A FEW REMARKABLE PEOPLE I HAVE KNOWN
GREETINGS
This little book of
stories about five large Birmingham, Alabama people, and one from Poland via
Troy, Alabama, started falling out of me, amidst much weeping, in the early
fall of 2004.
Here’s how this little
book began:
From
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sloanbashinsky@hotmail.com
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Sent
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Thursday, September
16, 2004 4:33 PM
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To
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mecommentary@npr.ord,
atccommentary@npr.org, sflowers@npr.org
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Subject
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commentary submission
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Dear NPR,
After a two-year hiatus, I recently had my
geographic and fiscal circumstances change so that I could again listen
regularly to NPR. Then late last week I heard on an afternoon NPR show a couple
of commentaries about stagnated writers whose careers were rejuvenated by
synchronistic experiences. The next or maybe the next afternoon, I heard a
young woman read at length out of a book she had written about her public
service experiences in Africa. Yesterday morning I was moved to tell a good
buddy of a remarkable judge I’d once known, who was, I felt, a saint, even
though he did not attend church. My friend said he hoped I would write it all
down and give him and our minister a copy. I then sat down and wrote a piece
that mostly wrote itself and took me into some pretty deep places. After I read
it to my new landlady and new friend yesterday afternoon, and told her how it
had all come about and that I was thinking perhaps of submitting it to NPR, she
said that she was already thinking along those lines, and that the piece might
be the first of a number of somewhat similar pieces, perhaps to make up a book.
I had three non-fiction books published/handled by Simon & Shuster, several
lifetimes ago, it seems. Then my writing became mostly mystical non-fiction, verse
and novels, which I self-published and mostly gave away, as I then had money
for doing that. This new piece perhaps is more generally accessible. Thanks for
considering it, and, even if you don’t feel you can use it, for helping to
inspire it.
Sloan Bashinsky
[NPR did not respond.]
HE USED TO DRINK MOONSHINE
I wish to tell a story about a wonderful man I
came to know and love, Clarence W. Allgood. No kidding, that was his real name.
I met Judge when I was still in law school,
still reeling from the sudden infant death of my son, and more recently from my
father and his father’s stunning disapproval of my desire to return to the
small south Alabama town, where they had been born and raised, to practice law
with a man my father had known growing up, who also had lost a son, and who had
offered me a lock-and-key law practice in his own office, use of his secretary,
an office, and referring to me the many cases he then was referring to other
lawyers, without asking for a dime back from me. I so wanted my father’s
approval, and his father’s too, I suppose, that I was left on what felt like
the edge of a great abyss, until a law school professor told me of a federal
judge in Birmingham, my home town, who had unexpectedly had his law clerk
resign and was looking for a replacement.
I wrote to the judge, got a reply back, asking
me to pay him a visit, which I did right away. We mostly talked about fishing
and hunting, and not much about lawyering or judging, except Judge told me he
tried all the federal criminal cases in the Northern District of Alabama, and
handled all appeals from the federal bankruptcy court and all appeals from
denial of disability claims from the Social Security Administration, and sat on
a few three-judge federal panels in special cases. I would later learn that he
had invented and piloted the federal Debtor’s Court right there in Birmingham.
This court allowed ordinary wage earners to seek court help in consolidating
their otherwise unpayable debts, and pay them off on a percentage of face value
at a monthly rate they could afford. By taking a referee’s commission off each
case, Judge made his fortune; but upon writing the Debtor’s Court law to be
passed by Congress, he put into it that referees would be salaried employees
and not work on commission, as he felt the commission method would lead to
abuse. From there, he was appointed to the federal bench, not having practiced
law a day in his life. It turned out to be a brilliant appointment, as he came
to be respected by the entire federal judiciary, as far as I could tell. But
there is more about this remarkable man, which had nothing to do with his being
a judge, piloting the federal Debtor’s Court, or going to night law school in
Birmingham before that.
As a lad, Clarence developed a fondness for
hopping freight trains. At about age fifteen, he was on a train he had hopped,
and as it neared a place in Birmingham he wanted to get off, he jumped as he
had done many times for the ground, but something happened and he tripped and
his legs fell across the rails and were amputated just above the knees. To the
hospital he was rushed, where he then languished in hell’s despair, wanting to
die, he told me one day. Then, into his hospital room came a man he had never
before seen, and this man began to belittle him for behaving in the way he was
behaving. Stunned and outraged, young Clarence told the man he had a hell of a
lot of nerve coming in there like that and getting on him about his attitude
about losing his legs, when he, the accuser himself, had two legs on which to
walk. Whereupon, this man who had come from out of nowhere did a standing
two-legged jump up onto Clarence’s hospital bed and reached down and raised up
his britches legs, and, lo and behold, there were two wooden legs!
In time, Clarence attended Auburn, where he
met a young woman named Marie, whom he began to court and found she was
high-spirited and he could not boss her around but it seemed she was able
sometimes to boss him around, he told me another time. So he nick-named her
“Bully,” and he called her that as often as he called her Marie. I swear, Marie
was as wonderful as he was, and she taught me how to cook real slow in a
barbeque smoker the best leg of lamb I ever ate. I had my first taste of her
lamb up at their getaway place in the country, in St. Claire country, on which
Judge had had a small lake built and stocked it with blue gill and shell
cracker bream, crappie, bass and channel catfish. He nursed them with fish food
he threw in the lake the way a farmer might nurse a calf with a milk bottle,
whose momma had died. He caught and released, mostly, but sometimes he took
enough for Marie’s skillet.
Every moonshiner in North Alabama knew Judge,
if not from having come before him, then by hearing of him from another
moonshiner who had. Judge had a fondness for moonshiners, having once had a
taste for the brew himself, but he had to give it up, and drinking altogether,
when he developed a digestive disorder, a hiatal hernia. I got the sense that
he still missed picking up a jug every now and then, and I knew, because he
told me, that he was not happy that his courtroom was used by US Treasury
agents to prosecute moonshiners for not paying the federal alcohol stamp tax
on their product. If they had bought the stamps, the State of
Alabama would find out about it and prosecute them for making moonshine
without a state license, which was not available, as no whiskey legally could
be made in Alabama. When a local attorney was hired by some moonshiners to try
to get the state prohibition laws declared unconstitutional in a three-judge
court, on which Judge was to sit, he asked me to try to find some legal
authority to support a verdict for the plaintiffs. Alas, I could not, and the
case went for the State of Alabama. But nothing really changed, as Judge
continued to sentence convicted moonshiners to probation, who then sent him
lots of fan mail and some of them, without even being asked by anybody, took it
upon themselves to patrol his farm and keep poachers off the place.
Judge had a way of putting convicted criminals
into prison (bank robbers, car thieves caught taking cars across state lines,
counterfeiters, etc.) that tended to gain their respect and led to him getting
a lot of fan mail from them, too. He also got plenty of fan mail from their
families. There were a couple of other things about Judge, which were told to
me by people who knew him well. One was that he literally ran the Democratic
Party in Alabama behind the scenes. Anybody who wanted to serve as a US Senator
or in the House of Representatives, or to be the US Attorney, or the US
Marshall, on in the Alabama Legislature, needed to get Judge Allgood’s stamp of
approval. He was on intimate basis with John Sparkman, Lister Hill and Jim
Allen, prominent US Congressmen. The other thing was that Judge was
considered a sage, and a lot of important folks came to him in
chambers seeking his counsel: lawyers, businessmen, even ministers. I heard
ministers brought to Judge the parishioners they could not help, and if they
did what Judge recommended, their lives got better.
When it was time for me to leave Judge, I was
by then thoroughly mixed up, had contracted a terrible G.I. tract disorder, had
lost my confidence, and was committed to go to work for my father’s company,
which his father and his father’s brother-in-law had purchased from a local
family just after the war, my father being a junior partner, so to speak, until
he eventually learned enough to be ready to run and expand the business
himself, at which time he bought out his father and uncle by marriage. Judge
tried to talk me out of working for my father, said I could stay another term
with him, if I wanted, but I didn’t listen and it was a sad thing for both my father
and me. When I gave up on that misadventure four years later, my marriage now
in tatters, my psyche ready for the State Mental Hospital I often felt, Judge
told me to leave Alabama, get my act together somewhere else, then come back.
For if people came to believe that I had psychiatric troubles, it would go very
badly for me. I ignored that advice, too, went into the practice of law,
gutting out the psychic trouble and got somewhat leveled out. But many years
later, after a lot of other things had happened, it all caught up with me.
I don’t recall Judge ever talking to me about
God but one time, which was in 1990, perhaps early 1991, before I fell apart
nearly all the way, before I even knew I was going to fall apart nearly all the
way. I had occasion to be in Birmingham, and I paid him a visit in chambers. He
was glad to see me, wanted to talk. I was expecting something else, as the last
time I’d seen him in chambers was when he had told me to leave the state back
in 1973. But he must have felt I’d pulled through alright, because I’d
practiced law over a decade, before leaving Alabama in 1986, for Santa Fe, New
Mexico, trying to find help for my illness, which nothing I’d tried had helped:
medicine, psychiatry, natural medicine, meditation, various forms of exercise,
including yoga and tai chi, diets, etc. After a year in Santa Fe, I finally
begged God to help me, and after that I started having experiences that were
not of this world, and they’ve been going on ever since. It was my telling some
folks once about how it all got started in Santa Fe that got me locked up and I
thought maybe put away forever in early 1997. But that finality was not to be,
even though the going was very rough for a good while after that.
