FollowI never thought to dedicate. Life is curious; especially the last few years needing to be free, open, receptive and absorbing. Playing a mind game, you let things fire away. Pick a topic; see where memory synapses take you. Synapses just fired from ‘Easy Rider’ to Otis Redding, Pete Seeger singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ to Eisenhower running for President and an “I Like Ike’ button my mother told me to save; pure random unorganized wondrous thinking processes. I just thought about a friend in Minnesota, Brenda (I call her Gracie, she calls me George.) The words of this blog entry are herewith (almost sounds legal) dedicated to Brenda. She encourages intellectual pursuit; winds of synchronicity (and David Gergen-Facebook) brought us together.
Now the blog title: The Shark River Inlet jetty (Belmar, NJ) is a favorite place, a spiritual bookmark. Many days synthesizing Vitamin D were spent on its boulders, dreaming of worlds and be(longing). I love Otis Redding. Words echo so it became my dock of solitude, thought and imagination. A computer screen may be in front of me but I’m really there, getting sprayed by wave remnants, shielding my eyes and catching a glimpse of the horizon and a ship heading to Kilimanjaro. Hemingway and F. Scott are aboard. I can barely make-out hands waving at me. When I was ten years old, I used to spend hours sitting at the dock, on a boulder and dream of the day I’d take my child to the jetty, and stare at this same horizon. When my son was ten, we did just that. Sometime later, he mentioned doing the same thing to his child. Another dream; he’ll fulfill his dream.
Somehow I want to say, if you’ve reached this point in reading my blogs, and have concluded, I might be a bit on the serious side, let me make this perfectly clear(right out of the Richard Nixon book of public speaking) I’m actually a frustrated comedian. Making people laugh is a lofty aspiration. Some (I don’t remember how many) years ago. I started writing a comedy act for local improvisation clubs. Two months later, I moved on; becoming a quantum physicist might be easier than stand-up comedy. Point being, I love laughter. A magazine says it’s the best medicine. Before I can laugh while blogging, I need to get the serious stuff out of the way first. It is a long way to Tiperrary( for you WWI buffs)
There’s a word, maelstrom that comes to mind. I’m in it now, hopelessly being tossed and turned (great album from 1963 ‘Tossing and Turning’). An old man and the sea rowboat, a vortex nearby, golf ball sized hail (what if golf was never invented?) and impenetrable fog conspire. More thoughts about the maelstrom; from my pharmacology days (one of my best courses at Rutgers); when the human body nears the finality of death, it slowly, methodically prepares itself by shutting down systems, organs and cellular communications on all levels.
Now I’m in a rattling mood. No rhyme or reason. No rowboats heading to shore. There’s an archangel, Michael. So what’s this I hear about the New Jersey budget problems? I sound like Ensign Pulver. The look on James Cagney’s face. A billion dollars gets slashed from education budget here in New Jersey. Size of classes may double when we need all the education we can get. With all the children we have, seems a better educational childhood is gone. And my alma mater, Rutgers, their state funding slashed as well. Libraries closing and cutting back on programs all over the body of the country. Airlines merging and cutting back on routes. Atlantic Blue Fin tuna nearly extinct (25,000 left). The gulf oil disaster. The UN the other day suggesting in forty years, that the 20 million people who earn a living from ocean fishing may have to look for new work; no more fish left. Carbon dioxide acidifying the ocean; oysters can’t reproduce, coral dying. Male small mouth bass fish in fresh water lakes in America now have eggs (71-100% of them). Endocrine disruptors messing with our bodies (all those hormones people took the last fifty years gets pissed into the ocean) Too many people not enough food and changing climate patterns so less farming lands. More video games and ways to play them on a mass transportation bus while fares went up 40% here in New Jersey. Can it be true certain American companies since the end of WWII collectively have killed more people than the Nazi’s? Hint: tobacco. Or do drug/car companies know they’ve got a bad product but leave it on the market longer because actuaries say extra sales more than cover extra law suits. A sewage treatment plant in Massachusetts moving to higher ground because future rising sea levels jeopardize safety. The Middle East. Nuclear proliferation. Neville Chamberlain, “peace in our time.” They want to build a coal plant in Linden, New Jersey and dump all the waste off the New Jersey shoreline. I thought about a “Frankenstein” amount of money for New Jersey tax collectors so to hell with the lungs of the people of central and northern Jersey. Great article:
http://stoppurgencoalplant.org/http:/stoppurgencoalplant.org/why-linden-why-not-rumsen-a-frankenstein-moment
Enough rambling and rattling. I love sitting on the dock of my mind, firing away, chest rising and falling with troubled breathing, worrying that I’m not shutting down like the world around me. Silver linings in clouds, seeded with iodide. I wonder if that ever really worked to make it rain. A jet plane just flew overhead. I’ll bet it’s heading to Kilimanjaro.
