A lifetime of reading

I buy way too many books.

I used to buy too many CDs, but all of the CD stores disappeared, so you can only buy them now at Wal-Mart, which only carries CDs by Kenny Chesney, Hannah Montana or Mariah Carey. Plus I won’t go in a Wal-Mart at gunpoint.

There are still bookstores, thankfully, and I can hardly walk in one without emerging with an armload of books. Then I bring them home and they are spread around the house, much to my wife’s chagrin. Our bonus room looks like a library after an earthquake.

I started early, reading sports books and Encyclopedia Brown and The Hardy Boys. The bookmobile would come through the neighborhood (I’m showing my age) and I would get literary classics such as The NFL’s Greatest Receivers or Amazing Baseball Teams. To this day, I retain a lot of knowledge about the Gashouse Gang.

When I was in the fifth grade, I began reading a lot more, because my parents sent me to this dopey private Christian school, since there were rumors of forced busing that year and I’d be forced to attend a different school across town. The private school was experimenting with some sort of “learn at your own pace” hokum, in which they’d give you a workbook, and you’d take a test at the end of it.

Apparently, all of my fellow fifth-graders had spend their formative years in a cave, because it took them six weeks to do each workbook, and I generally finished mine in about three days. They wouldn’t let me jump ahead, so I was left to do nothing but sit there and daydream about a girl named Candy who sat on the next row. By the way, if you want to guarantee your daughter grows up to be a stripper, name her “Candy.”

To alleviate my boredom, the teacher allowed me to sit there and read all day while my classmates struggled to remember the capital of California and how to do long division. The first really long book I ever read was Heidi, and to this day I have a weakness for lederhosen.

My children have a similar love of books, perhaps in part because I read to them every night when they were smaller, and didn’t consider me an idiot. This led to one of my more shameful moments as a parent. When my son was about 4, he had a children’s version of A Christmas Carol, and he wanted me to read it to him. Every. Single. Night.

I’d say “How about Go Dog, Go, or The Cat In The Hat?” Nope. He wanted to read “Scrooge,” as he called it. This went on, no kidding, for about three months. I didn’t think I could bear to read it one more time. So one day, when he wasn’t there, I took the book, and I hid it under the couch.

He came to me that night and said “I can’t find Scrooge!” He was distraught, and asked me if I’d seen it. And just like the Grinch, when he told little Cindy Lou Who that he was taking her Christmas tree to his workshop to repair a light, I looked in the child’s face and lied. And I didn’t even feel ashamed.

On the bright side, Scrooge was forgotten. For about two weeks, anyway, until he found it, and brought it triumphantly to the couch one night, a big smile on his face, and we plunged right back into the world of Christmas ghosts.

God bless us, every one.

It's only rock and roll

I was looking around today to see if I could spot a good concert to attend this summer. I’ve already seen Springsteen this year, and he was in top form, so it’s kind of greedy of me to want to see more. But I’m like that.

I know the Allman Brothers are playing in October at Chastain Park Ampitheatre. I doubt I'll go, because they’re really not the Allmans to me without crazy old Dickey Betts, and Chastain can sometimes suck as a concert venue because they have to keep the noise level down, being as it’s in a fancy neighborhood. In other words, none of the homes there have wheels.

The real problem at Chastain, as you know if you’ve ever been, is the crowd, which is frequently of the wine-and-cheese “we’re only here to be seen” variety. They buy their season tickets because they don’t want to miss the Kenny G show, but then they go to see real artists play, and annoy the rest of us.

A couple of years ago I went to see Mark Knopfler, and these two Buckhead princesses on the next row were loudly discussing their upcoming dinner party. They were talking over the long guitar solo at the end of “Telegraph Road,” which is only the second best guitar solo ever recorded, behind Duane Allman’s blistering 5 minutes or so at the end of “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” from the live At Fillmore East album. Don’t argue with me about this.

Finally somebody told the two ninnies to shut up, and they looked mortally offended, but the rest of us applauded, so Buffy and Bambi spent the rest of the show glumly stuffing their faces with brie and chardonnay.

I went to Chastain a few years ago to see Neil Young. This was the tour when he had just done his “Greendale” concept album, and he only played songs from that record, so the normally fickle Chastain crowd grew even more restless as people realized they didn’t recognize a single song. During a quieter, acoustic number, Neil quit the song in mid-strum, stood up, chastised the crowd for chatterint, strapped his tattered electric guitar back on and blasted us with another half-hour of songs about this imaginary town. Part of me admired his stubbornness, but part of me wouldn’t have minded hearing “Down By The River,” or “After The Gold Rush.”

(By the way, since this is a blog, and the rules of grammar can be nebulous here, I’m arbitrarily using italics and quotes for song and album titles. It’s fun. And because I’m old, I still say album. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.)

