Mother's Day

Augusta, Georgia. 1983.

“Blue,” I say.

Mom smiles and nods. The index card is colored with blue crayon on one side. She turns the card over and shows me the word “blue,” written in ink in all lower case letters. Then she sets the card down in a stack and picks up another card.

“Green,” I say…

In the nursery of the church where Dad is a preacher, we continue this exercise of learning colors. It is at this time that blue becomes my favorite color.

***

Wake Forest, North Carolina. 1983.

At Grandma Carter’s house, the exercises have become more complicated. Rather than going to kindergarten, Mom is teaching me to read at home. I will begin school in first grade in the coming months.

She holds up a large card with a series of words that form a sentence. Each word is marked with pronunciation indications for me.

“No, it is the a sound,” Mom says. “Short a, not long a. A. Say that.”

My TV time is limited while I work with Mom during the day on these sorts of activities. I can only watch for an hour.

After we finish the day’s schooling, my brother wants to use his allotment of TV time to watch a re-run broadcast of BJ and the Bear.

I lay down on the floor, with one of the green pillows from the couch over my face while he sits in front of the television.
I peek out from underneath the pillow and also watch the show. I think that Mom does not notice this.

When the show finishes, my brother obediently turns off the television, but I protest that it is my turn for an hour.

“No,” mom says. “You weren’t fooling me with the pillow. That counts as your time.”

“But I couldn’t see anything,” I argue.

It does no good.

After I become an adult, Mom tells me that during the time when she taught me at home, she would often get frustrated with herself and worry that she was not doing a good job with me.

But the memories that I have of her and that part of my life are much more pleasant than my memories of when I began first grade at Millbrook K-12 school. I would have preferred to stay at home with her to continue my education.

***

Lumberton, North Carolina. Mid 1980s.

Many evenings after mom has spent a day teaching school and then come home, cooked and served supper, she stands at the sink washing dishes. The sink has a window to the yard and fields outside, and Mom is content with that.

We do not have a dishwasher in the house out in the country where we live at Route 7, Box 568B.

I watch her sometimes, looking at the back of her head as she gazes out the window and scrubs dishes without looking down at them.

“As long as I have a window, that is enough. I don’t need a dishwasher or want one.”

In addition to her regular State job of teaching children with mental handicaps, she is now also going to teach blind children with mental handicaps. She spends many days over the summer in between school sessions teaching herself Braille.

I listen to the sound of the heavy metal Braille typing machine. Mom has to mash down the keys very hard to create the raised dots on the special paper. It is a loud machine, and she has to lug it around wherever she goes.

***

Lumberton, North Carolina. 1990s. Saturdays.

We live in town, now, in a middleclass community called Lakewood Estates.

After cooking us a breakfast of scrambled eggs, grits, bacon, and biscuit toast with butter and jelly, Mom sets about the task of cleaning the house.

The chemicals that Mom is using in the bathrooms are too strong for me. I step outside onto the front porch and get some air.

After Mom finishes making the showers and sinks and toilets spotless, she starts on cleaning the hardwood floors. She goes over the whole house with a broom, and then a mop sprayed with another cleaning chemical of some sort.

When that task is finished, she does everyone’s laundry. Dad, hers, my brother’s and mine.

In between these activities, she stops to make us sandwiches for lunch. Then in the early afternoon, she cooks dinner for us. After dinner, she cleans up the kitchen and washes the dishes.

We now have a dishwasher, thank goodness, but Mom spends about as much time pre-washing the dishes, pots and pans before putting them in the machine as she did before when she stood looking out the window over the sink at the old country house.

Sundays.

While I am still sleeping, Mom gets up at 5am to study her Sunday school lesson and work on the lunchtime meal.

After church, the family sits down to a feast of barbecued chicken, or fried chicken, or roast beef, or ham, or sometimes all of this. There are green beans, mashed potatoes or white rice with gravy, corn, sweet potatoes, black eyed peas, green peas, and biscuits.

When we have finished stuffing ourselves on the tremendous food with a certain taste that only my Mom knows how to make, I go to the living room with Dad and my brother, and we turn on the television to watch the NFL games or baseball games or college basketball games.

Mom continues to work in the kitchen, cleaning up everything and packaging the leftovers that will be dinner tonight.

Monday morning, it will up again early for her to deal with the kids at school, followed by cooking dinner and cleaning the dishes afterward in the evening.

Dad, my brother and I dominate the television set, watching whatever we want- usually sports if it is on.

Mom does not like watching television. When Mom has finished the dishes, she goes back to the bedroom and reads a novel until she falls asleep on top of the covers of the bed. Many times I walk to the back bedroom and see that she is asleep with an open book on her lap, across her stomach or even across her face. It is not even nine o’clock yet.

***

Present Day.

Mom has Parkinson’s disease, now. It is slowly increasing on her left side. Unless she concentrates on it, her left hand trembles. She notices other people noticing this, though of course it is not something she chooses to dwell on.

“I do the best I can with it, each day,” she says.

Mom has not had a sense of smell for years, and I have all ideas that it was destroyed from all those chemicals she used time after time in cleaning the bathrooms for our family.

I wonder as well if the Parkinson’s disease could come from that. No one knows what causes Parkinson’s, but all those years of working with difficult children in the State school system, all those years of also making meals for us, constantly cleaning the house and our clothes and the dishes, a never ending cycle of exhaustion- that did nothing to help her body and immune system fight off the beginnings of the disease.

“A man works from sun to sun, while a woman’s work is never done,” I have heard my Dad say often.

Mom deserves so much more credit than that- a pithy rhyming expression or a blog entry.

I will never be able to repay all that she has done for Dad, my brother and me, and the love that she has given us.

David and Goliath

Wilmington, North Carolina. Approximately 1981 or 1982.

One of the rooms in the church has a door with a small, square window so that adults can look inside.

