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Thursday, February 20, 2003
( All of this is still a work in progress. Rough drafts. I thought it would be fun to work online and it is.)
My Grandmother's house on Ovid Street.
That's pronounced Oh-vid like the street in Baton Rouge that I grew up on and not Ah-vid like the poet.
I grew up in a family that was well versed in the early history of the United States of America. I spent summers and weekends with my father’s mother, our official family historian. I was 5, 6, and 7 and she was in her seventies and we would sit together in her little parlor, and read, and paint, and she would try to teach me needle point, and every night she’d let her waist length hair down and we would both brush our long hair one hundred strokes, as she talked to me about our family and the fact that we were direct descendants of a Revolutionary War soldier, Matthew Davis. I was surrounded by my family's history, old book collections and tales, her oil paintings and pastels, and every candy dish was handmade with her own homemade candy inside.
Ladies didn’t smoke or talk loudly and I was expected to read quietly, draw, paint, or do embroidery, when I visited her. I liked her books the best, and I learned about world religions; Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, early Christianity, the Jewish faith, and then philosophy, world history and poetry, and the Greeks, and of course the Revolutionary War and Benjamin Franklin (one of her favorites) It would have been the typical upbringing of a young girl from the 19th century but it was the late 1960s and 1970s. My father was left her extensive book collection after she passed away in 1972 and for many years after her death, I would exclaim with delight over a newspaper article, or poem, or column, that she had a habit of clipping out, and leaving behind in whatever book she was reading with news of her day and the popular culture, literary, and art world of her young and middle aged adulthood.
My hippie cousins were in and out frequently (returning from rock concerts, anti-war protest, or road trips, college, etc) and she held them special in her heart, because she always was a bit of a firebrand in our family, (one of many) and she loved them (every one of them) and their intellectual and artistic freedom. There was a special room for them that I was never allowed to sleep in with her most controversial works; tapestries, crazy looking quilts, and wild psychedelic paintings. My favorite was my cousin Warren, who has since passed away; was 20 years older than me, and he would appear out of nowhere with his beautiful long curly brown hair, his guitar in hand, reciting poetry, or singing a song that he had just written on the spot and dedicated to my Grandmother and me. (Children in my family are known to sew their wild oats well into their late thirties, at which time we all return to school and become engineers, doctors, or accountants, ( a few judges) and respectable citizens at rather late ages. Wild spent youthful years were bragged on and encouraged in my father's family.) I know it all sounds bipolar, but that's the way they were back then, so forgive me my momentary insanities.
My father loved Opera and Woodie Guthrie's music; he admired Will Geer, and the Longs (The disenfranchised in Louisiana liked him and his populist family;) he really thought (at the time) that Will Rogers (and we ain't talking Jr.-- bleh) was running for president, and backed him, and his left leaning platform wholeheartedly, and my father was a bit of a socialist, who loved to read, and study; he hopped trains when he was a teenager, and then he hitchhiked around the country after the war before returning to college to become a staid engineer (yeah, right). Contrary to popular belief Louisiana politics have never been really static and it might surprise some people to know that Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate of 1912, carried most of the state, especially certain parishes in northern Louisiana.
There was once a family uproar over my Grandmother (I have a picture of her with a made up face and Clara Bow lips and short vivid red hair. In it she is a gorgeous, tiny woman in a lace blouse, just beautiful like all of her paintings.) When she was in her twenties, she bobbed her hair in a moment of pique, and scandalized the entire city of Ruston, Louisiana, where she ran a rooming house for university students after her husband died. She was a young hardworking widow, considered to be wild at the time (the 1920s and 30s) and I think she would have abandoned it all and headed for Hollywood, or an artist garret in Paris, if it weren’t for her children.
Instead, she ended up in Biloxi, while her sons and nephews went to fight in WWII, and maybe that was just as good for her purposes, because she never remarried, and was rumored to have a lover in that area. After that she moved to Baton Rouge to work in civil service and had an artist studio on Chimes Street and then finally settled on Ovid Street just off Perkins Road.She loved to paint swamps; incredible oils with snakes, boats, and trees rising out of the mist that looked vaguely like people in her life. She was an awesome Grandmother. She still had beautiful legs when I knew her, and she loved to wear short skirts even in her 60s and 70s, along with her beret and artist smocks.
