Playing the blues
Does the artist really work in abject loneliness? Does the creative act as executed by painters, sculptors, musicians, writers, et al, truly require confinement and utter solitude? I am lately coming to understand that art is a way of binding our relationships more closely, rather than dividing them. I can say with certainty that the phenomenal experience of knowing that others have been moved by something that I have produced makes me feel connected to them in a unique and significant way. I've also learned that making these connections demands the sort of honesty that can burn you in any number of ways. Besides, an audience can smell a fraud from a mile away.
To my thinking, one of the worst kinds of fraud is the artist who has not done his work. For instance, any musician can play a blues song with only three chords, and one must certainly feel the blues in order to play them, but for the modern blues player today, knowing the great tradition of the blues is essential. I say this mostly as a listener: as a musician, I would not call myself a true bluesman, but I did learn quite a lot of rural blues when I first started playing the guitar, and these days I often have the privilege of performing with a good friend whom I consider a master of the form. As he has done, any aspiring blues artist should listen to the oldest gospel music he or she can find, from both black and white churches across the American South. That music is deep in the roots of the great tree, so to speak. All of the struggle, sorrow, and triumph is in it. We build upon it, grow into it, lean upon it. Then the player must study the giants, the strong-shouldered spiritual heroes - Son House, Robert Johnson, Robert Wilkins, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leadbelly, Mississippi John Hurt, Furry Lewis, Skip James, Tampa Red, Pine Top Perikins, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Memphis Minnie, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Bessie Smith, Bessie Jones, Ma Rainey, Elizabeth Cotten, Blind Willie McTell, Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Gus Cannon, Charley Patton, and dozens more... Then he or she should try and master the styles of at least three of these demigods, though he never truly will, for this is a lifetime's undertaking. In the end, all he can really hope for is that some of the richness and depth that grew from a people's daily lives of bitterness, laughter, loss, and hope will stick to him just a little bit, and that maybe just a a little bit of the heat of a Mississippi cotton field or the whine of a northbound train will come through in the playing and give it a degree of authenticity.
And if he has done all of this and reaches a point at which he can begin to write his own stuff, the blues artist might then be able to find words and tunes and riffs and rhythms that seem real and that seem as if they have always existed. Only then, as in these lines from Son House's "Death Letter"...
I walked up right close, and I said I looked down in her face
I said the good ol' gal, she got to lay here 'til the Judgment Day
Looked like there was 10, 000 people standin' round the buryin' ground
I didn't know I loved her 'til they laid her down
can there be no doubt as to the truth being spoken.
John Lee Hooker | Photo: TeamRock
"Tell Us A Story, Mr. Trippe..."
I am now three weeks into my twenty-eighth year as a teacher. For one who, all those years ago, never expected to have a career in education (I had worked as a journalist up to that point), I am sometimes still surprised at the rejuvenating power of being around young people from day to day. Last year I began teaching middle-school English for the very first time, in part because I had been one of those high-school instructors who frequently grouse about kids arriving in ninth grade ill-prepared for the big leagues, as it were, and I saw this as my chance to do something about it.
I have collected no data to substantiate what I intend to say here. I can only offer expert testimony.
If you should hear a veteran teacher proclaim that students’ skills have declined overall in reading, writing, critical thinking, reasoning, problem-solving, and so on, do not doubt it; it is true. On the other hand, it is also true that every year I meet precocious youngsters who have an intuitive grasp of fairly complex ideas, who can talk and write well, and who in some cases have that gnawing hunger for more - tougher assignments, thicker books, loftier ideas. Still others of them are pleasant, hardworking optimists bent on success, who will find their own trails up the mountain eventually. What interest do they all seem to share? The answer is simple: stories.
At some time in their lives, people (most often family members) have told them good stories.
Stories within families, told to children at an early age, seem to contribute their emotional and intellectual growth in various ways. For example, the ninth grader who recounted to me her grandfather’s story about serving as a “tunnel rat” in the Cu Chi district of Vietnam showed advanced verbal skills, even if the tale was harrowing; she listened better than many other students in her class, and her writing was superb. The kid whose mother had been in an all-girl band and toured the country could talk about those vast western rock odysseys as though he had been there himself. Even less glamorous stories (“My grand-dad was a logger up in the north woods…” or ”My mom had a raccoon for a pet when she was a kid…”) also seem to have a significant connection to both students’ academic performances and their self-images. It is as if the student might say, This is me…or at least a piece of me. My story is part of someone else’s story. And if one is a part of someone else’s story, might he or she also be part of a really big story? This is me. My story is part of a greater one. My life has meaning and purpose because my story is integral.