Oh one more thing. A commercial. My first one. If you like this stuff and that’s what it is, stuff, why don’t you mosey (Texas accent) over to my website, check out my novel, ‘Vichy Water’ and maybe order. It’s all from the same gut.
http://vichywater.net And thanks.
Calvin,
First, I must say thanks for dedicating this blog entry to me. I am flattered and it sure made my smile. Your friendship has made me check my email and text messages with anticipation of another adventure in Calvin’s daydreams and thoughts. Gracie was surprised to realize that your frequent occasions of ‘sitting on a Belmar dock on a jetty’ was your imagination and ruminations casting the present state of mind onto an experience so spirtual one never forgets the pureness of those moment when we get lost and locked in a vision of something far away that we ‘cannot see’. Who needs to see when they can feel. Feeling deeply enough, you see through your soul’s eye. It works even if you are blind. When blinded by the accumulated muck of our current state of malcontent, the jetty is surely the place to go and stay for awhile.
I have my own jetty. Ocean View Park – more a parking lot on the Chesapeake Bay in Norfolk, Va. It was where Black folks could get to the beach when the beaches were restricted. The jetty was the only amusement there for us. My now young husband and I spent many hours climbs onto the piles of big rock and walking out to the end to sit and just ‘be’. Sometimes we would talk but mostly we just sat and allowed whatever we each needed to think and worry about [us as poor college students, married and hiding that fact from family; trying to figure how we would make a life together in the world at that time] from where we were right then. We were scared and we were happy and also anxious to know where we could go and what laid ahead for us.
I could see clear out, miles I am sure to a tanker or some flat barge moving something across the bay. Oh, maybe this ship was just a working ship that by night went into port after unloading some equipment for the Navy at the base. Or, was there a sailor out there who did not speak English about to port in Norfolk where everyone spoke but the one language, broken English. What would be think of this place and how did it look and feel compared to the home far away that he floated in to your port from.
The mist would chill the face in February and with it another ship seemed to pop up on the edge of the world, moving ever so slowly that I just knew they would be days ever seeing our ports and meeting the people of Tidewater. They did not know how fortunate they were to come to a city used to having foreign sailors come into port. I wondered if they would get better treatment than us local folks of the black and tan hues. 1964-5 and the Civil Right Acts was just like a dream and not yet real to us. The doors did not open for us to go to the white college across town or the professors to do more than token exchanges in a few departments to make a showing that Virginia was moving forward.
I don’t know how I got here. Educated and enjoying the world most of the time as if I have no color. That is it, if we had no color we would all be the same ‘color blind’. What would Martin and Malcolm think of this and how would the folks hiding behind the Earl Grey bags and the Texas school board adjust to being colorless like me? My goodness, now how can we tell those people from us seems a likely retort. Arizona would have us tattooed or something to show we belong here.
The citizens of the world, those sailors on the ships did not know what they were about to disembark to. They would be with color or ethnicity or both in this foreign land of ours. I then just took then back out to sea where they were in their element to dwell for days and weeks, make a fast stop just to unload and hide back to friendly shores.
Why can’t we see shrimp in these waters. From the jetty we can imagine that the water is just so deep and dark that we just cannot see the shrimp, crab and oyster beds. Then the mist hits and you come back to reality knowing the sea life is just not off this jetty. It all went someplace else were the people are more friendly, they speak Portuguese and Spanish and their schools are not so confused as to teach Virginia history as if it was noble that the gentry shackled other people to the land for generations, contaminated their gene pool, taken them away from their mother land never to know whence that even was and profit from their labor without providing them value worth the demands and sacrifices forced onto them.
Sitting on the jetty I often would find myself with tears running down my face and not be aware of what and where my mind had wandered. I was headed to Africa and did not know where along its Atlantic coast to land and ask if anyone would claim me. 45 years later and this puzzlement (is that a real word?) come to haunt me from time to time. I know should have gotten on one of those ships and seen if it would take me to the place my great, great, great, great — grandmother had been ripped from.
George, I sure was a long way from home sitting on the jetty tearful to know what was out there where at the edge of the world. Could any of us find our place across the horizon now. You know, on the other side of the thing there has to be something and people waiting for us. I cannot swim. I hope that does not stop me from getting there. After all I do not have any ocean freighters here in Minnesota to stow away so I can get out past the edge of the world. Right now it is a stopping / starting place for this girl’s imagination.
I must come back to NJ’s shores, go to Belmar to see if the view from your jetty makes any of this clearer or will it be murky, sticky and smelly from the oil spill and chemical soup modern manufacturing and commerce have made of our coast. Would there be ships on the horizon again? If we cross the edge of the world, out there at the horizon will we fall like off a cliff but forever into nothingness? Is that where we are headed?
Thanks George.
Brenda says Good Night to Gracie now.
Comment by Brenda Wiggins — May 22, 2010 @ 3:04 am
Cal,
I just looked at the time when my entry above posting. Again I am caught at my best time of the day. Can I ever get Gracie to say Good Night, not Good Morning?
Comment by Brenda Wiggins — May 22, 2010 @ 3:07 am