I'm a Yankee Doodle dandy

Not me. I'm referring to George M. Cohan, a vaudevillian from long ago who was born on the Fourth of July (2:38).

In much of the world, Yankee means American. In the American south (the former Confederacy), however, Yankee means anyone from up north.

This post is going to be an unflattering but realistic and possibly even affectionate portrait of my father.

In the small town in Texas where we moved when I was a child, my father was called Yankee by many people. Some of them didn't even know his real name. It was a nickname that stuck. He talked funny -- different from them -- because he had grown up in Wisconsin and Iowa. He didn't say "yes, ma'am" like everybody else, he said "yes, mom". That alone was enough to raise eyebrows. He said crick instead of creek and ruf instead of roof. He had lots of non-Southern phrases such as "quick, like a bunny" and "in two shakes of a lamb's tail".

The thing he said that I remember most is "Don't cry or I'll give you something to cry about."

Billy Ray Barnwell (not Sheriff Billy Ray Barnwell, a role played by actor Muse Watson in the film Morgan's Ferry, but someone I made up who rents space inside my head the way Donald Trump does with the mainstream media, and vice versa) included a long passage about my father in Chapter 2 of his book/blog Billy Ray Barnwell Here because my dad is, in a manner of speaking, his dad too. Billy Ray is known for his long, rambling paragraphs and unusual punctuation. If you have seen it before, it simply can't be helped. You're about to see it again.

Here it is:

Chapter 2

Billy Ray Barnwell here, in one of these little chapters or vignettes or whatever they are I absolutely positively must get started on a poem or essay or something really literary, boy it sure is hard being an author, there are so many possibilities to choose from that some days I can’t focus at all, maybe I could find me a pill I could take for that, but I sure wouldn’t want to become dependent on drugs like Udella Mabry’s cousin Virgil Abernathy did, that was a really sad case, but after he finished doing his time he went to school and became the town pharmacist, so all’s well that ends well, to coin a phrase. I do know this is not going to be a novel because if I were going to write me a novel the characters would already be saying things like “It don’t make me no never mind” and “If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy,” things I would never say in real life. I wish I could think of something interesting to write about today, nothing ever happens in this one-horse town, I will just keep pouring the words onto the paper and maybe something good will come of it, I have faith in the process. Mr. Morris said the only way to become a writer is to write, I don’t know why it took me so long to actually do it, Udella said the other day just think this is how Ernest Hemingway got started and I said I like William Faulkner better, then Udella’s buddy Juanita chimed in and said she didn’t care for Faulkner and I asked her why not and she scrunched up her face for a minute like she was trying to decide why herself and finally she said “too many words” well let me tell you I was flabbergasted, it was just like that scene in that Amadeus movie where the Italian composers tell the king or duke or whatever he is that Mozart’s music has too many notes, well in my opinion we should all have too many notes like Mozart or too many words like Faulkner, even though he did tend to use words like “scrofulous” and “phylacteries” and “lugubrious” and “mendaciously,” Faulkner I mean, not Mozart, which always sent me scurrying to the dictionary, wait a minute, hold the fort, that isn’t Faulkner I’m thinking of, that’s Thomas Wolfe, talk about a man who used too many words, O by the lost and wind-grieved ghost come back again my eye, why couldn’t he just write about simple things, a stone, a leaf, a door, that’s a joke for all you literary types, I’m sure it will bring great guffaws in English departments at universities all across this wonderful land of ours, and for those of you who don’t get the joke, I don’t want to ruin your concentration by explaining it, the joke I mean, not your concentration.

I wouldn’t want to think the well is running dry or anything, but all I can think to tell you about right now are things my father used to say, such as using a condom is like wearing socks to take a shower, or when you eat beans if you also eat macaroni you will get a pipe organ effect, or the ever popular pull my finger, he was a real delight to know, I didn’t think so then and I don’t think so now, in fact I prayed many times for him to be gone and now that he is I miss him more than I like to admit, damn was his favorite adjective and hell was his favorite noun, he smoked Chesterfield cigarettes like they were going out of style and between him and Mama the ashtrays at our house were always full and the air was always blue with smoke, and in spite of all of that or maybe because of it he started teaching the men’s Sunday School class at the Methodist church, you couldn’t make this stuff up, truth is stranger than fiction, I guess I should cut him some slack, he was a good man trying to do his best, he served in the U.S. Navy during the Second World War as a machinist’s mate, whatever that is, on a ship called the PCE869, which PCE stands for Patrol Craft Escort, I know because he talked about the Navy every single day of his life and it is emblazoned in my brain along with the Great Lakes Naval Training Center and the Panama Canal Zone that has towns named Cristobal and Colón and when you say Colón it is not like the part of your body that is somewhere between your stomach and your anal sphincter, it is like the cologne that a man might want to splash on various parts of his body before going out on a big date so that if a person got close enough to smell him that person would end up smelling the cologne and not the body parts, oh by the way Cristobal Colón means Christopher Columbus in Spanish, he drove me absolutely bonkers, my father I mean, not Christopher Columbus, but he did have what every man wants and what every woman dreams about, Udella please tell Juanita she can stop laughing, I’m talking about a weekly paycheck, he was a good provider, for nearly twenty years he worked at Consolidated Vultee Aircraft which changed its name to Convair and then changed it again to General Dynamics Corporation, he was a turret lathe and milling machine operator, he helped build the wing assemblies of the B-36, B-58, and F-111 airplanes with guys named Jim Hodges and Ike Pemberton and Finn Wahl, and he rode thirty-four miles each way to work in a car pool with guys named Bill Poe and Wayne Harmon and Hubert Beard, his round dark green plastic-covered badge said he was employee number 183473, Daddy’s badge I mean, not Hubert Beard’s, not that I ever really noticed, then he got sick and died about a year and a half before he would have been eligible to retire and it’s a damn shame, pardon my French, that he died of pancreatic cancer, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone so be careful what you pray for because you just might get it, and it is way past time to end it for now, this is Billy Ray Barnwell your roving reporter signing off.

(end of Chapter 2)

Okay, so it's not Remembrance Of Things Past by Marcel Proust, but it is what it is.

A dedication to end all dedications, or Meet the king of the comma splice

[Editor's note. I haven't mentioned Billy Ray Barnwell in a long time, and since there may be new readers among you (one can only hope) I thought I would show you/them the dedication to his now-decade-old book. Billy Ray is not exactly my alter ego, but he was ensconced in my brain for quite a while before I managed to get him out of there and down on paper. If you would like to read the whole book (again, one can only hope), it can be reached online by clicking on the link under the heading MY OTHER BLOG IS A ROLLS-ROYCE in the sidebar to your right. I want to warn you that Billy's writing style is rather unorthodox and you may find yourself gasping for breath, but please don't let that deter you. --RWP]


