-Eugene Baldwin's – The Genehouse Chronicles

August 22, 2015

My pops loves cantaloupe. He eats it then shits it out for the next two hours. He is dying, and all he wants to eat is cantaloupe. “Get me some cantaloupe, Cindy. They still got cantaloupe?” And I don’t know how I am going to get through this.

My sister lives three miles away, but she don’t have anything to do with taking care of our pops. I will not put him in a nursing home. He is proud, and I will be there for him to the end.

I gave him a bath this morning. Do you know what it feels like, to wash your own dad? To listen to the inside noises of your dad’s broken body? I put a washcloth over his lap—I can’t bring myself to touch his private parts—and he sat on the safety bench and stared straight ahead, biting his cheeks, and no words was spoke, and I just bathed him like he did me when I was a baby, and now he is my baby.

I have to leave the house, for food and stuff, but I can’t leave him alone. He insists on walking, and he always falls down. The neighbor comes in, don’t say a word, just sits and waits for me to get back.

I gave Pops a urinal to use, but he won’t. He pees and don’t tell nobody. Or stands to go to the toilet and falls on the floor. I never felt so alone.

He had a double lung transplant. They are rejecting his body. He is on rejectment— what you call it—meds; he can barely draw breath. I see him coming home from Nam, a proud, strong warrior. And now the VA says hospice.

What is that? What can I expect: hospice. They say they will wean him off all meds, and nurses will come and attend to him . . . and he will waste away. What does that mean?

Mom died at forty-nine. I am forty-nine. I weighed five hundred pounds, and I took control over my life, and here I am, still working on it. What good does it do? I am destined to die young. I held my children together when their dad catted around in motels. I was the strong one. This is my reward.

My son, my sister, they talk nostalgia talk over the phone. Remember, Sis? We did that, we did this? Remember, Mom? The snow forts we built, the trips to Branson?

But do they come here . . . where I am desperate just to get out for an evening, have some drinks, flirt? Do they come here, see Pops melting away? At least the VA pays me to care for him.

What will it be like? Will I see a shadow of him rise above his body? Will he say his last words? Will he just stop breathing? What? I have never been so scared.

What does it say, when Nam is your best memory?

August 20, 2015

One of my best friends was killed yesterday. She died young, as we say, and needlessly. Her friendship was therapy for me, as she presented me with countless gifts and all I could do was to continually thank her.

She was a bird lover. She had the rare ability to touch wild birds: finches, woodpeckers, crows, doves, hummingbirds, owls, wrens—they all sought her out. They sang to her. She fed birds, as do I, but she was spiritually in tune with them, more so than my friend Hummingbird Man.

She was voluptuous, with great inner beauty, brown-skinned and virtuous. She was fashionable, always colorfully dressed, seasonally dressed. And she danced with grace; she could move with the wind like it was her sister.

I took her for granted, I am ashamed to say. We were comfortable with each other, but she was welcoming and I was standoffish. And now she is dead, and now I mourn and think of all the things I might have said to her. Continue reading →

August 18, 2015

The ninety-three-year-old man got confused as to where his daughter lived, so he stopped at a St. Louis intersection, to ask for help. And he got it. Two young men calmly walked over to him, reached into his slacks pockets and took all his money.

Unfazed, the old gentleman got back in his car and drove to another intersection, to ask for help. And he got it. Two young men climbed into his car and drove off. Police found the man confused and standing alone. He told them what had happened.

Imagine the laughter as the four thieves gathered in their respective hangouts and bragged about their crimes. It was like taking candy from a baby, man. Man, we got that old sumbitch!

Except.

The old gentleman is a Tuskegee Airman. Continue reading →

August 15, 2015

Cathy, of Cathy and Mike’s Produce Stand, woke up last Saturday night and felt her heart trying to escape her chest. Mike drove her to the hospital. Her heart rate was 180. She thought this was her last moment on earth.

I found this out on Sunday when I saw an old, bald man standing behind the produce stand counter, and he told me he was Cathy’s brother; she was sick. He was so matter-of-fact: one side of the family gets heart disease, the other gets cancer. He is from the cancer faction.

Fortunately, for hundreds of friends and loyal customers, Cathy got her pacemaker readjusted, went on new medications, and went home on Tuesday. I stepped in to help Mike load in watermelons, cantaloupes, corn, tomatoes and a whole lot more, for business on Wednesday. He ran the stand for the next two days, and I helped him shut it down at closing.

On Friday, a very pale Cathy came back. I volunteered to be her assistant. Mike was off to the Mennonite farms to get produce for the weekend. Mostly, Cath sat in a lawn chair, and I ran the cash register and carried melons to cars for old ladies.

