-Eugene Baldwin's – The Genehouse Chronicles

May 15, 2014 

Today was the end of raspberry winter, the full moon in May and the subsequent chilly weather. Today you could plant tomatoes.

Today I went on the Genehouse walk and marveled at my own muffled footsteps, the forests now fully fledged and absorbing sound, the Osage iron trees bursting with notched green leaves and the oaks waving green. Yellow and purple irises were everywhere. The river was pregnant from heavy rain. A dead snake lay on the trail, a tire rut almost cutting it in two.

I stopped off at Farmer Orville’s and was greeted by Quilt Queen and Reba the dog and the orange barn cats, at the kitchen door. Orville was in the raspberry patch, transplanting new growth from between the rows. He keeps adding rows, even as he says this row is the last row. There will be more rows until there aren’t. He took a break and we jawed by the strawberry plants and cut asparagus spears with a Barlow knife (cutting anything with a pocket knife that’s not a Barlow, the knife of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, is sacrilege) and eating the crunchy raw tops, which tasted like fresh sweet peas.

Yesterday was Orville and Quilt Queen’s 54^th wedding anniversary.

“Look at me,” Orville said, rubbing his beard stubble. “Somebody loves me.”

“I sort of love you,” I said.

“So do all those old ladies who come for tomatoes and my husband smiles and gives them away,” Quilt Queen said, joining us. “And, I suspect, some of the younger ones too. We couldn’t have imagined it, that on that wedding day we’d be together, be alive 54 years later.”

I allowed as how I have a passel 20-something nieces, none of whom have shown interest in marriage, which is fine by me because I fear I would have to sing in public again, at a wedding. They didn’t know I had been a pro since junior high school. I told them I had been a boy soprano, even in college.

“Orville sang on the radio, the Lutheran Hour,” Quilt Queen said, as her husband rolled his eyes, “when he was a little boy soprano. Then his voice changed and that was the end of that. Do not ask him to sing now.”

That gush led Orville and me to exchange that glance that men do when they’re outed and revealed to have a soul and a soft side. We look like grizzled extras from “Lonesome Dove.” He reached into a bucket and filled a bag with fresh picked asparagus and handed it to me. Tonight I would have asparagus salad with kale and radishes and cucumber and Genespaghetti drenched in black pepper and Tabasco sauce.

“Hidden talents,” I said.

“Really hidden,” Orville said.

May 14, 2014

Last night on “Late Night,” Dave’s guest was an actor starring in an HBO revival of the powerful Larry Cramer play, “The Normal Heart.” The play is about the dawn of the AIDS epidemic, in the early 80’s. The actor talked and tears began to roll down my face, and I thought about my friend Randy Robbins.

I got divorced in the late 70’s, and I lost my professional way. My mother had been murdered a few years back, her brother Dee, my favorite uncle, had shot himself. I was deeply depressed. I got stage fright for the first time in my life. I no longer wanted to sing. I wanted to stay in theatre.

I began to write my first play. I couldn’t have known that the play would go to Off Broadway, in 1982. Meantime, I got a night job as a bus driver. My Evanston-based company contracted with McCormick Place, to ferry the casts of touring Broadway shows to Chicago’s Gold Coast, on the near north side.

Starting in 1979, the show “Annie” came to Chicago twice, each time a new Annie and a new dog, but the supporting cast stayed the same. Which is how Randall Robbins came into my life. Randy, who resembled the director Mike Nichols, played FDR, complete with cigarette in a holder and a wheelchair. “Annie” was his bread and butter, but we both agreed it was an awful show. We plotted to kill the little girls that belted out “the sun’ll come out tomorrow,” on the bus.