DEDICATION

Billy Ray Barnwell here, I let Udella Mabry who lives two apartments down read what I wrote for a Preface when she got back from her regular weekly hair appointment at Opal’s Beauty Palace and she said well, you have some pretty long sentences in there and you spell right good too, I was quite pleased to get both of those compliments because I consider Udella as fair and impartial a judge as they come plus you can’t hear nice things too often if you ask me, which you didn’t, but it reminded me of the only time I ever wound up anything but first in one of Mrs. Mary Lillard’s Friday afternoon eighth grade spelling bees, we would choose up into two sides and stand along opposite walls and if you missed your word you took your seat, I was always the last one standing and whichever side chose first always chose me before anybody else, it was kind of a guarantee of winning, but one time when several people were still standing, Mrs. Lillard gave me the word “material” to spell, only being a good Texan she said it like it had three syllables instead of four, I think that’s what threw me, because I stood right up there in front of God and everybody and spelled it M-A-T-E-I-R-A-L, and the whole room whooped and hollered for about three minutes, it was a day I would rather forget, prolly the low point of my entire life up to that time. Anyways, getting back to dedicating this book, if you managed to read the preface all the way through you prolly think I’m going to dedicate it to Mr. D. P. Morris, my old English teacher back in Grapevine Texas, well you would be wrong because I am not, I am going to dedicate it to Mrs. Janet Baines Brockett instead. Mrs. Brockett lived on the same gravel road we did about two miles out of town, we were the first house and she was the fourth, so we were neighbors even though it was about a mile to her house, Jimmy Wayne Oxley and Howard Griffin lived in between, Jimmy Wayne was two years behind me in school and his mother raised Poland China hogs, and Howard was the guy who later wrote the book Black Like Me even though he was white, Lord, that’s a whole story in itself, he went blind for ten or twelve years because of a plane crash he was in during World War II but one day when he was walking in his parents’ fields with his collie dog a blood clot behind his eyes suddenly dissolved, Howard’s eyes I mean, not the collie dog’s, and he could see again, and after that he said his blindness had taught him that the color of a person’s skin meant nothing, now this was a revolutionary idea in the South at the time, it was so shocking that after Howard’s book came out some local racists made a dummy and hanged Howard in effigy from one of the town’s two stop lights during the middle of the night, its right side was white and its left side was black and a big yellow stripe was painted down its back, the dummy I mean, not the stop light, and there it was the next morning, just hanging there, when everybody made the turn to go to school, personally I thought it said a whole lot more about the local racists than it did about Howard, and nobody took it down until after a news photographer from The Fort Worth Star-Telegram came out and took a picture to put in the paper. All Howard had done was he went down to New Orleans and paid to have a doctor chemically darken his skin, Howard’s skin I mean, not the doctor’s, and after wandering around the South for a while as a black man he came home, eventually his skin went back to being white and later he wrote about his experiences in a book, and his parents kept hogs just like the Oxleys, wait, I don’t mean the hogs were just like the Oxleys, I mean the Griffins kept hogs just like the Oxleys did, but they were Ohio Improved Chester Whites, the hogs I mean, not Howard’s parents. While he was blind, Howard had married Pie Holland, well her name was really Elizabeth but everybody in town called her Pie, and they had two children which he had never seen either her or them until that day he went walking in the field with his collie dog, you talk about a story. Anyways, not counting summers I rode to school with Mrs. Brockett every day of my life between second grade and eleventh grade, well Mondays through Fridays anyways, mainly because she was going there anyhow, she taught mathematics in the high school and all twelve grades were in the same building, and I would have gone with her in twelfth grade too if she hadn’t retired from teaching after my Junior year and the school hired old Mrs. Vickers, Flavill George’s mother, as math teacher when it hired Flavill as the new football coach, let me tell you she couldn’t hold a candle to Mrs. Brockett when it came to teaching, for one thing during trigonometry tests Mrs. Vickers let us use a sheet of paper with all the formulas on it, sines and cosines and secants and tangents, stuff like that, she didn’t make us memorize them like Mrs. Brockett did and as a result I can tell you very little today about trigonometry but I can still quote you the quadratic equation thanks to Mrs. Brockett, X equals minus B plus or minus the square root of B square minus four A C over two A, and to think some people actually say what good is algebra. Mrs. Brockett would tell me things on the way to school, for instance she told me about her grandfather who was a Southern Baptist preacher back in the early days of Texas before there was even such a thing as Southern Baptists, he supposedly baptized Sam Houston, stuff like that, and she got all upset at the thought that her daughter Genevieve had gone and married a Presbyterian but after visiting her daughter and son-in-law she seemed so relieved, she went to church with them and saw that Presbyterians preached the Scriptures too so she decided that they were just Baptists who have a little money, Presbyterians I mean, not Genevieve and John, although John was an architect so I suppose he had money, and also Mrs. Brockett’s son Delwyn became chairman of the board of Gulf Oil and whenever it was that Queen Elizabeth came over to Canada and dedicated the St. Lawrence Seaway Mrs. Brockett got to sit on the same platform with The Queen thanks to Delwyn. He was really Ernest D. Junior but I guess they called him Delwyn so they wouldn’t get confused at home and he went to Texas A&M and got a geology degree and eventually he married Francis Sammons from over in Keller and they had a son named Belmont who went to Duke University and years later after Delwyn retired from Gulf Oil they moved to the Royal Palm Yacht and Country Club in Boca Raton Florida and eventually it was bought out by British Petroleum, Gulf Oil I mean, not the Royal Palm Yacht and Country Club or Boca Raton Florida. But back to Mrs. Brockett, she drove her old two-tone green 1949 Pontiac with both hands on the wheel and both eyes on the road and she wouldn’t look anywhere else for all the tea in China, I know because I tried to get her to many times, but the thing I love most about Mrs. Brockett was after she retired from teaching I visited her in Arlington Texas when L.B.J. was in the White House, and I said, “Mrs. Brockett, you were a Baines weren’t you, are you any kin to Lyndon Baines Johnson?” and she said, “Oh, yes, Billy, I thought you knew that,” and I said, “Well, have any of the White House historians contacted you?” and she said, “Yes they have, but I told them they didn’t want to talk to me, they should go talk to the other side of the family,” and she wasn’t real happy that Lynda Bird or Lucy Baines one, I can’t remember which, had brown eyes instead of blue eyes like the Baineses and she told me how she and President Johnson’s mother, Rebekah Baines, were first cousins and how they used to go shopping together when they were young ladies before either one of them was married, we’re talking 1906 or 1907 here, and how Rebekah Baines was so stately and so dignified and that it was like being in the presence of royalty to walk down the street with Rebekah Baines and then Mrs. Brockett got a faraway look in her eyes like she was remembering something she hadn’t thought of in a long time, something she would rather forget if she could, only she couldn’t, and what came out of her mouth was “And then she had to go and marry that trashy Sam Johnson” and need I remind you she was talking about the father of the man who was then president of the United States and who if he had had a son in addition to his two daughters Linda Bird and Lucy Baines would prolly have named him Bird Baines, L.B.J. was so self-centered even his wife and dog had the initials L.B.J., Lady Bird Johnson and Little Beagle Johnson respectively, but L.B.J. the dog’s pups were called Him and Her and the president later got his picture in the newspapers when he picked up either Him or Her by the ears, I forget which one, dog I mean, not ear, and one time he even showed photographers the scars from his gall bladder operation, Lyndon’s operation I mean, not Him’s or Her’s, you talk about a trashy guy, I guess it’s true that the apple never falls far from the tree. Anyways, that one statement of Mrs. Brockett’s, plus the fact that A she may have been the first woman to graduate with a degree in mathematics from Baylor University in Waco Texas and B she lived to be 92 years old and C one day in the car on the way to school this woman whose whole career involved numbers shocked me by reciting from memory the first twelve lines of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard” complete with the beetle’s droning flight and the moping owl complaining¹ and D when I came back from my hitch in the military and told her I had accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior she said, “You know, don’t you, Billy, that only a Southern Baptist minister has the right to baptize you,” is why I have decided to dedicate this book to the memory of the one and only Janet Baines Brockett, because they don’t make people like that any more, or if they do I haven’t met any, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

-------------------------------------------

¹Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
(first twelve lines only)
by Thomas Gray (1716 - 1771)

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
.....The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
.....And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimm'ring landscape on the sight,
.....And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
.....And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;

Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow'r
.....The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such, as wand'ring near her secret bow'r,
.....Molest her ancient solitary reign.

There is always method in my madness

During the run-up to the recent American presidential election, certain bloggers from the U.K. who shall remain nameless would occasionally make a comment about the ultimate winner's surname, which is Trump in case some of you have forgotten. Apparently in England that word (Trump) means what my mother used to refer to as "breaking wind" and what much of current-day America calls "fart" (an Anglo-Saxon word that is not in my vocabulary, the technical terms being "flatulence" or "passing gas" or "tooting").

Who knew?

Anyhoo, it got me to thinking (how novel) about the chapter on names in my book Billy Ray Barnwell Here: The Meanderings of a Twisted Mind which you can access in its entirety by clicking on a link in the sidebar over there to the right.

So, to make a long story short and not to beat around the proverbial bush one second longer than necessary, I have decided to show you yet another chapter of that book, Chapter 7 to be exact, right here at rhymeswithplague in the hope that someone somewhere will be tricked encouraged to read more of Billy Ray's outpourings for him- or herself.

Anyone who does will learn very quickly that Billy Ray has a mind of his own that is not at all like mine. He writes very long, run-on sentences that can be downright exhausting. That was done on purpose. I set out to write a book that ignored all the rules of writing, and I think I just may have succeeded.

I'm pretty sure I haven't shown you this before but I could be wrong.


