Lughnasa                                                            Elk Rut Moon

Near the old capital of Illinois. 3:45 a.m. Awake.

Sleeping is not a gimme anymore, if it ever was. Now something in me wants to be awake late in the night or early morning. I fight it sometimes. Other times I get up. Like now. Once in a while I’ll take a sleeping pill. Like last night. I no longer get agitated about it, which obviously makes it worse; but, I wish it were different.

The road from Alexandria is literally and metaphorically a long one. One friend yesterday told me his son, a successful petroleum engineer, had an even more successful wife and ended being a stay at home dad. “I had more problem with it than her parents did,” he admitted. Another woman, a long time girl next door, told me she had a son living as a gay man. It wasn’t until later, when she told me she was now a member of the Christian Missionary Alliance, that the phrasing struck me as odd.

Cooking the pig, though it troubled me, produced the warmest memory of the day. Leonard, Frank, Tom, Eugene, Steve, Jerry and I stood around the barbecue talking, laughing. The years had not dulled our appreciation for the silliness, the strangeness of being together, separate, as we humans are, yet bound to each other, as we can be, too.

I plan to get to Abilene, Kansas today, perhaps a bit further. Then, into Lakewood to drop off the rental car, over to the lab to get my PSA test underway and home. Back to Shadow Mountain.

Lughnasa                                                    Elk Rut Moon

In Vandalia, Illinois. The 50th reunion in the past. If being old enough to have a 50th reunion is one marker, what is being old enough to have already had it?

The big event today was the pig roast at Toni Fox’s 20 acre place just off the Gas City exit of I-69. Three of my good friends got up at 3:00 am (or, rather, never went to bed), picked up the pig already stuffed by Tom Friend and put him inside a barbecue unit with a spit. When I got there around 1 p.m., they were all pros with thick gloves, thermostat watching responsibilities and the cautious conversation of guys cooking.

When they unwrapped the aluminum foiled and chicken wire covered pig, I had a flood of sympathy for the pig. I ate no pork. This sensibility I kept quiet because it confused me.

Susan Mahony asked me what had disillusioned me about the ministry. Indiana breeds devout church goers and I’ve never felt good about chipping away at another person’s faith, so I dodged the question, allowing the conversation to move away from the topic.

These reunions, these 50th ones and their follow-ups, have a special poignancy because the probability is that some of the folks you spent time with will be dead before the next one. Who? When? Of what? Hard to say.

Sept. 12, 2015
Chesterfield Christian Spiritualist Camp
10:45 pm
Surprising night at Norwood Bowl. Still feeling a little tentative, I arrived around 6:50. A lot of folks were already there. The meal was cubed steak, scalloped potatoes, green beans and corn. A very Hoosier meal.
The most surprising part of the evening for mecame when Richie Howard, a gentle 6 foot 3 or 4 bear of a guy, offered a memory of high school. “I struggled with math, but there was one person who always helped me, never blew me off. Charlie Ellis.”
That led to my being asked to say something. Which I did. I’d actually thought about it a bit. “Facebook is important. It proves that in a polarized political environment like we have in this country now, we can still be friends because we know each other, even if we disagree politically. That’s significant.”
When I finished, the one who called me up said, “Charlie, we love you.” And everybody clapped, smiled. It left me feeling a little shy, but very pleased. Warm.
That kind of moment validates, in an emotional way, a whole period of my life. Not that I felt bad about it, but high school was a conflicted time for me like it is for so many people. This put a rosy glow around high school that I hope never leaves me.

