-Eugene Baldwin's – The Genehouse Chronicles

October 31, 2014

They say that people and their dogs look alike. I don’t have a dog and I certainly don’t look like Scout the Cat. But I can say with certainty that people do not look like Nature.

We have evolved so away from our roots, so fast that we have become incompatible with the natural world. After all, we were fish and we crawled onto land, and we looked at the brave new, waterless world, and our suspicious natures started right there. And whales, those magnificent mammals, took a look around on the dry land and wisely crawled back to the oceans. And now we long to get “back to the Garden,” when if fact we poisoned the garden and the sea.

Machines will replace, are replacing, most of the work that our ancestors did. Family farms are museums. 3D printers make guitars. Teachers are ceding hands-on learning to computers. What do we do now?

Yesterday on the Genehouse journey, I was walking through the woods and heard a great chatter of birds. I stopped and watched hundreds of robins flitting through the treetops. Continue reading →

October 28, 2014

My family moved to Alton when I was in the eighth grade. My uncle Fred owned the Flamingo Motel, and my dad and I worked there, me as a weekend restaurant and gutter cleaner, Dad as a jack of all trades, supplementing his post office job. That October, Uncle Fred told us about the Halloween parade and we sat on the balcony of the motel, next to the old Alton bridge and watched the proceedings, and it was fun.

But one parade was enough for me, and the next fall I had some “cool” friends, Curt and Jake among others, who persuaded me to yield to the dark side. We rode the side streets above the parade, leaning out of our windows and soaping parked car windows. If your family’s car was soaped in 1964, it was me.

The next October, one of my cohorts had been jilted by a girl and he wanted revenge. And he got it, with one of the most sophisticated Halloween pranks in the history of prankdom. Continue reading →

October 26, 2014

The Genehouse walk is a crunch now, with waves of fallen and falling leaves, and my boots kick up orange and fire red and purple leaves and they crunch acorns. The sound is like popcorn popping, and I think of having popcorn tonight, and I see popcorn everywhere, in egrets and pelicans and flint and quartz.

Last night at Farmer B.’s annual bonfire and hayride, we all stood under the starlit sky and watched the international space station arc from northwest to southeast, a low candleflame of peace. Did the astronauts see our fire? Did they see the world on fire?

At sunset it was eighty degrees, and my drive on the way to Farmer B.’s house led me into shadowy canyons and back up to hilltops where the sun was a flaming pumpkin on the horizon, and the bats rose up and the swallows and the nighthawks.

Farmer B. had made his fabulous chili without beans and folks cooked hotdogs on the fire and set marshmallows on fire. Lucas did his famous log rolling trick and his feet flew in the air and he landed on his back, this fallen boy. And he sprang back up Continue reading →

October 22, 2014

I was eating oatmeal with raisins and cinnamon at the café this morning and listening to a nice young man do a monologue on deer hunting and deer sausage and deer salami and deer meat sticks and deer back-strap steaks. And there was coffee talk and bacon talk and a fat guy on a cell phone so loud we all heard his friend on the other end blathering about inventory.

But all talk ceased when the Golden Boy Pie truck pulled up. Pie is sacred in these parts. I have to say, Golden Boy pies do not stack up to homemade but they’ll do in a pinch of your love handles.

I was standing at the counter, paying my bill when the golden girl sisters, Barbie and Emma, began to unbox the pies and place them on a table in the kitchen. A table laden with pie is a stunning sight, the color scheme a tribute to autumn: brown nut pie, black pie, pie with whipped cream topping, yellow pie, red pie, blue pie. There was no deer pie.

“Oh me, oh my, love that country pie.” A girlfriend of mine once set me straight on Bob Dylan’s ode to pie when I foolishly waxed poetic on rhubarb, and she lifted her skirt and showed me peach pie, and I have been a fan of peach pie ever since. Continue reading →

October 21, 2014

Charlie Parker’s little known and irreverent “He’s a Fast Talking Son of a Bitch,” debuted on this day in 1946, as a side B on his bebob album, “Part of the Way.” Sadly, censorship prevented Parker from using the word “bitch,” instead substituting “witch.”