Of course, it is much too high for me to see through. The door is heavy and metal, and the window glass looks to be pretty thick. The window is crisscrossed with pinstripe black lines that look like they have been etched on.

Mom explains to me and the other kids in the class that the window on that door is the head of Goliath.

The height of us children and the height of the window is a relative comparison to the height of David and the height of Goliath as described in the Bible, Mom says.

The goal of the class today is to kill Goliath the same way David did it- with a sling shot and some rocks.



There is a sling shot on the table in front of us, but it is not like one I have seen before. The sling shot that I am familiar with is wish bone shaped, with a leather pocked tied by elastic bands to each side. I would put the rock in the pocket, pull it back until the bands are taut, and then let it fly.

This sling shot, though, is simply a strap of leather with a pocket for the rock. It is similar to the one David would have used. We are supposed to whirl it around our heads and then launch the rock at the head of Goliath.

The “rocks” are actually balls of aluminum foil, which we make ourselves from sheets that Mom gives us. Just as David carefully selected the stones he would use, we make our own balls of foil.

No one comes close to hitting the window/ head of Goliath. I cannot even get the ball of aluminum foil to go in the general direction of the door. How the sling shot is supposed to work has befuddled me. Another frustration is that I only get one try before I have to pass the sling shot to the next kid in the class and wait at the end of the line for another turn.

I am fascinated by the window, though, the etching on it, and what might be seen on the other side. I keep bugging Mom to lift me up to the same height as Goliath, so that I can see what he sees.

After everyone is finished with the sling shot, I finally get Mom to hoist me so that I can look through the window. I want to touch the etching, but Mom does not want me to get fingerprints on the glass. All that is on the other side is the barren hallway wall.

Still, I enjoy the view from up there.



***

Live Oak, Florida. Present Day.

Life is pretty good right now. This morning, I am recovering from a night at the Dowling House, one of my favorite places to eat and hang out in town.

Yesterday, I ran a 5k race in Tallahassee and saw several of my classmates from law school. We had breakfast at Jim and Milt’s after the race, my first time ever going to that restaurant…

Last week, I wrote a bit of a dark entry about this feeling that I have that there is not much longer for me to live.

That feeling is still there, despite how much I am enjoying myself now.

But what I dread much, much more than my own death is the death of my parents.

I hope they live for many years to come, but it is an inevitable fact that most of our time together has passed, unless they live to be over 100 years old.

This is something that I am incapable of thinking about for long, and I only note it here to balance out my last blog entry.

I worry how my mind will react when one or both pass away. I expect it to snap in some fashion, just as my cousin admits that she has to fight back insanity when she thinks about how her dad/ my uncle died unexpectedly of a heart attack when I was in law school.

My mind has snapped before- in 1997, the darkest year of my life. I was a student at Western Carolina University. I recovered on my own after dropping out of school for a year, but I never looked at the world the same way again. It was a new world with new rules.

A friend with whom I went to Western Carolina University lost her mother a few years ago, and I gather that was an event that changed her.

My grandmother on my mom’s side died in 1995 right after I graduated from high school. Mom talked about that as the single most challenging moment in her life to keep her faith, to believe in a heaven and in a god that loves us as she looked at Grandma lying on the hospital bed after her heart and her breathing had stopped.

I am not sure if there is a useful point to writing this part of my blog entry. Maybe when the dreaded event actually comes to fruition, I can go back and read this and it will help me.

But I doubt it. I imagine my mind will snap again, though in a way probably less severe than in 1997. I will recover, I hope, but it will be a new world again, with new rules for me.

In the meantime, I am doing the best I can to enjoy my life and the time with my parents. I talk to them almost every day on the phone.

Jumping a River, Sliding on Records, and an Evening Nap

Wilmington, North Carolina. Approximately 1981-1983.

In Sunday school class, Mom and the other teacher lay out a light blue blanket on the floor. It represents a river, from some story in the Bible where the people of Israel or something had to cross.



All of us children in the class line up to take turns jumping over it. Some of us make it, some of us do not and land in the “water.”

I am one of the ones that cannot quite jump over the entire “river,” try as I might. Making it over the water is a very real thing in my head. Failure is scary and disappointing.

This game is so popular that the kids want to keep doing it the following Sunday as well. In the week in between, Mom has the blanket at home. I practice in the living room, doing my best to clear it.

“Your heels still land in the water,” Mom tells me.

Some of the older and larger kids in the class can jump over the blanket pretty easily. The next Sunday, Mom and the other teacher take children’s books and line the edge of the blanket, pretending this is also water to make the river wider and more challenging for these kids.

But when it is my turn again, there is only the light blue blanket.

I line up against the wall, giving myself as much room to run as possible. Staring at a spot beyond the far edge of the water, concentrating on it as the place I need to reach, I sprint as hard as I can and then leap…

“Did I make it?” I ask mom.

“You made it,” she says. “Your feet completely cleared the water.”

I pump my fist in the air.

The other Sunday school teacher, an overweight, elderly woman, immediately bends over and begins slapping down a line of books against the blanket for my next try.

Mom must see the disheartened look on my face at this. She tells the woman, “No. He’s done well enough.”

The lady gives Mom a bit of a surprised look, but then picks up the books.

So I jumped over the sky blue river. Victory.

***

Wake Forest, North Carolina. 1983.

We are living with Grandma Carter while Dad searches for a job. Mom is working as a substitute teacher at Millbrook K-12 school.
Of course, at my young age I do not comprehend the stress and strain that is on my family right now.

One day, I am listening to children’s stories and songs on the record player in Grandma’s living room with my younger brother.



I stand on the couch, and the records are laid out on the floor. I do not like sitting or standing in place for very long while I listen, so I take a running jump off the couch and accidentally land on one of the glossy cardboard record sleeves.

To my surprise and delight, I go sliding across the floor standing on the sleeve.

“Wow! Adam, did you see that?”

I quickly line up the sleeve to the spot where I landed and hop back on the couch.

