Trey's Days No. 15

Life is Good

I read an article about a dude who hiked the Appalachian Trial from way down south to way up north, and realized there that all his big thoughts crystallized into "warm dry place to sleep, food to eat." My Appalachian Trial at the moment is many sheet pans of cookie dough, great bowls of strawberry bread batter, and many repetitions of attempting the best brownie recipe ever (if you haven't tried the Boulevard brownies, you must!). I didn't go to school to scoop cookies and attempt to perfect brownies. I went to school to think big thoughts and write about them for people who critique big thoughts and writing about them. But somewhere in the third attempt to make the brownies, in the reading of an Appalachian Trial tale, in the bone tiredness of working all night, comes my crystallization.

I recently was temporarily kicked off Facebook pending an investigation of an allegation of abuse. It was resolved in my favor, for which I am very grateful. I didn't realized how much I would miss my Facebook friends, our little interactions here, the sites I see and read here. The human community if so great. The love we share with each other is powerful, nourishing and life giving. Yes, I know, it's on-line, and it's Facebook, but it's also human. We touch each other with our little words, our posts, our poems, our pictures of our lives unfolding, and somewhere in there is a crystallization of love between real human beings, connected, even if it is with computers.

Just as I was coming back to Facebook there was an article from "elephantjournal" by a guy who is a Buddhist meditation teacher, about how Jesus is God, and like seeing a wave in the ocean, if you've seen him you've seen the Father. And so it is with us. The article is about Buddhism, meditation and the Bodhisattva way, but it says something powerful too about who Jesus is. He's God! And we, through the magic of the human connection can see God through His fearless giving. And this coming from a dude who is not a Christian! And there too, a crystallization! I realized how much I love Jesus and His Church while I was sitting on a cushion meditating with some Buddhist friends. I thought I was getting away for a while, only to realize I was always moving toward Home. We all are always moving toward Home, no matter how far away we may feel now. Trust that!

Whether we're hiking the Appalachian Trial, making cookies, sitting on a Buddhist meditation cushion, kneeling in an Episcopal Church, rocking out to heavy metal or drinking beer by the pool, we're all being called Home by a God who loves us, and after all the big thoughts and complicated words are thought and said, it's all crystallizing down to a warm dry place to sleep, some food to eat, and a loving human community to be a part of. For that I am very grateful. Life is Good! Amen.

Trey's Days No. 14

Guidance

I had known for a long time from experience that to stay on the beam, to stay clean and sober, to maintain constant contact with a higher power, I had to be willing to follow directions and to get honest. Time and time again I had thought I was willing to do that, only to discover that at certain times making decisions in life, mostly small every day decisions, I wanted to be back in the driver's seat, to call the shots myself. And each time I did, I got myself into difficulty, into pain, a pain that is not sustainable without some relief. Well, we know what relief looks like. It looks like a drink, like a joint, like sex, like pornography, like over eating, like spending money; it looks like something that feels good for a matter of minutes and leaves a long hangover of still more pain.

This time around it had to be different. This time around, I was ready for the permanent solution, the solution that comes not from myself, but truly comes from a power greater than myself. This time around I was willing to follow directions.

I had seen (we'll call him “J.”) once several years ago at a church I was visiting. He was one of the lay people in charge around there, a trusted servant we might say, doing his work, unassuming and shy, but with a quiet authority. We never exchanged words but I knew who he was. I did not know then that he would be my way back to a way of life that demands rigorous honesty. Years later I would see him at a convention where we gather to hear people tell their stories. And I would see him at a meeting I go to, and I would see him at a different church where I had become a member. It seemed I couldn't go anywhere without him popping up. Interesting how these things work when there's Guidance involved.

So one day after I had gotten sick and tired of being sick and tired, after I had reached the end of the rope of making all my own decisions, I saw him at my church, and during the Passing of the Peace he said my name. Then later when I got myself to a meeting, I saw him there, exuding that quiet power that comes from years of following directions and surrendering to a power greater than oneself. I looked him up and called him. We got to talking.

