STORY TIME

Poplarville, Mississippi

Do you know the Velvet Underground? I know a few songs of theirs, or really people associated with them. They’re a loose grouping band. I only know a few songs by anyone involved but I know there’s a woman with a deep voice and I know the band is associated with Andy Warhol and strange, underground people. One of the songs that I know is by the woman with the dark voice, it’s like five minutes long and it ends with her saying, singing, “Please don’t confront me with my failures/ I have not forgotten them”.

I said all of this without stopping. I could see in her face that she didn’t know what to do with it. She wasn’t the only one.

So I’ve been listening to stuff like this and a lot of Beatles and I click on “more like this” and there’s always Simon and Garfunkel, specifically their song America. Do you know this song? 

She didn’t know this song but did ask me what it’s about, which was a question she didn’t need to ask.

Well it’s a song about restlessness, but that’s not the point. At the nadir of hopelessness and helplessness, the immensity of what longing is and feels like gets compared to counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike. 

I told her that I can hear the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike from my house. I told her that I can count the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike through an open window while I lie in bed at night. 

The words felt good. I said it again. I can hear the New Jersey Turnpike from my house. She didn’t know why I said it three times. Felt good, I said. It was true and it was something I meant, I said. 

I can hear the New Jersey Turnpike from my house.

I was just trying to waste her time. I started saying how I grew up in a very nice place. A big red house on a street corner with pine trees all around the property and some leafy trees too. My town’s school district was a blue ribbon district in the year my older brother was born. The value of the homes have risen tremendously in the last 23 years but so have the property taxes.

She asked me if I was really trying to hit on her by talking about property taxes. I smiled and guessed so. But I told her that wasn’t the point.

There’s a band from my hometown that I’m embarrassed to love as much as I do and they were the most important band of my adolescence. They have one lyric that goes “So what’s the point of pretending/ When we’ve seen behind the curtain/ And there’s nothing much to see”. I always felt like I was constantly peeking behind curtains and constantly seeing nothing at all. Around the corner from my house are cul de sacs of houses that are bigger than their backyards and they help muddy the noise that soars over and drones down from the New Jersey Turnpike. I see doctors in scrubs plug in their Teslas in their garages and close their doors and their backyard has a playset that their kids outgrew two years ago. 

She said she didn’t grow up in a place like that. She said she grew up in a town called Poplarville, Mississippi where they have an annual blueberry jubilee and where in 2014 the townsfolk voted 361-149 in favor of allowing beer and wine sales. I said that there are probably that many people that live on the street I grew up on, with that red house on that corner. In Poplarville at the blueberry jubilee she was once a runner up of the Teen Miss Blueberry competition, for which she won a blueberry pie.

I’ve never won a pie but I see what the people around me won. They’ve won railings on fake balconies with sliding doors that don’t open. They’ve won above ground pools and privacy fences. They’ve won being able to count the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike even though that wasn’t the prize. The prize was a bushel of blueberries. The prize was a blueberry pie. The prize was a blue ribbon school district. 

That used to be the prize, and it was a good one. The school district is still one of the best in the country, but it isn’t a blue ribbon district. The home values are still good, but you don’t get as much lawn to mow as you used to.

Not that I ever mowed my lawn, I told her. She agreed with me, her parents never cared about how their lawn looked as long as it wasn’t overgrown, just like mine. She couldn’t tell me why people live in Poplarville or why they leave. It’s just what people did - they lived there and then they left there. That sounded definite and I liked that.

Assumption, Illinois

Maib at her Short Stop Corner Store told us about the local family who sent four generations off to four different wars and all four came back. 

Andrew sieged Atlanta, skirmishing and flanking and battling his way down from the Tennessee-Georgia border to take the capital city. His regiment then marched to the sea and scorched the earth on the way to taking Savannah. Hundreds of miles of train tracks, countless bridges and grain silos and whatever else was on the way was destroyed by men who lived over 500 miles away from the place they were burning. That’s the same distance as Paris to Berlin. The agricultural damage done to Georgia would be felt until 1920. The man in charge of the whole thing said that four fifths of the simple destruction was just that. The smallest fifth was helpful to winning the war.

I told Maib that one October in Pittsburgh during the pandemic I went on a walk in a great big cemetery to see the plain grave of a Negro League baseball player. I walked down around a hill on a path and stopped before a square plot of a few hundred Civil War graves. It was mostly Union soldiers. There were a couple dozen dead Confederate soldiers laying right there in the ground too. The Union soldiers had rounded headstones whereas the Confederates had pointed headstones. Otherwise it was a big field of bones that belonged to men who once burned down everything in their path and some of the men who tried to stop them from doing that.

After taking Savannah, Andrew marched over 400 miles, battling men that he might lie in the ground next to. Columbia burned the whole way down and then the occupation of Raleigh would close the curtains on the Western Theater. Andrew started serving 15 years and eight months after his birth.

Oscar went to Cuba in 1898. He caught diseases. In 1953 he was able to prove to some people that he had once stood alongside Cubans and was awarded a medal that reads in part “FIRST/ THAT THE PEOPLE OF THE/ ISLAND OF CUBA/ ARE, AND OF/ RIGHT OUGHT/ TO BE, FREE, AND/ INDEPENDENT” which is a funny thing for a man from Assumption, Illinois to be firstly concerned with in 1898 and 1953. 

Maib told me that Red served in World War One on the Mexican border where tensions were high. Red was stationed nearby Ambos Nogales when a border guard thought a carpenter was smuggling weapons and so a Private got shot in the face and three hours later about 150 people were dead. Most of them were Mexican civilians. Red was one of the men who took the hills South of Nogales, Sonora while his Captain who wasn’t a Mexican civilian got shot through the heart and died. After the events of that day a big wall was put up to stop something like 150 people dying because of a carpenter going home.

Soon the Johnson’s would get wise to this whole ruse but not until Jack got his ass shipped to Sicily by way of French Morocco. An amphibious landing at a fishing village on the Italian islands’s southern coast led to the strategic capture of two airfields 10 miles inland.

I couldn’t believe that Maib knew all of this stuff.

When the invasion of mainland Italy got underway it took Jack’s division 10 days to establish a beachhead at Salerno. Then because that wasn’t enough Jack landed at Anzio and like his father and his father’s father and his grandfather’s father he watched men die. Three months on the beach at Anzio doing trench warfare eventually broke the Germans. Jack was one of the first Allied men to reach the Vatican before fighting Nazis for land up Italy’s western coast. Another landing in Southern France eventually took him to the Maginot Line near Alsace. A couple of more rivers to cross and Dachau gets liberated, which is good.

Maib told me that by this time Jack was as amphibious as a frog. 

There were some things Maib did not tell me. 

Maib did not tell me about the war crimes. Maib obviously only told me the good stuff. She did not tell me about the burning of Georgia by a 16 year old, or the Mexican mayor of Nogales, Sonora getting shot while waving a white flag high in the air, or the tommy gun massacres of prisoners of war at Sicilian airfields. That’s not what people from Assumption, Illinois want to say about people from Assumption, Illinois.

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Civilians are starting to get bombed in Ukraine and I’m back in the Allegheny Cemetery. Wallace Wendell Smith was born five days before Christmas 1886. Wallace and his wife had twin boys in May 1926. Two months before his 19th birthday, Kennedy Carstairs Martin Smith would die floating in the sky over Wessel, Germany. His brother, Wallace Wendell Smith Junior, died in 2017, after 72 more years of life than the boy he shared a face with.

The next Jackson son was not a soldier. Maib did not know his name.