-Eugene Baldwin's – The Genehouse Chronicles

We are a fivesome. Me, Girl who is ten, my father, his friend Man and Man’s Son. It is night. There are no lights, but we see in the dark. Father and Man and Son have their own golfclubs and bags and golf balls. Girl and I each have one club, a driver. She drags her club along the ground, pretending it is a tail, and sings softly. Our golf balls are egg-shaped. We can only strike them and watch them roll forward a few inches, the others now so far away we can only see shapes.

“Why are we here?” Girl asks.

“Because they promised us, we would fly,” I tell her. I drop my club to the grass and flap my arms, and Girl jumps and claps. “What the hell is he doin’?” Man says to my father.

Save for the golfers there is no sound. No nighthawks or owls, no insect noises, no jets overhead, no rustling of trees—yet Girl and I watch the trees sway and bend sideways. She chews on her cheek and spits.

Ahead, Father and Man and Son, mime-like, talk to one another, stopping to hit their balls, look back at Girl and me, shake their heads as if bewildered. My father glares at me, his glances like telegraph wires attached to my gut; he has always been ashamed of me, always contemptuous of my skills. Tonight, he had offered me a carrot and stick: play golf and I will take you flying.

“Why are we hear,” Girl says, tugging at my leg.

Why are we hear.

“How shall we fly? Like birds? Like a plane?”

“Like a leaf, my girl.”

We watch each other line up our drivers on our egg-shaped balls, swing, the poor Girl not as tall as her club is long, watch the balls roll sideways a few feet, laugh hysterically then cringe when Father and the Man and the Son yell at us: “Come on!”

And so the golf match goes, no flag or green in the distance, first a par four becoming a five and now, surely, a par six. Girl is exhausted. She falls to the ground and curls up in the fetal position.

“You are fine. Pick up your ball,” I tell Girl. “We’ll wait until they are not watching, and we will throw our balls far ahead.”

Son walks back toward us. “They’re mad,” he shouts. “Why did you agree to play?”

“Because we get to fly,” Girl exclaims. She jumps up and pirouettes, slapping her fanny with her hands. “I am a leaf!”

Son runs angrily at us. He is a kid, and I am an old man. I just now realize I am an old man. He could kill me. He picks up our egg-shaped balls and puts them behind his back, signaling with his head to follow him. Girl and I hurry along and pretend to hit shots.

“Why are we her?” Girls says, hands to her face, as Desdemona. She is a born actor, is this mischievous baby who whistles and pokes.

Why are we her?

When we get close to Father and Man, Son drops the balls behind him on the ground. “You didn’t tell me about the flying,” Son says to Man.

“Flying?” Man asks my father. Father and Man laugh.

They examine the palms of my hands. “These is girl hands,” Man says. Father says, “Girl hands. I tried.”

They look at Son’s calloused hands with approval. Son glares at me with disdain. He has bested me in every kind of sport since we played baseball on the Roosevelt School field. Since that time when he played a game of Butt with me in the basement, and it hurt.

“Why are we here, Uncle Eugene?” my ten-year-old niece Taliana says.

“Tell the little girl shut up,” my father says. To the man, he says, “Where are we? Par ten?”

“I hit a hole-in-one,” Son says, no flag in sight, no evidence. Father and Man high-five Son and punch him on both shoulders.

Suddenly all the sounds of a summer night abound, the jets landing at O’Hare, their lights raking across us and catching us like thieves, and Father and Man and Son wave, night birds and katydids and cricket waltzes, and somewhere children laughing, wriggling of earthworms in the grass, cars on the expressway, mothers singing to babies, “Oh, child.” Lawn sprinklers douse us.

Taliana smashes our golf balls with her club, the eggshells spitting open, chick embryos oozing onto the grass.

“Look’a that,” Son says.

And now I am awake, and I know the answer, why we are her, here, hear.

We will not fly.

Dear Charlie,

It has only been a month since you died. We all miss you very much. Sheila and Lorenzo and Don and Harold and Paul send their love.

I thought I would catch you up, as I need to believe that you are still connected to Earth. The wreath laying ceremony was interrupted by an intruder, a woman wearing a sash reading, Mrs. Congeniality USA. I kid you not. She told your Baird family and the Cisco family that she was an ambassador to Wreaths Across America, which, of course, she was not. I asked a woman friend, what grown woman wears a sash and poses like a model at graveyards. She replied, a teenage girl who lost the beauty pageant.

After we all left, the woman doubled back and posed for a photograph of her next to our historical plaque about our revered Tuskegee Airmen. Then she drove to the Confederate cemetery, picked up the wreath that had been laid there, and posed laying it again. She was a narcissist, of course, which made me think of the Narcissist in Chief. I have wondered what you would have made of this poser.

