-Eugene Baldwin's – The Genehouse Chronicles

May 9, 2016

The rain fell all day again. The birds loved it, scurrying around for half-drowned insects. A pair of bluebirds has taken up residence in Geneyard, and a redheaded woodpecker, whose nest must be a hollow tree space or on top of a utility pole, scooped up live crawly things for impalement in its nest.

The news from Farmer Orville was that he planted his Early Girl tomatoes early and his squash plants were already flowering. The strawberries were about to burst like early fireworks, only you can’t eat fireworks—unless you’re incredibly dimwitted—and you can slush strawberry pulp in your mouth and suck it and swirl it and sluice it, and it is perfectly legal.

Bless me, Father, I have sinned. I have vegetable lust. You can lust after cantaloupes and not worry you’ll be indicted for sexual harassment. No carrot has ever called the police. You can pet zucchini, and what happens in the vegetable garden stays in the vegetable garden. If ripe blackberries remind you of perky nipples, who’s to know?

Ruby Puppy presented me with my very own dead blacksnake. She carried the hapless reptile around the yard, growling and whipping the snake’s body back and forth. By the time the serpent was offered to me, only the top third had completed the journey. It lay on my right shoe, like a trophy ready for head mounting. And Ruby Puppy licked me with snake slime, and scales are popping out on my arm.

A black-capped sparrow mom has built a nest under Orville’s carport and given birth to three balls of feathers. The mom cocked her head as she listened to Orville talk about his sister’s funeral. It went fine, Orville told me and the mom bird, only his baby sister died out of birth order—he should have been the one who passed. This made me wince: I couldn’t imagine life without Orville and the Quilt Queen, and now many of you can’t either.

Sheila S., no slouch in the story-telling department, told me this morning that when Saturday’s storm from hell hit, she and her friend Connie were sitting in an outdoor beer garden in downtown Alton, waiting for a concert to start, and the freight train wind descended and lifted all the table umbrellas from their holders, and she and Connie each grabbed an umbrella, and a waitress was literally blown off her feet twice and crawling around on the sidewalk, and patrons battled to close the umbrellas and not spill beer. An actual tornado would have been less exciting.

The buffalo gnats have returned. They swarm your face and eyes, and they take little delicate nibbles of your flesh, and they sing dirty songs in your inner ear. They love bald heads, and they freak me out much worse than crawly things do.

This afternoon’s menu at Geneyard: night crawlers, red worms, June bugs, red ants, aphids, black ants, leaf hoppers, pill bugs, pinch beetles, water beetles and inch worms. Don’t pet the pinch beetles.

And please pass the ketchup.

May 8, 2016

THE STORM came so fast yesterday, sun to green and purple sky, the sound of the 70 mile per hour wind like a freight train riding Route 3, and it slammed down and exploded trees, and it uprooted a huge old tree in the Melville Cemetery, which lay, this morning, across eight rows of graves, and hail scoured bark, and bird nests flew and there were orphans everywhere, and my yard looked as though a giant had beat it with giant’s baseball bat.

HUMMINGBIRD MAN wasn’t home this morning but his wife was, holding her new baby girl grandchild in her arms, and her husband’s obsession was in full view, the red feeders hanging from windows and trees, and a cage with a singing canary hung from a branch and swayed in the breeze, and I saw my first rubythroat glide in and sip and chatter at the canary.

SUNDAY MORNING ON THE ISLAND OF SCOTCH JIMMY was dotted with wild birds, a Canada goose mother and four goslings in a row, padding after her tail-to-beak, the nervous father bringing up the rear, and great egrets plied the roiled water for stunned fish, and overhead two great blue herons soared eastward, their wings flapping slowly, just enough lift to keep them in the air, and lines of small ducks padded upstream.

