-Eugene Baldwin's – The Genehouse Chronicles

April 29, 2014

My family was poor when I was very young. If we camped in the ShawneeNational Forest we had to catch fish in order to stay. A crappie haul from the lake meant one more day on the lake, one more swim, one more tramp in the woods. At home, we had designated foods for each day of the week and fried mush for most breakfasts—gag me. Friday was Vegetable Soup Day, for me by far the worst of the food days, worse even than liver and onion day, for the soup consisted of a tonnage of cooked, limp cabbage, just enough tomatoes and ketchup for a reddish tinge and a few carrot peelings and lots of salt. I have never been able to eat or smell cooked cabbage again. I did discover slaw, which I liked (hold the mayo) but I wasn’t crazy for it. Farmer B.’s wife Shirley makes a mean vinegar slaw (oh, her cucumber and onion salad!).

Last Wednesday, at Bobby Q’s Barbecue and Catfish, in Cookeville, Tennessee, I tasted something so good I can never eat regular slaw again. Now I lust for slaw, covet slaw—it may even be the last words I utter on my deathbed: Want . . . Charlie Hawkins’s Pool Room Slaw. Continue reading →

April 30, 2014

“Water” is the central word and metaphor of my life. My mother and I drowned I in it, Mom by a killer’s hand, and me falling through the ice on the Illinois River on a twelve degrees below zero night, my body soaked through and frozen, my brain sinking into a coma, only to be brought back to life by a screaming German named Marvin: “You vill not die!” I was ready to die that night . . . and now I’m not.

And I experienced a near drowning, standing on the bank of a flash flood on Piasa Creek, my backpack filled with thirty pounds of Indian artifacts, and me calculating that I could jump six feet across the flood to the other shore, me stepping back and leaping, the weight of the stones dropping my body into the raging water, down to the creek bottom, then swept-away boulders and tree limbs crashing into me from upstream, my breath spent, me grabbing a passing log and floating up to the surface and gasping for breath then pulled under once more, then snagging my right leg into a logjam, feeling my hip dislocate from the strain of holding on then landing myself on sand, and sobbing. I had come to Alton for a friend’s funeral and nearly became a body myself. Continue reading →

April 20, 2014

The perfume of the river valley is overwhelming, and so are the buffalo gnats.  The harsh winter seems to have made the noseeums more aggressive, or perhaps it is my imagination. Just walking from the front door to the garage brings down gnat swarms on my head and legs, the tiny pricks of their nibbles mildly hurtful, majorly annoying. On the Genehouse walk I flay my arms wildly and mash buffalo gnats in my ear canals.

I see two bald eagles early this morning, an adult and a juvenile. The migrating eagles have long since packed their bags: those two are permanent residents. Forty American white pelicans fly along ScotchJimmyIsland in a single, undulating line, staying close to the water. The air is alive with the sounds of baby birds. Crow and the missus have two kids, and they spend a lot of time pecking away at my neighbor Irene’s lawn, for sustenance for the babies.

“The river is wide; I cannot cross over.” Barges sport clothes lines now, and the Brussels ferry is open. I may just have to drive there and ride the ferryboat across the Illinois River, just for the hell of it. Cooking classes have sprung up, teaching students to cook the invasive, leaping carp which knock people out of boats. “If you can’t beat em, eat em.” Continue reading →

April 17, 2014

Gabriel Garcia Marquez has died at age 87. Gabo was the father of magical realism, in which characters see fantastic images, such as dead loved ones still dogging them or fantastic images of butterfly swarms as portents of coming event.

“One Hundred Years of Solitude,” a masterpiece about a Columbian family over many decades, their sins and their triumphs and breaths, affected me so deeply that magical realism is infused in many of my stories. The writer William Kennedy said that “Solitude” and “The Book of Genesis” should be required reading for every human on earth. Marquez wrote the book in 18 months, selling all but a space heater and two other items, his wife begging food merchants to extend them credit. It was an instant best seller.

“Love in the Time of Cholera” chronicles the separate lives of a man and woman who were in love when they were young, only to reunite when they are 80, and on to death. Gabo’s characters always march toward death. Though he wrote of violence and Fascism, as well as enduring love and the glories of the natural world, Gabo was by many accounts a happy, affable fellow.

Most if not all of you have read “The Book of Genesis.” It is time for “Solitude.” I would say rest in peace, but Gabo may show up here and haunt me. It’s his way.