I had finished school for the time being and it was abundantly clear that I was not going to seminary. The churchman I had sought out to help me with that had used me as a sounding board to share all his attempts at romantic exploits. He had listened to my theological and spiritual questions but assiduously avoided giving me the time of day on the content of my search, and each time I had broached the question, had made it clear I was not what his church was looking for. Not a squeaky clean undergraduate, not a successful second career person, no other degrees, more spiritual than religious, I was the exact opposite of what he would think of as a postulate for the discernment process. I went back to school with spiritual questions and seminary in mind. I had counciled with a minister who had helped me get to the place that at the age of 44 I was willing to go back to school and get that undergraduate degree I had abandoned to willfulness and youthful distractions. Minoring in music, philosophy and religious studies with a smattering of Spanish I was approaching a degree which looked on paper like one perfect for training for theology or ministry of some kind.

But Guidance would intervene at this point. The door I thought I had been persistently knocking on slammed suddenly with a smack. My persistent questions about spirituality and the church, my annoying comments about a church run by bankers, my demands that gay leaders, especially in the church have an obligation to be authentic and available to the struggling gay teen who is on the brink of suicide, my probing about the presence of God in our lives and the Guidance we receive through prayer, my exploration of eastern religion, had all just become too much. With the reprimand that it was obvious that the “friendship” had taken a back seat to my “other goals” he ended the relationship, soundly, suddenly and with characteristic vigor and finality.

Meanwhile Guidance had been pecking away at my brain. A friend had suggested a couple of books by Teilhard de Chardin. The Episcopal Church had celebrated the memory of Evelyn Underhill, Anglican mystic, on the day of the severing of ties with the closeted churchman, something had made me go back and reread “The Screwtape Letters” by C.S. Lewis, and J. had insisted that I apply for a job at the bakery, with a sprinkling of words about Brother Lawrence and “Practicing the Presence of God.” I had been clean and sober again for enough months now to know that Guidance was telling me something.

. A coworker at the bakery is “one of us” doing what I do for the problem I have. The people there are so patient and kind it immediately feels like I'm suppose to be there. The Teilhard, C.S.Lewis, Evelyn Underhill, and the words about Brother Lawrence, and not to leave out the Bill W. readings, all come together to show me that the Spirit of the living God was there all along, showing me the Body of Christ is not in just in an institution run by bankers with its buildings, budgets and bureaucracy. It's in the cookie dough. It's in a coworker who is one of us. It's in a guy named J. who keeps popping up every where and suggests I go apply for a job at the bakery. It's in Teilhard's fossils, Underhill's naked awareness, Brother Lawrence's “Pressence”, C.S. Lewis' quiet intuitive thought. It's in meetings where God has skin and shares stories of recovery. It's in the slamming of a door by a closeted churchman and the opening of a bag of patent flour. It's in a dog walk by the lake on a muggy morning, in a call from a friend at church I never knew knew me, it's in the peace that comes from finally surrendering to a power greater than myself and enough willingness to follow some simple suggestions.

I don't know where this journey is going, but recent experience is making it clear beyond a shadow of a doubt; Guidance is real, unmistakable, and it frequently looks very different from what we're expecting. It requires surrender and willingness, rigorous honesty and deep trust. But when those qualities coalesce in a moment, there is the feeling of being home at last, and the weary seeker can rest in the knowledge of Guidance.

Trey's Days No. 13

The Path

There was a flame from an oil lamp on the table between two chairs. This little light transformed the otherwise conventional mid-century living room into a chamber of soul searching. Anne had been through a lot. Minister's wife, mother, social worker, ordained minister now retired, it is here that she would share her considerable experience with me.

The session was life changing. She helped me make the decision. If I wanted to go to seminary getting my bachelor's degree was the first step. I would register for some classes and figure out what I'd major in later. There was on that day with the little light and the woman wealthy with experience a sense that something had changed. There was a new path, the path of education and preparation.

Academic advising with the chair of the music department was a mistake. It didn't seem like a mistake, but I emerged a music major. Dr. Choirmaster exclaimed “Major? Major?” and put his head down on his desk. Dr. Choirmaster has sent me to the department chair for advising. He had not imagined I would emerge a music major. “Okay, get ready!” he warned.

Concert choir was easy enough. Community chorus was even easier. Anyone with half a voice can sing in a huge choir, even if it is Handel and Mozart. It was the voice lessons and recitals, the piano lessons and recitals, the aural skills tests and the other classes on top of that that started the anxiety attacks. Standing in the wings, running “See the Raging Flames Arise” from Handel's Joshua in my head, the anxiety was like having an out of body experience. “Can you take it a little faster?” the Bulgarian accompanist asked as we walked out. “I guess” I squeaked meekly.

