-Eugene Baldwin's – The Genehouse Chronicles

February 17, 2014

This morning an ice storm hit the country. My front green concrete porch was glazed with black ice. My up-sloping driveway was as slick and curved and steep as the Sochi luge run. Clifton Terrace road was a ski jump. (Yes, I’m Olympic themed this day.) Schools were once again closed. This has been ‘the winter of our discontent.’

I needed to get out. At ten a.m. I put on my winter outerware and stepped onto the porch. I couldn’t move—even the welcome mat was stiff with ice. So I jumped down onto the gravel bed and planted my boots in the snow, for traction. I cross country-booted my way to the garage and climbed into the car. I backed out, felt good enough to drive forward and made my way slowly up to the main road. All was well. Continue reading →

February 7, 2014 

I have been struggling with depression, made all the worse by the devastating weather. I had two major surgeries in eight weeks, and allergic reactions to three medications. I’ve been sleeping two and three hours a night. And came a dread at each sunset, darkness swallowing the sun, shades being pulled and me and Scout the Cat holing up in our doll house.

Scout enjoyed staring at birds and all the wild animals in the snow. Me, I’d been watching television, thinking about death and the Big Bang theory, and all my artistic gifts ultimately meant nothing. I stopped writing my book, stopped smiling, started eating chocolate and bacon and pizza.

Until this morning. Continue reading →

January 28, 2014 

I stood on the riverbank last Sunday and watched eleven bald eagles rafting on ice floes. A lone pelican swooped low above open water patches. The sun was blinding. It was sixty-one degrees. I wore a black tee shirt. Walkers on the Great River Road path were dressed in summer apparel. A winter storm was coming but there was no sign of it. The unfreezing river seemed surreal. Watching the thick ice drifts took me back to the night I was baptized in ice and died, on a bitter cold winter night in February of 1995. . .

Sixteen people met on the east side of the Illinois River, 23 miles north of Peoria, for a walk across the ice. We met at a ranger station at six pm. It was twelve below zero. I was dressed in so many layers I could barely move my extremities. We carried coils of rope for emergencies (there had never been one in a decade of the ritual), backpacks with thermoses of hot chocolate and snacks, and flashlights.

We set off in eight pairs, one after the other. The full moon lit the way. The ice cracked and groaned and undulated slightly. It was like walking on a frozen water bed. I was sweating by the time we reached the second of two islands. Barred and great horned owls were calling out territories. Ice bubbles and rime ice covered the ground, a crunchy alien landscape. We smashed bubbles with our boots as we walked north to south on the narrow island.

At ten, we headed back for the ranger station. Not a hundred yards from the island, there was a great crack of ice, like a lightning crack, and Leo, a short, elderly man fell through the ice and disappeared. Johnny fell through next. He was six foot four; he landed on the river bottom, bounced up, grabbed a rope and was pulled out in short order. I was just behind Johnny. I saw the fissure of ice race at me, splitting ever wider, and I plunged into the icy, dark river. Continue reading →

January 25, 2014

I live in the darkness of light

I live in the still of the wind

In the blindness of sight

In the hush of birdsong

In the sere of the rain . . .

There is pain

I live at the bottom of breast

I live on the slope of the hip

In the crack of the kiss

In the numbness of touch

(In the sere of the rain) . . .

There is pain there is pain

I live in the void of the moon

I live in the softness of stones

In the flightness of wings

In the breath of dead leaves

(In the sere of the rain) . . .

There is pain there is pain there is pain

I live in the heat of the ice

I live in the waking of sleep

In the salt of spring flowers

In the perfume of blight

In the space of time

In the time of space

In the walk of the race

(In the sere of the rain) . . .

There is pain there is pain there is pain there is pain

I live in the darkness of light

I live in the still of

In the blindness

In the hush

The sere:

There

January 16, 2014

Scout the Cat sits on my desk, behind the computer, and watches birds through the south facing window. Every few minutes she swivels her head and stares at me. I know she’s content because she isn’t yowling. She has learned that I don’t care for yowling, so she yowls to lead me to the water bowl, or the food bowl, or the litter box.

Another, lower yowl occurs at sunrise when she jumps on the bed and attempts to burrow under the comforter. This wakes me up, but hey, it isn’t about me. She “allows” me to pet her, scratch her with my—her—fossil shark’s tooth, gently poke her belly (she spends a third of her awake life on her back, obscenely displaying her undercarriage) and hold her in my lap as I try to work, or until my thighs go numb.

The payback is entertainment. Sunday night I was standing in my office, talking to Sheila S. on the phone, and I saw, under a coffee table laden with Indian artifacts, a hairy cat leg thrusting outward, pumping up and down like an oil well: a cat bath was underway but all I saw was a plump, striped leg, uninhibited, a furious fulcrum. And I laughed—and the cat emerged and stared. Continue reading →

January 11, 2014

One week after the blizzard and it is over fifty degrees, and sunshine and vitamin D and westwind burn. And I do the Genehouse walk and it is like sailing. The hills are saturated; the rocks are glistening with winter’s sweat. The river’s ice sweats and a lone great blue heron plies the sinkholes along the island. Eagles perch on glass and aim heads down; nervous gulls aim heads up.

I shed coat, hat, gloves and I sweat my way west on the River Road walk. A sluice of snow ahead and birds speckle its surface. I ski the snow drift, stopping when I hear excited chirping at my feet. Two tufted titmice perch on my right hiking boot. One of them pecks at my sock. What do they think I am? A sunporch above the stream. I hum, they chirp . . . and they launch to the top of icicles, dripping off a sharp rock.