In fact, research does show that family stories, even those that do not feature sunshine and lollipops, can significantly affect young learners. As Elaine Reese, a child development specialist, wrote for The Atlantic in December of 2013, “All families have stories to tell, regardless of their culture or their circumstances. Of course, not all of these stories are idyllic ones. Research shows that children and adolescents can learn a great deal from stories of life’s more difficult moments–as long as those stories are told in a way that is sensitive to the child’s level of understanding, and as long as something good is gleaned from the experience.”
I am not suggesting that teachers chuck out those lessons that require discipline and constant review, such as sentence structure and vocabulary acquisition. I do believe it is vital that they alsoinclude as many opportunities for stories - hearing them, telling them, reading them, and writing them - as possible. I can say from my own experience that the light that comes into a young person’s eyes when he or she suddenly realizes the power of a great story is as redeeming as anything I have encountered in my career as a teacher.
Two Fish
Two Fish
- © Jeff Trippe
For almost every mystery, there is a method. I remember those Saturday afternoons when my father would come home from fishing trips with his two best friends, Fred Stokes and Bob Honeycutt, smelling of brine and fish guts and gas fumes. There was the dutiful unloading of coolers, the rinsing of his boat and gear, and then the filleting of the bass or the catfish, or if he had cruised north where the brackish St Johns River spills into the Atlantic, of redfish, done with precision and efficiency at the raw wooden cleaning table he had built in our back yard. Whatever had happened that day out on the river, whatever masculine conversations and rituals and indulgences had occurred, it all remained shrouded to me until a still-dark July morning, the summer after I had turned ten, when he ordered me out of bed.
“You’re going fishing today,” he said.
We picked up Misters Stokes and Honeycutt on our way out to Goodby’s Landing. They were nice enough men, though both a bit rough-edged at such an early hour; Mr. Stokes was a card, always ready with a joke and his smoker’s laugh, a manager at Turner’s Hardware Store whose real calling was that of a gifted raconteur. Mr. Honeycutt was darker in hair color and demeanor, but he knew how to enjoy himself as well; he had a very good-looking wife named Rowena, who would one day soon become the focus of my pre-adolescent stirrings. A few years after that, Mr. Honeycutt would get rich as a purveyor of pornography, at which time my dad “unfriended” him - not in the modern Facebook sense but in real, pre-pixilated life.
In any case, we arrived at the boat ramp, and in one sweet and tidy spinning of the station wagon’s wheel, my dad backed the trailer down into the water at just the right angle and at the right depth - a skill I would never learn to master. Mr. Stokes held the rope and the three of us stood there like pilings until Dad had parked the car and then walked back down to us and said,
“Get in.” We did.
He was exceedingly proud of that boat. It was made by the Borum company of Jacksonville, Florida - our town, as it happened, and even now I can feel its steady, sturdy hull under my bare feet, gliding across the slight chop in Goodby’s Creek like a breeze-borne paper airplane, and I hear the kick and whirring of the inboard motor, a small marvel of power and restraint. And the men are before me even now with their sun-rutted red necks and white tee shirts, Mr. Stokes nodding and smiling between discreet drags on his cigarette as we nosed steadily out of the narrow inlet and into the broad, coffee-colored river, cutting crosswise against a stiff north-flowing current and then moving with it toward what lay beyond and was as yet unknown in my experience.
We might have turned south and made our way into the wilder reaches of the river, where the water widened and the fish camps and Baptist churches were straggled along the banks like teeth in an old man’s gums, as we would do on many subsequent weekends, a couple of times even anchoring and sleeping on the boat in places as far away as Palatka and Hibernia. But this first time, I think, my father wanted to impress me with his knowledge of the busy northern reaches of the St. Johns and the stunning sunlight that poured unrelentingly from the vast sky and over us and over the downtown skyline, receding abruptly from the echoing darkness below the Acosta and Main Street bridges, where he was a master and commander among tugs and, after a few miles more, among shrimpers and trawlers as we neared Blount Island and the jetties and the Atlantic Ocean. He knew those waters well, the “lower” river around Mill Cove and the Timacuan Preserve, and his aim was to get us somewhere we might have a chance of landing some big red drum or speckled trout.
