P. J. Laska "Morning In America A Poetic Assemblage From The Long Decade"

P. J. Laska “Morning In America A Poetic Assemblage From The Long Decade”

Igneus Press 2016 $8.50 Paperback

              Appalachian poet and philosopher P. J. Laska could not have chosen a better or more appropriate time to release his new book, “Morning In America A Poetic Assemblage From The Long Decade”.  "Morning In America" by P. J. LaskaThe book is, as the subtitle suggests, an assemblage of poetry and Socratic teaching set as an ongoing discussion between his protagonist, Dominic Love, and a friend named Anonymas.  The book’s title hails back to a fine collection of poetry which Laska also published with Igneus Press in 1991.  The earlier book was a collection of powerful, kick like a mule poetry which bewailed the destructive policies of the Reagan Administration.  The new book uses the same kind of philosophically based poetry and the Socratic Method to attempt to educate the world to the current political reversion in a large chunk of the American populace toward such destructive and debilitating politics.  Some of the poetry was contained in the earlier work but much of the text is brand new and just as powerful.

P. J. Laska Photo By Roger D. Hicks

              The poetry is reminiscent of the best work of another native West Virginian, Former Heavyweight Champion Jack Dempsey, who grew up in the coalfields of Logan County just as P. J. Laska was raised in an immigrant coal mining family in northern West Virginia.  The poetry attacks a problem in ways very similar to Jack Dempsey attacking an opponent in the ring.  Two or three light poetic jabs flick across the attention span of the reader before being followed by a head jarring left hook which delivers a key philosophical and political concept which points out how the American military industrial complex has controlled and manipulated both the American populace and much of the greater world over the years from the Viet Nam War to the current conflicts in Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq. Laska knows just as well as Dempsey how to deliver a critical blow and both learned it in the coalfields of Appalachia.

Roger D. Hicks & P. J. Laska Photo By Candice Hicks

 The reader should also keep in mind that before Laska became a doctoral level philosopher poet he was a Viet Nam era military analyst and linguist.  Before he was a finalist for a National Book Award in the 1970’s, he learned both Russian and English as a child in a coal mining family of immigrants.  Before P. J. Laska adopted Buddhism as a central pillar of his life, he prepared the host and ceremonial garments in his local Catholic church as an altar boy.  P. J. Laska is a man of the world who has risen from relative poverty to national recognition as a poet, philosopher, critic, essayist, educator, and magazine editor.  This book is the culmination of a lifetime of deep thought on the part of a highly contemplative man who was moved to consider many paradoxes in the world including poverty & wealth, government & citizenship, socialism & oligarchy, as well as good & evil.  In his new book, Laska reminds those of us who forgot and hopes to instruct those who never knew that in many cases oligarchy and evil won. 

The opening poem in the book is a republication of the title piece from “The Day The Eighties Began” which reminds us of the day Ronald Reagan was allowed by organized labor and the American populace to fire the nation’s air traffic controllers, an act which began a slippery slope in American politics and public thought which has continued in the disasters of trickledown economics, the Iraq War and that country’s subsequent fragmentation and the birth of both Al Qaeda and Isis.  It is easy for a devoted reader of poetry to hear this discussion of the work and choose to avoid such directly political poetry.  But keep in mind, this poet was a finalist for a National Book Award with his first book, “D. C. Images And Other Poems”.  He is a fine writer and this is excellent, well-constructed, linguistically artful poetry.  These poems are well deserved candidates for any future anthology of Appalachian or American poetry.  Many of them have been previously competitively selected and published in highly respected magazines.  This author’s personal favorite is the poem “Down And Back” which is set as a story of driving through an Appalachian night, picking up a hitchhiker, and discussing the utterly human consequences of the economics of oligarchy.  A working mother tries to rationalize how she will handle the loss of her Black Lung benefits.  The hitchhiker says it all in the powerful sentence, “You don’t know what you can stand ‘till it comes around”.  And that, my friend, is a sentence which has come out of the mouths of many thousands of Americans who have suffered the consequences of “The Long Decade”. 

Buy this book! Read it closely and slowly! Give yourself time to consider ruminatively all you find in it which provokes such consideration.  Then, when the dust in your head has settled from that last linguistic left hook, go back and read it again. 

Knott County High School--My Favorite Places In Appalachia

I graduated from Knott County High School in 1968.  I entered school there in the fall of 1964 after graduating from Salisbury Elementary on Beaver Creek.  I spent one year as a manager of the basket ball team under Coach James Moore.  As I recall, our freshman class entered with about 110 students and only graduated 58.  But I have always been proud of the fact that our graduating class finally had at least 6 students who received a master's degree or higher in college.  We had an interesting and generally well qualified faculty and Principal Ed Madden was a major factor in the lives of many of his students.  Hubbard Martin, who was near retirement at the time,  primarily taught  mathematics courses but could also teach English and might well have been competent at nearly any course in the somewhat limited curriculum.  He was famous for being able to do long division and multiplication either in his head or at lightning speed on a chalk board. When Hubbard Martin was near death in the University of Kentucky Hospital I was working in Lexington and heard that he was hospitalized.  I visited him in the hospital to thank him for trying to keep me on track.