Anyway, this story is about Judge, not about
me, except to give some scruffy pedigree for the teller of this yarn that is
only now getting to what I believe is the most interesting part, which begins
with me in Judge’s chambers in 1990. He is very upset about the Eleventh
Circuit setting up so many judicial sentencing guidelines that, if
followed, render a federal judge into a robot. “But you know me, I figured out
a way around it, but not even you will I tell how I do it!” he says with that
crinkly smile I came to love so many years before. But after the smile leaves,
I see another look in his eyes, and hear a tone in his voice, and see the
tiredness and pain in his body and soul, and his loneliness: his beloved Marie
had suddenly died of a stroke ten years or so before, in his arms, and since then
he had lived alone. I know he is leaving.
In the meantime, a beautiful commemoration is
written and published by legal folks in Birmingham, whose lives Judge has
touched as much as he had touched my life. The authors call and interview many
people, including past law clerks. I tell the story of the moonshiners,
and some other stories I never feel they will publish, but they publish it and
I am sort of the one really sticking out there. But Judge seems not to mind but
is somewhat pleased by it all, after I write him to say I owe the writers one.
Judge’s note back says he is getting old and is worried about the state of his
soul, because he used to drink moonshine, cusses and doesn’t go to church. I
write back, addressing him as “Clarence.” I’ve never dared do that before now,
because only God, other federal judges and a federal judge’s spouse address a
federal judge by first name. But something makes me do it, and then I get on
him good, say after all the good he has done people, what does he mean by being
worried for his soul? When he gets to the Pearly Gates, there is going to be a
very large homecoming party thrown, very large. He writes back thanking me;
says I always was one of his favorites (of his law clerks). I weep.
I guess it was about a year later that a
friend in Birmingham calls to let me know Judge has passed on. I ask when is
the funeral? A couple of days off. I say I will get a flight out the next day.
I am now living near Denver, Colorado, have been since 1988. When I, by the
way, ask my friend if he knows the cause of death, he says that he thinks Judge
killed himself with his own .38. I think to myself something like: Just like
that tough old bird: his life in the last light, his mate gone, his body giving
out, he probably had a lot of physical pain, the Eleventh Circuit was trying to
strip his humanity and God-given wisdom out of him, he didn’t want to live out
his days in a nursing home: like an old Indian brave who knew that his time had
come, but who could not fall behind the tribe and let the animals have him to
spare them having to look after him, he did it in a modern way.
I weep at his funeral, then go back to
Colorado and write an eulogy somewhat like this one, send it to some folks in
Birmingham, who had loved Judge, but hear nothing back. I had entitled the
piece: JUDGE CLARENCE ALLGOOD: MY SPIRITUAL FATHER. He was a living saint, in
my opinion, and in the opinion of a lot of other people, I would wager by the
way they revered him. When later I asked it of him, he started coming to me in
spirit visions, sometimes, and in dreams, to mentor me in difficult times and
in times not difficult. I feel his presence all around me at this time, and I
feel more than his presence. I hear angels singing. I see the black woman who
raised me as if I were her own, even as she loved and served my white family
for twenty-five years in our home, the other living saint I have known in this
life. She did go to church, and there is a lot I could write about Sister
Charlotte Washington, but I do not sense this is the time to do it. This is the
time to write about Brother Clarence W. Allgood, who used to drink moonshine,
cussed and did not attend church.
SHE WORKS BEHIND THE
SCENES
I wish to tell a story about a wonderful woman
I once knew named Charlotte Washington, who was not, I don’t think, a
descendant of George Washington, whose name her Negro slave parents or
grandparents might have taken as their own.
As I was told it, Charlotte came to our home
looking for work while I was in the hospital being born. She was there waiting
when my mother and I came home. She would stay there, through two moves to
successively larger houses, for twenty-five years, living with us except on
Thursday afternoon and Saturday night and Sunday, when she went to visit her
other family in Bessemer, which lies about twelve miles westerly of Birmingham,
on the road to Tuscaloosa where no Negroes attended college in those days.
Except I came not to call her Charlotte, but “Cha” (Sha), as that was about all
I could get my mouth around when I was a tot. And as Sloan was a pretty hefty
moniker for a tot, I was called “Bash,” borrowing the first four letters of my
last name, which is Bashinsky. How that came about, Bashinsky, perhaps is a story
to be told another time.
Cha called me “Bashlabuttons,” and she loved
me like I was her own. She loved my parents and my younger brother and sister
like they also were her own. And my grandparents and uncles and aunts and
cousins, and my friends. She cooked food so delicious, old Southern style
cooking, the way the wealthy white folks had long eaten, that I was spoiled for
life. Her biskits were a closely guarded secret, that is, how she made them.
They weren’t big and fluffy but where thin and a bit crunchy, and with a pat of
butter and some honey, yummmmmmmm. She cooked greens and peas and beans the old
way, with bacon and pork back. She used Crisco to slowly cook fried chicken in
a black cast iron skillet; I never yet ate any other that good. She cooked
roasts (standing rib, rump, we never had pot roast), ham, leg of lamb, country
fried steak (made from cubed sirloin), and stewed and fresh corn and homemade
rolls that were to die for. I liked leftovers, and hash from the meats, as much
as the first pass at it. Her chocolate pudding and whipped cream, and boiled
custard, somewhat rare treats, still linger in my mouth at age almost
sixty-two. She must have known the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.
Cha also must have known that in my soul I was
a fisherman, because she was the one who first taught me how to fish: cane
pole, string, cork, spit-shot, safety-pin or small hook, worms or grasshoppers
in fresh water, a small piece of shrimp or cut bait in salt water. It may not
be stretching it to say she probably liked fishing better than I did, but she
didn’t get to go much when I knew her, with all the work she was doing for us:
cooking, washing and ironing our clothes and bathroom and bedroom linens, and
cleaning house. That was the first house, which was small. We had other Negro
housekeeping help in the bigger houses, and to take care of the yards. About
all I ever did was mow the grass and sometimes weed out crabgrass, all of which
I did my best to get out of doing. Somehow I had gotten the notion that white
children did not do yard work. I’d gotten some related notions, too, I’m now
ashamed to say.
I don’t remember Cha ever preaching the Bible
to me, even though she was always listening to Negro religious radio stations
while she cooked and ironed, which she seemed to do most of the time except
when she was sleeping. She had a schoolmarm way of tilting her head down,
looking sort of up at me, hands on hips, or at her sides, saying, “Umh, umh,
umh, ain’t you shamed!” whenever I did something that even I knew I ought not
to do. But usually I acted as if I hadn’t done it, while I backed off from
doing that I shouldn’t be doing. Usually is wasn’t all that awful, compared to
some of the things I would get into when I wasn’t at home, usually on weekend nights,
when I was allowed to stay out until about ten o’clock. Then came the
misadventures away from home, as I approached manhood, and those that came
afterwards. As if Cha, where she now perches, doesn’t see it all anyway. She
will speak to me about it when I am there with her, and I sure do hope that she
will not then threaten to leave and go to Bessemer like she sometimes did when
my brother and I really gave each other and her a hard time, when our parents
were out for the evening or off on a business trip. I finally got to where I
didn’t believe Cha, that she would go off to Bessemer and never come back, but
she finally did do that, and I’ll tell about that later.
In the meantime, there’s more to tell about
just what a wonderful presence she was in my young life. She was joyous
whenever I brought home some bass or bream, but catfish she loved most. She
also liked the game I shot, doves, quail, squirrels, rabbits, but would have
loved a possum, which I never wanted to hunt. I never shot a deer and am now
glad for it, but in those days I would have liked to notch one or two up.
Nowadays I’m not even glad I shot anything, but I don’t feel too bad about the
fish I caught and brought home for Cha; sometimes I got to eat them but usually
not, as my family was not into eating fish very much in those days. I can’t say
I was all that fond of fish either back then, but I sure did like catching
them. If I had to do it all over again, I might never get all those
increasingly fancy rods and reels, spin casting outfits and then the fly rods.
I might just stick with a cane pole, and I just might make a lot of noise about
Cha getting to go with me. I’m getting sentimental thinking about that.
It’s difficult for me not to get sentimental
about Cha. Maybe it’s because in my soul I’m half Negro? Maybe I felt invisible
kinship with her many children and many more grandchildren and great
grandchildren out in Bessemer and down in the country in middle Alabama in a
place she called “Eeps,” but I later learned it was Epps. My mother told me Cha
didn’t know how old she really was because the census taker had come around
only once every ten years. She might have been ninety-eight instead of
somewhere around eight-eight when her heart finally gave out on her out there
in her grandchildren’s home in Bessemer. But how could I feel such kinship,
when I was racially prejudiced against Negroes, didn’t think they should ride
at the front of buses, drink out of the same fountains or use the same
restrooms, or go to the same schools? Yes, for a brief while I was for George
Wallace.
Came the freedom marchers, and fire hoses and
police dogs and police with riot sticks and mace and probably tear gas. I was
off in another state at a white prep school, getting ready to go to a white
college, Vanderbilt, but I didn’t know yet I was going there. I was not
emotionally involved in what was going on in Birmingham, Selma and Montgomery,
but I really was emotionally involved because I was starting to experience
mixed feelings. I was sometimes remembering when I once told Cha that I would
not eat what she had prepared for the hired help, when I asked about lunch. It
was turnip greens, black-eyed peas, corn bread and buttermilk. It was the
buttermilk that caused me to say I would not eat nigger food. I can’t imagine
the black arrow that shot into her heart, but my mother let me know about it
pronto, and I felt so bad that I wanted to crawl into a hole and never come
out.
