the man with the panama hat

He reminded us of the Curious George books. When our electricity was down during a bad storm, he came and inspected the electric box. There was something different about him. There was, in a manner of speaking, light coming out of him. An energy of soft-spoken, kindly goodwill. As if he'd already fixed our problem before he'd begun to look at it.

After he left, the lights came on inside the house. I went outside and cautiously lifted the electric box hatch. There was a piece of paper pasted to the metal on the inside of the box. It said: "God bless the people who live in this house."

The hurricanes that season were Bonnie, Charley, Francis, Jeanne and the following year, Wilma, Katrina and others I can't remember now. We got through each and every one. Thanks to the man in the panama hat ... and the man upstairs ... he's still there, they're both there ... haven't you read their messages?

-- From the one-page novel, A Raga for Ragga Island, published by Longhouse, one of the oldest, longest-standing-still-printing alternative presses in America.

Miss Manners and Mr Sloppy

Have you noticed she's not around but he is?

What a pity.

I remember a very proper Jamaican lady telling me not long ago, "We have lost a generation or two."

By which she meant, Miss Manners was on vacation. Anyone who has been on a country bus in Jamaica may have an inkling of what she meant. But what about America?

I would say it's much worse here. Public rest rooms are light years away from when I was growing up.

I'm not talking about small children making mistakes. I'm talking about sloppy men who  know better and don't care. We used to say, Excuse the pigs, the hogs will be along later. But that doesn't work metaphorically. Pigs are actually very clean. Humans are not. 

There was a sign in the main hall of the grammar school I attended in the 1950s and it said -- THMINK. There was another one that showed the picture of a doofus with a goofy grin. He was saying, "Last year I could not evun spell Enjuneer, and now I are one!"

Maybe there's a lot more enjuneers running things.

My mom was a stickler for detail. She instructed me to put the toilet seat down after use. There was a great maternal thing going on in the fifties. Women weren't running things as much as they were informing and shaping them. My mom was anyway.

My mom's gone. But I would still like to think Miss Manners is out there. Or that Mr Sloppy might wake up to the Golden Rule. I saw a sign in the restroom of a local restaurant that gave me some hope. The sign said -- "We aim to please. Will you please aim?"   

From Dreamer To Writer To Award Winner

It always starts with a dream ...

And then with a pencil, pen, marker, chisel, awl, crayon, wet finger on dry wood,
chalk on blackboard ...

It begins some where on some thing ...

Now let's speak about the lovely smiling writer, Frances Bonney Jenner, who was recently awarded a Bronze Medal for Juvenile Fiction by Independent Book Awards and a Silver Medal from the Colorado Independent Book Awards in the Juvenile and Young Adult category.

Let's mention her dream -- to tell the story of a young girl going West in a covered wagon. This was her dream as a writer and she wrote it by hand at first, then by PC, then by hand again, then by PC, and so on and so forth for six years until she had the story down. It's a story you want to read because of the voice of the narrator. And that narrator stands before you holding her book because after much travail -- and, literally, travel on the road her ancestors took to the goldfields of California. Yes, she camped, this author did, on the trail, not once but several times that her family followed in the long ago. And, then, in the writing, she made that long ago seem not so long ago, so that the reader is there, right there in the dust and the sun and the sickness and betrayal and river crossings and hungry longing for home, any home, anything but the trail going West.

For me, as witness to Fran's triumph in prose and verse (the book is made up of both), the book has special meaning. And maybe that can be summed by poet Gene Fowler: "Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead." My father used to say, "If it were easy any damn fool could do it."

Well, now lots of damn fools are out there trying, and I have to admire them for that. No doubt they are all equally good at the dreaming part, the pencil part, the typing at keys part. But as author Andrew Lam (Saving Sight) recently wrote about writing, "It is not a sprint. It is a marathon."

That is why we take our hat off to Fran Jenner. She may be wearing a medal around her neck, but she's still running. There she goes round the bend of the 25th mile. Read her wonderful book, Prairie Journey which is about writing, and life, and a lovely girl named Savannah who learns about these things on the California Trail in 1850.

