-Eugene Baldwin's – The Genehouse Chronicles

March 15, 2015

The singing began toward sunset, the palpable long trill of a red-winged blackbird. And there is never a lone red-winged blackbird, so I know the ponds and wetlands are about to come alive with the thrilling songs. The males have sere wingtips and an under-layer of cream yellow tufts. The females are extremely maternal and will drill your head with a beak if you come too close to a nest.

And yesterday two blue-brown sandhill cranes landed on my bluff and slow-strutted around piles of brush and timber. I watched them with binoculars, knowing how rare it is for cranes to be up bluff. The males can be four feet tall. They have red feather slashes along their heads. They are great fathers.

In my yard are redheaded woodpeckers and red-shouldered hawks, both species with heads the color of rage. In my yard are cardinals and red housefinches and scarlet tanagers, flame throwers all.

I have always like redheads. Continue reading →

March 12, 2015

It started last night: the spring peepers, at first a few groggy ones then some more, and now the woods surrounding me filled with syncopated song. The branch holes of the trees are throbbing with the altos of nesting mothers, and sex-minded male wrens are busting a gut and the redwing blackbirds along the bank of the river compete for the avian version of American Idol. It is glorious.

I visited Farmer Orville this afternoon. If Orville were a bird, he’d be a whooping crane. He was in the blackberry patch pruning branches, especially the higher ones. “Ain’t nobody gonna reach up there and pick them,” my friend said. I assured him I would; keep the high branches as an exclusive Genehouse premium. I saved the lives of some eight footers.

“Can you hear them?” Orville pointed at the dirt path between fields. “Asparagus babies cryin’ under the dirt clods. Continue reading →

March 10, 2015

Fifty years ago tonight, practice for the Alton High School spring show, “Wonderful Town,” the musical version of “My Sister Eileen” had just let out. I hadn’t wanted to be in “Wonderful Town,” but our music director George Heidbrink had more or less threatened me, that if I didn’t do this, if I wasted my talent, he was done with me and did I know I was being groomed to play the lead next year? I did not.

So I played an Irish cop, among other teensy parts and sang “Darling Eileen,” with my two fellow Irish cops and amigos, Steve Darr and Paul Glassbrenner (now my brother-in-law).

Paul and Steve and I stood outside in the pit and made plans to drive to Burger Chef and chow down. They knew I had a crush on a senior, Carla P. and they were teasing me unmercifully.

And who should bound out the stage door but Carla herself. My partners had secretly offered to give her a ride home. Carla was tall and rangy, with glasses and an amazing array of braces. She always wore puffy dresses and sweaters buttoned at the top. So she and I climbed into the back seat and my snickering pal Steve started his car.

There are women who read this chronicle who can verify this: I was/am afraid of the opposite sex. So Carla was scaring me just by sitting next to me. She couldn’t go for burgers, so we took her to her house. I walked her to her back door.

And there we stood, a warm spring night. Five minutes went by. We didn’t talk. We looked in opposite directions and hemmed and hawed. Finally: “It’s your birthday tomorrow.” “Yes,” I stuttered. Continue reading →

March 7, 2015

2 am. I stand outside. The snow and ground have been drenched in ink, and, using the soft solar light, an unseen artist directs the flow and curved black lines fill the meadow and my pale legs are crossed with black lines and the snow melts and there is the sound of running water.

This is a magic mushroom dream or the full moon in spring.

I pick up a slender, long twig and write “Betsy,” in the snow.  We made love on the roof of her mother’s house, in the snow in Minneapolis.

The meadow is a nursery filled with underearth voices, babies of a trillion species stirring, for the slow winter cadence of the planet’s heart has sounded the alarm and the drumbeat quickens.

A red fox arches its back and leaps in snow piles, and the undersnow squalling tells the tale and the fox takes tender meat into its mouth and vanishes. It will leave a pile of bones by its lair.

This is an aglianico wine dream or the full moon in spring.

I scrub myself with sandpaper snow. The woodpile below is as busy as a Chicago apartment building: rustling, scurrying, snarling, chattering residents responding to undersky magnetic pulses. Then clouds veil the solar light and there is silence then the clouds unroll like waves and there is beautiful music.

And down the bluff a rushing of water, a swelling of water and a barge sounds its foghorn. The river seeks higher ground. North Woods ice is kayaking the valley.

This is me dreamasleep on my swaying feet or the full moon in spring.

March 3, 2015

Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, ranking member of the Senate committee on environment, famously produced a snowball from a cooler on the Senate floor and pronounced it as proof that global warming is not happening. Such insight from the ranking senator in charge of environmental issues is breathtaking.

Of the 99.9% of climate scientists who claim that global warming began a long time ago, 55.777 % renounced their research based on the courageous Inhofe and his snowball. Said Dr. Allan Edwards of the National Science Institute, “Wow. That guy threw a snowball on the Senate floor—it was a slider down and away—and I’m like, Gosh Darn, he is right. I donated the remainder of my research grant to UNICEF.” Noted physicist Stephen Hawking put it more succinctly: “Senator Inhofe is an effing genius.”