I felt just as bad one night some years later,
when I was readying to go out and discovered that I didn’t have a clean dress
shirt to wear and demanded that Cha get me one ready. My shirts were washed but
not yet ironed. She stopped what she was doing and fetched one of my shirts out
of the ironing basket and started ironing, as I impatiently stood over her and
watched. The longer she ironed, the more awful I began to feel. I’d never seen
her iron a shirt, or anything, except in passing. I had no clue what was
involved in ironing by hand just one long-sleeve cotton dress shirt. I told her
I was going out the next day and buy drip-dry shirts, and that’s what I still
wear to this day.
I don’t feel badly, though, about all the
attention Cha, and my mother, lavished on me when I would get sick and not feel
like even getting out of the bed. I doubt any child ever got better nursing
care, even as my father’s brother, a pediatrician, came over — Leo made house
calls until he retired — to look down my throat, sometimes stick me with
needles, and tell them to give me dry toast and jelly and plenty of fluids
until I started getting better. Sometimes I delayed getting better by saying I
was sort of feeling dizzy, because there was nothing I hated worse than going
to grammar school. They saw right through it, even when they let me pretend to
be getting away with it, for a day or perhaps two longer than I really needed.
Then was the time when my favorite dog ever,
George, a wonderful basset hound my mother had gone to New England to get and
bring back on a train, got run over and killed and nobody even stopped. When I
came home from school, Cha came to me and grabbed me in her arms and told me. I
was so upset I went upstairs and got my .22 rifle and loaded it and made off
down the road looking for the bastard that had killed George. But I didn’t get
really out of my bedroom — the rest of it was in my imagination — because I was
so heart-broken that I couldn’t hardly move. I cried and moaned and threatened
and cried until Cha called Uncle Leo. My mother and father were in Colorado
Springs on a business convention, and he read me the riot act, which shut me
up, but it didn’t stop me from wishing George was still with me. The next
basset we got didn’t match up to George, but when I was in law school I had one
that did, until he got run over, too. That time the car stopped, after I
started yelling after it, but I was so upset over Heathcliff that I didn’t
really feel like loading my shotgun, but my wife, Dianne, gave him hell.
Cha saw me go through a lot of pretty awful
things, but I don’t know if it was any different for any other little boy in
the big scheme of things. But there was one thing she saw me go through that
probably wasn’t exactly ordinary. I was not looking like a little boy my senior
year in law school at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, after my
seven-week-old son died of sudden infant death syndrome. I was a lot number
then, than when George had gotten run over. I was so numb I couldn’t even cry.
When the funeral was over in Birmingham, I headed with Dianne for the car to go
back to Tuscaloosa. But before we reached the car, Cha ambled straight to me
and even before she reached me I burst in to tears so awful that I couldn’t
deal with it and I got into the car and somehow drove away. That night, my
Uncle Leo, a man I had wanted to be my father because he loved to fish as much
as I did, who had taught me some of the modern methods of doing it, called and
gave me the dickens. He had no idea how many more times I would cry over the
loss of that child, but I imagine Cha sort of knew.
I also will never forget when Cha cornered me
and asked me to tell her what was wrong with my mother. “She’s got cancer, Cha,
she’s dying,” I said, grabbing her to me. I’d been sworn to secrecy by my
mother, I was not to tell anyone who didn’t already know. How could I not tell
Cha when she asked? I could not not tell her, any more than I could not weep
for George or for my son. Or now, maybe because I’m leading up to the parts of
this story that I feel are the really important parts of it.
Cha began to decline after my mother died in
1966, more so after my son died the next year. After she went to live with her
grandchildren in Bessemer, I remember going by there only once and seeing her
in the big bed in the main bedroom in their not very large house, a midget
house compared to the one she had left, which was my family’s house. She seemed
sort of delirious and didn’t want me talking about her being sick. I didn’t
even hug her, I don’t think, but I gave her family some money, maybe $20, for medicine,
if she needed it; and said to let me know if she needed more. Then I headed
back to Tuscaloosa. A couple or so weeks later, I was back up in Birmingham and
had just gotten through playing golf at the country club all of my family
belonged to, when Dianne came to pick me up and told me Cha had died. I
collapsed into her arms, said I didn’t think I could take anyone else I loved
dying.
We came back to Birmingham a few days later
for the funeral at a large Negro Baptist Church in Bessemer. Dianne and I were
the only two white people in that packed church. The minister said the
congregation welcomed their white brother and sister, surely knowing I was one
of Cha’s white children, and Dianne, too; she and Cha were very close. Only to
Dianne had Cha revealed the biskit recipe, and then very begrudgingly, after I
asked her who would cook me biskits after she went to be with God? Then the
minister told a story I’d never heard: that “Sister Washington” had from behind
the scenes led the civil rights movement in Negro churches, counseling
tolerance, patience, loving their white brothers and sisters, never stepping
forward and claiming any public credit for herself.
Then it was over and time for us all to pass
by the open casket, where my Cha lay in quiet repose. When I got there beside
her, I wanted to jump into the casket, never let her go. At the very least, I
wanted to lean over and hug her, kiss her cheek goodbye. But all I did was keep
moving, out toward the front of the church where her son, Tom Dew, was already
sitting on the front steps, head in hands. Tom had worked for my family around
and in the house for many years. He had worked for me in Tuscaloosa. I knew him
pretty well. As I sat down beside him, he wailed out, “My momma is dead, Mr.
Bash, my momma is dead, what’s I gonna do?!!!” He burst into tears. I burst
into tears, didn’t know what to tell him. I felt embarrassed, crying like that.
I stopped it, patted Tom Dew on the shoulder, got up and walked with Dianne
down the steps to our car. I still remember crying out when I was a little boy
and Cha wasn’t nearby and I was hurting about something, “I want my Cha! I
want my Cha!”
It would be many years before I saw Cha again,
early 1993, actually. She came to me in a stunning spirit vision, the first of
a number of such visions. I am not going to describe those visions, which are
indelible in my heart and I can tell every last detail if I wish. What I will
tell instead is that I became convinced Sister Charlotte Washington is an angel
in service to the Holy Spirit, who came to earth to live as a person. She
instilled into me something I cannot describe, not so much by talking to me but
mostly by simply being. The Holy Spirit has, I believe, been pretty much in
charge of my spiritual journey since it consciously began in 1987, which is
another story altogether. She has loaned me out to Jesus and angels to
instruct, comfort, protect and refine me. But always, at a distance, if not
always hands-on, She is behind the scenes, holding me to her breast, loving me,
keeping me on this world from which I often have wanted so badly to leave.
Why was I was put into the stewardship of
Sister Charlotte Washington, then Judge Clarence W. Allgood, about whom I wrote
first when I started this writing the other day? Why was that priceless gift
also given to me? Perhaps it is so some day I might write about them, as I knew
them, both on this world and from heaven after they left this world. Perhaps
there are other reasons I do not yet know and have not yet been told, that these
two angels came down to walk among men and women, and were men and women.
Perhaps it is that we are all angels, which we forget when we come to earth,
and it takes the Holy Spirit using angels like Judge Clarence Allgood and
Sister Charlotte Washington, working behind the scenes, to remind us of just
who and what we all really are.
[I did eventually meet and get to know
somewhat one other living saint – Dorothy Sherman, who started and ran the
soup kitchen in Key West.]
HE CALLED A SPADE A
SPADE
I wish to tell you of my father’s older
brother, who, when he and I first met, had just finished his residency at Duke
Medical School. It was back when he entered his freshman year of medicine there
that Leo’s family and medical school professors discovered he was a genius. He
was also the greatest fisherman in the world, as far as I was concerned later
in my young life. But for now, not even six years old, I was simply in awe of a
six-foot-four giant, weighing about two-hundred-forty pounds, whose hands
looked to be about the size of Goose Tatum’s of the Harlem Globetrotters, who
could palm a basketball and a cabbage in one hand, I supposed when I saw him
play in Birmingham a few years after I met Leo. I actually would see Leo palm
my youngest daughter, Alice, by her bare butt and lift her high above my head
squirming sort of like a baby seal when she was just home from the hospital
being born, and say in his gruff laughing way, “Now that’s a fine baby!
Leo was blessed with an inheritance that
allowed him to practice medicine in whatever way he wished. He had patients
from over the mountain, Mountain Brook and Crestline Heights, two burgs south
of Birmingham where mostly rich folks would eventually congregate, or people wanting
to be rich folks. That’s where I grew up, and my friends. Leo and my father
grew up on the Birmingham side of the mountain, in Forest Park, when that was
where the rich folks lived, or folks wanting to be rich. By the time Leo got
out of Duke and came home to be my and a lot of other babies and kids’ doctor,
the migration over the mountain was getting pretty well underway.
Actually, Red Mountain wasn’t really a
mountain but was merely a ridge at the tail end of the Appalachian range, where
once industrialists had mined iron ore, coal and limestone to make steel in
Birmingham mills. The mills closed one by one after the raw materials ran out
and it became cheaper to make steel elsewhere, than to ship the raw materials
from Mobile up the Warrior River to Birmingham. But long before that demise, a
very large cast- iron statue of a scantily-clad Blacksmith named Vulcan was
given to Birmingham by some place or folks I don’t now remember, and it was
erected on top of Red Mountain, over the cut where 20th Street went over
the top and down into Homewood, which lay just west of Mountain Brook.
