Poet and Pulitzer Prize winner, Mary Oliver, who grew up in Ohio, died yesterday at age 83. Here's the first few lines from her poem "Wild Geese."
"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles in the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
Love what it loves..."
When Rachel White, of Designs, Vines, and Wines, asked me to draw something for Black History month, just about this time last year (2017), I decided to draw memoirist, longtime Winston-Salem resident, and America's Poet Laureate, Dr. Maya Angelou. As a poet myself, it just seemed like the obvious choice to draw. The drawing came out well, and that drawing made the rounds and a print ended up in the collection of Maya Angelou's niece and archivist.
One of the things that happened later, as a response to the Maya Angelou drawing, is that Rachel got a request for me to draw another poet, Mary Oliver. It was a commission by a high school English teacher, as I recall. I'd never heard of Ms. Oliver, so I dug into her story and searched for a good photo to work from. There were very few photos of her, and none that really worked well with my style of drawing. Technically, this was never one of my favorite drawings. But I really liked her work. I was stoked to hear that she grew up in northern Ohio, like I did. Her poems took me right back to the countless hours I spent wandering the woods, creeks, and lake shores of Ohio as a kid. Even more interesting, on a personal level, is that Mary grew up in Maple Heights, only a few miles from where my grandma grew up. My grandma, as a young woman, easily could have met Mary as a young girl.
As I read several of her poems, I really liked the way Mary looked at the world, and I wound up doing the drawing. To the best of my knowledge, the drawing above is hanging in a classroom in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I imagine the classes in that room will spend some time going over her poems Monday, while looking up at the drawing now and then. As a longtime wordsmith, it's cool to think a drawing of mine may help draw some young people a into the world of poetry for an hour, and maybe even for a lifetime.
For those of you reading this, you now have a brief idea who Mary Oliver was. If you have any interest in poems at all, I advise you to take a few minutes and check out her work. You might find a gem of an idea that really strikes you, like the last line of "Wild Geese" I quoted above, did to me.
R.I.P. Mary Oliver. Let the soft essence of your soul love what it loves and fly where it flies...
We managed to live in a small cottage on the end of Holiday Lakes, outside that small town of Willard, Ohio, for 2 1/2 years. That was 6th through 8th grades for me. We didn't have a boat, but I swam at the little beach all summer long with a bunch of friends. This video was made by one of my little sister's good friends who still lives there.
Last Friday night, I FINALLY made it to the First Friday Art fest on Trade Street here in Winston-Salem, NC. For a bunch of reasons, I'd never actually hung out on a First Friday, when the art scene here opens doors to everyone. I had a few of my Sharpie drawings with me, and they got a surprisingly good response from everyone I showed them to. I was really stoked on that. So, since I've now introduced myself to some of the Winston-Salem creative scene, and told a few people about this blog, I figured I'd better give you an idea who I am. This post will tell you a bit about my school years up through high school. The next post I'll link a bunch of stuff I've done and worked on since then. Early years- I was born in Ohio in 1966, making me one of the old farts in what's now known as Generation X. My dad was a draftsman and worked into a design engineer as I grew up. So I was raised looking at mechanical drawings my dad had done. He also taught me to draw Army Jeeps when I was 8, which made me fairly cool among the artistic kids in third grade. My mom was a housewife, who worked several part time jobs, and liked doing crafts. Ceramics in the early 70's was the one she excelled at most.
But I was chubby, sucked at sports, had buck teeth, and couldn't say my "R's" and S's" well until about 7th grade. I was also the shortest kid in class in every grade school, and super shy. So I grew up as a dork, geek, dweeb... take your pick. My family was more dysfunctional than most, less dysfunctional than some, and we moved to a new house or apartment nearly every year. As I grew up, we bounced around Ohio and Indiana until 8th grade, then a year in New Mexico (culture shock!), then to Boise, Idaho, where I managed to go to the same high school for three years, though we lived in three houses during that time.
As a kid, I spent most of my time imagining, wandering the woods (later the desert), and drawing, and into things like being a Boy Scout.
