Waiting On Florence

September 12, 2018
It has happened again. A storm has formed off the coast of Africa and has made its journay across the Atlantic. No longer just another storm its winds now are 140 miles per hours and it is a hurricane. And it is coming our way.
The South Carolina coast is hardly immune to hurricanes. There was the monster Hugo in 1989. Massive destruction. Millions of dollars in property loss. The current hurricane is named Florence and she could be stronger than Hugo.  Wind and rain in great quantities. Winds exceeding 140 mph.  Rainfall in double digits. With the high tide and storm surge the streets of Charleston, South Carolina will be flooded.
Twenty miles inland from Charleston we are waiting and watching the Weather Channel. Yesterday the nearby interstate highway was configured for westbound traffic only. Shiuld we leave? The governor has ordered manditory evacuation. But this house survived Hugo. Why not Florence? After all the weather gurus are predicting landfall near Wilmington, North Carolina, sever hundred miles away. But Florence like all those named for that gender is not completely predictable.

Miyazaki and Porco Rosso

I am a fan of Hayao Miyazaki, the Oscar winning director of "Spirited Away" The Japanese film director and producer was an artist first.  It is a little known fact that anime producers render the entire process. They write the story and produce the art, then animate it. Perhaps someone else writes the music. Miyazaki did all of these. As an artist his watercolors are colorful and energetic. Many of Miyazaki's works show his love of aviation. (A subject close to my heart.) His love of aviation is best shown in "Porco Rosso". This film is about a bounty hunting aviator cursed with a pig's face in the years prior to WWII known as the "golden years of aviation". The young widow singing the song is Porco's love interest. The pirates of the Mediterranean and Adriatic fly seaplanes.  The planes show all of Miyazaki's imagination in their design. Actually, Miyazaki's grandfather operated a factory that produced parts for the most famous Japanese fighter plane, the Zero. In the American version "Porco Rosso" the  voice actress notes that she was singing a song in French in a Japanese film set in Italy with English dialogue. Porco also appeared in manga, the Japanese comics as well. Miyazaki contributed to newspaper comic strips also. His stories featured the constant conflict of good versus evil. Progress versus the destruction of the environment. Miyazaki confirms my idea that creativity transcends various genres of creative endeavors. I am a great fan of those creators the "do it all".  And I like to follow suite in my own small way. 

Interestingly enough, but maybe not for me, is the contrast between my favorite anime films, "Porco Rosso" and "Cowboy Bebop". Kind of a comparison between the Wright Flyer and the Lockheed Martin F-35.

The Ghost and the Thunder

It was back when we lived in the little house. It was a sharecropper’s house on a large farm in the red clay area of South Carolina. A strange thing happened on that late summer afternoon. I was eleven years old and attending Bradley Elementary School.  It was the time in my life when I could have been considered the “boy scientist”. I was intrigued by the possibility of space travel, no doubt fostered by devouring issues of Collier’s Magazine and its stories of space travel as predicted by Werner von Braun. I had been trying to make black powder for a rocket that day. 

The day of the week was Thursday.  I remember it was Thursday because Daddy had been to the grocery store that day on the way home.  Thursday was also the day he got paid.  It was a warm day with a temperature in the nineties. (I had started recording daily weather conditions in my scientific journal.) The late afternoon thunder clouds were beginning to form in the previously cloudless sky. Mama, my younger sister, and me, were sitting down for supper when Daddy came into the kitchen carrying a bag, a small brown grocery bag. It did not seem to be very heavy, but then Daddy was a big strong man. At over two hundred pounds and over six feet tall he earned the nickname,” Big Jack”. He set the bag on the table and announced, “I brought a special surprise  today!”

I elbowed my way past my sister to get closer to the bag. “What could it be?” I thought.

Daddy’s big calloused hand reached into the bag and pulled out the biggest Coca-Cola I had ever seen! It was the twenty-six ounce size. 

“Put some ice in some glasses, Mama, and we’ll enjoy this surprise”, he said.

Mama went to the Frigidaire, got a tray of ice, and put some cubes in each of the four glasses. All

the glasses were different, having come from different kinds of store-bought pickles and jellies.  Daddy, of course, had the biggest glass and got the most ice. He opened up the big Coke just as we heard the first clap of thunder close by.  He gave everybody some of the soft drink and replaced the cap, leaving the bottle about one quarter full. 

That Coca-Cola sure tasted good as we stood around in that little kitchen.  I always liked the way the foam on top of the Coke tickled my nose.  Mama had been cooking supper, and It was really hot in there.  

Before we could finish our treat a bolt of lightning struck the big cottonwood tree beside the back porch, and the lights went out in the kitchen.  (We had the lights on because it had been almost dark when Daddy got home.)  Now we were in total darkness. As it often is before a deluge of rain, it was very quiet.  For some reason, in our family, you were expected to remain seated and very quiet during a thunderstorm, almost reverent.

“I hear something,”  my sister whispered to me.

“Yeah, me too.  It’s called thunder,” I responded.

“No, something else. It’s like someone whispering. Like Sh…sh…sh,” she said.

I listened intently for a few minutes. I heard it too!

But not to allow my fear to show, I said, “I think that might be the ghost!”

“A ghost?” I could hear the fear in my little sister’s voice…and I loved it!

“Yes, Grandma said that the old man that died here always spoke in a whisper. Like this:’ I see y-o-u…!’” I whispered.

From across the room I heard Mama say, “Stop scaring your sister!”