To my little boy eyes, the first time I saw
Leo and heard him bellow about scarlet fever and how it and whooping cough were
primary killers of children, he looked about as big as Vulcan and made about as
much noise as I thought Vulcan might make if he could really talk, and I sort
of wanted to migrate somewhere . . . else. For I’d already had my taste of
penicillin from another doctor, when my younger brother was nearly dead from
pneumonia, while Leo was still studying to be a doctor. I was burning up with
something trying to eat me alive from inside out, and they gave me the shots,
too, only to later learn I had the world record case of the red measles. My
brother and I didn’t cross-pollinate and kill each other, and we both lived to
have Leo come around from time to time when we were sickly and eyeball us and
pretty well size up the situation before he even felt our throat and neck for
lumps and made us stick out our tongues and get that awful wooden flat gag
stick in our throat and “ahhhhhhh” shit would have been how we really felt
about it if we were old enough to know such words.
I remember one day Leo came calling when I was
home sick with something he figured a needle would take care of and my mother
was not there but my mammy Cha was, and I decided no way was he going to stick
that needle into me and I fought him tooth and nail, really a great plan, him
weighing about four times what I weighed; but it was more tussle than he or I
realized I had in me, and finally he nearly had to hog-tie me and was huffing
and cussing, a leg over me, an arm sort of around my waist, or maybe it was my
neck, when he injected me and, yep, I thought it was going to hurt like that:
it was penicillin after all, if it hurt like that. But I started getting better
pretty quick, maybe because I got so hot and bothered that the sudden fever of
it killed off whatever it was in me that had summoned Leo to poke that needle
in me in the first place, or maybe it was just the desire for him not to come
back and do it again that caused me to get better.
Leo gave up on doctoring me when I was about
twenty and had contracted some sort of deadly dysentery while running a summer
vacation route for my father’s potato chip company, Golden Flake, but I didn’t
yet know I had contracted some sort of deadly dysentery because the runs hadn’t
yet started. I was so tired that I could barely move and felt nearly dead when
Leo got there, called in by my mother from a party of some kind, accompanied by
another doctor I’d heard a lot about, named Keehn Berry. I’d been wanting to
meet Keehn because I’d heard from Leo that he was a great fisherman, but not
under such circumstances as these. I suppose Leo had ESP’d it from afar at the
party, I wouldn’t put it past him; or maybe he just figured this was the last
time he wanted to be called at night to come see me, one of his oldest
patients. He would make house calls until the day he retired, for babies and
children.
Anyway, neither Keehn nor Leo had yet figured
out what was wrong with me by the time they headed back to the party. The
figuring out would take my throwing up and crapping all over everywhere for the
rest of the night, and then for Keehn to see the wretching remains of me in his
office the next morning, which was Saturday, they still worked on Saturdays in
that time, for him to announce that I had dysentery and was headed for the
hospital without passing Go. Shigella was the bacteria breed they assayed in
the lab, and tetracycline, as I recall, was the killer drug they used on it. I
was in there nearly ten days, barely able to even move until the very end of
it. Keehn was an internist and taught medicine at the nearby University of
Alabama Medical School. A doctor’s doctor, Leo had called him. Leo never got to
treat doctors, but if he had, he would have been called that, too, I imagine.
Well, I say Leo never got to treat doctors.
Who knows what he and other doctors talked about privately? Or at the
Birmingham Country Club, where Leo loved to play cards: gin rummy, hearts,
bridge, as he chain-smoked. I always thought the cigarettes would get him, and
maybe they somehow did, but that is not what I want to talk about in this
moment. I want to tell a story I heard from perhaps the greatest plaintiff’s
lawyer the Alabama Bar ever produced, at least up to this man’s departure from
this world. Francis Hare told me that Leo was the greatest doctor who had ever
lived, and while I already knew this might be so, I wanted to hear Francis’
reasoning. It was because he had said to Leo, over a card game one afternoon, I
think this was in the 19th Hole, that he had been having headaches for
years and had never been able to get much relief. Leo reached out a giant paw
and took off Francis’ glasses and bent the stems a bit wider and put them back
onto Frances’ nose and said, “How’s that?
Then was the time my oldest daughter, Nelle,
was outside playing with neighborhood friends, and all of a sudden there was
this great yelling and shrieking and in she came holding her right arm,
dislocated at the elbow from some other kid swinging her around in the air
holding onto her wrist. I called Leo at home, I believe it was a weekend day,
and he was there in about ten minutes. Not exactly how Nelle had hoped would be
the way her day went, as she also had a close association between Leo and the
needle, and as he still was about as big as a grizzly bear, Nelle was not in
the least disposed to him ever getting his mitts on her again. But Leo was not
a bit concerned about how any child felt about him; as far as I could tell, he
was only concerned about them getting well, if they were feeling poorly. He
picked Nelle right up from behind, sat down in a straight-back chair with her
in his lap, her little back to his giant torso, and did some sort of
manipulation on her right arm, bringing her hand and forearm up to her chest
and then twisting it a bit inward, I suppose. When he then asked if that didn’t
feel better, the grateful look on Nelle’s face said she would always be glad to
see Dr. Leo after that.
The only time Leo did not treat Nelle for
pediatric stuff was one time he was out of town and another doctor had to cover
for him and I ended up taking Nelle away from that doctor and to Children’s
Hospital, and the residents agreed with me that she indeed had pneumonia and
they took over until Leo got back and took over, and she got better. There was
one other time, not pediatric, when at age five Nelle got run over on her
bicycle and nearly lost her left foot above the Achilles, and an orthopedic
surgeon saved her leg. Leo said we were darn lucky Dr. David Vesley was on call
that day at the hospital. I don’t say that to flack other doctors, only to say
what Leo said.
I mentioned in another of these little
vignettes that I once had wanted Leo to be my father because he loved to fish
as much as I did. Leo’s two sons didn’t care all that much about fishing, and
many years later Leo told Rick Ruoff, a Florida Keys fishing guide friend of
mine, to whom I had introduced Leo, that I should have been his son. We really
did spent some close time together, bonded pretty tight, but after I went
through a lot of changes, it wasn’t so tight outwardly, but inwardly I still
feel much the same about that gruff old bear of a man. Maybe that’s where I got
some of my gruffness; maybe that’s why not long ago I was told in a dream Leo
had died. Twice in that same night I was told that. But then, maybe it was
because he was no longer my doctor even in spirit ways, which he had done some
of over the past couple of years in my dreams, to help me see things a bit
differently when I was in tight places. That man sure could see, and I wonder
if it will be okay to tell some stories about how well he really could see?
I’ll test those waters, to see how the angels who monitor me 24-7 feel as I
ease into it. They have their ways of letting me know.
I believe a good place to start is a morning I
chanced into Leo and his second son, Bo, also a pediatrician, at a local
breakfast place one morning. After being in private practice for a few years,
Bo had recently gone to work for an HMO and was feeling a great weight had
lifted off him. Bo always was a more business-like doctor than had been his
father, many of whose patients were from poor black, Italian, Greek and
Lebanese families, who often paid Leo’s doctor bills in fresh vegetables,
home-baked bread, pies and cakes, and so forth. Leo made house calls in those
families’ homes too. Some of the mothers, especially those living over the
mountain, took not to liking Leo because he was wont to tell them he was into
treating babies and not mommas, and for the nervous mommas to sit down and be
quiet while he examined and figured out what was wrong with the patients, that
is, the babies. Sometimes he told mommas a lot sterner stuff than that: like it
was their own over-heatedness that was playing out in their babies. And once I
heard him tell a momma on the telephone that she had a lot of gall calling him
on Sunday afternoon about her child’s fever, after it had started the preceding
Wednesday, and it was because of people like her that he was retiring from the
practice of medicine. Then, as he figured something really was wrong with this
child, he told her to meet him with the child at the hospital. Later, Leo’s
wife, Betty told me that the real reason Leo had retired was because he had
contracted encephalitis and it had affected his memory and he was forgetting
things like who was still sick, when he was supposed to see them, and so forth.
So he took himself out of the calling to which he had dedicated his life. So
this morning over breakfast, Bo wants to talk about a new drug on the market
that reduces fever in children and makes mommas happy and his life easier. I,
now being a somewhat self-appointed expert on various forms of disease and
wellness, pipe up that I think fever is what kills infections, and so why take
a pill for it unless the fever is really high and putting a child at risk? As I
smugly wait for Leo to nod approval, he says softly, “It’s babies who couldn’t
make a fever that worried me.” Thus ended the lesson for that day from the
master who now has Alzheimer’s, which breaks my heart but I suppose he doesn’t
suffer too much from it. Last time Leo and I had a frank talk, which was
before he knew of the Alzheimer’s, he said he was waiting on the Lord to take
him. Why the Lord has now waited so darn long, I don’t know, but I sure do hope
the Lord doesn’t wait much longer, even though Leo is a lot like Noah in that
wonderful movie, the name of which I can’t now remember [The Notebook], but
Noah’s wife was named Allie, and she got Alzheimer’s and he moved into the
nursing home with her and looked after her.