Adam watches carefully as I do another running leap off the couch and again slide some distance.

Soon, he and I are both doing this, and we also quickly learn that we do not need to jump off the couch. Getting a running start on the floor is even better. We scoot across the carpet, riding the record sleeves like surf boards.

The ones that have the record still in them slide much better than the empty sleeves.

Neither my brother nor I are big enough to reach the record player and change it when one ends. Mom comes into the room.

“Hey Mom, watch what we can do!”

Adam and I both give her a demonstration.

“Stop that!” Mom instructs us. “You’ll tear up the records.”

Sure enough, we have put some significant creases in the cardboard and stomped on some of the faces pictured on them.
Fortunately, Adam and I are both light enough that we did not actually break any of the records. Maybe the sleeves are pretty strong.

Later, I ask mom for an old record sleeve that I could use just for sliding. She begrudgingly gives me an empty one. Perhaps I wear it out, or perhaps it definitely needs the record inside it to work, but I never get the one she gave me to slide very well.

***

Live Oak, Florida. Present Day.

This afternoon I went for a six mile run. It was my third six mile run in less than a week. I am trying to get in shape to keep up with some friends from law school who enjoy doing races in Tallahassee. 18+ miles is more than I have run in one week since I was on the high school cross country team in 1994 and 1995. I can do these six mile runs on flat ground in Live Oak in comfortably less than an hour, but I need to be able to do it over hills in Tallahassee in about 45 minutes if I am to keep sight of my friends in a race. That is a tall order, and I am already starting to notice little tweaks, aches and pains.

But I am motivated. These are people I would like to be around, that it would be healthy for me to be around. So I hope it works out, that they enjoy my company and want me to keep coming back for these runs.

The uptick in the distance I run causes carry-over fatigue when I get home from work. A couple of days this week, I collapsed in my recliner after walking in from the job and went to sleep almost immediately.

If a baseball game is on television, I will set that to a low volume and then drift off to sleep. If there is no baseball game on, then I play a movie.

One of my favorite movies to go to sleep to is Blade Runner. I saw it for the first time in college, and did not think much of the film then. As I have gotten older, though, I have come to enjoy the world it creates. Two of the scenes in the movie are among my all-time favorites. And though it is uneven in parts, particularly with Harrison Ford’s narration, overall it is one of the best science fiction movies ever made, a terrific futuristic film noir.



I had a vivid dream during my evening nap this week, while Blade Runner was quietly playing.

I dreamed that I was back in law school, that I was a permanent student, having seen many three year cycles come and go. I am no longer young, but actually 37 years old. I sit alone at a table at a Student Bar Association event. It is at a nightclub of some sort. The law school students are all crowded around the bar, ordering drinks with their backs to me, except for the newly elected SBA president, who stands in profile at the end of the bar.

I watch him and marvel at how young and full of life everyone is. Then there is a pain in my chest, and I have the distinct feeling that I am about to die.

The thought that goes through my mind, that I know will be my last thought, is that I did my best to enjoy this. I did my best to enjoy being young. A stern religious upbringing , severe acne well into my 20s, and what was referred to as “autistic tendencies” were obstacles that impeded me, especially with girls, but I did the best I could once I understood myself better.

There is no feeling or fear that I am about to be judged by someone or something on the good and the bad things that I have done or on the beliefs I hold. There is only my hope that I did the best I could to appreciate the life that was given to me.

I know that I cannot rewind time, that I cannot be young again. I am not a part of this group who stands around the bar. I say out loud, “I did the best I could with the circumstances as I understood them.” But no one is paying attention.

Then there is a feeling of reluctant acceptance that my time is over. A pop in my chest. I exhale and die.

I literally die in my dream…

And then I wake up from my nap. The pain in my chest is very real, and I struggle to sit up straight in my recliner and shake the cobwebs from my head.

Over the past few weeks and months, I have had the uneasy feeling that I am going to die very soon. Of course, I hope it is all just nonsense and that many years remain to me. I am guessing that the feeling partly comes because I have settled happily into Live Oak and this job. Never in my adult life have I stayed in one place or kept the same job for very long.

I have been in Live Oak less than a year as well, but this feels like a place where I could live and a job that I could do for the rest of my life if I am lucky. It feels like a sort of last stop. I think perhaps my body and brain do not know how to react to that. And I probably never will trust this to last long, based on my other experiences.

Anyway, one of my all-time favorite scenes from any movie was coming up in Blade Runner when I awoke…

Roy, a type of superhuman clone gone rogue, has arrived at the last minutes of his pre-programmed four year life span. He has developed his own emotions and questions about the meaning of it all. Roy decides to spare the life of Deckard, the man trying to terminate him for the danger he presents to humans, and these are Roy's last words:

Roy: I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the darkness at Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die.

On the written page, it does not seem so powerful. Performed by Rutger Hauer, though, in a setting from Ridley Scott, it takes on potency. Here is the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_saUN4j7Gw

Perhaps in the future, I should just try to sleep without a movie playing in the background.

The Coloring Contest

Wilmington, North Carolina. Approximately 1981-1983.

Mom and the other Sunday school teacher pass out the coloring sheets. Everyone in the class gets the same pattern- a large flower, like a daisy, with multiple petals.

While the other teacher, an old woman, sets the Crayola crayons in the center of the table for us all to use, Mom explains how the contest will work.

“We’re going to see who can give the flower the prettiest colors. There are only two rules about coloring. The center of the flower, the little circle holding all the petals in place, you have to color that yellow. The stem of the flower has to be green. Also, keep your eyes on your own paper. If you copy someone else’s idea, you won’t win the contest. When you are done coloring, turn your paper over, write your name on the back, and we will pick them up.”



The crayons are the basic eight colors: Black, brown, red, orange, yellow, blue, green, and purple. There are not enough crayons for everyone to use, so I wait for my turn to get yellow and green crayons to color the center and the stem before I begin on the rest of the flower.