I head for Stroke Hill, up Stanka Lane. Hummingbird Man watches through his picture window and waves. The hill is a miles-long shadow iced by light. Earth and the woods are freckled brown and bronze. At midhill, bushes are budded, heralding a fifth season: winterpsring. Nature no longer has a slow gear. Continue reading →

January 5, 2014. 

I was mopping my apartment’s kitchen floor in Chicago when the phone rang, in June of 1983. A man said, “Mr. Baldwin? This is Bill Hunt calling.” Silence. “William Hunt? You don’t know who I am. You sent an unsolicited play to me; it’s a wonder I read it. Are you sitting down?”

I was standing holding a mop. And now I was in shock. “We’re going to debut “Going Steady” in late October, Off Broadway at the Quaigh Theatre on Forty-third Street. I need you here for rehearsals, starting in August. I’m sending you a plane ticket. Mr. Baldwin?”

In mere seconds I had morphed, from floor swabber to playwright. Weeks later, I found myself living in New York City, in Brooklyn Heights at my friend Sheila C.’s attic apartment, at the beginning of September. I was already fighting with Bill Hunt over rewrites; we were oil and gasoline. And I was making the rounds of TV and radio shows. I appeared on the “Joe Franklin Show,” sitting next to Brooke Shields, then a teenager promoting antismoking. And the old Borscht Belt comedian, Joey Adams, and his wife had me on their radio show, along with Jack Klugman’s wife. I was hot. Continue reading →

January 1, 2014 

I did the Genehouse trail this morning, down Clifton Terrace to the Great River Road, west to Stanka Lane and up Stroke Hill to Route 3. It was forty degrees, with little wind. I saw flocks of gulls, eagles, a snowy egret and  . . . robins. Robins filled up the woods and cliffsides, pale orange—all birds fade their finery in winter—and chattering away. It is easy to take these T Rex descendants for granted, but a forest of gossiping robins is a splendid thing.

The robins’ din made me think of Farmer Orville, so I stopped at his house and joined him and Quilt Queen for coffee and chocolate chip cookies. I pored over great grandbaby pictures and heard of their plans to visit their son in Australia. They hadn’t seen me since my second surgery, so I demonstrated my new and improved shoulder and said the St. Louis Cardinals were recruiting me. They laughed; they think I’m funny.

Orville looked about five pounds heavier. His hands were placed on his stomach, the way a pregnant woman might cradle her baby bump. Actually, Quilt Queen said it: “Did you notice my husband has gained weight? You know what we call it?” Continue reading →

December 30, 2013

My bank gifted me with a fifty dollar Amazon card. I didn’t really need anything so I chose whimsy—music. Which is how, “The Essential Leonard Cohen” arrived at Genehouse, on Christmas Eve. Last night, I opened the package and played disc one, settling into my easy chair, Scout the cat on my lap. The first song was “Suzanne,” and I was quickly taken “down, to her place by the river,” knowing full well that this river would flow in my brain all the way back to 1969, my first apartment in Chicago, and the very first time I heard that haunting song.

I had traveled downstate to my hometown of Alton, to surprise visit my girlfriend Holly, but the surprise was, she had checked out of her dorm room at MonticelloCollege and gone to St. Louis with another guy. Merry Christmas. I boarded a Amtrak train and went back to Chi the same day I arrived. I may have shared some whiskey with a sailor who had been similarly cuckolded and was returning to Great Lakes Naval Base.

By the time I got back to the city it was one in the morning. I knew I didn’t want to enter my apartment and deal with five farting roommates. I heard music coming from my neighbor Pauline’s place. I knocked on her door. She had been asleep with her boyfriend, but I was a frequent overnight couch guest. I told her sorry, the music, you know. “Our couch is already occupied,” Pauline said. “You’re welcome to come in, floor space only. I’m freezing.” And off she went, back to dreamland.

“Suzanne takes you down . . .” The music came from a record player in the livingroom. The light came from flickering candles. Cigarette smoke enveloped me in a blue cloud. I put down my backpack and followed the contrail. On “my” couch was a beautiful woman, maybe nineteen, dressed in a white, diaphanous nightgown. She stared at the bay window across the room. She held a cigarette in one hand, a glass of red wine in the other. A long braid of red hair hung down her exquisite pale neck, onto her back. Her legs were tucked under her. “And Jesus was a sailor . . .” She glanced at me. “I’m Erica. Wine?” Which is how I came to drink the first glass of red wine of my life. Continue reading →

December 26, 2013 

Geologists worldwide have been working toward naming a new epoch. Look for the Anthropocene, or as it’s subtitled, The Sixth Extinction (author Elizabeth Colbert’s designation), coming to updated textbooks everywhere. Generally epochs are designated by fossil records—places on Earth where fossils of different orders ranging from 500,000 million years to 17,000 years were found. Extinctions brought each epoch to a close. This part of Illinois is rich with fossils of sea animals of the Devonian epoch: crinoids, trilobites, worms, sponges and shelled animals once safe in a coral reef, all turned to stone. Something killed them off—some planetary event. I have slabs of limestone at Genehouse with thousands of animals studding the rocks.

The first five extinctions were cosmic rolls of the dice. The Anthropocene debate is about whether to start this epoch at the Industrial Revolution or in 1940, roughly the dawn of human-manufactured radioactivity. That first burst of radiation, mostly the fallout from bomb testing, is still with us. Its invisibility keeps us from losing our collective sanity. If radiation were colored pink, say, we would see everything in the world with the proverbial rose-colored glasses. If archaeology somehow survives as a science, future explorers will open our monuments—nuclear and chemical waste dumps—and die. The Aztecs had their sun god, Huitzilipoctli, and they spilled a lot of blood; we have radiation—the new “The Mummy.” There is a rosy future in radiation. Continue reading →