Despite being a giant, Leo was a great dancer,
talked women off their feet, made them laugh, flattered them, romanced them,
but never beyond play-pretend. He once told me a story, I was about twelve, as
a shapely red-head crossed in front of the car he and another man and I were
in, during a fishing trip for speckled trout in Pensacola Bay. The fishing was
awful and the woman was striking, and the other man and Leo were both gawking,
even as Leo said that once he had done something he ought not to have done and
Miss Betty had told him that if he ever did that again she would wait until he
was asleep one night and would get a big rusty knife out of the kitchen and
slit his throat, and she really meant it, too, he said. I wonder if it really
was his throat that Betty told him she would slit. I know her well enough to
wonder that.
One time I got involved in doing some legal
work for them, the subject matter of which I’ll not get into other than to say
and I was doing it for nothing, just as Leo had treated me and my brother and
sister and my children for nothing; and I was doing it because I loved Leo and
Betty. But eventually I let the situation get away from me; I was far too close
to it, to be detached and professional, and I had to tell them to seek help
from their regular lawyers and that took a while and some money but it worked
out okay in the end, I hope. It would have worked out a lot better if they’d
had the other lawyers to begin with, because the other lawyers would not have
let them even get involved with what I let them get involved in. Betty was the
leader, Leo was following, and I was tagging along, and it was during the
darkest hour of it all that I heard Leo say things to Betty about how he would
see it to the end, protect her interests, and he told me that he loved her (and
for me to lay off her).
I have written to Leo and Betty that I do not
wish to attend any funeral but would love to throw a party for whoever goes to
the other side, and the one left behind and all the relatives and friends will
be welcome at wherever I throw the party. Leo himself never was much for
funerals: he told me he was glad his father, suffering a long time from
leukemia, had finally crossed over and was now out of pain. I never heard Leo
express concern about the state of his own soul, nor did I ever hear him talk
about the state of anyone else’s. If he liked something, he complimented it. If
he didn’t like something, he said so. He seemed, when I heard him speak of the
Bible, to enjoy the Old Testament more than the New. He was one-quarter Jew,
through is father and paternal grandfather. Like Old Testament men of God, he
called a spade a spade, and some people didn’t like that.
[Leo finally crossed over in
2006, and I stayed in the Keys and wrote an eulogy which left
my heart heaving.]
HE WAS A NOBLE
CREATION
I wish to tell you about a man I never
personally met, as he died a few years before I was born. His name was, I hope
this spelling is correct, Leopold Baczinsky, which he much later changed the
spelling of to Bashinsky, to make it phonetically pronounceable in English, and
also easier to spell, I would imagine. What I tell here was told to me by his
relatives, in bits and pieces.
When he was fifteen, Leopold’s father took his
third wife, who also was fifteen. Leopold’s mother and first stepmother had
both died, thus the third marriage. However, being the same age as his new
stepmother, Leopold decided to strike out on his own, to America. He came from
Poland by ship, and came in through either the Charleston (or was it Savannah?)
harbor, where he had a relative, who then helped him to move eastward to the
Alabama-Georgia line, to where there was another relative. After hanging out
there for a while, Leopold migrated further eastward to Troy, Alabama, where he
found employment with a Mr. Frederick Fox Henderson, I believe was the
gentleman’s name, as his son and grandson bore the same name, I knowing the
great grandson eventually.
Mr. Henderson owned a mercantile store and
Leopold started out stocking shelves and sweeping the place out in the
evenings. This went on for a while, even as Leopold learned the business from
the bottom up and eventually, perhaps in his early twenties, was managing the
entire business. The business prospered under Leopold’s stewardship, and one
day he went to Mr. Henderson and said he thought they should open a bank. Well,
Mr. Henderson said he didn’t know anything about banks. Leopold said, well,
they were already pretty much a bank, loaning out three dollars to a lot of
folks on Fridays, and they would bring back four dollars the next Friday. There
couldn’t be much more to it than that, Leopold opined. And he knew where there
was banking school, lasted six months, up in St. Louis, I believe it was,
although another relative said the school was in Montgomery. So Mr. Henderson
sent Leopold to the banking school.
In three months, Leopold was back, having
completed the school, and he opened the bank. Mr. Henderson told Leopold that
he wanted him to be the president, but Leopold said, no, it was Mr. Henderson’s
bank and he would be the president and he, Leopold, would be the vice-president
and run it for Mr. Henderson. That’s what happened, as I myself once saw a
dollar bill on that bank signed by Leopold as “v-president.” And that’s when
Leopold’s real gifts began to come forth. For the townspeople found he was
honest and they came to trust his judgment. In time, Leopold became the town
mediator and arbitrator. Folks who had disagreements went together to see him,
having agreed in advance that whatever he said would be fair, they would abide
by it. The town lawyers were nearly put to just writing up wills and contracts
and deeds.
Then came the troubles on the horizon that
Leopold saw in the late 1920s could cause banks and a lot of folks serious
trouble. He traveled to banks in nearby counties and got those bankers to
agree, if one of their banks had a run on it, the other banks would come to
that bank’s aid. That way, they might all be able to stay open and in business.
But as fate had it, the first run, of sorts, came to Henderson Bank, when a
wealthy farmer and landowner came into town one day and into the bank and right
there in the lobby loudly bellowed out that he wanted all his money because he
didn’t trust this or any other bank! There were a few local citizens in the
bank, and the ears were listening and the tongues set on ready to wag, which
Leopold knew when he came out of his office and greeted his biggest customer
and depositor and told him, no problem, he would get his money but it would
take a little while to count it all out. Did he have other errands to run in
town? Yes, the man said. Could he go off and do that and come back in about an
hour, and then pick up his money? Sure, the man said.
An hour later, the man returned to a bank now
surrounded by most of the people in Troy, who had come to see what was going to
happen. Many of them also were depositors in Henderson Bank. And then before
them, through the front door onto the marble steps leading up to the bank, came
Leopold carrying two large leather money bags, the kind you see in stage coach
and bank robberies in old western movies, I imagine, and dropped them at the
feet of the wealthy farmer and said, “There’s all your money, in gold. Do you
wish to count it?” The jingle and jangle left no doubt in anyone there’s mind
that there really was a lot of gold coin in those two bags.
The wealthy farmer’s mind was one of those
minds, as he already was thinking that maybe this was not such a good idea
after all, him hauling all that gold back to his farm, with everyone there
knowing he was hauling all of that gold back to his farm, to be put somewhere
that somebody might decide to come looking for it and take it somewhere that
nobody would ever think to look for or find it. So the wealthy farmer said he
didn’t want gold but wanted paper money instead. Now, that’s not going to work,
Leopold said, because this and all other banks issue our own paper money, which
is how it was done back in those days, and they backed it with gold that was
deposited. This depositor had just stripped the Henderson Bank of all its gold
reserves, but Leopold had not mentioned that, not wanting to create a riot and
stampede.
Cool-handed as Luke, whom Leopold would never
get to know, as he died in 1940, I think it was, he told the wealthy farmer, if
he did not trust the Henderson Bank, he could not trust the Henderson Bank’s
paper money. So please take the gold and go. Well, now, the wealthy farmer
suddenly really did have himself a predicament, didn’t he? And he tried to get
out of it by offering the gold back to Leopold, who politely declined to take
it back. Now that really set the wealthy farmer to squirming in his boots, and
maybe he was squirming in other ways too. He now is begging Leopold to take the
gold back, and Leopold is politely declining, and finally the poor man, defeated,
leaves on his wagon with his gold. But he does not give up, as he comes back
every day trying to get Leopold to take the gold back, and every day Leopold
politely declines, and, of course, nobody else is asking for their money to be
given back in gold. And when he senses it is time, Leopold finally does relent
and takes back the wealthy farmer’s gold, and it may have been said to me that
Henderson Bank was the only bank in Alabama that did not go bust during the
ensuing Great Depression. Not bad for a Pollock, but then, Leopold was a Jew.
At that time, probably the only Jew inside a
fifty-mile radius, even though his brother, Max, or maybe Max was a cousin,
would eventually come to Troy. I’m a big foggy about Max, as he seems not to
have been spoken of much when I was listening. But I did hear that Leopold
learned one day that a woman in town had called off her engagement to a man
from out of state, and Leopold went calling and asked if he could court her and
she agreed to it. Her father had fought in the Great Waw, that is, the Waw
Between the States, that is sometimes called the Waw of Northern Aggression,
but never the Civil War. Never the Civil War. Many years later, as I sat at her
big dining room table one Sunday dinner (noon meal), eating fried chicken,
cooked and served by a Negro servant, my great grandmother Elizabeth Burford
Bashinsky asked me, “Sloan (nobody but her called me Sloan, my nickname was
“Bash”), do you know why southern people eat our friend chicken with our
fingas?” “No, Grandmother,” I said, not having ever given it a moment’s thought
that there might be yet another way to eat fried chicken. “It’s because the
God-damn Yankees came down here and stole all our silverware and then we didn’t
have anything to eat our fried chicken with but our fingas!” Maybe that’s when
I understood why she was carving her fried chicken up with a knife and fork,
which I viewed as about as bad as the Yankees coming down and stealing the
silver to begin with. Meaning, I still eat my fried chicken with my fingas.
Well, it turned out Elizabeth’s Baptist family
were a bit relieved that she wanted to marry Leopold, because she was about
thirty by now and they were ascair’t maybe she wuz gonna ends up a spinst’r en
not gib dem no gran’ babies, even iffen’s dey did knos sumtin’ bout birthin’
babies. And three children they had together, my grandfather, Leo, and two
daughters, Mary Elizabeth and Helen. Mary Elizabeth would come to be called
Mary Eve, or just Mary E, and she would marry a wonderful man from Montgomery,
I believe he was from there, named Noble Crump. They lived in Montgomery and
had their three children there, Elizabeth, Jane and Helen, actually a
generation older than I, thus second cousins, I think it is; but I call them my
aunts to get their goats, as Helen, at least, is a couple of years junior to
me.
