Not Charlie

When each biennial Roundup of the Usual Suspects is winding down, we agree on a location for the next reunion, and someone takes responsibility for scouting out locations and making arrangements.

In our minds, we Usual Suspects are still the four young couples that we were in the mid-1960s when our friendships formed in St. Petersburg, Fla. Photos from the ‘60s, from our first reunion in 1994, and the most recent one last year, however, would reveal the irresistible tug of time and gravity.

It has been a long journey

Just getting accustomed to being adults and too poor to be pretentious, we were friends simply because we liked each other. We are friends now because we still like each other.

We could have missed knowing that, though, except for a lunchtime conversation.

Jean and Charlie had remained in St. Petersburg, and Tom and Shirley lived in Clearwater. The two couples did not see each other often, but Jean and Tom both worked in downtown St. Petersburg and often lunched in the same place.

By then Chuck and Leanne and Adelaide and I had long been gone from St Petersburg. They were settled in Claremont, Calif., and we lived in Montgomery, Ala.

One day at lunch, Jean suggested that the four couples have a reunion at the house Tom and Shirley had built in the mountains of Colorado in anticipation of retirement.

I think curiosity impelled all of us to attend that first reunion, and we approached it with questions and a certain amount of trepidation. Within minutes of the last couple’s arrival, the intervening years were swept away, and the Usual Suspects were born.

We agreed that meeting every other year would keep the reunions from becoming a duty, and the schedule gave us something to look forward to. The primary site specification was that there be room for all of us to hang out.

If you listened to a sound track of our gatherings, you would understand why. You would hear laughter, punctuated by barbs that would make you wonder how the verbal combatants could possibly be friends. We are armed with sharp tongues, but we never draw blood.

Each time a Roundup of the Usual Suspects ends, we know that our numbers might be diminished before the next gathering. Mortality is a reality, and as the years pass, the horizon comes closer.

Still, in the summer of 2008 when our reunion on the Oregon coast broke up, none of us expected that the first person missing would be Charlie.

Charlie was full of life, passionate and curious and energetic. He loved corny jokes and bad puns, and he would tell them with relish, knowing that his reward would be a chorus of groans.

He loved his native St. Petersburg and the starkly beautiful Four Corners of the Southwest and the brooding mountains of Tennessee. And because he loved them, he acquired a depth of knowledge about the flora and the fauna and the people of each region.

He loved visiting rock shops, and he polished stones to decorate the exquisite wooden boxes that he crafted.

He and Jean were the perfect pair. And he was positively gaga about his grandchildren.

In all the years, we had never known Charlie to be ill with anything.

But not long after he and Jean returned home from the reunion, Charlie was diagnosed with lymphoma. Chemotherapy drove it away, and last spring Jean and Charlie and Adelaide and I spent a week in his beloved mountains celebrating his remission from lymphoma and my recovery from bypass surgery.

The lymphoma had retreated, but it had not surrendered, and it returned last summer more virulent than before.

Charlie died just before Christmas.

So early in January six of the Usual Suspects will go to St Petersburg. We will join Jean at a memorial service for her husband and our friend.

Adelaide and I will share our son’s observation upon learning of Charlie’s death: “To make a difference and to be well remembered is something everyone aspires to.”

Certainly Charlie achieved that and much more.

But knowing that does not ease the sting of his departure.

Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com

Good words about Good Old Boys

(I ran across this while cleaning out some old files -- more about that later -- and realized it had never been published. So here 'tis.)


