My childhood nemesis, my older sister Billie, has often attempted to control my memory of certain childhood memories. When the family would get together and look at photographs, we would argue about what was going on when the photograph was taken. Usually, I didn't have any idea what was going on at that one moment all those years ago, but my sister takes the position that she was two and a quarter years older than me, and was more aware of what was going on. Then she clams up.

Since I don't have any real memory of such photographic events except for her dumb assessment. It's all based on some stupid snapshot from a bad camera and even worse film. It's just sickening to think I could have a little girl's memory of my childhood simply because she could beat me up if I didn't agree with her. But, she was even more underhanded when it came to blackmail.

Billie was a tattletale. A little power game she was good at. Inevitably, she would come to me first and tell me that she was going to tell our parents I had done something against the rules. I would call her a liar and that her shirt tail was on fire, and the screaming began. Then, she would stop yelling, draw herself up into her most self-righteous nine year old stance, and tell me that if I didn't pay her something to shut her up, she would tell on me, and not only that, but that she was obligated by family duty to expose me for the sinner I was.

Then, with a haughty practiced twirl, she would spin round on her heels, and head for the house yelling, "Momma" like the witch she only pretended to be. Mostly, I would find myself following her and yelling, "You better not tell! You better not tell!" Fat chance. Billie was a tattletale.

Usually, by the time she found out what I'd done, my parents already knew about whatever it was she was manipulating me about, and it didn't make any difference what transpired between Billie and I. Our family was a very closed loop system, being strangers with no kin about, and the outcome of my innocent mischievousness was painful and certain. Spare the rod, spoil the child.

Billie taught me the nursery rhyme about what little girls are made of, you gnow, sugar and spice and all that jazz. Billie liked the part about what little boys are made of, and when she got to that scene she would scrunch up like the Wicked Witch from the fairy tale about Hans and Gretel, and her eyes would be sizing me up for the oven while she screeched that part out as if it were truly painful.

Billie was fairly believable. You should hear her ghost stories.

"Sweet Mother of God! Run for your life!"

**************

A friend wrote to tell me he felt holes in my last entry about the trumpet. He didn't get a sense of closure because I didn't tell what my parent's response to my terrible anger at my father's present of a cornet instead of the silver trumpet. I realized I was closing the story fast, because I wrote it late at night and run outta steam. I just wanted to end it and go to bed.

I don't seem all that sure what my parent's attitude was about breaking a child's spirit. Maybe that attitude seemed similar to that of the prevailing community standards of that time, and yet they raised me and my brothers and sisters away from the place they themselves were raised, and the two societies were much different in set and setting. I think it made a difference they had both been to college (my father had already graduated by this time), and they were of an experimentive temperament as young couples sometime are. My father beat me, quite badly at times, especially if he was under a lot of pressure, but the beatings he administered were not as a stranger.

His beating seemed sometime like a ritual that included an unseenfamily group I did not know because we had moved around so much. My father would compare a beating he gave me with one he had recieved as a kid for doing exactly the same stunt he beat me for. He would compare a time he beat me with beatings his older brother and male cousins got for doing something he said I did. And we both deserved it.


Candidly, I don't know if I was ever convinced that what I was supposed to have done wrong was really all that bad, but that I was getting beaten for was because of family tradition. Blood is thicker than water. To become a member of my family seemed to require beatings of a certain kind for a very specific reason. My natal family might suggest I fell out of the highchair when I was a baby as an explanation of my uncouth ways, but I don't think they would ever deny that I earned my stripes as a family member.

Of course I got beaten for throwing a tantrum. It was standard fare. As usual, everything was calmly discussed before hand. I knew exactly why they thought I needed punishment. It made no difference if I plead innocence. The metaphor of how it was going to hurt them more than it hurt me got spoken like a a prayer for my wicked, lost soul, and the games began.

Some people finalize a deal with laughter, others with some unholy waking of the dead ancestors with ritual screaming and despair. I was punished severely, and heard the lecture about how much sacrifice the family was making to give me what I preyed for. I was bruskly informed that I was going to take that cornet to band practice, and I was going to learn to play it whether I liked it or not, because the family's honor was at stake. Why on earth should the generosity of my father be slandered by my childish selfishness? I would do right or suffer the consequences.