The Crumps were the major source of much of
this tale telling about Leopold, such as him going Sundays to the Baptist
Church on College Street in Troy, where Leopold and Elizabeth had built their
somewhat antebellum looking home, with marble steps leading up to the great
white pillars; just imagine how that would have impressed the folks back home
in Poland. Leopold was said to sit in the back pew, listening to the service,
but it was not said that he converted. What was said, however, was when it came
time for their children to start receiving their own religious training,
Elizabeth asked Leopold about his sentiments and he said he thought they should
be raised Christian, and that’s what happened. Today, there is little talk in
my family about our Jewish heritage. For all I know, I’m the only one who
perhaps hangs any stock in it. How could I not hang stock in a bloodline from
someone like Leopold, who sometimes comes to me and advises me how to deal with
stuff?
The great tragedy came when Helen, Leopold and
Elizabeth’s third daughter, Helen, married a wonderful man, Cyrus Case, but not
too long later she contracted a virulent pneumonia, or perhaps it was
tuberculosis, and perished very quickly. The entire family was struck something
awful in the heart, and Leopold’s wife, Elizabeth, declared a year of mourning
for the family, she and her daughter dressing in black, not going anywhere
except for the absolute necessary things, and church. But before the year was
out, Leopold could take no more and he grabbed up the entire family and took
them on a ship to Europe, to break the spell. I don’t know if the spell was
broken completely, probably wasn’t. I lost my first child and only son
suddenly, in 1967, and that spell isn’t completely broken yet, and it’s 2004. I
may write about that another time, but for now, I wish to finish telling you
about Leopold.
Actually, there isn’t all that much more to
tell, except when I went to his wife’s funeral in Troy in March 1968, she was
perhaps one hundred and four years old. I was then planning to move to Troy to
practice law with a highly respected Alabama lawyer, Pi Brantly, with whom my
father and grown up in Troy, before his father, Leo, Leopold’s son, had decided
to move to Birmingham. That migration, too, might another story be. Here,
though, I’ll only say that my own migration back to Troy all fell though
at the funeral, when my father and grandfather got very upset with Pi and me
for what I was about to do. But because of that, I would soon meet another
noble man, Judge Clarence W. Allgood, and become his law clerk, about which I
have already scribbled down a few words.
It was there, at graveside, that I saw
Leopold’s grave stone, on which an epitaph had been inscribed, by his wife, I
would later learn: “God’s noblest creation is an honest man.”
As I sit here sort of dumbstruck, I’m
wondering if Leopold had something to do with my meeting Clarence? Wouldn’t put
it past them.
HE WAS A PARISH PRIEST
I wish to tell you today about an Episcopal
priest who came into our burg south of Birmingham, Alabama when I was about
eleven years old, which would make it sometime around 1953. I don’t know where
Lee Graham came from, or even if he’d had another church before that. Even
then, he did not have exactly what folks in those days would call a church.
What he had was an old farmhouse on the edge of Crestline Village’s “business”
district, where the city library now stands across the side street from City
Hall and the Police and Fire Departments. Sometimes friends of mine and I used
the crawl space under that old farm house to hide after we had set off a big
string of firecrackers beside the fire and police stations, to watch the
firemen and policemen come out and just stand there watching what none of them
were about to do anything about but let it run its course.
Anyway, I remember going to this old farm
house one Sunday with my mother, who, as I recall, said she was very impressed
with this young minister who had come into our community. I don’t remember
anything about the service, and never would remember much about the services at
that age, as I had been raised Baptist and was attending only Sunday school,
which I enjoyed because we talked about stuff I seemed to understand. I only
think I went to one or two church services at Mountain Brook Baptist Church on
Montevallo Road, a couple of blocks from where we lived in our second house. I
didn’t like those services either. I don’t know how it was for other boys, but
this boy didn’t like sermons and church announcements, and he didn’t even like
the singing all that much either.
My mother was so taken by Lee Graham that she
finally decided to switch her membership from the Baptist Church to St. Luke’s,
which was what Lee called his little farm house church. I don’t know what he
was doing, but I know it wasn’t long before that little farm house wasn’t big
enough and they moved the whole kit and kabuddle over to what I believe had
been another church on Church Street, which was and still is the street that
runs through the middle of the Crestline Village’s business district. It was
about then that my mother switched my own church membership to St. Luke’s, and
while already the protests from the family and the Baptist Church were pretty
strong and loud, as I recall, they now got a whole lot stronger and louder. Yet
my mother was determined to hold her course, and that’s how she, my younger
brother and sister and I became Episcopalians, even though in my heart I
suppose I am still at least half Baptist, because I still like Sunday
School. [Later, I got over liking Sunday School.]
I don’t know if Lee still is on this world,
somewhere down near Tallahassee. That’s where he went after he told my mother,
she told me, that he had achieved his purpose at St. Luke’s. I wasn’t directly
privy to any of what I’m about to say, as it all was told to me by my mother,
who was devoted to Lee and St. Luke’s, served faithfully on the Altar Guild and
even was in charge of it one year, as I recall. I always felt it was her hope
that I would become an Acolyte, which I steadfastly refused to do, perhaps
because I had not wanted to be confirmed in the first place. I had wanted to be
playing baseball and going fishing those spring Saturday afternoons of my
twelfth year, instead of learning the Ten Commandments, liturgies and
catechisms. I have also suspected that my mother wanted me to be an Episcopal
priest. Regardless of whether any of that is true, I know it really bothered
her that I stopped expressing any interest in church for many years, and that I
was not much of a church-goer when she passed away when I was twenty-three,
during my second year in law school. Even so, maybe she got more done back then
than she had believed, because the few stories I’m now about to tell about Lee
Graham, which she told to me, left an indelible mark deep in my heart.
The first story was about the time of year, my
Mom said, when all Episcopal priests were required by the Diocese to preach a
sermon on tithing to the Church. Mom said Lee hated more than anything
preaching that sermon, and when he preached it, I heard him say he didn’t like
doing it. It was the only thing I remember about any sermon he preached. I
would conjecture, as it seems unlikely that there could be any other reason for
it: Lee felt if he did God’s work, then God would provide the money to
support it. Shoot, tears just came to my eyes. St. Luke’s congregation was
generously supporting their church, because, I would again conjecture, they felt
their pastor was feeding their souls. And darn, there go some more tears trying
to come out of my eyes. In fact, they got to be so many people in the
congregation, and some of them were somewhat wealthy, it being a part of
Mountain Brook, that they built a much larger church down the other side the
hill from where Montevallo Road crosses Church Street just above Crestline
Height’s Elementary School, where I went for eight years. Across Montevallo,
Church Street becomes Montrose Road, and down about a half mile, at the curve
at the bottom of a ridge, is where the new church, a rather big church, was
built and still stood last time I was by there in 1999. I believe it was around
this time that my mother started telling me that she thought Lee Graham would
be the next Bishop of the Alabama Diocese.
It wasn’t all that long after the new big
church was built that the freedom marches and sit-in’s began, and Negroes
started just showing up at some white churches for Sunday service. St. Luke’s
congregation was all white. Most of the Vestrymen had started out, I suppose,
over at the old farm house, and had walked a lot of miles with Lee. The
question arose during a Vestry meeting about what St. Luke’s would do if
Negroes came on Sunday to attend church? Lee was there observing. It was
finally agreed they would hire off-duty Mountain Brook police officers to stand
out front and turn away any Negroes who came for Sunday service. That
agreed, they were about to adjourn, my mother said to me, when Lee asked the
Vestry if they were interested in his thoughts on the matter? Well, er, yeah,
perhaps they should hear his thoughts on the matter. Well, he said his thoughts
on the matter were he had built this church up from scratch, he had put his
life and soul into it, and if they did not let Negroes come into St. Luke’s and
worship, then he would close the church and resign as their minister. Darn,
there are some more of those tears trying to get aloose from my eyes. So, the
Vestrymen backed off from what they had just agreed to do. As it turned
out, no Negroes I ever heard of came to St. Luke’s. Even so, a deep rift had
occurred, and it wasn’t all that long, maybe a couple of years, before my
mother told me Lee had told her he had accomplished what he had set out to
do and was taking a small parish near Tallahassee.
My mother passes away, cancer takes her not
all that long, as time goes, after Lee went to Tallahassee. My father has Lee
flown up to Birmingham, to do the graveside service. I don’t remember a word
Lee says, as I am numb and wondering what is wrong with me that I cannot even
cry for my own mother’s passing? The truth, I think, I was upset with her, but
I didn’t yet know I was upset with her. It all seemed such a waste: she was
only forty-five, I think it was, when she left us. She had more friends than
you could shake a stick at. All my own friends and my brother and sister’s
friends viewed her as their own special friend. They are terribly upset over
her passing; shocked might be a better word. Yet there I sit in the family row
at gave side, as Lee says last words I will never remember about my mother. He
doesn’t smile, nor do I recall ever having seen him smile. As he comes down
through the family, shaking hands with my father and brother, hugging my
sister, I am looking down, preoccupied with what I cannot comprehend. So he
passes me by, saying nothing, perhaps the strongest thing he can ever say to
me. Well, here come some more tears.
