June 2007 Archives

Brother Dan is A-OK.  The procedure took place late Wednesday.  I screwed up, went to the hospital at the wrong time, and didn’t see him Wednesday, and yesterday, Thursday, morning when I went in to visit him in the ICU, he was already up and around and getting ready to check out.  I took a walk with him and his attending nurse around the ICU—she was holding a monitor to check his blood pressure—and she said the procedure went just great.  So that’s a battle won though it’s still hard to tell how long the war might go on and if Dan’s recovery will be complete enough for him to keep his excellent job at Cetrix.  They will not make a decision on that till the fourth quarter of the year, October, November, December.

Maybe because I was too anxious on Wednesday to do much of anything else, I got Carol to come with me and we started in to trying to clean out our garage with its 13 years of collected junk.  True, we did some prior tossing, but not nearly enough.  We have books up the old wazoo.  We took three tubs of them to Planned Parenthood.  I have got books from college; for example, a copy of Vanity Fair for 1.25 from about 1966.  Damn.

I had trouble looking at them and sorting through them.  I tried to keep the books, some at least, that I wanted to read again, or hadn’t read completely the first time, or ones I had some sort of reading experience with the first time I read them.  I kept for example Jean Genet’s Thief’s Journal because that was the first book I read by an author that I knew was homosexual and who wrote about it.  I remember feeling sort of strange reading it, but after a while that feeling went away and I felt I was just reading about a guy with peculiar habits living in a world I would never fully understand.  And I kept another, a collection of essays, by Antoine Artaud, another French guy and the father of what they call the theatre of cruelty.  Quite a bit of the writing was done while he was in an insane asylum, and the book was given to me by a guy I knew in college who went insane himself.

I remember one line from that book.  He wrote, “Let the lost get lost!”  I think I know what he means.  Just leave the lost alone, and maybe they will find themselves.  They are the ones who will have to do it.  Trying to help the lost find themselves just mucks them up and doesn’t help at all.

And then I found stuff I had written.  Man, I have written a lot of words over the years.  Articles I tried to get published when I was still trying to get a job as a teacher of literature and from before that mounds and molding mounds of short stories.  Man, I wrote a lot of short stories, and I sent them out too, and got them rejected over and over, except for one that was published in the Kansas Quarterly.  I tried to read parts of a couple of the short stories, and I felt odd reading stuff I knew I had written, but I couldn’t remember having written at all.  I mean, I couldn’t remember a word of it.  The parts of the short stories I looked at were sort of funny in places, the plots weren’t too good, and overall they seem damn strange.

I didn’t throw any of that stuff out.  Who knows maybe someday I will read the stuff and try to get a feeling for who I was like 30 years ago. Or maybe I won’t.  But I couldn’t throw the stuff out.

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Above.  I came across his piece of paper going through the junk.  When I got it back in 1971 I expect I felt very relieved.  Now I just stare at it and wonder why I was “rejected, physically.” Seems sort of redudant to me.  Why not just “rejected.”

On my first trip back to the South in some 30 years, I set about locating Tingle Road.  I was surprised to learn there was a Tingle Road.  But Joan said there was one in Blount, Georgia.

We pulled off the interstate from Atlanta to Macon to see if we were headed in the right direction.  When I said we were looking for Blount, the kid behind the desk said, “What would you go there for?”  I said I had people there though I didn’t tell him they were all underground.

Blount is one of those places you wouldn’t know existed unless you had a map telling you it was there.  As far as I could tell it was just a crossroads with the Payan Baptist Church sitting there at the junction.  Church was just getting out, so I approach a fellow, and asked did he know where Tingle road was, and he said Mrs. So and So might know, her being the local historian.  Mrs. So and So was a really old, little lady and she said all I had to do was turn to the right at the first dirt road right past the church—that would be Gregory--drive on it a bit, till I crossed a little bridge and pretty soon after that on the left would be the entrance to Tingle road.

Sure enough we found Tingle Road and drove on it till we saw the chimneys marking the Tingle House of Archebald Daniel Tingle I believe that had burnt to the ground some time in the 1930’s.  The remains of seven chimneys suggest a pretty big establishment.  But we couldn’t see much beyond that because the undergrown was so thick, and I had heard there were plenty of ticks in there.

I wanted to drive clear to the north end of Tingle Road though Carol was getting a little freaked out what with us driving on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere and on private property too, though there didn’t seem to be a living soul anywhere about.  I insisted on driving a bit further, till we topped a knoll and saw that the road ahead was ankle to knee deep mud.  I decided to exercise a little prudence then.

I don’t if it was that trip or the next one but eventually we drove around and found the north end of Tingle Road near Mount Vernon Baptist Church located just across the county line in Butts.

Recently, checking out Goggle maps,  I learned to my disgruntlement, that Tingle Road is disappearing.  The road is still there but for some reason the people in the area have renamed the road especilly at the north end.  But maybe Google maps made a mistake because they call the north end of Tingle Road, Teagle Road.  Teagle is awful close to Tingle, don't you think.

Here's a link to a Google Map of the South End of Tingle Road.  The old Tingle place is located on what Google calls Tingle Road.

I thought to distract myself a little from my worry about Brother Dan's upcoming procedure (tomorrow) as well as channel my perpetual anxiety that I would recreate a website I had up a good while ago called: Tingle Territory.

This site consisted mostly of pictures of Tingle places I have visited in Georgia and SC in search of my roots. 

The last TT was a regular web page; you scrolled down the page to see the pics.  This time I am using some goggle freeware to create a webpage with thumbnails.  When you click on the thumbnail the pic gets bigger and some captions I have written should also appear.

This is sort of a test run.  This first page I call "Pappy Tingle's House."

Click here to see the test run. 

  To the best of my knowledge this house was built at the turn of 20th century.  Back in that day, there was no air conditioning; so you had to build a house that helped you to cope with the heat.  The high roof and ceilings had apparently some cooling properties.  One big corridor runs right from the front door to straight to the back door, so you could let cooling breezes, if there were any, go right through the house.  Along the corridor were two big rooms on one side and two big rooms on the other.  And back when the house was first constructed the kitchen was out back and not attached to the house.  But the kitchen is long gone.