Charlie, you missed it. The senate is now 50-50, with Harris to break ties. Georgia turned blue. Huzzah! But that victory was short lived. Carpetbaggers Kelly Loeffler of Illinois, posing as a Georgian because she figured that state would be a pushover, and Josh Hawley of Missouri, who is not from Missouri, but he uses his sister’s Missouri address, and he is in actually, a Virginian, who posed in the Show Me state wearing a flannel shirt and jeans and sitting on a haybale because he figured that hick state would be a pushover for populism and it was… those two led the conservative chorus for overturning a presidential national election. Hawley saluted the protestors with a raised fist outside the capitol building. Loeffler and her colleague, Perdue both got rich using insider stock information, but the rural white Georgians did not blink an eye.

Then Trump went after the Republican vote authorities in Georgia, threatening harm if they did not change the vote count. The result was a Black and a Jew won the senate races and Mitch McConnell will no longer hold the senate at proverbial gunpoint. Oh Charlie, how I wish you had been here to see it.

Yesterday, December 6, 2021, thousands of armed Proud Boys and their acolytes stormed the statehouses of Michigan, Utah, Oregon, Georgia, Arkansas, Washington state, Kansas, and Texas. But—wait for it, Charlie—the Capitol Building, the people’s house was overrun by a mob, many carrying weapons. Four people were killed. Members of the house and senate were guarded in safe rooms as the violence spread throughout the building. Amy Klobuchar, who was tending to the wooden boxes of certificates of votes of all the states, ducked to the floor and was escorted out, leaving the boxes unguarded. Fortunately, a staffer grabbed the boxes and fled. Had the content of the boxes been destroyed by the white terrorists—for white terrorists is what they were—no one knows what fate awaited the United States.

The terrorists: People sporting t-shirts with “The Bible” and “Civil War” logos, draped in American flags which dragged the ground, old men wearing capes as if they were Southern Generals of the Confederacy, assorted thugs, bullies (in the old days they would have been the madding crowd at a Jim Crow lynching), miscreants, idiots, simpletons, little boys playing war, gun nuts, right wing religionists who must have thought they were headed to The Rapture.

The so-called capitol police did not draw their weapons, did not make any attempt to stand their ground. No less an authority than General Barry McCafferty contrasted the armed forces who kept the Black Lives Matter protestors at bay, and the woefully understaffed police from yesterday. Did the authorities deliberately stand back and let the terrorists—the white terrorists—attack? If they weren’t prepared to fight, McCafferty said, then the army should have been called in and fought with fury to defend our country.

The brilliant political guru James Carville, he of the deep Louisiana drawl, said on MSNBC that Republicans are meat and cleaver people who chop-chop in a fight. Democrats sit around a campfire and sing “Kumbaya.”

But Charlie, the most dramatic moment of all. In the chaos, white terrorists roaming free, a boy paraded inside the rotunda where John Lewis had recently lain in state, and inside the senate chamber, waving a Confederate flag. He was waving a Confederate flag, Charlie, the flag of traitors and the defeated, the fodder of Faulkner and Tennessee Williams and Flannery O’Connor, the flag which represents lynching and slavery and the myth of the “white race.”

Sorry if I am unduly worrying you. Perhaps where you are is a quiet, contemplative place, and you no linger and bear the burdens of the world. Perhaps where you are is like an eternal TV news program where you and our beloved Ted Shobe sit together and mutter at injustice.

So, Charlie, we are at war. Your and my generation want to be left alone, sit back, and take photos of food and grandchildren and sunsets, and they will only fight from their recliners, TV remotes (what an ironical invention, the remote) their preferred weapons. In other words, cluck.

The young people blame the old people, and their version of a revolution seems to be graffiti, Tik Tok talent shows (do not ask), and Snapchat. Two principal things must be enacted: The elimination of all firearms in public places. Editing the ability of anybody saying any incendiary goddamn lie on Facebook. The revision of all history books to finally let in the truth of the slaughter of Indians and enslavement of Africans, to the benefit of white citizens of this country. Okay, that is three things. You know how I am with math, Charlie.

While watching the carnage yesterday and considering going after one of our classmates who attacked me on Facebook and disparaged Black Lives Matter (too easy, the combatant is a drunk), I suddenly thought of you, my dear friend, my brother. I cried, Charlie, I just cried. I miss you so. Please give my love to Ted.

With apologies to Bob Dylan: The times they are barely changin’.

A two-story house in Chicago. My sister rocks in a wooden rocker, clicking her knitting needles but knitting nothing, chews on her cheek. She watches me.

A plump young woman walks in from the kitchen, runs toward me with open arms. I don’t know her, but I open my arms as she talks soundlessly—I can’t make out her words: omygoshmydad—pulling my head down to the crotch of her new blue jeans. I am horrified; I push her away. My sister rocking, knitting nothing and watching.