Burnis Jacobs also taught mathematics and algebra and loved to hunt, especially coon hunting.  It was a common ploy for students who wished to avoid class work to attempt to get Burnis interested in telling a coon hunting story in order to distract him.  Burnis also made a somewhat unsuccessful attempt to start a Boy Scout Troop loosely connected to the school.  It was not successful primarily because most of the boys in the school were from families who were too poor to buy the uniforms and other items necessary to be a good Boy Scout.  Burnis was one of my favorite teachers and got me through Algebra I and II after I had somewhat deliberately failed Algebra I under Hubbard Martin due to my tendency to be a nuisance in class.  His wife, Mary Lois Jacobs, taught English and is still on my Facebook Friends list.

Wallace Niece taught the social science courses and loved to show horses.  He was also somewhat subject to narcolepsy and had been known to fall asleep in class from time to time. I will always remember Wallace Niece discussing the Great Appalachian Migration and imitating a bus station attendant using the station PA system to inform travellers that the "bus is now leaving for Dayton, Detroit, Middletown, and all points north."  Wallace Niece may well have been the first person to make an attempt to impress on me the importance of Appalachia and being Appalachian.  Jean Francis also taught English courses and was in the early years of her career when I was in high school.   

The building was one of those wonderful old WPA cut stone structures built during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.  It had weaknesses in its design and showed some wear by the time I arrived.  But it had still been built to last a thousand years with ongoing maintenance.  It is a shame it no longer exists.  When Knott County consolidated the high schools in the county with the exceptions of Cordia High School and the Hindman Settlement School, the building was sold at auction and bought by Ed Madden who later sold it to Alice Lloyd College which demolished it to make a parking lot.  That was a terrible waste of a historic building.

If anyone who reads this has old photographs from Knott County High School and is willing to have them added to this post, I would greatly appreciate it.  You can send me an E-mail at rchicks@mrtc.com and we will arrange to post them with full professional credit to the photographer who shot them.

I will write further about the school and expand this post as soon as I have some more time.  But let me say the most important thing I can about the school.  We graduated from Knott County High School not Knott County Central.  From time to time I see one of my classmates list the wrong school on their Facebook page and I always remind them to change it.  Our school had a fairly long and positive history before being consolidated and those of us who went to school there should never allow it to be forgotten. 

Where Rock Fork Used To Be--My Favorite Places In Appalachia

Rock Fork Knott County Kentucky

At Garrett, KY, which is actually in Floyd County, you will find the mouth of Rock Fork Creek most of which lies in Knott County.  Actually most of what used to be Rock Fork Creek lies in Knott County Kentucky.  In my childhood and youth, Rock Fork Creek was a small creek about five or six miles long which wound away from Garrett, crossed the Knott County line and ended on one of the highest ridges in Knott County lying up against the area that my good friend, Kentucky poet Albert Stewart knew and loved as The Kingdom of Yellow Mountain.  But in the 1970's, the Kentucky Department of Highways decided to convert Kentucky Route 80, a serpentine two lane road, into a four lane highway between Prestonsburg, the county seat of Floyd County, and Hindman, the county seat of Knott County.  Nearly no one who lived in the areas affected wanted to see the road expanded except a few business people and coal operators.  Albert Stewart fought valiantly to stop the road but lost.  It demolished nearly all of Rock Fork that was meaningful and paved it over with only a few house sites and ridges left of what had been one of the most beautiful little creeks in Appalachia.  In many ways, this is a story about road construction which can be told of hundreds of little creeks in the mountains.  But the destruction of Rock Fork and Yellow Mountain was personal to Al Stewart, most of residents of Rock Fork, and to me.  

Rock Fork is and will always be in my memories and my heart.  It is also literally in my DNA.  My great grandfather, Hence Hicks is buried in the Chaffins Family Cemetery beside the Rock Fork Freewill Baptist Church which survived the highway destruction.  Hence Hicks's grave, and those of several other members of my family, are not far from the hillsides where Hence Hicks scratched out with a hoe the $4,100 for which he was murdered in a cornfield in 1935.  My maternal grandfather, Woots Hicks, was born and raised on Rock Fork and so was my mother, Mellie Hicks.  Somewhere on Rock Fork, lost to the sands of time, are the graves of an aunt and uncle who died in childhood.  Their sandstone markers are long gone.  Probably only dust remains of their bodies.  Rock Fork Creek is literally in my DNA.  

