Author Archives: Juancho

I haven’t kept my word about moving my online world back to the circus. More importantly, nobody wants to read a blog that starts out whining about not writing a blog. While this tiny ember of hope from the election, and real talk of vaccine development is something, 2020 continues to deliver its unmerciful bludgeoning.

There is this one thing I’m stuck on though, so I might as well get it out there.

I feel like I had this recurrent experience and I’m wondering if anyone can relate to it.

If you aren’t familiar, we had a little cat visit us a few months back. We adopted him and named him “Ronie” and he fit right into our little family. I called him Justin Timberlake, because his charisma was just too powerful to deny.

Anyway, one morning way after we let our guard down, Ronie went out in the morning and never came back. It sucks.

So this other event is connected to Ronie disappearing, and it’s this guy Noah.

We met him at our local low dollar golf course, the venerable Jake Gaither aka “The Jake.” Three of us were playing, and as usual it was all backed up and everyone was struggling to get any rhythm going. There was a single dude behind us, and someone suggested we should invite him to join us and do the right thing to tighten up the pace of play. Well, myself and one buddy said, nah, fuck that guy. Let’s just keep going, but then Paul, a real golfer and a gentleman, chastened us and we acquiesced to the invitation.

You see where this is going probably. Noah turns out to be this solid dude. Very Ronie-like in personality. Just a guy from Peoria, Illinois, which is a town name that really lends itself phonically to good story-telling. So Noah has this mighty swing that wooshes by like a freight train, and lord jesus when it connects it is a real thing to see. He’s got the golf jones real bad too, which is contagious, so after a round full of highlight shots from all of us we trade numbers and just like that Noah is in the crew.

This crusty crew does not excel at making new friends, and then just like Ronie, Noah waltzes right in like a breath of fresh air.
Then he left, just like Ronie. Tallahassee didn’t work out for him. Not this time. He’s back in Peoria hanging out on a real goat farm instead of our pretend one at the Jake.

I think this pandemic, and misery in general, creates a lot of movement. As the situation changes, anyone on a margin or edge, is bound to get disrupted and seek a new equilibrium. Until it’s your turn, others will rebound and ricochet off of you in search of that new level ground.

That’s what I think.

-jr

P.S.

I drew this picture while spending some time at the local youth shelter, my old alma mater. I’m sitting with two of the nicest kids, and a staff person. She gets out the big box of art supplies and we all set out to draw something. I’ve got Ronie on my mind, and I’m thinking about how sad Melissa is so I start drawing this picture you see. About half-way through, this twelve year-old boy asks me what it is. I tell him it’s a cat. He says, it looks like an owl. He sees I am crestfallen, and quickly encourages me, “It looks like a cat too.” I ask him what he thinks I can do to fix it. He tells me, “Just keep making it look more like a cat.” He shrugs his shoulders unaware of his genius and returns to his mastery of illustrating anime hair. His advice got the above result.

I’m going to resist the urge to point out the obvious lesson in the homily, but it ain’t easy.

Juancho

Monday, October 5, was the birthday of Stetson Kennedy. I thought to honor him by rushing over here and sharing my appreciation, but then I realized absent from social media there is less urgency to get my thoughts and opinions out there. Before I get into the life and work of Stetson Kennedy, let’s check in about the exodus. Melissa asked me how it felt to be off of social media. The overwhelming emotion is relief, like exiting Interstate 65 between Montgomery and Birmingham and just taking U.S. 31 up to Pea Ridge and enjoying the slower pace. My days are longer, and a single thread of thought can develop and grow throughout the day. The books on the shelf are no longer anachronistic decor, but voices whispering to me from faraway places and moments in time. Their pages do not blink with advertising or the knee-jerk opinions of unqualified dolts and bores. “HOLDEN NEEDS TO STOP WHINING AND GET BACK IN SCHOOL, ANNOYING, DO NOT RECOMMEND.”

So if you are wondering what it might feel like, there is nothing to fear. You will feel like yourself, except more so.

Now, William Stetson Kennedy. I searched my site for references to him, and he has a feature in the Clydesdale Hall of Fame, and some cameos in other posts. As a writer he is able, striving for clarity and function over literary device. A social activist born during the first world war, he died mere months before American troops withdrew from Iraq in 2011. I met him just a month before he died.

He was 95 years-old, and the feature act of an art show titled The American Dream. He was gracious with his time, and at least two-hundred of us clustered around him sitting on the floor, or craning our necks to see. A month later, he died.

His books, The Klan Unmasked, and Southern Exposure, are seminal works of the Civil Rights movement of the 20th century. Do they matter now?

As a white man, looking to not make matters worse, or enjoy the mantle of privilege without the responsibility to use it subversively, Stetson is a role model. There are many, many others. James Reeb, John Brown, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and Charles Moore. They all died for the cause of racial equality. Martyrdom is not a requirement though, to apply one’s white skin to the purpose of liberating darker skin. Senator Doug Jones, from Alabama, who sent murderers Thomas Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry to prison for the rest of their lives for the murder of children at the 16th Ave. Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL is a living example.

It’s great to admire Medgar Evers, Nelson Mandela, and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. I consider it my personal responsibility to defend Rev. Al Sharpton from his moronic detractors, teeth full of bread, necks shiny from grease, as their spittle-soaked recitation of stereotypes and urban legend land on screen or pavement.

Those leaders are not our role models though, as honkies and cracker-ass-crackers. We have plenty of examples who look just like us, and we would do best to learn their stories, and aspire to their ranks.

Juancho

How fitting, on this, my last day on social media, to be writing about exits. A departure far more significant is happening today than mine from Facebook.