Soon we found a likely spot along the southern bank, where we were more or less out of the channel but still in a current swift enough to bring wayward fish within striking distance. This was relatively easy going, as it was a simple matter of running your line through a thick popping cork, baiting your hook (in our case, with some cutup crab that Mr. Stokes had prepared ahead of time), and then attaching a lead sinker. It was a nice, heavy rig, and after Dad and the other men had demonstrated proper casting for me, it came quite easily, and I soon found that I could hurl it out nearly as far as they could into the short, wind-snapped waves. Just like that, I was a fisherman.
Within a few minutes, Mr. Stokes’s cork plunged downward and disappeared into the water: sploosh! Adroitly, he set the hook in the fish’s mouth with one hand and flicked the ashes from his cigarette with the other, saying calmly, “All right, then, Harry Lee… Now we’re talkin’.” My father’s closest friends called him by both his first and middle names.
Within moments, even as Mr. Stokes was still reeling his catch in, it was my dad’s turn. A precipitous dunking of the popper indicated he had a big one on his line. “Now, watch, Jeff,” he said. “I’ll just bring him in slow. Red drum are not fighting fish. They’ll cooperate with you, just don’t get overanxious and break your line or tear the hook out. The mouth is pretty soft.”
“Yeah, baby,” Mr. Stokes crooned. “Swim to me.”
When both fish were in the bottom of the boat, thrashing out the last of their obliviously happy, watery existences, we all looked down at them admiringly. Of course, since Mr. Honeycutt had yet to have a strike, he offered a superficial congratulations to the other two men. This was my first exposure to the subtle psychology of conversation among anglers: “Well, boys, you two certainly are the shit, aren’t you? I probably won’t take a single one today.” Then, glancing at me: “Oh, sorry, son. Pardon my French.”
But his time was at hand as well. Suddenly his rod was whipped over into a sharp arch, and with his thick forearms flexing rhythmically, he hauled another red up to the boat. When he was laid along the gunwale, he measured nearly two feet - the largest one so far.
“It’s all about the luck,” Mr. Stokes said. My dad smiled at me and winked.
“Looks like we’re into ‘em, all right,” he said.
And so the morning went, each man taking a fish every few minutes or so, talking softly to it, or yelling sharply, moaning, laughing. At one point, Mr. Stokes broke into a velvety rendition of Hank Williams’ “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” drawing a Schlitz from his small blue cooler and cracking it open, his rod tucked into his armpit and froth spilling over his fingers. The glaring, unspoken truth, of course, was that my own cork had not budged at all. My father urged me to reel it in and check on the bait, and I did so; the chunk of crab dangled before us, still intact and firmly on the hook.
“Hm” Dad said. “Let’s change it out anyway. The meat could be bad.”
Even so, another half hour passed with no signs of life other than the ripples washing around my popping cork. Now a pall hung over the Borum, and the breeze died. The river flattened out, and I could feel the sweat collecting in the hair that clung to the back of my neck. Every time one of the other three scored a heavy strike, he would reel silently, gazing at each fat red drum as though it were an inconvenience, then with utter indifference, and finally with expressions of disavowal and denial, as though they had just been delivered with some intolerable news. Even the self-absorbed Mr. Honeycutt now scowled every time his bright orange cork was dragged under, until after his tenth fish, he decided to bum a beer from Mr. Stokes and take a break, settling on the bench along the starboard side. I doubt there has ever been a more pitiable group of anglers.
At last, around noon, King Neptune smiled upon me. It wasn’t much of a strike, but my cork suddenly dipped downward and then began to wobble on the surface. I yanked the rod, setting the hook as I had been instructed, and then reeling, reeling, beside myself with excitement. My hands vibrated: there is no more exalting sensation than knowing that the will of another earthly creature is at odds with your own, feeling his stubbornness, small though it may be, but remaining assured all the while that you are the dominant species and will, as such, prevail in the end. I brought him close and then drew him out and up for all to see; he was six inches worth of desperation, flipping about on the line like a twitching eyelid, and all three men grinned and nodded.
“There he is,” Mr. Stokes chuckled. “I knew he was out there.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s a croaker,” my father said. “Listen.”
We grew quiet so that we could hear the fish’s croaking, a mournful grunt, a pitiful lamentation that said, over and over again, “Help me…help me…” A thin trace of blood bubbled from his mouth, ran down his glistening scales, and drifted to the water below.