    Good old boys have an image problem.
    Say good old boy and the picture that comes to mind is of an ignorant redneck with mud on his shoes and beer on his breath, an overweight hayseed whose vocabulary is smaller than his belt size, a hick in a rusty pickup truck.
    The reason for this sad state of affairs is that good old boys don’t spend their time indoors writing scripts for TV shows or drawing cartoons for slick magazines.
    It’s time someone set the record straight. It’s time to say something good about good old boys.
    A good old boy is polite to a fault. He will take time to compliment the flowers in your front yard and inquire about the health of your mammy and pappy even before he asks to use the phone to call the ambulance because his wife has gone into labor with their third child.
    A good old boy is helpful. If you have hay in the field and it’s making up to rain, he’ll show up before you call for help and he’ll stay til you’re through. In fact, if what you’re doing is more interesting than what he was doing, he’ll stay til his wife threatens to serve supper without him.
    A good old boy has perspective. He knows that a hundred years from now not much of what anyone’s doing is going to be in the history book, so if it’s a nice day and the fish are biting, it’s no big deal if the fence doesn’t get painted until tomorrow. Or the next day.
    A good old boy is an island of calm. When’s he sitting on the front porch in the rocking chair and he looks as if he’s asleep, he’s just meditating. Folks in town pay big money to their yoga teachers to learn to do that.
    A good old boy is friendly. Notice what happens when you meet one coming down the road in his pickup truck. If he doesn’t know you, he’ll lift one finger off the steering wheel. That’s short for “Hi.” If you’re another good old boy, he’ll lift two fingers. That short for “Hi, there.”
    A good old boy is not a slave to fashion. You won’t see him changing his wardrobe every year just because some dandy in Paris or New York said it’s the thing to do. He never bought a leisure suit or a Nehru jacket, and there aren’t that many different ways to tailor a pair of hog washers.
    A good old boy is a smart consumer. The cartoonists may picture him as a rube dumb enough to buy the Brooklyn Bridge, but you won’t find him paying good money just to buy drinking water that some slicker has put in a fancy bottle. Heck, you can get beer for that kind of money.
    A good old boy is a conservationist. If there’s something around the house that he doesn’t know what to do with, say an old water heater or air conditioner, he’s won’t just take it to the dump. No, he’ll toss it over the fence, because sooner or later he or one of his neighbors is going to need to scavenge something off of it to fix something else.
    A good old boy shares. You won’t find him throwing a perfectly good aluminum beer can in the garbage can. He’ll toss it in the ditch, instead, so some less fortunate soul can salvage it for recycling.
    A good old boy uses cash only if all else fails. He’d rather trade than eat, and anything he’s got is prime for barter except his kids and his hound dog. Well, the hound dog for sure.
    A good old boy knows good food. He’d eat fried dirt if you put batter on it.
    Being a good old boy is a state of mind. Even someone who has been to college, even a lawyer, can be one.
    Of course you can’t have good old boys without good old girls, but that’s a whole other subject.


Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com

Barreling Down the Wrong Trail

    I wonder how historians a few decades from now will view this crazy period we are living in. My guess is that they will regard it as one of those fits of temporary insanity that our country goes through every now and then, sort of collective post -traumatic stress syndrome.
    Although we tend to regard our own era as unique, it is not; our country has lived through many tumultuous periods when the old order was changing and the future was uncertain.
    The post World War I and World War II Red scares, the Great Depression, even the candidacy and election of a Roman Catholic as president, all caused alarms of one degree or another. And that’s just a short list.
    These times shared some common elements: There were those who preached that the sky was falling, those who believed them and panicked, those who saw advantage in the alarm and profited, and those who stood bemused on the sidelines.
    Each time there were prophets who preached that this time was different. The sky really was falling.
    What was different was the prophets themselves.
    The sky was not falling then; it is not falling now.
    The current prophets of doom are Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh, the Walter Winchell and Father Coughlin of their day. Like Winchell and Coughlin, they will one day be just footnotes in the history book.
    It’s easy to regard the protesters spurred on by people like Beck and Limbaugh (and encouraged by Republicans who seem bent on emulating the Federalist Party of Jefferson’s time) as crazies and racists.
    The so-called 9/12 protests in Washington, D.C., would give some support to that notion. There’s no need to recount all the wild claims and hatefully racist themes of some of the signs some protesters carried.
    And yet, not all of those protesters – perhaps not even a majority of them – are crazies. In fact, they have a lot in common with those who have not taken to the streets. They are angry about the present and uncertain about the future. They know that they have lost ground and don’t see how they are going to make it up. They have seen that there is one set of rules for the powerful people and institutions and another for them.
    They are looking for someone to blame, a scapegoat. That’s happened many times before, too.
    And there are always those to spur the mob on, this time in the personages of Limbaugh and Beck, among others. (Hearing those two try to turn President Obama into a Nazi is more than ludicrous. They have more in common with Hitler themselves. Like him, their ravings become increasingly bizarre as time passes.)
    Of course they are abetted in whipping up anxiety and hate by Republicans, who know that if they can divert attention from everything they did to get the country into this mess, the better chance they have of returning to power.
    These Republicans appear willing to do whatever it takes to win. They are, after all, the inheritors of Lee Atwater’s legacy.
    The Republicans know that there is no evidence to dispute President Obama’s American citizenship. Even the Republican governor of President Obama’s home state of Hawaii has attested that his birth certificate is in order. But they refuse to dismiss that phony issue and encourage the crazies to keep beating the drum.
    They know that none of the health care reform legislation would create “death panels” to pull the plug on grandma, but they have stoked that fear.
    They know that the president’s so-called czars aren’t evil cadres appointed to subvert the constitution. But they hyperventilate trying to scare the socks off the citizenry.
    Consider Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., pandering before the Values Voters Conference. “I’d be just about as happy,” he said, “if more of them (members of Congress) read this a little more,” he said, holding up a copy of the constitution.
    “Nowhere in here can I find the word czar,” he went on. “Washington, D.C., must become a no czar zone.”
    Red meat for the right, certainly, but Rep. Pence either is thick as a brick or he knew he was dissembling.
    As David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, who served in the Justice Department under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, pointed out in a column in The Washington Post, “The White House czars are presidential assistants charged with responsibility for given policy areas. As such, they are among the president's closest advisers. In many respects, they are equivalent to the personal staff of a member of Congress. To subject the qualifications of such assistants to congressional scrutiny – the regular confirmation process – would trench upon the president's inherent right, as the head of an independent and equal branch of the federal government, to seek advice and counsel where he sees fit.”
    They also noted: “Some of the positions many are now criticizing have existed for years. As The Post reported this week: ‘By one count, Bush had 36 czar positions filled by 46 people during his eight years as president.’ “
    Perhaps Rep. Pence and his shocked colleagues (as shocked as Capt. Renault was to discover gambling was going on in Rick’s café in the movie Casablanca) should spend a little more time reading the constitution themselves, especially the separation of power section.
    It’s not just liberals or middle-of-the-roaders who think that the conservative anger at President Obama is misplaced.
    Consider Bruce Bartlett. He is one of the original supply-siders who helped draft the Kemp-Roth tax bill in the 1970s. He was a leading Republican economist in the 1980s and 1990s.
    In a column last month in The Daily Beast, a news and opinion reporting and aggregating web site, he wrote:
    “To a large extent, Obama is only cleaning up messes created by Bush. This is not to say Obama hasn’t made mistakes himself, but even they can be blamed on Bush insofar as Bush’s incompetence led to the election of a Democrat. If he had done half as good a job as most Republicans have talked themselves into believing he did, McCain would have won easily.”
    “Conservatives delude themselves that the Bush tax cuts worked and that the best medicine for America’s economic woes is more tax cuts; at a minimum, any tax increase would be economic poison. They forget that Ronald Reagan worked hard to pass one of the largest tax increases in American history in September 1982, the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, even though the nation was still in a recession that didn’t end until November of that year. Indeed, one could easily argue that the enactment of that legislation was a critical prerequisite to recovery because it led to a decline in interest rates. The same could be said of Clinton’s 1993 tax increase, which many conservatives predicted would cause a recession but led to one of the biggest economic booms in history.
    “Until conservatives once again hold Republicans to the same standard they hold Democrats, they will have no credibility and deserve no respect. They can start building some by admitting to themselves that Bush caused many of the problems they are protesting.”
    Bartlett has a number of other insights. You can read his complete essay
here.
    Watching the protesters in full cry after President Obama, I am reminded of my youth in North Louisiana.
    On many a warm summer night, we would put the coon hounds in the back of the truck and drive out in the country to find a corn field. We would listen as the dogs struck a scent and then went baying after their quarry.
    You could tell whether they were trailing and when they had treed.
    Armadillos were establishing themselves in the area by the mid 1950s, and far too often you could tell that the hounds were chasing an armadillo instead of a raccoon. When they were chasing the wrong animal, you might as well call them in and go home.
    Nobody is going to call the protesters in, but maybe they will figured out they’re on the wrong trail.