Chapter 7

Billy Ray Barnwell here, Mama always said fools rush in where angels fear to tread, but here goes anyway, some people have unusual names, don’t you think? for example the principal of the high school I attended back in Not Grapevine Texas was named Willie Pigg, he had a daughter named Barbara Ann and a son named Billy Dale, you’re prolly saying what’s wrong with that? well don’t look now but their initials were B. A. Pigg and B. D. Pigg, why would anyone do that to their children?, and back around World War Eye as the famous bandleader Lawrence Welk would say there was also a Governor of Texas named Jim Hogg, he and the lovely Mrs. Hogg had a daughter they named Ima, that’s right folks, Ima Hogg, and legend has it there was also a Ura Hogg but that has been emphatically denied, I have heard that in her old age Miss Ima Hogg reigned supreme as the grande dame of Houston society sort of like Alice Roosevelt Longworth the daughter of President Teddy Roosevelt did up there in Washington D.C. with her little pillow that said if you can’t say something nice about someone come sit by me, but I don’t know whatever became of Miss Ura, if indeed there ever was a Miss Ura, I guess the jury is still out on that one. In the service I had a friend named Jim Parsley and I knew of a guy whose last name was Turnipseed and I worked with a Marsha Lamb, I don’t know what it is with animals and vegetables, oh and my first grade teacher back in Pawtucket Rhode Island, as the famous newspaper columnist Dave Barry says I am not making this up, was Miss Edith Wildegoose, I still have her wedding announcement that Mama cut out of the newspaper to prove it, yes I was born in Rhode Island but only because I wanted to be near my mother and she happened to be there at the time, but just as soon as I could convince my family, we moved to the South, well that’s a little joke but it’s not entirely untrue, I was six years old and pre-asthmatic when the doctor told my parents I would prolly do better in a drier climate, and since my father thought he might find work in the aerospace industry, we sold our furniture and packed up our clothes and left our third-floor apartment at 61 Larch Street and our landlord Mr. Lee Vitale pronounced Mr. Leave-a-TALLY and the Misses Irma Chisolm and Yvonne Schack at the Pawtucket Day Nursery and also Mrs. Mullins who taught me for one whole week in public kindergarten before I was moved into the first-grade class of the aforementioned Miss Edith Wildegoose at Hancock Street Elementary School and moved to Fort Worth Texas on a train, a trip that took three days and two nights. I can hear some of you saying Texas isn’t the South, it’s the Southwest, well it seceded if that’s any qualification, but getting back to odd names, let us not forget Tom Bledsoe, and Mama said she knew a girl back in Philadelphia named Violet Roach, and when I finally got around to taking Latin in college the teacher who taught me all about conjugating the verbs and declining the nouns and adjectives so that I finally understood Mama’s little joke and also realized that my uncle wasn’t saying “so messy phooey” at all, he was saying the principal parts of the verb to be in Latin, was named Elizabeth Beaver. I have heard that when people began using surnames several hundred years ago they might pick a nearby geographical feature like Hill or Field or Rivers, or their occupation like Carpenter or Taylor or Cooper which means barrel maker, or an identifying physical characteristic like Long or Short, we won’t delve into that any further, or an animal name like Wolf or Fox or Byrd, but why someone would choose Beaver or Roach or Wildegoose is beyond me, and it’s not just animals either, some names just sound right and some do not, take colors for example, we all have friends named the Whites or the Blacks or the Browns or the Grays or the Greens but do we have friends named the Yellows or the Purples or the Oranges or the Beiges? no we do not and in the great overall cosmic scheme of things there’s prolly a very good reason why we do not, and some people go out of their way to try to be cute, for example that guy who wrote the book Chitty Chitty Bang Bang had characters in it named Truly Scrumptious and Caractacus Potts, of course those people were not real, but I think trying to be cute can create a burden for the child, for example George Lear who created Lear Jet airplanes named his daughter Crystal and so far so good but her middle name was, are you ready for this?, Chanda, that’s right, Crystal Chanda Lear, and my friend John Cornelius told me the other day he used to know a girl named Candy Machine but he may have been pulling my leg. Girls seem to have to bear the brunt of parental inventiveness, for example I know a family named Musselwhite where the sons are named Fred and Wayne but the daughter’s name is Fredonia, and I know another family named Furbush where the son’s name is Carl, common enough, but the daughter’s name is Tranquilla. Fredonia Musselwhite and Tranquilla Furbush and both of them are Caucasian, so you can stop giggling and rolling your eyes about the Sha’niquas and Champaydrons in your local African-American community. Two of my all-time favorite names are Ninnie Threadgood and Fannie Flagg, one is real and one is made up, in fact the one that is real made up the one that is made up, maybe we could start a contest and you can guess which is which, just send your postcard entries to me, Billy Ray Barnwell, care of General Delivery, Not Grapevine Texas, say either “Ninnie Threadgood invented Fannie Flagg” or “Fannie Flagg invented Ninnie Threadgood,” whichever one you think, we could have a drawing for the big prize, maybe a year’s supply of fried green tomatoes or something, this could be big, really big, but getting back to names, we all know families who fixate on a particular initial, for example I know a D group, Don, Doris, Darryl, and Dawn and I know a J group where the children are Jonathan, Jennifer, Jessica, Jeremy, Jason, Justin, and Julia, but the parents, go figure, are David and Sabrina. I also know a woman with a beautiful name, Amalfi, who told me her father was visiting in Italy and saw a highway sign that said Amalfi and he said if he ever had a daughter he was going to name her that, I told her if he had gone to Atlanta instead we would be calling her I-285 today, either that or Peachtree Industrial Boulevard. Amalfi’s sister Sammie has a total of 21 names because her father happened to be the pastor of a small church and when his wife became pregnant every woman in the congregation suggested a name for the new addition and since the pastor and his wife didn’t want to show favoritism or hurt anyone’s feelings they used all 21 names, Amalfi can rattle them off without blinking an eye but I can never remember what all of Sammie’s names are, the whole concept is so overwhelming, so whenever I see Sammie I just make some names up and say Hi there, Sammie Imogene Esmerelda Hildegarde Florence Ophelia Desdemona Eleanor Bess Mamie Jacqueline Ladybird Thelma Betty Rosalyn Nancy Barbara Hillary Laura, well you get the picture, and we all have a good laugh, Sammie doesn’t mind, but one thing she does do is she gets married a lot, she has been married several times in what I believe is an unconscious attempt to have enough last names to bring the scales into balance. Then there’s the case of everyone’s favorite violet-eyed actress, the famous Elizabeth Rosamund Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Burton Warner Fortensky, I don’t know what her reason is, and let’s not even attempt to understand Zsa Zsa Gabor who is from Hungary and has been married so many times her wedding dress is prolly drip-dry. Speaking of Hungary, foreign names are a world unto themselves, for example people from India all seem to have names like Praline Lolafalana or Bajeeb Bagoshbaghali, don’t you think? and we have all heard about names that are prolly just jokes, you know the ones, let me write phonetically here, fuh-MOLLY, oh-RON-juh-LO, luh-MON-juh-LO (female, orange jello, lemon jello), it just gets worse, my step-uncle, that would be my stepmother’s brother, married a woman named Ovaline and I always called her Ovaltine, behind her back of course, and years ago when a friend of mine married his wife Udella, no kin to Udella Mabry, three little kids I know began calling her Umbrella, behind her back of course, maybe it’s something in their DNA, like I said earlier the apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree, and on that disturbing note this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.


[Editor's note. Something else that prompted this particular post was the fact that we ran into Amalfi and Sammie at lunch yesterday at Captain D's seafood restaurant. We hadn't seen either of them in about eight years. Here's Amalfi, who is nearly 90, with Mrs. RWP:

And here's her sister Sammie, who informed me she is 93 (she looks 60), has 19 names (not 21), and that it is their sister Peggy who has been married so many times, not her.

Keeping it real, folks, keeping it real. --RWP]

"We" forsooth, or isn't doomsday by definition unsurvivable?

So just in case everyone continues hell-bent for leather to put candles on birthday cakes in spite of the wonderful suggestion in my last post and global warming continues unabated, hastening the end (a scant 500 million years hence) or not (the end could happen sooner, when we least expect it, perhaps on a sunny afternoon next October, for example), I urge you to read what some nice scientists at Columbia University have published, a learned treatise on what we will need to do to survive doomsday. The article is brought to us courtesy of an internet news service in Australia, wouldn't you know, even though doomsday is by definition, as I mentioned in the title of this post, something no one will survive.

The comments after the article are interesting too, but I would really love to hear my readers' reactions.

It occurs to me that by the time our race is that old, perhaps we ("we" forsooth) having grown weary of the world like Tolkien's elves, will be ready, even eager, happily anticipating -- mama in her kerchief and I in my cap, as it were -- lying down for the longest of all winter naps, but that, I suppose, is beside the point.

What concerns me more than any of that is the fact that my writing and thought processes are becoming more and more like Billy Ray Barnwell's (q.v.) every day.

Since June is the month for weddings, here are some helpful hints from Billy Ray Barnwell