THE THREE WISEMEN sat at Table 2 at the café, Old Man Grayson telling Jerry and me about his bootlegging days, Alton to Chicago for booze and cigarettes, him a kid riding under the canvass, armed with a pistol and an axe handle in case of hijackers hijacking the hijackers, and Jerry explaining Skype to an 87-year-old rough-hewed man whose knowledge of the modern world was confined to the St. Louis Cardinals, spying on his neighbors, and watching another Jerry–Springer–on the TV and learning about love.

THE MAYOR OF GODFREY drove the bluff hill roads in his sporty car and sized up the storm damage, and waved to me and mouthed “tomatoes soon.”

AN ACCIDENTAL MOTHER ON MOTHER’S DAY fretted over ten baby ducklings moving as one on the Great River Road path, a wave of brown and stripe and yellow fuzz, stone to stone, whap of tiny webbed feet, “cheep, cheep, cheep,” and I didn’t know what to do: flag down a car, call 911, take off my shirt and collect them all in the cloth and drive to an animal shelter, oh god, come night they would be ten small meals for raccoons, coyotes, foxes, my cat if I brought them home; please help me, please; and then the mother duck, fifteen minutes later, waddled past me and gathered up the kids and my mothering was over, and why was I sad?

THE FRIGHTENED WOMAN and her frightened dog walked by me, leaning out and away, perhaps thinking I was a bad guy, and I have been a bad guy, and I’ve done some good, “I’ve Done Some Good” my country song I sing alone at night.

A MISSISSIPPI RIVER WOODCHUCK watched me, only running for it when I was ten feet away, scrambling up the steep bluff side, an engine of marbled fat and fur undulating against gravity.

STEVIE waved to me and I shouted “Happy Mother’s Day,’ and she folded my greeting into her chest, this very old woman known to hikers and bikers and drivers, Stevie’s Fish Stand corner of the Great River Road and Clifton Terrace, about to open for the season.

DOG WALKER OF LAVISTA PARK let me hug his fat blond dog, the mutt slobbering my face, and we talked about the storm, how it lifted up two portable johns in the park’s parking lot and smashed them flat, and I said: “How’d you like to have been standing in one of those johns when the storm hit,” and he replied: “I wouldn’t want to be standing in them johns under any circumstance,” and we laughed so hard, snot shot out from my nose.

May 3, 2016

Farmer Orville’s younger sister Aletha died last night. It was a blessing, he said. She had liver disease and was suffering dreadfully.

And I watched my friend sit pensively in his rocker in the kitchen, and I listened as he talked about death. He has a good buddy, who is confined to a nursing home, and that man is living out a bitter existence, and Orville wishes he could do more than just visit his friend. And he is feeling his own mortality.

“The worst part for me,” Orville said, “is if I was laid up bad and somebody had to mow my acreage for me. They would do it wrong, and I would have to take it.”

We walked along the strawberry patch. Actual green berries had already popped out. In two more weeks, there will be a feast of nectar and red pulp. Ruby Puppy ran after us and rolled in the strawberries and barked at us.

It is all well and good to talk calmly about death, about the naturalness of it. It is quite another thing to be nearing that moment, the sand having run out of your hourglass. How do we know we are dead? Even my devout friend, on this day, was existential.

Out of the blue, Orville said, “You are a really good writer.” He has never complimented me on anything.

Nests of bird babies were woven into the blackberry bushes. They never survive, the babies; the barn cats and the king snakes see to that. But today, wren mamas were stuffing their kids’ beaks.

I mentioned to my friend that the first U.S. citizen displacements have begun, from coastal areas of Alaska. The ocean is swallowing whole villages of Inuit. Global warming began around 1887, not 2016. “I will die if I move inland,” a woman told a reporter. Many Florida condos, at high tide, now have their lobbies fill up with seawater.

“I was close to Aletha,” Orville said. “She was a good woman.”

He and the Quilt Queen will drive to Southern Illinois for the funeral. I will take care of the chickens and dogs and cats.

We drove to my place in his pickup and loaded the back with brush from the effluvia of my recent pruning. I worried that the stuff wouldn’t burn. Orville allowed as how he would put gasoline on the plant matter, light it and jump.

