It's 9AM
He picked a spot in the shade of an old oak tree so they would have a cool place in the hot Arkansas summers.
I know you are, but what am I?
Another icon dead and gone.
It happens.
Has happened.
Will happen.
And gonna happen even more as I get older.
Sinead O’Connor.
Pee Wee Herman.
These things come in threes, and though I don’t have to hold any sort of breath to wait, I know another is coming.
The weird way about this news being delivered was via headline.
I was standing in a graveyard talking to a rock.
Or if it’s marble, is it a sculpture?
A marker? A stone?
Either way, I was visiting a couple of ghosts after a tour of Pine Bluff, giving them updates and keeping them up to speed.
My phone gave a little buzz in my pocket, so I pulled it out to check.
Not to be rude to Mamaw and Papaw, but they’ve really got nothing but patience now.
The headline read: Paul Rueben, Pee Wee Herman, dead at…
There’s something sort of appropriate about getting the notice while standing among the headstones.
It made me sad though.
His big adventures were funny.
His fall from grace funnier still.
For a nation of people who got here from the beast with two backs mattress dancing, we are a bit prudish when it comes to self loving.
Especially in public.
Not that I can blame anyone.
Anytime I see a couple slobber snogging in public like they need to get a room, I get a little bit of the heebie jeebies.
And that’s knowing that the wang bang is my only addiction, if I am addicted to anything.
Maybe addicted to big ideas and big plans and big ambitions.
Derailed sometimes by the chase of that sweet other addiction, but ever present none the less.
What I shared with the grands was the status of their home.
Or the burnt remains therein.
I sent a letter to the current lot/ruins owner with a deal.
I’ll clean up the lot, demo and clear the ruins in exchange for a quit claim deed.
Never heard back.
Now the city has tagged the exterior with instructions to demolish for safety.
And the land owner gets a lien on the property.
Just a reminder that people are stupid.
I only have a little idea of what I’d do with a lot in the hood anyway.
It’s surrounded by boarded up houses, and overgrown lots.
There’s even a home across the street that’s reclaimed by the vegetation and trees so bad, you can’t see it.
It is an impenetrable wall of twenty years of overgrowth.
I only know there’s a house there because the old man was a friend of Papaw’s in the way back when.
No one’s been there since he died.
What’s funny though, not in a ha ha way, but a tilt your head kind of fashion is just how fast nature can reclaim the world.
There is a house up the block that hosts an old oak tree across the middle.
A storm blew through a few years ago and soaked the roots enough that heavy winds knocked it across the middle of the dilapidated house.
A new tree is growing in it’s place, right where the roots were for the oak, and grass is growing inside the now open air house.
Water has infiltrated and destroyed the walls, and it’s breaking down more and more each time I see it.
In a few years, it will be overgrown and gone, just a thick shape of vegetation.
It doesn’t take long.
I told Papaw I wish I could ask him for some advice.
I have a problem, or a series of problems I’m trying to address, and it feels like the only thing keeping me from addressing them is…
Fear.
Not the “I’m standing in a graveyard and the ghosts are talking back” kind of fear, but the “oh no, here we go again” kind.
Leaps of faith are like that sometimes.
There’s always the 50/50.
You’ll fail, or you’ll succeed.
And though I try to think of failing as learning, sometimes people like to kick you when you fail.
Hell, sometimes they like to kick you when you win too, and try as hard as you might not to give a flying F#ck, there are sometimes F’s to give.
I guess what I would want him to say is I’m not being stupid, all evidence to the contrary.
I have heard from more than one person that “if you’re so smart, why are you…(insert whatever complaint you can think of here).
I have heard “You’re so smart, why won’t anyone hire you?”
I have heard “You seem smart, why isn’t that working?”
These are common refrains among the pragmatics and realists, and the very much “make it work right now” crowd.
Maybe that’s why I went to Pine Bluff today.
To update my big To Do list, and get some updates on projects that are moving way too slow.
But also because I wanted to sit beside a stone and wish for a piece of pie at a Formica tabletop, and a rub on my shoulder, and someone to sit on the patio with in folding lawn chairs and listen to stories.
Stories about how hard it was to raise money for a truck and trailer and gas to move free houses twenty miles across town.
Stories about working and scraping and roofing under the hot sun to build something.
Reputation and referrals and rental houses.
Building a whole life that’s gone now, except in a few memories.
I guess I would ask him if it’s worth it.
The trying.
If the house is going to go, and the town is going to go, and the people are going to go away, is there really a reason to try?
I mean, I have an endgame in mind, and an exit strategy for getting done with a timeline to go with it.
Which is what he had.
Own thirteen houses, retire at 65, sell a house every other year to supplement social security and pension.
His plan worked.
Mine might not.
Or it might.
Maybe I went to see them because I needed to be reminded.
Reminded of the things they taught, the things that stuck.
Work hard at working smarter.
Try to be better.
A better friend, a better father, a better man.
I know you are, but what am I?
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