Randy had higher aspirations. Robert Redford was in town during the first “Annie” run, casting the small parts for the film, “Ordinary People.” You can see Randy, playing a family friend walking in Winnetka with Donald Sutherland’s character, alongside of Mary Tyler Moore’s. Randy got the part by ignoring the lines he was supposed to read. Hundreds of actors auditioned for the part; the odds were stacked against them; why not do something to catch Redford’s eye? So Randy wrote a monologue that treated his character as the lead, not the back story. Redford hired him on the spot. Continue reading →

May 11, 2014

Three hundred of my daughters were kidnapped in the last two weeks, by terrorists. Terrorists need no excuse to do heinous things but the stated reason was that my daughters were in school and being educated, and it was God’s will for women to be uneducated.

I am not surprised by this; women have been downtrodden for two million years. Women were chattel in this country for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and much of the twentieth century. Black women and American Indian women had it worse for obvious reasons. George Rogers Clark hung Indian women by their fingertips from trees and flayed them alive as a message for their men. It worked. Anthropologists estimate that forty per cent of pioneer women and girls were raped, often by husbands and fathers.

The film director John Ford captured the grimness of the frontier, the gun-toting and drunken mentality and dark souls of its men, in “The Searchers.” See John Wayne’s face, as “Ethan.” Walk the Alton mall, the ubiquitous malls of the country and see those men, often alone, today. Continue reading →

May 7, 2014

The small town of Golconda, population about seven hundred, is in the heart of the Shawnee National Forest, on the bank of the Ohio River. A lot of senior citizens live there because rents and expenses are cheap. Paducah, Kentucky is the nearest large town. Golconda makes Alton seem big. The town is enclosed in the forest. Not everyone there likes the fact that a national park was created by the acquiring of their land and the lowering of their tax base.

I did three presentations down there, on the history and artifacts of Indians, sponsored by the Pope County Historical Society. The evening show was at the high school, and I appeared in two seventh grade history classes. Continue reading →

May 8, 2014 

It began yesterday morning as I reached the top of Stroke Hill on Stanka Lane, a splotch of purple flower, and as I got closer, pushing aside the curtain of dangling inch worms and braving the onslaught  of maple seed boomerangs, I knew it was a purple iris, and there is nothing on earth as beautiful as an iris in a rain of maple seed, “iris” a Greek word meaning rainbow, and there tens of purple irises on that roadside spot, waiting for the signal to open, and you will find me there until the last petal falls.

Archaeologists search for irises in the woods, as those indicate where a cabin might have been. I once accompanied an archaeologist friend to a wood where he believed 19^th century settlers may have lived. I could see the outline of the cabin; there were that many irises. My friend then tamped the ground with a steel pole, feeling for the old outhouse hole. Once he located it we began to dig with shovels. A few feet of packed earth later, we discovered discarded, hand-blown green glass bottles circa 1830. Most of the containers were imprinted with the word “Bitters,” which was popular drink back in the day, for what ailed one, and bitters was in fact alcohol. Continue reading →

March 23, 2014

My friend, Richard P., a professor at Lake ForestCollege, used to work at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. He would invite friends to previews, so I got to see a lot of theatre. And he would invite me to have lunch with living playwrights. The joke goes, it’s easier to work with dead playwrights—they can’t complain.

I twice had lunch with Pulitzer Prize winner, August Wilson, as the Goodman staged his plays, “Ma Rainy’s Black Bottom,” and “The Piano Lesson.” August, now sadly gone before his time, wrote a play for every decade of the Twentieth Century, on African American themes. He was self effacing, chain smoking (he smoked in “No Smoking” places all the time) and funny. He was raised in Pittsburgh, and his plays reflect on the lives of poor black people, particularly their family memories and how the past is always present. August told me he had a phobia about being alone, which is ironic considering how writing is such a lonely occupation. He lived in Minneapolis, and when his wife went to work, he would gather up pencils and notebooks and drive to a bar that opened early. And there he wrote his masterpieces, perched on a bar stool and writing in long hand on yellow legal notepads. He asked far more questions of me than I did of him. His pet peeve was the “Chitlin Circuit,” small theatres featuring plays that embraced black stereotypes. Tyler Perry came from that background. If you wanted to get August Wilson on his soapbox, mention “Madea,” the motherly icon of the Chitlin Circuit. Continue reading →

May 1, 2014

When you come to Nashville to be a country western star, consider staying at the Hartleroad Hideaway. The bed is firm, the pool is cool, the deck beats all heck, the free take-home coffee cup is, uh, free, the tour guides are only too happy to let you off at Doom and watch you kill yourself . . . and then there is Aunt Judy’s Chocolate Pecan Pie. I’d enclose a photo, but I ate it. The pie, not the photo.

