F in yesterday’s more feather shaman medical and twilight zone adventures post, wrote:
Monday was certainly a heap of appointments. They are meticulous at Mayo. It was the first time I had ever been studied so closely and thoroughly in preparation for a biopsy coming this Thursday.to be something. It is as if that was major surgery. It is about prostate cancer that I had diagnosed about 12 years ago and was put on 'wait and watch' until a recent blood test showed a PSA level that concerned my doctor. The first appointment at the beginning of the day was online and that doctor was investigating a spot that appeared for the first time recently, most likely cancer. That is a slow one and so instead of proceeding as quickly as on the prostate, my next appointment will not be until February, on 'wait and watch for that now. All the rest of the day was a series of tests and at the end a ECG by a doctor my son Dacre knows well as a colleague there. For her I answered a seemingly endless series of questions. The whole day could not have been more thorough or have flowed so well, and all the people so considerate. It was amazing. Now I know why Mayo is rated number one in the world! Impressive and such a big help.Also, I am trying to remember your Bashinsky Family, who is who. Leo was a golfing friend of my father and lived around the corner from us on Country Club Blvd.across from the East Course of the Birmingham Country Club. We lived at 3307 Montevallo Road, right across the street from the 16t green of the west course. Then he moved across to the other side to Country Club Road near the corner of Ridge Drive. Was he your uncle, maybe your father's older brother? Sloan, and family, thinking that included you, so your father, lived On Montevallo Road on the other side from us and on the way up the hill toward Crestline village. I believe your father was Sloan and involved in still one of my favorite things to eat, Golden Flake Potato Chips. Once I get them cleared up I have more to write about how we were connected. More later.about health and our connections.In the meantime keep staying as well as possible!Roy
Me:
You have the Bashinsky family names and residence locations right. My family lived on Montevallo Road east the Birmingham Country Club West Course, The home of my father's older brother Leo’s was about 100 yards below us, facing the Country Club’s East Course, where I won the junior golf championship when I was 16. The East Course was called “the ladies course,” because it was much easier than the West Course, which was called “the men’s course”. Leo is the third person I memorialized in A Few Remarkable Alabama People I Have Known
When I first learned I had prostate cancer, the retired oncologist in my son-in-law’s family told me that prostate cancer moves very slowly and most men with prostate cancer die of of something else. After I learned my PSA level was 22 and I told the retired oncologist that, he told me to do what my doctors told me to do.They took their time with me, and they required me to get my heart checked out if I wanted to go the surgical route, because they did not want me to die on the operating table. My internist did an EKG that indicated my heart was not healthy. He did a chemical-induced EKG, instead of a regular stress EKG, because he didn’t think I might survive a regular EKG stress test. The chemical stress EKG showed by heart wasn’t healthy. He referred me to a cardiologist, who did an arteriogram at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Birmingham. After the procedure, the cardiologist said my heart was fine and the two EKGs were false positives and for me to come see him a week later. When he saw me in one of his examining rooms, he said my heart was fine and what was I doing there? I said he had told me to come see him. We walked out of his office laughing and he said in front of his packed waiting room, “Get out of here, I only treat sick people.”As I said in an earlier email, I chose to go with the radiation beam therapy, after the oncologist told me that there was a possibility they would not get all the cancer if they surgically removed my prostate, and then I would be looking at radiation and/or chemotherapy. Urology Associates in Birmingham. They knew what they were doing.According to handed down family stories, Leo and my father had a younger brother, Jack, who was born with the umbilical cord around his neck, which left him pretty much mentally and physically disadvantaged invalid, Leo and my father were so embarrassed about Jack that they did not bring their friends home with them. In the fall of 2002, I had a dream in which I was told I had an adversary about whom I did not know. I woke up and that day some things happened and thoughts came to me that remind me of Jack. At that tiime, I was shunned by my father and his second wife. They knew I was reporting not of this world experiences, but something happened that perhaps was the final straw, as follows.Through my and two close friends’s dreams, I learned that my father and an older son whose mother was the teenage daughter of his parent’s live-in black servants. The son’s name was Travis. My father’s father had paid the mother to leave Alabama with Travis and never come back, and he sent her money to help them get by. Later, my father sent them money through one Golden Flake’s independent potato broker. I went to see Leo and we talked a while, and he said he was waiting on the Lord to take him. He asked me why I had come to see him? I said, “Do I have a brother I don’t know about?” Leo looked me dead in the eye and said, “I don’t want anything to do with that!” I thanked him and left. I sat on that for about a year, then I knew it was time to approach my father about it. We did not see each other, but we sometimes exchanged handwritten letters. I told him two friends and I had dreamed about an older brother named Travis, I left Leo out of it, and If Travis existed, I would like to meet him if he was still living. I heard nothing back and a Christmas gift of stock certificates my father gave to each of his children every year did not arrive.I was instructed by angels to legally change my name to Sloan Young, which was my middle name, and to legally renounce inheritances from my father, which I did, and I so notified my father and other family members by letters. Sloan Young was the truest, toughest man I had ever known. But he had no money and was homeless, and he probably would have died on the street. In 2003, I was told to legally change my name back to Sloan Young Bashinsky, Jr., which a judge did for me. I never saw my father alive again, but inheritances from him ended my homeless life and I became maybe one of the most prolific writers in world history?