Who Cast the First Stone in Sanford?

In most human conflicts the question is asked, "Whose rights are being violated?"

I like to go farther back in time, biblically speaking, and ask: "Who cast the first stone?"

In America we have always "enjoyed" the right to bear arms, use force, if necessary, and this goes back to the first stone thrown at the outset of the American Revolution. This happened on the evening of March 5th, 1770 on King's Street in front of the Custom's House in Boston.

That fabled stone, encased in ice, was thrown by a bunch of rabble rousers, as they were called by the King. They were actually patriots who were soon to resist taxation and, amazingly, overthrow the British government that ruled them.

But who got hurt in that first encounter? And who died?

The men who were injured by snowballs, iceballs and rocks were British infantrymen, Lobsterbacks they were called, hirelings of the empire, but nonetheless innocent of any real crime other than guarding a building which they were assigned to watch over.

Who was killed?

One of the first Boston citizens to die in the Custom's House encounter was a man named Crispus Attucks. A black man. The English soldiers got away without serious injury. Attucks became a symbol of colonial rights, and his death was significant. He was a free black who was also part Amerindian. And he was both dead and "dead to rights", the people said. As a martyr no one questioned his pedigree -- who or what he was at birth meant little or nothing to the patriots. He was a fallen soldier in the fight for freedom from tyranny shot dead by two bullets from a British musket.

What really happened?

A revolution happened. After which it became law that a citizen of the U.S., could stand ground, if need be, and protect himself against the threats of the State, the government. Upon this rests the question: Who cast the first stone?

The lobsterbacks? They had the guns. And they were ready to use them. The people with the iceballs? They were ready to use them too. To this day no one knows who cast the first stone in Boston, which, it might be said, was cast in the mind not the gun or the hand. We do know that the lobsterbacks were exonerated. It was none other than John Adams who defended the British soldiers successfully and somehow convinced a jury to acquit his clients.

And it is that way today in Florida.

So who cast the stone in Sanford and who had the gun?  Who is the martyr and who is the murderer? Who is alive and who is dead?

Zora's Story, A Runaway Rests In Peace

Zora was a runaway. A rescue dog from Hurricane Katrina who, during the storm got run over by a truck. Hip-shattered and in the road, she was picked up by a vet, operated on, healed and put up for adoption. Some nice folks from Pine Island, Florida adopted her. But Zora had a habit of running away. She ran this way and that, got lost in the mangroves, ran down the road that links St James City to the south with Bokeelia to the north. Lots of people knew Zora -- a dog as big as a small horse trotting to who-knows-where isn't invisible.

I met her at the Pineland Post Office, which I believe is the second smallest PO in Florida. There she sprawled, all seven feet of her, head to tail. And when someone new walked in, her head popped up, she looked, and lay down. It was as if she were searching for someone. We adopted her from the people who had adopted her who got her from the vet who saved her from being run over more than once.

One of our first days with Zora she slipped through the front gate and ran down the white shell road, turned right and headed for the old runway for small planes. I jogged along after her for about two miles or so. She's not going into Matlacha Pass, is she? Yes, she was. And did. I swam after her. The water deepened as I got hold of her collar and turned her about and sort of hauled in to shore. We were both out of breath. She looked me in the eye. "Is this the way it's going to be?" I asked. She looked up at the sky seeking a rift in the clouds. She studied the solid wall of mangroves seeking a break in the leaves.

That was nine years ago. Zora did settle down, mostly on my lap as you see in the photograph. That was her favorite place to be when it stormed, and it storms a lot in the summer on Pine Island. Sometimes when the thunder was thunderin' and you happened to be sitting on the toilet, she bumped open the bathroom door with her nose, came in and sat down on your knees.

When Zora wasn't running away or sitting on you, she was stepping on you. How I miss, now that she's gone, that reminder of how heavy a big Great Dane is. She weighed anywhere from 150-160. And when her full weight was on your bare toes, you really felt the presence of that dog. Another thing -- her head was always at perfect level with your dinner plate. Once she sunk her teeth into a block of Spanish smoked cheese from BJs. She liked the block so much she didn't eat it, just carried it proudly around the kitchen. That enabled us to disengage it and shave it where she'd slobbered, but her tooth marks were always there.