Billy Ray Barnwell here, I’m getting ready this week to play for a wedding at our church, Ashley and Dustin are getting married, and they’re a lovely young couple, really they are, but every time I think of the phrase “Ashley and Dustin” I don’t see the beautiful blond girl and the handsome tall boy, what plays on the movie screen of my mind is, wouldn’t you know it, right out of the movies, only it’s kind of warped, I see Dustin Hoffman as Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy walking down the streets of Manhattan but Jon Voight is not walking next to him wearing that great fringed cowboy jacket, no, who I see walking next to Dustin Hoffman is Leslie Howard, the actor who played Ashley Wilkes in Gone With The Wind in 1939, he was the one that Scarlett O’Hara wanted and sweet Melanie got, and it really freaks me out as to why Dustin Hoffman would be walking with Leslie Howard, Leslie is all dressed up in his Ashley Wilkes Civil War uniform, gray for the Confederacy, and Dustin and Ashley are holding hands in my movie just like George W. Bush and that prince from Saudi Arabia did, maybe I’m finally going off the deep end, I’m sorry but that’s what I see, whatever happened to good old-fashioned names like Willard and Edna, Cletis and Eula Mae, Herb and Phyllis, Walter and Margaret, Arthur and Irma, Clarence and Mildred, Vernon and Gladys, you just knew with names like those that their marriages were solid as a rock, nobody ever got divorced in the old days, or if they did we don’t seem to have kept a record of it, they were pretty good back then about making their bed and lying in it, not like nowadays where if a relationship doesn’t make you tingle all over at all times you just shed it and try another one, it’s kind of a serial polygamy if you ask me, which I know you didn’t but I’m just saying, but at least Ashley and Dustin, the real ones I mean, not the figments of my overworked imagination, are getting married, they haven’t forsaken the institution, their mamas raised them right. So anyways I thought as a public service I would include a list of light classics that are suitable for playing at weddings, it’s also a fitting tribute to my piano teacher, Mrs. Alyne Eagan, who had polio when she was younger and walked with crutches but it didn’t keep her from driving a car and after I had taken piano lessons from her for about eight years she suddenly married a Mr. Cyrus and moved to Las Cruces New Mexico with her slightly crazy teen-aged son and the only person left in town who taught piano was Miss Clara Malone of Holly Springs Mississippi, how Miss Clara ever wound up in Not Grapevine Texas would prolly make a story in itself except I don’t know it, but I do know she couldn’t teach piano worth a lick, mostly she prepared people to go back to their church and play hymns out of their hymnbook, she was a Methodist but she preferred the Southern Baptists’ Broadman Hymnal to the Cokesbury, I never did know what Mrs. Eagan was but she would drive into Fort Worth every month and play for the Downtown Kiwanis Club’s monthly luncheon meeting and she claimed to have accompanied Ginger Rogers before she became a famous dancer and movie star, Ginger I mean, not Mrs. Eagan, now that would have been a sight to see, her doing everything Fred Astaire did only backwards and in high heels while also using crutches, well anyways back to the list of wedding music, there’s “Clair de Lune” which means moonlight and also “Reverie” which means reverie, both of them are by the French composer Claude Debussy, there’s “Liebestraum” which is German for Dream of Love by Franz Liszt, I always have to work hard to get the cadenzas right, and there are several good ones by Frederic Chopin which is pronounced SHO-pan such as his “Etude in E Major,” and there’s the “Eighteenth Variation From Rhapsody On A Theme By Paganini” by Sergei Rachmaninoff, no kidding, that is what it is called, Eighteenth Variation From Rhapsody On a Theme By Paganini which is not by Paganini but by Rachmaninoff, the Variation I mean, not the Rhapsody, which is by Paganini, or maybe it’s the Theme, how confusing can you get, and by the way the composers’ names are pronounced SAIR-GAY Rock-MAH-nih-nawf and pagguh-NEE-nee respectively, one was Russian and the other was Italian, you might have heard it in the movie Somewhere In Time if you weren’t drooling over either Christopher Reeve or Jane Seymour, so if you want a classy wedding choose those pieces, I have also played at weddings where the bride wanted things like “Beauty And The Beast” which I definitely think sends the wrong message about the groom, or “The Little Mermaid,” Disney stuff, people have gotten away from songs by Karen Carpenter and that one by Noel Stookey of Peter, Paul, and Mary, I can never remember whether Noel was Peter or Paul but he definitely wasn’t Mary, and certain movie themes are popular like the themes from Ice Castles and Somewhere In Time and “Tara’s Theme” from Gone With The Wind, hey, there’s Gone With The Wind again, some of the older wedding music is completely dead and buried now, “Oh Promise Me” and “I Love You Truly” and “Because” to name three, they’d laugh you out of the church if you sang those today or maybe they’d just sit there in complete shock, oh one that is quite popular of late is “The Prayer” as sung by Celine Dion and Andrea Bocelli, it says so right on the sheet music, only most of the times I have heard it sung it hasn’t sounded the least bit like Celine Dion and Andrea Bocelli, but at least people are still getting married and I have to hand it to Dustin and Ashley for respecting the institution of marriage, like I said, they were raised right, Ashley’s mother plays bass guitar in our church’s praise band and Dustin’s mom and dad sing alto and bass in the sanctuary choir, well to be precise his mom sings alto and his dad sings bass, I didn’t mean to imply that they both yodeled in the choir. I guess Tevye in Fiddler On The Roof was right, there’s something to be said for tradition, of course the Bible says that you have made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition, don’t get mad at me, Jesus is the one who said it, and by you and your he meant the scribes and the Pharisees, they were the ones he was talking to, so if you are neither a scribe nor a Pharisee then you needn’t get your panties in a wad or your knickers in a twist as they say in Great Britain which is also called the United Kingdom even though it has a queen, but if you are one, a scribe or a Pharisee I mean, not a queen, then do us all a favor and clean up your act, the world would be a much better place, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

[Editor’s note. The foregoing is Chapter 27 from Billy Ray Barnwell Here, a 2007 book written by my imaginary friend, nemesis, and alter ego, the one and only Billy Ray Barnwell. --RWP]

When my old English teacher, Mr. D.P. Morris, said to write the way you talk, he probably didn’t take into account Billy Ray Barnwell

Still, and I am as sure of this as I am of anything, Mr. Morris would have expected us to be able to diagram the 1,590-word sentence that is Chapter 33 of Billy Ray’s book, Billy Ray Barnwell Here (The Meanderings of a Twisted Mind). Billy Ray may or may not be my alter ego but he definitely functions as my steam valve. When things get all bottled up inside, out comes Billy Ray.

Unlike moi, he is not without quirks endearing qualities. For example, every chapter of his book begins “Billy Ray Barnwell here” and ends “and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.” I prefer to think of his meanderings as (a) stream of consciousness writing, rather like James Joyce without the profanity and (b) a definite challenge to Mr. D.P. Morris’s love of the diagrammed sentence.

Here, then, for your reading astonishment pleasure, is an offering from today’s guest blogger, Billy Ray Barnwell:


CHAPTER 33

Billy Ray Barnwell here, I feel this thing winding down, I really do, I wish it didn’t have to be this way, but as Mama used to say, “if wishes were horses then beggars would ride,” I’m telling you, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Daddy would say “wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which you get the most of” only sometimes he wouldn’t say spit, the word he said did rhyme with spit however, but before I throw in the towel, before I call it quits and walk off into the sunset, before I say “and good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are” like the great comedian Jimmy Durante, I thought I would share a few more poems with you that I have written over the years and just stuck in a desk drawer, some of them go way back, my poems I mean, not my desk drawers, and the reason I’m going to share them with you is I may never write another book, I mean I never intended to write this one, it just sort of happened, bird by bird like Anne Lamott said, five hundred words here, five hundred words there, sometimes more, sometimes less, bit by bit, day by day, it turned out that sitting in front of a computer was more habit-forming than I ever dreamed it would be, when I said in the beginning I could learn to like this I had no idea, so along with all this new stuff I have churned out I don’t want the old stuff to go to waste, not that anything ever really goes to waste if you believe Mr. Albert Einstein, E equals m c squared and all that, I have no idea if what I just said is true, the part about nothing ever really going to waste I mean, not the E equals m c squared part, I presume that that is true although I don’t know how you could ever prove it, I guess that’s why it’s called the THEORY of relativity, because no one can prove it, physics was my worst subject back at Not Grapevine High School, all I remember is something about levers and fulcrums, the rest went in one ear and out the other and never settled down in my gray matter, of course it didn’t help that the physics teacher also sang high tenor in a Southern gospel quartet on weekends, he didn’t know a glissando from a hemidemisemiquaver but still tried to teach us to read shaped notes like the Sacred Harp crowd does, that’s another Southern tradition that prolly causes you Northern readers to scratch your heads, I won’t go into shaped notes or Sacred Harp, both of them are just too bizarre, you have to remember what a diamond and a square and a kettle and different kinds of triangles mean and you have to sing fa sol la fa sol la sol fa, you talk about strange, I prefer A to take my fa sol las with do re mis at the beginning and a ti do at the end like any normal person would and B to look at round notes, well to be honest they’re actually elliptical, oval, ovoid, whatever, and C to remember F-A-C-E and Every Good Boy Does Fine for the spaces and lines in the treble clef and All Cars Eat Gas or All Cows Eat Grass and Good Boys Do Fine Always for the spaces and lines in the bass clef instead, mnemonic devices are an interesting phenomenon in themselves, there are acronyms like COMOS to help you remember the five tribes of the Iroquois nation only I think I remember reading there were six and there’s TULIPS to help you remember the six tenets of Calvinism only I think I remember reading there were five, and there are phrases like Gentiles Eat Pork Chops and General Electric Power Company to help you remember the order of some of St. Paul’s letters in the New Testament, people tell me all the time I should try to get on Jeopardy and the truth is I did, try I mean, not get on, I went one bright spring morning in April of 2003 to the Marriott Marquis Hotel in downtown Atlanta to their auditions, they were in town for three days, Jeopardy I mean, not the Marriott Marquis Hotel, and I was one of four people who passed the written test in my particular session, there were about sixty people in this big room and some of them had come from as far away as Pensacola Florida and Greenville South Carolina and Knoxville Tennessee and after the other fifty-six had been dismissed the four of us who were left played some sample games of Jeopardy complete with those little buzzer dooma-flotchies right there in the Marriott Marquis, and after the games we filled out some forms and they took Polaroid pictures of the four of us, individually I mean, not together, and said they would keep us in their files for fourteen months but unfortunately I never heard another word from the folks at Jeopardy, it kind of hurt my feelings, I don’t know about the other three, but I eventually got over it, and let me just state for the record here that I don’t study trivia, I don’t like the game Trivial Pursuit at all, things just enter my mind through my eye gates and my ear gates and they stay there except of course anything having to do with physics or chemistry, for example I learned years ago A that comedienne Carol Burnett had a younger sister named Christine who was married to an actor named Will Hutchins who starred in a TV western series called Sugarfoot and B that the wife of Mexican actor Ricardo Montalban was the sister of Oscar-winning actress Loretta Young and C that Roy Rogers and Dale Evans were names somebody in Hollywood invented for two people named Leonard Franklin Slye and Francis Octavia Smith and I just never forgot those facts, one doesn’t try to explain these things, one just suffers in silence for the most part, and when some fact comes out of your mouth, which it inevitably will, people think you are showing off when you’re not, someone wrote a love song once called “You’re Easy To Remember, And So Hard To Forget,” well that describes my malady pretty well, maybe it’s not a malady, maybe it’s a blessing in disguise, I remember being at a computer conference in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania back in 1969 and some of us were having dinner in the hotel with some colleagues from Sweden who were attending the conference and one of the Swedes said something about kviksilver and everyone’s face had a blank expression except mine, I said, oh, we have that word in our language, you’re talking about mercury, an old name for mercury in English is quicksilver, not quick as in fast but quick as in living, quick as in the phrase the quick and the dead in the Apostles’ Creed which means the living and the dead, quick as in quickening which is what they used to call it when a pregnant woman first knows the baby inside her is alive because she feels it moving, plus mercury looks alive as it rolls around in little balls which you would know if you have ever broken a thermometer, but it might could mean fast silver also because Mercury is of course the messenger of the gods and he is always pictured with wings on his helmet and on his heels because he is so swift, I believe he is also the symbol of the Florists Telegraph Delivery Service but I may be wrong, or maybe the whole thing is just a big linguistic coincidence, of course you do have to be living to be fast, dead people just lie there and don’t move at all, it all came out in a torrent like it had been dammed up for a long time and Lars-Gustav Halverson kind of harrumphed and said “trivia” and Sue Levy from our office, bless her heart, leaped to my defense, well she didn’t actually leap because we were all seated around the dinner table, what she actually did was she said to Lars-Gustav which is pronounced Larsh GOO-stawf, “What’s trivia, anything you’re not interested in?” and she became one of my heroes at that moment and all of these years later I still remember that evening, boy I would like to see them try to make a movie out of this book, Hollywood I mean, not Sue Levy and Lars-Gustav Halverson, and maybe in the next one, if there is a next one, book I mean, not movie, I will be able to set aside all the trivia and tell you about the people who are really important in my life, for instance there’s A Eleanor, my wife of, lo, these many years, and B our two great sons and their wives and C our wonderful daughter and her husband, and D our six absolutely magnificent grandchildren, two were born in Marietta Georgia and two were born in Birmingham Alabama and two were born in St. Petersburg Florida, but before I could even begin to tell you about them I need to clear my mind of all this clutter, well I guess the time has come to say it one last time, this is Billy Ray, oops, I almost forgot about the poems.

