-Eugene Baldwin's – The Genehouse Chronicles

March 27, 2014

There is a country café above Genehouse, on Route 3. It has just enough kitsch to make it interesting. There are signs on the walls, with jokes about coffee, and a sexy Coke poster from bygone days, depicting a 1940s lass in a bathing suit, sitting on a beach, her legs slightly parted, and a bottle of Coke extended from off poster, and our lass looks at the phallic symbol and says, “Yes.” Yes, indeed.

Most days, the waitresses are three winsome sisters, twenty-something blonds. They wear low cut, skin tight pants. (I mention the costumes as your fashion commentator, not as a concupiscent man.) The siblings share a bond with Chekov’s “Three Sisters,” always looking out the long wall of north-facing windows, past the Baptist church across the highway, perhaps looking for a more exciting life and better days, always talking about cities, the glamour of cities. The oldest sister likes my rocks. Two part-time waitresses—we’ll call them Sally and Sissy—aunts of the three sisters, are friendly women my age. I can’t remember what they wear. Continue reading →

Yesterday, I walked at the Alton mall. I met an artist, Erick, who was preparing to sketch what will be a very large mural depicting Alton history, on the east wall, on the second floor. I introduced myself and we talked. I reminded Erick that Hal Holbrook, in narrating Ken Burns’ great documentary, “The Civil War,” spoke this opening sentence (paraphrasing): It could be said that the first shot of the Civil War was fired in Alton, Illinois, on November 7, 1837, when an assassin gunned down the outspoken abolitionist, Elijah P. Lovejoy. And then I told Erick the following story. Continue reading →

My friend, Richard P., a professor at Lake Forest College, 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, 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 →

“From mud comes blessins.” That homily was uttered by my Grandma Olive, when I was just a tadpole. She meant fruits and vegetables and roots from her and Grandpa Floyd’s truck farm: grapes, peaches, cucumbers, tomatoes, kale, cabbage, beets, sassafras (oh, the smell of the root cellar!), potatoes, squash, thick stalks of rhubarb.

Mud has brought me much treasure. In 1985, I was walking barefoot in a creek, hunting for Indian artifacts. I stepped into a mud bank and sank to my knees. When I hit bottom, I felt searing pain in my right foot. I finally extricated the foot, which was leaking a stream of blood from a four inch vertical gash below the toes. I got on my belly and fished around in the mud hole and came up with a fluted Clovis spear point, 14,000 years old, the rarest of spear points in North America. The Clovis point’s last gashee might have been a woolly mammoth. The foot hurts me to this day. Continue reading →

March 10, 2014

It was the first day over 70 degrees. The windows of Genehouse were open and the cat pawed at insects on the screens. All birds had nesting material in their beaks. A field full of robins moved frenetically like a crazed marching band, spearing worms. The air reeked of mating; it smelled like deep, dark, soft earth.

On my walk I saw two Cooper’s hawks acrobatically tumbling in the air, the male under the female, touching claw to beak. The first woman jogger in spandex ran past me, her winter-fatted buttocks rippling. Oh yes, mating was in the air—well, in my case, fantasizing about mating. And what was that ripple in the low meadows? Checker spot butterflies, tens of them, heating their wings and clinging to dried grasses—butterflies in March. ‘I know why the caged bird sings.’ ‘Will you love me; will you love me forever.’ With apologies to Maya Angelou and Mr. Meatloaf. Continue reading →

March 9, 2014 

I stopped at Farmer Orville’s house on the Gene walk today. His wife Quilt Queen had a right knee replacement last week, but I’m happy to say she is fine. Except: “She has a shitty nurse,” Orville said. “She deserves better—look at me.”

To look at Orville is to look at the America of the great film, “Nebraska.” His face is a road map of deep wrinkles, tattooed with faded freckles and set-in grease stains, and his white hair is a fall crop, wispy and unmanageable. He sat in the kitchen he built, the ever-ready coffee pot on the stove, and the canisters of chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies and other devilish delights on the open shelves. He drummed his gnarled, hairy fingers on the great wooden table. Family photographs were everywhere. His Missouri Synod Lutheran God was omnipresent. Continue reading →

March 7, 2014

I took my first Genehouse walk of March yesterday. The sun gleamed off the motoring ice floes, the river’s belly swollen, the last of the eagle visitors working the turbulent water. A shadow passed over my head on the River Road trail: a westward heading bald eagle riding the wind. A rock slide, its powdered limestone remnants splayed across the path, revealed fossil slabs of crinoids (stone age people wore necklaces of crinoid beads) and sea worms and stone seashells, a reminder of the ocean that once flowed in this place, three hundred million years ago.