So, I’ll say, “Welcome.”

This is the day. The forest is olive hued, as soft wood trees push out the babies and there are fields of lush green grass reflected in the opalescent eyes of my chattering-at-birds cat. Three weeks ago I could see a quarter mile into the canopy of woods and now green fills in the spaces, like an oil painter’s brush strokes. Monet saw such a day and set up in the gardens and painted dazzling landscapes while The Band sang, “While I Paint My Masterpiece.”

Three of my trees have knot holes and mama birds jamming nest material into those holes. Sheila S. told me to put my dryer lint in the grass, the birds would use it, and Sheila S. was right. My yard contains dryer lint, strawberry tops, kale stems, apple cores and bread slices, all of which disappear overnight.

A mockingbird has arrived just in time to organize and terrorize all the other birds. Crow and his lady coo like doves. The goldfinches are fully colored, looking like mustard smears on branch ends. No-Tail the squirrel—he got his tail ripped off in the winter—has adjusted to life without back balance. He climbs a tree and sits up like a prairie dog and leans back into the trunk and gnaws on his snack. Continue reading →

Everyone please take a look at the article written about me in today’s Alton Telegraph!

April 8, 2014 

On the Genehouse walk it was a day of gift finding. Climbing down Clifton Terrace Road on the east side, I came upon a dead box turtle. I knew it was dead because the elaborate shell markings had peeled off from the hard, mound-shaped oval, leaving the exposed area chalky white. The marking, as thin as paper and diaphanous, was in three inch by one-and-a-half inch scabs, each slice of art eerily resembling an x-ray of a human hand.

Just steps into the River Road section, I found a huge neck vertebra four inches long and three wide, the bone white and austere and the nerve canal the size of a dime. I held the bone vertically and the west wind made a whistle of it. Farmer Orville—he was the last gift of the day—said it was a cow bone. I asked how a cow came to be on the river and he said it was a miracle. Continue reading →

April 5, 2014

I did the Genehouse walk this fine, sunny afternoon. The tree buds are thickening and jonquils and daffodils are abloom and the Final Four was coming up, on CBS. I stopped to see Farmer Orville. He was working in the blackberry field, pruning branches and tying up spindly trunks. I asked if I could help.

“I perty much work on my own,” Orville said. “I’d be a son of a bitch to work with. I have my ways and I’m stubborn. Reba (the herding dog), don’t climb on Gene. The wife, she comes out here and tells me how everything I worked at for hours is done wrong.”

Fortunately for my friend, Quilt Queen was in the house, napping, blissfully unaware. Continue reading →

April 3, 2014

The rain began two nights ago and continues to this moment, early Thursday morning. My south woods are enshrouded in fog, the tree shafts rising like an army of dark giants. The river looks like lentil soup with a foam of sour cream, of the whipped up fog. The deep green of newly lush grass and willowy wild onions carpet the meadows, and the scent of the onions is pungent and sharp. The recesses of the hills are filled with temporary muddy water, above the moody, muddy river. You can hear the mosquitoes coughing themselves awake.

At five o’clock this morning, there was the crack! crack! of lightning, the tympani of thunder and the sweet soprano chorus of spring peepers. And the fearful moans of one Scout the Cat, pressing under the comforter to my bare chest, seeing no romance in rain.

“Blow, winds; crack cheeks!” Shakespeare Continue reading →

March 29, 2014

1. Beginning. Sometime early in the 70s. I am working at Grace Lutheran Church in Chicago, a liberal hotbed of a place which houses the National Hotline for Runaways, offers free meals and clothes for indigents, and has its own art gallery and a folk rock Sunday service, composed by my friend, musician Art Gorman. The activity is 24/7. I also tour with the international company of “Jesus Christ, Superstar.” I play Judas. Certain old girlfriends might say I am Judas.

I write and compose “The Sun,” a rock opera. I put an ad in an underground newspaper, looking for band members for the show. A guy named Dennis calls and agrees to meet me in the church sanctuary. On the day Dennis is coming, three other guys are in the sanctuary, bargaining with me to rent the space and put on a play, Eugene O’Neil’s “Beyond the Horizon.” Their leader, Dave, smokes a long cigar. The other two, Billy and Stephen, argue about where to put the stage and how to light it. I couldn’t know it then, but Billy and I would become pals. Continue reading →