I did a little of both. My parents and I both seemed to somehow negotiate a deal over time about it. Later, all of us seemed more repentant about our anger than what the horn represented at the time. The last time I saw the cornet, my oldest daughter kept it as an icon representing her absent father. She says she feels my pain through it. She wants me to feel her pain too. Maybe I do. She says I cheated her out of family tradition by staying away from her. I hope so. Some pain is not all in your head.

We came to Clinton just after I turned twelve years old. I was truly awed by living in a town more than twice the size of the last town we had lived in. The last town we lived in was twice the size of the village I lived in previously. Clinton already had kid's little leagues in baseball and basketball, and I had never played much of either before we arrived here.A lotta bonding, both seen and unseen, had already taken place with many of the native kids. As a result I was one of those kids who was the last one chosen for the first coupla years after we moved here. I was a tough kid, but I was small and skinny. I had a big head and a small body.

The best thing that happened to make me feel pretty good about being in Clinton was finding myself intrigued by Sidney Carter's silver trumpet. Sidney was a kind of quiet, shy person. He was the grandson of the man who owned the house my family rented. He lived with his grandfather in the big house up the lane.

The house was a one-story house. It had a modular look to it as if it had grown from a fairly small cabin. It was told
that ol' man Carter built it himself, and had added more rooms to it as his fortune developed. It looked like one of the last additions to his house he made was a front porch. It had banisters around it. They were painted white and consisted of a rounded top rail, a rectangular bottom rail about six inches off the floor of the porch, and turned wood spokes spaced about four inches apart like the pickets of a fence.

But, for me it was hallowed ground. I would go visit Sidney at that house and the first thing I would do would be to ask him to show me his trumpet. He was proud to do it at first. He would bring that trumpet, case and all, out to that porch as though it was the holy grail on a velvet cushion, lay it down with great, exaggerated tenderness, and then open the case up. The suspension and awe I felt as it came into sight was one of the most beautiful sights I had ever seen. It was for sure the most precise machine I had ever seen, and it was shiny!

It was a marvel just laying there in the soft, royal blue, deep pile lining. Slowly, with proper reverence to the Gods of Music, he would uncradle it with his hands and hold it up to the sunlight, and it bedazzled me. My jaw would drop open when it sparkled in the light like some precious jewel. Then, he would play and shatter my illusions like so much fluff. I didn't want to hear him play that trumpet. I wanted to hold it it my own hands. I yearned for it with the deep prepubesent yearning of a twelve year old boy to hold that thing in my hands and just turn it over and over until I had memorized every detain to my heart's content. I abided with his torturous attempts to play just for the chance I could talk him into letting me hold it. There was some horrible angst overcoming me, because Sidney recognized how mightily I wanted to hold the trumpet, and began to tease me unmercifully, but he wasn't a mean person, Sidney wasn't, and we both knew the time would come.

When he did let me hold the trumpet I felt stupid. I had only seen pictures. I had never seen the real thing itself, and I felt belittled by it's very structure. It astounded me that somebody had taken the time to figure out how to make it. It made me wonder what I would have to know to create a trumpet. I couldn't even imagine making the shape of it in model clay. Much less figure out what had to happen when a human blew into the mouth piece to make those sounds come out so acutely on the right pitch. Something woke up in me that day out on the porch of the big house when I finally got to hold the trumpet in my pitifully small hands.

I wanted my own trumpet. Then, as now, I have no shame. Whatever it takes. For some reason it seems a little unpleasant to remember what I had to do to get that trumpet. I'm sure my mother had a lot to do with it. Earlier, she had me taking piano lessons hoping to lead me into a more cultured perspective. They didn't take. It wasn't my idea of something to do. But, the trumpet was my heart's desire.

One day I came in from playing just after my father had gotten home. He called me over with the rest of the family. Immediately I saw a strange box. My father was in a good mood. That was a good sign. When he felt relaxed and playful he was a lot of fun. He didn't get that way often because of his work. Today, however, he was in good form. His antics always made me smile, but today I wanted to know what was in that box. He saw me looking at it. He knew how powerful my curiosity can appear when I am totally dumbstruck. I knew what was in that box by the way he teased me. I knew it was my turn in the barrel.

