[at-l] Y?

[cballs at verizon.net (Curtis Balls)]

Shane writes:
> Why would you waste time garnishing?  ;)

[Curtis] 
I'm a self-respecting homo?

> 
> You're probably Whitman re-incarnated...  I really do still have your post
> on the subject from so many months ago...


[Curtis] 
Thank you.  I'm an embarrassed self-respecting homo.

 

[Curtis] 
This story about when you were a teenager on Fox Mountain by the Jordan
River is beyond compare. I think it one of the best things, perhaps the best
post to this group ever.  (Rick Boudrie has made a few, more on ATML and
Weary can sometimes choke me up, usually from that experienced philosophical
point of view, full of grace, of an older man.)  But your memories are so
vivid and your description is so nuanced and so loving that I can feel the
sweetness of the Alabama nights, hear the incessant sexual clicking of the
locust, the mating screech and bellow of the tree and bullfrogs. I can smell
the seminal green scent of the trees, the decaying dampness of the forest
floor, here the faint far off sound of a freight train, feel the cool,
sumptuous earth pressing on my back as I look up with you and your buddies
to drink in the studded canopy of the glittering southern sky and I am
transported back to my own earlier time of loafing in the open meadows and
woods with one of my brothers and a couple other boys from neighboring farms
when we would go tenting.  We didn't have a place as secret as Fox Mountain
nor quite as magical nor did we have the luxury of staying so long, but it
possessed it's own magic and the sky was ours too.  Your story makes me sick
with nostalgia and a little envious.  There is something acutely, perfectly
Southern about your story, aside from the significance to you of the land
and your play with it. (Southerners have a spiritual attachment to the land
and when you separate them from it for long periods they begin to forget who
they are.) It's the gravel pit workers and your pranks on them and the guys
telling bigger and bigger lies at the store.  It's all so perfect.  I hope
you're writing a book about this time and these friends of yours and this
place where you and they became totally human.  Every time I read that, and
I've read it several times, this makes me cry from the sheer sense and
sweetness of it.  It's forgiving, redeeming and open to all the
possibilities, especially at that age.  It makes everything alright.       

> For some reason, standing there in the
> midnight sky as the clouds cleared and the stars came back on, we all had
> a
> kind of epiphany that we would talk about for years to come. We were human
> beings, and we were all awake.

What exquisite prose, what wonderful sense.


> 
> I think my love of the outdoors started very early. One of my earliest
> memories was on a Saturday when I was watching TV. My father came in and
> hollered, "It's too nice a day to be inside watching TV! Turn the damned
> thing off and go play outside!"


[Curtis] 
We were blessedly deprived of television for a few years when I was younger
but when we did have one, we heard the same thing.  Your dad is a genius.
Television will make you stupid, and fat.


BIG SNIP (If some of you haven't read Shane's original message, go look it
up.)

>You
> can
> get to it here:
> 
> http://www.theplacewithnoname.com/voiceoftheuniverse/

[Curtis] 
Just as soon as I can get the time.

> 
> "It is the night, and the lessons of infinity trouble my waking dream as
> voices in the dreamtime sing to me
> of futures unremembered. I listen closely for awhile,
> but eventually the voices fade into the background of
> the universe and I am left listing to the sound of the
> planets and the sound of the stars. Gradually, I become aware of new
> voices - the voices of the mountain spirits; the Tengu. The Ice Giants are
> in their number, and no power have I to resist their call. I rise, and go
> out into the night..."

[Curtis] 
Excellent.  This reminds me of a Marquez character who suffered from
insomnia because of the noise the stars made, but that's a different kind of
"listening."



> 
SNIP> 
> "Before my body dies,
> I pray
> That the river I was born to
> Will again wash over me."
> 
> Talk about goosebumps...

[Curtis] 
Yes. Let us pray.


SNIP

> The idea that my child
> will
> have to read Pygmalian is almost enough to make me home school...


[Curtis] 
Hysterical!  I don't know if any of those you mention are required anymore
any where.  I would require them in High School at least (We had to read
Whitman, unfortunately a time and with a teacher who didn't really
understand him, but at least we read him.) and some of them sooner than
that.  That would probably inspire a revolution and the system would finally
have to be shut down so that'll never happen.  We educate for blandness and
a great struggle toward mediocrity and the greatest lesson taught and the
greatest lesson learned is to stay in line.  There are those who might visit
a classroom today and decide that there is too much getting out of line, but
they mistake self-centered, belligerent acting-out for independent thinking
and I'm talking about the fifth graders.  (Your forays to Fox Mountain seem
to have given you a life experience with far greater meaning for you than
those you learned in a classroom and they seemed to have served you well.)
The system succeeds mostly at grinding up the insides of all the pupils and
is a lousy rotten failure at just about everything else, most of the time,
some educators would argue all the time.  Some make it through in spite of
all that (the human being is amazingly resilient) and go on to learn of the
half truths and out right lies, the misinformation and unspoken realities,
but most are marked for life.  It's really not a very good way to educate
children.  There's the parents who have a heavy hand in the way things are
going and who are products of the same system.  Most teachers are not
responsible for the mess.  They too are products of the same system and
they're at the mercy of politicians and school administrators and parents
who own and run the system instead of the teachers, who ought to.  There's
no way to fix it.  The best one can hope for is that some day it will just
be shut down from lack of funding.  Sorry, I'm on a tangent.


> 
> Well, stay in touch better than you did last time.  Send me a postcard or
> something...  When you leave us with, "I wonder if Curtis is bleeding in a
> ditch somewhere?", it ruins my whole day.


[Curtis] 
OK. I promise.