Tag: Alabama

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Covered Wagon, by Cecil Bethea

Dear Sirs,
You all should know that Mary’s Bar
actually did exist here in Denver, but years ago it was urban renewed into a
parking lot.  About five years past the
parking lot became the site of the building housing the offices of the two newspapers.  An actual takeover of the bar took place
during World War II, but I know none of the details.  The result is that my account is fiction in
all details except for the name of the establishment.
Having had nothing published, I have
been told to include something about my life. 
A biography would be slight, I’m from Alabama but have lived in Denver
for over fifty years.  My life was
certainly not exciting and no doubt of little interest to almost any one.
Then on August 25th of
last year during the Democratic Convention, everything changed.  While coming home after doing some research
on the Battle of Lepanto at the public library, I became enmeshed in a
demonstration by the anarchists that bloomed into a full-fledged conflict with
the police.  Because the eldest of the protestors
could not have been thirty, my white hair made me stand out like the Statue of
Liberty.  The police in their contorted
wisdom decided to take me into custody. During their manhandling of me, a
photographer for the Rocky Mountain NEWS took a splendid photograph of me being
wrestled by two 225 pound policemen.
After the publication of the photograph and an explanatory
article in the NEWS, fame came suddenly and fleetingly.  However, I do understand that my name is
embedded somewhere on the Internet.
Since then I have testified in seven
trials of the protestors.  Also the
A.C.L.U. is working toward a lawsuit for me. 
Not the sort of suit that stirs up visions of orgies in Las Vegas with
the payoff.  The lawyer has warned me not
to splurge at MacDonald’s.
The best!
© 23 Feb 2009 
About the Author 
Although
I have done other things, my fame now rests upon the durability of my
partnership with Carl Shepherd; we have been together for forty-two years and
nine months as of today, August 18th, 2012.
Although
I was born in Macon, Georgia in 1928, I was raised in Birmingham during the
Great Depression.  No doubt I still carry
invisible scars caused by that era.  No
matter we survived.  I am talking about
my sister, brother, and I.  There are two
things that set me apart from people. 
From about the third-grade I was a voracious reader of books on almost
any subject.  Had I concentrated, I would
have been an authority by now; but I didn’t with no regrets.
After
the University of Alabama and the Air Force, I came to Denver.  Here I met Carl, who picked me up in Mary’s
Bar.  Through our early life, we traveled
extensively in the mountain West.  Carl
is from Helena, Montana, and is a Blackfoot Indian.  Our being from nearly opposite ends of the
country made “going to see the folks” a broadening experience.  We went so many times that we finally had
“must see” places on each route like the Quilt Museum in Paducah, Kentucky and
the polo games in Sheridan, Wyoming.  Now
those happy travels are only memories.
I was
amongst the first members of the memory writing class.  While it doesn’t offer criticism, it does
offer feedback.  Also, just trying to
improve your writing helps no end.
Carl
is now in a nursing home; I don’t drive any more.  We totter on.
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Over the Edge by Phillip Hoyle

Cringing, I wiped cobwebs from my face that day as if I were in a movie navigating the canoe downstream through an African jungle of reeds. Would we be attacked by crocodiles? Would snakes drop out of the trees? Would we be overturned by a hippopotamus? I certainly hoped not and knew boas, crocs, and hippos were in short supply along the Black River that flows through the desert south of Carlsbad, New Mexico.
 
“The water splits into two channels just ahead,” I shouted back to David. “It looks like more water goes to the left.”

“Then take it to the left.” So I guided the canoe into the passage past rocks and willows. Still no snakes; and then we were beyond the reeds with their spiders. We continued to paddle, not in a hurry, just looking at what lay ahead.

David and I enjoyed each other’s company. We were both ministers who shared leadership in religious education and got a kick out of being together. We were attending a ministers’ retreat at the Tres Rios Area Retreat Center not far from where the Black River emerges from Carlsbad Caverns in southeastern New Mexico. The prior evening the retreat group had made a short canoe trip upstream to where the water appears from beneath a dry, rocky riverbed. At breakfast David asked the retreat director if the river was navigable downstream and found out one could canoe about half a mile, then make a short portage, and then canoe another three quarters of a mile. 

“Would you be interested to go down the river with me?” he asked. 

“Sure,” I answered, although I am not particularly the outdoorsy type. Still, I liked spending time with this man. We had already been talking about how we hoped someday to find a mastodon tooth or other age-marking relic at this site on the western edge of the old Permian Sea Basin. Perhaps we would make our discovery on this trip.

During an afternoon break we walked to the canoe rack. I suggested we carry the canoe a few yards down the road to a place where I thought we could easily get it into the river and ourselves safely into the boat. David asked, “Why don’t we just put in here. The access looks easy, and the water’s barely moving.”

