fEBRUARY IS OVER

In Vermont in the fifties, February was a mean month. Houses had acquired a permanent smell of snowsuits drying behind a kerosene heater in the 'warm room.' The snow in town was gray and the surface of it speckled like a pock-marked face. Small children looked into their mothers' eyes and saw reflected bck themselves upon a platter, their rosebud mouths plugged with withered macintosh from the barrel in the cellar. Linda Kenyon's mother was seen at the post office with one black eye, and her arm in a cast. It was still unremittingly cold.

In school the teacher read a sonnet:
"When Winter Comes, can Spring be far behind?"
We laugh, and she moved on to long division.

Each evening my grandmother sent me down to the root cellar to forage for vegetables. By late February there were only a few carrots, limp as drunken bridegrooms. She would serve them boiled with a little brown sugar and they would still taste bad.

Today, modified by modern conveniences, there is still a pall that hangs over February. Perhaps it is the anniversary depression therapists speak of. People are glad it is the shortest month of the year.

For me, this February lingered on into the first few days of March. I got up this morning and cruised on to Charles Bukowski's homepage. He showed me intimations of mortality in a barbecued potato chip. Then Rufus, Livingston and I walked down to the creek. I waited for them, mentally composing haiku about homelss men and dogs shitting in the park. On the way home, tattered, rain-sodden azaleas flirted with me, like ancient southern belles, and I realized, "February is over."

This Very Earth the Lotus Paradise

It's a June day in Vermont.
Carole and I meet in the field
between our two houses
to fly kites
and pick wild strawberries.

The sun is warm.

Everywhere we look there are
daisies, asters, buttercups,
Indian paintbrush,
black-eyed susans.

Tiny blue grapes grow in the hedgerows.

The trees are vast, leafy castles
a thousand shades of green, yellow,
purple, orange.

Tall grasses are adorned with
grasshoppers, ladybugs, butterflies.

Birds dip and fly.

The ground, too, is alive with
rabbit-holes, mole-tunnels.

Our kites fly high as we lie
on our stomachs
eating wild strawberries,
listening to locusts sing,
the hum of breezes passing through
grass and trees.

Blue sky goes on forever.

Excerpts from the Prunewhip Gazette (1953)

RECIPE OF THE WEEK

Lime Jello Surprise

Ingredients:

One packet of lime jello (follow directions on box)
two tablespoons Miracle Whip
one cup Spam cubes
Several large leaves of lettuce
5 or 6 celery sticks (with leaves left on)
5 or 6 carrot sticks


Make a bowl of lime jello. When it is partially hardened, blend in two tablespoons of Miracle Whip and one cup of spam cubes. Let chill for several hours. Serve on a bed of lettuce. Top with celery (complete with leaves) and carrot sticks, inserted upright in the jello so as to create a 'forest effect.' Great for a children's birthday party!

LOCAL NEWS

Mr. and Mrs. Maynard Crouch returned to Prunewhip last Wednesday, after a ten-day tour of the Holy Land. They will present slides of their trip at 7 p.m. Saturday evening in the basement of the First Baptist Church. Maynard and Gladys also brought back a jar of water from the Sea of Gallilee, which will be on display. All are invited. Welcome back, Maynard and Gladys!

The WHY CHEAP ART? manifesto

The WHY CHEAP ART? manifesto

PEOPLE have been THINKING too long that

ART is a PRIVILEGE of the MUSEUMS & the

RICH. ART IS NOT BUSINESS !

it does not belong to banks & fancy investors

ART IS FOOD. You can’t EAT it BUT it FEEDS

you. ART has to be CHEAP & available to

EVERYBODY. It needs to be EVERYWHERE

Because it is the INSIDE of the

WORLD.

ART SOOTHES PAIN !

Art wakes up sleepers !

ART FIGHTS AGAINST WAR AND STUPIDITY !

ART SINGS HALLELUJAH !

Art is for kitchens !

ART IS LIKE GOOD BREAD !

Art is like green trees!

Art is like white clouds in blue sky !

ART IS CHEAP !

HURRAH !

-Bread and Puppet, Glover, Vermont, 1984

Moving on to Florida

A lot of old Vermonters end up living in Florida. This is connected to realizing, at some point, that it’s possible to be warm during the months extending from October through March - to be really warm - to lounge about the house in a t-shirt eating ice cream in February.

When I was a kid I totally accepted being cold six months out of every year because I didn’t realize there was any alternative. I grew up in a brick house built before the Civil War. It had no central heating. There were many such houses in Vermont in those days. Each house had a designated ‘warm room’ where you could go down a layer or two (we routinely wore coats, wool hats, mufflers and mittens as indoor apparel) and lounge about having a cup of cocoa and listening to the radio. Being in any other room of the house meant working nonstop - sweeping and scrubbing with the dogged fervor of a chain gang at rifle point. To stop working was to freeze.

