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“Parting Words from Moristotle” (07/31/2023)
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By Roger Owens
This is the bad part, with a very bright spot right in the middle of it. We’re in South Carolina, rolling down I-95 at a smart 63 miles per hour. That’s as fast as I can go without the transmission on my old Explorer shifting up and down, and it sucks gas bad enough without pushing it. Like I said, we’re not in a hurry. I reckon we’re getting about ten miles to the gallon, two hundred miles on a twenty-gallon tank. Just about right for breaks for old dogs, and old people as well.
By Roger Owens
So, when you buy a boat, or a camper, first you really check it out, figure out how things work, and then it’s time to try out your new toy. We called it a “shake-down cruise,” in keeping with the nautical theme. Cruises plural, rather. On three short trips we learned that the swaying of the trailer was a bit uncomfortable, between the wind and the big rigs blowing by the old farts doing 63 in the camper. We’re not in a hurry. I have driven many trailers, but none with this high of a profile. We call it being “under sail,” because, buddy, the wind and the truckers’ slipstreams are pushing you around like a sailboat whether you like it or not. Of all the crap we’ve packed, we sort out what we’ll really need and what we can ditch back at the house. Once home, I purchase a sway brace and install it on the trailer. It works. Lesson One learned.
By Roger Owens
When Mom passed and the dust had settled, with the usual bickering over her estate, we got some money and I decided to get us a camper. Cindy and I had always thought we would go back to a pontoon boat for our retirement, but it was clear we are no longer up to boating. Plus, we would be limited to the waterways nearby. But with a camper trailer, we would be going back even farther, to our days as master tent campers. We had it all, double inflatable mattresses so you’re just like in a bed, reading lights, side tables, fans, shower, our own toilet, and a separate room in the tent to put it in. I mean, we were pros. In the intervening years we rented motor homes several times, and the ease with which we could get into the wilderness and then just pack up and leave impressed us greatly. So, a camper it would be.
By Roger Owens
We decided to go to Belize in 2012; we just had to see the temples before the end of the world, you know. That whole Mayan calendar thing was a huge joke there, with tee-shirts showing cartoon Mayans saying things like “Down tools, everybody, we lost the contract,” to a crew of stonecutters, or one stonecutter to another, “People in 2012 are really gonna freak out over this!” Of course, the world didn’t come to an end, but we sure saw some incredible temples.
By Roger Owens
What are these things? I mean I know what they are, I’m not stupid! But what are they doing, damn it? What are they doing? What are they doing there, or there, or there? What right do they have to just lay around like that? What right? Laughingly, accusingly, disdainfully. Just laying there. Cluttering up the place, getting in the way, serving no useful purpose, but most of all irritating the living hell right out of me. Just a year or two ago, any tool or implement I possessed would scurry in a fright to its appointed station rather than have its master find it out of place. A place for everything, by God, and everything better be in it if everything knows what’s good for it.
The Faces of Jack
By Roger Owens
Mike and Bonnie have our cat, Jackie. Mike and Bonnie live over on the next street, and Jack has essentially moved to their house. It’s OK though, because he won’t stay home anymore anyway, and at one time we had their cat. Jackie Jack never really lived at any one place; he’s always been a vagabond.
Maybe I should go back and start at the beginning.
By Roger Owens
Tuesday, September 3, 2019. We see the reports that a storm is coming. We saw them as far back as last Wednesday. This is not unusual in Florida. It is so not unusual that it is hardly, no pun intended, a blip on our radar. It follows one of the most common tracks, coming off the West African coast somewhere northwest of the Bight of Benin, the name of which I, personally, have always found romantic, dangerous, adventurous; a name from novels of wooden ships, pirates, and slave traders. It crosses the Atlantic, glacially gathering strength like a boxer lifting weights, determined to bulk up for a fight far in the future. It creeps into the southwestern Caribbean, and our consciousness, like news reports of a string of grisly ax murders in a nearby town, disturbing but not personally threatening. Yet. It makes our stomachs tighten up a little, but we are not currently ready to allow it to affect our monotonous daily existences.