We met a mere three years ago, me walking up his driveway and inquiring about pick-your-own blackberries, and now we are brothers. He is the best of men; I am an imitation of a man. One of us will pass first. The other will follow. At least, the current evidence suggests it is so.

In playwright Thornton Wilder’s masterpiece, “Our Town,” the dead sit in the cemetery and talk about the living, about how life is a fool’s errand. To my mind, that is exactly right. In a world where Inuit Indians drown, where old ladies in condos demand that ocean water leave their lobbies, when in fact we have done it to ourselves, life is indeed a fool’s errand.

I’d like to think, though, that Aletha, Orville’s sister, is sitting in her grave and chatting away as she watches her brother.

I am down with heaven so long as there is red wine and I can eat never-ending cashews. Sex is temporary, but red wine and cashews are eternal.

Rest, our dear Aletha. If you are able, touch your brother’s hand.

Good night, Aletha. We will see you tomorrow.

April 26, 2016

This is the 30^th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant meltdown. Just look at all the photos on your browsers, of wild animals coming back to the site, of former residents returning, of a farmer selling irradiated milk. Only thirty people were killed. “Only.” The first responders, knowing they would be killed, went in anyway and sacrificed their lives.

Today, the Russian government is disputing the claims by outside scientists that the soil, plants, air, and all mammals in a one hundred square mile radius carry up to a hundred times, the doses of radiation considered safe.

I interviewed Dr. John Gofman (now deceased), former head of the Atomic Energy Commission, just after the Chernobyl accident. He was an oncologist and had a PhD. in physics. For the war effort, he made the first teaspoon of plutonium for use in experiments at Los Alamos. He had been fired for finding that radiation causes cancer,

Gofman told me that the thirty or so victims of Chernobyl were the tip of an iceberg. The radiation would remain toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. In 30-40 years, cancer rates would skyrocket, from Russia to Great Britain. And his prediction has begun to become true. Cancer, in Belarus, has become the plague. Thousands of people are sick.

The radioactive remnants of the disaster were carried on the winds west to Scotland. It follows that cancer rates along the path of the winds will grow exponentially. The iceberg is just now fully exposed.

Nuclear power works, in theory. What the science doesn’t account for is human error. There is no human endeavor on earth that isn’t prone to error.

We are the Neo Aztecs, Gofman told me. They sacrificed tens of people in the belief that the sun, a god to them, could only be appeased with blood offerings. (This same impulse may have been the driving force for the sacrifices at Cahokia Mounds.) The Neo Aztecs created and used nuclear materials without regard for the consequences, for sacrifices of humans, for the “greater good.”

And just as the Aztecs had their gods and superstitions, we have the curse of our nuclear mummies: waste dumps which will remain radioactive for as long as half a million years. In the event of a human catastrophe (it’s a good thing there is no global warming), the survivors, after a few hundred years, would find burial mounds. Archaeologists would excavate them and die, not knowing what was in the mounds.

Because, you can’t see radiation. It is our Aztec god. From World War II alone, the current radiation in the atmosphere, if it were a color, pink say, would drive us crazy with fear. The empty spaces of the entire planet would appear as a dense pink.

How many nuclear waste dumps, legal or illegal, are in the United States? Thousands, Gofman told me. Like the one outside of Princeton, Illinois which has been abandoned. Wildlife, deer and coyotes, and other species, roam freely. Local hunters have to have the livers of their kills checked for radiation. There have been huge fish die-offs in local streams. Plutonium waste had been illegally buried there. The dump’s owners had flown the coop.

Happy 30^th Anniversary, Chernobyl. And hey, Great Britain, France, Spain, Brussels, Italy, et al, thanks for your sacrifices, and enjoy all that free health care.

You’re going to need it.

April 17, 2016

It was heron and egret moving day. On the River Road trail, I saw countless snowy egrets standing in mud, fishing. Three blue herons were high stepping in Piasa Creek. I could see the carp from the bridge. And a great egret was holed up in a small stream below the bluff cut.