[Editor’s note. At this point in Chapter 33, Billy Ray displays 40 of his poems (I shall not include them here, but I shall tease you with their titles) . --RWP]

The People in Belle Glade
Sonnets for the Space Age, circa 1976 (I, II, III, IV, V)
An Amplified Catharsis
An Afternoon Encounter
And All The While The Far Hyena Laughter
Be Still And Know
Canute (994?-1035)
Deathwatch
December, 1972
Delirium
Eyewitness
Glossolalia, or The Gift of Tongues
In Crowded Elevators, Silent Men
Intrusions
Lament
Matins
Meditation for Christmas Eve
Nebuchadnezzar To His Astrologers
On Being Shown a Photograph of an Ancestor
On Viewing a Medieval Bridal Chamber
October 25, 2004
The Entrepreneurial Spirit In The Twenty-first Century
Poem, Untitled
Revelation
Table Grace With Musings Afterward
The Thing About His Poetry Is
Nancy Reagan
Oz Redux
Six Six Six
Byzantine Christ
Thy Brother’s Blood
To Lukewarm In Laodicea
A Hummingbird Came To Our Patio
Visitation
Florabelle Oxley (1918-2007)
The Writer

after which the chapter ends with Billy Ray’s trademark line, “and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.”

To read any of the poems, click here.

To read Billy Ray’s entire book, go over to the sidebar and click on the link under the heading My Other Blog Is A Rolls-Royce.

To read one other poem entitled “To Eleanor” you must read the Epilogue to Billy Ray’s book.

To learn more about Mr. D.P. Morris, click here.

When the juices aren’t flowing

...it’s a good time to let Billy Ray Barnwell out of his cage and be our guest blogger for the day. For those who don’t know, Billy is sort of my alter ego and sort of not; suffice it to say that he and I have somewhat of a shared history except that his incorporates a lot of fiction and mine actually happened.

Here’s another chapter from his book, Billy Ray Barnwell Here:


CHAPTER 2

Billy Ray Barnwell here, in one of these little chapters or vignettes or whatever they are I absolutely positively must get started on a poem or essay or something really literary, boy it sure is hard being an author, there are so many possibilities to choose from that some days I can’t focus at all, maybe I could find me a pill I could take for that, but I sure wouldn’t want to become dependent on drugs like Udella Mabry’s cousin Virgil Abernathy did, that was a really sad case, but after he finished doing his time he went to school and became the town pharmacist, so all’s well that ends well, to coin a phrase. I do know this is not going to be a novel because if I were going to write me a novel the characters would already be saying things like “It don’t make me no never mind” and “If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy,” things I would never say in real life. I wish I could think of something interesting to write about today, nothing ever happens in this one-horse town, I will just keep pouring the words onto the paper and maybe something good will come of it, I have faith in the process. Mr. Morris said the only way to become a writer is to write, I don’t know why it took me so long to actually do it, Udella said the other day just think this is how Ernest Hemingway got started and I said I like William Faulkner better, then Udella’s buddy Juanita chimed in and said she didn’t care for Faulkner and I asked her why not and she scrunched up her face for a minute like she was trying to decide why herself and finally she said “too many words” well let me tell you I was flabbergasted, it was just like that scene in that Amadeus movie where the Italian composers tell the king or duke or whatever he is that Mozart’s music has too many notes, well in my opinion we should all have too many notes like Mozart or too many words like Faulkner, even though he did tend to use words like “scrofulous” and “phylacteries” and “lugubrious” and “mendaciously,” Faulkner I mean, not Mozart, which always sent me scurrying to the dictionary, wait a minute, hold the fort, that isn’t Faulkner I’m thinking of, that’s Thomas Wolfe, talk about a man who used too many words, O by the lost and wind-grieved ghost come back again my eye, why couldn’t he just write about simple things, a stone, a leaf, a door, that’s a joke for all you literary types, I’m sure it will bring great guffaws in English departments at universities all across this wonderful land of ours, and for those of you who don’t get the joke, I don’t want to ruin your concentration by explaining it, the joke I mean, not your concentration.

I wouldn’t want to think the well is running dry or anything, but all I can think to tell you about right now are things my father used to say, such as using a condom is like wearing socks to take a shower, or when you eat beans if you also eat macaroni you will get a pipe organ effect, or the ever popular pull my finger, he was a real delight to know, I didn’t think so then and I don’t think so now, in fact I prayed many times for him to be gone and now that he is I miss him more than I like to admit, damn was his favorite adjective and hell was his favorite noun, he smoked Chesterfield cigarettes like they were going out of style and between him and Mama the ashtrays at our house were always full and the air was always blue with smoke, and in spite of all of that or maybe because of it he started teaching the men’s Sunday School class at the Methodist church, you couldn’t make this stuff up, truth is stranger than fiction, I guess I should cut him some slack, he was a good man trying to do his best, he served in the U.S. Navy during the Second World War as a machinist’s mate, whatever that is, on a ship called the PCE869, which PCE stands for Patrol Craft Escort, I know because he talked about the Navy every single day of his life and it is emblazoned in my brain along with the Great Lakes Naval Training Center and the Panama Canal Zone that has towns named Cristobal and Colón and when you say Colón it is not like the part of your body that is somewhere between your stomach and your anal sphincter, it is like the cologne that a man might want to splash on various parts of his body before going out on a big date so that if a person got close enough to smell him that person would end up smelling the cologne and not the body parts, oh by the way Cristobal Colón means Christopher Columbus in Spanish, he drove me absolutely bonkers, my father I mean, not Christopher Columbus, but he did have what every man wants and what every woman dreams about, Udella please tell Juanita she can stop laughing, I’m talking about a weekly paycheck, he was a good provider, for nearly twenty years he worked at Consolidated Vultee Aircraft which changed its name to Convair and then changed it again to General Dynamics Corporation, he was a turret lathe and milling machine operator, he helped build the wing assemblies of the B-36, B-58, and F-111 airplanes with guys named Jim Hodges and Ike Pemberton and Finn Wahl, and he rode thirty-four miles each way to work in a car pool with guys named Bill Poe and Wayne Harmon and Hubert Beard, his round dark green plastic-covered badge said he was employee number 183473, Daddy’s badge I mean, not Hubert Beard’s, not that I ever really noticed, then he got sick and died about a year and a half before he would have been eligible to retire and it’s a damn shame, pardon my French, that he died of pancreatic cancer, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone so be careful what you pray for because you just might get it, and it is way past time to end it for now, this is Billy Ray Barnwell your roving reporter signing off.

You say potato, I say 馬鈴薯

As I begin my fifth year of blogging, what better way to pique (not peak) your interest than by being thoroughly and completely incomprehensible?

Please do not be so rude as to mutter under your breath, “Why should today be any different?”

According to Wikipedia, “Chinese, the Chinese languages, or the Sinitic languages (汉语/漢語 Hànyǔ; 华语/華語 Huáyǔ; 中文 Zhōngwén) is a language family consisting of languages which are mostly mutually unintelligible to varying degrees.”

Good, then, we’ll use Chinese.

Actually, there is method in my madness (as opposed to my madness being completely random).

Many of you know that I have another blog called Billy Ray Barnwell Here that was the vehicle to get my unusual book of the same name before the eyes of an adoring public. When I set the blog up, I encouraged people to leave their comments on the topmost post rather than on the individual chapters because this would make it easier for Billy Ray Barnwell to respond.