By Roger Owens
If one does an internet search for the Stephen Foster Memorial or the Stephen Foster “Culture Center State Park” in White Springs, Florida, a veritable cornucopia of interesting information is presented. Directions to the site from Jasper, where I spent summers as a child, are basically “Get on Highway 41 and drive southeast until you see White Springs.” One will be informed of the camping, the hiking, the bicycling, and the carillon bells playing Foster’s most popular songs all day long. There are demonstrations of quilting, blacksmithing, and the making of stained glass. In January, there is Stephen Foster Day, and in May there is the Florida Folk Festival. Of course, much of the most interesting information, as is true with many histories and Federal investigations, is what is not revealed.
By Roger Owens
His son. His son. He buried his son. We heard it. Not the actual, physical interment – the funeral. For hours we could hear the black women wailing, the preaching, the church music. It was across the little branch of the Layou River known as the D’Leau Manioc. The D’Leau Manioc runs right in front of the bungalow at Zen Gardens, where we were staying, in the tiny Caribbean island known as Dominica. Zen Gardens is in Bells. Bells is a tiny village in a tiny island. To call it a wide spot in the road is to denigrate the road. When something happens in Bells, you can hear it.
By Roger Owens
My uncle Guy’s gas station sat just east of my Aunt Sue’s house, by the turn onto what is now known as North East 38th Street. But I much prefer the moniker it had back in the 1960s: “Buzzard Bay Road.” The station was just west of where Buzzard Bay met County Route 6, the main east-west highway, or what passed for one at the time, into Jasper, Florida. If you took Route 6 past the station and the house, you would arrive in Jasper proper in a few minutes; if you went Buzzard Bay way, you would meet up with County Route 51 north of town. The station sat on the north side of Route 6 facing a bit southeast, and across the road was a corn field that, to the eye of a child at least, appeared to begin at the barbed wire fence and form an impenetrable wall that just kept on going. Out the back was another just like it, but it contained some trees in the distance, which seemed to give a bit of perspective, and to suggest that these fields did not, indeed, continue unto the ends of the Earth.
By Roger Owens
The summer I was ten, I learned that the two massive oak trees that bracketed the driveway to my Aunt Sue’s house had grown from the green oak gateposts in front of the old plantation house. The house, originally a white, two-story clapboard Colonial structure, sat on the north side of Route 6 about three miles east of the town of Jasper, Florida, and had recently been demolished and rebuilt as a one-story, red-brick Ranch.
By Roger Owens
If you head out of Jasper, Florida, going north on State Road 129, before long you will cross the Georgia state line, and pass through the small town of Statenville. As recently as 2010, Statenville boasted a population of just over one thousand souls. Once known as “Troublesome,” Georgia, Statenville is named for Captain James Watson Staten, a Confederate officer who is said to have opened the first store in the town, selling staples like rice, beans, sugar, flour, and coffee to the loggers and turpentiners who “cat-faced” the slash pines for the turpentine, something like how maples are tapped for the sweet sap used for syrup. Turpentining is about the hardest, most dangerous, and least profitable work a man can do; it was mainly done by poor blacks and white men on the run from the law, usually in concert with their production of bootleg liquor.
By Roger Owens
The summer I was ten, I was riding with my grandpa, Amon William Dedge, in his brand-new F-100 Ford pickup truck along County Road 6, headed from Uncle Guy’s Shell gas station west towards the town of Jasper, Florida. At that time Old Red – as the pickup came to be known – was not old, but still Ford eggshell white, not the dull red it would be for many years after, red being the cheapest color you could buy to paint a truck back then. Its wide expanse of hood the day of our drive reflected the unforgiving Southern sun into our eyes as it descended, in infinitesimal increments, toward the distant, cool dream of evening. On either side of the flat, straight, jet-black brush stroke of the newly paved highway, fields of corn, soybeans, and tobacco baked their way ever so languidly up into the steaming July air. The deafening screams of cicadas filled the cab of the truck with their incredible hissing, a high-pitched screeching so ubiquitous that it became a silence more profound than that found in any graveyard. Grandpa didn’t much care for small talk, and, little chatterbox that I was, I had learned that if I wanted to stay on his good side, I would curb my wandering tongue or get left behind on trips like this one. I liked having Grandpa to myself; as one of four brothers it was all too easy to get lost in the crowd. That day was the first time I noticed that I had the same knobby bumps on my wrists that he did. My brothers didn’t have them. I had no idea then that those protruding bones were the early telegraphs of a debilitating arthritis; I thought it was cool that my hands looked the same as his. They made me feel connected, whole, complete.