Mr. Honeycutt remarked, “You know, a croaker is really better eating than a redfish anyway. You fry that thing up right and serve it with some cheese grits, and you’ll never have a better meal than that.”
My father reached out and grabbed the fish with his gloved hand. He quickly worked the hook out and then tossed it back into the water. I watched it go flitting away, a small white spark disappearing back into the mystery below. “You can do better,” Dad said.
He was right, at least in terms of size.
All of us returned to our business, patient monuments in the cascading, unending light over the river, Misters Stokes and Honeycutt resting their Schlitzes in the coasters my dad had screwed to the top of the gunwale (put there for their benefit, since he did not imbibe…and to avoid having beer sloshed around in the bottom of the Borum). My moment of truth came after about ten minutes: without warning, my cork suddenly plummeted like a torpedo aimed at the river’s bottom, and my rod lurched over into a horseshoe shape. It was as if one of those Saturday morning professional wrestlers I used to watch - and which I would actually have been watching were I not out fishing for the first time - had performed his fire-poker-bending trick before my very eyes. I was astonished by the power of whatever was pulling back at me.
“Dad…” I said.
“You’re fine. Just give him a little line.”
When I pressed the drag-release button on my reel, the line went screeching out as the fish made his instinctive attempt to escape.
“SHIT!” cried Mr. Stokes, slamming his own rod into the holder in the boat’s stern. “Crank it! Crank it!” I cranked, but the line continued to race out and away.
“Want me to take it?” Mr. Honeycutt asked, setting his rod down, too.
“No,” Dad said. “Let him do it. Put the drag back on and brace yourself.”
I did, and then it was all I could do to keep from being pulled overboard. Lucky for me, the timely Mr. Stokes grabbed the back of my belt and held on firmly. “Get the tip of the rod up,” my father said. Far easier said than done - my skinny ten-year-old arms pulled feebly against that tremendous willpower far below the dark river’s surface. I held on, though, and gave the reel a turn whenever I sensed the slightest sag, until finally I was able to turn it two times, three times, four in a row… The fish was tiring at last.
“Now,” Dad said quite calmly, “keep the rod up, but be careful you don’t break your line. You just have to try and feel it. If it feels like it might break, give him a little more. He’ll make one last try at running.”
“It must be a giant redfish,” I said.
“That ain’t no redfish,” Mr. Stokes said.
The beast’s final act of defiance ensued quickly. Just as my father had said, when it seemed he had completely surrendered and his demise was imminent, there was a final surge of musclebound will. He abruptly exploded downward and away into the depths, and I felt Mr. Stokes’s hand tighten on my belt once more. The rod bent double, and thinking that the line had reached its limit, I placed my thumb on the release. Then I felt him rising, rising, the line slackening, and we saw it.
A thick grey fin suddenly appeared above the water.
Mr. Stokes’s mouth fell open, and his cigarette dropped into the water and fizzled. Mr. Honeycutt muttered, “Shark.”
My dad nodded. “I thought so. Bring him over slowly. Lord knows we can’t bring him in the boat, but let’s have a good look at him.”
He was a bull shark, according to Mr. Stokes. With the very last of my energy, I wound him slowly up alongside us. He rolled over and showed us his length - about five feet, as long as I was tall. I could see where the hook had him solidly in the jaw, with the line taut between his teeth. His squinty, old-man’s eye was fixed on me. My dad produced the clippers from his tackle box and held them open, poised beside the line three feet above the shark’s mouth.
“I’d say he gave you a good little introduction to fishing,” he said. “You may never get into a fight like that again on this river.” Then he snipped the line, and the shark turned back over, his thick, strong back curving porpoise fashion, and in a smooth arc, he disappeared back into the mystery. “Time to head home.”
My father had been correct once again: I would nevermore have a fight like that on the river. We traveled up and down that broad, snaking, wild slash of dark water, taking fish from Black Creek and Doctor’s Inlet and even Lake George and the Ocklawaha, but we saved the lower river for those rarer occasions when we might seek the potential wonders wrought by the mixing of the freshwater with the salt of the Atlantic. Who knew what freaks of nature the ocean might heave at us?
I do not recall which of the three men caught the most reds that day. I knew that I had caught none. Nevertheless, lying on the floor at home in front of the television and listening to the spattering of the deep fryer and to my mother’s soft humming, I was certain that I had earned a king’s feast.