I can’t say it, except through conjecture, but
I wonder if Lee had sensed for some time that he really wasn’t cut out to have
a big congregation, if perhaps he was really a simple parish priest, who didn’t
have to deal with high finances and politics, and was supported by a small
congregation, and the Diocese when extra fiscal help was required? Why do tears
keep coming to my eyes, as I write about this man I hardly knew? Why do I only
really feel home in an Episcopal nave, while in other churches I feel like I am
merely a visitor? Why do I miss the old Episcopal Liturgy and not feel much of
anything when the new Liturgy is used? Why do I suddenly feel Lee has been with
me in spirit ever since I first laid eyes on him and he stared right into my
soul?
Maybe I have answered the question so many
people once asked about why my mother left the Baptist Church to go to church
in an old farmhouse in Crestline Village. Maybe I have answered the question of
why I feel the strong presence of God anytime I attend an Episcopal service,
and usually have a sort of special private service that parallels the one it
seems everyone else is having. Maybe I have answered the question of why I have
a sort of private service even when I go into an Episcopal Church during off
hours and just sit there quietly until something happens. Maybe Lee Graham is
there, waiting on me. Maybe those were Jesus’ eyes staring through him at me,
causing these tears to keeping trying to get out of me.
WHAT YOU SAW WAS WHAT
YOU GOT
I wish to tell you today about a lawyer who
represented my family for many years. It was said John Gillon just showed up
one day in Birmingham, Alabama, at the law firm where Frank Spain was
practicing law. Frank had grown up in Troy, Alabama, with my Grandfather Leo
Bashinsky and a kid named Frank Samford, who one day would buy a small life insurance
company out of receivership up in Pennsylvania, I think it was, and move that
firm to Birmingham.
I don’t know whether that was before or after
John Gillon talked Frank Spain into giving him office space and use of the law
firm’s library, in return for his doing some legal work for the firm. But what
do know is, eventually, John became a senior partner in the firm and it
represented Liberty National Life Insurance Company through its meteoric rise
in value under Frank Samford’s stewardship. Today, Liberty National is a wholly
owned subsidiary of Torchmark Corporation, which, I believe, still has the best
earnings record of any company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Its
common stock is the foundation of my family’s wealth.
John Gillon eventually was invited to become a
member of the law firm. The way the story went, Frank Spain and another
partner, perhaps it was Hobart Grooms, who later would become a United States
District Judge in Birmingham, were discussing a case in the hallway of the law
firm. Apparently, there was some legal issue they did not have an answer for.
In that moment, a voice wafted from out of what lawyers call “the stacks,”
which are the long, tall shelves of law books found in law firms and law school
libraries. The voice said something like, “I believe you can find the answer to
that question in . . .” Now, not only did the voice name the case, say it
was Johnson v. Baker. The voice also gave the legal reporter in which the
case could be found, and the precise volume and page number, say 15
Alabama Reports 237. That’s precisely where Frank Spain and the other lawyer
found the answer to the legal question they were discussing. I doubt John
Gillon forgot anything he ever read or heard spoken, and he read and heard a
lot. For him, the law was a life calling, his jealous mistress.
I have written elsewhere that my first child
and only son died of sudden infant death syndrome in 1967, during my senior
year in law school. One of the things that happened during the aftermath, which
I also wrote earlier, was that I lucked into what sure seemed to me and a few
other people like a sweetheart deal with a well-respected lawyer in Troy, where
my Bashinsky ancestors lived before my Grandfather Bashinsky moved his family
to Birmingham in the 1920s, I think it was. My grandfather and father were not
in favor of my Troy plans, and, in an effort to help me see more clearly, my
father suggested I visit with John Gillon, who had grown up in a small town,
and see what he might have to say about living in a small town.
That seemed like good advice, so a few days
later I went to Spain-Gillon’s offices in the John Hand Building on the corner
of 20th Street and 1st Avenue North. The John Hand Building used to
be the main office of what then was First National Bank of Birmingham, which
today is known as AmSouth Bank. John Hand had either been the original founder
of the bank, or pretty close to it. This was the bank that enjoyed the
Bashinskys’ banking business, it was the trustee under the various trusts John
Gillon had drawn up for the benefit of my Grandfather Bashinsky’s grandchildren
and great grandchildren, and some day it would administer the estates of my
Grandfather Bashinsky and his wife, Cora, after they left this world. And I
believe Spain-Gillon then did some legal work for First National.
John suggested we go into the library to chat.
Perhaps it was all set up, perhaps it just happened, but suddenly most of the
lawyers in the firm were sitting around that long library table with John and
me. I knew them, more or less, and two of them had been in my law school class
at Alabama. John pulled out his pipe, stuffed in some tobacco, and lit and
puffed it, before looking at me with those steely, twinkly eyes and saying, “I
understand you want to practice law in a small town?” I said that was my plan.
His next remark was, “Do you know what it’s like to live in a small town?” I
said I did not, as I’d never lived in one. (I do now). “Well, he said, with a
now mischievous grin, “All you have to do is go out to the golf course on
Saturday night and drive around it to find out who’s fucking whose wife.”
Now you probably don’t know, because I
probably haven’t said it straight out yet, but the death of our son had caused
some difficulties between my wife and me, and it was a flat out truth that I
was actively entertaining my getting to know some of the women in Troy on an
intimate basis after I got there. John stared into my eyes, as if he knew just
what I was thinking about, and not another word was said by him, or by me.
However, there is something else you probably don’t know, because I probably
haven’t said it yet either. John was a dedicated Christian, Bible scholar and
churchman. For him to say something like that to anyone was a bit beyond the
pale, I certainly thought in that moment. But perhaps I didn’t know him yet,
and perhaps even his law firm were as taken by surprise as I, but not for the
same reasons, as I sure as hell wasn’t letting on that I’d just had my hide
nailed to a barn door. But what happened was, the entire lot of them burst out
into riotous laughter, as if it was the funniest thing they had ever heard
said.
Maybe it was later that same day when I asked
John privately if Spain-Gillon had an opening for a lawyer fresh out of law
school. He said he would check with the firm and get back to me, but when he
called a few days later, it was to say they were not then looking for a new
lawyer. So I was left sitting between Troy and nowhere in particular law firm,
until a law professor told me about a federal judge in Birmingham having just
had his law clerk resign unexpectedly. As I already wrote to begin this series
of stories, that is how I came to know Judge Clarence W. Allgood, one of the
three United States District Judges in Birmingham. Hobart Grooms was another
one, and Seybourne Lynne was the third. They all three seemed to take me under
their wing, even as about two or three weeks into my appointment with Judge
Allgood, John Gillon called me on the telephone in my law clerk office and said
something had changed and now Spain-Gillon needed another lawyer, and was I
interested? I was tempted, but I’d only just gotten started with Judge Allgood,
he’d already suddenly lost a law clerk just before me, and I declined the
offer. It was a few years before I wondered to myself if my grandfather and
father might not have had something to do with something changing in
Spain-Gillon: like maybe one or both of them suggested to John Gillon
maybe the law firm might consider hiring me on. It was a fact Spain-Gillon not
only handled all the Bashinskys’ personal legal work, they also represented my
father’s company. Golden Flake might then have been the firm’s largest client.
One of Spain-Gillon’s young lawyers at that
time, John McKleroy, had been in my law school class, and some years later
would be in my tax law school class. Between his two stints in law school, John
McKleroy was trained by John Gillon. That training probably began in earnest
after my father decided that he wanted to take Golden Flake public around 1970.
Spain-Gillon had never handled a public offering, but said it wanted to do it.
After my father agreed, John Gillon gave it to John McKleroy, who surely
started from scratch, because Spain-Gillon had never done this before and there
were no securities courses in law school while we were there. The offering
seemed to go off well, but later it was discovered by John McKleroy that
something had been overlooked, I’m not now sure what it was but it was
significant and a lot seemed at stake. John Gillon put it all face-up on the
table with my father and said Spain-Gillon would take care of it on its dime.
And it was taken care of. John McKleroy now represents all of my father’s
myriad legal interests, and the interests of some of my other relatives, while
other members of Spain-Gillon represent even other relatives. And Spain &
Gillon remains Golden Flake’s (now Golden Enterprises’) corporate counsel. But
perhaps I get ahead of myself, so let me go back in time and tell you of yet
another short but sweet sermon.
It was around 1982. I had almost given up
on the general practice of law, which I had entered in 1973, after working
four years for Golden Flake. I was in poor health and was stumbling around in
general. Downtown around noon one day, I dropped into John’s Restaurant
on 21st Street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues North. A popular New
Orleans and Greek-style sea food cuisine, John’s also served plate lunches,
meat and two or three veggies, cornbread and rolls, tea or coffee, for about five
bucks. There even was a special table where only lawyers sat, just dropping in
for lunch and chewing the fat. John Gillon and some men I did not recognize
were sitting at their own table, which suggested they probably were not just
chewing the fat.
When I went over to say hi to John, he said he
wanted to see me about something, could I come by his office? Sure, I said, I’d
come by. Wow, what could that be? I let my imagination run pretty good with it.
I should have known better. When I dropped in on John a few days later, he
said, “You’re never going to be happy until you find God. That’s all I wanted
to say to you.” We then talked about different things that were on my mind but
probably didn’t have anything to do with what John had just speared me with.