Something about my father and me fell out of me one August 2005 day on a public library computer in Helen, Georgia, and as I tapped the last sentence and period, my father’s lawyer called to say my father had passed away. The lawyer and I were classmates at the University of Alabama School of Law in Birmingham and later in its masters in tax law program taught at UAB twice a week for two years. I made what I wrote that day a chapter in THE GOLDEN FLAKE CLOWN’S TALE, which is a free read at this link: https://archive.org/details/goldenflakeclownstale
Here is what fell out of me in August 2005.
I spent the summer of 2005 in Helen, Georgia, where I had spent two earlier summers.
In late August 2005, I typed very quickly something about my father and me on a computer in the Helen public library. As I typed the last sentence and period, my cell phone rang. It was John McKleroy, calling to say he had tried to reach me for 2 days, to tell me my father had passed away.
I was living barely off the street and looking forward to more of that and living on the street. (I imagine now that John had been my father's ally and adviser regarding my attempts to renounce my inheritances. I imagine John had advised my father to ignore me.)
John offered to get me to Birmingham, but I had a friend in Helen, who said he would drive me to Birmingham. A friend in Birmingham let me stay in a spare bedroom in his home. He loaned me an old pickup truck he had revived.
I attended my father's memorial at Mt. Brook Baptist Church, where my father and I had attended Sunday school for years, when I was a boy.
The minister, who was not there back then, carried on about my father's success in business and giving a lot of money to various charities.
My 3rd wife, Deborah, who had suffered my black night of the soul, sat beside me. She blanched and hissed, not entirely under her breath, "You cannot serve God and mammon."
The minister was preaching to Joann.
The minister said my father was awarded many medals during World War II.
That was news to me, and would have been news to my mother and to my father.
I wanted to wring the minister's neck.
A few days later, I went back to Mountain Brook Baptist Church and gave the minister a copy of what I had written in Helen.
A codicil to my father's Last Will and Testament instructed that his ashes spread on the grounds of Mt. Brook Baptist Church, and if any of his heirs contested that, they forfeited all inheritances from him.
John McKleroy advanced me $10,000 of the $1,000,000, which I had inherited under my father's will.
I mostly hung out in Birmingham until my father's estate settled and John wrote me a check for the rest of the $1,000,000 on February 14, 2006.
I bought a used Toyota Highlander and drove back down to Key West, where money my father had made the old-fashioned way enabled me to live comfortably and try to save the Florida Keys from developers and their lawyers and their captured county and city commissions, and to rock the so-called "Paradise" status quo boat generally, for a decade.
Here's what fell out of me in Helen about as fast as I could type it.
THE HIT AND MISS CLUB
Sloan Young Bashinsky
around age 50
Sloan Young Bashinsky caused the Golden Flake Potato Chip Company in Birmingham, Alabama to become a market force in the southeastern United States. This below leaped out of me right before I learned he had died.
“THE HIT AND MISS CLUB”
IT’S AUGUST 3, 2005. I was involved in something for a few years that did not turn out very well (in my estimation), and I was beating myself up about it and wondering what I was going to do instead. Then came a series of dreams last night. In the last two dreams, my oldest daughter, Nelle, takes me by the hand and leads me away from something toward something else; then my father’s wife, Joann, is a legal secretary who hands me a case file I do not have in a bundle of other files I’m already carrying. I wake up about sunrise, knowing there is something I have missed or do not yet know about. Then I find myself thinking about a hunting club that went by the name of “The Hit and Miss Club”. Now why, I ask myself, am I thinking about that?