A precocious little girl at the end of the table grabs some crayons and dives into the work, not waiting for yellow and green. She covers her paper with her left hand and arm and keeps her face lowered.

I am only between three and five years old myself, so I do not perceive her as precocious. I feel jealousy and uncertainty, looking at this girl at the end of the table from me.

Finally, I get a yellow crayon passed to me and color the disc at the center of the flower. Then I get the green crayon and color the stem. I decide to hold on to the green crayon, and color all of the petals green as well.

When I am finished, I see that the girl at the end of the table is still coloring. She takes longer than anyone else. When she at last finishes, Mom and the other teacher compare them to pick the winner.

It is the girl at the end of the table.

Mom holds up the picture for everyone to see. The girl has given each petal of the flower a different color.

Mom and the other teacher compliment her on her creativity, and she wears a smug look of satisfaction. An anxious sensation begins tingling in the back of my throat. I stand up and walk quickly over to Mom as she turns her back to us to put the boxes of crayons away.

My height is to just over her knee. I look up at her and protest that my flower was the prettiest.

“Green is opposite of yellow, Mom. I made it opposite, and then I matched it with the stem.”

Mom shakes her head that her decision is not going to change.

I feel betrayed.

It is one of my first lessons in how to handle defeat.

I make an adjustment, from this, however, and never lose a coloring contest again in my childhood. Every contest from then on, I use multiple colors. I can remember one contest I won where we had to color a picture of a boy in a shirt. I made the shirt a striped one, using several different crayons to create my own stripes.

Then the smug look of satisfaction was on my face when the teachers complimented me on my creativity.

***

Live Oak, Florida. Present Day.

Writing blog entries, writing a novel, writing cross examination questions and closing arguments, all of this writing has sparked a desire in me to try something else creative.

I am not a good artist. If I could draw, I would have created my own comic books from an early age. My handwriting is often illegible, even after I made the decision in high school to go to all caps to help people read it. Multiple times in my life, a pretty girl has told me that my handwriting looks like it belongs to a psychopath or a serial killer. I never know how to respond to that. That characterization came up even last year, when I was in sales in Miami and trying to draft a sign about the special deals on bar preparation courses.

Anyway, I need something simple to help me relax at night and go to sleep. Creative writing does not do the trick.

Coloring with crayons comes to mind. Like a craving for a certain food, I suddenly have the need to get a set of crayons and a coloring book.

It has probably been 25 years since I held a crayon in my hand. I hop in my car and head out to Wal-Mart at 10pm, for the sole purpose of buying crayons and a coloring book with perhaps some super heroes in it.

I walk up and down the toy aisles, but cannot find anything. At this time of night, there are very few employees around to ask. Eventually, I wind up in sporting goods where a lady is handling some shotgun ammunition to put under the glass case.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” I say. “I know this is sporting goods and you may not know the answer to my question, but I’m looking for crayons and coloring books.”

She can see and hear the enthusiasm in my question and seems amused and delighted to help me.

“Sure, we used to have a display of coloring books up at the front, but I think they took that down. They’re all over in the stationary section, though.”

“Ah,” I say. “I was looking in the toy department.”

She walks me over to them. My face must light up when I see the familiar Crayola boxes, because she smiles with happiness herself.

“Jackpot!” I exclaim. “Thank you very much for your help.”

“Sure, it’s no problem,” she answers as she walks away.

As a young child, I can only remember having the basic box of eight crayons. I was envious of the kids who had the bigger boxes with colors like pink, spring green, gray, and white.



Looking at the boxes, though, I do not even see the basic eight crayon box anymore. The smallest box is 24 crayons. Maybe they have quit selling the box of eight.

Anyway, I am an adult, now, with a job and money in my pocket. I am going to buy the biggest box of crayons they have, just like I sometimes buy as many powdered doughnuts as I want.

A pick up a plastic wrapped box of 120 crayons. Beneath the crayons are the coloring books. They are all things I am not interested in, though- “Hello Kitty” or stuff for three year olds.

Then I find a Batman coloring book. Beautiful.



The crayons and the coloring book only cost a little over 10 dollars.

When I get home and tear into the box, the smell of the paraffin wax and Crayola pigment brings back a flood of memories, including the one about the coloring contest in Wilmington. I hold the crayons in my hands and remember what it felt like to break one in half, to tear the paper roll back as it got used up, to peel off all the paper to see what the plain crayon looked like, to mash down hard to make the crayon look like paint on paper. My hands were much smaller back then than they are now.

25 years.

The box of 120 crayons also comes with a crayon sharpener- something else that I did not have as a kid.

I find a great picture in the book of Batman and the Joker on top a building in Gotham, and go to coloring. Though I am right handed, I decide to color with my left hand. I like the sensation in my fingertips and my brain better, using my left hand…

I talk to my parents almost every night on the phone- something I started doing to help fight anxiety shortly after I moved to Miami in 2012. Now, I color as I talk to them.

I hope to find coloring books of World War II airplanes and perhaps Florida birds and flowers with instructions on what colors to use. That would help me learn to recognize various birds and flowers.

The picture of Batman and the Joker is almost poster sized, and it takes me over a week to complete it during the evenings as I watch a baseball game or talk with my parents. When I am done, I fold it up and mail it to Mom and Dad in North Carolina.

Mom puts it on the refrigerator.

The Irrelevance of iPhone Shell Shock

Millbrook K-12 School, Raleigh, North Carolina. 1983.

It is my group's turn to do exercises. Today, these exercises will be on the new computers. It hurt my feelings a bit when, a few weeks ago, the teacher did not assign me to the first group, supposedly the smartest students in my first grade class. I have been placed in the group of second smartest students. She did not tell us how she was classifying the groups, of course, but I know. The first group is ahead of mine on the number of exercises completed. My group is ahead of all the others.

I sit down in front of one of the computers, looking at the big blue screen while the other students in my group take their places as well. It is the first time that I have ever seen a computer in person or touched a keyboard. The teacher's aide, a lady with dark red hair and thick glasses, sets up the program for me. It is a series of spelling exercises.

