Grits

 

We either like ‘em or not. No middle ground for discussion.

 * * *

Grits, a staple of the South. Stone ground corn, boiled, buttered, red-eye gravy and cheese. If served with biscuits the size of baseballs and country ham, it’s as close to nirvana as you can get.

 What? It turns your tummy, you say. Then relocate before you contaminate the culture.  

 Grits don’t agree with everybody’s taste. There is no middle ground to tastes. You like something or you don’t. If the taste of grits doesn’t suit you, then you were either born wrong or somewhere north of here. Maybe you preferred sucking your thumb, but grits were our Manna.  

 Personally, I detest the taste of liver. Like bear meat, it has the propensity to multiply itself. Chew it, it grows. It won’t go down. Pass it around. One bite of the disgusting meat will feed an entire army.      

 My mother would say, “Son, it will put iron in your blood.” I remember telling her I’d just as soon continue licking a rusty nail to get the same result. Pity mothers trying to raise adolescent boys. She finally threw in the towel and probably spent her liver budget on vodka. Who could blame her?

 Listen, there’s no middle ground to tastes. You have yours, I have mine. But not so cut and dried in the ‘middle grounds’ of life. Sooner or later, you’ll find yourself hung up in one, trying to get consensus or to escape the conflagration of conflict.

 It’s in the ‘middle ground’ where all the action takes place, mano a mano. It’s where left grapples with right, where truth fights fiction, where love examines its hidden motives, and where the wall of partition between religion and politics remains firmly fixed.

 The outer margins of things are trivial when looking for compromise. No threat to the middle ground. They’re disposable claptrap, easy to negotiate around, to compromise with, to dismiss. Give a little, take a little, ever moving towards the center. No big winners or losers, not a zero-sum game yet. The spirit of cordiality is still alive. But not for long.

 As the middle begins to collapse, it becomes a vice. Nerves become tightly twisted.  Inflexible positions take hold, heels dig in, push comes to shove, snarls replace smiles, meaningful words are exchanged, tempers rise. At this stage, the outer limits of cooperation have reached an impasse. From here on in its clubs, knives and guns.   

 Now take grits.  Maybe you don’t like ‘em. Maybe from a distance you can bear to see them boiling, maybe even endure the smell of them cooking. No trouble there. But when a steaming heap is set on your plate, well, there’s the rub, the pushback. You’ve gone your last mile.  

 Suppose you’re an invited dinner guest and grits end up on your plate. There they are, all buttery and steaming, staring back at you next to your favorite, fried quail. They mock you. The bile in your belly begins to boil. You know what’s about to happen. Now what?

 Your choices are limited. You’ve just reached your final negotiating position at the table of the invisible middle ground. No further. What to do?

 Like Houdini, you do the next best thing…confuse the issue. You surreptitiously stir the foul food briskly with your fork, spread it around, sacrifice a couple good stalks of asparagus by laying them atop the vile dish. Then you disguise and obfuscate it beneath crumbs of the biscuit for its final interment. Reputation saved.    

 But none of this is necessary if you’re a connoisseur of grits. You would crawl across the hot coals of any middle ground just to put a spoonful of them in your mouth. But try to convince someone who detests this delicacy to even taste them, why you’d have better luck convincing a frog to hop into a pot of boiling water just to see if it could survive the encounter. Drop the issue. Quick. No middle ground here to win.

 So much for the analogy of grits for strategies of escaping the mine fields of life’s middle grounds. Life situations are stickier and more consequential than dealing with grits. But when you find yourself entering the no-man’s-land of verbal conflict, remember: Confuse, Disguise and Obfuscate.

 * * *

Take it from the frog…when it comes to middle grounds, the best advice is to avoid the hot water altogether.

 

 Bud Hearn

February 19, 2021

Unity

 

“Now, I heard there was a secret chord, that David played, and it pleased the Lord…”

             Lyrics, Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen (Beautiful song. Your iPhone muse will play it for you.)

 * * *

Unity…makes me dizzy just thinking about such an illusionary and fleeting concept. The nation of red/blue is going berserk trying to assuage the raging passions of everyone’s disparate and tender opinions while keeping peace in the process.  It might be easier to unlock the molecular structure of the universe than to discover the mystery of unity.

It reminds me of the time I looked high and low for a special long-lost wrench that was last seen somewhere in the jumbled mess of a toolbox in the garage of hoarded junk. I know it’s here, but where?   

Unity was probably not a big topic in the ancient tribal world.  Doubtful if seminars were held on how to synthesize everybody’s personal opinions about how things ought to be run. Might made right back then.  Politics had not yet been invented. Gender equity was not an issue in question.

Look back several thousand years.  Imagine one of your relatives coming up with the bright idea of identity politics. He finds the tribal fathers gathered around the council fire, poking its embers with sharp sticks.

He squats down, promulgates his higher thoughts of unity. Pretty soon he finds himself being stoned as a sacrifice upon the rock pile of radical ideas. Times haven’t changed that much.   

The big galvanizing factors in the tribal world were more about food, safety and how to hang on to possessions they’d beaten some other tribe out of. No senate hearing was needed to make decisions. Step out of line and stoning was an acceptable deterrent. Rules were unwritten. Unity needed no definition. All for one, one for all. Or else.

But as the ages became civilized, things changed. And now here we are in a conundrum, seeking the yet unfound secret chord of unity.  With more folks riding in the wagon than folks pulling it, unity is a long way off. The more civilized we get, the more nearly insane we become. Read the news.

Oh, you gotta hand it to our ‘leaders’ for dredging up ways and means to achieve this amorphous concept. One man, one woman, one vote. That’s the best way, we hear. Really? How did that work out for unity back in November?

We’re stuck smack dab in the middle of a pandemic. That should account for something more than printing money. “We’re all in this together,” the news reports. Not really. Some get vaccinations, others don’t. No unity here.

 We’re trying to make everybody equal, no distinctions, color blind, fair shot at opportunity, money for nothing doled out without accountability, favoring those who are only asking for a ‘fair advantage.’ Smoke those concepts over and see if you can exhale a smoke ring of unity.

In spite of what you see and hear, there’s hope for us yet. It was discovered the other night, right in our kitchen. It proves that dogs are brighter than humans.  

Our hound, Mr.  Bogey is sleeping at my feet. I pull the harmonica out of my shirt pocket and begin to play. The tune is ‘Dixie.’ Its power to unify pretty much vanished with the end of minstrel shows and the Confederacy getting canceled out except among the die-hards of Lost Causes. 

He perks up, lifts his head and begins to howl. It’s a chilling howl, a howl like a wolf, a call of the wild. I keep playing, louder. His howling follows suit. Pretty soon the phone rings, neighbors call, concerned. I blow the last notes, “to live and die in Dixie.” He lies back down, resumes sleeping. Perfectly unified in the family pack.

My daughter asks Google why dogs howl like this. Google says it’s innate in their nature, inherited from their progenitors, the wolves. It explains why this call of the wild is heard still today on the empty plains of the West by wolves and coyotes. It’s a call to assemble the pack, the tribe, for some common purpose. It’s their musical call of unity. 

Wordsworth’s words come to mind: 

“Oh, Joy, that in our embers

Is something that doth live,

That nature yet remembers,

What was so fugitive.”

Maybe this is a reach too far in the pursuit of unity. But alas, our searching for the ‘secret chord’ remains, ever hopeful that the figurative line of division will one day disappear beneath the lofty ideal of unity. 

* * *

“Now, I heard there was a secret chord, that David played, and it pleased the Lord…”

We’ll know we’ve found the right chord when the howling begins.

 

Bud Hearn

February 12, 2021