In my misspent youth, I became quite close to several people my own age who grew up and lived on Rock Fork.  Several of us were then and still are proud to have been among the first hippies in Eastern Kentucky.  We spent time together, sometimes partied together, railed against injustice together, and formed opinions which still direct our lives today.  Two of the young men who were in that group were Avery Chaffins and Snap Conley who both died in a car wreck at the Mouth of Stone Coal Creek about a mile from the Mouth of Rock Fork Creek as they were returning late one night from a trip to Vicco in Perry County, the closest wet county at the time.  The last time I ever saw Snap Conley alive was within sight of the Rock Fork Freewill Baptist Church where their funeral was held.  They are buried in a little joint Chaffins & Conley Family Cemetery on Rock Fork which the two families began upon their deaths along the line fence of the two little family farms.  During the youth service which was held in the church, with their caskets sitting end to end in front, I sat with Maude Chaffins, the mother of the Chaffins boys who were a part of that group of young hippies.  Maude Chaffins often comes to my mind because she went out of her way to take care of many of us not just her own children.  If you were able to keep your mouth shut and sleep it off, when you made it to Maude's house you knew you were safe for the night.  

Maude had a habit of not always wearing her dentures and leaving them in a coffee cup of Clorox water on the back of her stove.  Snap Conley had a habit of eating and drinking anything he could get his hands on and, since he grew up next door, was always in and out of the Chaffins house.  Many of us will never forget the time he reflexively grabbed the cup holding Maude's dentures and drank Clorox water from it thinking it was coffee or some other edible drink.  

Rock Fork Creek was destroyed by the highway but still technically remains with the four lane highway cutting its way up the entire creek to the ridge into Yellow Mountain.  Only the mountains on the sides of the creek and a few house sites on level ground remain of the Rock Fork that used to be.  But for those of us who lived some portion of our lives there, Rock Fork Creek will forever be in our hearts and minds.  Rock Fork Creek is literally in my DNA. 

Why I Make French Toast

Why I Make French Toast

A Cultural Experience Paper

            My French toast is one of the favorite weekend breakfasts of both my wife and daughter.  For most people, French toast is nothing more than a fast, easy, inexpensive way to prepare breakfast.  Every time I make French toast I retell some version of the same story about where, when, how, and from whom I learned to make French toast.  For my family, the story is much more important than the French toast.  For me, the story is a way to remind myself of many of the most important values and ideas I have learned in my life.  It is also a way to remember and honor one of the finest men I have ever known.

            When I was about twenty-one, I lived in Summers County, West Virginia, on an institution called the Appalachian South Folklife Center.  The Folklife Center was founded by Don West and his wife Connie.  They lived there until shortly before their deaths in the early 1990’s.  Prior to founding the Folklife Center they had lived in Baltimore, Atlanta, and a variety of other cities and towns all over the Southern Appalachian Region.  Don West was a poet, preacher, teacher, union organizer, and social activist.  Connie was an Appalachian artist and social activist.  She spent most of her life raising her two daughters and supporting Don in his work.  Their lives were dedicated to the preservation of Appalachian culture, social activism, and the teaching of art, literature, and ideas related to those subjects.

            All year round in the 1970’s, large groups of people from all over the country and world came to the Folklife Center for workshops, festivals, and other activities.  Don West felt very strongly that the Folklife Center should not accept any government funding due to the bureaucratic and ideological controls which would have been attached to such funding.  As a result, money to operate the Folklife Center was always tight and spending had to be closely monitored. 

            One of the ways that Don West cut spending was by frequently feeding French toast for breakfast to large groups.  Don would frequently perform the cooking chores himself even though he was the founder and Executive Director.  The eggs came from chickens which were kept on the large farm which is the site of the Folklife Center.  The bread was always from the thrift store; or in the vernacular of the poor, was ‘day-old bread’.  Don had grown up on a hillside farm in North Georgia and was the hardest working person I ever knew.  He had paid his way through Lincoln Memorial University by working  in a dozen or more jobs in his four years there. He had done the same while earning a master’s degree from Vanderbilt. He had gone on to work in textile mills and coal mines in conjunction with his union organizing activities.  As the director of activities at the Folklife Center, he ran the farm and often engaged in carpentry, plumbing, or logging in order to lower expenses.  Don would enter the kitchen at 5 or 6am with his large calloused hands and do the work in the kitchen while simultaneously teaching Appalachian culture, literature, or union history to whomever might be helping him that morning.  On many of those mornings, I was lucky enough to be helping Don West.

            Don had graduated from Lincoln Memorial University in 1929 in a class that included James Still and Jesse Stuart who were also famous Appalachian writers.  Don was famous enough at his death that the New York Times carried his obituary.  However, he was not nearly as well known as his two classmates.  But collectively, they are often referred to as the best group of regional writers to graduate in a single class from any college or university.  The fact that Don West was not as well known was largely a matter of choice on his part.  His first major book of poetry, “Clods Of Southern Earth” was a major pre-publication success and received very positive reviews all over the country.  Don West could have pursued his writing career purely for the sake of money and success and would have been likely to be just as well known as Still and Stuart.  Instead, he chose to focus the work of his life on the promotion of Appalachian culture, unionism, and social activism in a consistent and unflinching way for the rest of his life.