He stretched the suspense out pretty good, but not enough to hurt me, and then handed me the box and sat waiting.

I didn't know what to do. If it was what I thought it was, then it didn't appear to be a long enough box to fit a silver trumpet in. Carefully I pried the flaps off the box and opened it up. The first thing I saw was the crowsack colored side of the case. I got it all the way out of the box and saw that it had mahogony brown leather reinforcing all around the edges of the case. The stitched leather handle had shiny brass rings on each end of it that attached to brass templates on the case itself.

Something was wrong. Hurriedly, I unsnapped the shiny latches and opened up the case, and there it was. It was not a trumpet, and it was not silver. It looked like a trumpet, in a rather squatty way, and it was not slim and slick, but bulky and utilitarian. It was a cornet. A lousy CORNET!

My response was not discreet nor diplomatically conceived. I screamed. I raged. I tried to throw it in the fireplace. My whole family dived for the cornet to save it from my wrath. They knew me well. I ran outside. I never went back to Sidney's house to see the trumpet again. I hated him and his damned trumpet.

I was a spiteful child, and I became a spiteful man. Wrestling that demon rage seemed to have become my life's work.

This rage, as such, seems neutral and unconcerned with the ethics of it's demands. Just that it moves the mountain. When it appears it comes like a thief in the night and overtakes me by surprise. It both protects me and wounds me like a double-edged sword that it mimicks. It took a long time to see it as cyclic, that it came in waves of passion that pulsed at the periphery of whatever understanding of things I might have in a particular moment. Always beyond the this and that of my day-by-day sniveling, I could not conjure it for my own use. Rather, it used me.

In this particular case the outcome of that particular rage did not fare me well. It was not a hard thing to do. I just refused to learn to read sheet music. I found that if I could learn the scales and practice them by rote, that I could play anything I wanted. I could stand next to somebody who could read the notes, and after I'd heard it once I could play it by memory. The band leader figured out my ploy, and in a big humiliating scene in front of the whole band, he told me to play a new piece of music to see what the trumpet part would sound like. Naturally, I was shocked and became a muttering fool. But, Ed Taylor was not through with his humiliation. It would last for three more years.

First, he made me switch instruments and play the French horn. He got the same results. Then he made me play a baritone and soon gave up on that. At the beginning of my 11th year of high school, he switched me to playing the tuba, and that was that. I could figure out what the bass line would be by memory, and as long as I played in key, it didn't really matter what I played, cause I got pretty good at improvising.

Mister Taylor was a stern disiplinarian. A taskmaster of unyielding morals. My very presence seemed painful to him. Occasionally, I would look up to see him grimacing at me as if in the throes of deep agony. He simply outlasted me. He was determined that I would learn to read musical notation. In my senior year he told me that I was going to be one of the soloists in the yearly Band Day Concert, and the musical piece was called Tubby the Tuba. I was required to learn to play that song by note or I would be the laughing stock of the whole school.

After consulting with my father, his fellow teacher, and telling him the plan to call my bluff, My father agreed to let Mr. Taylor keep me after school for two hours every day but Friday for private tutoring, with the tutor being himself.

I don't recall exactly how they blackmailed me into it, but by the date of the concert arrived, I was almost convinced myself that I could performed the piece just like it was written. They had patiently watched me made a joke out of playing music long enough or me to owe my father and Mr. Taylor a sincere effort to do right. The concert went over big, and my big solo got me three standing ovations.

I was hooked, but as it turned out, it was the roar of the crowd that really excited me. I really enjoyed getting people revved up enough they can't stop clapping was the biggest thrill of all. I just didn't know it yet.

I find it interesting how I sit around all day now. When I get up in the morning I have a ritual of disgust. First think I usually do is mash the start button on my computer so that it will boot up while I'm attending my toiletries, and when I return and turn on the monitor it is usually set for TV reception from watching the late shows a little before I go to sleep, so the first input I get is usually a morning show. Many times the first thing I see is the news portion of the morning show, and the whole idea of keeping up with this crap is what really disgusts me. I only receive the three network stations, and their version of the news is so sensationalized and censored for cuteness it drives me crazier.