I crashed and burned. Two lines into the all together too fast Handel aria I looped and forgot the words. “Kristina, we have to stop.” She ignored me and kept on playing. Lost, I turned and tried to sing again. That was my last public performance. It was an unmitigated disaster. After many successes singing and playing, after mastering a gob of theory, after working my ass off, it all lay in the ruins of one disastrous performance. “Major?” Right. Big mistake!

Advising in the philosophy and religious studies department after years of a steady diet of music felt so much more appropriate. Of course. Preparation for seminary or a theology degree would involve philosophy and religious studies. Naturally. Off I went for some more years of classes I mostly loved. Existentialism, Islam, Medical Ethics, Eastern Thought, all wonderful stuff. But something had happened to me in the process of working on this patchwork we call a Liberal Arts degree. All the resolve of that day with the flame lighting a new path had vaporized. The hope of a degree itself had crashed on the rocky shores of a biology class taught by an old school hard ass. And the anxiety of crashing and burning on the shards of “See the Raging Flames Arise” with the Bulgarian racer now followed me everywhere.

“Wanna get high?” the hippie brother beckoned. Well hell yeah. Years of experience taught me how to make that stalking anxiety go away. Relapse held at bay for a while by a fellowship and a program, there comes in the life of every recovering person the moment when there is no human defense. Hell yeah I wanted to get high. I wanted relief, relief from “Major? Major?” Relief from “See the Raging Flames Arise”, relief from the passive bureaucracy of urban public education, but mostly just relief from myself, from my disease, from stalking anxiety that followed me from childhood, stirring my brain chemistry into a perfect storm of confusion and exhaustion.

I escaped with most of my dignity in tact and a zillion hours. I learned a tremendous amount. From Dr. E I got my faith back in Eastern Thought, Philosophy of Religion, and watching him teach. From my friends I found a new kind of fellowship, one of ideas and aspiration. But I had lost the light of that little flame showing me the way to a new path that would take me to the vocation for which my maker had given me great and powerful gifts.

The fellowship that offers a way out was right where I left it. Many of my old brothers were still there. They had saved me a seat. And in that fellowship I found the lamp still burning, the path still illuminated by the light of that one still and steady flame. The gifts are still there and into them has been stoked the logs of learning and even still breathes Spirit to fan the flame. Tomorrow I go to meet one who found his vocation and met his calling, to hear a word of experience. The path stretches out before me still, and still alive and breathing I have a chance. I am starting to see how my experience can benefit others, and alive in my recent memory is the message of Sister Helen Prejean reminding me not to be overwhelmed but to reach out to one in pain. And I have a whole list of names of people in pain who are waiting for me to reach out. The flame still burns, and the path will become visible again as my eyes open, I trust.

Trey's Days No. 12

Sister

I went to see the Dalai Lama. And I did, along with several thousand other folks. What I wasn't expecting was to be blown away by a Catholic nun. Sitting there between the leader of the Tibetans and a great American civil rights leader was a woman who taught me a lesson I've been needing for a while. She taught me how to not be overwhelmed in a world full of unimaginable suffering. She said you do it by reaching out to one person in pain.

Sister Helen Prejean sat between the civil rights leader and the Tibetan god king, an ordinary nun in plain clothes. She spoke plainly. She wore a red scarf and pants. She told of befriending one who had committed an unspeakable crime and another who was the father of one killed in an unspeakable crime. She told with great authority how they both wanted healing and how that healing cannot come from more violence. She told of a killing chamber with a window. Three are invited to watch the killing. There's the state's witness, there's one who is the representative of the victims family, and there's the mother of the one to be killed, her hand pressed against the glass as she watches her son the killer be killed. Nothing gets solved there and the cycle of violence continues.

Not overwhelmed in such a world where the cycle of violence continues unabated she loves each of them one at a time. She listens to them one at a time. She is Jesus for each one of them, one at a time, and walks away strong, sad but strong onto the stage of the Razorback arena before thousands.