I have eaten pie a few times, to be neighborly, or social. I have seen pie fly. My fondest memory of childhood is me and my Grandpa Red at a carnival in Sidney, Nebraska, when I was five. A very fat white man, having won a pie eating contest (banana cream) boarded a Ferris wheel, the black operator of said wheel sending the pie guy into space. And soon, the pie eater got sick. He yelled, “N—-r, let me off of this thing!” The black man calmly unloaded everyone except the pie man and set the wheel to run endlessly. And it began to rain banana cream pie. “I will kill you, you goddamn n—-r!” Grandpa Red—he bossed oil rig workers and carried a Colt .45 cowboy pistol in the waistband of his pants, and his unblinking right eye scared tough men to death—signaled to the black man and escorted him out of the carnival. Continue reading →

April 15, 2014

In the beginning, the First People and the Animals shared precious Mother Earth with an immense orb of flame so hot and intensely light they feared blindness and fire. The orb of flame must somehow be moved, they agreed, or the First People would perish. What to do?

There was a long silence then Vulture spoke: “I will lift the orb of flame into the sky.” Vulture lowered his head and lifted the orb and balanced it and flew the orb of flame into the sky, the brave bird’s feathers afire and the First People weeping for this unselfish act. And Vulture hung the orb high in the sky, lighting the entire world and heating it, and it was good. Vulture flew back to Earth, the feathers of his head and neck burned off and his naked head colored blood red. Which is why, to this day, vultures do not have feathers on their heads. Continue reading →

May 2, 2014

I drove a panel truck for the then Alton Evening Telegraph, in the late 60s. My job was to deliver bundles of newspapers to Fidelity, Shipman, Gillespie and Greenfield, as well as throw individual papers onto farm driveways at eighty miles an hour. I learned how to high speed bounce the papers off the highway and onto the target. Some farms had dogs that waited for me, collies mostly, picking up the papers in their mouths, and farmers near Macoupin Creek, during spring flooding, might canoe out to the road. I got to know the delivery people in the larger towns, mostly girls around my age, and there might be lemonade or iced tea waiting.

My newspaper career ended when I totaled my van, slamming into a hillside near Piasa. This was before mandatory seatbelts, but I was saved by the wall of newspapers behind me. There were two other incidents which have never left me, which haunt me when I drive Route 67 or 16 and see me, the boy. On that same Piasa stretch of Route 16, I was driving east, like a madman, when a redtail hawk swooped down and into the windshield. I remember braking and running back to the creature and crying, its wings snapped and the head and beak hanging loosely by gristle. I felt I had sinned, and I spent hours at Main Street Methodist Church, praying for the soul of the bird. And there was another death, and a life lesson, a truth as kept from the young as the cruel lies about Santa Claus and the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny: birthdays lead to deathdays. Continue reading →

Saturday, my friends John and Judy drove me south along the Natchez Trace parkway, in Tennessee. We stopped at several Trace original sections and hiked them and admired the brilliant spring wildflowers. We stood where a ferry once crossed the Duck River, in the early 1800s, and where many soldiers of the War of 1812 are buried. Bloody Andrew Jackson had ridden on horseback here, and it is probable that Davy Crockett had used the ferry.

By mid-afternoon we were nearing the site of the grave of Meriwether Lewis, of Lewis and Clark fame. We suddenly realized that Hohenwald, the writer god William Gay’s hometown, was very near the Lewis site. In fact, William’s house and Lewis’s grave are but a couple of miles from each other, and so this had become the Lewis and Gay Expedition. Continue reading →