I don't know if this type of house is called a shotgun shack or not. 

I visited the house first in 1963 when the family came back to SC for a visit.  I remember sitting there in the heat feeling I was in the middle of nowhere.  Back then there was a scupponan arbor along one side of the house.  I ate some.  They were good.  I think that is the one and only time I have eaten scuppons.

I visited the house again with Carol many years later in 1994.  We drove by, stopped, took some pictures.  Finally, I went to the front door and knocked.  Mrs. Webb came to the door.  I told her I was a Tingle.  She didn't quite follow and started telling me a Tingle lived right down the road.  When I made it a bit clearer who I was, she and Mr. Webb invited us in and they let us take a look around the place.

 They seemed very proud of their big freezer that ran along one wall of the corridor.  They opened it up and I admire the stuff in it though I couldn't have said what it was.

Mr. and Mrs. Webb are now both dead.  Mr. Webb, suffering from a prolonged illness, killed himself out in the backyard.  Mrs. Webb died some years later.  I don't know who owns the house now.

Pappy Tingle was the father of William Berner Senior, William Berner Senior was the father of WB junior, Neal, Edith, Addie, Carl, Mamie and Doublas.

So he was my great-great grandfather. 

I am recovering from our trip, though slowly.  My internal clock was stuck on SC time, so Friday morning and yesterday morning I woke at 430.  Way too early, though I got to see the sun rise.

Going to sleep I found myself thinking about Brother Dan and realized that I will be emotionally tense and anxious until he has his procedure this very Wednesday.  As I said, he is optimistic, and he should be.  But I think I have what Henry James had, an imagination of disaster.  I intend to be at the hospital when he has the procedure, but I don’t know the time of it yet.

Also, among this huge pile of mostly junk mail that I found awaiting me upon my return, was a thick batch of paperwork from the lawyers in charge of the Tingle Trust.   I was happy to see it because it meant the lawyers are finally getting off their collective asses and doing something, but reading over the documents the list of things I should do and things I  shouldn’t do as Trustee of the Trust was perplexing and a bit horrifying.  I mean I don’t want to make some mistake.  But as far as I can understand what I read, I think I—and the rest of the brothers involved in managing aspects of Joan’s finances—have done a good job and are on the right path.

Some of the paperwork has to do with the government.  They want their piece of the pie.  I will have to file income taxes for whatever income the trust receives, while the money is still in the trust, from the time of Joan’s death until the estate is distributed whenever that might be.  Legally, the trust is considered some sort of separate entity and was given its own tax identification number.

A lot of the other stuff has to do with trying to clarify or negotiate or minimize possible fighting, suits and counter-suits, among the heirs over what I as the trustee did with the trust while it was in my trust.  In other words, the law anticipates that my brothers and I will start suing each other and wanting to go to court over the terms of the trust or how it was administered. 

The law is much like the rules established in a bureaucracy.  Decent people have to concern themselves with the rules because the bureaucracy makes everybody pay for the deeds of the incompetent, the vicious, the vile, and the venal.  The law is aimed at regulating, in other words, the lowest possible common denominator of the human race—the operative assumption being we are all already or potentially mean creeps motivated wholly by our own self interest.

All this is tension and anxiety making too and I won’t rest entirely easy till its over and done with.

I have gone back to SC four times now since about 1994 and each time I am grateful for the welcome I receive from my relatives.  My first trip back was amazing.  I was exhausted the whole time but woke each morning with positive expectations.  Going back was important somehow deep down to see the place and the people I had known when I was a boy.  And when I did finally, after some driving around in Georgia, get to my see my relatives I was enveloped in a sense of acceptance and warmth.

Why should they have paid such kind attention?  After all I had been in no real contact with them for about 40 years. I didn’t really ask myself that then.  But now I would answer by saying, well, we were and are family.  I was WB’s son and that was enough for them to go out of their way the way they did.  And perhaps they were curious a bit about me as I was one of those children of the prodigal son, WB, who had gone off to California while they had all stayed at home, many still living within forty minutes of each other by car in upper Carolina and now a bit in North Carolina.

When WB left in 1955 he lost immediate contact with all that family, and so did I.  We were in California very much the “nuclear” family, mom, dad, kids and dog, with no extended family anywhere about.  Back there though there’s lots of extended family, living in what politicians might call family values territory.  And family is valued, though I don’t think the family thinks about it that way.  Family is just there.

I don’t know how frequently the many members of the family get together or actually see each other.  But I do think they are always aware of each other and have a pretty good general idea of what might be happening in one portion or another of the family, who is having a baby, or who is getting married, or who has come down with something, and who has moved, and who got a new car.  And while it would not do at all to pretend things are all hunky-dory between individuals in the family or that they all like each other or something like that, I do think in times of trouble the individuals would try their best to overcome their personal feelings and help out if they at all could.

As I was told frequently while growing up, blood is thicker than water.  In a growing and changing world, where it becomes increasingly hard to be recognized by anybody, family recognizes family.  And being recognized is tremendously important, and additionally in places like SC where the government provides very little for the people; people must provide for themselves and family can take up the slack. Psychological recognition and, more in the past than today, economic need held family together.

I can see better the importance and the function of the extended family partly because I was not raised back there with all that extended family about.  At the same time, with all that family about, one could easily spend one’s every waking moment thinking about family, gathering news of family, doing for family, and visiting family, with the result as one relative suggested, it becomes easy to forget that there is anything beyond family, that there is a bigger or other sort of world out there of people who do not think, or feel, or believe as family thinks, feels, and believes.

In places like California.

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On the way back from the services for Joan, a number of us stopped to take a look inside Grandma's old house, built in the early thirties. 

South Carolinians, I conclude, take their eating damn seriously.  Their idea of lunch is my idea of dinner; and their idea of dinner is on a whole other plane.  We went with a cousin to a K and W’s near Simpsonville, SC, for lunch; this is a chain of cafeterias located in West Virginia, Virginia, North and South Carolina.  For about 3.50 I got a heaping plate of white rice covered with country steak and gravy.  For just over a buck I got a side of black eyed peas; I had something else too…maybe a little salad.