My first experience at Chastain was when I went to see Chuck Berry and the forgettable Bo Diddley, who somehow manages to work the words “Bo Diddley” into about three-fourths of his songs. Bo opened, then after a while Chuck came out and announced to the crowd that he wanted to perform for us, but the promoter would not allow it. Then he walked off stage, and the crowd booed and grew restless. A few minutes later he came back, announced that the promoter had seen the light, and kicked into his set. I found out the next day that he was demanding more money before he would come out on stage, and finally the promoter had to give in. Nice move.

Anyway, there are a lot of good shows coming up all over Atlanta – Knopfler, Tom Petty, Lucinda Williams, John Hiatt, Old 97s. And probably a rockin’ Kenny G show somewhere.

Plum wild

I went wild plum picking the other day.

That’s not to be confused with going plumb crazy, which I also do from time to time. No, what I did was find a dirt road, pull my car over to the side, and start picking wild plums.

They are just about to get ripe, but not quite, and the time frame to pick them is pretty small – Memorial Day to D-Day is basically the window, in this part of the world. They always seem to grow on the side of the road, and along fences. I don’t know why that is.

Many times I’ve been driving down the road and seen a bunch of wild plum trees hanging full with little red and yellow and green orbs of paradise, and it hurts my heart to know they are just going to fall off and rot. I have dreams in which I am surrounded by wild plum trees and they are bursting with fruit, so much I can’t pick it all. This must be how Adam and Eve felt. If they’d only stuck to eating plums, a lot of trouble could have been avoided.

Wild plums are much smaller than their tame counterparts, and generally not as sweet. I love them when they’re green, just before they start to ripen, so tart that they turn my lips inside out, not to mention my digestive system. I put a little salt on them, and I could eat 100 at a time.

I never take a sack to put the plums in. I usually just line my pockets or, as I did the other day, take off my baseball cap and fill it up.

You have to be careful picking wild plums. Some people might even consider it stealing, but I hope there aren’t many such Nazis around. The main issue is avoiding briers, because wild plum trees are usually surrounded by blackberry bushes (that’s another subject, but we’re about a month early for that). The other thing to be careful of is, as my mom used to say, you might “come up on a snake.”

But those usually hang out in apple trees.

Tighter than Dick's hatband

I have missed many things about my mother since she died in 2006, but maybe nothing as much as the colorful sayings and phrases I used to hear from her.

My mother was the quintessential Southern woman – loving mother and wife, good friend, incredible cook – and she taught me my love of reading, and words, and language. I wish I had written down all of the things she used to say, many of which were funny, and some that were just plain baffling.

She often spoke of things being “tighter than Dick’s hatband.” Example: Nobody was home, and the house was locked up tighter than Dick’s hatband. I don’t know who Dick was, or if his head was too big, or if he bought the wrong size hat.

I never heard this phrase anywhere else until one day when I was reading Rick Bragg’s excellent memoir “All Over but the Shoutin’,” which is mostly about his mother, and he quotes her using that phrase. I met him once at a conference and I told him I was relieved to see that somebody else had said that, because when I had used it a couple of times people looked at me like I was crazy.

“I know,” he said. “It sounds like you’re saying something dirty.”

My mother, of course, never intentionally said anything dirty. She would sort of half-cuss (not curse – a curse is something a witch puts on you), by either abbreviating a word, or spelling it out. For example, she might say “shhhtttt”, eliminating the “i”, and therefore not really saying a dirty word. Or she might say somebody is going to “h-e-double-l”, or threaten to spank my “a-s-s.” I never saw the difference in spelling it or saying it, but she did, and I didn’t question it.

She also use some words that I think she may have made up, like “asslin’ .” Again, not a dirty word, but almost. Asslin’ basically meant horseplay, as in “stop asslin’ around and get in the house.”

Another one is “swonney.” Swonney apparently means the same as declare, or swear. As in, “I swonney, I believe we’re going to be late.”

Something expected to be over soon would last “no longer than Pat stayed in the Army.” I once asked her, “Who is Pat?” She couldn’t remember. I can’t find evidence of anybody else ever using this phrase, so I suspect there really was a Pat somewhere that she knew of, and he didn’t stay in the Army long.

If somebody moved slow, she’d say, “He’ll be late to his own funeral.” If she asked you to do her a favor, she’d say “Do it and I’ll sing at your funeral.” I don’t know what the funeral obsession was about.

If somebody was poor, they “didn’t have a pot to piss in, or a window to pour it out of.” If you did something that might make her mad, she’d threaten to “cloud up and rain all over you.” You didn’t want to be rained on, trust me. Somebody in a bad mood was as "ill as a sore-tailed cat." In times of astonishment, she’d say “I’ll be John Brown,” which really is sort of like cussing, to a Southerner.

I wish I could remember them all. I dream about her all the time, so maybe I should start sleeping with a note pad and pencil by the bed, just in case I hear something.

Human resource?

When did I become a resource?

Of all the examples of the bastardization of the English language foisted upon us by the corporate world, I find the term “human resources” the most distasteful of all.