As we waited in the afternoon to see His Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet again, coming to receive his honorary degree of humane letters from the University of Arkansas, the audience are in their own thoughts. A mother and daughter behind us check their stocks and talk excitedly about Pepsi's recent split. Another wears lama colors, yellow and maroon. The superstitious and the irreverent together waiting to see if the sound system can be fixed so the monologue on a non-violent response to Chinese oppression can be understood better than the morning talk which presumably was on non-violence, although it was anybody's guess since very little of what he said in the morning could be understood; his English fast and bubbly runs together in the giant re-verb of too much amplification, soft fast speaking and a giant echo in a huge domed room. All that way and a year of preparation, to present a god king and scarcely a word he spoke could be understood. Finally some brave anonymous one of the thousands yells “louder!”. But louder was not the answer, maybe slower, clearer, with less reverberation.

The message which could not be heard was that a baby learns love and compassion at her mother's breast. We carry that mother child connection into the world and we can't let it get beat out of us. In a jail cell in a Chinese prison, a monk has the snot beat out of him over and over by a guard whose job it is to be cruel as a matter of course. “My enemy my best teacher” he can almost be understood to say. Can't learn patience from a loving mother, from a Buddha, from your best friend. No. But from a guard who beats the snot out of you on a daily basis as a matter of course because he's just doing his job, you can learn patience. His culture irreparably altered forever, his childhood home raised to the ground, his people systematically oppressed on a daily basis in the country where he was once the god king, he smiles, even laughs. “My enemy my best teacher.”

It was the re-verb that taught me patience on this fateful day. Arising at 4, driving up in the morning, sitting through unintelligible speech all morning, returning hoping for another chance to hear the god king before he goes back to his place of exile, perhaps never to come this close to us again, it was agonizing to see him and hear sound coming out of his mouth and to be able to catch only about every third word. But what we did hear loud and clear is that unimaginable cruelty and suffering on a global scale cannot take away our hope. An ocean of suffering cannot overwhelm us. They taught us with their unintelligible words to love each other one at a time, to reach out to one in pain today, and to bring our love and hope with us, even into a great reverberating stadium full of chatty people checking their stocks, and superstitious groupies wearing the right colors with “spiritual” jewelry. From the god king and the simple sister came a love that cannot be killed, even by all that.

Trey's Day No. 11

Secrets

Wiping his mouth he was sweaty and out of breath. It was obvious something had been going on. Then came the trick out from behind the curtain, zipping his pants. Sam Steward aka Phil Sparrow muttered something to the sailors coming in the door about how he wanted a fly tattooed on his head.

His tattoo shack was in the most dangerous part of Chicago, a part frequented by bikers, rough trade, sailors and misfits, perfect for a genteel patrician professor with a secret life. No one would ever find him here. Tattooing was great cover that got him close to the lower men he craved but rarely found on the campus of the Catholic school where he taught snotty brats. This is the life of the “Secret Historian.”

Teaching in universities through the era of Joseph McCarthy's witch hunt when mail was routinely opened on a variety of pretexts required secrecy if you were homosexual. The inner self that could not be expressed publicly had to find outlets in secret. The difference between Samuel Steward and many thousands of others was that he kept meticulous records in his “Stud File.” This record survives today and is shared now by Justin Spring in his sometimes raunchy tale of a secret life now revealed. What hits home here is the toll that secrecy took, driving Steward to alcoholic drinking and drugging. extreme masochism and what in the end was a lonely life painful to see. It was as true for him as it is for us; we are only as sick as our secrets.

“Exit Through the Gift Shop” exposes the secret life of street artists, finding walls in LA to make their art. London, Paris, New York, train cars, bill boards, all filmed by this crazy Frenchman who came to be known as “Mister Brain Wash”. Recording their secret art and the adrenalin stoked nights of painting and running became a passion that took him all over the world. Sam Steward needing the sweat and danger of toughs, graffiti artists needing to leave their art in dangerous places, radicalize me back to the true authentic self that would be kept secret in a world full of posers, polished polite people and their repression, smiling and thinking to themselves, “Eeeww, what's wrong with him?” But “Mister Brain Wash” and Justin Spring's Sam Steward each in their way make it clear the light of day is necessary for life and dark secrets make us sick.

So re-radicalizing to the un-secret world of Sam Steward's tattoo shack and the rush of secret artists streaking through the night their free gift to give, I breathe in the fresh life giving air of secrets exposed. The “Secret Historian's” story is told so we see how sick secrets make us. “Mister Brain Wash” gives us public auctions gobbling up once secret art for a hundred thousand quid, all to show us the life giving power of the light of day.