Hemingway Almost Does Some Yard Work
I do not yet have a theme for this blog. My only objective at present is to keep it fairly lighthearted - no spiritual advice, no wisdom for the brokenhearted and/or disenfranchised, and no particular political agenda.
This first installment was inspired by the mundane, an ordinary occurrence on an ordinary day: the prospect of some unpleasant outdoor work on a brilliant August morning that was handmade for relaxing. In the midst of the brambles and biting bugs, for some reason I recalled Ernest Hemingway's well-documented abhorrence of physical labor of any sort. Of course, he had the cash to afford such disdain. I, on the other hand, do not. Still, I hope you enjoy this glimpse into an alternative Hemingwayesque world.
In all, it was ten days now that the man had looked out at the hedge that grew along the side of the villa. It gave him a sadness that he had felt before, yet he could not give this sadness a name. In any case, the name did not count for anything, since the hedge had now grown taller than the windows, and that was all that one could see anyway.
The bad weather had come beforehand, as he had predicted, but for nine days the sun had shone brightly, and today, the tenth day, the sun was bright and warm again, and the air was quite dry. At first, the woman who shared his bed, who had a bright mane of hair and eyes like flaming brandy, would look at him each morning and smile hopefully at him. Then she would watch him fill his glass with vodka and ice and perhaps cranberries or naranjas, after which he would return to his "office" and pretend to peck at the typewriter. Then she would take her cafe con leche out onto the veranda and sit by herself. And for the rest of the day, for nine days, she would not speak to him.
Now he looked at the hedge outside the window, and he raised his glass in its direction.
"All right then, hedge," he said. "You have beaten me this time. You're a damn stubborn hedge."
He knew that there were some things that a man must do, and some of them he must do alone. This hedge business would be bad enough, and he knew it would not do for that little tejon of a wife to be involved. No, she was built for other things, such as buying expensive tiles for their cuchina, and he knew - had always known - that he and that hedge would get to know each other well soon enough.
He wondered: would it be as bad as it had been in the mountains that summer, when the trout had refused to run, and he had to eat the jelly sandwiches instead? He could not say, but there the hedge was, looking at him, even though he knew very well that a hedge has no eyes.
He walked past her but did not look at her, walking down the steps of the veranda into the bright sunlight. He had his cold glass of fresh vodka and ice, and he thought that if he could just make it to the tool shed without stumbling, he would be all right. The shed seemed far away, even though it was just by the side of the villa. Still, it was not as bad as it had been in the trenches outside of Madrid with the smells from the landfill coming up the hill toward him, and before the glass was sweaty in his palm, he was there.
The shed was dark and full of manure, with little chinks of bright light to show where the tools were buried. With his foot he found the hedge clippers, and he knew immediately that the blades were dull, but he was certain that it was too dark in the shed to find the sharpening stone, and in in any case, he did not want to risk leaning over and landing face-first in the manure. With the clippers in one hand and his glass in the other, he flung the door open and made for the hedge.
"All right then, hedge, damn you," he said, and he gave his old death smile.
Someone called to him, and he saw an old man looking shriveled and hanging over the gate that opened onto the villa's lawn. "Papa! What the hell are you doing?"
Instinctively he changed direction and veered toward the gate, somehow managing to focus his eyes. "Is it really you, Colonel Pietro?"
"Truly."
When he was close enough, he knew by the old man's breath that it truly was the colonel. They had been drinking together many times in Italy, and they had fished and hunted in many of the good places, until the old man had come down with the gout.
"I thought you were dead, Colonel," he said.
"No such luck, Papa. Why are you carrying those big scissors?"
"I have to trim that bitch of a hedge." He pointed toward the villa where the hedge had climbed nearly to the eaves.
"Screw that," the colonel said. "I'll send my boy over here tomorrow to cut the heart out of that hedge. For now, I am going to the Floridita, where the beer is on ice and the women are like wheat waiting to be harvested."
"Well," he said, "I'm not sure what you mean by any of that, but I could certainly use a beer."
"Good." The old man smiled his rank, toothless smile. "My car is just over there. I had an abrupt encounter with a tree, but the motor is still running at least."
He knew inside of himself that the hedge would not be trimmed today or tomorrow or the next day, and he knew that the tejon with her flaming-brandy eyes would be waiting for him in the morning. All the same, he turned and flung the clippers high in the air, where they turned over and over like a lost propeller, finally landing with a soft shushing sound in the thick green hedge.