Then, I switch the monitor over to my desktop and double click on my mail program to download the e-mail. I created mailboxes for each of the discussion groups I'm subbed to and all my friends I receive mail from have their own mailbox. What shows up in my Inbox is pure spam. This morning I had 18 spam posts in my felix Inbox and not one single post from the discussion groups or my friends. My rabblerouser tag had some posts from the discussion groups I'm subbed to in that name. No spam. felix was my first e-mail name, and I learned a lot about what not to do using that address.

Presently, I contemplate the notion of changing my felix address by using a 1 (one) instead of an l (ell) in the name to maintain the idea of it, and yet by changing one letter to a number I think it will stop a lot of the spam I get. These spammers appear to run a list of common names for each ISP and develop a list of addresses for each ISP based on commonality.

It seems odd when e-mail slows down to a crawl. The groups I sub to have members from many different countries and many different time zones, but it seems like when the volume of e-mail slows down, it slows down all over the world. I have read lots of comments about how the internet acts as a group mind. Participating in discussion groups seem to make it easy to find that very believable.

I hope to start writing of random adventures about places I have slept while hitch-hiking and traveling around North America soon. The series I wrote previously centered around my last trip taken several years ago, and my memory of those events are still pretty good and easy to put in sequence. The others happened some time ago and were not so sequential.

Many times I would just leave my residence and get on a local road and start hitch-hiking. When a driver picked me up and asked me where I was going I would make up a destination in the direction they were headed and tell them that. But then, a little later, I would ask them where they were going and if that place sounded like an interesting place or some place I had never been, I would tell them I was going there for a while. In other words, I didn't care where I was going. I was just looking for adventure and I didn't know where it would show up. That "not knowing" seem to exist as an attitude that allowed me to find excitement where I could find it, rather than going to a particular place in hope of finding it. In this way my sojourn seemed more digital than linear, because it resulted in me zigzagging all over the place as the opportunity arose.

Many drivers were local to the place they were going, and seemed delighted to show me the local sites of interest. As a hitch-hiker I was normally in the passenger's seat or in the back seat, and got shown many places as if I were on a tour with a tour guide who enjoyed telling me the stories associated with the site. I got a ride with one guy who had a fascination with petrified wood, and he was going to the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. While I wasn't totally consumed with the idea of petrified wood, I used my casual interest to ask him questions about one of his favorite subjects. This resulted in him spending a good half day showing me around the various exhibits of the park and explaining to me how he thought each exhibit came to exist in great detail, and then bought me lunch so he could tell me his general theory about the geographical history of the earth.

I have been thinking about how to write the final leg of my hitch-hiking trip I did at the age of 60 just before my 61 birthday three years ago. Maybe I just don't want to end it, but the truth is that I don't remember that much about the end of the trip because I had getting home on my mind more than what actually happened.

I woke up at about dawn in Florence, South Carolina. Immediately I started thinking about getting home. In a way, I already was home because in Florence I was already on the coastal plains of the Carolinas. I wasn't born in the Carolinas, but I was raised there from the time I was two years old. I had lived in many different parts of the U.S., but I always felt most comfortable here.

I could smell the swamps in the air and even on my clothes and skin as I lay there listening to the traffic of I-95 and all the cars and trucks using the intersection. There was a misty dew on the ground, and all over me. The mugginess was as familiar to me as the sound of my own voice. I stood up and gathered my stuff to get back on the road. I realized that I was very hungry, and decided to see if there was enough money left in the bank to use my debit card to eat breakfast. I was within a hundred miles from my house, and I wanted to celebrate having almost completed my sojourn.

I had slept about two hundred yards away from the intersection near the entrance and exit ramps that catered to the traffic headed north on I-95, and so I walked over to Highway 54 to the motels and restaurants there. I saw a sign on a Ryan's Steak House driveway that said they were serving an all you could eat buffet for $4.95. I figured I had at least that much in my debit account, and decided to go in and pig out for breakfast as my celebration.