“But this seems quite a bit higher than where I was thinking,” I countered, my indoors preferences showing a little too clearly. “We’ll probably have to navigate through some riffles or walk in the water.” But we followed David’s suggestion and started our unusual adventure.

As we left the reeds I warned, “The stream separates here again. Looks like more water on the left.”

“Go for it,” David advised. We did. I ducked to avoid an overhanging tree branch, and when I looked ahead screamed, “It’s a waterfall!”

We plunged over the rocky edge dropping about five feet into a deep pool. I held my straw cowboy hat as the canoe went under and turned over. Sputtering, I bobbed to the surface, took a big breath, and grabbed for the canoe. “You okay, David?” I asked my likewise sputtering friend.

“Yeah. Boy that was a surprise.”

“Are you hurt?” 

“I don’t think so. I did bump my shin on the canoe. I’ll be fine,” he reassured me. “How about you?”

“I’m fine,” I lied as I found a foothold on a rock. The 50° F water came up to my neck. “I’m standing on the bottom here. If you hang onto the canoe I think the current will push you over to the shore. Then we’ll see if we can get the water out of the boat.”

We were successful and finally got the canoe righted and emptied. In the process I felt my right knee giving way. As the current continued to push against my leg, I tightened the muscles gripping the rock with my feet. What I didn’t tell David was that my knee had dislocated in the fall and was threatened to give out again. I was starting to feel chilled. I suggested David carefully hoist himself into the canoe while I held it secure against the shore. Then he held it while I slithered in like the jungle snake I had feared.

“I hurt my knee,” I admitted when I got safely aboard. “But I want to go on down to the first portage. I want to see the river. We can come back up here to get out.” I pulled off my shirt to wrap my knee and re-secured my lifejacket. The desert sun warmed me as we paddled downstream. 

Huge cottonwood trees provided shade over some of the river, and in these bosque giants blue herons nested. I’d never seen such large birds perched in trees. The whole area took on an exotic aura for me. As we drifted, sunfish jumped right next to the canoe. I wondered if anyone fished here. Surely few people had floated the river. As I examined the bank, I was fascinated by the way clusters of prickly pear cacti hung over the precipice like green waterfalls sometimes extending ten feet or more to the water’s edge. I thought of the mounds I’d once seen on the high bank above, ruins of the homes of people who lived in the area long before white or Spanish arrivals or even the Athabaskan Apaches migrations. I wondered at the history and the exotic, profligate beauty of this ancient desert terrain. 

When the river got too shallow, we turned back upstream, then dragged the canoe up the steep slope to the road. After we hoisted the canoe back onto the rack, I limped to the dormitory while David fetched ice and an ACE bandage from the kitchen. With my leg elevated, I lay back in an easy chair and told other retreat participants about our misadventure. Finally I closed my eyes playing back scenes from my own point of view richly embroidered by movie cuts from Saturday afternoon matinees of my childhood. 

Certainly this was an unusual day of adventure and new experiences, a singular time I will long remember and often retell. The waterfall threatens to grow higher, the river longer, and of course, my torn meniscus more painful. 

Denver 2010

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, giving massages, and socializing. His massage practice funds his other activities that keep him busy with groups of writers and artists, and folk with pains. Following thirty-two years in church work, he now focuses on creating beauty and ministering to the clients in his practice. He volunteers at The Center leading “Telling Your Story.”
He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

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Memoir: A Pile of Leaves by Cecil Bethea

     With the end of September comes the annual event of the falling of the leaves and the concomitant chore of raking them up and getting rid of them one way or another.  Back home we used to heap them up into piles and then set them afire.  The burning leaves produced an aroma, not a smell, that was a delight to the senses but pleasured us only once a year and is not forgotten decades later.  Since then I’ve often wondered whether a forest fire amongst deciduous trees produces so sweet a smell.  Anyhow I still have a Pavlovian reaction to burning leaves of memories from the distant past in Alabama.

     Friday I decided to start the series of rakings necessary to rid the yard of leaves.  Can’t burn them now without being inundated with police and vile thoughts of the neighbors.  Steven, who lives next door, operates a compost heap and is delighted with garbage cans of leaves.
  
     For some reason or another, I felt Puritanical and tackled the trash collected along the fence.  Pulling the leaves and other trash into a pile, I marched at a slow step down the fence.  Then it dawned that the pile had the shape of a recently dug grave.  By a quirk of mental contortions, I realized that it was also the 150th anniversary of my grandfather’s birthday.  This meant that Saturday, October 1st, would be the 77th anniversary of my brother’s.
     