Finally, John pulled out a Zondervern Bible, my first inkling that such a Bible
was even in existence, and showed it to me. It seemed to interest him a great
deal, making fine distinctions between English and Greek translations.
I believed in God, always had. But for me the
Bible was an arcane law book, written for people in another time, even as it
seemed to threaten to upend me and other people in this time. Church didn’t
appeal at all to me. I felt a lot closer to God in my vegetable garden,
paddling white-water rivers with friends, writing, and stalking bonefish on the
flats in the Florida Keys, alone, with my second wife, Jane, and with our
fishing guide friend, Rick Ruoff. I felt a lot closer to God junking with Jane,
helping her with her artwork, going with her to out of town art shows, hanging
out and fishing at her family’s lake property in Blount County, half-way to
Oneonta from Birmingham, near the communities of Allgood, Remlap and Palmer.
(Remlap is Palmer spelled backwards). I felt a lot closer to God when I was
with my daughters. Sometimes I felt a lot closer to God when I was with other
family members. I had never felt close to God practicing law. I knew in my
bones John was correct, but didn’t know what to do about it.
I don’t remember having much dealing with John
after that fated day. However, I do remember hearing his wife had died
and he had eventually remarried at the ripe young age of about
eighty-five. I also remember, after the young lawyers in his law firm decided
they wanted to purchase and restore an old building on 2nd Avenue North,
just east of 21st Street for their modern law office, John was said to
have squawked a bit, but then went along. I also remember seeing his office in
the new law firm; he wasn’t there at that time. It looked just like his office
at the old location: he still had his old wooden desk and wooden swivel chair,
the same metal and wooden bookshelves, the same green visor, to keep the glare
off the law books he read as voraciously as ever. It as if time had outwardly
stood still for John Gillon, the lawyer, while inwardly he surely was still the
one lawyer I would want representing me in just about anything I might need a
lawyer for, even it was not a area in which he had practical expertise. He had
native expertise, no matter what area of the law he was in, and I saw it
proven time and time again.
Many times, things would happen to Golden
Flake that would cause most people or businesses to file a lawsuit. However,
nearly every time that happened, John told my father not to file a lawsuit, but
to try to work it out, and if that didn’t get it taken care of, then to let it
go. This scenario came about most often when a shortage of potatoes developed
and the price of spuds shot straight up through the roof. Some farmers would
bolt their potato contracts entered into before the growing season had begun,
and sell their potato crops to the highest bidder. Some of these farmers had
been bailed out in other years, when there had been a surplus crop and spud
prices had plunged, but Golden Flake had not gone shopping for the lowest
offers and had honored the contracts. Mounted over doorways in Golden Flake’s
offices and lunch rooms are large golden rulers, on which are written, “Do unto
others as you want done unto you.”
There were only two times known to me, when
John Gillon was prepared to litigate. The first time actually resulted in
litigation, after another company came into Birmingham selling “Golden Flake”
bread. The natural assumption in the average person’s mind was this bread
company was part of the Golden Flake “Potato Chip Company,” which was a
household name and product in Birmingham and Alabama. John invoked the federal
trademark and unfair competition laws in the local United States District
Court, and Golden Flake ended up collecting treble damages, as I recall the
story.
The other time was after I had clerked for
Judge Allgood in 1968-69, and now was working for Golden Flake. We had started
making our own corn chips because potatoes were about ninety-percent water and
it was very good to get fifteen pounds of potato chips out of a hundred pounds
of whole potatoes, after all the water was boiled out of the sliced raw
potatoes and a little oil was absorbed in the cooking process. Whereas, a
hundred pounds of dry corn might produce about one hundred and fifteen pounds
of corn chips after oil absorption. Hoping to cash in on Fritos’ corn chip
franchise with consumers, we had designed our corn chip packaging to sort of
resemble Fritos corn chip packaging. By and by, Frito-Lay’s lawyers wrote a low
key letter, saying Frito-Lay had done some market research in Montgomery,
Alabama grocery stores, and the market research indicated Golden Flake Corn
Chips packaging so resembled Fritos Corn Chips packaging that confusion was
resulting in the market place. A meeting at Golden Flake’s Birmingham offices
was requested, to discuss resolving this confusion.
Frito-Lay had come about by virtue of Lay’s
Potato Chips jobbing Fritos Corn Chips for many years. Although Frito was
larger than Lay’s, Herman Lay owned all of his company and ended up with more
stock in the merged company than anyone else, and thus became its chairman of
the board. My father, perhaps the shrewdest investor on this planet, according
to some people who perhaps ought to know, then purchased a large amount of
Frito-Lay’s common stock, hedging his bet on his own company. That hedge would
prove very profitable some years later, when Pepsi-Cola and Frito-Lay merged,
and Herman Lay ended up being Chairman of the Board of PepsiCo. No doubt, my
father’s position in Frito-Lay common stock was known to Frito-Lay’s attorneys
when we all sat down that day to discuss the corn chip package confusion we
were said to be creating in the market place.
It all boiled down to the fact that Fritos
Corn Chips had a familiar slanted red bar across the top of its packaging, in
the middle of which slanted red bar was a red oval, over which was written
“Fritos” in white letters. For all of its products — potato chips, cheese
curls, pork skins, popcorn, peanuts, snack crackers and so forth — Golden Flake
used a familiar red slanted bar across the top of its packaging, in the middle
of which slanted red bar nestled a golden potato chip, over which was written
Golden Flake in red letters. Frito-Lay’s lawyers wanted Golden Flake to remove
the slanted red bar from its corn chip packaging, and, of course, Golden Flake
did not wish to do that.
Some time before this meeting, John Gillon had
asked us to round up all available photos of Golden Flake packaging and trucks that
could be found. The photos showed this very same slanted bar and logo had been
featured on all Golden Flake packaging and route and transport trucks since the
1920s, which predated Fritos going into business. After showing the photo album
to Frito-Lay’s lawyers, John said, if there was any confusion in the market
place, Fritos had caused it way back when, by choosing a logo similar to Golden
Flake’s. Therefore, Frito-Lay could stop the confusion by redesigning its corn
chip packaging.
The matter was settled when Golden Flake
agreed to slightly change the coloration of its corn chip packaging, and
instead of using opaque packaging, it would now use packaging with a window
that allowed the corn chips to be seen. Golden Flake had always used windowed packaging,
except it had not done so with corn chips because Fritos had set the national
standard by using opaque packaging for corn chips. After going to the windowed
packaging, Golden Flake’s corn chip sales increased because some consumers
liked to see what they were getting. It was that way also with John Gillon:
what you saw was what you got.
So now comes, I sense, the moment of truth. I
see John Gillon before me. He’s puffing that same old pipe, sitting in that
same old wooden swivel chair beside that same old wooden roll top desk. He’s
looking straight into me. He’s wanting to know if I’m now ready to take an
entry-level position in my Father’s law firm. This time I’m saying yes, and
here come the tears.
POSTSCRIPT
Someone who read this last story asked me if I
ever went to work for my father’s law firm? I told this person, who was a
devout Christian, to re-read the story and to note the spelling of Father in
the last paragraph.
For others, perhaps this poem that fell out of
me a few months prelude to this little book falling out of me explains it
better:
SHANGHAIED
A calling to serve carries its own wisdom,
which legitimates both the calling and the serving
so that the two are one.
Only the one called to serve
can know this wisdom,
and for some who are called
the knowing comes easily,
while for others the knowing is a fiery baptism.
Each calling is different,
and while some callings can be declined,
others cannot,
and those whose calling is without repentance
know they are in it for the duration of the calling,
and while others may try to persuade them out of it,
the calling for ones such as these always prevails;
thus is it advised to all called for keeps
that they view their calling as a blessing
even when it seems at times to be a curse,
and that they try to reconcile the loss of their captain status
and allow the Spirit of God to man the helm of their ship,
and be glad and willing crew members thereon,
knowing that all sailing ships of souls
need a crew as well as a captain
to maintain and navigate the ship through
seas of many tones, depths and flavors;
so consider each league sailed
as part of the overall journey
going to where the captain deigns to go
by using whatever winds and sea currents available
to navigate the ship to the experiences
this ship and crew need to have
in order to fulfill their calling and its wisdom
revealed by the journey of many leagues,
many known only to the ship and its crew,
all of whom come to know,
some sooner than others,
that once conscripted
there is no safe jumping ship.
which legitimates both the calling and the serving
so that the two are one.
Only the one called to serve
can know this wisdom,
and for some who are called
the knowing comes easily,
while for others the knowing is a fiery baptism.
Each calling is different,
and while some callings can be declined,
others cannot,
and those whose calling is without repentance
know they are in it for the duration of the calling,
and while others may try to persuade them out of it,
the calling for ones such as these always prevails;
thus is it advised to all called for keeps
that they view their calling as a blessing
even when it seems at times to be a curse,
and that they try to reconcile the loss of their captain status
and allow the Spirit of God to man the helm of their ship,
and be glad and willing crew members thereon,
knowing that all sailing ships of souls
need a crew as well as a captain
to maintain and navigate the ship through
seas of many tones, depths and flavors;
so consider each league sailed
as part of the overall journey
going to where the captain deigns to go
by using whatever winds and sea currents available
to navigate the ship to the experiences
this ship and crew need to have
in order to fulfill their calling and its wisdom
revealed by the journey of many leagues,
many known only to the ship and its crew,
all of whom come to know,
some sooner than others,
that once conscripted
there is no safe jumping ship.
(7 June 2004)
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