In live concerts, club audiences would yell, “Play the bitch!” This led to legendary Hollywood actor John  Barrymore climbing onto the bandstand and fondling Negro backup singer, Serena Backright from behind, Barrymore’s long fingers caressing Ms. Backright’s tummy as though she were a musical instrument.

The mystery remains: Who was the fast talking son of a bitch (if indeed there was a fast talking son of a bitch)? Sideman washboard player Kilometer Davis, brother of Miles, claimed that he was the man of the title, but in fact Davis talked so slowly that audience members clapped between words.

Jazz historians cite fast talker President Harry Truman, who wielded his power from the White House to talk Bird into trying out young Margaret Truman on keyboards, though Ms. Truman, a mediocre pianist at best, could only play in the key of F#. A side note to music history shows that Margaret, noodling F# while the rest of the band played in D, may unwittingly have given birth to the 12 tone scale and “modern” music, which would drive American audiences mad.

Tall Shorty, the octogenarian tenor sax player (he slept through sets until it was his time to jam) was a fast talker, but only when he was dreaming. Father Charles Coughlin, “Cough” to his friends, the rightwing radio personality, was a fast talker but his rhythm had been removed in an experimental brain surgery.

Which leads us to the greatest fast talker of his time, move star Lou Costello, of Abbot and Costello fame. Costello and Bird met while dining separately but equally at Sardis, in New York City. As Bird told it, “There was this fat, fast talkin’ son of a bitch at a table near me, six foxy ladies hangin’ on his every word, and the dude was riffin’ on this poem, ‘Who’s On First?’ I mean, the cat crackled.”

“He’s a fast talkin’ son of a bitch/He can sing ‘Star Spangled Banner’ without a glitch/Sell ice to Eskimos with his slick pitch.” That memorable lyric would win Charlie Parker worldwide acclaim and a Pulitzer Prize for White Poetry, in 1950.

Mint condition copies of “Part of the Way” sell for as much as six dollars on E-Bay. The one rare recording of Bird using the word “bitch” can fetch much as a Norman Rockwell etching.

Sadly, we’ll probably never know who the “fast talking son of a bitch” really was, as everyone mentioned in this article is dead. Kilometer and Miles Davis put it succinctly in their 1952 hit, “For Bird: Dead Dancing is Slow Dancing”: “The dead dance bad/The dead speak deadly.”

With the end of bebob, came bebop, and rebop became Reebok, and truebop became Tupac, and shockbop became doo wop, and so it goes. With the coming of global warming, there won’t be another Bird, another Tree Rollins, another Leif Erickson.

But take heart: the mediocre live on. We’ll always have Miley, the Beiber, Josh Grobin making us sick to our stomachs with “You Raise Me up,” and Jeff Bridges imitating country singers.

Jazz, America’s music is beloved in Europe. We’ll always have Paris.

October 15, 2014

This was the fifth day in a row of rain or mist, of wind or gusts, and tornadoes skirted the edges, and I felt as though I were going mad. And then, at two this afternoon, the final outrage: three minutes of sun, that cock tease, three minutes of light and blue and shine and gleam, and heartlift . . . and then gloom times ten.

There were no birds at my feeders. Where they were hiding was anybody’s guess. The fawns, now grown into young brown women, stepped delicately in the mud and matted grass as though they were afraid of sliding away.

At the Mehlville Dairy, at the café, at the doctor’s office, the worst swear word of them all was muttered over and over with bitterness and dread: “Winter.” “Ebola” was a close second. “Obama” was third.

(Of course: Africa brought us Ebola and Obama—ask any white person where I live. Africa birthed the entire human race, you redneck jackasses.)

A doctor on NPR today said that rural people should take note: Do not go to your local hospital if you are sick and somehow your third cousin twice removed had been exposed to Ebola; only trust “major medical centers.”

Perfect.

“It’s a government plot, Ebola,” J., the young woman who can’t go to school because she refuses to be inoculated, said. “That’s why my mom don’t vote.”

Silly me, I tried to show her the error of her ways, pointing out that her mom had no voice. She said aloud to the handful of customers, “Anybody here vote?” Not a single hand went up.

“Buncha thieves,” a guy in a “Duck Dynasty” sweatshirt said, hitching up his 38 waist pants to the bottom of his 46 inch waist. “Fuck ’em.”