You could never curse, or say the word Nigger, or be racist around Edith; anything like that was met with a stony faced silence that let the speaker know that, that was considered the utmost in uncouthness and ill breeding, and God forbid if you were ever uncouth or ill bred in Edith’s presence. I think it was because after her husband died the only people who befriended and helped her were the black people in the (Rayville) community. She was a beautiful petite 25 year old woman with five young children when he died in 1922 and left her in debt with a large farm and house to care for and the busy bodies in the town labeled her as a racy widow woman and all the local good people gave her a hard time. They even suggested that she put her children in an orphanage. Edith was very stubborn and refused the sort of help that the white town council offered. It was the black farm families that came to her rescue when she needed help with anything. She always spoke so fondly of them. The bank finally foreclosed on the farm and her house and she moved to Ruston to run the rooming house. She managed to put all five of her children through college, including her girls, and she never forgot the slight that the uppities in town gave her and she never forgot who her friends were during the most difficult times of her life.
My Grandmother's house on Ovid Street.
That's pronounced Oh-vid like the street in Baton Rouge that I grew up on and not Ah-vid like the poet.
I grew up in a family that was well versed in the early history of the United States of America. I spent summers and weekends with my father’s mother, our official family historian. I was 5, 6, and 7 and she was in her seventies and we would sit together in her little parlor, and read, and paint, and she would try to teach me needle point, and every night she’d let her waist length hair down and we would both brush our long hair one hundred strokes, as she talked to me about our family and the fact that we were direct descendants of a Revolutionary War soldier, Matthew Davis. I was surrounded by my family's history, old book collections and tales, her oil paintings and pastels, and every candy dish was handmade with her own homemade candy inside.
Ladies didn’t smoke or talk loudly and I was expected to read quietly, draw, paint, or do embroidery, when I visited her. I liked her books the best, and I learned about world religions; Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, early Christianity, the Jewish faith, and then philosophy, world history and poetry, and the Greeks, and of course the Revolutionary War and Benjamin Franklin (one of her favorites) It would have been the typical upbringing of a young girl from the 19th century but it was the late 1960s and 1970s. My father was left her extensive book collection after she passed away in 1972 and for many years after her death, I would exclaim with delight over a newspaper article, or poem, or column, that she had a habit of clipping out, and leaving behind in whatever book she was reading with news of her day and the popular culture, literary, and art world of her young and middle aged adulthood.
My hippie cousins were in and out frequently (returning from rock concerts, anti-war protest, or road trips, college, etc) and she held them special in her heart, because she always was a bit of a firebrand in our family, (one of many) and she loved them (every one of them) and their intellectual and artistic freedom. There was a special room for them that I was never allowed to sleep in with her most controversial works; tapestries, crazy looking quilts, and wild psychedelic paintings. My favorite was my cousin Warren, who has since passed away; was 20 years older than me, and he would appear out of nowhere with his beautiful long curly brown hair, his guitar in hand, reciting poetry, or singing a song that he had just written on the spot and dedicated to my Grandmother and me. (Children in my family are known to sew their wild oats well into their late thirties, at which time we all return to school and become engineers, doctors, or accountants, ( a few judges) and respectable citizens at rather late ages. Wild spent youthful years were bragged on and encouraged in my father's family.) I know it all sounds bipolar, but that's the way they were back then, so forgive me my momentary insanities.
My father loved Opera and Woodie Guthrie's music; he admired Will Geer, and the Longs (The disenfranchised in Louisiana liked him and his populist family;) he really thought (at the time) that Will Rogers (and we ain't talking Jr.-- bleh) was running for president, and backed him, and his left leaning platform wholeheartedly, and my father was a bit of a socialist, who loved to read, and study; he hopped trains when he was a teenager, and then he hitchhiked around the country after the war before returning to college to become a staid engineer (yeah, right). Contrary to popular belief Louisiana politics have never been really static and it might surprise some people to know that Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate of 1912, carried most of the state, especially certain parishes in northern Louisiana.