Carol and I ate with another cousin, at the original Stax in Greenville, home of the famous deuces wild breakfast, two apparently of everything.  I had a club sandwich that covered one half of a large platter and on the other half was a heaping mound of French fries.  Also in Fletcher NC, Carol and I had lunch with another cousin at a local place called the Acropolis where I ordered—over my cousin’s warnings—the lamb gyro platter with Greek salad. Damn, another huge amount of everything, and I ate it all for 7.95.

And sweet tea.  Wherever you go--sweet tea.  I grew up on sweet tea as a matter of fact, and the only place I have ever found it is back there in the South.  I order iced tea in California and they bring you this tea with ice in it and nothing else.  With sweet tea, you boil some water and dump three or four teabags in it and let it seep and boil till it is practically black, and then you put in a heaping cup of sugar and add water to stretch it out a bit, and put the whole thing in the refrigerator and let it cool. 

No wonder I am a caffeine head.  I started drinking sweet tea as a kid and drank it all through the time I lived with my parents.  I wasn’t allowed to drink coffee as a kid, since that was an adult drink and would stunt my growth.  But what the hell, pray tell, is the difference.  Maybe coffee cost more. I remember now I made sweet tea and our particular touch to sweet tea was adding to it, along with the sugar, a small container of frozen lemonade.  Clearly, this stuff was the original energy drink. 

I had a special lunch at Aunt Addies.  It was pretty hot, on a Sunday afternoon, as I recollect, and Aunt Addie wasn’t up to fixing lunch for everybody.  But earlier in the day, I had admired some of Uncle Ed’s tomatoes that were sitting on a sideboard ripening in the sun.  I picked one up said it smelled like a real tomato.  Uncle Ed said I should eat one before I left.  When it seemed like we were fixing to go, Uncle Ed said I should eat my tomato and did I want to make a tomato sandwich out of it.

Now I don’t remember having ever eaten a tomato sandwich, but I must have because as soon as he said, tomato sandwich I knew what to do.  Take two pieces of white bread, slather them both with mayonnaise; sprinkle pepper over the mayonnaise, slice the tomato as thin as possible, stack the pieces high so you use all the tomato (if it’s on the small side), salt the tomato.  And put it altogether.  Damn that was good.  Carol took a bite and wanted her own tomato sandwich.  So we ended up staying another hour as we all ate tomato sandwiches and drank sweet tea.

I am talking so much about food because I gained about six pounds in ten days in SC.

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That's Aunt Addie's house on Chipwood off Lisbon Road right near Mountville, SC. 

I wanted to find something on local history so Carol and I went to an independent bookstore in Greenville SC.  I couldn’t find much but located a picture sort of book on Laurens County.  Honestly, how this book got published I don’t know.  I certainly don’t recommend it; it’s called Images of America: Laurens County.  It had pictures of the damndest things. For example the entire graduating class of ought 7 with no names just a picture of unknown people, or for example, John Langston, described as a substantial citizen but with no indication whatsoever as to why he was or what he did to make him so.

I did find out that Laurens was possibly originally called Laurensville and that it was divided into five townships, variously:  Laurens, Dial, Waterloo, Sullivan, Scuffletown, Hunter, Cross Hills, Jacks and Youngs.  So cousin Jacks Tingle was named after a Laurens Township.  Ora is mentioned very briefly as part originally of the township called Scuffletown.  No explanation is given for this odd name, though one supposes a family named the Scuffles lived there.

Mountville is mentioned as a community that sort of sprang up on its own and as having probably the oldest church in the county.  I think Uncle Douglas may be buried there. Anyway, don’t buy that book.  If you see it, just pick it up and look at the pictures while you are standing there.  And then put it back where you found it.

Healthful eating has not caught on in SC;  indeed the restaurants of SC seem to be engaged in counter-programming against all those healthy trends coming out of places like California.  How else to explain a restaurant chain that flauntingly calls itself Fatz?  I ate at Fatz; the food was medium good and the portions enormous.  They start you out free of charge with some flavored rolls that have been deep fried.  Carol ate all of them.

All of the visiting Tingle brothers ate breakfast at Ryans in Laurens right across from the WalMart; this is a chain of different styles of restaurants.  The one we went to was all you could eat forever and ever.  They had a separate room for smokers.  I went in there to take a puff and found myself in a room with four other smokers—all workers at the restaurant and all black—I don’t know how long it’s been since I was in a room with four other smokers. 

But laws are being passed and challenged and passed again restricting smoking in public places and bars.  One of the workers sitting there said, “Are they trying to take all of our pleasures away from us.”  Carol and I went back to Ryans at seven or so for dinner, and the guy who had defended his right to smoke was still working.  He looked really tired and had the horrible job of just standing there behind the steak and ham and waiting for people to come up and tell him what they wanted.

 All you can eat for 8.99.  With sweet tea or soda pop extra. 

According to the Laurens picture book, that’s the oldest church in Laurnens County, located in Mountville near Duncan Creek.  I don’t know though if the structure pictured is still extant.

So I am back in SB, but Carol is not.  She stopped in Mobile, Alabama, to attend a conference of the National Dance Education Organization.  She will have a good time visiting with old colleagues she has come to know over the years.  She is staying she says in a terrific hotel, with a view overlooking a river.  I didn’t know a river ran through Mobile, thought now I do, but I don’t know the name of it.
 

I woke up at 430 AM CA time and try as I might couldn’t get back to sleep.  My interior clock is now set for SC time and thinks 430 is 630.  It will take a while for the interior clock to reset.  I remember this happened last year when we went back to bury WB; it took a week or so to reset but also started for some reason an unfortunate trend of my waking up at 530 AM that I could not shake for quite a while.  Of course, I have had a lot on my mind this last couple of years.

And now I have a bit more.  Brother Dan wrote to say that he will have the procedure for his stroke this coming Wednesday.  It’s called an Carotid Endarterectomy and involves cutting in, pulling out the carotid artery, opening it, cleaning it, putting it back together, and sticking it back in.  He will be in the hospital from Wednesday to Friday and for the month after he will have to limit what he does because he cannot put any strain on the sutures.  He is taking a very positive attitude towards the whole thing; the doc says there’s only a two percent chance or so that some really bad could happen.  He does hundreds of these procedures a year.