            Don West was actively involved in the defense of the Scottsboro Boys. Don West was run out of Atlanta for working to spread the truth about Angelo Herndon, a black radical who was sentenced to death in Atlanta under the sedition and treason laws of the time during the Great Depression for speaking out against poverty and discrimination in the south.  During his lifetime, Don West had three homes burned by people who were opposed to the teaching of social activism and equality.  Don West was called before the McCarthy Committee during the witch hunts; and his testimony was copied and passed out on street corners by people opposed to his teachings in Hinton, West Virginia, when he first created the Folklife Center. 

            The final fire in Don West’s life was accidental and destroyed the combination dining hall, kitchen, and meeting room at the Folklife Center in the time I lived there.  A small group of us had been to an evening class at the Antioch Appalachia location in Beckley, West Virginia, and received a call that the building was in flames.  We rushed at dangerous speeds across the mountain between Beckley and Hinton, past Bluestone Dam and onto the Folklife Center property to find Don and Connie West, a few volunteer firemen, and a small group of neighbors who had learned over the recent years just how important Don West and the Folklife Center were to Appalachia.  Don West, who had been beaten and left for dead in Harlan County union efforts, sentenced to inhumane country jails for his beliefs, and threatened with death a hundred times stood with his six foot four frame bent and tears in his eyes staring into the still flaming embers.  His arms and face were scorched from multiple trips into the flames to rescue several of Connie’s paintings and a few mementos of their lives.  But the thing that Don West spoke of regretting losing most was a simple chestnut board riddled with bullet holes.  It had been labeled The Death Board where it had hung for years over the food service window.  That board had been in a wall in a small coal miner’s shack where several union miners had been stood against the wall and murdered by company gun thugs.  That board had symbolized the entire American labor effort against inadequate wages, open shops, and company sponsored discrimination.  It had also symbolized both the group of men who had been willing to die for the effort and Don West who had lived his life with the same willingness to die for the effort while fighting daily to see that such men and women were never forgotten. 

            Another of the most telling memories I have of Don concerns the one time he allowed me to read his scrapbook.  As I was leafing through the volume of book reviews, newspaper stories, and letters, I came on a wrinkled and tattered page from a Blue Horse Writing Tablet, the common household writing paper of the south.  There was a hole in one side of the page where it had been wrapped around a brick which had been thrown through Don’s window in the middle of the night.  In a semi-literate scrawl, the page read “You nigger loving son of a bitch get your ass out of Georgia”.  Don had simply replaced the window, put the page in his scrapbook and gone back to work teaching, preaching, and promoting the ideas in which he believed.

            When I make French toast, I am doing much more than just making French toast.  I am honoring Don West and the life he lived.  I am making sure that at least a few other people in my life know that there are many more important things in the world than money.  I am working to pass on the ideas and values I learned from Don West.  I am making an attempt to insure that my daughter will have the foundation of thinking instilled in her which can lead her to be a contributing member of society in more than a simple tax paying kind of way.  I am doing much more than making French toast.

 

There’s Anger In The Land

By Don West

              In the summer of 1950 I picked up a Negro hitchhiker in south Georgia and brought him across the Chatahoochee at Eufala, Alabama.  As we crossed the river, he began telling me the story of how his brother was lynched and his body cut down from the limb and flung across the doorway of his mother’s shack—broken, bloody, and lifeless.

              Oh, there’s grieving in the plum grove

              And there’s weeping in the weeds

              There is sorrow in the shanty

              Where a broken body bleeds…

             

For there’s been another lynching

              And another grain of sand

              Swells the mountain of resentment—

              Oh, there’s anger in the land!

             

And a woman broods in silence

              Close beside an open door

              Flung across the flimsy doorstep

              Lies a corpse upon the floor!

              You’ll not ask me why I’m silent;

              Thus the woman spoke to me

              Her two eyes blazed forth anger

              And her throat throbbed agony.

              Let the wind go crying yonder

              In the treetops by the spring,

              Let it’s voice be soft and feeling

              Like it was a living thing.

              Once my heart could cry in sorrow

              Now it lies there on the floor

              In the ashes by the hearth-stone—

              They can’t hurt it anymore!

              Did you ever see a lynching,

              Ever see a frenzied mob

              Mill around a swaying body

              When it’s done it’s hellish job?

              Yes, the night was full of terror

              And the deeds were full of wrong

              Where they hung him to a beech wood

              After beating with a thong.

              Oh, there’s grieving in the plum grove

              And there’s sobbing on the sand,

              There is sorrow in the shanties—

              And there is anger in the land!

            When I make French toast, I am doing much more than making French toast.

 Copyright 2003 & 2015 by Roger D. Hicks

The Widespot Women's Club

Appalachian Fiction by Roger D. Hicks*

They had never chosen the name for themselves.  They never would have.  The name had been given to them by the community.  Or more accurately, the name had been given to them by the men of the community.  They were known quietly and derisively, often even by their husbands, as the Widespot Women's Club.  They were spoken of this way on days when decisions were being made about the little church to which they all belonged.  On these days the church board would meet and all the members of the Widespot Women's Club would be there in their official capacity.  Today the Widespot Women's Club was meeting.  There was a decision to be made.