In the summer of 1982, we moved to a trailer park outside Boise known as Blue Valley. There were only three girls our age there, and the cute one had a boyfriend. So all the junior high and high school boys didn't have much to do, so we started trying to out-do each other on our BMX bikes. We started racing at the local track, and by the next year, BMX was my thing. That little bike changed the course of my life.
Looking into the poverty and lack of jobs in rural parts of the country, I ran across this video by the Washington Post, published in June of this year. I won't make fun of The South like I do a bit too much, I'm going back to Ohio, where I was born and lived through 8th grade. In first and second grade, I lived about 60 miles away from where these interviews took place.
It was a different world back then, the factories were still going strong. Of course, the Cuyahoga river in Cleveland caught fire once back then. I'm serious, the freakin' river caught on fire. I digress.
But the factory jobs have mostly gone, either to a factory somewhere cheaper or to a factory filled with robotics and other technology. I first remember hearing about factories moving in the late 70's. Old men were bitching about it. But the jobs weren't going to Mexico or China then, they were going to the American South, where there was cheaper labor. People have forgotten that.
So... the higher paying jobs in the Ashtabula area have gone. They blame Obama for that. I hate to tell you folks, but thousands of people have been working towards cleaner energy for decades. They've been doing that because the environment matters. You can eat the perch and walleye from Lake Erie, in part, because of environmental regulations. Obama just signed his name a few times.
Here's what I don't see in this clip. I don't see one person even talking about creating new jobs themselves. It's not Obama's fault that you have mostly low wage jobs. It's YOUR fault. Read a fucking book about technology. Get on the internet. Learn the computer skills of the century you're actually living in. Then, either move, or start creating jobs where you live. In this clip I see a bunch of fucking lazy people blaming everyone else for their problems. This is one of the worst relics of the Industrial Age that is fading away, the idea that somebody else is responsible for creating your job. If the companies leave... then either move to where the good work is, or figure out a way to create some new jobs in your area. What kind? Any kind.
I'll give you a great example out of rural Ohio itself. The Amish Country. Amish are as rural as rural gets, many drive horse and buggies everywhere they go. The Ohio Amish country around Millersburg and Silver Creek gets about 4 million tourists a year. Really, they get more visitors than Cedar Point, the main northern Ohio amusement park. Why do the Amish get so many tourists? Because they make all kinds of handmade food, crafts, furniture, and stuff you can't get anywhere else. They've been doing this for years, and lots of people are willing to travel there to check it out and buy unique stuff.
You don't have to make handmade furniture, but you do have to start using your imagination to come up with something fairy unique to Ashtabula (and every other small town and rural area in the U.S.), and you have to start creating jobs. CREATING JOBS IN DYING TOWNS IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE RESIDENTS THERE. Stop waiting for Prince Charming to show up and bail your asses out.
There used to be a thing known as "American Ingenuity." That was the idea that Americans were great a figuring new things out, coming up with new products, and new ideas to get things going. Americans excelled at finding answers to tough problems. Let's bring that concept back. If you're just going to sit around and hope the most incompetent president ever put in office will perform a miracle, then you might as well put heroin in your water, kill everyone off, and let someone with some ideas take over your town.
Three letters people: D.I.Y. Do It Yourself.
Oh, and I love how Brenda at 6:05, the one on disability, is bitching about illegal immigrants. Will everyone who lives more than 1,000 miles from the Mexican border stop bitching about immigrants? I've lived in New Mexico and California. Most Latino immigrants are better Americans than you are. They work hard. They go to church. They are very family oriented. And if that isn't enough, THEY INVENTED GUACAMOLE. What did you invent?
This was my favorite place that we lived in Ohio. It's called Holiday Lakes, outside Willard. We lived there for about 2 1/2 years, 6th through 8th grades for me. I think this video was uploaded by one of my sister's friends from back then.