All was going smoothly until March 28, 2010, when someone named 宥軒 said, and I quote:

“小聊天室彰化聊天室豆豆聊聊天080人聊天室尋夢元聊天咪咪色貼咪咪情色區哈比成人網金瓶成人影片交流區金平梅近親相姦免費影片松島楓看波波貼圖區波波線上美女拳波波線上遊網波波線上戲網波霸美女貼圖區玩女人視訊網玩女人試看片玩女人影片直播色情片直播免費影片芭比成人情色花王影片哈比淫色網哈免費小遊戲洪爺色情免費影片洪爺色情網站影片洪爺色論壇洪爺免費直播片學生妹做愛自拍影片夫妻聯誼視訊美女豆豆聊天室”

I suspected 宥軒 was not a real reader at all and that his or her comment was pornography because a lot of pornographic Chinese comments were showing up on the internet around that time. So I ignored it.

After a year, though, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I decided to find out what 宥軒’s comment said. On April 18, 2011, Billy Ray Barnwell left a comment of his own:

“More than a year has elapsed since the preceding comment showed up, and curiosity, which as we all know eventually killed the cat, finally got the better of me, so using an online translator, I now know who my visitor who speaks Chinese is and what he or she said. Ready?

Yu-Hsuan Chang Hwa said ... small chat room chat room chat room 080 chat Peas dream element erotic chat areas Mimi Mimi Habib color paste gold bottle adult video adult net exchange area close relative Jinping Mei Matsushima Feng rape free videos Bobo Bobo map area to see beautiful women boxing online network wave wave line upstream of the online game network map area beautiful big breasts video network playing a woman playing a woman playing a woman Look at the film live porn video live free adult erotic video Barbie film Kao Habib kinky color screen Hung Yeh Ha free game porn free porn video movie Hung Hung Yeh Yeh Yeh Hung-color forum free live films making film school girl sex video beautiful couple friendship chat room Peas

and all I have to say to Yu-Hsuan Chang Hwa is A you have problems and B you definitely could use a good shrink, probably in more ways than one.”

So it was not real pornography; it was just silly. I did learn, however, that people in China use the word Peas instead of quotation marks.

Something very odd has happened, though. Neither Yu-Hsuan Chang Hwa nor anyone else, Chinese or otherwise, has ever left another comment on Billy Ray Barnwell Here. And that’s a shame, too, because it is a Rolls-Royce.

Where else but here on rhymeswithplague could you read silly Chinese pseudo-pornography and see a photograph of a 1979 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow II on the same post?

It’s a portent, a harbinger, a foretaste of things to come.

A lot can happen in a hundred years (by guest blogger Billy Ray Barnwell)

Billy Ray Barnwell here, I’m sure it will prolly come as no surprise to you, but a lot can happen in a hundred years, and each and every year is memorable for various reasons, take 1901 for example, in that year A the queen of England, Queen Victoria, died after a long reign and B President William McKinley was assassinated in the United States and C the recent end of a war with Spain brought the formerly Spanish territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippine Islands under U.S. control, but as often happens headlines in one century wind up as mere footnotes in the next and by The Year of Our Lord 2001, which is what A.D. which is short for Anno Domini means in our old friend the Latin language, it turned out that A Victoria’s name, when it was mentioned at all, was usually followed by the word “secret” and B the mountain in Alaska named for Mr. McKinley had been called Denali for some time to please the Inuit population and C persons of Hispanic descent, far from being conquered, had become America’s largest minority group. Like I said, a lot can happen in a hundred years. Consider the case of Palm Beach County, Florida, which a hundred years ago didn’t even exist on a map, it was just the northern portion of a very large Dade County (think Miami). Even forty years ago, traffic practically evaporated in South Florida at the end of the winter tourist season, why a person could just about lie down in the middle of U.S. 1 and take a nap, a person might even see crabs crossing highway A-1-A (please, no cracks about your Aunt Mabel and Uncle Claude in Boynton Beach). By 2001, however, discussions about Palm Beach County were not about the increase in automobiles or the decline in crabs but about the disputed 2000 presidential election between Vice President Al Gore of Tennessee and Governor George W. Bush of Texas, well you may not want to believe it, but a hundred years from now people may not care about the role Florida played in the 2000 election, they may not know what a butterfly ballot was, they may not have any idea what chads, dimpled or otherwise, were because for better or worse, life does go on, as proof let me ask you this question, when was the last time you became apoplectic over the 1876 election between Samuel Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes? Anyways, I wrote a poem called “The Ballad Of Palm Beach County (Centennial Edition, Annotated)” which you will be reading shortly which may make you smile or laugh or even cry, but I hope it will make you think about some other things as well, such as A the historical inaccuracies that sometimes creep into what passes for scholarly research and B the arrogance and self-assumed superiority of some researchers and C the way some people blindly accept as fact whatever is presented to them and D the enormous chasm between the haves and have-nots in our society and E the false impression of us that future generations may have and maybe even F the ever-so-remote possibility that our own impression of previous generations may not be entirely accurate. I realize that’s a lot to ask one poem to do, but hope still manages to spring eternal in the human breast, to coin a phrase. Whatever your reaction turns out to be, I now send my poem forth into the world, along with two more hopes, G that it will give you pleasure, pause, and enough food for thought to make a meal and H that its purpose, unlike the remains of the Key Biscayne Zoo, does not remain a mystery.


The Ballad Of Palm Beach County
(Centennial Edition, Annotated)

[Note to reader: Research by anthropologists and archaeologists at the National Archives indicates that these are the original lyrics sung by the great Nathaniel and Wyoming, the Joads, in 1994. To get an idea of what late twentieth-century audiences must have experienced, read through the entire song once, ignoring the footnotes. Then, read the song again, this time referring to the footnotes. In so doing, you will understand better the song’s many obscure references, and you will also be in compliance with President Lopez-Walesa’s executive order.]


Oh, Burt Reynolds(1) has a ranch in Palm Beach County,
And Jack Nicklaus(2) sells new cars in Delray Beach(3),
Cubans migrate north from Dade, but the people in Belle Glade
Know that livin’ in the fast lane’s out of reach.

Perry Como(4) owns a mansion in Tequesta,
And Rose Kennedy’s(5) forgotten how to die,
Lots of money down in Boca(6) is derived from leaves of coca,
But the people in Belle Glade go home and cry.

For the people in Belle Glade get mighty tired
Of workin’ in the cane fields(7) all day long,
And the children pray(8) that Daddy won’t get fired,
And they pray that God(9) will keep their Mama strong.

Oh, the snowbirds(10) come and go each spring and autumn,
And Rose Kennedy just turned one hundred five;
And they call their banks from condos while the symphony plays rondos,
But in Belle Glade people fight to stay alive.

All the fishing boats go out on Okeechobee(11),
And the tourists(12) all complain about the heat,
And some citizens of Broward say their congressman’s a coward,
But in Belle Glade there is not enough to eat.

And the people in Belle Glade get mighty tired
Of workin’ in the cane fields all day long,
And the children pray that Daddy won’t get fired,
And they pray that God will keep their Mama strong.

Oh, the honky-tonks(13) are full on Dixie Highway(14),
And Rose Kennedy’s one hundred seventeen;
Tourists sail on the Atlantic, but in Belle Glade things are frantic,
And it looks like one more year in old blue jeans.

Burt and Loni raise their child(15) in Palm Beach County,
And the Kennedys throw parties all year long,
And the rumor mill is juicy with affairs in Port St. Lucie,
But in Belle Glade people know there’s something wrong.

For the people in Belle Glade get mighty tired
Of workin’ in the cane fields all day long,
And the children cry ‘cause Daddy just got fired,
And they pray that God will make their Mama strong.

On the coast they drive fast cars and chase loose women,
They water ski, play golf(16), and just have fun;
While the folks on A-1-A(17) just grow richer every day,
Out in Belle Glade seems like work is never done.

So the tourists come and go, Rose lives forever,
And the coca down in Boca is high grade,
But the people that God sees are the ones down on their knees,
And God hears the people praying in Belle Glade.

Yes, the people in Belle Glade get mighty tired
Of workin’ in the cane fields all day long,
And the children pray that one day they’ll be hired,
And they thank the Lord their Mama was so strong.(18)

----------------------------------------

Footnotes:
(1) An actor remembered not so much for his thespian abilities as for numerous sexual liaisons with various beautiful, mostly older women. Among them were actresses Dinah Shore, Sally Field, and one Loni Anderson, about whom little is known (see “U.S. Supreme Court, Reynolds v. Anderson” in the Encyclopedia Tropicana). Unsubstantiated rumors persist even today of Reynolds’s alleged trysts with publisher Helen Gurley Brown and the legendary eight-term governor of Texas, Ann Richards.

(2) An obscure athlete, possibly a golfer.

(3) A town once located on the coast. Delray Beach and other coastal communities mentioned in this song apparently thrived in the days before the successive calamities of Hurricanes Andrew, Ivan, Hannah, Marcia, Penelope, Steve, William, Yasmin, Agamemnon, Hildegarde, Eunice, Bertha, and Claude.

(4) May have been a singer.

(5) Great-great-great-great grandmother of U.S. president Shriver Schwarzenegger Cuomo Lopez-Walesa.

(6) Boca Raton, a coastal town destroyed by Hurricane Steve.

(7) In the days before the Great Disasters caused a population shift inland, the current state capital was an agricultural center.