I went inside and chose a booth near the entrance that didn't have any people near it. I was aware that the scent from my clothes and body was highly odiferous, and I didn't want to offend any more people than was necessary. A middle-aged waitress came with some silverware, and asked me if I was going to do the buffet, and if I wanted coffee. I said I was and I did. She flounced off to fetch my coffee, and I went to look at what food they had to offer. It looked real good, they had a big variety of various foods that looked like they took into consideration the different tastes that would come in from the Interstate. The scrambled eggs looked freshly cooked and the bacon and sausage was not to greasy looking, I saw they had plenty of grits that didn't look too lumpy, and so my homecoming breakfast was complete.

I loaded up a plate and went back to the booth where I found the waitress had brought a pot of coffee and a basket of fresh baked yeast rolls. I took my time settling my butt into the booth seat, because I knew I was gone be sitting there for a long time. My stomach had shrunken over the last three weeks because I hadn't eaten regular, and if I ate too fast I was gone bloat up... a sin in an eat all you want buffet... and not get my money's worth.

Not only was the food good, but the moment itself was delicious. I indulged myself mixing the scrambled eggs with the first grits I'd had in a month as though it were some exotic delicacy from an equally exotic location, because to me it was exactly that. Most non-Southern people don't really understand that grits exist as a fairly tasteless medium with which to carry the real flavor of the other breakfast foods like eggs and bacon. It's particularly good with salt-cured country ham. Country ham itself don't taste quite as good as grits with red-eye gravy.

A couple came in and sat at the next booth closest to the entrance. They looked to be in their late forties or early fifties. The woman sat with her back to me so she could look at the traffic coming and leaving from the entrance. This was significant to me because it kinda told me who the boss was in their relationship. Another thing about her that seemed to support this notion was the way she was dressed. She didn't look like she dressed to please her man, and yet the way the man was dressed looked somehow like she had chosen his clothes, as though she dressed him to please herself. He looked fairly well groomed with a full head of wavy hair, and as he glanced at me, I saw him take in my day pack sitting in the seat beside me, and then he looked at my face. The woman was sitting within 4-5 feet of me, well within range of the muskiness I felt sure emanated from my person, but didn't appear to pay any attention to me as they got up and got food.

As I was sitting there I decided to get out my spiral notebook I had done a little writing in during my trip, and started making notes about the trip, and then started writing a poem to commemorate the event. When I paused in my writing and looked up from the note book to take another bite of food or to reflect on my memory of the trip, I notice the man looking at me with a curious look on his face.

The waitress had kept tabs on me pretty good, and brought me some more yeast bread to replace what was left and had gotten cold. I got the impression that she empathized with something that had happened to her earlier, because she seemed like she was mothering me to some degree. I thanked her for her attention, and she asked me where I was going. Briefly I told her what I had done, and how excited I was to be so near to my house where I was anticipating a long hot shower and sleeping in my own bed. The man in the next booth was unabashedly listening.

Just after she left my table, the woman sitting in the booth in front of me got up and went to the bathroom. When she did, the man got up and stood in front of me, and told me he had heard what I had told the waitress. He had a big smile on his face and he seemed quite friendly, and so I asked him if he would like to sit with me for a moment. He sat down, and began to ask me a little about my trip and why I had done it. I told him that my trip was done for old time sake, that I had spent years on the road when I was in my twenties and thirties, and I just wanted to remember the old days and to see if anything had changed.

This man looked at me as I was talking with a sense of awe on his face. He looked toward the bathrooms to see if his wife was coming, and upon seeing that she was still in there told me that he had always wanted to do what I had done, but had given in to living the domestic life working and taking care of his family. I saw his wife emerging from the bathroom and he followed my gaze and understood she was coming back to the booth. He stood up and reached out to shake hands, and tell me how much he appreciated our little encounter. I felt something in his hand and took it, and when he returned to sit with his wife I looked in my hand and saw a twenty dollar bill. I looked up as they were leaving and we exchanged smiles, and they went to the cashier to pay up and leave. I put the twenty into my pocket feeling grateful that I wouldn't get home totally broke, as had happened so many times before.

Eventually, I had sat there so long and couldn't find any excuse to remain in this inside place to be, and got up to pay my bill. When I got to the cashier's booth she waved her hand and told me the man had also paid for my breakfast. This seemed like a good start to what I hoped would be an uneventful and speedy homecoming.

