Appalachia breeds children every day.
But when Her children start paying attention
to the rest of the world, She loses them…
Every time.
I came from people that didn’t give a rat’s ass about world order. They never had the time, nor the interest. Between working their fingers to the bone, likely at the local textile mill, trying to grow enough food for the family to eat, preserving said food for the Winter months, going to church, visiting family members, and spending a precious few moments of solitude at home, there just wasn’t a spare minute to worry about what was playing on Broadway, or what the latest fashion trend might be in New York City (much less Paris).
Never mind. Let the world turn, they said (without really ever saying so at all). Leave us alone, they said. Leave us here in the heart of Appalachia. Let us live amidst this natural beauty uninterrupted. We’ll pay your taxes, and we’ll pay in to your social security. but you better be ready to give it back when we need it. Money’s precious. So is life. This is life.
Why did I want something else?
What made me a dreamer — a stranger — a foreigner in my own home, and in my homeland? What twist of fate, or chemical imbalance, made me yearn for more — feel the need to leave that place of safety and security. To roam — seek to know the world — travel to places my family never cared about, see things and people my family never needed to know, and live a life so unlike anything and everything I ever knew?
I wish I knew, may never know. Will always struggle to know. May go to my grave never knowing, or understanding what drove me to take this different path — this different life — this strange and utterly foreign life, so far from all I knew.
I have dreamed. And I have questioned when and where I could. But what is truth, and what is only perspective? What is a lie, and what is fancy? And who can tell? Will Tell. Even cares.
Did you know my father? Was he like me? I lived with him for eighteen years but could not tell you who the man really was, what drove him, how his mind worked, or what he craved to do in the world, but could not. Perhaps we are not meant to know such things about our forebears, and yet I find myself asking — wishing I knew — could know.
Did you know my mother? Am I like her at all? Did she ever care for things outside her front door? Want to see things? Dream things? Be things? I ask her questions like these and she must think I am mad. Why do I feel the need to ask such questions? She looks at me with such great love, but such great sadness. Why can’t she understand why I ask questions?
Did you know my nanny? I’m like her they say. But then they say she was selfish. Willful. Angry. Smart. She gave me coffee in small espresso cups when I was a kid. It would have been our secret if I’d ever seen a secret I could keep. Got her in trouble so many times. She always gave me coffee though. And a cigarette later, if I wanted one. Nanny used to tell me stories about how she studied French. How she once got to go the the State capital with the Four-H. She stayed in the dorm at North Carolina State University (although it was a farm school then). Told me how she wanted to go to school there, and how there was no money, and how there was a great depression, and how the TVA took their land and their town and flooded it beneath the waters of lake Fontana. Maybe there’s more to that story than…
Did you look at her, then look at me, and wish personality traits didn’t skip a generation? Did you look at me and worry, even then? Was that why you started giving me books to read, and chores to do, and animals to feed. Was that why you watched everything I did and corrected me any time you saw something that seemed to come from somewhere else? I was like nanny? I was like my mom’s people. I was like my great aunt Ethel, I was like, no nothing much like you.…
I have touched the pyramids, walked the circumference of Stonehenge, and ascended the Great Wall of China. But I have never found common ground with my mother, who I love dearly, and who gave me so much of herself, from the turn of my nose to the overlap of my two front teeth. Neither did I find common ground with my dad, much as we found a lasting and mutual respect.
I am so like my parents, yet nothing like them. Made from their loins, and from their the love within their hearts, yet with dreams and desires and drives so foreign that we might never cross the thresh hold of understanding, were it not for the blood we share.
I will tell you this, dad. And this one’s just for you. I finally learned to embrace and understand all of the (bad) traits you always feared. You know the ones. The things you always hated about my mom’s family, and my nanny — your own mother. You know The things you always saw in me in spades.
I admit that I used to wonder how you could ever have loved mother, while seeming to hate everything she came from. It’s a testament to her ability to be a chameleon, I suppose.
I got that one too, by the way. That trait. I really cannot even help it. It’s a self-preservation thing, I think. Anyway, I often wonder if that very trait was what drew the two of you together. Either that, I suppose, or maybe your own family trait of criticizing anything and anyone “not Green” just couldn’t stay hidden for long, despite the overpowering drive of romantic love. Same with your mother. How did you ever come to take your father’s family’s position regarding your own mother? True or not, it seems a bit extreme. But maybe that’s just me. My own perspective. What is truth, and what can only be described as my truth? I still don’t know the answer to that one.
But back to the two of you. I guess in some ways it’s not surprising. You were both children, after all. She, by age and everything else, and you, certainly by right of passage. Children. And what you wrought! No wonder the first try gave out even before the birth pains began. I was weaker — or stronger. I guess that depends in the perspective too. I did stay to live and endure, after all.
Lived. Grew. Outgrew, one might more properly say. Not that I love being everything you never expected, but I have to confess that I could not have been otherwise. Perhaps, mom, you should have stepped off the step stool with me in your womb the way you did with the other one. Or maybe that one — that ghost brother — was the one that should have come to term, full term, and lived to fulfill all the dreams I never could — or will. It was your hem that found fate. You tell the story.
I’m sorry Dad. Mom too
I AM an artist, and a dreamer -
And all those things you’d hoped I’d never be.
I couldn’t help myself. But I guess you suspected that. Worried about it. Wished it away every chance you could.
You tried everything you knew — to temper me, test me, teach me — make me a strong and sane version of that wild and insane image (person) that you saw that I so resembled.
And I guess in some strange sense you really did succeed.…sort of. Because I am a somewhat strange blend of crazy artist and rock of Gibralter.
Apples, it seems, really don’t fall so far from the tree, despite the random mixing of egg and sperm. Don’t become something so fully strange, despite natural tendency.…
And on another note.…
Am I the only one that believed the bullshit? The only one to fall for that “you can do anything” crap?
I did, you know.
Believed it.
I really thought any of us kids could have anything.…
All we had to be was smart enough or driven enough.
And worse yet, I actually wanted that -
Wanted to try to go beyond the county line, and live a life that was bigger than me -
Bigger.
Better?
Well, in the end, different.…
Am I the only one that ever listened when all the old folks talked about all the things that they believed that I could do?
I did, you know.
Listen.
I really heard the things they said about getting out, and getting something better?
Something that might put something other than lint in my hair.
All I had to do was work hard enough, and keep my focus -
Dream of a life that was larger than life -
Special…
Significant?
Well, in the end, distant.…
Am I the only one, in the end, that ever bought the line?
The only one to really make a go of it?
I did, you know.
Bought it.
and more than that, I really tried to live it…
What I never knew was that maybe I wasn’t smart enough to really reach the top.
For all I tried, the closest I could get was close to it -
B+
Near enough to see that life, but never quick enough to catch it.
What I have? What I had?
It was good.
I know enough to know that I tried…
and I did a lot.
Went far, and lived large.
And in the end, I’ll own that.
I know I did what I could do, given who I was and where I came from — given — shit! You know what? I could have done a whole lot worse than this.
There’s a porch swing out there somewhere, where kids can swing as far as they like
without ever worrying that it might break.
and a swing set, bright and shiny, that never flies too high.
Never rusts, or fades in the Summer sun. I know it’s there. I’ve wished it into being.