Over last weekend, Inhofe, author of “You Say Super Tornado, I say Super Tornahdo,” wrote a new book, “Climate Change Schmimate Change: What Would Jesus Do?” which goes on sale in April. An excerpt follows: Continue reading →

March 1, 2015

It is in our canon that the god of light will rise and fall and god of darkness will rise and fall and this is good.

It is in our canon that the god of color dressed us in feathers, made us vermillion and made the snow white, that we may be seen as we sing, and that come the verdure we join our gold and crimson and violet and blue sisters in chorale.

It is in our canon that the god of seeds, the one god revealed to us feeds us thistle, and sisters Junco and Dove and Chickadee share the feast. And the god returns, his path revealed by the god of light, and he looks to his brother Light and sings to us, his beak pursed, echoing the song, and our sister Chickadee lands on his shoulder and he laughs.

It is in our canon that Goddess of the River is the artery of a heart, and the beating heart is called Oceana and we send her rivulets of snow and fill her gaps and slake her thirst and we bathe in her and our children venerate her and we reflect on the river’s silver and azure blue and its winding plants and our sisters Egret and Heron and Swan, and the song of the heart is “Rivers to the Ocean Run,” and “Gloria,” the streams’ counterpoint.

February 25, 2015

Yesterday the Genehouse walk was bent into ice winds shooting across the river. Already, trees were budding and crocuses were abloom. Tens of robins scurried up and down the lower bluff, bathing in snow water puddles along the highway and furiously stabbing at the mud layer. Were there worms in there, having survived raw winter only to be beaked by birds?

Farmer Orville, in autumn, told me I was seeing robin flocks getting ready for mass migration. How then, to explain today’s robin cities and hamlets and cul-de-sacs of fat, middle class robins?

There was a pale half moon in the turquoise sky to the east, meaning there would be moonset after sunset and starset after moon, Continue reading →

“Are we by that river?” Olive asks.

She is swathed in white nightgown and bedclothes, her cheap brown wig—the family calls it the helmet—askew. The skin of her face is loose and corrugated. Photos of grandchildren and folks long dead and one framed print hang over the bed. The twin bed cater-cornered from hers is empty; the occupant died this morning.

I assume she means the Mississippi River, a mere two miles from the nursing home here in Alton, on the Illinois side just north of St. Louis. All her ninety-five years she has had close attachments to rivers: baptized in the Kaskaskia River, fished in the Big Muddy in Southern Illinois, and the river-like Shoal Creek wound like a coiled snake through her father’s farm.

The nursing home is a hundred miles from Mt.Vernon where she had lived on two farms and another house most of her life, the first of which my parents and sister and I lived in for three years. We were very poor, so the story goes, my father making one dollar an hour in a local foundry.

My mother and father had met in Mt.Vernon, the local bad boy bootlegger and the pretty, redheaded, freckled girl from Oklahoma, whose father was an oil derrick worker for hire, and Southern Illinois was rich with oil in those days. My mother got pregnant with me at age sixteen and it was downhill from there. Continue reading →

February 22, 2015

I’ve got Oscar fever—because I saw Michael Keaton’s performance in the extraordinary “Birdman” and I want him to win, and sultry Jennifer Lawrence will be live on the TV tonight and I get another kind of fever when I see J-Law.

Alton and surrounding area is quite scenic and would make a great backdrop for a film. Elsah could be the set for “Tom Sawyer,” or Huckleberry Finn”—the houses are ready to go. Filmmaker Brian Jun already made his mark with “Steel City,” a gritty piece of art which starred my Clifton Country Inn AND America Ferrera (“Ugly Betty,” “Real Women have Curves”) and the wonderful John Heard (“The Sopranos”). And there were other Jun movies and a bowling movie.

In 1965, when director Norman Jewison went looking for a backwater Mississippi town in which to film “In the Heat of the Night,” a punch of a movie Continue reading →

February 20, 2015

I drove to the Hayner Library today to pick up some DVDs I had reserved, most notably “A Most Wanted Man,” the last film of Philip Seymour Hoffman, perhaps the greatest American film actor of the last twenty years.

I got my selections and was talking to my pal, librarian Penny Noble, when I saw an elderly Asian man walk in the door. He carried a blue plastic grocery bag and shuffled across the room and exchanged his returned DVDs for some new ones, the collected works of “Jeeves and Wooster,” the long running PBS English comedy hit based on the satirical books of the irascible P.G. Wodehouse.

Then the gentleman got a newspaper off the rack and sat at a table and read. Sudden recognition hit me. I asked the checkout clerk: Is that man named Towata? Yes, the clerk said, he comes in nearly every day. Someone bought him a DVD player, and he’s always picking up his limit.

And since the clerk was a young woman, I asked if she knew who Arthur Towata was. She thought he was an artist. A world class artist, I told her.

Arthur Towata is a ceramicist and sculptor and painter. He is quite old. His pieces grace museums around the world. As a young artist, his peers encouraged him to go to New York and be part of the art scene. On his way to the Big Apple, he stopped in Alton . . . a small apple orchard perhaps, and he never left. Continue reading →