Authenticity, real raw reality is a rare thing. So filtered was the world of Joseph McCarthy's 1950s, so cultured and narrow the world of art and self expression that they unwittingly birthed the tortured life of a secret historian and the unbridled exuberance of Mister Brain Wash. An elephant painted red with gold fleurs de lils brought all the stars out for a street art show “Barely Legal” in Los Angeles, and suddenly the art that couldn't make it in the filtered fiber free world of the art show was making all the galleries and auction houses and a vandalized telephone box off a London street brings 100,000 dollars; brilliant!

Unfiltered was Sam Steward's secret world when he became Phil Sparrow, inking flies on heads below the waist, doing a sailor, wiping his mouth as the next customer comes through the door of the gritty shack. Exposed is the secret world of repressed art exploding in the night filmed by Mister Brain Wash and brought to us in the fresh brilliant light of day as we take in “Exit Through the Gift Shop.”

So spray about some authenticity today and let out some Phil Sparrow. Don't exit through the gift shop but find art on a train car, on a wall, in your heart, let it out! We're only as sick as our secrets.

Trey's Days No. 10

Resurrection

She awoke covered in blood. For a minute she wondered if it was her own or somebody else's. It was her own. She had walked into a bar to have a few drinks after work and ended up in a strange place with strange people not sure how she got there. As she became conscious the evening slowly came back to her. She remembered meeting the two “coke whores.” They told her that if they went with these guys they had just met they'd get some coke. She didn't want coke. She wasn't like them, she told herself. She just wanted to have a couple of drinks to take edge off. Now here she was lying in a motel bed covered in her own blood, raped and badly beaten. And this was not the first time.

Memories like this prepared her for what was next. Today she is a forensic nurse who helps women who've been raped by gathering evidence that might convict their assailants. She also carries the message that if you think you might have a problem with alcoholic there is a solution. You don't ever have to drink again. Having been a drunken coke whore lying a pool of her own blood she knows there's a way out. She ends by reminding us of Palm Sunday. Jerusalem's streets are crowded with people waving palm branches cheering Jesus. “What if the donkey thought all that was for him?” she asks. And she concludes “I'm just the jackass who gets to carry the message.” That's Springtime in the Ozarks.

The sun had finally come out and it warmed up. Sitting outside at Local Flavor we had a great vantage point for watching people. Bikers rumbled by. Some strollers waved and called up to us. An old friend was our waiter. We were sitting in a sea of friends. With dogwoods blooming and the warmth of love and sunshine life is pretty sweet at Springtime in the Ozarks.

The stone antique auditorium has wooden seats. If they were an inch narrower my wide behind wouldn't fit. Down front standing up talking animatedly to the people in the row behind him is the muscle dude we called John. He had on a tight “John 3:16” t-shirt. His porcelain skin shown below short black hair gelled just so. His pecs and arms clearly were not an accident but the product of many hours in the gym. But it was his friendliness and joy that I noticed above the muscled physique. He clearly had found a way out of the dilemma that plagues many. The fresh peace and happy laughter that he exuded was even more attractive than his gym honed body.

The lights came down, the audience hushed, and the Serenity Prayer was said by 1,000 people in unison. I feel at home. To the stage walks a man from Shrewsbury Mass. In a South Boston accent he tells a tale of loosing himself in the “High Life.” He tells of being taken to meetings by a friend who was eight months pregnant, through the Boston snow, driving to help her friend find what she had found, a way out. His spontaneity as he shared his love and deliverance with 1,000 strangers, his courageous sharing of gruesome pain,his ready laughter at himself, were contagious.

It was 9:30 before we got out and we hadn't eaten. In the tiny town of Eureka Springs nothing much is open at that hour. Between McDonald's and Subway we chose Subway. We were not the only ones. About 15 people had lined up suddenly and there was only one poor fellow working there. It took forever to get our food. Now one would expect that at least someone would be impatient. I was struck by the calm kindness with which all the waiting hungry cheered this lone Subway worker. We waited patiently and one woman noted that we all seemed to have been at the same place doing the same thing, getting a dose of serenity we could then pass along. That's Springtime in the Ozarks.