Still….I am anxiety prone and will be feeling that till the procedure is over.  He has been feeling anxiety too I think, and said he really wants to get it all over with.  He also sent along an email detailing his first few hours back in Ora.  He makes writing errors that he does not usually make, but over all his writing has improved immensely over a month ago…  He wrote the email, I think, partly as mental exercise to help work on the stroke.  I don’ think he would mind my passing it along as follows:

Ora was a trip.

We set out from the SB Airport at 4:30 AM and got the direct fight to Dallas, and then another direct fight to Columbia SC.

We made it there in 8 hours (5:36 PM). Got a car at the Avis place and set off on the road to Clinton where we were going to meet brother in law Nick and Carol, David and Tree, and nephew Brian. Steve and I set off down the road. And were met in Clinton by our brothers and nephew across the street from the Hardeys, the Wendys, and a gas station and a Waffle House.

It was green there. Green Green Green.

We made our way over to Hickories BBQ for and all you can eat a taste of the south. The table were rough pine and they but on a decent BBQ : oven hash, BBQ ribs, BBQ Chicken, Fried Chicken, Pulled Pork, Green Beans, Corn, White Gravy, Rice, Bread, Onion Rings, Chitins', Corn Bread, Cole Slaw and Patoate Salad and Chocolate Ice Cream for dessert.

It was a time there, used to recalled times spend with the Tingles.

From there we went to rest for a spell.

Later I wound up in Nick and Carols and then later I wound up in Dave and Tree's.

Both Nick and Dave had some thing to say.

Nick saw this as a path through to another room.

Dave saw it as a pass through Ora again after another year

I slept like the dead.

Woke up to my black pants and shirt on the table and wandering off in them to the Days Inn breakfast.

Every body else was up.

We all spent time in, or around are rooms. Nick was spent with Coffee and Cig's.

Dave rolled around a Cigar, and lit it once, kept it going for a time.

Around 10AM we all got down to Ora.

I rode out with Dave and Tree.

We passed farms.

We passed nothing at all but trees.

And then we came to the Ora Church.

We drove up and parked.

It was not hot at all, just a breeze blowing buy.

All at once I came to feel it was time to rest the body of Joan K. Tingle.

By her side was the Infant Baby of W.B. and J.K Tingle.

Ann.

Maybe I remember her as Ann, but there had to be a name there.

Back in the Church the Reverend went over how we could remember Joan.

All spoken in words of the Bible.

So be it.

And then we passed out of the Church and came to a grouping around her tomb.

Some more words of the Bible.

So it goes.

The Church Women put on a show for us.

Tasty Chicken, Mac and Cheese, Devil Eggs, another cheese pie, green beans, tuna salad on white bread, a peach set in jello, some biscuits and a cake made out of 6 slices of wrapped in thin chocolate, and oat meal cookies.

I got to hand it to the Church Women.

                                                The End

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If you go through LAX to SB, you ride the last leg on a small plane that flies at about 6000 feet.  We are lower than that in the pic above.  Up towards the top the point of land jutting furthest out into the Pacific is campus point where the University is.  Carol and I live just a mile or two beyond that. 

Last year about this time while in Ora, SC I spent a number of hours trying to locate the spot on a river or creek where I had nearly “drowned” when I was in second grade.  I thought I had located it on the Enoree; I even wrote a song about it with the word Enoree in it, but during this past year in a visit with Joan, I mentioned what I had done.  And she said, what did you do that for?  Thinking I guess that I made too much of having nearly died while she was supposed to be watching out for me. And then she said, anyway it was on Warrior Creek.

 So during our last day in the Ora area, I made Carol ride around with me while I tried to locate Warrior creek.  I found Warrior Creek Road and drove on it on and on through what appear some land of the Cherokee Nation (hence I guess, the name Warrior Creek) but had no luck at all locating any body of water near Warrior Creek Road; finally I came back out on the main road well above Ora, and driving back what do I drive across, but Warrior Creek.

So I got out of the car and took these pictures.  The Creek is low perhaps because of the extended drought, and this is not the spot where I nearly “drowned,” but this is Warrior Creek. And I must have nearly drowned on it somewhere nearby.  Indeed, I regret having not turned off onto a dirt road with the sign “Slippery Rock.”  I would bet that gave public access to the Creek.

Also I drove back to North Greenville Community College today and took these pictures should some doubting Thomas not believe there really is a Tingle Residence Hall.

 

I don’t know why—maybe it was money for gas, or time lost to make money, or a general inability to enjoy ourselves—but we did not when I was a child in Ora SC travel very much, if at all.  I don’t remember even having gone to Clinton which was maybe in those days 15 minutes away by car.  But I do remember us having driven a considerable ways to visit some relatives. I didn’t know where this place was back then, but I now know it was a place called Tigerville north of Greenville by 15 minutes maybe.  That would have been a lot of travel back then close to two hours, I bet, what with what the roads and cars were like back then from Ora to Tigerville.

Actually Tigerville is more a name than a place, or let’s say if you did not know the name you would in all likelihood not know you were in the place, since there isn’t anything to suggest that there is a Tigerville exactly.  But we went there because that’s where Uncle Neal lived with his wife and two sons, at that time back in the early 50’s.  Neal’s wife, Doris, was a school teacher and the sons were Rusty and Jacks (yes, Jacks).  They were roughly parallel in age to me and Brother Steve and I remember having enjoyed playing with them, though I have no idea what we did since we had none of what people might call toys.  I suppose we ran around and looked at things.

Carol and I went to Tigerville escorted by my cousin, Lucy, to find located, where once there had been nothing, the campus of North Greenville Community College, directly in front of Uncle Neal’s House.  I did not know fully understand the intensity of the relation of the Tingles to this college—a Baptist College—until driving onto the campus I read across the top of a building the name of my cousin, Jacks Tingle, and then further around back found the Tingle Residence Hall.