The doorbell rings. My mother, who died in 1972, glares at me, straightens her paisley dress, pushes her winged glasses up on her nose. She opens the door, smiles warmly and greets her visitor, an older woman dressed in a prim, long skirt, hose, and white blouse.

“How are you?” “Fine. “You?” “Fine.”

They start to climb the stairs, Mother leading the way.

I call out, “How long of a drive is it?”

My mother is annoyed at my interruption. The guest stops and smiles down at me.

“Oh, I’d say an hour and a half, straight west on the Eisenhower.”

“That’s not far,” I say.

“They send their hellos. They are waiting for you,” the woman says.

The women climb on up the stairs and walk down a corridor.

My cat runs into the kitchen. I follow her and watch her jump into the full laundry basket by the table screwing her body, sinking and burrowing under the clothes. I spin around and around, until I’m unable to stand. I fall against the refrigerator and onto the wooden floor, sending the cat food and water dishes flying, my brain in the vortex of a tornado.

And then I remember, I have got to get to the people in the country, waiting. I meditate myself along the expressway, sailing west over skyscrapers rising like jail bars then suburban houses in long rows, then the countryside, finally reaching the exit to the farm.

I float along the two-lane highway leading north, spotting the farm in the distance, the husband and wife and their little black-haired girl waving me in and talking all at once, excitedly, in tongues: heshereheshereheshere.

Their farm is the only building in a valley filled with winter wildflowers poking above the snow. I land and run toward them, my only true family, my loves, and they smile, all with their huge teeth protruding, all wearing ponchos and sombreros of gold.

And they smother me in darkness, and I feel them nibbling on me, the cat gnawing my right calf on the floor in Chicago, and I know that parts of my body are scattered in the stars, that I am everywhere and all. The plump girl in the new blue genes applauding, patting her groin, and saying silently, You knew it would end this way.

My sister rocking, knitting nothing, watching.

Stillness, Saturday afternoon, the river was still and the sky. Even the creeks were still, and a lone old man sitting on a bench, paunch-bellied and bald and sporting a Santa Claus beard, glared at me wordlessly when I wished him a good afternoon, his angry stillness like a mask. It might have been something he ate—or something he voted for.

I hadn’t walked for five days. My right knee has deteriorated to the point that I have to take breaks. A year ago this very day, in Atascadero, California, I was playing pickle ball with my friend Dave and his pals, and I stepped back to make a shot, and my foot planted, my right shin hyperextending at the knee, and I fell and yelped. It’s been downhill—no pun intended—ever since.

The temperature was in the mid-40s, just low enough that the packs of motorcycles which deafen hikers along the river trail weren’t out and about. Perhaps distended Thanksgiving bellies relegated the noisy to stillness and multiple naps.

Flocks of robins chatted in the tree and bluff tops (the biggest bird myth I know is about robins flying south), and a pileated woodpecker worked a high dead tree trunk and granted me permission to stand and watch. Chickadees and nuthatches held court and a blue jay called around for relatives, but none answered, perhaps burdened with pie bellies.

Me, I have cookie belly from eating a thousand peanut butter cookies over three days. I considered but declined, to take my weekly Shadow picture because the Shadow is fatso.

Two young couples walked ahead of me, the women annoyed with their men, who tossed the old pigskin up and down the trail and whooped like they were Green Bay Packers, only the men had gravy bellies—and maybe wouldn’t have girlfriends by the end of their walk. Young men believe they shouldn’t be still under any circumstance, which makes them boring as a class of people. Young women, even the worst boors among them, have glorious, god-given derrieres. This is their saving grace.

A man with a walking stick, his belly showing no sign of excess, passed by me. His name is Tom, Alton High Class of 69, though he looks much older, wearier. He walked these woods when he was a kid, before there was an asphalt path. Before him came escaping slaves and before them Indians forged the first path about six thousand years ago, long before Cahokia Mounds was settled. Their stone artifacts lie under the surface of the farm fields on the north side of Route 3, Rocky Fork Creek the northern boundary.

The stillness on the return hike was broken by leaf blowers. It had warmed up enough that gadget people were compelled to bring out their gadgets and annoy the hell out of everyone else. One man, facing the bluff above him, leaf blower at the ready, had to balance his ginormous belly forward, to keep from rolling backwards into the Mississippi River. I was rooting for the river.

The motorcycles were sure to follow.