(8) A religious exercise formerly thought to have value, now discredited.

(9) A deity worshiped by the pre-Presleyites.

(10) Possibly tourists (q.v.) or egrets (white-plumaged waterfowl, extinct)

(11) Before public pressure caused the Florida State Legislature to convert Okeechobee into a gigantic rollerblade center, it contained water.

(12) Until marauding bands of vigilantes (see “Posse Floridus” in the Encyclopedia Tropicana) discouraged all but the hardiest of travelers, persons known as “tourists” or “snowbirds” (because of their pale skin and seasonal migratory habits) visited the Florida peninsula on a regular basis, their arrival usually coinciding with the snows in the North. Some historians believe that the great calamities hastened the demise of “tourism”; others attribute it directly to the cataclysmic earthquake along the Santa Katherine Harris fault that destroyed Janet Reno World south of Orlando in the autumn of 2025.

(13) Places where “honkies” (Caucasian pre-Presleyites, many of whom, according to The New World Order Dictionary, were rude drivers, hence the name) “tonked.” Tonking, according to the NWOD, consisted of desperate and sometimes pathetic attempts to arrange sexual liaisons with honkies of the opposite gender while dancing to Elvis Presley recordings. Many historians believe that tonking also involved the consumption of large amounts of alcoholic beverages, but this has been vehemently denied by the Society of Reformed Neo-Presleyites.

(14) The name is of unknown origin. Some scholars believe this one-time major thoroughfare was named in memory of Ms. Dixie Lee Ray, an early chairperson of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Others of equally reputable stature believe Dixie Highway was named in honor of a paper cup. References in earlier editions of the Encyclopedia Tropicana to a “Mason’s and Dixon’s line,” alleged to have divided Pennsylvania (supposedly part of “the North”) and Maryland (supposedly part of “the South”) have now been thoroughly discredited by the diligent research of the National Archives anthropologists.

(15) Quinton Reynolds, the infamous Senator from North Dakota who led an incursion into New Cuba in 2039 in an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow King Elian II.

(16) A game, no longer played, believed to have originated in Scotland at the St. Andrew Lloyd Weber Country Club, in which players such as Jack Nicklaus (see footnote 2) used dowels to try to move small spherical pucks into a series of sandy areas, or traps, near manicured lawns. If the players, called “golfers,” succeeded, spectators often burst into applause. Thus, a new word, “claptrap,” was added to our language.

(17) Traces of this road can still be seen in a few places where rubble has been cleared.

(18) “The Ballad Of Palm Beach County” (originally called “The People In Belle Glade”) was adopted as the new national anthem on August 23, 2087, by the 150th Congress, replacing “You Ain’t Nothin’ But A Hound Dog.” The tune sung by the Joads in 1994 has unfortunately been lost to us due to the tendency of late twentieth-century musicians to record their work on compact discs (CDs). The familiar music now used with our national anthem was originally known as “To Elian In Heaven,” a tavern drinking song composed by Katherine Harris Bush a few days before the fatal 2025 earthquake that destroyed her villa on Francis Scott Key in New Cuba. Archaeologists exploring this hallowed site in 2101 discovered evidence of earlier buildings known collectively as the Key Biscayne Zoo, whose purpose remains a mystery.

...and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

Guest blogger Billy Ray Barnwell shares financial secret

[Because I am very tired today from the long drive back to Georgia from Alabama (even though in certain places -- along the border, for instance -- the trip takes but a single step), I have relinquished control of the blog for one day only to my good friend, Billy Ray Barnwell, who promises me that all he plans to do is set you on the path to financial security by sharing some much-needed financial advice (and perhaps a few other thoughts as well) that will help you live prosperously in President Obama’s America, or as it used to be known, the land of the free and the home of the brave. --RWP]


Billy Ray Barnwell here, I would be the last person in the world to tell you how to run your finances, there are plenty of financial planners in the world willing to do just that for a fee if you are dumb enough to let them, but I do want to pass along the best piece of financial advice I ever heard or rather ever saw, we had stopped to eat at a Stuckey’s just off the interstate years ago on the way to somewhere, I forget where, we were prolly in south Georgia or deep in L.A. which in my part of the world means Lower Alabama and I was checking out the souvenirs on the way back from the restroom, you know the ones, the baseball caps with the Confederate flags that say “Forget, hell” and the sets of shot glasses with somebody else’s favorite college football team logo on them and the beach towels that say Harley-Davidson and the salt and pepper sets that look like little outhouses, stuff you cannot possibly live without, and suddenly I saw this plaque that you could buy to hang on your wall that said If your outgo exceeds your income your upkeep will be your downfall, the plaque said it I mean, not your wall, and I was dumbfounded, I had this epiphany just like O. E. Parker did when he was in the tattoo parlor in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Parker’s Back” and saw this Byzantine Christ tattoo whose eyes said to him GO BACK, boy I wish I could write like Flannery O’Connor, either her or Pat Conroy, his prose flows and hers shocks, I guess if I had to pick just one it would be Flannery, but unfortunately the only way I know how to write is like me, anyways I knew I had to have that plaque, I wanted to buy it so bad I could taste it but I also knew we couldn’t afford it even though it was only $9.95 because we had saved for months just to make that trip to wherever it was we were going and we needed every penny we had for food and for gasoline to get back home on, so I did the next best thing, I committed that saying to memory instead, who needs a plaque on the wall when it is emblazoned in your heart is what I say, so for years that saying has been my watchword, well more of a goal I would have to say, as there have been many times when my outgo did in fact exceed my income and I was very much afraid that my upkeep was indeed going to be my downfall but somehow we always managed to make it through to the next paycheck, thank you Jesus, it’s always darkest just before the dawn is what my stepmother used to say, not the thank you Jesus part, that was me, and she would still be saying it too only she passed away last November in Texas at the age of eighty-nine years, seven months, and twenty-eight days, not that anybody was counting, and she was right, about the darkness and the dawn I mean, because dawn always came and that black cloud would somehow have a silver lining and life would go on, except of course for her it didn’t as of last November, but you get what I’m saying. It’s funny how at the most unexpected times I get a flashback to a story I’ve read or a movie I’ve seen, the movie Field of Dreams has that effect on me because my Dad moved from LaCrosse Wisconsin to Cedar Rapids Iowa when he was in junior high school, he joined the Navy from Iowa, he and I were such different people, we never threw a baseball to each other on more than a couple of occasions, he was always working at the factory and I was always reading a book or practicing the piano, I was never very good at sports but I did love baseball and except for the minor detail that I couldn’t hit, couldn’t catch, couldn’t pitch, couldn’t throw, and couldn’t run, I could have played baseball, I always rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers whenever they ended up playing the New York Yankees in the World Series, so I was drawn to a movie like Field of Dreams, I become a blubbering idiot every time I see it, Udella Mabry’s cousin Darlene Abernathy says well why do you watch it then and I really have no answer except that something grabs me in the pit of my stomach every time Kevin Costner which is pronounced Kevin Costner finally has that encounter with his father, the person he could never communicate with, and his father, who has been dead for many years but looks as young as or maybe even younger than Kevin, thanks Kevin for building the baseball field and says “It’s like a dream come true” and then asks “Is this Heaven?” and Kevin looks around at the baseball diamond and the cornfield and says “It’s Iowa” and his father says “I could have sworn it was Heaven” and Kevin says “Is there a Heaven?” and his father says “Oh yeah,” and after a short pause in which you can tell Kevin is thinking “What’s it like?” his father says “It’s the place where dreams come true” and Kevin looks around at his house and his wife and his daughter and says “Maybe this is Heaven” and he and his father finally have that game of catch and up on the front porch of the house Kevin’s wife throws the switch and the baseball diamond is lit up in the growing darkness and the camera pans back and up and you see all these hundreds of cars with their headlights on making their way in the twilight to the baseball field all because Kevin heard the voice saying “If you build it he will come” and “Ease his pain” and “Go the distance” and went to see James Earl Jones as Terence Mann and then the both of them went to see Burt Lancaster as Archie “Moonlight” Graham who gave up his heavenly baseball career to save Kevin’s daughter from choking to death on a hot dog and by this point I have been reduced to a puddle on the floor thinking about what never was and what might have been and what part of the fault was mine, Virgil Abernathy says he can tell from all the time he spent in rehab that I am way too involved with that movie, I’ve never been in rehab but he is prolly right, some other movies I especially like include Dances With Wolves which also has Kevin Costner in it, some parts are almost like looking at a painting in a museum, parts of the movie I mean, not parts of Kevin Costner, oh and there’s To Kill A Mockingbird and Some Like It Hot and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Prince Of Tides and Out Of Africa and of course the incomparable Casablanca, and if you ask me, which I know you didn’t but I’m just saying, the motion picture industry is in a great decline nowadays with the notable exception of the three Lord Of The Rings movies, and I guess I got a little off-topic, but if you have any questions for me, I will try to answer them, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

Announcing a second blog.

I am unveiling a second blog today.

Make your way, if you dare, to Billy Ray Barnwell Here.