Now all these things weigh heavy as I type. Her teeth went deep into that cheese, but her love went much deeper into my heart. I wish she'd come and stand on my foot. I wish I could run down the landing field to find her swimming to Cuba: I wish she'd come sit on my knees. A wish is a wish. But a dog is a dog.

Mackie McDonnough, Rasta poet & songwriter

mixed media art by Mariah Fox

 

 A new review of Rastafarian Children of Solomon from Culture Magazine:

If your knowledge of Rastas begins and ends with your worn copy of Bob Marley’s Legend . . . then, my friends, you need a culture bomb thrown at your front door. No, dear friends, the ideas and concepts behind the Rastafarian movement that took root in Jamaica during the 1930s go way beyond reggae music and giant spliffs—though they are connected. Here, author and storyteller Gerald Hausman tells the stories of Rastas, or the “Children of Solomon,” in his and their words. From farmers to healers, to Rasta elders and fisherman, Hausman uses colorful words and first-hand experience to powerfully describe his subjects: “Mackie [McDonough] knows his history, his story; and his face is a finely carved mask of inscrutable character. He can stare down a stump, as the expression is, and he fears no man or woman . . .” Or in the case of Horace “Winston” Churchill: “His twinkle-eye and easy smile could charm a snake, and probably have.” Hausman’s Rastas leap beyond the confines of any mere album cover. Even Bob’s.

They reason they do, if they do, is because the people I have written about are real people leading their normal, irie lives on the North Coast of Jamaica. Some are gone now because I began writing the book in 1985 and a lot has happened since then. When we first came to the island the currency was one to five. That is, one "Sammy dollar" as Tosh put it for five Jamaican "smalls." Now it is one U.S. for 90 JA. If you do not understand the politics of grinding poverty, you cannot begin to understand the love of blinding vanity that separates rich from poor, haves from have nots.

In spite of the economic crisis in Jamaica, the Rastafarians have, in general, risen above it as Bob Marley and many others said they would. Their message -- how to break the mental chains that bind us -- is the substance of this book.  As they still say in Jamaica: "Walk good!" For walking for something, as they also say, is better than sitting down for nothing.

Saving Sight: An eye surgeon's look at life behind the mask and the heroes who changed the way we see

 

 

In his new book Dr. Andrew Lam says so many remarkable things about human eyesight that I believe all writers and readers should put this on their must read bucket list. I, for one, have read it twice. First, because it I found it so well-written and second because as a writer my eyes are the primary tool of my existence. 

Lam's narrative covers the lives and inventions of doctors who have literally changed the way we see -- but not without extreme difficulties. 

It wasn't their invention, generally, that troubled them. It was its reception. 

I always thought critical reception was hardest on visual artists and experimental writers. Wrong. I didn't dream that doctors with ideas that run contrary to current medical opinion had it much worse than Vincent Van Gogh or Mr. Poe. 

Take the case of Harold Ridley, knighted at the age of 93, after a total lifetime of opposition in the medical field. The knighting came a bit late but at least it came along with the other honors that he deserved for his groundbreaking surgical technique and his invention of the intraocular lens. 

Ridley's discovery began with the injured eye of a WWII fighter pilot, who had bits of plexiglas from a shattered airplane window lodged in his eye. What Ridley found curious was that the human eye had made peace with the plexiglas. This led to Ridley's invention of an artificial lens made of the same material. After this, cataract surgery was not the same. It was, and is, quick and effective.  

Dr. Lam has written what I would like to call a "medical thriller" wherein we learn just how hard it is to advance inventive science. As an extra bonus he cites his own behind the mask experiences that are often edge of the seat mini-dramas. There is a world of wonder in this informative book about the men of science who would do almost anything to overcome the complacency of a tradition that accepts illness as a given.