Brushing my old lady cat

is a sensual thing,

she turns on her right side

switches to her left, electric

purring creeps up my arm,

tail tip whip-cracking

and I gather up fur detritus

into a ball on the oak floor,

Open the back-porch door,

cold fresh air knifing in

from the soaked timbers,

wind from the southeast

fogging the storm door,

and behind the porch rail

a carnival of chattery dyed birds

Ride the bare sticks of forsythia:

Carolina wrens and cardinals

saturated in ice droplets,

flailing spray from their wings,

and I toss the woven cat fur

on the dirt-streaked porch table,

and go back inside, towel off

and watch through the storm glass

As a song sparrow lands,

gathers the skein of fur in its beak

and white-streaked cheeks,

and wing-rises to the rafters,

stuffing the treasure into a crack

puffing its body ball-shaped

head upraised, belly vibrating,

and it sings madly, reedily,

a hymn to treasure:

St. Louis Post Dispatch:

Man bites dog/Feline donates to avian cause

If I confess to the daydreaming cat

I am a cold heart, a traitor,

if I confess to the bird

I am a vile feline enabler,

so, I confess to the iced naked trees

stripped of finery, all their vanity,

old ladies, winter-scoured of makeup,

somnolent, and not much caring

about irony

Protons

It was the fifth day without sunshine, the fifth day of wind that crawls under your pant legs and stabs you and boils your face, the fifth day of cold rain, a day of wet squirrels and outdoor cats, and feather- and beak-shaking birds.

Farmer Orville and Quilt Queen’s old, raggedy, yellow barn cat lay on a towel under a lawn chair under the carport. The sidewalk was littered with crushed walnut and acorn husks. To the east, a neighbor’s Trump flag tried to blow off its pole. I was tempted to help it do so.

The couple were sitting in the kitchen and watching Dr. Phil, and Beverly was making toast and microwaving Jimmy Dean sausage. A huge canister of Pepperidge Farm Cookies was set at my place on the table. Mint Milano, there was my personal addiction. So, I sat and drank coffee and ate cookies and sausage.

Orville was filling my coffee cup at the counter. To the question, how are you? Quilt Queen said, “Oh, you know,” and pointed to her husband’s back as if to say, he’s not well. It has been a long eight months for those two, fear of Covid-19, fear that Orville might not survive his proton therapy, fear that the two of them were getting too old to deal with their land and buildings, fear that the astronomical cost of Orville’s cancer medications might ruin them financially.

“I should have my own talk show,” Quilt Queen said. “I’d know what to say to those broken kids on Dr. Phil.”

To hear her talk, you would assume Bev was born and raised on a farm. Her childhood was a nightmare, living in a St. Louis tenement, with cockroaches and rats and mice crawling in the walls. A newspaper showed a photo of little Beverly pointing to her lip where a rat had bitten her the night before. She has an irrational fear of rats and mice.

A subatomic proton is yin to an electron’s yang. A concentrated beam of it is an alternative to X-ray radiation. The jury is out on its efficacy.

To Orville, proton therapy involves lying naked and restrained in a tube for an MRI which shows where to fire the protons, and every once in a while, feeling a nurse’s hands lifting or moving his testicles around and or inserting something “up my ass,” which makes him uneasy. “You know.” Afterward, it is common to feel exhausted and have burns on the area affected by the treatment.

The universe is composed of atoms, and we are atoms “glued” together, and imagination plays a huge part in our reality. There are no new atoms being created; we literally borrow existing atoms and glue ourselves into us. Sir Arthur Eddington posited that the universe is composed of ten viginsextillion atoms. I just like saying “viginsextillion” and “sex.”

The reality today was a warm kitchen and trust—that the three of us were okay in each other’s company. Quilt Queen suffers from seasonal effective disorder, SAD, as do I, and weeks like this one do not help. We caught up on each other’s lives and shared photographs. They saw pics of Scout the cat, known recluse, for the first time, laughing at my cat asleep with her paws in my slippers. In the several years Orville cat sat for me when I was traveling, he never saw the cat.

The word for the day was not proton but death. Coming soon. Returning one’s atoms back to the universe so that someone else, some thing else, can gather them, glue them, and re-form. That’s me the existentialist talking. I wouldn’t mind coming back as a bird.

Orville and Quilt Queen are on the heaven train.

Styrofoam cups, a plastic 7-Up bottle, a beer can

And red and gold and orange autumn leaves

Roll along the highway’s shoulder

Gaily tossed by gusts of wind

What would fall be without Americans

Tossing their detritus out car windows

A child’s canvass shoe here

And there a crumpled slipper

Baby’s diaper bye-bye

Schnuck’s plastic be gone, Aldi’s “Shop different”

A highway is another word for landfill until

We run out of room and bomb the mountains

America, once beautiful, once verdant

Now a trash flash mob throwaway

Now McDonalds Burger King Taco Bell

Jingle all the way

Give me leaf trash, bits of broken bark

Stream-split granite shards and sandblown glass

Shriveled iris petals and worm casings

And shed blue racer snake skins

The sponges of Eden did not write

About the trees the seas the leaves the serene breeze

They lived and soaked up sun and water

And saltily brushed the first oral

And then Man came along a wrote and wrote

Epics word songs and poems jazz birds and bees

And then Narcissus saw himself in the water’s mirror

And threw the first Kleenex into the stream