I don’t remember there having been any college there at all when I  was a child but there must have been something there or maybe it appeared after my time, but that is where Uncle Neal became an ordained Baptist Minister and later worked through the ups and downs of the college over the years as head of facilities, I think it was.  Later on, no doubt because of the location of the college and his father’s involvement with it, Jacks Tingle gave the college a lot of money.

Jacks has a lovely house located in a lovely piney woods right next to the college.  The house is situated in such a way as to produce what in California might be called a view.  Views are rare lower in the state, but around and north beyond Greenville one is heading into North Carolina and the Smokey Mountains. Jacks at one time was the owner of many, many Burger Kings and that’s where the money came from to help out the college so that now there is a Tingle Residence Hall.

Jacks has suffered several strokes so we did not drop in unannounced at his home, but earlier in the day, we did, down in Greenville, drive by Rusty’s nice brick house.  He was out front doing something to his car, so we stopped.  I can’t say had I seen Rusty on the streets that I would have recognized him; it has been 50 years more or less since I last saw him and people do change over 50 years. But as we talked I remembered his presence and understood why I had enjoyed playing with him and Jacks.  He is a good guy.

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A road in the rain outside Charleston. 

I don’t know how many people exactly attended Joan’s service, but there was a number, around 20 I suppose of mostly Tingles and their husbands and wives and children.  After the services back in the Fellowship Hall of the Church, I tried to mingle but felt like a billiard ball bouncing from this little bit of conversation to the next, struggling mightily the whole time to remember exactly to whom I was speaking, what with fatigue and the ravages of time having wreaked considerable havoc on my memory and other mental capacities. 

I remember much more vividly than last year speaking briefly with Uncle Douglas’s wife and his children, a son, whose name now I have forgotten completely, a daughter with her daughter and another child evidently on the way.  Douglas’s son works at Clemson College as one of the managers of the dairy farm there, with hundred and fifty cows, not to mention students. 

Uncle Douglas died very young, years back, in his mid fifties I think of lung cancer.  He took up the habit in the military and he smoked Chesterfields, unfiltered, which was the only way you could ever get that particularly awful brand.  Or was it unfiltered Camels?                                           

Uncle Carl was there though it was not sure he would be since he had been in the hospital in Greenville but the day before because his blood pressure had been going up and down erratically.  So he was checked in for observation, I guess.  He had been out driving somewhere again without his license when his condition was discovered.  I told him he should probably stop driving because it could get him in trouble.  I asked him how his eyes were and he said, bad and getting worse.  I can hardly see a thing.  The condition of his eyes though I could tell was not going to keep him from behind the wheel.  He has been driving since he was about 13 and he has no intention of stopping till he drops or becomes too weak to turn the wheel.

Uncle Carl is a small man and he has shrunk further every time I see him.  And every time I look at him I am startled because he looks so very much like WB but with a very bad overbite and smaller chin.

Aunt Edith, who lives up in Greenville, is very frail.  Aunt Adie struggles with a very bad lung conditions, and Carl, well, is Carl, though there is less of him each time.  They are all that is left of the original seven.  Aunt Mamie died a few years back of cancer, colon cancer, I believe it was and Uncle Neal died sometime in the 80’s of a massive heart attack while sitting alone in his truck.  

I felt bouncing around like a billiard ball an awful lot of loss.  I know the next time I visit, as I believe I will, in all likelihood there will be still fewer left and my connection to the family, although I continue to cultivate relations with cousins, will become thinner, and more anemic.  And so too will my connection to that particular piece of country side become thinner.  Every time I go back another landmark has vanished.  All that will remain soon of what I remember will be that little church, founded in 1792 and the graveyard beyond it with WB and Joan lying there now side by side.

We were fortunate on the day of Joan’s burial to have weather more balmy than blistering, not like June 17^th of this last year when we laid WB’s remains to rest.

The service started promptly at 11 and the Reverend preached for a good 30 minutes from diverse texts including the 23^rd Psalm and 1^st Corinthians among several others.  The subject was death and how to stand it, with his being a strong advocate of the Christian approach to this existential problem.  All had been laid down for Joan and her kin even before the beginning of time, he said.  This idea, however, frightened me even more than the idea of death, so I am not certain I benefited in the intended way from his homily.

After the preaching, we repaired to the graveyard for further preaching.

Joan’s ashes had been “vaulted,” the Reverend having attended to that for us, in a metal box itself coated over with what appeared to be a beige space age plastic completely unyielding to the touch.  This was a new policy set in place by the church to keep the ground from sinking over decaying boxes.  The vault and Joan’s ashes within it appear completely non-biodegradable.  That box, barring an atomic explosion and some form of anti-burial policy in the distant future, will remain in that graveyard for the next three billion years until the sun blows up and the end of time.

 It was that kind of day overall, one that made one think of the time before time and the time when the earth will be reduced to an astral charcoal briquette, if even that, when the sun gives up the ghost and goes nova.   These thoughts—and that of one’s personal morality—put the day on the hard side emotion-wise.  Most of my days are on the hard side emotion-wise, but this was quite a bit more than usual hard, if you can imagine.

Later Carol and I towards the end of the day on the way back from a visit to the Village Cup, Lauren’s one and only coffee house, drove again through the graveyard and ran into the Reverend, who was there doing graveyard chores.  At first I didn’t recognize him in his street clothes, and as we talked about the day, I realized that his shape in his street clothes was so considerably different than his shape in his suit and robes I had to conclude that the Reverend had to don for his preaching a corset or something of that kind that shifted the weight around his waist more upward.

 I do not judge.  But I was put in mind of Ecclesiastes and the vanity, all is vanity theme that runs through that book.  But of course I am not sure of Ecclesiastes is saying that vanity is a bad thing really; just perhaps that is how it is.  In which case that would make Reverend Roper, in the words of that notorious atheist, F. Nietzsche, “human, too human.”  And who is not, human, too human?.

I sit in something called California Chicken waiting for a salad a couple of blocks from the South Carolina state capital in Columbia, SC.  Carol is about five miles away talking with an administrator in the dance program at Columbia College, which has been in operation since 1852, though you couldn’t tell it from the buildings since it was burnt to the ground a couple of times over the years.  Now it’s all red brick buildings.