Sept. 12, 2015
Chesterfield Christian Spirtualist Camp, Spirit Fest

The grounds outside this modest 1930’s hotel room buzz with conversations, children’s shrieks of fun. Cars sit under trees, the parking lots filled. It’s Spirit Fest. Reiki healers, tarot card readers, clairvoyants, crystal manipulators and the amazing Tomstones (wielded, as you might guess, by a guy named Tom) are all available at card table size booths or tented places outside. It’s $5 to get in, but I’m staying in the hotel so I got in for free with a promise that if I decided to attend, I’d pay $5.
At 10:00 am this morning reunion events continued with coffee and donuts at the Alexandria Historical Society. We were all a little more comfortable, more classmates recognized, or cadged from people we did remember. The Alexandria Historical Society has a lot of stuff. A lot. So it was interesting to put this exercise in yesterday inside a building devoted to the past.
Henry Benefield and I talked. His family ran the small grocery store nearest the junior high of my day. We often gathered there to buy candy, long paper strips of sugary, colorful dots, small waxy bottles filled with a sweet liquid, jawbreakers. Henry lives to fish. He’s posted some good sized catches on Facebook.
Steve Galloway told me about his daughter and the planning, then execution she put into a recent trip to England and Scotland. He worked at a golf course most recently, but quite after “too many drunks and people expecting me to know everything.” He had worked as an engineer before that.
Leonard Dockery, apparently quite rich now, lives in Tennessee with his family and his daughters. “She gets the house.” Leonard was most memorable to me for a dive he took off a second story balcony when shot while we were playing army. He was a good friend back in the day.
My best friend, Ronnie Montgomery, with whom I have lost contact, will not come. Toni Fox, who seems to know everyone, did not know why. Neither will Cathy Thomas be back.
Not sure what makes a class reunion attract some and repel others. Certainly it has something to do with the sort of feeling tone high school retains, but that’s not all of it. Some of it, I suppose, is self-esteem. Perhaps there are those not interested in the long ago at all, living their lives forward. Others may have a particular remembered slight or embarassing incident, imagining that moment is all others recall.
I go back out of curiosity about my past. Since I’ve been away from town for now well over 45 years, it’s easy to have the Alexandria days become unmoored. They can seem almost like a fantasy, a period of my life lived in a place I’d never really been. And, in a sense, that’s true.
A common refrain at this reunion is that the town we knew is gone, vanished with those automobile jobs in the 1970’s. “A mausolem.” “A ghost town.” “Sad.”
The Alexandria of my youth had no shuttered stores, no retail blocks filled with dollar stores and antique consignment shops. We had Bailey’s and Rexall pharmacies. There was both Ferman’s, a high quality women’s store, and Baumgartner’s for men. Furniture stores, dime stores, two movie theaters, The Alex and The Town. We even had, a town of around 5,000, a daily newspaper, the Alexandria Times-Tribune where dad worked. I delivered it on several different paper routes.
This Alexandria, now long sunk under waves of global economic change, was a vibrant small town. It had its own economy and a healthy sense of identity that we all shared, not knowing it was a temporally bounded thing, just waiting for Toyota and Volkswagen to destroy. Alexandria teaches the impermanence of life as surely as Ephesus, Angkor and the Roman Forum.
Tonight is the big event, a feed with 90 from our class scheduled to attend. It will be at Norwood lanes, a bowling alley and pool hall, where I learned the art of the bank shot and how to avoid a gutter ball. Another time for reconnecting.

Lughnasa                                            Labor Day Moon

Humidity. Water here is not, for now at least, an issue. The shower can just run. No second thoughts about the well, the snow pack, a possible drought.

Anderson, where I am right now, used to be the employment heart of Madison County with thousands of jobs in General Motors’ factories. All those jobs are now long gone. The houses look under cared for and old, paint peeling, roofs faded.

Some things have not changed. When I pulled up to a light this morning, a guy in a Corvette pulled me next to me, gunned his engine, then sped away as the light went green. This is car culture, a Detroit influenced swath of the U.S. Much of Ohio is similar.

I told my brother yesterday that I could barely stand to be in the state. “It repels me.” And it does. The Klan in Alexandria. The confederate flags and the macho bullshit everywhere. The lack of cultural amenities. A desert of the human artistic heritage.

Yet. My roots remain here. That cannot be undone. I know from Facebook that my high school classmates have spread out geographically and ideologically, some to the left like me, some to the right. They were all my friends. Still are, in a distant sort of way.

It is time, past time really, that I made my peace with this place. Like parts of me in my shadow it will not become different; it just is. Like those aspects of me judging Indiana only hides it, makes it less accessible. Besides, my repulsion is for the political and cultural narrows that exists here, but it is a passage way to my childhood and my childhood was wonderful.

So, I intend to open myself to childhood feelings, to friendship based on early days, not battered by later ratiocination. What hope do we have as a country if we cannot reach across the political divides? Especially when the people in question are friends from childhood.