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Perhaps She's Still Invisible

    The reunion of the Ruston (La.) High School Class of 1959 was, I imagine, very much like the 50th reunions of countless high school classes.
    At the last reunion I attended, the 30th, the erosive qualities of time and gravity had begun to alter the landscape of the class of ’59, but now they had plowed deep furrows and dragged away our youth. I could have passed a lie detector test that I had never seen some of those people in my entire life.
    (Memo to class reunion planners: Make the name tags really big, so people with fading eyesight aren’t so obvious in trying to read a name as they squeeze a hand and say something like, “Hey, Robby, of course I remember you.”)
    I did not keep in touch with my classmates after I went away to college and essentially left my hometown for good. Many classmates remained in town or nearby, but over the years when I returned to visit, I spent most of the time with my brother and sister and with the diminishing number of other kinfolks.
    The reunion events were limited: a tour of the old alma mater – it has been renovated and expanded, but it was more recognizable than some of the alumni – and a party at the home of a class member.
    In the weeks leading up to the reunion, it was natural to try to recall what school felt like at the time.
    Racial segregation was still the order of the day, so our high school was all white. It was the only white high school, though, and as small as it was (about 110 in our class), it comprised a wide variety of people.
    There were the kids who rode in from the country on big yellow buses. Many of the boys took classes in agriculture and shop and were distinguished by their blue corduroy Future Farmers of America jackets. Many of the girls took home ec and wore dresses that had been sewn by their mothers or had come from the bargain rack or a catalog. (There were exceptions, of course; no group is totally homogenous.)
    There were the town kids – the children of business people and professors at the college – who constituted the school’s social elite.
    There were, of course, the athletes who were a group in themselves and who had, at least for a time, acceptance by the elites.
    The largest group was no group at all, that faceless middle that fell into that category simply because it did not fall into any other. I was one of those.
    So, in some sense, the gathering of the Class of ’59 was only partly a reunion, since for some the only unity had been in being a member of that particular year’s graduating class.
    The high school years may be more difficult for girls than it is for boys. Our school, for example, had sororities, which by their very nature exclude people.
    It started, I think, with one sorority – the upper tier as it were – followed by formation of another sorority, which I guess was composed of those who hadn’t quite made the first cut. They were pretty exclusive themselves, so during my high school years, a group of girls who had not been invited to join either of the other groups formed their own club..
    But some girls – and boys – were rejected by everyone, even that faceless middle.
    There was a girl I remembered who always seemed as frightened as a cornered animal. She was obviously poor. Her clothes had the appearance of hand-me-downs, and I am not sure they were always clean. She did not seem to have any friends; I don’t recall seeing her chatting with anyone in the halls or in the lunchroom. She never participated in class. I remember a time or two trying to start a conversation with her, but by then she must have been so wounded that she was suspicious of everyone.
    I hadn’t thought of her for at least 50 years, but she came to mind as I tried to recall those years. I wondered what had happened to her.
    The reunion committee had done a good job of tracking down the members of the Class of ’59, and they handed out a sheet with the names and addresses of the living and a list of the departed.
    On the entire list there were only two names that had no information at all. Hers was one of them. No one knew her then; no one knew her now.

Contract the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com