There was once a family uproar over my Grandmother (I have a picture of her with a made up face and Clara Bow lips and short vivid red hair. In it she is a gorgeous, tiny woman in a lace blouse, just beautiful like all of her paintings.) When she was in her twenties, she bobbed her hair in a moment of pique, and scandalized the entire city of Ruston, Louisiana, where she ran a rooming house for university students after her husband died. She was a young hardworking widow, considered to be wild at the time (the 1920s and 30s) and I think she would have abandoned it all and headed for Hollywood, or an artist garret in Paris, if it weren’t for her children.
Instead, she ended up in Biloxi, while her sons and nephews went to fight in WWII, and maybe that was just as good for her purposes, because she never remarried, and was rumored to have a lover in that area. After that she moved to Baton Rouge to work in civil service and had an artist studio on Chimes Street and then finally settled on Ovid Street just off Perkins Road.She loved to paint swamps; incredible oils with snakes, boats, and trees rising out of the mist that looked vaguely like people in her life. She was an awesome Grandmother. She still had beautiful legs when I knew her, and she loved to wear short skirts even in her 60s and 70s, along with her beret and artist smocks.
You could never curse, or say the word Nigger, or be racist around Edith; anything like that was met with a stony faced silence that let the speaker know that, that was considered the utmost in uncouthness and ill breeding, and God forbid if you were ever uncouth or ill bred in Edith’s presence. I think it was because after her husband died the only people who befriended and helped her were the black people in the (Rayville) community. She was a beautiful petite 25 year old woman with five young children when he died in 1922 and left her in debt with a large farm and house to care for and the busy bodies in the town labeled her as a racy widow woman and all the local good people gave her a hard time. They even suggested that she put her children in an orphanage. Edith was very stubborn and refused the sort of help that the white town council offered. It was the black farm families that came to her rescue when she needed help with anything. She always spoke so fondly of them. The bank finally foreclosed on the farm and her house and she moved to Ruston to run the rooming house. She managed to put all five of her children through college, including her girls, and she never forgot the slight that the uppities in town gave her and she never forgot who her friends were during the most difficult times of her life.
Monday, February 17, 2003
MY Thoughts on War With Iraq
To question the ethics and morality of our leaders is not un-American, but American to the core. We have a right to do this. It is what our country is based on.
And just because you don't support military action does not mean that you don't support the individual soldiers and their families. I'd like to see them all safe at home.
(Direct Descendant of Matthew Davis, soldier in the American Revolution, Halifax, NC)
To question the ethics and morality of our leaders is not un-American, but American to the core. We have a right to do this. It is what our country is based on.
And just because you don't support military action does not mean that you don't support the individual soldiers and their families. I'd like to see them all safe at home.
(Direct Descendant of Matthew Davis, soldier in the American Revolution, Halifax, NC)
Friday, February 07, 2003
W, and The Prophecies of Nostradamus
(Warning: The Alert Level is now raised to Flaming Red)
I had a friend years ago who was a real idiot. I hope you don’t mind me calling him that, but he really was an idiot. For the purpose of this diatribe I am going to call him by the first letter of his first name which is W. I don’t want him to get busted, so I‘m not going to use his whole name.
I think the only book that W had in his house, besides the phone book, and the bible, was a book on the Prophecies of Nostradamus. He kept an assault rifle in the corner of the kitchen and lots of ammunition in his closets to help him prepare for the day when every thing fell apart. I knew him and his family as they readied themselves for the end of civilization, as we know it, back in the late 1980s. They were sure that 1987 was the year, that was going to be end of the world. I was pregnant at the time and they were my neighbors.
Every morning I had to face W in the parking lot. W was a short, middle aged, nome looking, little country guy, from way back in the swamps, he had greasy dark hair, and squinty eyes, and bad teeth, and he always wore a dirty white T-shirt. His parking space was next to mine at our apartment building and W would always be sitting on the hood of his car with his assault rifle propped up next to the front driver side tire.