Vermont kids were expected to be tough. We never had a snow day except once when snow reached the sills of second-story windows. If the school furnace broke down, we sat at our little desks, suited up, trying to operate a pencil while wearing mittens. You could see your breath in the air. The boys in the back row - the class thugs - would bring two fingers up to their mouths and breathe out, so it would look like they were smoking.

The moment a Vermonter finds out about being warm is kind of like the moment Adam and Eve shared the apple. The gates of paradise swing shut and you find yourself in Florida. There are worse fates.


Southern Poetry
is sold
from backs of pickup trucks
on country roads.
Hand-lettered signs for miles say
HOT BOILED POEMS
BOILED POEMS
JUST AHEAD


Big Time Florida Saturday Night

The Korean store on the corner
sells gold hoop earrings,
barbecue sauce, ice cream,
six-packs of cold beer
sweating silver rivers of promise.
Cain and Abel cruise Magnolia Street
tires squeal,
short red dresses,
high-heeled golden slippers
dance across moon-shadowed
neon pavement waving tickets saved
since the Garden of Eden.
Mother Eve’s Dance Hall opens.
Duenna Live Oak fastens moonbeams
to her shawl,
hangs shaggy veils of spanish moss
across her gnarled eyes
not to see the scandalous carrying on,
hands clasped to warm ripe bottoms,
nibbling cinnamon ear lobes.
She hears
car radios clawing gardenia-scented air
with saxophones,
Big time Florida Saturday night.


Pleasant Street Neighborhood

Hot purple music,
Cajun-style despair,
Jesus ecstasies...
Bubba & Laverne’s Grocerette
boarded up...
shambling crackhouse...
Old woman growing petunias
in a washtub next door
wears a headrag,
praises Him
her hidden treasure,
her crown of glory...
The peanut man on his three-wheel bike,
head misshapen like a sideways goober,
Big Smile,
collecting cans
in a rusty basket...
Crack addicts wandering dazed circles
before the God by Faith Mission,
worn out from a night of
hustling money,
hustling rocks,
can’t sleep...
Smell of ribs from Mom’s Kitchen...
Men in three-piece suits whispering
in front of Dorsey’s Funeral Parlor,
close-in,
here where the dead roam with the homeboys
through spanish moss and live oak streets
while an old man boils shrimp in a barrel
under the sweet Southern sun.

Discovering the "L Word" in 1963

It was September 1963, and I was a freshman in college. One afternoon there was a tapping on my dorm room door. I opened it and was surprised to see one of the little blonde cheerleader sorority pledges who ordinarily did not give me a second glance, standing there with a look of grim determination on her face. I invited her in. She refused my offer to sit down and launched into what was obviously a prepared proclamation.

"There is a lesbian living on this hall, and we feel that everyone has a right to know. We are going to the bathroom in pairs and carrying sharpened pencils."

"What's a lesbian?" I asked.

She haltingly explained. My inner reaction was a great big "WOH!" I thought I had read everything there was to know about sex, and now this! She left and I sat there thinking about it.
Finally I walked down the hall (no sharpened pencil), and knocked on her door. There was a whole group in there discussing the dire peril we were now facing.

"If a guy were living on the hall we wouldn't automatically assume he was going to attack us, would we?" I asked.

Everyone agreed. He would be another student - someone's brother, someone's boyfriend - and probably harmless.

"I don't know anything about lesbians. I didn't know there was any such thing until just now. Is attacking people part of being a lesbian?" I asked.

There was a silence. Finally, someone said, "I don't know."

Another silence. Then a brave piping voice said, "Well, let's find out."

We walked down the hall together - courage in numbers - and knocked on Marilyn's door.

"It's not locked, come on in." Marilyn was a big farm girl from the Oklahoma panhandle. Her bed was piled high with pink and purple pillows and she was reclining amongst them looking like
a butch version of Elizabeth Taylor in "Cleopatra." We formed a line at the far end of the room.

After an awkward silence Marilyn seemed to be enjoying, one of us quavered, "Is it true you are a l...l...l..."

Finally tired of the preliminaries, Marilyn said, "Yes, I'm a lesbian."

Long silence. Broken by another tiny quavering voice, "Does this mean...you are attracted.....to us....?"

Marilyn laughed, and she laughed, and she laughed - big rolling Ha HA HAs that must have vibrated through the entire building. When she could catch her breath she said, "I have a girlfriend who's a total knockout. None of you little chicken legs would stand a chance."

Although this was not exactly a compliment, it somehow just didn't sound mean, the way she said it. Within moments we were all perched around her bed asking a zillion questions about what it meant to be a lesbian and about sex in general, a topic that Marilyn seemed to know much more about than any of us.