I walked back out to the entrance ramp to continue this last part of my three week journey. I had to wait about an hour to catch a ride with this young guy who was going to the South of the Border exit on the North Carolina-South Carolina border. When I walked up the entrance ramp to catch a ride, I was in North Carolina. I barely turned around when a car stopped to pick me up. The driver was a man in his fifties. He asked me where I was going and I told him the name of my home town. Then he asked me if I had played football in high school. When I told him that I did, he asked me who my coach was. I told him, and he began to tell me all about Coach Carr. It turned out that this guy had been a coach in the area for most of his life, and he told me all about this part of his life before he let me off at the intersection of I-95 and Highway 24 which would take me to Clinton.

I was less than thirty miles from my house, but I knew from the past that thirty miles might take all day. I don't have a good explanation for why things happen this way, but it has proved difficult to hitch-hike between Fayetteville and Clinton. This proved to be another one of those times.

The intersection of I-95 and State 24 got built as some sort of experiment the government did back when it was brought into existence. Route 24 had been four-laned for the last 10 miles in and out of Fayetteville because of the commuter traffic, and the Interstate getting built was celebrated as an excuse to try this experiment. There are lots of 'conveniences' at this intersection. The entrance and exit ramps are very long and they connect to a separate service road which makes it easy to build up speed before you actually enter the traffic of either highway. There was a lot of land used for this convenience, and there are no exits for a long way from the intersection. I've heard it said that if you have car problems it's the worst place to have them because it's so far to where you have to walk to get any help.

So when the coach let me out, I had a long walk ahead of me. Still I was really on the last lap when I got on 24, because my house was only a short distance off this very road. The few cars that past were going the speed limit, and my walk was a little complicated by the fact that the state had decided to repave the road in my absence. There were still some construction equipment around, and the new pavement was still sticky with newness.

I trudged along the road toward Clinton. I could hear the cars approaching me from behind me, so when I did hear a car I turned around and stuck out my thumb. I walked around three or four miles in this fashion, and when I finally did get a ride with this old man in a badly rusted, ancient pickup, he was only going a few miles down to the next road crossing. There was a stoplight there, and I got out hoping the stoplight would slow down the traffic enough that it would increase my chances of getting a ride.

The traffic did slow down, what there was of it, and some even had to stop when the light turned red. I was kind of embarrassed to be standing there on the side of the road looking and smelling like a direlect when some of the traffic was going to my hometown, and knew my natal family. I wasn't so embarrassed for myself, but for my family who had somehow gained a respectable reputation through the years. If a person from Clinton did pick me up I would have gladly accepted a ride, because it would mean that I would have a ride all the way home, and I would soon be clean as a whistle with fresh clothes on. It didn't happen though. It took me another hour or so to get a ride, and that ride only took me to the next little town of Stedman. Stedman is an even harder place to get a ride, because it isn't big enough for people to feel like they have to slow down to get through it, but since people do get speeding tickets there fairly often, they slow down in a token way, only to start speeding up just as soon as they get past the main crossroad. Another problem is that the shoulder of the road coming out of Stedman is very narrow, and not an easy place to pull over to stop.

The closer I got to clinton the more self-conscious I became. I could feel my family's disapproval of my wretched looking state even though I was twenty miles away. Another hour or so passed before I got another short ride to the next little town of Roseboro. Roseboro is only twelve miles away from Clinton, and the road I live down toward the airport is a coupla miles west of Clinton, so I was about ten miles from my house. Roseboro is also within Sampson County, of which Clinton is the county seat, and so more traffic was going to Clinton, and there was a higher possibility that the people there might recognize me as somebody they could gossip about seeing as a bum by the side of the road. I really, really wanted to get out of public view.

Sure enough, a guy who was a student of my father in high school came along and gave me a ride to Clinton. I guess in rememberance of his affection for my father he even went out of his way and took me directly to my house. I stopped him at the entrance to my driveway, and told him I wanted to walke the last hundred yards.

When he turned around and drove off, I took off my shoes and walked barefooted to my doorway, walked in the house tearing off my clothes, and jumped in the shower where I stayed until the hot water ran out. I was truly home.