The pop up shows are a mini version of the longer shows, an MTV unplugged type model. An hour long book reading performance with acoustic music from one or two musicians. If you’d be interested in hosting a Jeanette unplugged show in your backyard or home or VFW for your friends or a birthday or to support my art please let me know.
I saw at hummingbird at my mom’s house but I haven’t seen any in my yard yet
You are such a wonderful storyteller Chad! You lived on a magical world, we all kinda did but the way you tell it makes those memories come alive inside of me!