The climb up Stroke Hill on Stanka Lane was accompanied by so much birdsong: robins, redheaded woodpeckers, catbirds, redwing blackbirds, bluebirds, cardinals and goldfinches. I reached the top, the farm of last summer’s fairy ring to my left, its pond melting, inviting, so much so I fantasized about taking an icy plunge. And then I heard it. A bass trill, low and grinding, like trucks with anti-lock brakes on steep hills. Silence. Repeat. It was the first, lonely bullfrog. There was a crash in the woods on the east side of the road and I quickly turned in time to see a sleek and fat groundhog, its fur luxuriant, replete with sun highlights. Continue reading →

March 13, 2014

It lay below my driveway yesterday at sunset.

I had stepped out of the house, heading for the garage, when I suddenly got the sensation that something was behind me and was going to be attacked. I dropped to my knees and ducked. And felt so much rushing air above me: the enormous dark wings of seven turkey vultures, just as startled as I was, leaping into the air from my roof, and more vultures rose from the ground below me, all with naked, red heads, from off the torn carcass of one of my girl deer. Her head was pulled back, her slack tongue hanging from her mouth, and her eyes seemed to stare at me. Behind the house, toward the west woods came a hail of gunfire. Were the events connected?

A Madison County sheriff came to call this morning. He is an avid hunter. He walked to the carcass of my deer and lifted her front and back legs and rolled her over, looking for wounds. She had been shot. On Sunday, she and her sister stood below my office window and foraged through the tufts of grass. Now she was dead, born in the autumn, and will never know a summer.

Over the winter I found three crossbow arrows—bolts—stuck in the frozen back yard, having been fired from my west hill. The shooter or shooters hadn’t had the courage to trespass and retrieve the bolts. I know the perps—a group of local boys who drive four wheelers across my land, drink beer and throw the bottles down the hill. So now I have to decide whether or not I’m Gary Cooper. The macho among you need not respond how you would wreak revenge, get justice. I am not Gary Cooper. I will not go to jail for shooting stupid twenty-somethings. A Department of Natural Resources officer is coming to investigate. No more leaving my west windows open to the night.

‘Last night I had the strangest dream.’ I was in a warehouse or some large building, in the dark. I and hundreds of people were lying on the concrete floor. We lay flat and whispered to one another. There were human predators, about to enter the room and cull our herd. Four of them, carrying torches and bayonets, walked in, stepping on our bodies, looking for a suitable sacrifice. One of them picked up a young girl by the legs, her mother moaning on the floor but surrendering to the inevitable, the girl’s screaming—her high-pitched wail sounding like a wounded deer—cut short by her head being lopped off.

I awoke and went to the bathroom, careful to do my business in the dark, afraid to turn on the lights because the house was surrounded by the predators. I was terrified. I crept back to bed, afraid to go back to sleep. I heard noise coming from the porch. I wept. I was aware I was dreaming and I wanted out.

I awoke and went to the bathroom. It was five in the morning. This time I peed for real and went back to bed. I couldn’t go back to sleep, for fear the dream would return. This morning, I walked down the hill to my deer, waiting for the deputy sheriff. Coyotes had been there, and crows, and the smell of death, the putrid gag of it, permeated the air.

Animism. I practice it. I talk to animals and the spirits of Indians, fellow Animists long turned to ghosts. Is some death senseless and some in the order of things? I eat but a little meat, but I eat meat so this is not a piece about hunting. This is about the abject cruelty of human beings. My deer wasn’t going to live a long life. But she was going.

And now she’s not.

March 2, 2014

I recently got a job as a blogger, for a hotel group in Chicago. My friend, Earl A., is the manager, out of the Chicago Lake Shore Hotel in Hyde Park. I drove up for an overnight visit, to meet the staff and stay at the hotel. I had my own fourth floor suite, overlooking Lake Michigan. The highlight of the day was Earl and me going to the seafood buffet in the charming Lake Shore Cafe and listening to Friday Night Jazz. Which is how I came to meet and have dinner with eighty-two-year-old John “J.J.” Jarrett, the gregarious black band leader for The Jazz Masters.  Continue reading →

February 20, 2014 

I was watching TCM last night, the 1938 Best Picture Oscar winner, “You Can’t Take It With You.”  And there was one of my favorite showbiz people, the great movie dancer Ann Miller, playing the crazy little sister of Jean Arthur and granddaughter to Lionel Barrymore. “Easter Parade,” with Fred Astaire, “On the Town,” with Sinatra and Gene Kelly, “Kiss Me Kate,” with Howard Keel. And after not acting for awhile, her famous 1970 Campbell’s Soup commercial in which she played a wife who morphed into a Broadway star and danced on a giant can of soup, her ‘husband’ admonishing, “Why do you have to make such a production out of everything?”

In 1980, Miss Miller came out of retirement to star in the touring company of “Sugar Babies,” with Mickey Rooney, homage to Vaudeville. She was middle aged then but she still had the legs for dancing. “Sugar Babies” came to the Airie Crown Theatre. I had a job as a part time bus driver, delivering the stars from McCormick Place to their north side hotels. Which is how Ann and I became pals. Continue reading →