Today, like all days when the Women's Club met, the men were in the Widespot Grocery next door, talking, telling jokes, trading knives, and waiting to hear what decision had been made by the Women's Club.  No man had ever been a member of the Widespot Church Board.  None of them ever expected to be.  It was a situation they had come to accept; some of them quietly, some with grumbling, and some with the faint hope that someday something would change.  All these men were members of the church.  All attended church each Sunday.  All came to the Widespot Grocery to vent their frustrations, eat a bologna sandwich, or buy a few groceries. 

Widespot had been named several years ago when the post office had been about to arrive in a little white building across the road from the grocery.  The post office was going into a new little building beside the house of Wilhelmina "Willie" Wilson who in addition to being the postmaster was the chairperson of the Widespot Church Board.  Willie was known in the all male enclave at the grocery as "The President", a name her husband Bobby had coined once when a decision of the Women's Club had left him feeling powerless and emasculated.  The post office had required a name and the community was so small that it had never even had a name until the Postmaster General had decreed that it must.  The decree had also delegated total authority to Willie, in her capacity as postmaster, to choose that name.  After long thought and little discussion with anyone, Willie had chosen the name Widespot for a place that had been known in past years as Down The Road, Over There, and Them Wilson's Place.  Willie had chosen the name; the place would forever be Widespot and that was that.  This was Willie's customary way of making decisions.  This was how the decision today would be made in the Widespot Church. 

Willie called the meeting to order in her customary way--"Well, let's get started."  The other women in the club nodded, smiled, and mumbled, "Okay", "All Right", and "Uh Huh", just as they always did at the start of every meeting.  In the store, Bobby sat on his stool behind the u-shaped wooden counter littered with a hand operated cash register, an old set of Globe-Stimpson scales, wrapping paper for bologna sandwiches, and a University of Kentucky basketball schedule.  He called the meeting of the Widespot men to order in his usual way--"Well boys, what do you think they're going to do over there?"  Bobby's brother Billie, Uncle Bert Small, and the others all responded in their usual way.  There were muttered grunts, "I don't have no idea", and a statement from Jim Bob Johnson, the only single man in the group, "Whatever they want to do, just like always." They all knew that today a decision would be made. 

The Women's Club would hire a permanent minister for the church today.  There were only two candidates for the job.  There were two opinions in the community about who should be hired and why.  There was only one opinion in the Women's Club and that was Willie's opinion.  She already knew who would be hired; in their own way, the men knew who would be hired also. 

One of the candidates was a retired minister who had once helped build a large and effective church on the other side of the state.  He held a doctoral degree from the best seminary in the state and had been a minister for over fifty years.  He was looking for one last community and church in which to preach, minister, and matter.  He was known as Tom Price, or in the area where he had preached before, as Independent Price.  Independent Price had been given that name by a banker who had once served as the chairman of a church board where Tom Price had served.  The banker had wanted very much at that time to build a church football field that would bear his name because he loved both football and himself.  Tom Price had wanted to build a new addition to the church that would house several new Sunday School rooms and a baptistery because he loved to minister and felt the church needed the new addition.  Tom Price had won the discussion with that church board and the new addition had been built.  However, the banker had won the overall discussion with the community and Tom Price found himself out of a job a year later and known as Independent Price.  He had not sought the appellation, but he did not deny or abhor it.  He cherished his independence and believed he had earned it with fifty years of service to the Lord.

The other candidate was a nervous and acquiescent young man of twenty, who was in his first year at a second rate seminary whose students were farmed out to little churches at low wages while they completed their educations.  His name was Marion Shirley, although the men in the Widespot Grocery had begun to call him Shirley Marion.  Shirley had no degree; he had no experience; he had no opinions and no desire to form any.  He was exactly the kind of minister Willie Wilson wanted.  She had realized this one morning as she had begun making biscuits.  The dough in her hands had been soft, white, and formless.  It changed shape often and readily in her hands.  It met her every desire and was completely powerless to resist.    And, after ten minutes in her overheated oven, the biscuit dough would become small, tasteless, worthless lumps that bore no resemblance to anything desirable.  Naturally, as she kneaded the dough, Willie thought of Marion Shirley and what he could become in her hands. 