30 years ago I hit the road for Spring Break as many college students do. I wasn’t going to Ft. Lauderdale, or Panama City Beach, but to Plymouth, WI, hometown of a new friend I’d met at Food Glorious Food, where I worked. The trip itself is quite a story. We left town in a Mazda and arrived in Wisconsin in a Saab, but that’s not germane to my point here. During our week in the Middle Western region I met another friend, who quickly joined us in Tallahassee. Since he arrived at 247 Lipona Dr. in a red Nissan Pulsar, we’ve been inseparable with a few exceptions. We’ve lived together in four houses, been neighbors five times, across three states: Florida, Montana, and Oregon. We both spent time with the first friend I mentioned, and other brothers, in Bosnia, although never together. I was passing through, he stayed quite a while.

I detoured to the Gulf coast, and upstate New York without him. He set up camp in Gainesville, and rural Marion county for a time. Other than these brief solo sorties Joey has been right there, so close I can reach out and put my hand on him, which I’ve needed to do more times than I can count.

Last night we broke protocol and hugged in his driveway, where he’s lived a mile away for close to 10 years. He, and his good and able companion, Paige, are off to North Carolina, to live in the mountains.

I’ve been thinking about friendship, and writing about it, for even longer than I’ve known Joey. Saying goodbye to friends is so hard. I’ve been lucky enough to experience that sense of loss more times than I can count. Learning Spanish, I was delighted to realize one day that the expression, “I miss you”, is so much better said in español. It more literally translates, “I am less you” or “I am minus you.” Let me tell y’all, I am very minus Joey.

What I hang onto, what holds me together, is an idea I’ve honed all my life; that we live many lives simultaneously through the lives of those we love. I am here in Tallahassee, doing non-profit work from home. Sometimes I ride my bike. I am also a plumber in Montana, a rock star in Portland, a data specialist in Orlando, a cartographer in North Carolina (soon), a paramedic in the Adirondacks, a bon vivant on the shores of Lake Ontario, a senior strategist at the Gates Foundation, and a horse trainer in Reddick. I’m a school teacher in Lee County, and I own some Melting Pots in DC. I lived in Singapore for a while, and I am an award winner photographer in NYC two times over. I save lives every day in heart surgery. I never came back from Bosnia, and I have many cherished children. I am a farmer and a librarian. I teach tolerance and humility in Colorado. I’ve saved countless children in countless places. I am an artist in the low country of Georgia, a scratch golfer and a stone cold pro of a drummer twice over. I have a little dog named Winter. I sell restaurant equipment and shred a Fender Strat or a Gibson SG. I am a nurse, brave and capable in a pandemic. I make ceramic totems for peace and kindness. I am the greatest wedding cake artist from the mountains to the deep blue sea. I’ve climbed the peak of the Grand Tetons, and wisely bailed on Aconcagua. I’ve made beautiful works of glass and read 10,000 books. I know Charles Mingus’ oeuvre by heart.

Those are just a few of the lives I live.

So yes, things are changing, which is all things ever do. Wherever you are today, and whatever you’re doing? I am there, and I do that too.

Juancho

We went to a parade on Saturday morning, for military veterans, which would draw him like a wise man to Bethlehem. We walked from our home on Redberry Farm through the neighborhood of Woodland Heights into Cascade park. I had him on my mind, and I would name him here, but I fear I have no right to do so– the boy that would sleep in the woods, and the man on the go loping across Tallahassee knapsack unraveling, weighing down like a sack of wet cotton. From the park we climbed the bank of the highway onto the shoulder then the sidewalk, police officers already stationed to block the traffic below the Capitol. Just the other side of the road is the hotel where he used to sleep– not in it, but behind it by the retention pond where the big red buses idle in the night. That’s where he was staying right before I started solving problems he didn’t have, me the one unable to bear him being homeless, which he told me time and again was a bargain price to pay for intellectual freedom and a currency of time and self-determination I could never understand.

We set up on the corner, sunshine dripping on this caramel apple of a day, citizens lining themselves along the route with folding chairs, cotton candy, and strollers. A woman selling boiled peanuts and water from a cooler in a wagon caught my attention and I swear I saw him slip behind her. Cold needles ran down my arms and legs, sweat beading on my scalp, knowing it could actually be him, as this whole long year I’ve yet to find the evidence he died. It could also be his ghost, which will surely haunt me to my own deathbed, and if I see anyone waiting across the gauzy haze it will likely be him.

I follow him with my eyes until I see in profile it is not him at all, but one certainly of his kind– sliding through the crowded downtown absorbing all around him with a curious bespectacled eye. He loved Tallahassee, or he loves Tallahassee, and Tallahassee loved and loves him too. When I learned of his death, rumored to have occurred on a bridge in Mobile, AL I searched all combinations of “bridge” “John Doe” “Black Male” “Suicide” and I still do, and still I find nothing. The trail cools quick and we must accept it.

When someone precious is lost, and we all of us are precious, I swear to my own heart I will build a towering monument of fire to the heavens in their honor, commit countless acts of noble grace in their name, devote my dwindling days to guaranteeing they will not be forgotten– then,the dream deferred, explodes; and the falling ash frosts my lashes as guilt and regret, because the thing you want to do can’t be done. There is not enough time. Not enough me. The person is actually, and matter-of-factly, gone.

Others out there remember too, but there is no social club for mourning, no projections of the deceased’s face on the clouds across the sky, no tattoo or car window decal in memoriam. Somewhere around town there must be others who still see him too? Head down in a pained posture as he perseverates on the collapse of our civic institutions, striding like a knight through Frenchtown towards the library and anywhere else a prince remains welcome in his kingdom that forgot him.