I got a somewhat less than terrible night’s sleep.  And we got out of the Charleston hotel about 10 and hit the road for a 2 hour drive to Columbia.  It was an OK drive except for a torrential downpour that became more and more torrential as we approach Columbia.  It got cool enough that I had to put on this light jacket I brought and a pair of Jeans in the male locker room at the all woman college.

The area is unimpressive, sort of uncontrolled California sprawl, strip malls aplenty, but with trees to make it all more green and to hide some of the ugliness of it.  Also the gas stations all have strange names and the gas is at least a buck cheaper a gallon than back in SB

I will eat my salad, if and when it ever gets here, and go back and pick up Carol about 230 ECT and we will start the final leg of this transition day down to Clinton, SC, where the brothers should be assembled by the time we get there.  Right now Dan and Steve are in the air and Teresa and Dave may already be down in Clinton or on their way.

Part 2: having arrived at the Day’s Inn in Clinton, David, Teresa, Brian, Dan, Steve, Carol and me (Nick) all went for pit smoked barbeque at Hickory Hills, 257 Torringon Road, Clinton SC.  Low plain buildings stand in an area surrounded by a high chain link fence.  Nobody seems to know why the fence is there; one person said by way of explanation, “It’s always been there.”  One parks wherever one wishes there being no blacktop or parking spots per se.

One enters and heads straight for the all one can eat bbq buffet.  One picks up a paper plate, the kind with the little ridges to make separate areas on the plate.  One then proceeds to cover the plate with such things as cole slaw, potato salad, hash, white rice, chicken, fried and barbequed, pulled pork to be put between two slices of white bread or just eaten on the side, spare ribs, onion rings and pork rinds.  Plus other unknown things.  One downs the whole assortment with sweet tea, and if one so desires one can polish off the whole affair with soft chocolate ice cream.  Oh, and of course one may go back to the buffet as many times as one likes.  Oh, and corn bread of course, and green beans.  The whole thing costs 8.99; one pays on the way out.

Then one lies down on the ground and never gets up again having gone to pork heaven.

I do not travel well.  Also perhaps the nature of this particular journey—Part 2 of Trailing the Ashes or the Burial of Joan—is stirring up crap low down in the unconscious.  In any case, I was an off again, on again, raving lunatic throughout the day.  The day is not over yet but thankfully at this point Carol and I are still married and talking to each other.  Probably a miracle considering my mood.

We went out driving in our ugly burgundy whatever car from some part of Asia, Korea, I think.  We asked the kid at the front desk where to drive.  He said don’t go to this one place—the Isle of Palms—I think because all you will see is BMW’s.  He recommended another place called Folly Point.  The name should have dissuaded us but we drove there anyway.  It’s an Island.  There is no end of Islands around Charleston. 

This was a place along the order of Pismo Beach in California.  Sort of low down, a bit tacky, really local stuff, I guess you might say.  With beach houses all strung out along the main drag, mostly retails.  I guess some families come there every summer and hang out to vacation a little near the water.

I turned the wrong way at the stop light and drove out towards where a light house was said to be located.  So we start walking down this paved road as the sky gets darker and darker and thunder starts rolling and lightening starts cracking.  We kept on going so we could see the light house.

It is pictured here with the storm gathering above it.

That was fun actually—the storm I mean.  You could drive without air conditioning, with the windows open though all sorts of grit blew in.  Then we got coffee at some place the name of which I forget and we asked the waitress person where to go next and she told us about a couple other islands about 30 minutes away.  So we drove there; but the one we went to was so exclusive you had to have a pass to drive around it.  I do not like the whole idea of gated communities.  So no way was I going in there, especially not in the mood I was in…the sight of all that wealth was sure to get me ranting and raving again.

But on the way there we drove through the James’ Island State Park and it was wonderful and beautifully green, and the rain started coming down at that point to add to the very southern atmosphere, what with highways covered over with trees and moss hanging down.

So aside from ranting and feeling like a lunatic off and on, the drive was a good thing to do today.  With the weather being the most interesting contributing factor.  Who would have thunk it.?

Dave and Teresa drove north on 17 and were just getting back in the Charleston area when I gave them a call upon our rearrival at the King Charles Inn where once again our so-called keys did not work.  Dave seemed in a good mood.  They had eaten at a nice place, and they were in the middle of a downpour as we briefly spoke.

Seems to be about 4 pm ECT here in Charleston.

 We go out, come back and once again our plastic keys don’t work. So Carol gets another set and then they both don’t work. 

 So finally, they are going to get somebody to look at the lock.  The automatic assumption is that the person renting the room is screwing up the lock.  So it has to screw up a dozen times before anyone will look into seeing if there is some problem other than the person renting the room.

 I sound a bit irritated.  I am.  I didn’t sleep terrifically well.  And while as I have previously noted, I am a very regular person constitutionally, travel does muck about with my regularity.  That’s also irritating.

 On the non irritating side, the weather is very mild for this part of the world at this time of year.  Overcast with an occasional shower.  Reminds me of when I was a kid back here; a storm would come up, out of nowhere, black as hell, deposit its load and move quickly on.  Not like Southern California where—when it does rain—it comes in low and sort of broods on top of you for a couple of days before doing its business and moving on   (hmmm..the metaphors I use suggest a bowel preoccupation).

 So Carol and I were out walking down by the water and while we sat there talking with a student from Charleston College who was selling Italian ices, rain comes up, wets the ground and moves on.  Carol wanted she-crab soup so we went to 82 Queen where the she-crab soup is for lunch, and struck up a conversation with a woman sitting across who is a flight attendant and was graduated from the University of Athens and with the waiter who is a few years out of college and spent two years as a Peace Corp Worker in Siberia of all places.  That’s Siberia Russia.

 He thinks there will be a revolution in Russia next year; the people want to go back to some form of socialism and the corruption is beginning to get way too blatant.

 The Italian Ice girl is from Boston, but likes Charleston ok.  She plans also to go abroad after graduating.