Marion Shirley was about to become the next minister of the Widespot Community Church and he had no idea. That was his customary state. He had come to the church on a Sunday in July just before his first semester in the seminary to preach on an emergency basis without having ever known where Widespot was, who lived there, or their leanings in religion.  The little church often had ministers sent to them by the seminary president because they often had ministers sent elsewhere by the Widespot Women's Club due to Willie's aversion to "preaching that got too far over everybody's heads".  Bobby and Jim Bob Johnson had jointly come to the conclusion that her real aversion was to preaching that got too deep in the Bible.  Bobby was not a supporter of his wife's positions.  However, his wife was the primary support of their family since her father had once made a living buying, selling, and converting anything his hands found available into money.  Willie owned the Wilson home.  She owned the building in which the Widespot post office resided, and her father had donated the land on which the church sat.  Bobby knew better than to argue with Willie.  Tom Price had come to Wide Spot under the same circumstances as Marion Shirley since the seminary president also sometimes referred him to churches on a temporary basis.  Tom had come to Widespot with knowledge of the church structure statewide and a general knowledge that no minister had stayed in Widespot long who ever amounted to much later in life.  Tom had come to the church just as he had gone to many churches armed with his Bible, an extensive knowledge of its contents, and a lifetime of experience in both ministry and the world.  

Tom preached a sermon that first morning based on a short story from Tolstoy and a Biblical text.  He also had an extensive knowledge of literature.  The sermon had called for Christian action, love for the down trodden, and awareness of one's own shortcomings.  Willie had stated after she gave Tom the little check from the church, "Can you believe that man preached a sermon about a story some Russian wrote?"  On his way to his car, Tom Price smiled to himself and thought, "That was not the favorite sermon some of those people ever heard.  But thank the Lord, they heard the truth."  

On his first Sunday in Widespot, Marion Shirley had preached, or more accurately, mumbled and stuttered his way through a brief attempt to explain why he thought he should become a minister.  He had no Biblical text, organization, or conclusion.  It pleased Willie Wilson greatly.  As she handed the quaking young man the check, she gushed praise for him, saying, "That was so nice Marion.  You are going to make a fine minister.  The church needs more dedicated young men like you to preach the gospel."  Marion had limped to his car thinking, "Why on God's green earth did I ever think I could be a preacher?"  For the first time in his life, he had come to an accurate assessment of himself.  Willie Wilson had not.  

The minister who  had been serving the Widespot Community Church at the time of the first visits by Shirley Marion and Tom Price had returned from his vacation in Myrtle Beach to inform the church that another opportunity had been offered to him during his trip and he must resign.  The opportunity had been in the form of the bikini clad daughter of a Georgia peanut farmer but the minister did not inform Willie Wilson or the church of that in his resignation.  Instead, he simply stated, "I must leave within sixty days to pursue a career in agriculture in Georgia.  I may also minister to a small flock there as well."  He made no mention of  the ministration he had in mind or the fact that they would be on the peanut farmer's daughter.  She had assured the fellow "Daddy will take care of us and you can take care of me."  Like many of Willie Wilson's former ministers he had found his natural calling.   

The resignation had left a job to be filled and for two months the seminary president had sent a different seminary student or retired minister to Widespot each to preach while the church board reached  a decision about which they wished to hire.  The only two who applied for the job were Marion Shirley and Tom Price.  Each was called back to preach one additional sermon prior to the meeting of the church board.  Marion Shirley had blundered his way through an essay he had snitched from Reader's Digest about finding satisfaction.  Tom Price had preached eloquently and well on a text from the New Testament with the title "Do You Know A Prostitute?  Jesus Did!"   Tom Price's sermon caught the hearts of Bobby Wilson and Jim Bob Johnson.  Uncle Bert Small said he found the sermon interesting, "but I just ain't that interested in it at my age."  Marion Shirley's blundering ineptitude and apparent malleability caught Willie's heart.  She made the final decision of the church board with her hands deep in her biscuit dough.  

Immediately after bringing the meeting of the church board to order, Willie Wilson stated to the group, "As you all know, we are here today to decide which minister we are going to hire for the church.  We had two applicants, that wonderful young man of the cloth, Marion Shirley, and the old man from over in the flat land who preached about that communist writer when he was here.  None of the women, including Willie, remembered, or wished to, that the sermon had been about nothing remotely related to communism.  But Willie knew that since the story on which it was based had been by Tolstoy she could easily hang Independent Price from the yardarm which Tolstoy's words had created.  The restless squirmings and unhappy mutterings of her minions told Willie instantly that she had chosen the correct method of getting her way.  

After assessing the mood of her club members, Willie went on.  "We have all seen the applications, (She did not know the word resume.) and it is obvious to me from the fine work Marion Shirley did in high school that he is going to do fine work at the Bible college and he will be a fine young minister.  Would anybody like to make a motion that we hire one of the applicants?"  There could only be one name placed in nomination.  Willie waited patiently to see which of her underlings would nominate Marion Shirley.  She knew that each of the women wanted to make the nomination but that they also would hesitate for some time in order to avoid the possibility of appearing to seek to take charge.  Finally, Bert Small's half sister, Sally "Sweet" Small, a bitter, venomous old maid who might one day assume Willie's seat at the head of the table were it not for her lack of intelligence and overabundance of bad judgement, leaned forward and said, "I think we should assist the good Lord in doing his work and give that fine young man a chance to preach where we can help him along in a good way."  