Tall and lanky with dark wrinkled skin that shows his Indian blood and a life in the desert sun make him look tough. But he warns, “I'm a crier so get over it.” As he relates a saga of running, marrying nine different women, “hostages” he calls them, the tears flowed freely. Over more than a quarter of a century of a different way of life he has found what he was always looking for in a whiskey bottle, in Las Vegas bar rooms, in nine wives. His tears now are tears of joy, joy he shares with us as he freely cries in front of a room full of people from all over, people he doesn't even know.

Eureka Springs is a town of just a little over 2,000 people, and we were a visiting group of 2,172. As the weekend progressed I had the distinct feeling that I was not just among friends but family. Just like me, they all had felt what we all feel, had done what we have all done, and now together we have a common solution. We were everywhere in that tiny beautiful Ozark town, surrounded by love and springtime sharing our solution.

From Belfast a Catholic man tells of being burned out of his house at age 12 by the opposing paramilitaries. He tells of living a life after emigrating to New York that revolved around a bar full of toothless hopeless people. He said once a beauty queen with three teeth came in and stopped the chatter, even the juke box went silent. Relating the unfeeling environment in which he was raised, he said once there was an Irish man who loved his wife so much he almost told her. Feeling unloved and unlovable, he nearly drank himself to death. But even he from his hopeless state of confusion and depression found a solution.

As we drove down out of those green and flower covered mountains toward home my companion and I agreed that if life never got any better than this it would be just fine. We had been reminded not to confuse peace and contentment with boredom. We were assured that the safe warm sea of love and friendship is open for business 24-7-365 and it's free for the asking. All we have to do is surrender. If this is all the resurrection I ever see it would be enough. From what I hear there's more where this came from and more will be revealed. As my eyes and heart slowly open I see resurrection all around me. That's Springtime in the Ozarks.

Trey's Days No. 9

Running

“He did not look back.” Sarty escaped. He ran and didn't look back. One barn too many had burned and he wasn't watching another. He'd had enough. He wrenched himself free from the gripping hands that held him. Faulkner has this one escape the horror of a life he couldn't stand, people he wouldn't be held by. That one running, that one not looking back is me too. When I left the grip of Faulkner's Mississippi I did not look back but now “Barn Burning” holds up a mirror on the horizon. Moving forward not looking back I find myself running into a mirror and there before my horrified and wondering eyes is the Mississippi I ran from, in a strange light with the “liquid silver voices of birds” calling me home, and I didn't look back but forward--forward into a mirror.

The sound of night wind through tall pines was not first called whispering nor the call of quail in a backyard covey “bob-white” in Pine Hills outside Hattiesburg, but that's where I first knew them. In midnight black we rolled quietly into that needle carpeted drive where thick air was scented with pine resin and angel biscuit and murmuring voices heavy with history waited, a light on in the kitchen. As one who knew nothing of Oxford's Faulkner nor of the tension beneath the staid veneer, my sixties Mississippi was an enchanted land. Two sets of grandparents and their stories of parents as children sprang to life before my eyes at the first hint of those magic scents and sounds. I was engulfed in the love of another time that never lasted long enough, evaporating as too soon we drove north toward Memphis and home. It seemed you couldn't carry such fragile stuff far from its sacred sea of humidity and slowness.

Hearing early Oktibbeha, Kosciusko and Pass Christian in the strange way they are said there prepared me for Yoknapatawpha. Yet I was afraid when I started on the stories of Faulkner, afraid I wouldn't understand-- afraid I'd be ashamed of his Mississippi, my Mississippi. I've been told Oxford got hot under the collar looking in the mirror held in their faces by their most famous son. But hope told me that as my shame from narrow beginnings was confirmed, it would be purged by Faulkner. Hope was right. His Mississippi feels liberating and nourishing. That nourishment calls itself truth, truth that shines from a dark mirror its light to share.

I recently heard the story of a black woman from Haynes Arkansas, one of ten children, she is forty-six now and has four grown children and three grandchildren of her own. She told of a town in the Delta of about 350 people and two churches, one for white and one for black, and one honky-tonk that brought them together. Her folks ran that honky-tonk and it raised her. Drinking as a child is a big part of her story, one of pain and struggle punctuated by encounters with older brothers who brought her drinks, taught her how to be a woman in the way they would have her, typical of the Mississippi Delta. At first I was afraid I wouldn't relate, but I did. One daughter's Haynes is a son's Yoknapatawpha and another's Hattiesburg. Deep inside where it counts, beneath the skin where names fall away and blood is blood and pain is pain, we're the same.