The advantage of being at a produce stand at closing is you go home with a lot of food. In my refrigerator are several Calhoun peaches, Continue reading →

August 7, 2015

I am in favor of boobs. I have enjoyed some wonderful boobs in my day. And last night, OMG, was the boob of boobs night. Fox Sports 1 had the Miss Hooters Contest and that other Fox network overflowed with boobery.

Fox Sports 1 emailed me in my role as journalist last week, to ask if I would participate as a judge from my home. Each home judge would focus on one part of the female body. I got “thigh gap.” I was to concentrate on that area and rate the gaps. One of the scantily clad young women had a four inch gap. You could have put a fist in there.

But I was distracted all contest long, as my eyes would wander up to the chests of the mostly breast-enhanced young ladies, their boobs shaped like ripe, fat cantaloupes and spilling from their tops. Poofy, bleached blonde hair seemed to be a requirement, as well as ultra-high spiked heeled shoes, recessing the thigh gaps and making me sit very near my HD television so that I could be completely fair.

Each Hooters Girl represented a region of the country. Miss Illinois works in Champaign—Go Orange! She made the top ten, but Miss Georgia had the best peach—I mean, thigh gap.

Meanwhile, Fox News, in an attempt to humiliate the non-debate candidates, shot them in a darkened stadium with no audience and even had a Lindsey Graham-cam which cut to him standing on a platform because he is height challenged. Continue reading →

August 4, 2015

Dear Mr. Baldwin,

Congratulations on being so old. But not so fast, you hairless geezer! All good things must come to an end, as the saying goes. Your time is up, Mr. B. Cha cha! Bye-bye!

You, along with every other American over sixty-five and two hundred pounds of weight, have been reclassified as “Borrower,” as in borrowed time. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” as the saying goes, so you’ll be checking out real soon.

Mr. Baldwin, do you remember that old movie, “Soylent Green?” Charlton Heston plays a man who uncovers a plot to kill people and turn them into food? Well, guess what? Thanks to the Obamacare Death Squad, science fiction has become real! We are going to process you and feed you to starving children in Appalachia! Can I get an “Amen?”

You know the value of marketing, Mr. Baldwin. We can’t call our new food Soylent Green—people would get upset, damaging the quality of their meat.

Announcing Continue reading →

August 3, 2015

Mike and Cathy, owners of the fruit and vegetable stand on the top of the bluff, are two of the hardest working people I know. Their stand is set in front of an old-time gas station, a lane with an over-hanging roof resting on two brick pillars attached to a small service building.

You smell the goods before you walk in. Cantaloupes and Calhoun peaches lure one from a hundred feet away. Then the mounds of sweet corn make your mouth water. And there are juicy watermelons—I ate three quarters of one in a single sitting—peppers, white and red potatoes, piles of tomatoes, several varieties of cherry tomatoes with exotic colors of chocolate and lemon, cucumbers, green beans, jars of apple butter, onions, apples, eggplant, squashes and a whole lot more.

I have become sort of an honorary relative, Uncle Gene, who comes over to the stand in the late afternoon, sits in a lawn chair, sometimes helps customers, other times shoots the bull with an amazing cast of steady customers including: Stevie, the old woman who runs the fish stand on Clifton and the Great River Road; the old professor in sport coat and shorts and enormous turquoise necklace and earrings; Continue reading →

August 1, 2015

On windless summer days, vultures perch on the cell tower up the hill from my house and scan the horizon. They are glider pilots; without wind they would use up their wing energy in minutes. So they watch and wait and smell and balance and ballet.

I walk in shadows, black treetop to treetop on windless summer days, and butterflies sip my sweat. The leaves sag and fold inward and pant, and the tallgrass prairie flowers are trampolines for bumblebees.

Bluetailed skinks and obsidian-colored rat snakes sun themselves on the hot asphalt, bodies pulsing to repel ants, eyes upward to watch for sentinel owls and redtail hawks, on windless summer days.

On windless summer days, the river is torpid, glassine, rippled by garfish, patrolled by fisherbirds: great egrets and herons and American white pelicans, wings agleam in the hot sun, and seagreen bullfrogs sit trancelike on the river’s bottom and hold their breathe.

Squadrons of dragonflies dive and dart over the coffee-colored tepid water on windless summer days, their beating wings papery and rattling, and green bottleflies dart as fast as Zorro’s sword.

Monarch butterflies float across and through tree limbs, their eyespots glaring like ogres, their bodies poisonous to predators, and they parasail and rise and fall, on windless summer days.