Willie smiled and accepted the nomination after it was seconded by Bobby's obese and timid Aunt Birdie Miles.  Then Willie asked, "And would anybody like to make any other nominations?"  Mercifully, she hesitated only briefly before closing the nominations lest one of her club members err by nominating Tom Price.  Then she proceeded by saying, "Well, since we only have one nomination, we don't have to put it to a vote.  We have just made the God directed choice of hiring that eloquent young man Marion Shirley to be our next minister."  Then Willie brought the official meeting to a close by asking, "Birdie, did you bring any of that wonderful German Chocolate Cake today?"  

The meeting broke up quickly and the women served the cake and coffee which had been perking in the kitchen and the conversation turned to grandchildren, spring greens, and ways to keep onions from going to seed.  Then Sally Small asked, "Don't you think we should get that fine young man a welcoming gift before next Sunday? And who is going to tell him he has been hired?"  

Willie gave a Sally a look that left no doubt who would deliver the message and then smiled benignly at the other members of the Widespot Women's Club, "You all can find him some kind of gift with the church money.  But it should be small and we can give it to him after church on Sunday,  I'll call him, as the chairperson, to tell him we have hired him.  I might get him some kind of welcome gift of my own.  But if I do, I'll give it to him when we meet in town to discuss his money and other stuff."  Then she smiled sweetly, contentedly, and thought quietly to herself of that upcoming private conversation with the naive young man.  Then as she helped clean the table of the cake crumbs, she said to no one in particular, "I think I'll bake biscuits in the morning.  I swear I'm craving biscuits."

Author's Note: This story was originally published in "Orpheus Volume VI No. 1 Spring 2004".  Orpheus held first publication rights only.  
Copyrighted by Roger D. Hicks, 2003 & 2015.  

GIGGLES DECEMBER 8, 2000-SEPTEMBER 12, 2015

THE BEST DOG IN THE WORLD

Today I buried the best dog in the world.  Her name was Giggles and she was a 15 pound miniature Dachshund who had been a member of our family all but six weeks of her long, wonderful, and loving life.  We got her in late 2000 shortly after my wife Candice had progressed into a wheelchair due to a rare, genetic, degenerative disease which had begun in the middle 1990's when she was in her middle 20's. Giggles would have been fifteen if she had lived until December.  Candice had a great deal of depression early in her disease progression.  When we got Giggles, she proceeded to spend the great majority of her life in Candice's lap or walking between the wheels and behind the axle of her wheelchair on their many trips to Old Mill Park in our home town of West Liberty, KY, where they often went to exercise.  Giggles learned very rapidly that the best way to avoid being nipped by the wheelchair wheels required her to stay between the wheels when the chair was in motion.  When Candice would stop rolling, Giggles would come around to the front of the chair, climb on the footplate and then into Candice's lap which was her favorite place in the world.  I have always said that she was the best untrained therapy dog in the world.  I gradually came to simply call her The Best Dog In The World and she was.  She was a bundle of joy and boundless energy.  She went nearly everywhere we did except to work. And we developed a habit, if we were leaving her at home to tell her "we are going to work" no matter where we went.  She traveled a great deal of the Eastern United States with us by car and it never mattered where we were so long as Candice and her wheelchair were there Giggles was absolutely dependable in any situation.  She loved me too and I loved her just as much as Candice did.  But in her heart, Giggles had a seven day a week job taking care of her "Mommy".  But until she got too old to climb up into my pickup, she would meet me at the top of our driveway, if she and Candice were in the yard when I came home.  And then she would climb in the seat with me behind the steering wheel and greet me with a "howl fest" which we both loved to do generally to the accompaniment of my favorite Bluegrass music.  She slept in the bed with us every night and loved to spend long hours in Candice's lap in a recliner under a quilt.  Candice continued to work for ten years in our local food stamp office after she progressed into the chair and Giggles was a major part of that accomplishment.  She was much more than a dog.  She was a family member.  In the fall of 2010, she survived a stroke which temporarily disabled her entire left side and we thought at the onset that she would not survive that event.  So, in reality, we had known for five years that she was on borrowed time.  But we were not anywhere near ready to see her go.  She developed serious intestinal problems late last night and went downhill rapidly.  There is no real late night emergency veterinary services in our area and we were hoping she could hold on until they opened today.  But she deteriorated quickly after 4:30am and died in her "Mommy's" arms at 6am.  We wrapped her in her favorite blanket and chose a spot for her in front of the sidewalk in front of the porch as close to the house as we could keep her.  As I dug her grave with the same old hand tools, I have seen my elderly neighbors use to dig human graves during my childhood, I remembered one man in particular who had no public job, volunteered to help dig every grave within walking distance of his house, and felt very strongly that the last decent thing we can do for anybody is to dig them a perfect grave.  I have seen that man mix small balls of mud to fill tiny holes which fell out of the side walls of a grave in order to ensure that he was paying proper respect to the deceased.  So in memory of that old man and The Best Dog In The World, I tried my best to dig her a perfect grave.  I used my double bit axe to cut the tree roots and throw them out.  I used my spade to smooth the bottom and the sides.  I got down on my knees and laid her gently in it and told her I loved her once last time.  But nothing I have done today, or in the last fourteen plus years can ever properly repay that little dog for everything she has done for me.  And, I will end this piece with a comment I have made about her in a multitude of places for quite a few years: I thought more of that dog than I did many of my relatives.  She was with us for almost fifteen years and never lied to me, stole anything from me, or ever voted Republican.  You can't ask for much more from a dog.  Godspeed, Little Girl!  I love you!  