Jeannelle of Iowa

This blog has a new reader, Jeannelle, and since she lives in Iowa, I have dubbed her Jeannelle of Iowa. That has a nice ring to it, don't you think? Sort of like Eleanor of Aquitaine, a woman who lived in the twelfth century and was the mother of Richard the Lion-hearted. She mentioned in a comment a few days ago (Jeannelle of Iowa, not Eleanor of Aquitaine) that she saw Field of Dreams listed in my profile as one of my favorite movies. She said she lives not far from where the movie was filmed, and she allowed as how she is not really a Kevin Kostner [sic] fan, but the movie was so moving near the end when Kevin Costner's departed father played ball with him, a classic tear-jerking scene for her.

In my previous post, "Why I Blog," I mentioned that I have written a book entitled Billy Ray Barnwell Here (The Meanderings of a Twisted Mind), and it can now be revealed that Chapter 27 of the book brings up that very scene. The narrator is Billy Ray Barnwell, who, I must warn you, not only writes in an unconventional manner (unlike myself) but also wanders all over the map (hence the subtitle).
So for Jeannelle of Iowa and any others of you lurking out there who might be reading my blog, get out your hankies. Here it is:

CHAPTER 27
Billy Ray Barnwell here, I would be the last person in the world to tell you how to run your finances, there are plenty of financial planners in the world willing to do just that for a fee if you are dumb enough to let them, but I do want to pass along the best piece of financial advice I ever heard or rather ever saw, we had stopped to eat at a Stuckey’s just off the interstate years ago on the way to somewhere, I forget where, we were prolly in south Georgia or deep in L.A. which in my part of the world means Lower Alabama and I was checking out the souvenirs on the way back from the restroom, you know the ones, the baseball caps with the Confederate flags that say “Forget, hell” and the sets of shot glasses with somebody else’s favorite college football team logo on them and the beach towels that say Harley-Davidson and the salt and pepper sets that look like little outhouses, stuff you cannot possibly live without, and suddenly I saw this plaque that you could buy to hang on your wall that said “If your outgo exceeds your income your upkeep will be your downfall,” the plaque said it I mean, not your wall, and I was dumbfounded, I had this epiphany just like O. E. Parker did when he was in the tattoo parlor in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Parker’s Back” and saw this Byzantine Christ tattoo whose eyes said to him GO BACK, boy I wish I could write like Flannery O’Connor, either her or Pat Conroy, his prose flows and hers shocks, I guess if I had to pick just one it would be Flannery, but unfortunately the only way I know how to write is like me, anyways I knew I had to have that plaque, I wanted to buy it so bad I could taste it but I also knew we couldn’t afford it even though it was only $9.95 because we had saved for months just to make that trip to wherever it was we were going and we needed every penny we had for food and for gasoline to get back home on, so I did the next best thing, I committed that saying to memory instead, who needs a plaque on the wall when it is emblazoned in your heart is what I say, so for years that saying has been my watchword, well more of a goal I would have to say, as there have been many times when my outgo did in fact exceed my income and I was very much afraid that my upkeep was indeed going to be my downfall but somehow we always managed to make it through to the next paycheck, thank you Jesus, it’s always darkest just before the dawn is what my stepmother used to say, not the thank you Jesus part, that was me, and she would still be saying it too only she passed away last November in Texas at the age of eighty-nine years, seven months, and twenty-eight days, not that anybody was counting, and she was right, about the darkness and the dawn I mean, because dawn always came and that black cloud would somehow have a silver lining and life would go on, except of course for her it didn’t as of last November, but you get what I’m saying. Speaking of going back, it’s funny how at the most unexpected times I get a flashback to a story I’ve read or a movie I’ve seen like that scene from Funny Girl I told you about, the movie Field of Dreams has that effect on me too because my Dad moved from LaCrosse Wisconsin to Cedar Rapids Iowa when he was in junior high school, he joined the Navy from Iowa, he and I were such different people, we never threw a baseball to each other on more than a couple of occasions, he was always working at the factory and I was always reading a book or practicing the piano, I was never very good at sports but I did love baseball and except for the minor detail that I couldn’t hit, couldn’t catch, couldn’t pitch, couldn’t throw, and couldn’t run, I could have played baseball, I always rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers whenever they ended up playing the New York Yankees in the World Series, so I was drawn to a movie like Field of Dreams, I become a blubbering idiot every time I see it, Udella Mabry’s cousin Darlene Abernathy says well why do you watch it then and I really have no answer except that something grabs me in the pit of my stomach every time Kevin Costner which is pronounced Kevin Costner finally has that encounter with his father, the person he could never communicate with, and his father, who has been dead for many years but looks as young as or maybe even younger than Kevin, thanks Kevin for building the baseball field and says “It’s like a dream come true” and then asks “Is this Heaven?” and Kevin looks around at the baseball diamond and the cornfield and says “It’s Iowa” and his father says “I could have sworn it was Heaven” and Kevin says “Is there a Heaven?” and his father says “Oh yeah,” and after a short pause in which you can tell Kevin is thinking “What’s it like?” his father says “It’s the place where dreams come true” and Kevin looks around at his house and his wife and his daughter and says “Maybe this is Heaven” and he and his father finally have that game of catch and up on the front porch of the house Kevin’s wife throws the switch and the baseball diamond is lit up in the growing darkness and the camera pans back and up and you see all these hundreds of cars with their headlights on making their way in the twilight to the baseball field all because Kevin heard the voice saying “If you build it he will come” and “Ease his pain” and “Go the distance” and went to see James Earl Jones as Terence Mann and then the both of them went to see Burt Lancaster as Archie “Moonlight” Graham who gave up his heavenly baseball career to save Kevin’s daughter from choking to death on a hot dog and by this point I have been reduced to a puddle on the floor thinking about what never was and what might have been and what part of the fault was mine, Virgil Abernathy says he can tell from all the time he spent in rehab that I am way too involved with that movie, I’ve never been in rehab but he is prolly right, some other movies I especially like include Dances With Wolves which also has Kevin Costner in it, some parts are almost like looking at a painting in a museum, parts of the movie I mean, not parts of Kevin Costner, oh and there’s To Kill A Mockingbird and Some Like It Hot and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Prince Of Tides and Out Of Africa and of course the incomparable Casablanca, and if you ask me, which I know you didn’t but I’m just saying, the motion picture industry is in a great decline nowadays with the notable exception of the three Lord Of The Rings movies, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

Maybe you didn't need your hankies after all.

Why I Blog

The Writers Guild of America strike, now in its eleventh week, has produced an interesting byproduct (I mean besides the cancellation of the Golden Globes Awards telecast). A new blog called "Why We Write" started 23 days ago, and each day another member of the Guild writes a short essay explaining his or her raison d'être. It has contained informative and entertaining stuff, although I personally could do without the increasingly obligatory four-letter words. On one of my bookshelves is a book entitled, "Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction" that I bought in 1998; it includes essays by Norman Mailer and Pat Conroy and Terry McMillan and Richard Ford, twenty-six people in all. Now that my blog is almost four months old (glory be! who woulda thunk?), the time has come for me to think out loud about why I decided to start blogging.

In December of 1972, when I was thirty-one years old, I wrote my first poem. I know the date because the poem's title is "December, 1972." Clever, huh? I put it in a folder and put the folder in a desk drawer. Over the years since then, I have added another poem occasionally to the folder. I say occasionally because the folder now contains around 40 poems, not enough to make a book, but too many to ignore. They call to me from their desk drawer.

In 2006, when I was sixty-five years old, I started writing a book (who hasn't?) and it was finished in time to give each of my children a copy at Christmas 2007. Thanks to the Fed Ex-Kinko people, there are exactly four spiral-bound copies of my book in existence: the three I gave away and the one I kept. My book's title is Billy Ray Barnwell Here (The Meanderings of a Twisted Mind). You can say you read about it here first. Midway down the title page are the words "Not a memoir...Not an autobiography...Not Grapevine, Texas" and at the very bottom are the words "A Truly-Godawful Book" (which doesn't necessarily mean what you might be thinking). I'm not sure what I intended my book to be, but it turned out to be what it is. If it's a novel, it's a most unconventional one. I broke, on purpose, every rule of writing known to man. For example, the first sentence is 274 words long and there are more commas than you could shake a stick at. Maybe one day my book will find a publisher who will distribute even more copies. One can only hope. Why did I write it? Because I could, I suppose. In the meantime, while waiting for lightning to strike, I blog.

Writing/blogging is a form of self-expression, of course, but self-expression can also be achieved by throwing rocks at passing cars. Not that I would ever do that. When someone once asked Georgia's own Flannery O'Connor why she wrote, she answered bluntly, "Because I'm good at it." I hope that's one of my reasons too, but I would never be so bold as to say it out loud. Oops, I think I just did. (That's the thing about blogging, people can read your mind. If you're not ready for them to, maybe you'd better not start.) Mama always said, "Don't break your arm patting yourself on the back." Listening to your Mama can be quite instructive, depending on the kind of Mama you have. If you weren't happy with yours, you can always put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, and tell the whole wide world about it. The world may or may not choose to listen. That's strictly up to them.

I think a third reason I write is to make a difference. When Paul Revere (or Dr. Samuel Dawes or whoever the historians have decided it was) went riding through the Massachusetts countryside yelling "The British are coming! The British are coming!" one April night in 1775, his chief reward was that someone out there was listening. I can only hope to be as fortunate.

A fourth reason I write is to discover who I am. As T. S. Eliot wrote in Little Gidding, "We shall not cease from exploration. And the result of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

Perhaps I have just begun to answer the question, "Why do I write?" Perhaps I'll be writing more on the subject later.