On windless summer days, girls in skimpy clothing walk with sure legs and piston hips: the rise and fall of the male empire.

Sailboats languish and drift on windless summer days and weekend sailors put their feet up and sip cold beer and dream(?).

Kites do not fly, coyotes do not stalk, babies do not laugh, old men do not walk, snapping turtles do not snap, farmers do not reap, mourning doves do not stop crying, praying mantises do not pray, hummingbirds do not hum, songbirds do not sing:

on windless summer days.

July 27, 2015

Please do not pray for me, promise me hope or eternal life, offer platitudes or pearls of wisdom. Don’t tell me if only you had known. Nothing will do today.

I have known for some time, after a long spell in therapy with a compassionate and skilled person, after dealing with PTSD—the childhood trauma version—I knew. And now I know.

The first time I heard PTSD applied to me, I remarked that I hadn’t been in a war. Yes you have, my therapist said: The War of the Baldwins. For which there were no medals for valor, no flags or songs, no nurses to care for and comfort you and attend to your invisible scars and the tickle monsters in your groin.

Peel off my skin. There I am a commercial for Band-Aids. There is gauze and salve and unguent and sear and needle stick and pus and corruption—there.

There were casualties. My mother was murdered. So engrossed in the war was she, she forgot to look left and right. So engrossed in the war was I, I accepted embraces where I could get them.

I was raped when I was thirteen.

Rapists are great listeners. Comforters. Confession receivers. Concessionists.

The rapist is dead. The gift he gave me is eternal. It comes with a guarantee for life. Sadly, I have several women friends who were raped. Rape, like guns, is all-American.

The hollowness I feel, is like . . . is as . . .

Oddly, I am sleeping—odd for me. Most of the weekend. Nine hours last night. An hour this morning. Through movies, sporting events. On the floor. In the car. With no dreams.

The small stands in for the large. A house is a battlefield. A boy is all the victims of Pinochet and Pol Pot and Boko Haram.

Details are not forthcoming. The rapist is not in hell. The rapist is.

I am many things. I am not ashamed.

I was raped when I was thirteen.

“Can you forgive me?”

I said, to the mirror.

July 26, 2015

I spent the early afternoon picking blackberries and tomatoes at Farmer Orville’s place and, of course, sitting on a porch swing with the wiry philosopher himself. His wife Quilt Queen was resting inside having almost feinted at the Sam’s Club across the river.

“She was overdoin’ it,” Orville said. “You’d expect me to faint, count of the price of food.”

He invited me to tonight’s ice cream social at his Lutheran church. What’s the harm in that, you might ask. He has also invited me to the pancake breakfast, the Easter egg hunt, the Christmas party, the flea market, the spaghetti supper, the veggie swap, the book fair, the fish fry and the tenor-from-Africa-concert. All of this is a plot to get me into a church, but I am a staunch heathen and will not be led down the garden path for ice cream or exotic tenors.

“I cleaned the portable toilet this morning,” my friend said, nodding to a white-painted facility baking in the sun. He means, he used his “special spoon” to dig out the poop because, dang it, some berry picker dropped a load, and he’d be damned if he’d hire a service to clean the john. The toilet is supposed to be used for urination only, it is unspoken local knowledge, but every once in a while uh, stuff happens.

Reba the farm dog was crusted in horse poop—she loves rolling in it; she follows the horse around the pasture, hopeful for the next deposit. She lay across my sandals for a belly rub and licked my calves: a sure mosquito repellent and possibly a universal repellent.

Next I went to Mike and Cathy’s farm stand for peaches, corn and cantaloupe. They keep a lawn chair at the ready for me. I like sitting in the shade and chatting up the customers.

Today’s lineup: a charming four-year old girl named Michelia who showed me chewing gum tricks and told me I smelled (thanks, Reba); a gouty old woman who pronounced the food overpriced and walked away angrily; a hillbilly from Central Casting with a waist the size of five watermelons, his belt girding his bare belly and the threadbare jeans threatening to fall below, his beard thicker than a bramble bush, him spitting tobacco juice; a very old man dressed in a white suit coat and white cargo shorts and sporting two earrings and a huge chunk of turquoise for a necklace; a retired Air Force Colonel who talked about fighter jets; a customer who in informed Cathy that the corn here wasn’t close to the corn at the Godfrey Road stand, and Cathy informing her that the Godfrey Road stand was hers too, all the corn came from the same field, and the customer, well, she never.

Pick a little, talk a little, confirm or change your opinion re the human condition. Savor the peach juice and store it in the memory bank for winter. Press your fingers into the melon and hear it and feel it sigh and breathe. Explode the juicy corn with your incisors.

Ah, summer.