I was born in Columbus, Mississippi in 1960. Some baggage is Louis Vuitton and some garbage bags and so it is with the mix of gifts that comes with such a history. Being born in Mississippi, parents from Mississippi, growing up in Memphis, I remember knowing there was something powerful to be proud of in our culture and something to be ashamed of too. We were a people with backs stiffened against the northern winds of change. Southern conservatives then and now are a stern quiet people who don't mind having angels among them but hate to hear them flap their wings. Both of my parents were born in south Alabama and moved as children to Hattiesburg ninety miles from the Gulf coast. Just about every middle class white family had a maid who made about forty dollars a week. Garbage men made so little money they qualified for welfare. I can remember the shooting of Martin Luther King and the riots that followed. Hearing that tale of a Haynes honky-tonk, this Mississippi boy could feel his childhood creeping up on him like a spook holding a mirror in the dark, barely visible, my own face in it.

These threads of Haynes, Hattiesburg and Yoknapatawpha weave together into a chord as southern as grits, as queer as Capote and as human as Adam and Eve. One pain is the pain of a black woman from Hanyes who can't stop drinking, the confusion of a Dixie queer boy who ran and the power of Faulkner's running Sarty, telling her story and mine at the same time in his Yoknapatawpha tale. He ties us together into a sinew of humanity breathing words that flow with the power of that muddy grandfather of all waters that gave all three of us life. A honky-tonk daughter, a Nobel Prize winner and I are one humanity, the same in the deep dark truth of that shining mirror.

Stories like “The Tall Men” and “Shingles for the Lord” and “Barn Burning” show me my culture, my people, my self. In the history Oxford tells of itself they admit the town was not fond of Mr. Faulkner until after 1962 when he died. As they realized the rest of the world called him genius they decided he was their favorite son. So it is with this double legacy, half blessed by genius, half willfully ignorant. I am no different. Listening to that shining black daughter of the Haynes honky-tonk, I get a little hot under the collar looking into that mirror of powerlessness, pain cleansed by truth. Just as God spoke to Mississippi in Billy Fa[u]lkner so She speaks to me out of the mouth of a Haynes honky-tonk daughter. Truth is like that, coming from dark places its light to share. Our powerlessness, our running, our wrenching away from a past that would hold us, is the same. We are all Sarty not looking back only to see we are running toward a dark mirror on the horizon shining.

As I read the “n” word used over and over by Oxford's Billy Falkner and the world's William Faulkner, I hear my mother's voice; “Julia spent twelve hours a day, six days a week working in Mother's house while she raised two children of her own and two that were not her own, and Mother thought she was doing Julia a favor..” Julia was my connection to the honky-tonk daughter, intertwined in the blood. Julia Banks ran my grandmother's kitchen, told the truth, stood tough and gentle in the face of the unimaginable. I see her face too in the “garbage men” and “yard boys”, in how they had to go on strike to get a little raise, standing tough, signs reading “I AM A MAN.” The April evening in 1968 when King was shot my Daddy explained “He's a trouble maker and he has a lot of followers, so there's going to be a lot of trouble.” I didn't know who he was until he was dead. I was eight years old.

It was in her face I saw it, that shining black face of the honky-tonk daughter, in Julia's voice I heard it as she asked me one Easter morning “Kind'a hot ta tote ya' coat, ain't it?” My mother had to translate. And she was right it was, on a steamy Easter morning in South Mississippi, from which I would run as soon as I had legs big enough, run like Sarty and not look back, to San Francisco, as far away as I could get, only to pick up Billy's tale of a boy who ran and didn't look back and see myself in a mirror there. Under the skin where blood is blood we are all the same, that Haynes daughter, Julia, Sarty, running toward the mirror showing us each ourselves, our deep selves, taking that magic sea of humidity and slowness with us all the way to Ocean Beach, and we get there and there we are.

Angel biscuit, pine scented air and the soft call of “bob-white” run deep in me. The daughter of Haynes drinking to run, Julia standing not running, “I AM A MAN” marching, all deep in me, woven together by Billy Fa[u]lkner in his Sarty, his Yoknapatawpha, his running and not looking back, showing me a mirror of my deepest self. Can you see it? Look! There it is on the horizon, shining darkly.