I drew my conceal/carry Glock nine and shot him dead, for stupidity. “The Walking Dead” put down their 64 ounce sodas and ate him, and they all came down with Ebola, and I sent them to a rural hospital.

See what three minutes of sun (that cock tease) will do to a guy?

October 10, 2014

This is a day of slow, steady rain and drizzle. Only the chickadees brave the thistle feeder. The maple tree outside my office window is full of disconsolate birds, all facing south.

The meadow floor seems alive, as squirrels carry nuts in their teeth—some of them tote hickory nuts as big as their heads—and scurry to hiding places, and robins run around helter-skelter and pluck drowning earthworms.

Is there a worm equivalent to Robert Frost’s poem, “Fire and Ice?” The worm poet-in-residence, writing about which way to die is better, drowning or devoured by robin?

Trivia: 75% of native North American worms have been wiped out, supplanted by foreign invaders. That red wriggler you rescued from the garage floor is Italian. Oh, and half the wild animals of the world have died off. Who needs them? Continue reading →

October 2, 2014

I was dreaming in the middle of the night, and strobe lights made everything more anxious, more dangerous. I heard myself talking, and a dreamwoman pointed to the well-scrubbed floor, and ticks crawled by the dozens across the surface, and I picked them up and squeezed, and popping ticks sounded like popcorn.

I woke up in a sweat—and the strobes were still there: lightning. No sound, just lightning, like lightning bugs. And then a deep rumbling, and then the trees cracked and swayed and groaned, and then the storm came, Thor driving his hammer on my roof. It rained until five this afternoon. It stormed in spurts all day.

I wrote for my blogging job then I drove past Grafton to the ferry, to cross the Illinois River into Calhoun County. The sky was purple. I could see the Mississippi bluffs ahead of me, lightning striking the ridges. Continue reading →

September 30, 2014

Farmer Orville and I helped our friends Mike and Cathy break down their produce stand and carry the pieces to a trailer. I smashed the middle finger of my left hand between two boards, so I can only properly give the finger with my right hand.

Loading up a produce stand for the winter is like being at a wake. Two weeks ago, there were cases of cantaloupe and squash and green beans and tomatoes and multicolored peppers and cucumbers. I will miss the bounty. And I will not eat a tomato from California, its texture like a tennis ball, its pale fruit flavorless.

Still, this morning my neighbor Irene brought me a bowlful of fresh picked lettuce, and Orville gave me a sack of tomatoes, and Reba the farm dog gave me a lick. Still, dog-eye sulfur butterflies, beautiful pale yellow and spotted against predators, fly and rest on the ground in yellow puddles. Still, ruby-throated hummingbirds feed below my window, and nuthatches run upside down along the maple tree and pileated woodpeckers hammer holes and red-shouldered hawks soar down the bluff fall.

The leaves are just beginning to turn to their true colors. The forest is turning gold, and the fields are pale gold, and the low sun is golden. The local roads ripple with wooly caterpillars, and turtles are on the move to winter dens and timber rattlesnakes are returning to their caves in the bluffs. Stroke Hill is littered with Osage oranges, fat and green and bane to spiders and loved by squirrels.

Speaking of which, No-Tail the Squirrel has grown a new tail. He showed up in tailless my yard last December. Some predator had grabbed him and came away with a fur stole. And No-Tail adapted, learning how to balance in the crooks of trees so he could sit up. Yesterday, he walked by me and I didn’t recognize him—until I noticed an odd tail, attached by a straw-shaped lump of naked flesh that resembled a pipe cleaner, then fluffing out into a splendid grey muff. Size does matter, and no tail is bad tail. I shall continue to call him No-Tail because I don’t know his real name. He knows me as the God of Nuts.

My resume lists God of Nectar, God of Nuts, God of Seed, God of Watermelon and God of Stale Bread, and sometimes God of Water. The animals haven’t yet been philosophically poisoned by Christian missionaries.

This gold, this heat, this low light, this placid river: these I hold on to. Come the last hummingbird, I will be lonely. Come the last tomato, I will bawl like a Girl Scout whose cookies got stolen.

Raise high, the middle fingers of your right hands, to winter.