We talked for hours. Marilyn's room became a gathering place on our floor. She taught us how to read Tarot cards and took us on a field trip to a gay bar. She showed us how to deliver a solid left hook to drunken, groping frat boys. The sex education she disseminated was accurate and highly practical.

I lost track of Marilyn after college, and I'm sorry for that. At points in your life you're fortunate enough to meet someone who opens vast new horizons. At the time I didn't realize how much courage she had, as a gay teenager in 1963. Thank you, Marilyn, wherever you are.

Millie Paddock's Baby

The Paddocks lived across the street from us in Prunewhip. They were low on the social register, and furthermore they were weird. Mrs. Paddock and her daughter Gladiola went to chiropractors, who were universally considered to be quacks. They had no grass on their front yard and Mrs. Paddock was an indifferent housekeeper. They didn’t know how to manage money and were always going to the Lady’s Aid Society at the First Baptist Church for a bailout. The ladies refused to give them money - you don’t give money to people who are going to run over to Bennington and spend it on a chiropractor. But they would buy them a bag of groceries here and there, because it was the Christian thing to do.
Worst of all, well - I wrote a poem about this:


Old Man Paddock - 1953

Old Man Paddock was a vegetarian and he wrote poetry.
Twice a year he’d get drunk and terrorize the neighborhood,
going from house to house roaring rhymed couplets about
God, Jesus, and beauties of nature.
We’d all lock our doors, pull down the curtains and
huddle inside waiting for it to be over.
It was the next best thing to funerals,
where everyone cried and there was lots of
fried chicken and potato salad.

No-one was surprised when the Paddock’s youngest child, Millie, got pregnant at age 16. But here was the shame of it - every once in awhile a young lady of Prunewhip found herself with child out of wedlock. There was a procedure for this. Her parents would take her out of school, early on, because she had to go to Ohio and take care of her ailing grandmother. Then they would spirit her off to the Florence Crittendon Home of Redeeming Love in Burlington. She would stay there until the baby was born, give it up for adoption, and return to life in Prunewhip. These trips fooled no one, but they served to preserve the veil of propriety shrouding all activities that could not be done in the middle of the street in broad daylight. Millie Paddock, however, decided to spend her entire pregnancy at home and keep the baby. Furthermore, her slack-jawed, trifling parents supported her in this decision. They weren’t even ashamed. They sashayed around town going to the store and the post office and the June strawberry festival like they didn’t have a care in the world. This was so scandalous, people walked across the street if they saw Millie Paddock coming in the opposite direction.

At this point my Aunt Cynthia kicked in. She was a rebel, also, in her own way. She smoked cigarettes and never went to church. Nor did she make excuses for not going to church. She never claimed that she had a bad back and sitting in the hard wooden pews gave her blinding pain. She never said that she worshiped God as He is manifested in the grandeur of the natural world. She just stayed home smoking and sewing. She was the town seamstress. Her sewing skills were legendary. She could see a fancy dress hanging in the window of Drysdale’s Department Store in Bennington, go home, cut a pattern out of old newspapers, and make an exact replica of the dress. She could make three-piece suits that fit like a glove, and wedding dresses fit for royalty.

Cynthia was also the magic maker of doll clothes. She saved her scraps and turned them into incredible doll clothes complete with pockets, with little handkerchiefs sticking out of them, with a flower embroidered on the handkerchief. She could make felt hats and red rubber boots for dolls. All year she made these doll clothes and on Christmas eve she’d sneak around town leaving packets of them on little girls’ front doors. She hated thank yous.

Aunt Cynthia also hated gossip. If anyone tried to gossip in her presence she’d cut them off in mid-sentence, saying that none of us were any better than we should be. She did not like what was going on with Millie Paddock. A month or two into the situation she announced to one and all that she was making a layette for Millie Paddock’s baby. Then she went to work on it. I don’t think the Prince of Wales had a better layette than Millie’s baby. She lined a basket with satin and covered the edges with a lace ruffle embroidered with yellow rambler roses. She made a tiny mattress and pillow covered with fine cotton sheets and a pillow case edged with lace. She filled the layette with sacks and shirts and diapers and shawls and all manner of finery such as no one had ever seen before. As the months wore on, people took to stopping by Cynthia’s house just to see the latest addition to this fabulous layette.

When the layette was done she made another general announcement (you only had to announce something to one person in Prunewhip and everyone would know within an hour), as to the day and time when she would deliver this layette to the Paddock household. Sure enough, a small crowd gathered to watch her grand promenade up the Paddock’s front walk, across their creaky porch and through the front door, carrying the magnificent layette.

My Aunt Cynthia enjoyed a great deal of respect in Prunewhip, despite her peculiarities. You could not continue shunning someone Cynthia singled out for such a gift. Millie had a boy, whom she named Ernie. They took their places in the life of the town with no more disapproval than that reserved for any other member of the Paddock clan.