“But Mama…”

“Don’t ‘But’ me,” Mama said.  I knew that the next time she spoke to me she would use my full name and that would mean I was in real trouble. Daddy hadn’t said anything.  He was deaf in one ear and we never knew whether he didn’t hear us or just didn’t care to respond.

We continued to hear the noise as the storm raged outside. It seemed to rain forever, but it didn’t.

Then, suddenly, the lights flickered and came on.   I looked on the kitchen table at the remaining Coke.  My throat was dry.

“Mama, can we drink the rest of the coke?” I asked.

“Share it with your sister,”  she said.

 I grabbed the bottle and unscrewed the top. The mysterious noise stopped.

Proudly I announced, “I found the ghost!”, which really wasn’t a surprise since I was a budding scientist!

T

Jimbo tries out for football

This is a story about my boyhood friend Jimbo Dillashaw. 

I reckon we were about 11 or twelve years old at the time. It was in late summer. On some of those days of summer Jimbo would visit and help me pick off peanuts. Daddy had just plowed up the peanut crop and we were picking them off the vines in the front yard underneath a big chinaberry tree. We would wash the peanuts later and bag them up for sale. Daddy would sell them at the cotton mill where he worked.  On this particular day it was in the late afternoon and Daddy was home from work when a new Oldsmobile drove up in the yard. Neither me nor Jimbo recognized the car. But Daddy did. 

It was Daddy’s overseer from the mill. He had a young fellow with him. Jimbo elbowed me in the ribs and said, “You know who that is?”

“Naw, I don’t,” I said.

“That there is Bradley Thompson. He’s the quarterback of the Greenwood Emeralds. They say he’s gonna go to Clemson next year!”

“Really? He’s a lot bigger than I thought he was.”

“Oh yeah! He’s a big boy. He can throw that football a long way to.”

“I’ll bet you couldn’t catch one of his passes!

“Oh yeah, I could catch anybody’s pass. I could even catch one of Johnny Unitas’ passes!”

Jimbo’s mouth sometimes promised things he couldn't deliver. And I thought I would have a little fun at my buddy’s expense. 

“Jimbo let’s see if he will throw a pass to you,” I said.

“Right-o!” Jimbo said.

We walked over to the young man with the flat top haircut dressed in a varsity jacket with the big green “E” on the front. We talked for a few minutes about football and then I made my request. 

“Brad, my friend, Jimbo, here wants to be a wide receiver in high school, if he gets there. He says he can catch a pass from anybody. I wonder if you would throw a pass for him to catch?”

“I’d be glad to,“ the high school football star said.

Jimbo handed the old scarred up old Wilson football to Brad with a big grin on his face. We must have been quite a site. Two dirty farm boys barefooted in bib overalls  looking up at the idol of local youth. 

Brad palmed the football in his big right hand, winked at me and told Jimbo to run. 

Jimbo was thin, but wiry, while I was somewhat rotund and slower than he. His bare feet kicked up dust as he ran across the red dirt empty peanut patch. Brad cocked his big right arm and delivered a perfect spiral in Jimbo’s direction.  Jimbo was fast, you know, he had once chased down a rabbit and caught it! The ball seemed to float over Jimbo’s right shoulder as ball caught his eye. We saw him dive forward and disappear in a cloud of red dust. As the dust settled we could see Jimbo dancing around holding the football high overhead in his left hand. Brad couldn't believe his eyes and took refuge in the big Oldsmobile. By the time I got to Jimbo I found that his dancing around had nothing to do with football at all! He had dived into a fire ant mound and they were biting furiously. 

One eye was swelling shut and his right arm was twice its normal size. 

The next day at school Jimbo was showing off the new muscle in his right arm. He said he was taking the Charles Atlas bodybuilding course he had seen advertised on the back of a comic book and he was only halfway through the course.  That boy could make the best of any situation. 

Jimbo did play football for the Greenwood High Emeralds though. He was All-state wide receiver. 

note: This is a work of fiction for the most part. A story in the upcoming book:"Stories from the Red Dirt Road...and then Some.

Continuation On A Theme

This title may be a bit trite but I think it sort of fits this blog post.  In my  last post I wrote about seeing William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet at the Mesa Performing Arts Center performed by the Southwest Shakespeare Company. We enjoyed the show tremendously.

Thursday night, February 8, we saw The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged presented by the Flowertown Players in Summervile, SC.  It was a treat equal to any chocolate nut sundae.  Like the previous mentioned work of the Elizabethan playwright, we had seen this play before. But there are those things in life worth repeating. This play was presented in the theater annex, or at least I think that is what it is called.  We had forgotten about this location. So after arriving at the box office we were directed to go to the corner, around the gas station, and down the alley. After feeling our way through the dark alley we found the small theater behind the theater.  There were few people there on opening night. I'm some times leery of opening nights.  Maybe the director hasn't gotten all the bugs out of the performance. In this case there were no bugs or they weren't obvious in this fast paced show.

There were only three actors: two women and a man.  As you might imagine there were many costume changes for the many characters played.  And, of course, costumes were minimal.  You must enjoy laughter at this show singularly and corporately. There is great audience participation too. There was one intermission in the show and it takes you by surprise.  Two of the actors simply leave the stage, run out of the theater and disappear into the night while the other is left on stage to explain their actions.  

We really enjoyed this play.  If you enjoy Shakespeare and laughter be sure to see The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged.   The play runs through February 17.