Digressions of a Dilettante

Digressions of a Dilettante
Vignettes of Inanity by Bud Hearn

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Intimations of Spring…an Odyssey


We’re driving on a sandy dirt road somewhere in Atkinson County, Georgia. No map, no GPS, no hurry.

The morning sun casts long shadows through the oaks. A sack of sausage and biscuits sits on the seat between us. Cups of steaming Starbucks are squeezed between our knees.

Without warning Wayne jams on the brakes of his old red pickup truck. It swerves and skids sideways in the soft sandy backroad. It stops just short of the ditch.

What the…?” I yell. Tiny drops of coffee slosh on my jeans.

Look,” he shouts. “There, between the oaks. See ‘em?”

Barely visible through the thick undergrowth a pair of black, accusatory eyes stares at us. We feel like grave robbers, violating the sanctity of a place occupied by ghosts.

“Let’s check it out,” Wayne says.

Wayne is Wayne Morgan, a noted photographer with a country boy’s eye for the unusual. Slightly off-center myself, we make a perfect pair. We slide out of the truck.

An eerie and windless silence of the timeless place greets us. It’s seems captured in suspended animation of a forgotten past. We walk cautiously up the overgrown driveway while shards of sunlight warm the forest floor. Steam rises, dissipates and slowly disappears.

A derelict structure emerges. Its boards are blanched from years of neglect and decomposition. Peering from it are two hollow and blackened holes, like empty eye sockets in a bleached skull. The vision adds surrealism to the marred relic.

Gray beards of Spanish moss descend like a mist from the gnarled limbs of the massive water oaks. The setting evokes a gothic sense of foreboding. We gaze in stunned silence at the scene. Nothing moves.

We’re here by chance. Life led the way. Country dirt roads always lead somewhere, even if to nowhere special. ‘Nowhere special’ is where the exceptional is found. Which is our mission…affirmations of Spring.

Atkinson County is basically nowhere. Little has happened here since Bill Atkinson was governor in 1894. It’s a perfect place to find genuine evidences of spring.

The artifact we see is a ruined vestige of the tenant farming era. A black, moldy velvet sofa sits on the rotting porch. Beer cans and broken glass surround it. The sofa seems to crawl with parasitic tenants, giving the illusion it’s alive. We walk inside by a sagging screen door hanging by its hinges.

Debris litters the floors. Splintered remnants of wooden furniture lie scattered throughout. Broken glass covers the discolored linoleum. The wall paper, long since faded and green with mildew, appears to melt from the walls. Nothing of value remains.

We sift through papers yellowed with age. One is a postcard with palm trees, postmarked Daytona Beach. It’s addressed to Waldo Winslow, Sandy Bottom, Georgia.

Terse and barely legible from water stains, it reads, “I’m not coming back, Waldo. I’m sick and tired of the cold and picking tobacco and cotton. You can take your 80 acres and…” Nothing more is legible. It’s signed, “Goodbye, your wife, Yolanda.”

“Can’t much blame her, you?” Wayne says. “Must have been a hard life here. Heck, those palm trees look inviting to me, too.”

“I guess,” I reply feeling a tinge of sorrow for old Waldo. “Wonder what happened to him?”

Through a shattered kitchen window we see a weathered marble tombstone. It’s half-covered by Carolina jasmine vines. He looks at me, “Waldo’s still here. See?”

We walk down the dark hallway and go outside. I pick up an old Prince Albert tobacco can. It’s closed tightly. I pry the top open, look at the contents.

“Wayne, here’s what we’re looking for, right inside this tobacco can,” I say.

In the sunlight we empty the can. Inside are dried daffodils, like the kind found pressed between pages of old books.

“What do you make of this?” Wayne asks. But he knows, even as I do.

Waldo had saved some daffodils from another time as a reminder that though winter slays, spring resurrects. They apparently nurtured his hope for better times, and that his fallow fields would soon burst with new life.

Guess Yolanda wasn’t convinced,” Wayne says, “They don’t compare to palm trees.”

Let’s give ‘em back to Waldo,” Wayne says. We scatter them on the sunken earth that held his dust beneath the headstone.

So long, Waldo,” Wayne says, uttering the shortest eulogy in history. He shoves the Prince Albert can into the back pocket of his jeans. We leave.

Wayne’s Nikon shudder clicks, capturing the moment, and we turn and walk back into today. “What did you see?” I ask.