In 1964, my father purchased a membership in this club, which mostly was for quail hunting, while I was still in my senior year at Vanderbilt. He was not a hunter but in those days hunting was a pretty big deal for me, and he did it for me. We went down there some together, and sometimes I went with friends. What I remembered this morning, after waking up and thinking of this place, was a time my father and I were coming back to Birmingham after hunting over the weekend, and I was driving and we were talking about different things. I was going to leave Birmingham and return to Vanderbilt that night. It was good between us; it felt tight. About halfway home he said he liked me driving, he felt safe, which he said he did not usually feel when he rode with other people. Maybe he felt safe because I drove a lot like he did, which some people in those days told me made them a bit nervous when they were riding with me. Well, maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe it was just one of those things that happened on that day but might not have happened the next day.
Another thing that came to me this morning was that a lot of what I seem to be given to do, and a lot of my life before I got into this way of living, has had a lot of hit and miss in it. Maybe more miss than hit. In baseball, if you bat .333, that is, you get a hit one in every three at bats, that’s considered very good. You might even win a league batting crown with that percentage, but certainly you will be a star and maybe play in the All Star Game and will get well paid for hitting so well, and with a life-time batting average that high, well, maybe Ted Williams and a few others would be higher up the ladder but you would be way up there yourself, too. Maybe that was God’s way, this morning, of telling me to stop beating myself up about not hitting a home run with every job assignment, or even a triple, or even a double, or even a single, or even just getting a walk or hit by a pitched ball.
Darn, I’m about to have myself a big conniption here, if I’m not careful. Why that is, is that for a very long time now, it has seemed to me that heaven has had me on a training regimen that is all or nothing. I do assignments perfectly, or it’s judged for naught. I bat 1.000, or I bat 0. And even if I bat 1.000, if my playing partners don’t also step up to the plate, then it’s as if I did not step up to the plate, too. I heard a few times in dreams that this is what has been going on, so for me it’s not mere conjecture. I told a friend after I got up this morning that this whole thing was driving me nuts, feeling that I have to do everything just in a certain way, or I get plastered afterwards. Jesus surely made mistakes, I said. How could he not have made them? He was human.
The Job assignment that had not gone well came to a head out of nowhere, like I had stepped unexpectedly on a covey of quail I did not see hidden on the ground in plain view right under my very eyes and the darn things suddenly erupted with all of their unnerving flapping wing-noise right from underneath my startled feet and swarmed up and all around me in various trajectories and directions designed to get me to shoot at holes in the air and run out of shells as they frantically dove for safety, and maybe I got one or even two of them but I didn’t shoot the whole damn convey out of the sky and maybe I didn’t hit even one of them. Hit or miss, that’s what bird shooting is. That’s what life is. Despite Jesus saying in Matthew 5:38 et. Seq., for his disciples to be perfect, even as their Father in heaven was perfect, that dog simply doesn’t hunt, at least not on this world.
After God has gotten ahold of someone real good and that has gone on for a while, the aholdee starts to see things both from the perspective of both a human being and an angel. However, this is not the same perspective that just being an angel enjoys. An angel doesn’t have to mess around with and put up with the human being messing up what the angel is doing. An angel can just be an angel. But a human being can’t just be an angel. A human being has to mess around with and put up with being a human being, too. It’s a serious problem; maybe it’s a kind of multiple personality disorder: a perfect angel yoked to a perfect donkey, or something like that.
I probably could say that my father was a perfectionist and his father was a perfectionist and his father also was a perfectionist and so I am a perfectionist therefore. Perhaps there is some truth in that. But then, I said, perhaps it is fucking impossible to be a perfectionist, because it is fucking impossible to be perfect. However and despite all of that, I told John that I now find myself thinking of some perfect moments I had with my father, and that drive home from the Hit and Miss Club was one. Maybe just a small one, but it was one. My father knew how much I loved to hunt, and he didn’t care that much for it yet he made it possible for me to have that experience. I had some very good times down there with college and law school buddies, and our wives. I don’t care to hunt now, but that doesn’t take away what it was for me then.