I checked in the dictionary, and read that a resource is something that “lies ready for use or that can be drawn upon for aid or to take care of a need.” Well. That makes me feel special.

“Human resources” is just some made-up piece of corporate jargon, designed, I suppose, to give the personnel department a loftier sense of importance. But I’m not sure I like being called a resource.

The “human” part of the term is self-explanatory, though I’ve had some co-workers before I’m not so sure about. I’m regarded as a human lying ready for use. This is not to be confused with a human lying around, which describes me on the weekends.

There are other silly terms that have been adopted in the corporate world. One of my favorites is “talent management,” or “talent acquisition.” So now, I am considered to be talent. This has to be welcomed news for Mrs. Harris, my eighth-grade teacher, who always saw a lot of potential in me.

Talent acquisition, I believe, used to be referred to as hiring. Hiring was a perfectly good title for these people because it’s what they do - they hire people. In the old days, you’d go down to the lumber yard or the cotton mill and ask the foreman, “Are you hiring?” I can’t imagine his reaction if you had gone down and said “Excuse me, sir, but are you presently acquiring talent?”

I prefer the old-fashioned terms. At least “personnel” had the word person in it.

We all know what this is about. There is a prevalent belief now that you can lessen the impact of doing something bad by giving it a different name. At one time, people were fired. Then, they were laid off. After that came downsizing, and its distasteful cousin, rightsizing. Look, buddy, if I want to rightsize, I’ll go to Men’s Wearhouse.

Now when people are fired, they are offered “career transition packages.” This is generally a couple of weeks pay and some Krystal coupons. I was offered one of these once, but honestly, it’s not much of an offer, as you don’t really have a choice. It’s a Don Corleone offer.

There are no employees anymore, either. We are all associates or team members or partners. Anything but what we actually are, which is workers. This is nothing new. When I worked at a grocery story as a youth, I wasn’t a bag-boy, I was a courtesy clerk. I courteously stuff canned goods and produce into paper bags (I’m showing my age) as some housewife with curlers in her hair would threaten my life if I smashed her loaf of bread. Courtesy was at times elusive.

And now, I am a human resource. People can leverage me, they can partner with me, they can develop synergy with me. Here I am, lying ready for use.

Good man gone

It saddened me to read this morning of the death of Hamilton Jordan, the former chief of staff for President Jimmy Carter.

Jordan was famous for a few things, most notably his stormy time in the much-criticized Carter administration, and more important for founding Camp Sunshine, a camp in Morgan County, Ga. for children with cancer. He didn’t know when he founded the camp that he would later be struck by the disease, and it eventually killed him, too young at 63.

I didn’t know Jordan, but I did meet him once, in 1986, when he was campaigning for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate against Wyche Fowler. Fowler won, and Jordan disappeared for the most part from the political scene, though he later worked on Ross Perot’s failed presidential bid.

I was a young reporter in Griffin, 22 years old, just out of the University of Georgia, armed with a journalism degree but no real idea of how to be a reporter. The editor of the paper was a doddering old idiot who had worked at the paper forever and couldn’t write a grocery list, let alone a coherent news story. This was my mentor.

One day, not long after I started, he stuck his head in the newsroom and said “Mark, come in here to my office for a second. I want you to interview somebody.”

I must admit, I was not very excited. To this point in my journalistic career, my most important stories had been one about the problem of squirrels causing electric outages by climbing over live wires, and another exploring the problem of teen pregnancy (I was able to discover what causes it).

So I walked into the shabby little office and the editor said, “Mark, talk to Hamilton Jordan.” Then he walked out of the office, closed the door, and left me standing there looking like an idiot. Thankfully, I knew who Hamilton Jordan was, but I was not entirely sure why he was there, or what I was supposed to talk to him about. What with the electrified squirrels and the wanton teenagers keeping me busy, I had not kept up with the Georgia political scene.

To my great relief, he couldn’t have been nicer. He answered all of my stupid questions patiently, and treated me as if I was a real reporter. I asked him generic things, like “Why do you think you’d be a good senator?” and, “What’s your position on education?”, softballs that he could handle with ease. I wished later, when I learned more about him, that I would have asked him if he really snorted cocaine at Studio 54 (an allegation he always denied), or what was it like negotiating for the return of the hostages from Iran, in which he played a big part.

After a few minutes of talking, he shook my hand and moved on to the next little town and the next ignorant young reporter. I wrote some hapless story which is thankfully lost to history, but that was my first test at being a real journalist. At least I didn’t do anything stupid, like ask him if he believed Jimmy Carter really got attacked by that killer rabbit.

Later on that summer I met Wyche Fowler at a fundraising barbecue in town, and I didn’t find him nearly as charming. He was a bit sarcastic, condescending, and clearly annoyed at having to talk to a bumpkin like me. I’m not saying I blame him, but I came away thinking that Jordan was a better man, politics aside. The way he lived his life after that, and his tireless work for sick children and his optimism in the face of the cancer that was ravaging him, proved that I was right.