 Lots of people going abroad.  If the USA has a brain drain we have had it.  If I were a bright, well heeled young person today I would go abroad also.  The USA is not the wave of the future.

 We took David and Teresa to the airport to pick up their car.  They drove off to visit a plantation and we went back to the hotel to get our luggage that finally arrived.

Not too bad, I guess.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That's a bad pic of the she-crab soup place at 82 Queen. 

Well we made it to Charleston but without our luggage.

We got up at 415 to be at the airport by 515 for a flight to leave at 6 only to be greeted by a line of people and the announcement that our flight had been postponed till 7.  Actually it left at 730.  So we barely made it to our connecting flight in Dallas, but our luggage didn’t make it.

Overall, a terrible trip.  We are on the run way at Dallas getting ready to take off and we are called back to the terminal because they forgot to sign some paper work.  The world is in the control of incompetents.  So we go back and sign the paper work and take off again.  Finally arriving in Charleston at around 5 pm but without our luggage.

There we were greeted by Brother Dave and Sister-in-Law Teresa who had taken the red eye the night before.

We get those plastic keys to our room.  But they don’t work.  So I take them down and get some more.  But those don’t work either.  Finally, the young woman at the desk walks up another set of plastic keys and this time they work.

Brother Dave and Sister in Law Teresa have a really nice room at the corner of the building (The King Charles Inn on Meeting Street), big and roomy with a frig and a micro that Dave found on the web.  Ours is OK but not quite so well appointed.  I think it is almost eleven SC time, but my body still thinks it’s about 8.

Damn.

We had dinner at this place Carol likes because they have she-crab soup.  It’s a quaint sort of place, with waiters who talk way too much, and it makes me nervous when the so-called entrées top 20 bucks.  It’s a sociological thing.

Oh me, oh my!

Yesterday, I was just a goddamn lump of aching fatigue.  Partly, the day before I took a Claritin D to get rid of the allergy stuff.  It wiped out the allergy—pretty much—and me as well.  But most significantly, I forgot to take my morning meds and by mid-afternoon I began to think if this is what life is like when you get old then I really don’t want to do it.  Then I thought, did you forget to take your meds?

I thought about turning out a bumper sticker:  Did You Take Your Meds Today?  I figure maybe getting people to remember to take their meds would cut down on road rage.  They had to completely close down a road that was being worked on in LA because the motorists were starting to attack verbally and physically the guys working the on the roads.  I hate to say it but I have felt the urge myself.  Here I am sitting there stewing in the heat, late of course, irritated because I have forgotten to take my meds, and there is this imbecile standing there doing nothing but holding up a little red sign that is blocking my path.

While I was feeling like a lump of fatigue, I was reading through a batch—about 50, I guess—of research papers.  I was getting them emailed via emailed attachment.  I would get through a batch; then I would check my email, and there would be more of them waiting for me.  I did this over and over again.  Read, click, more to read.  And for some unknown reason, the students are all writing the full 12 pages I asked for.  One was even 15 pages.  Damn!  I kept thinking I will find a short one or a really screwed up one.  I can do those fast.

I am doing them fast, as fast as I can anyway, because I want the grading stuff pretty much taken care of before we head out to South Carolina to bury Joan’s remains.  Sure I will still have email contact wherever I go, but I don’t want the student papers on my mind, hanging over my head to be done, while I am trying to “get away” a little bit, though I am not sure going to a funeral counts as “getting away.”  Although, what’s that joke I tried to make up:  A Tingle’s idea of a vacation is to get pneumonia.

Actually, one of the best vacations I ever had was when I threw my back out for nine days.  I couldn't stand up straight. The doctor gave me a powerful muscle relaxant, and for nine days I just forgot the outside world, work, all that crap because I couldn’t move and the muscle relaxant produced a sort of high.  I just read stuff on the Battle of the Bulge, for example, and the making of the Panama Cannel.  I didn’t mind at all except getting up and going to the bathroom was pretty painful.

We have to get up before 5 am tomorrow to get a flight that will take us straight to Dallas where we get another flight that will take us straight to Charleston, SC.  So we should be there by about 430 ECT.

Knock on wood.

I must say I felt a little light hearted upon learning that the blood flow to my brain remains relatively unimpeded.  I had dreaded the occasion of course of the examination itself  and my light hearted-ness was somewhat dampened by what might be called post-anticipatory anxiety exhaustion.  Still, the potential for some light hearted-ness was there, but on top of the post-anticipatory anxiety exhaustion what happens but that I should have a massive allergy attack.

Actually, the attack started sometime last week.  The winds kicked up and Carol and I on the same days started sneezing like crazy.  I had felt I was fighting it off.  But Tuesday, after learning the blood is flowing correctly to my brain, the allergy attack hit me full force and now I am concerned what with the constant flow of PND (post nasal drip) that the attack will deepen into a horrible cold or possibly even bronchitis.

So while the blood is flowing to my brain, you could not have proved it by me yesterday so complete was my fatigue from the allergy attack.  I don’t know if I can describe how miserable a thing it is to go to bed with a stuffed up nose and runny head and have to wear on top of that whole mess a sleep apnea mask.  Trying to breath through the nose with a cold while wear a sleep apnea mask is like totally frustrating; you could sleep with your mouth open but that would defeat the whole idea of the mask which is to help you keep your mouth closed so your tongue doesn’t flop back in your mouth and cut off your air supply. 

So I tossed and turned and finally to alleviate my agony had to take some of that fearsome Nyquil.  I don’t know what the hell is in that stuff, but it usually knocks me out every time.  So Wednesday and yesterday, passed pretty much in a fog of fatigue, drugged up stupor and excessive snot.  I became very irritable.  I had wanted to rest up a little before tackling the 50 odd research papers about to come in over my email.  Instead, I will be reading through them with rheumy and drippy eyes.

Speaking of which—some of the research papers have come in and I must now turn to them….

Having endured an anxiety racked week or so, I finally got in yesterday to have my carotids checked out.  Heaven forefend, but I even got in exactly when I was scheduled.  I was escorted by a woman, perhaps a few years younger than myself, back to a room with the sonogram equipment.  I told her right off that I didn’t like medical stuff much and was pretty anxious, a fact confirmed by my blood pressure that was 150 over something or other (well over the 140 considered the cut off for the “normal” range).