A cartoon, computer graphic image of a bare, pink skinned foot appears. Five dotted lines are below the picture- the spaces to type in letters- and an automated voice says, "Ankle. Spell ankle."

I type in the letters slowly in the five blank spaces, searching for them on the keyboard. A...N...K...L..E. Then I press the "enter" key.

"That is incorrect," the voice says. "Spell ankle."

Confused, I type in the word again. a...n...k...l...e.

"That is incorrect. Spell ankle."

A...n...k...l...e.

"That is incorrect. Spell ankle."

Maybe the computer is wrong, I think. So I try an incorrect spelling.

a...n...k...e...l.

"That is incorrect. Spell ankle."

I raise my hand in frustration.

The teacher's aide comes over, a small and sour frown on her face. I do not think she likes me that much, as I do not like school. It was much better when Mom taught me at home. I did not have to go to kindergarten because she taught me at home, and this is my first year of being in a classroom and being around other students.

"I am trying to spell ankle, but it keeps telling me that I am wrong," I say to her.

"Well, type it in again," she says.

She watches as I press the keys a...n...k...l...e. Then I press enter.

"That is incorrect. Spell ankle."

I look up at the teacher's aide. Now she looks confused, and I feel vindicated.

She leans over and tries to type the word in herself.

"That is incorrect. Spell ankle."

"Go have a seat back at your desk, " she says. "I'll see if I can fix this."

I walk across the classroom back to my desk, and watch as she tries to get past the "ankle" screen to no avail. She calls over the regular teacher, Mrs. Hawkins, and the two of them try to figure out what is going on. Meanwhile, the students on the other computers type away, and I get an anxious feeling that I am being left behind.

The teacher's aide ends up turning off the computer, and I do not get to do any exercises that day...

Thus begins my rocky relationship with technology and computers.



***

Present day.

One of the reliefs of my new job in Live Oak is that I do not have an iPhone.

I work hard here, putting in much more than 40 hours per week. A difference between being a government lawyer and a lawyer at a private firm, though, is that when I leave the government office, the work stays there. My mind is free to think about other things if I choose. That is rarely the case in private practice, where you always have to be ready to take a phone call and make money for the firm.

Last year, I held a job in sales. As part of our company issued gear, I was given an iPad and an iPhone. I used the iPad for one day, but decided that it was not as user-friendly as my lap top computer. I put it back in its box and never turned it on again.

The iPhone was necessary, though, given the nature of the job. Answering emails quickly was vital, and I answered more than I care to count on the iPhone, punching away at the small screen with my thumbs.

Emails came in at all hours of the day and night- from my boss, from students (customers). The pinging sound that the iPhone made when a new email came in slowly but surely began to grind on my nerves. Each time I heard that sound, it was like being hit with anxiety pellets.

In my job here in Live Oak, there is a prosecutor and some members of the court who have their iPhones set with that same sound when they receive an email. I hear their phones go off when I am sitting in their offices or perhaps the hearing room. Each time I hear it, I get a slight nauseating feeling.

World War I veterans would laugh at me for using the term "shell shock" in the title of this blog entry.

Computers have made my life better in many ways. I like the internet, Facebook, and Youtube. Writing this blog would obviously be impossible without computers.

But there are many things about computers and smartphones that make me feel stress and unhappiness, too. I do not like text messaging, tweets, iPads and iPhones.

What I have discovered though, is that no one cares what I do not like about computers and smart phones. I feel like I am the only person on the planet who prefers to stare out a window as opposed to messing with an app on an iPhone. If I do not participate in the newest wave of technology, then I run the risk of quickly becoming irrelevant in my job and even in social circles.

So far, anyway, this job is very satisfying in that I still get to work with printed books and printed files. I hand write my notes on a legal pad. Westlaw and the internet provide important research functions, but I am lucky in that the vast majority of my time consists of face to face contact with people, working with paper and pen, and working within my own creativity with the facts of the case in front of a judge or jury.

It is a refuge from the pellets of anxiety being lobbed at me, a foxhole to protect against the strange and unpleasant electronic sounds of an incoming shell...I mean incoming email.

My Favorite Doughnut

Late 1970s/ Early 1980s. Wilmington, North Carolina.



One of my earliest memories is riding in the back seat of my parents' car, a tan late 70s model Ford Fairmont.

My seat was always behind mom, or the right side passenger. My younger brother, Adam, sat behind dad. We were small enough that both my brother and I liked to rock back and forth, bouncing against the rear seat. These were the days before back seats had shoulder strap seat belts. Truthfully, I do not even remember wearing a seat belt in the back seat until I was a few years older, though Mom and Dad may have buckled us up.

Adam and I could hit the back of the seat as hard as we wanted with no harm done to either us or the leather interior- we were both that small.

I also remember Dad driving us to a Krispy Creme Doughnut shop some evenings after Sunday night church services. A cream filled doughnut is my first memory of tasting something sweet. Cream filled doughnuts from Krispy Creme remain my favorite, though I try not to order them often, so that I can keep the taste special for me. When I bite into one or even just smell it, I can see in my mind the fluorescent lit green and white shop set against the dark sky of a Wilmington night, and I remember riding in that Ford car, rocking and bouncing against the back seat.

"Angeles," a Water Gun, and a Rainbow

This evening in Miami, I walked from my apartment to the grocery store across the street. My apartment is on the third floor, the top level. As I made my way down the stairs, I saw that I have some new neighbors on the ground level. A young man and woman with a newborn baby stood in their fenced in courtyard. The woman held a bottle to the baby's mouth, watching the man spread bags of reddish brown mulch on the ground. They looked up at me as I came down the stairs, and I nodded to them.