Look,” he says. Around the base of that wretched skeleton of a house yellow blossoms of daffodils were bursting forth in the sunlight. “There’s evidence of Spring,” Wayne says.

Wayne grinds the gears and the truck lurches forward, speeding down the dirt road to somewhere. It’s a good day to be alive.


Bud Hearn
February 23, 2016


Friday, February 5, 2016

Message in the Wind


Confusion everywhere. So many questions, so few absolutes. Dylan tries to help, “The answer my friend is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in the wind.”

**********

It’s a typical early morning. I pace around silently, waiting impatiently for Mr. Coffee, our low-budget butler, to provide wake-up assistance. He seems unusually slow this morning, though he’s always predictable, more so than most of life.

Sooner or later the caffeine will jump-start things. While this marvelous chemical reaction activates brain cells, I doodle. A sample of this morning’s achievements yields no conclusive message.

Avoid attempts to comprehend mental flushes. There’s no Rosetta Stone to decipher the musings of sleep-deprived madmen. It taxes sanity and overloads cognitive settings.

Today’s flashes seem existentialistic, a convoluted collage of last night’s dreams, or the consequence of the yesterday’s chili. Such mish-mash gives credence to the theory that Eris, the goddess of Entropy, is pushing the boundaries of confusion.

Existentialism started with an espresso-induced epiphany of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Sorbonne sage, a fellow short in stature but long in sagacity. He obviously recognized that Risk is Fortune’s shadow. Testing the direction the wind’s blowing is advisable to identify pitfalls. Wind’s aberrant gene is prone to erratic and unpredictable behavior, more dangerous than a hot teenage romance.

Whether by Providential design or human manipulation, the iconoclastic winds of change are goads that prick the idol of bloated human ego. Many shudder to think that a golden “T” could soon appear on the White House or an avowed Socialist could collapse the gains of capitalism. Yet, time and chance still happen to all, like it or not.

How do we test the unseen? Simple. Lick your index finger, thrust it into the air. Unscientific? Yes, but reliable. It’s better than expensive polls, and besides, looking downcast accomplishes nothing.

Today’s newspapers lie scattered on our table. Take a random glance at any headline: seditious acts, investigations, manipulations, murder, mayhem, conspiracy and lately the absurd ‘white’ Oscars. Such diurnal rubbish is an ill wind that blows a chill in our hearts and is an insult to human intelligence.

Speedy computers can plot the breeze, but they can’t yet synthesize the news into anything cogent, except providing evidence that randomness remains more than a hair-brained theory. Are you still shocked to comprehend that you are not in control of anything?

Figuratively speaking, there are many forms of wind, much of which is self-generated. My mama expressed her distaste for some things with the idiom, “I’m fed up.” Wonder what she’d say about today’s politics?

Candidates utter preposterous promises behind podiums on garish stage-sets. Their lofty pontifications resemble a clanging cacophony of discordant wind chimes, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Hot breath turns cold when cash leaves the Party.

Wall Street’s windmill of windfall speculation is the proximate cause for the blow-hard breeze stirring from the land of the resurgent Left. The evil drum-beat of income inequity roars louder. Revolution is in the air.

Bernie’s boning up on mouth-to-mouth resuscitation techniques, attempting to blow life into the dried bones of Marx and roll his granite stone away. Exhumed Socialist failure will be a stinky experiment.

Speculation is a fact of life. High-stake horse bets with long odds coupled with a sufficient quantity of mint juleps will eradicate ennui and explode euphoria. We bet on the future daily. Nothing like the high from slapping down cash on a black jack table. We know it’s a rigged, zero-sum wager of winner-take-all. Still, it’s highly intoxicating, if not addictive.

But now speculation is an expletive. The deck is stacked, they say. The cards are marked. The game is rigged. Computers run it. Significant taxing will slay the beast. The entitlement crowd is giddy with anticipation.

But face it, most things are rigged. Taxing speculation will only drive it underground, into back-street bazaars where black-market cash vacations offshore. But alas, there’s no stopping the march of jack boots towards redistribution, the unveiled euphemism for ‘confiscation.’

Face it, all life is speculation, a gamble with incredible odds. If it were a bet, you wouldn’t take it. Now there’s a philosophy you can chew on.

**********

The caffeine high finally hits and my doodles spring to life and speak:

“Go outside, lick your finger and look up. After all, that’s still where all the answers come from anyway.” Amen?


Bud Hearn
February 5, 2016