When W wasn’t talking about the end of the world, he would read the want ads in Soldier of Fortune magazine out loud to anyone who would listen, and he’d talk about which job he was going to take, usually some kind of mercenary position in South America, I think. He'd exclaim loudly if he found one looking for a hit man, and who ever was walking by, (mostly me) would have to point out to him, that the one for the hit man, was probably put in there by the feds. And then he’d scratch his head and agree, and go back to reading, or he’d bring up Nostradamus and the end of the world, again.
W’d see me outside going to work or a doctor’s appointment or something, and he’d walk over and say things like, “Well Marie are you ready for it? It’s going to start with earthquakes and then everything is going to happen at once. It's going to be the war to end all wars and everyone on earth is going to die” and then he’d hold up his assault rifle and pat the barrel of it and say in a deep, gravelly, voice, “If you need protection, girl you know I’m here.“
His daughters and his wife believed it too, except they were into this religious thing and if they were outside, they’d chime in with eerily sweet little tinny voices and say odd things like, “Jesus, will come for your baby, so he won’t have to be born or die.” Everyday was going to be our last day on earth, or could be according to them, and Orson Welles, who narrated the movie about the life of Nostradamus, which they watched over and over, and talked about incessantly.
If you live in a city like Baton Rouge you get used to scenes like that. Hyper religious, republican, racist, gun nuts with assault rifles in your parking lot are all the norm in Louisiana and Texas, but W and his family were starting to get on my nerves. I was 6 months pregnant and every morning I awoke to that asshole and his brood and their apocalyptic visions complete with weapons, and descriptions of how he was going to be ready for the fall of all civilization, and he said it with such a gleam in his eyes. You know, I think W and his family were actually looking forward to it.
Finally one morning I’d had enough, so I started yelling at him “Look W, let me tell you something. I don't give a FUCK if it is the end of the whole FUCKING world as we know it. W I have had enough of this and I don't care if we are all about to die. I have to go to work, and my feet hurt, and it's going to be another hard day, and the last thing I need to wake and hear, is more about possible catastrophes. I may walk across the street and get hit by a car and die from my injuries, or I may get struck by lightening, or die suddenly from a heart attack. W what you and Nostradamus say might be true, we may all be about to die in one big bang, in earthquakes, wars, or terror attacks, but we’ll all still be the same kind of dead. It doesn’t matter if we die one by one, or whether we all die at once, because when I die it’s the end of my world, and when you die it’s the end of yours. People have been dying for millions of years, so what fucking difference does it make how you die, or how many people die along with you? You‘ll still be just as dead. W you gloat too much about fighting in wars for profit and you don't even think about who you might kill if you do answer one of those ads. W I think you and your whole family should enlist and go join the fight." I kicked the tire on W's car for emphasis, as hard as I could, and watched as his assault rifle clattered noisily down to the pavement.
W scratched his greasy gray-black hair, and pretended not to think, and jumped down off the hood of his car, and picked up his assault rifle, and cradled it, like it was a newborn, (I think he may have kissed it) and propped it up on the car, again, and went back to reading the classified ads in Soldier of Fortune. I think the idiot really wanted to be a hit man or a mercenary.
My baby was born, healthy, months later, and 1987 came and went without the fall of civilization or the massive continent jarring earthquakes, or world wars, and we moved away and I don't know if W ever answered any of those ads in Soldier of Fortune, but I haven't seen him in quite a while.
(Hey, It's Satire and yes, I know, I have a warped sense of Humor) Mel
(Warning: The Alert Level is now raised to Flaming Red)
I had a friend years ago who was a real idiot. I hope you don’t mind me calling him that, but he really was an idiot. For the purpose of this diatribe I am going to call him by the first letter of his first name which is W. I don’t want him to get busted, so I‘m not going to use his whole name.
