Piety come to Indiana

Chef Hubert Grandview Spaggios

Boyd

Boyd
April 25, 2010 1:50 PM
For all that's said And all that's done, It is we who carry on, The weight of our world That we created, a tiresome load That is lightened by song, By good times with family And a cup of Welsh humor. I sip a toast to you beloved brother, Red as a herring and white as a dove You gave us a lift When the going got tough. And that was enough.

Smoke

Smoke Speaks of Experience vs Armchair Coaching

My cat sees a moth, moves closer, eyes focused, swishes tail, positions legs four, five times..........Moth flies up, cat jumps and just misses.

I say," If you would spring earlier and stop adjusting your legs over and over, you would catch that moth".

Smoke's conversation is filled with questions:
"How many mothe have you ever caught? How many voles, mice, grasshoppers, blue jays, cardinals, sparrows, gold fish, toads? How many garter snakes, have you bitten off their heads?

"I had no intention of killing this moth. I want him to return for another day of play. Just smoke your pipe and shut up with your advice. My name is Smoke. All you can do aged clumsy monkey man is blow smoke. End of story.
        

The Shape of a Bear

The Teddy Bears’ Picnic (with apologies to Wanda and Boyd - you guys were there for me too.)

James Wright had his Martin’s Ferry. I had my Kings Mills. Both are small river towns in Southern Ohio. Wright wanted to escape his home after schooling and eventually found himself in Italy. At an early age I aspired to escape my family.

When I was three I left home in search of the Teddy Bear’s picnic. The rail bed of a defunct interurban rapid transit was just over the back fence with a bridge that crossed a swail. Beyond the bridge was a locust grove and then down hill to the river where the powder line of the King Powder Company was arrayed. The red buildings of the line were the same brick color as the hotelsin the family Monopoly set. The buildings looked like barns and stored the ingredients of gun powder and were connected by rail. Brass shoed horses moved the salt peter and sulfur sparklessly in rail cars to other remote buildings where "powder monkeys" combined the ingredients into gun powder.

"Powder monkeys" was the name given to the black faced Appalachians that the powder company lured from the coal mines ofEastern Kentucky to an equally dangerous job as mining coal. A hapless worker would light a cigarette and the crew would be blown to smithereens. The utility of the powder line was that the distance between the buildings prevented a chain reaction of explosions.

The "powder monkey" families lived in a string of run down apartments on
Cherry Street, one street over from King Avenue where my family lived
in a company house. At the top of King Avenue stood the King mansion
where Colonel King, the founder of KPC lived. At the bottom of the
avenue, just before the S curve that took you down to the powder line,
was my dad's barber shop. His name was Boyd Stanley Ellis. He had a
glass name plate on the door initialed B. S. Ellis. Townspeople would
see the sign and say Barber Shop Ellis. Dad was known as the barber
and I was known as the barber's boy. I was the last child of the family and I knew I was the favorite.

Why did I want to leave home? My Dad had went to look for me and I told
him I was looking for Teddy Bears in the woods. He told me I was not ready
to leave home. I had to take care of my own Teddy Bear who lived in my bedroom.

My father had left home when he was sixteen. He was from Carrol County
Kentucky and my mother was from Western Kentuck. He was quick to
distinguish us as a better class of people than those from Eastern
Kentucky, where the hills and mountains lay. Stanley Ellis was born in a
sharecropper's shack along the Kentucky River close to where it flows
into the Ohio, a hundred and fifty miles from upstream Martin's Ferry
and fifty miles from Cincinnati.

In Cincinnati, my parents met at the state mental hospital, the "bug house" , as they called it. My dad learned barbering, cutting patient's hair while my mother made a stint at nursing at the hospital. My Dad chose to move the family to Kings Mills because it lay on a deeply rutted hillside in juxtaposition to the Little Miami River much like his boyhood home lay next to the
Kentucky.

My parents left their homes to escape the poverty of Kentucky. There was another kind of poverty that I wanted to escape. A poverty of imagination.

My knowledge of the world came from uncle Bob in California who gave us a Christmas subscription to the National Geographic. I would study the black and white pictures before I learned to read. I would get books from the bookmobile. I loved " A Child's History of the World. I preferred to be alone with my Teddy Bear. He was my study companion. I would sit on the floor of the pantry with the door closed and read about Alexander the Great cutting the Gordian Knot, unseen by anyone.

The Teddy Bear's Picnic was a song on the radio that sparked my wanderlust. The song promised that if you went to the picnic, to the woods, you would never be seen again. That suited me because I preferred the company of Teddy and his friends. When I die, heaven could be like that.

My mother died a few years ago. My forgotten bear drew the largest sum of money of anything sold in the auction at the family home. I was glad to see him gain some respect from the family. I had abandoned him to a box in the attic when I left for school when I was seventeen.

At Miami University, fifty miles away, I was light years away from Kings Mills. My mother had wanted me to attend a Baptist school in North Carolina. That would certainly sober my youthful imaginings. My father was incontact with customers at the barber shop who helped him to see the advantage of a secular education. Miami was my escape, but it was his
invention.

My father had had the courage and wisdom to leave home and better himself and his young wife when he was seventeen. He positioned me almost unwittingly for my "escape" from him. My parents had lost their first born and were overprotective of me. I felt that constraint as a three year old. But someone left the screen door unlocked, the fence unbolted, and I had made my escape at age three.

When I was seventeen, I cut the family Gordian Knot. My father drove me to the university in the family Buick where I would continue my search for "Teddy Bears". A community of Bears, an unbearable lightness of being that I keep with me.

Boris, I will always be true to you. Thanks, buddy.

Teddy bears live solitary lives with lonely children. Mute, they listen to repetitive stories told by illiterate boys and girls.

In their hearts they long to be with their own kind, in the remote woods.They come to the picnic to feast on the presence of other Teddy Bears.

It is imagination that sustains the bears and the quest for imagination is what they teach the boy or girl who attaches themselves to one of their fuzzy little kindred.

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