I remember when my fourteenth birthday came and my mom and dad asked me what I wanted for a birthday present, and I said I wanted to go to Destin to fish in the Rodeo. I’d heard about the Destin Fishing Rodeo, that it was the best fishing time of the year. My birthday was in October, in the peak of the Rodeo. So my father came and got me out of school on Friday and off we went to Destin, five hours away, before I had learned to drive in the way my father drove, all rather exciting for me, but he seemed blessed with a sixth sense and we arrived safely and a bit early, as I recall, at the Silver Beach Motel, which you might still be able to find today underneath all the high rise condominiums down there.
I remember a few years before that fishing trip, the last day we were to be there that summer vacation, we were staying at the Old Miramar Hotel in Ft. Walton, which is about twelve miles west of Destin. In those days, there were no motels and no anything else on that beautiful beach lying east of Destin, and my father and brother and I went out there to swim, and it was one of those magic moments, like I had died and gone to heaven, but was still on this world, and I really didn’t want to leave that beach that day, I wanted to stay there forever actually, just us, no one else was there. I asked Daddy why it felt so good that day and he said it was because it was our last day down there. I think it might have been because of this day, too. My tears say it is so.
Anyway, when we got up on Saturday morning, it was raining and the seas were stirred up. We had a boat chartered for that afternoon and the next morning, but nobody went out in this sort of weather. Over breakfast in the Silver Beach Motel restaurant, I don’t think I was drinking the water but only milk, because the water from under the ground there is full of sulfur, Daddy said we could stay and try to fish tomorrow, if the weather let up, or we could go home and come back the next weekend and fish. I chose to go home and come back, and when we came back the next weekend the weather was perfect the first day and we caught a lot of nice king mackerel that first afternoon, after fishing on Crystal Beach pier that morning. The wind had shifted by the next morning, a cold front coming in. The kings were not biting so we changed to bottom fishing and caught a bunch of nice red snapper. We took it all home. It was the best birthday present I think I ever had.
Many years later, my father started taking me into the Florida Keys to fish there, for bonefish mostly. This is not something rookies can do very well, as you have to learn the flats and tides, see the fish, stalk them, and so forth. It’s a cross between hunting and fishing and finding and stalking the fish is similar to using bird dogs to find quail, which bird hunters feel is as important as, if even more important, than actually shooting. Most people who don’t know how to do it already use flats guides; and most people do it out of skiffs to cover more territory, although wading works very well if you know where a good wading flat is. I fell so in to love with bonefishing that there are no words to describe it. When my father bought a nice home on Lower Matecumbe Key, about Mile marker 76, I really got to do a lot of bonefishing.
I went down there a lot with the family, and with my wives and friends. It was Paradise. It made me want to live in the Keys. It seemed when I left the Keys headed back to Alabama, that my soul stayed behind, and when I went back down there and reached the Overseas Highway, just below Homestead, my soul was there waiting for me. I could literally feel my soul greet me when I left the mainland. It’s still like that, and I am having these big raindrops falling out of my eyes right now over this. My father loved it down there, and I felt awful when I learned he had finally sold his beautiful home on the Atlantic, because I knew how much he loved it. But, I was told he had not been up to going down there for a few years, and so it was sold.
My father once told me that he didn’t go down and live there all the time because he was afraid he would find out just how sorry he was. But I tell you truly, when I learned he had sold it, I wept, because I could not imagine him being more happy than down there; but he had all sort of things in Birmingham that were important and close by that he was involved in, and he let go of what I once told him was the only thing he had that I really wanted: The Fish House. I didn’t feel that way when I later learned it was gone, but I felt that way when I said it, and it looked to me that it sort of got to him that I said it, because it sort of looked to me that he saw that I really meant it.
Most likely, I would have lived in the caretaker’s cottage, gotten guide papers and fished the flats with clients, and rented out The Fish House, when it wasn’t being used by folks who had fallen in to love with it too. For my father let many people use it: family, friends, business customers. Beside the front door, as I recall, was a sign on which was printed: “Welcome to my home, please treat it as you would your own.” Somewhere inside, as I recall, was another sign saying, “Some guests please us in their coming, others in their leaving.” And over the toilet in downstairs bath was a drawing of Bear Jesus, er Bear Bryant walking on water, and underneath were these words: “I Believe!” Coach Bryant spent some serious time down there with my father and other close friends of theirs, and in the Green Turtle Inn still hung, last time I looked, a pair of old white tennis shoes in a plastic bag, with some sort of card or sign hanging off them, saying “Bear Bryant’s Booties.”