I had to lie down of course but in my own clothes which I like and Sharon (I think that was her name) went to work rubbing this device here and there along the inside—by which I mean the front along the adam’s apple--of my neck and up to the hinge of the jaw bone.  Like totally minimally invasive.  No pain at all, not even your fabled “mild discomfort.”

I let her know right off my carotid artery history and about my smoking habit and how much I had tried to stop it, and how guilty I felt about it, and all the crap that has gone down this last year or so, and how I am depressed, and pretty much—I apologized—a human train wreck.  To which she said there are more people like you running around that you might expect, or something to that effect.  Oh, I said, I knew—there’s lots of human train wrecks running around these days.

Turns out she is Catholic and up to her neck in guilt herself and raised a daughter who appears to be in the running for sainthood what with all the time she is putting in with crazy children and methadone addicts to get in her 3000 hours for an MFCC.

Anyway, she wasn’t about to make me wait for the doctor’s report (the doctor’s report would have probably been her report in any case), so I now know that my carotids have been variously described as “great,” “very good,” and “good.”  I will average it out and say that overall my carotids appear to be very good.  Wide open really with some plaque but of the hard, calcified and not likely to break off variety.

When I got back to the condo, I took my blood pressure and it was back to its usual range 128 over something or other.

Sharon showed me a picture that looked a like this one—at the spot where the carotid splits and where plaque tends to collect.

Paul McCartney has another album coming out and to promote it I guess he agreed to do some interviews, a lengthy one in the New Yorker, and a shorter thing in the LA Times.  I usually don’t read such things because I don’t really care that much about the gossipy details of a celebrity’s life.  I mean for god’s sake who really needs to know that Paul’s ex-wife clains he refused to allow her to keep a chamber pot in the bedroom causing her to crawl to the bathroom at night because she has only one leg.  Who knows if this is true?  Except for the one leg part.  That’s probably true, and one has to wonder why the hell Paul married somebody with one leg.  Not that there’s anything wrong with marrying a person with one leg.  But for me it brings up all sorts of psychological issues….for me at least.

Paul just turned 64 I guess and so the thing that kept coming up was the song, “When I’m 64.”  The song starts:

When I get older losing my hair,
Many years from now.
Will you still be sending me a valentine
Birthday greetings bottle of wine.

I don’t know the year Paul wrote the song, but whenever he did “The many years from now” is upon us.  Upon me, anyway.  It’s odd to me to think he is only three years older than I.  I think John was a couple of years older than Paul.  Anyway, there they are flying around the globe, turning out record after record to unparalleled popular response, when I am in high school reading Dostoevsky.  Somehow back then I felt they were way older than I was, though I never did look into it back then.

 The New Yorker interview brings up the loss in Paul’s life, the loss of his mother when he was 14, I think, John, of course, George, and Linda, his wife of 29 years, I think.  That’s lots of loss.  And at the end of the New Yorker interview, he goes on about how he is a pretty positive guy, and how he knows all of those people who have died before him would want him to carry on with a positive attitude, etcetera, and etcetera.   I wonder did he think that was necessary or something for the sake of the fans, possibly.  Please.  Give me a break.  I would rather he had said I am depressed as shit and think about killing myself every day, but, what the hell, I carry on, or something like that.

 But Paul wasn’t the “deep” one, in any case.  John might have said something like that were he still around.  But he took a quick exit back in 1980 when some lunatic shot him in the head.

Happy days.

Poking around in a book, I find the author of a preface asking if prozac, and effexor, and paxil, and so on and so forth “work,” do we really need a book like this one, called the Cruelty of Depression by, moreover, one of those unnecessarily incomprehensible French  Lacains?  Well, that’s a rhetorical question of course; is any editor going to publish a foreward that says this book is useless.

But it’s a good question though I think some clarification necessary.  What does it mean to say Prozac works?  Works does not in my experience mean cure. It just “works, is all, to mute the symptoms possibly otherwise overwhelming.  Still can a book do even that?  The answer has to be no, unless of course one uses a very heavy book to render someone unconscious.  That is, at least, a temporary, if some drastic cure, for depression.

I continue to poke around:

This mother, by the way, is not distracted. She is absent for her child and for the man who would occupy a position of father for that child. She is present only to herself. How, then, is one to introduce the Other into the treatment?

When Lacan said that human desire is the desire of the other, he let it be understood that the first object of desire is founded upon the desire to be recognized by the Other. Let us assume then that this Other refuses to recognize us, that at the moment, say, when the child turns to its mother to seek out in her gaze what will support the outlines of its mirror image with recognition, she turns away her head or offers the child an empty gaze. What can conic of this but a meeting with the impossible? Desire will now be more or less suspended. At a crucial point—the founding point of recognition, i.e., the point that also permits identification—the place of the Other is mute.

The Other's muteness and blindness, its indifference to being addressed, cause a shattering in the subject that lands it this side of mourning. We can say of melancholics that something befell them, "fell their way," in the sense that their speech fell on deaf ears, was lost in limbo. Here the letter is no more lost than it is in suffering; it's questing after a receiver, so that that it finally can be written. One step further arid the very notion of a letter fades: "I must do something, but what?" Then the dreary weight of "I've nothing to do, I'm good for nothing," increasingly sets in and invades the psychic landscape. This considerable distress results in that anxiety-less suffering that is the lot of the melancholic.

 

As the observant viewer will note, in WB Stone: Part 1, the space below the birthdate of Joan K. is blank.  But for eighty dollars, Mr. Wilson of Wilson memorials drove over to the Ora, ARP graveyard and chiseled Joan's departure date.

It's odd to think that the blank space below Joan's name will only be blank in photographs of the gravestone before she died. Now, the blank is filled and will remained filled.

I find it odd to think about this and to look at those pictures.  But maybe there is something to this stuff, doing these things I mean.  In prior times, people had sometimes extended periods of mourning after the death of a relative.  And at times, I have wished that I had been wearning a black arm band to signify why I was (am still) more morose even than usual.