By Roger Owens
Jasper, Florida, is a little hole in the road near the confluence of Highways 41 and 129 in North Florida, in the shady area somewhere between Live Oak Florida and Statenville, Georgia. It is the county seat of Hamilton County, and today it owns the dubious distinction as the home of Hamilton County Correctional Institution, the site of recent gang riots. Hamilton Correctional has boosted the population of Jasper, as of the last census, to the astonishing number of four thousand, five hundred, and forty-six souls; I don’t know whether the inmate population is counted as real people or not. The growth is astonishing because, back in the 1960s, the population of this backwater was around six hundred. I know for a fact, however, that the black population in what might have been considered the “greater Jasper area” in today’s parlance was not counted back then; Jasper was a “sundown town.” Anyone driving in to town on County Road 6, from east or west, would see signs that stated, in plain block letters, “NIGGER. DON’T LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON YOU HERE.” The black population of the town of Jasper, Florida, was, precisely, zero.
By Roger Owens
I love the smell of jasmine. It’s blooming late this season. We have several types here at our Florida home. We have Star jasmine trees, Confederate jasmine, and not a few of the ubiquitous “night blooming” species that grace our yard, effortlessly shouldering the feathery weight of their melodious Latin appellation: cestrum nocturnum. Their myriad perfumes permeate our home, where we spend many hours each day and evening outside, under an overhang, enjoying the natural beauty of our life here. Sights, sounds, and, they say, particularly smells, can bring back memories very strongly.
The battle is over
By Roger Owens
For the greater part of a year, my wife, Cindy, and I have been dancing with the Devil as we battled the specter of her breast cancer. I include myself, because all caregivers to cancer patients should be included, for the perfect reason that it is our battle as well. No less than a war correspondent or an unarmed medical corpsman is subject to the same enemy fire as any soldier, are those of us who care for cancer victims we love vulnerable to the destruction of the afflicted. Arguably the greatest war correspondent of modern times was Ernest Taylor “Ernie” Pyle, and that great soul was killed at the very end of the war in the Pacific, at the battle of Ie Shima (eeyayshima), at a time when the area was believed to be safe. Pyle was speaking to a regimental commander when enemy machine-gun fire ended his storied life. We all take risks, and losing a friend in combat is as common as dirt.
By Roger Owens
Among those who attend to the political machinations of the day, I know of not one who does not believe our country is in a genuine crisis. We may debate upon the nature or the severity of it, but about its existence there is no doubt. The left sees what they consider literally decades of social progress threatened by people they regard as little less than barbarians at the gates. The traditionally quiescent right is aggrieved by what they consider the destruction of all they hold dear by usurpers, who, failing to advance their agenda at the ballot box, mangle beloved values via the courts.
The long march
By Roger Owens
Much is written about the vagaries of war, the battles, the heroism, but I have chosen today to focus on some of the more mundane realities of war. Mainly, the constant marching, the privation, the drudgery. Earnest Taylor Pyle was maybe the most widely-known war correspondent in the modern era, and a perusal of his columns, such as “Digging and Grousing,” reveals some of that odious, behind-the-scenes labor without which wars could not be fought. (I know; we can only wish it were so odious that wars were not fought, but there you have it.) “Digging out here in the soft desert sands was like paradise…the ditch went forward like a prairie fire…a plain old ditch can be dearer to you than any possession on Earth.” (E. Pyle, 1943)
Upon waking Wednesday
By Roger Owens
With our penchant for neo-syllogisms,
We feed the man behind the mask.
The One, Who could save us, if He only would.
The lighter side of cancer
By Roger Owens
Attention on deck. Our interim action report today will start with a subject near and dear to my heart: boobs. That’s right, titties. Tatas , tits, bazoomas, gaboonzas, breasts, bosoms. The top hamper, headlights, hooters. Jugs, melons, cans, knockers, yabbos, tetas grandes! I like ’em. Love them in fact. I like to look at them, see them move, touch them. Most guys do. Guys have code to talk about them when their wives are present: “Look at the nuts on that dog,” to a buddy, refers to a fine set going by at the mall when the wife might not appreciate a more direct comment. Even gay guys can appreciate a shapely rack. Some guys like them so much they want to get a pair for themselves, and, thanks to modern medicine, they can have them!