I decided not to try and start a conversation, or to tell them that their apartment is in a bad location. The man was spreading mulch most likely because there was no grass in their courtyard, only dirt. There is no grass because I have noticed that every time it rains, water funnels off the roof and pours into that yard in buckets. Any vegetation is drowned out.

I felt some sympathy for them, new parents in a new home, trying to make a go of it in this world. I imagine that it was probably much the same for my own parents when they were getting started with me in a small apartment on Christa Drive in Wilmington, NC.

My first and some of my best memories come from this time- the early 1980s.

One day, I remember playing in the front yard with mom. I heard talking coming from the apartment next to ours. The window was just low enough that I was able to see over the edge, and out of curiosity I walked over and looked in through the window at the people inside. The woman sitting in her living room saw me and said hello.

Mom corrected me, though, and told me it was not polite to look in through windows at other people in their homes.

The woman who lived next to us was named Angela. My favorite TV show at the time was CHiPs, a show about two motorcycle cops for the California Highway Patrol in Los Angeles. Here is a video clip of how it came on each week:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6hzt9RA_VQ



Watching the show come on again with the music, the way the cars and the film look, reminds me that my childhood is truly a different era, now.

Anyway, I had picked up on the name of the city as a boy watching the show, and I identified it with the name of our neighbor. When I saw her, I said, "Hey, Angeles" instead of Angela. I remember her with thick glasses and a blue bandana in her hair.

The first rainbow that I ever saw was in the back yard there in Wilmington, too. I remember looking at it really hard, trying to discern where one color stopped and another one began. As I recall, it was not quite a complete rainbow. I've seen a perfect rainbow only a couple of times in my whole life.



Perhaps I am mixing the two memories, but it seems that the same day that I saw my first rainbow, I was also introduced to my first water gun. It was a small plastic pistol that Dad filled for me. Another one of our neighbors, a man with a dark mustache, was playing with his child in a kiddy pool in the back yard. I ran up to him and squirted him in the chest with the water gun. Dad told me to stop, that what I was doing might be fun for me but that the man probably did not want to play.

The man said it was okay, though...

Now, back to the present, where I sit in my apartment in Miami, typing this blog entry. It is almost midnight.

Earlier this week, I received the news that Mom has been diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. The diagnosis explains some of the things that I observed last summer with her when we went on a family vacation out west. As I am learning, it remains to be seen how fast her symptoms will progress and how severe they will be. We are watching for how she responds to the medication she started this week.

Her condition has me thinking about a lot of things.

I value my early memories of my parents, and writing this blog serves an important function for me. My parents will not be around year after year. I finally began to grasp some of what that meant when I was a student in law school. The bad news from this week only confirms it.

Mom and Dad both have been pretty brave and cheerful about it, though, and there is hope that she can live with the disease for a long time without a major impact on her lifestyle. I am lucky that they have lived long enough for me to come to this new appreciation of them.

Port and Acka-Dacka-Ooh

I lived in Wilmington, North Carolina for the first five years of my life. From there, the family moved to Augusta, Georgia. We lived in Augusta for only six months before returning to North Carolina, this time Wake Forest- just north of Raleigh. Most people think of Wake Forest University when they hear that name, and the school was in fact founded in that town. However, in 1956 the school moved to the city of Winston-Salem, NC and the old Wake Forest campus became Southeastern Seminary.

When I was a child living in Wilmington, I can remember the first time that I became fascinated with a word.

The word was "Port." I had heard it on the TV, and the way the person said it sort of tickled my eardrums. I went running to mom in my excitement, who was in the kitchen of our apartment. I can't remember what I said to her, but it probably wasn't very coherent. I was trying to explain to her that I knew a word, but I don't think she understood.

In my head, the mental image that came to mind with the word "port" as the person on TV had said it was actually a microphone, the larger type of metal microphone, used at radio stations and which had holes in it. The tickling sensation that the sound of the word made in my ears was sort of synonymous with being able to touch the metal microphone and feel all the holes on it. I'm not sure why I made the association between "port" and a microphone. Perhaps the person on TV had said something like, "Plug the microphone into the port." But I really don't know.

This all might seem a little "out there." My memories from Wilmington are my first memories, though, when I was able to make even less sense of the world than I can now as an adult.

The more that I write about these early memories, the more that come back to me, which is what I wanted to happen when I started this blog.

The same tickling sensation in my ear drums returned when we lived in Wake Forest. Mom was a school teacher by trade, and she taught me at home for the first year or so. I never went to pre-school or kindergarten, but started my formal education in the first grade.

This was at Millbrook, a kindergarten through 12th grade school. Mom worked as a teacher's aide at the school, and it was a tough start to each day when she took me to my classroom and then had to leave me there. I remember one anxiety filled morning in particular when I was there in the classroom, waiting. Mom had to leave me there before anyone else had arrived. I sat there all alone on a bean bag with the lights turned off.

Anyway, mom always made me lunch, which I kept in my metal lunch box. She often included seedless grapes for me to snack on later in the afternoon.

One of my friends at Millbrook was an African-American boy. I can't remember his name, now, but I do recall that he spoke with a bit of a lisp.

At the end of each day, we would all be sitting at our desks, waiting for the intercom to call students to their buses. He rode the bus, but I waited for mom to come and get me.

The boy, who sat at his desk across from me while we waited, saw me eating my grapes. He said that we could play a game with them.

I was interested, so we began the game. It consisted of the boy mimicking the rhyme of "eeny, meeny, miny, moe," except he used words and phrases that I had never heard before. I can't remember them all, but one phrase he used a lot was "acka-dacka-ooh."

He would tap my desk and then his own, back and forth as he chanted the phrases. Whenever he stopped the phrase, that's how we would know who got a grape.

Of course, he ended up getting most of the grapes, but I did not mind. Listening to him speak those strange words with his lisp while he tapped our wooden desks with his fingers tickled my ear drums. It was comforting to me to listen to him, and I was disappointed when the intercom called his bus number and he ran out of the class.

There have been other times when I hear something that tickles my ear drums, but it is very rare.