There were mockingbirds everywhere. I stopped at the top of Stroke Hill and dueled with one. My crow was as good as its crow, and my whippoorwill and bobwhite were outstanding. But the bird’s repertoire included bluejays, Carolina wrens and towhees. I was soundly defeated.

I met up with Hummingbird Man. A friend told him that a hummer had been sighted, and he was cleaning a single feeder and filling it. He said he used up fifty pounds of sugar last year. Ten more feeders will go up before May. Vance loves his rubythroated hummingbirds.

Even early morning, mufflerless motorcycles roared in packs up and down the highway. The riders play loud radios—really loud radios that be heard over the din of the engines. What is the point? Why ride along the Mississippi and Illinois rivers and not look? And then there are the newer, tricycle-type vehicles that just look old kiddies on the playground.

I stopped at Admire’s Bench, the carved granite furniture by the creek, with the poem written by Carol Admire (who was killed on her bike last year by an impaired car driver), etched into the bench back. And on the ground below the bench was homage to Carol’s passion for ecology: a yellow plastic bag with Dollar General inked on it. Some jackass had sat on that bench and left his or her garbage.

I am against capital punishment (my mother was murdered, remember; I have some experience with this) but I would gladly smother any littering douche bag with his/her own Dollar General plastic garbage.

It was eighty-four degrees by afternoon. The house was slightly cooler. The cat lay asleep in the wingback chair and kneaded her front paws in the air. This is the time of year when we all come from the State of Dreams.

I went outside and flung wildflower seed all over my front yard. There is a lot of seeding going on, judging from all the frenzied male birds singing and dancing and preening for the girls.

And now it is naptime. And now I close my eyes, rehearsing for death, the last thing I saw, the image I will dream: the buttery dogwood flowers and the pink redbuds.

I am quite good-looking, in sleep.

At mid-afternoon, six black vultures fly east, glide east under the half moon half up in a blue crayon sky. Three black crows perch in a maple tree rooted in sandstone and single squawk, for they know me. And green maple mouth whistles prepare to fall on children’s lips. Jumping spiders hop across the trail. Purple lilacs lilt lushly.

I am committing suicide the slow way—eating everything, drinking everything, watching not walking—except for today. Today is indulgence in flower heads, in moist, green, unfolding blankets under tall trees. Fast suicide I find unappealing; you cannot take a day off the fast way.

The very act of description sets us apart, keeps us from immersion, from being. To live sentient is to decay decadently. To stand is to hold dominion. And so I lie in shadows and wait.

At mid-afternoon, a thin, graceful, young woman clad in jeans walks by without looking. She smells like green tea. The vultures, the crows, the half moon, the old man: she does not see.

Last night I saw a giant pill bug trotting along a farmer’s field. It morphed into an armadillo. In the blackberry and strawberry patches, the insects played Johan Bach who wrote music for crickets and cicadas and June bugs, placed stamp-size sheet music along the berry rows, for the musicians to practice.

I don’t sleep anymore; I simply rise from my body and float through walls and down highways and across space, returning in the morning and hiding under the covers and yawning and checking body parts and thinking about coffee.

At mid-afternoon, I watch a crow pick up a twig and drill and twist its tool into the ground then fetching a wriggling morsel from the dig.

Life is pop. Death is dance. Silence is surrender. Passive is active. Active is acting: Shakespeare got it right. ‘All the world’s a stage . . .’

To a single specie—of millions of species who play Bach in the moonlight fuck and feel and eat and scream and nest and swim and light and prey and dive and sway to magnetism and atom race and worship truly worship.

I am committing suicide the slow way. The fast way terrifies me.

April 14, 2016

At mid-afternoon, six black vultures fly east, glide east under the half moon half up in a blue crayon sky. Three black crows perch in a maple tree rooted in sandstone and single squawk, for they know me. And green maple mouth whistles prepare to fall on children’s lips. Jumping spiders hop across the trail. Purple lilacs lilt lushly.