STRADDLE POLL POLITICS IN APPALACHIA

JUMPING THE FENCE GETS YOU CAUGHT ON THE BARBED WIRE

    When I was growing up in Knott County KY, I was taught on a daily basis that Franklin D. Roosevelt, from whom I had gotten my middle name had, along with Winston Churchill, saved the world and that the best interests of the working class, poor, elderly, infirm, young, disabled, and minorities lay with the Democratic Party.  Later, after I left Knott County for a larger and wider world, I was fortunate enough to meet and be mentored by two other men, Don West and Jim Ferrell, who reinforced the validity of my childhood political learning.  During my youth, I was taught that there is no worse form of vermin in the world than a "straddle poll".  For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, a straddle poll is a person who regularly switches sides in elections, jumping from party to party and candidate to candidate based on whim and easily shifting winds of purported change.  In my youth, the switches were most often predicated by a flurry of $5 bills and half pints of whiskey passed out within a few days of the election.  In my native Knott County, which had been controlled solidly by Democrats for more than a hundred years, such a switch was predicated by thousands of tons of gravels placed on private driveways and roads which resulted in the winning Republican Judge Executive being sent to the federal penitentiary on election fraud charges.  And actually, that Judge Executive was following in the footsteps of his Democratic predecessor who had already been tried, convicted, and sentenced on similar charges.  Today, I am unable to even find the term straddle poll in my Concise Oxford English Dictionary.  When I look it up on Google, the answer comes back with the second word spelled "pole" and describes an artful move by a nude dancer. In some ways, the two definitions are rooted in similar shenanigans or artful moves under duress.  In addition to attempting to educate potential voters about the inherent fallacies in independent politics, a major objective of this post will be to salvage the expression "straddle poll" from the linguistic scrap heap.  

Today it is not uncommon at all to hear individuals who regularly vote exclaim proudly that they are "an independent and I vote for the candidate and not the party".  More than 200 years of American history have proven this belief to be self defeating and unfounded.  I know of one county in Eastern KY, Magoffin County, where the court house is regularly occupied by a divided corps of elected officials split between the two major parties and generally unable to agree on anything more than the site of the actual court house.  That county has been embroiled in legal disputes over elections for at least five years involving the duly elected County Judge Executive and his narrowly defeated opponent.  The case has wound its way through the KY court system and the appeals process has become both highly personal and unending.  And, whether the voters ever admit it or not,  the turmoil is a direct result of an electorate who are incapable of committing wholeheartedly to either political party for any length of time.  It is a direct result of straddle poll politics in both aforementioned counties.  Additionally, when local jurisdictions, whether they be counties, precincts or cities, become unpredictable in their voting patterns, politicians and leaders in control of both major parties become distrustful of the electorate and are more and more unwilling to take positive actions to support that electorate and provide the communities involved with the services and infrastructure they need.  For many years, Magoffin County KY has been among the highest counties in unemployment in the state in spite of having been crossed by the Mountain Parkway, a major artery for business in and out of Eastern KY.  But business executives are often unwilling to commit large expenditures for long term operations in a county where the leadership of the court house in unlikely to remain in place more than one term.

By contrast, Leslie County KY, about 85 miles to the southeast and located along the Daniel Boone Parkway, has been a solid Civil War Republican County since 1865.  It is impossible for a Democrat to get elected in that county and it served as the site of Former President Richard Nixon's return to public life after his impeachment and resignation primarily because it has been absolutely loyal to Republican causes since long before the current oldest residents were born.  In that kind of safely predictable setting, a former president was willing to step out in public and begin his work to rebuild his legacy as much as possible before his death.  And, while Leslie County KY is not generally wealthy, their economic existence is much more stable and predictable because higher level politicians and business executives know that the county is politically predictable.  \

My own home county, Morgan County Ky, is currently simultaneously working to recover from a major tornado on March 2, 2012, and the necessity for the federal government to prosecute, convict, and imprison County Judge Tim Conley, a Republican who was elected in 2008 after more than a hundred years of highly predictable Democratic results in the county.  The bottom line is that straddle poll politics does not work.  It is not any less distasteful if it is called by the misnomer "independent politics" and it will nearly always result in confusion at the court house, distrust by state and national party leaders due to unpredictability, and will always cost a locality in terms of investments, infrastructure, and political capital in state houses and Washington, DC.  Or as my father taught me, if you keep jumping back and forth across the political fence, sooner or later you will leave the figurative family jewels hanging on the barbed wire.