I can give you a first hand example of one, though. I enjoyed watching the late painter, Bob Ross, on the Public Broadcasting System.

Here is a link to one of the episodes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPPOpWBMFx4

When he talks, that is often enough. But especially when Ross talks and at the same time knocks the knife against the palette, those are pleasing sounds.

Perhaps I am the only person who gets this. What tickles my ear drums may seem weird to everyone else, but this blog is about my experiences. I hope that reading about it is enjoyable for at least some people.

The General Lee

When I was a child in the early 1980s, one of my favorite TV shows was The Dukes of Hazzard.

In Wilmington, I can remember sitting on the carpet of the apartment, playing with a Hot Wheels car that had a Fire Bird painted on the hood. I mimicked the stunts that I saw on the show with my toy car.

As an adult, I now know that the Dukes of Hazzard was really not that great of a show. But I think back with fondness to it because of all the action and the colors of the show. I remember a promotional plastic cup that we got from either a gas station or a fast food restaurant that had pictures from the show on it. It was my favorite cup.

The Confederate flag is an offensive symbol to many people, much more taboo now than when I was a child. I venture to say that no major network today would pick up a show like the Dukes of Hazzard because of things like the prominence of the Confederate Flag.

As a child, I thought the design of the flag was fascinating, though. I can still remember the pretty blue bars with stars on the cup. As mom washed it again and again over the months, the dark blue became lighter, which I liked even better. It was probably the reason blue became my favorite color.

Luke Duke, one of the characters on the show, almost always wore a blue plaid shirt with blue jeans. Bo Duke, a yellow shirt with blue jeans. I was too young to appreciate the cut off blue jean shorts that Daisy Duke made iconic.

My favorite part of the show was the car that the Duke boys drove- "The General Lee." The General Lee was a modified orange 1969 Dodge Charger with the Confederate Naval Jack painted on the roof of the car.

It would be a few years later before I understood the significance of the car's name.

In 1982, my family moved from Wilmington, North Carolina to Augusta, Georgia.

We moved to Augusta when Dad became a pastor at a church there. The show was at the peak of its popularity. Here is a link to how the show came on each week:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBlNNlSgxxE

I remember one of the church members had a replica of the General Lee, which he drove back and forth to the services. It even had the horn which played the first line from the song, "Dixie." He gave us a ride one day for a few blocks around the church, which I thoroughly enjoyed...

Over 20 years later, in 2006, I moved to Las Vegas. The apartment complex where I resided was in a high crime area, a couple of blocks east of the Las Vegas strip.

"East of the strip is sh*t!", one of the city bus drivers told me. My car insurance more than doubled when I moved there from North Carolina. The insurance agent said that the zip code in Vegas where I had moved, 89109, was the number two zip code in the country for stolen cars.

All sorts of interesting but shady characters walked the streets around my apartment, and at all hours of the day and night. I had to always keep my blinds closed, so that they could not tell if I was home or not. Otherwise, there is no question that my apartment would have been robbed on a regular basis.

So, it surprised me one day when I came home from work from the auto dealership where I had found a job and saw The General Lee parked outside the leasing office.

I immediately walked up to the car and began inspecting it. A young guy about my age, who turned out to be the owner, came out of the leasing office and said hello to me.

I told him about watching the show as kid, and he completely understood. If he was telling me the truth, the car was not a replica. The General Lee I was looking at was actually one that had been used in the filming of the TV show. He told me he had a certificate of authenticity.

The guy said he had bought it just a few days before moving to Vegas, and he was here hunting for a place to live. I can't remember how much he said he paid for the car, but it was over $100,000.

The doors were welded shut, just like in the TV show, and you had to climb into the car through the window. I remember that the interior was a basic white leather. I asked him if the horn worked, and he demonstrated it for me. He said the car had been jumped for one of the episodes, and the certificate of authenticity identified the episode in which it appeared. The jump broke the axles. We both crawled underneath the car and he showed me the points where the axles had been welded back together.

In our conversation, I advised him that this was not a good place to have a car like that. Almost every morning, I would go outside and see a car that had been broken into overnight, or had damage done to it like slashed tires or busted mirrors.

He said the insurance company would not let him have it on the streets anywhere in Vegas for more than two days. They simply were not going to insure it if he planned to be driving it around town. He had just got into the city. He was going to drive it for the two days, and then put the car in a garage.

I'm not sure why the guy moved to Vegas, or why he was considering living east of the strip, as he had the money to spend over $100k on a car, but I never saw the car or him again while I lived there.

As a child of the 80s, The General Lee, along with K.I.T.T. from the show Knight Rider, is one of my two favorite cars of all time.

Fire Ants and Lost at Sea

When I was a small child, I had very little fear of animals and basically no fear of dogs.

I have fond memories of my childhood in the early 80s in Wilmington, NC, where I lived from my birth until I was five years old.

We stayed in a small apartment on Christa Drive.

One day in the front yard, I discovered some fire ant mounds. I remember that the ants were carrying tiny white balls, and I asked Mom what those were. "Those are eggs," she said. And she also told me to be careful, that fire ants can sting.

I had fun for a while, playing in the dirt of the mounds, being careful to not touch the ants. I would bury them in a little bit of dirt and watch how long it took for them to dig their way out.

Suddenly, I felt a burning sensation on my index finger. Somehow, an ant had managed to sting me.

I didn't cry, but I remember hopping up and down on one leg, saying, "Ow! Ow! Ow!"

"I told you," Mom said.

She took me inside to put some sort of medicine on my finger. One ant sting did not really hurt that badly. It had just surprised me.

Looking back, now, I enjoy this memory because of the time and place. It was early 1980s Wilmington. My mom was young and not working at that time. I really had no cares in the world, and I remember the fun of being outside and playing in the dirt and soft, almost pure white sand in our front yard. The dirt with the fire ant hills was directly in front of out apartment. The white sand was in a vacant lot to the left as you walked out our front door. The white sand would be cool to the touch at sunset.