I think the only book that W had in his house, besides the phone book, and the bible, was a book on the Prophecies of Nostradamus. He kept an assault rifle in the corner of the kitchen and lots of ammunition in his closets to help him prepare for the day when every thing fell apart. I knew him and his family as they readied themselves for the end of civilization, as we know it, back in the late 1980s. They were sure that 1987 was the year, that was going to be end of the world. I was pregnant at the time and they were my neighbors.
Every morning I had to face W in the parking lot. W was a short, middle aged, nome looking, little country guy, from way back in the swamps, he had greasy dark hair, and squinty eyes, and bad teeth, and he always wore a dirty white T-shirt. His parking space was next to mine at our apartment building and W would always be sitting on the hood of his car with his assault rifle propped up next to the front driver side tire.
When W wasn’t talking about the end of the world, he would read the want ads in Soldier of Fortune magazine out loud to anyone who would listen, and he’d talk about which job he was going to take, usually some kind of mercenary position in South America, I think. He'd exclaim loudly if he found one looking for a hit man, and who ever was walking by, (mostly me) would have to point out to him, that the one for the hit man, was probably put in there by the feds. And then he’d scratch his head and agree, and go back to reading, or he’d bring up Nostradamus and the end of the world, again.
W’d see me outside going to work or a doctor’s appointment or something, and he’d walk over and say things like, “Well Marie are you ready for it? It’s going to start with earthquakes and then everything is going to happen at once. It's going to be the war to end all wars and everyone on earth is going to die” and then he’d hold up his assault rifle and pat the barrel of it and say in a deep, gravelly, voice, “If you need protection, girl you know I’m here.“
His daughters and his wife believed it too, except they were into this religious thing and if they were outside, they’d chime in with eerily sweet little tinny voices and say odd things like, “Jesus, will come for your baby, so he won’t have to be born or die.” Everyday was going to be our last day on earth, or could be according to them, and Orson Welles, who narrated the movie about the life of Nostradamus, which they watched over and over, and talked about incessantly.
If you live in a city like Baton Rouge you get used to scenes like that. Hyper religious, republican, racist, gun nuts with assault rifles in your parking lot are all the norm in Louisiana and Texas, but W and his family were starting to get on my nerves. I was 6 months pregnant and every morning I awoke to that asshole and his brood and their apocalyptic visions complete with weapons, and descriptions of how he was going to be ready for the fall of all civilization, and he said it with such a gleam in his eyes. You know, I think W and his family were actually looking forward to it.
Finally one morning I’d had enough, so I started yelling at him “Look W, let me tell you something. I don't give a FUCK if it is the end of the whole FUCKING world as we know it. W I have had enough of this and I don't care if we are all about to die. I have to go to work, and my feet hurt, and it's going to be another hard day, and the last thing I need to wake and hear, is more about possible catastrophes. I may walk across the street and get hit by a car and die from my injuries, or I may get struck by lightening, or die suddenly from a heart attack. W what you and Nostradamus say might be true, we may all be about to die in one big bang, in earthquakes, wars, or terror attacks, but we’ll all still be the same kind of dead. It doesn’t matter if we die one by one, or whether we all die at once, because when I die it’s the end of my world, and when you die it’s the end of yours. People have been dying for millions of years, so what fucking difference does it make how you die, or how many people die along with you? You‘ll still be just as dead. W you gloat too much about fighting in wars for profit and you don't even think about who you might kill if you do answer one of those ads. W I think you and your whole family should enlist and go join the fight." I kicked the tire on W's car for emphasis, as hard as I could, and watched as his assault rifle clattered noisily down to the pavement.
W scratched his greasy gray-black hair, and pretended not to think, and jumped down off the hood of his car, and picked up his assault rifle, and cradled it, like it was a newborn, (I think he may have kissed it) and propped it up on the car, again, and went back to reading the classified ads in Soldier of Fortune. I think the idiot really wanted to be a hit man or a mercenary.
My baby was born, healthy, months later, and 1987 came and went without the fall of civilization or the massive continent jarring earthquakes, or world wars, and we moved away and I don't know if W ever answered any of those ads in Soldier of Fortune, but I haven't seen him in quite a while.
(Hey, It's Satire and yes, I know, I have a warped sense of Humor) Mel