I am committing suicide the slow way—eating everything, drinking everything, watching not walking—except for today. Today is indulgence in flower heads, in moist, green, unfolding blankets under tall trees. Fast suicide I find unappealing; you cannot take a day off the fast way.

The very act of description sets us apart, keeps us from immersion, from being. To live sentient is to decay decadently. To stand is to hold dominion. And so I lie in shadows and wait.

At mid-afternoon, a thin, graceful, young woman clad in jeans walks by without looking. She smells like green tea. The vultures, the crows, the half moon, the old man: she does not see.

Last night I saw a giant pill bug trotting along a farmer’s field. It morphed into an armadillo. In the blackberry and strawberry patches, the insects played Johnny Bach who, disguised as a human but being from another dimension, wrote music for crickets and cicadas and June bugs, placed stamp-size sheet music along the berry rows, for the musicians to practice.

I don’t sleep anymore; I simply rise from my body and float through walls and down highways and across space, returning in the morning and hiding under the covers and yawning and checking body parts and thinking about coffee.

At mid-afternoon, I watch a crow pick up a twig and drill and twist its tool into the ground then fetching a wriggling morsel from the dig.

Life is pop. Death is dance. Silence is surrender. Passive is active. Active is acting: Shakespeare got it right. ‘All the world’s a stage . . .’

To a single specie—of millions of species who play Bach in the moonlight fuck and feel and eat and scream and nest and swim and light and prey and dive and sway to magnetism and atom race and worship truly worship.

I am committing suicide the slow way. The fast way terrifies me.

April 13, 2016

Dear Mr. Baldwin, We have received your application for residence at the Shady Pines Rest Home for Women (a Trump House Enterprise). Our admissions panel has reviewed your CV and, frankly, we find you too sunnily salacious for the Shady (Trump Inc.).

While we have been considering changing our policy and are indeed searching for a suitable first male resident, we read your “My Life as a Monti Girl” piece, in which you imply you have slept with an entire college of sex-starved girls, and it became obvious we couldn’t trust you in the hen house (Trump This LTD).

It is our judgment that your Genehouse Chronicles are lewd, disgusting, malicious, sexist, violent, parsimonious, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, flippy flippy, fabulist, flimflam, fisty, frou-frou (frooh-frooh), fatalistic, phantasmal, fish-mongering flatulence.

While a person’s politics is no barrier re residing with us, we admit a slight bias against Shady liberals. We find that Shady Conservatives (trademark pending) are docile, nostalgic, MeTV moo-moos that are easily cared for.

You posited some questions, and here are our answers. Yes, our nurses wear underwear. Yes to Poles dancing, no to pole dancing. No, we do not masturbate our guests. No, we do not offer “comfort women.” No, we do not allow Porn Hub on our computers. No, we do not allow strip poker. No, no. No. No-no-no-no-no-nonono- nonnono.

You, sir, are not Shady (A Little Trumper Boy Resort) material. You disgust me.

Sincerely,

Ruth (you can’t handle the Ruth) Grossman-Humpback-Whale Director, Shady Pines Rest Home (a Trump House Consortium)

Ps. Perhaps we could discuss this over a G & T, under a tree, but not at S.P.R.H. (a D.J.T. Joint) as our pine trees died from global warming three years ago.

April 6, 2016

I awoke early, anticipating rain, and the day to come. To my surprise, there was a brilliant sunrise peeking under clouds. I drove into the light, to the convenience store to get my morning coffee. When I got out of the car, I noticed a truck driver pointing to the west. There was a black and purple sky backdrop, and a double rainbow rising up into a concatenation of racing clouds.

In front of the rainbows, a redbud tree kick line on the hilltops was backlit and neon bright, and the taller softwood trees’ budding leaves blazed with green light, like the earth was a stage for a Rockettes production of the American masterpiece “Our Town.”

Five minutes later, without thunder or lightning, sheets of rain smothered the rainbows and charged east, and I stood in the cold rain and felt cleansed. I shivered in relief, as I wouldn’t have to shower this morning. And because I am a Midwesterner, I thought of the fall and winter to come. No wonder we drink coffee, take stimulants, quaff alcohol.