About four or five years ago, around 2008, that time period began to seem like a different era for me. No longer was it the recent past.

I began this blog, as I've said before, because it bothers me that my earliest memories are beginning to fade. I thought that I would always have them, but that is not true. Once they are gone from my mind, they are gone completely except for what I record here. I find that others in my family don't have the same recollection that I do. It will be very much like the events never happened, which is disturbing to me...

We moved from Wilmington to Augusta, Georgia in 1982, when Dad decided to become a pastor.

At the church where Dad preached, I remember playing on the lawn. After I had finished playing, I got into the back seat of our car.

I suppose my Mom's sister's family was visiting us, as I remember her husband, my Uncle Duke, sitting beside me in the back seat.

As we were about to drive away, I noticed that my pants were covered with fire ants.

"Ants!" I said.

Uncle Duke ignored me.

"Ants!" I said again.

"Be cool," he replied.

Finally, he looked down at me and saw the problem.

The next thing I knew, he and Dad had both snatched off my pants and were shaking them fiercely and knocking the ants off outside the car on the grassy lawn of the church.

Luckily, I did not get stung once.

Over the years, my memories of Uncle Duke have also faded. He and Aunt Martha divorced not long after this story took place, and I have probably only seen him once in the past 20 or 25 years, that being at Grandma Carter's funeral in 1995.

I remember that I was hesitant to play with him when I was a child. He was pretty rough, and I might have actually gotten bruises from the way he tossed us kids around.

Otherwise, though, I have heard people say he was a good man...

The first trip to the beach that I can recall was in Wilmington with my Mom. My brother, Adam, may have been there, too, but I don't recall him. My memory is of just Mom and me.

Wilmington is a port city (as an aside, it played a large role in the Civil War), so it was easy for Mom to take me to the beach, if the car was available.

The ocean, stretching as far as my eyes could see, was fascinatingly scary.

Mom gave me a cup to play with in the sand. It was a blue plastic drinking cup almost exactly like what students use to play beer pong now.

I remember trying to scoop up the ocean in it as waves came in. I could not have been more than three or four years old.

One wave knocked the cup out of my hands, and to my shock, it disappeared in the water. I could not find it again.

I asked Mom where it went, and she told me that it had gone out into the ocean.

I looked to the horizon of the sea and thought that she meant that the cup was now way out there.

She said that the ocean would eventually wash the cup up on the shore again in a different place. We walked down the beach for a while, looking for the cup, but we never did find it.

I suppose that was my first experience with the power of the ocean. I've never been a big fan of the water or of going out on boats, though I enjoy the beach. Perhaps if I was a stronger swimmer things would be different, but the swimming lessons I took a few years later in Lumberton never stuck.

This again, though, is a good memory because it is one of the few remaining that I have of Mom and Wilmington from the early 1980s.

The Christmas Tree in the Lobby

Last year at this time I was living and working in Kissimmee, Florida, with the Public Defender's Office.

In the lobby of the Osceola County Courthouse stood a beautiful Christmas tree.

The specific courtroom where I worked every day was on the 4th floor. During the Christmas season, I made a point not to take the stairs so that I could enjoy the tree in the lobby while I waited for the elevator.

There was something about that tree that reminded me of the Christmas tree at my Uncle Ray and Aunt Margaret's house.

Aunt Margaret is my mom's twin sister. She married Uncle Ray and had one child, Beth, who is a little older than me.

As a young child, Aunt Margaret and Uncle Ray's house is where we went to celebrate Christmas on mom's side of the family. They lived in Zebulon, NC.

Just like Maple Hill on my dad's side, there was plenty of space to play at Uncle Ray's house. Sports, either watching it on television, or playing outside, is how we passed a lot of the time there after eating a huge lunch.

Uncle Ray had a basketball goal, but it was a little hard to bounce the basketball because we played on the grass lawn.

The yard was big enough for baseball games, too, which I enjoyed with my cousins and other aunts and uncles.

Uncle Ray was a huge fan of Duke University sports teams. Usually, Duke played a basketball game when we visited on Christmas, and he made sure to be watching that after we had lunch.

I will probably write about Uncle Ray a number of times in future blog entries.

I never knew Archie Carter, my grandfather on my mom's side- he died when mom was just 14. Grandma Carter passed away in 1995, just after I graduated from high school.

But I still had all of my aunts, uncles and cousins from the Carter side, and family gatherings were still quite special in that regard.

Uncle Ray died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack in February of 2009, though- during my first year of law school.

I regret not going to the funeral, now. I was in school in Florida when he died. I remember standing in the first floor lobby of the law school, listening to the voice mail from my brother telling me the news. At that time, I was obsessed about keeping my GPA as high as possible, as I thought my future and the future of my family really depended on it. If I had it to do over, though, sacrificing some GPA points would have been worth being with my family during that terrible, shocking time.

I am still not over the loss of Uncle Ray. It is probably a personality flaw that I can hold on to things like this, rather than setting them down and moving on. But the rage I feel toward god about what happened to my Uncle Ray and in turn the pain it caused Aunt Margaret and my cousin Beth is only numbed by my ever growing suspicion that there is no god, or at least not one that can be personified and that cares about us.

In my mind, aside from my grandparents, there are cardinal members on each side of my family who form the nucleus of who we were and are as a family. Uncle Ray was one of those cardinal members. He was also the first to die.

The Christmas tree in the lobby of the courthouse in Kissimmee reminded me of the tree at Uncle Ray's house at Christmas. The tree in the lobby reminded me of Uncle Ray.

I do not know if I will ever see Uncle Ray again. I have my doubts, but those doubts are too dark for me to dwell upon...and I also must try to hope. There is really almost no other choice but to hope.

I take joy in his memory and the memories of the Christmases past at his house, and of the beautiful tree with the glowing lights that added to the pleasure of being with family.

Nathan Marshburn