I caught a passel of bonefish wading that flat out in front of The Fish House, and I caught another passel of them in the little Boston Whaler my father bought when he got the place back in 1963. I fished those flats hard, got really sunburned chasing those grey ghosts hither and yonder. And then, as had already happened with hunting, which I had come to love after I had fallen in to love with fishing, it went away. I no longer wanted to fish for sport, and I really didn’t even care much to fish for the skillet either, even though I might do that sometimes.
The changes started in early 1987. I felt it, like a great shadow coming over the land. I felt it over me, against me, and inside me. There really is no describing it, but I knew it was going to be very different. Very different. Then an odd thing happened: I saw that I was still fishing, but it was a different kind of fishing. Very different. I still used what I had learned on the flats, and before that at Destin, and fishing lakes and ponds and streams near Birmingham: cane pole, bait casting, spinning and fly, but invisible. In this moment, I have no doubt that my father’s spirit was there with me all along, and my son’s, we three were fishing together. We three are fishing together now.
My father was fishing when I was twelve and it was early spring and baseball was warming up and there would be a Little League in our community that year. We made up a pitcher’s rubber and a home plate in the gravel drive behind our home. He bought a catcher’s mitt and came home after work every day, and I threw until his knees wore out from stooping in the catcher’s position. I got to where I could get it over the plate pretty well and could hit different spots in the strike zone. I didn’t have any stuff on the ball, no curve, no knuckleball, but I had zip, and I was left-handed, and that was unusual for a pitcher in those days and batters were not used to it coming from that side, and I got on a good team and I was one of the pitchers, all because my father and I had gone into the zone together those many afternoons after he came home from work.
He had season box tickets behind the visitor’s dugout at Rickwood Field, where the Barons played. We went a couple of nights a week. I’d get in the back seat and go to sleep on the way home. Jimmy Piersall played one year, before he went up to the majors. He hit a lot of game-winning home runs, to the opposite field (he was right-handed), in the bottom of the ninth, as I recall. In those days, baseball was the most important American sport to me, although football would take its place one day. In football, winning is everything, or so said The Bear. I suppose it is, but it has killed me, trying for perfect records every day of my life.
I made a lot of bad casts to bonefish, but I caught my fair share. I wrote a number of very good books, non-fiction, novels, verse. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, a lot of good books wrote themselves, using me, as I had no clue where it was coming from, just as I have no clue where these stories here are coming from, before they come from wherever they are coming from. Yet by the measures of this world, those books were inconsequential. How they sold in heaven, I cannot say, because I have not been told. The best novel I may ever write was written right here in Helen, Georgia, 2001, perhaps on this same library computer.
And I just now received a phone call from John McKleroy, my father’s lawyer, to tell me that my father passed away in his sleep yesterday morning…
Maybe I need to stop writing, for now…
Next morning epilogue…
I burst into tears when John McKleroy called yesterday afternoon, because, I said, I had not gotten to see my father before he left. John said I would see him soon, and I said, yes, but still my tears were because I had not seen him here, on this world, before he left. I said I see him often in my dreams; it is good for us.
The night before John called, I also was told in dreams why my father and I were not seeing each other: it wasn’t anyone’s fault and was just one of those things I would never have known if it had not been revealed to me. Then I got up and went to the town library and I wrote yesterday’s story. Then John called to say he had not been able to reach me the day before yesterday, to tell me that my father had gotten up that morning in his home and had breakfast, then said he wanted to take a nap and thanked everyone there for helping him.
About four months ago I was told in a dream that something undefined would change by August 2. A friend has offered to drive me over to Birmingham this afternoon so that I can attend the memorial service tomorrow. John McKleroy has offered to get me a rental car and place to stay. Friends in Birmingham have offered me their home, for a place to stay, and I will take John up on the rental car. Dreams last night were encouraging. It did not turn out as I had hoped, but then, maybe that’s why I awoke yesterday morning thinking of the Hit and Miss Club. Maybe some things just turn out the way they turn out and that’s a good enough batting average.
Sloan Young Bashinsky Jr.
2006 photo
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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