     I decided to sit down and have a cigarette.  All sorts of thoughts from a country churchyard spun through my head.  Moreover I now frequently ponder matters mortal.  These two men were and still are important to me.  Papa was born in 1860 remarkably two days after the census was taken.  His entire life was spent in Meadeville, Mississippi, thirty miles east of Natchez.  The population has always been less than 500 depending upon what had happened during the previous decade.  He vituprertivly denounced Lincoln and all his works.  Years later, I could understand his thinking.  Being born when he was, Papa could not remember what life was before the War.  No doubt his elders looked back at those times as a golden era.  We know this wasn’t so because by 1860 the nation was just recovering from the Panic of 1857.  
     
     No matter, he was old enough to remember when the Yankees came.  He had learned that the blue bellies were booger men who liked to steal bad little boys.  Then suddenly one day the whole front yard was filled with blue bellies.  Like any small boy, he went screaming to his mother.  The commanding officer picked him up and tried to calm him.  The result was that they discovered that Papa’s Christian name DeMont was the same as the officer’s sir name.  Papa was convinced that the Yankees did not burn the house because of this happy accident.  Maybe.  Even the Yankees did not have the time to burn every house they ran across.  

     Papa inadvertently taught me about aging.  Dying at ninety-seven, he was the oldest citizen of Franklin County.  The men who were mere elders gave him a birthday party organized primarily by Mr. John Rounds every year.  He told me that those men hadn’t been his friends. His comment was, “Why, I danced at the wedding of John Rounds’ folks.”  A body’s friends go, then his contemporaries, and finally only memories remain.

     My brother was born in 1933 and was named for our grandfather, but nobody called him Wentworth except Mother.  Those W’s and R were too much for me to cope with, so I called him Wimpy.  Then our sister, Duane, came along nine years later and called him Bibi, which became a name limited to the family.  To everybody else, he was Wimpy.  

     The three of us looked nothing alike.  My hair was dark brown back in those days, Bibi was early on tow headed which later became a dark blonde,  Duane was a red head.

     Bibi was six feet at fourteen and ended up at 6’2″.  His two sons grew to 6’6″ and 6’7″.  Duane’s boy is somewhere over six feet.  I just got none of the height genes in the family.
     
     Bibi deserves to be remembered by the world at large for one statement he made,  We were discussing intellectuals, what they were, their qualities, their purpose in society, et alia,  At the end of the conversation, he summarized by saying, “Intellectuals are just like Christians; many are called but few are chosen.”

     Later in his life during one week-end, one of his boys was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship and the other was admitted to med school.  This would be a feather in any parent’s cap–actually two feathers.  Bibi was more modest; he asked the question “What did I do right?”  He realized that he was in as much a quandary as those parents who ask, “What did I do wrong?”  To me these questions show how iffy parenthood is.  
     
     Another more egocentric reason for my remembering him so fondly took place in Venice.  He was sitting at a table in an outdoor café in the Piazza watching the people, taking in the sights, and generally enjoying his place in the sun,  While studying the facade of St.  Mark’s, he noticed and remembered the four horses.  They were part of the loot the Venetians brought home from Constantinople after the Fourth Crusade.  I believe they were had been removed from Rome by one of the early emperors.  Anyhow Bibi said he remembered my telling him the history of the horses when he was a little boy. .  From all the verbiage that I have spewed during my years on this earth, he is the only person to say that he had remembered some of my words years later.  I did say that my reasons were egocentric.

     Papa is buried in Meadeville cemetery amongst his friends and family.  Bibi’s ashes are scattered somewhere in the Smoky Mountains.

     Life goes on at least of some sort or another.  I picked up the rake and continued my chores. 

About the Author 





Although I have done other things, my fame now rests upon the durability of my partnership with Carl Shepherd; we have been together for forty-two years and nine months as of today, August 18the, 2012.

Although I was born in Macon, Georgia in 1928, I was raised in Birmingham during the Great Depression. No doubt I still carry invisible scars caused by that era. No matter we survived. I am talking about my sister, brother, and I. There are two things that set me apart from people. From about the third grade I was a voracious reader of books on almost any subject. Had I concentrated, I would have been an authority by now; but I didn’t with no regrets.

After the University of Alabama and the Air Force, I came to Denver. Here I met Carl, who picked me up in Mary’s Bar. Through our early life we traveled extensively in the mountain West. Carl is from Helena, Montana, and is a Blackfoot Indian. Our being from nearly opposite ends of the country made “going to see the folks” a broadening experience. We went so many times that we finally had “must see” places on each route like the Quilt Museum in Paducah, Kentucky and the polo games in Sheridan, Wyoming. Now those happy travels are only memories.

I was amongst the first members of the memoir writing class. While it doesn’t offer criticism, it does offer feedback. Also just trying to improve your writing helps no end.

Carl is now in a nursing home, I don’t drive any more. We totter on.