As a talebearer with a renewed poetic license, allow me to hurl some pith: April Showers brings her naked girlfriend May, flowers.

I write this in the eye of the first storm. Not a leaf or a branch stirs. The eastern sky is black. The songbirds have emptied the top half of the feeder, which I refilled the evening before.

he hardwood tree in front of my office window (I haven’t identified it yet) has several large holes in its trunk and each hole hosts curious bird heads poking out. Soon it will be a condo with a baby nursery.

The flowering trees and the attendant honeybees, the stained-glass green of the grass, the fish smell of the rain, the night shift of the spotted moths, the finery of the first tiger swallowtail butterflies: this is so sexual and sensuous as to be maddening, deafening, overwhelming.

Winter is a cold, flinty man, like Scrooge. Summer is a hot war, like a yowling Maggie the Cat on her fiery tin roof. Autumn is old people leaf skiing. Spring is a woman, sapid, curvaceous, bejeweled, bedazzling, fragrant, soft and yielding, budded.

In the wonderful Bernardo Bertolucci film “1900,” an aging Burt Lancaster (if you haven’t seen “The Swimmer” and “Local Hero,” you are a seriously deprived person) plays an elderly Italian man who has climbed a tree and refuses to budge. His family implores him to come down. He replies—bellows, really—“I want a woman!”

Amen, brother.

April 5, 2016

The Quilt Queen is having knee replacement surgery tomorrow morning. This is her second one, and she is actually looking forward to it. Today when I asked her what could I do to help, she said, “Take care of Orville.”

If you know Farmer Orville as well as I do you know that he’ll eat cold food out of the refrigerator, chomp down all the cookies in the house, watch Fox News until he is bleary-eyed, and maybe just maybe watch a movie in which emotion is evoked. Does emotion coming out of an old man’s weeping make a sound if there is no one there to see it?

Reba the farm dog has a new playmate, Ruby Puppy, also a herder dog, weighing in at a robust and squirmy three pounds. If you hold her in your hands, she pees on them like frogs are wont to do. Her belly is palm-sized and soft-heaved. Reba is intensely jealous, but the girls bunk together in a straw-filled kennel, and I suspect there is cuddling—when no one is watching.

Meanwhile, asparagus rises in clusters in the fifty-foot-long patch, and my pee smells funny. The blackberries have leaved out and are flowering, as are the pick-your-own strawberries. The tomato beds are furrowed and aerated, though they won’t be planted until a magic day in May. And there is a quarter acre patch of dirt, awaiting seeds. “Cantaloupe, watermelons, cucumbers, radishes, peppers, maybe carrots,” Orville told me. “You want some kale, Gene?”

I’m thinking of planting a lawn chair next to that patch and watching for signs of life, for the next eight weeks. But you know what they say about watched pots. I suspect watched plots are about the same.

Redbud trees are flowering. Genehouse has two flowering redbuds, a long swath of forsythia, irises, baby bunnies, tree frogs, two cardinal couples, some nuthatches, chickadees (one of which scolds me while I fill the thistle feeder), goldfinches, and purple and red finches. Crows are literally fighting for mates. Orville and I could see the males beaking one another in the air and posturing like teenage boys.

So the beds are made, the sheet of earth is washed and kissed and tucked in. Babies are in the oven, Quilt Queen will have a new knee.

The writing god William Faulkner introduced me to the word “fecund.” He used it in his novels a lot, and as a kid reading “The Sound and the Fury,” and “Light in August,” the word seemed “dirty” to me, the F-word from another brother. “Fecund.” But that is exactly the descriptive word which paints spring days—soil and leaf and plant and baby bird: the fecundity of nature.

“Let me Kodak you by baby’s breath, baby, by lilacs by lilies, love.” I wrote that line when I was a tender and callow fellow.

By dogwood, dandelions, daisies.

Until death do us part. Until my last plot is watched.