I was born in 1966 outside Akron, Ohio, and my family moved around small towns and rural areas of Ohio as I grew up. My dad was a band geek as a kid, playing clarinet and saxophone. He became an avid car guy and target shooter in his younger years. Among his cars, he owned three of these babies. My dad was a draftsman, so he actually drew pictures for a living. He taught me how to draw Army Jeeps when I was 8, and later how to draw isometric and oblique pictures.
My mom listened to country music all day long and liked to do crafts. Ceramics was the one she was best at. I have a sister, Cheri, five years younger than me. My family was more dysfunctional than most, and less dysfunctional than some. We moved to a new house or apartment nearly every year.
I was pudgy, smart, bad at sports, I had buck teeth as a kid, couldn't say my "R's" or "S's" well. Yeah, I was a dork who got picked on a lot. When things got bad, I'd usually run off to the woods and wander around on my own for hours. John Denver's "Country Boy" was my theme song as a kid.
At age 10 in Willard, Ohio, a kid showed me a skateboard for the first time. It was handmade by his dad out of pressed aluminum with steel roller skate wheels. He showed me how to ride it. I rolled about a foot on his rock sidewalk, hit a pebble, fell down, scraped my knee, and said, "Skateboards are dumb." I changed my mind a few months later, and saved my allowance money for nine months to buy a green, plastic Scamp skateboard at Western Auto. It cost me $11.92. A couple years later, I bought a homemade board for $2 at a flea market. It was surfboard shaped, made out of a 3/4" piece of oak, and had 2 1/2" wide GT wheels. I rockwalked that board until about 1988.
When I was in 8th grade, in the late 70's, my dad's company was having troubles, and he found a new job... in Carlsbad, New Mexico. That was a huge culture shock for a small town kid from the Midwest. I went from this to this overnight. It was a rough year. But then that company had problems, and we moved to Boise, Idaho. Though we moved to a new house every year, I did manage to go to Boise High School for the full three years and graduate. My plan was to go to college and become a wildlife biologist. But I didn't have money to start college, so I "took a year off" and ended up never going at all.
At the end of my sophomore year of high school, in June of 1982, we moved to a trailer park in the "desert" outside of Boise. The plan was for my parents to save money for a year and then buy a house. Officially, the park didn't have a name, but all the street names started with the word "blue." So everyone called it Blue Valley. There was nothing but miles of sagebrush in three directions. The other direction was bounded by I-84. It was really hot in the summer, so the dozen of so junior high and high school kids in the park would watch TV all afternoon, and then we'd come out in the early evening after supper. Like kids everywhere, we'd play basketball, whiffle ball, football, or just talk smack to each other. But all us guys had cheap BMX bikes, and we'd also go out to this little area of jumps and berms some motocross rider had built a couple of years before. As the summer progressed, we spent more time riding our bikes and less time playing other games. BMX became our thing. In October of that year, someone heard that there was a BMX track near downtown Boise. We found it, and raced the last race of the year. The track was at the edge of the foothills, in a drained sewer pond. It didn't look like much to most people, but it was amazing to us. Despite our cheap bikes and lack of actual racing experience, we all won trophies. Our daily competition with each other paid off, and we surprised and pissed off the local racers by doing so well. "Where'd all these fast kids on lame bikes come from?" they asked all day. BMX became our thing.
I raced BMX for all of 1983, and helped re-design the Boise track, and then designed a new track. But the emerging sport of BMX freestyle, doing tricks on BMX bikes, was way more interesting to me. I joined the only BMX trick team around, and did shows with Justin Bickel and Wayne Moore. For once, I was actually good at a sport. OK, hardly anybody else actually did that sport, but I didn't care. Much to my parents' dismay, I spent hours a day learning tricks on my little BMX bike. Without realizing it, my life turned in a totally different direction. The idea to be a wildlife biologist faded, and I worked at restaurants and rode my bike, and not much else.
The year after I graduated high school, 1985, my dad got a job in San Jose, California. I finished my summer job in Boise, managing a small amusement park called the Boise Fun Spot. In August, I packed up my ugly, brown 1971 Pontiac Bonneville, and drove solo to San Jose to live with my family.
While my year in Carlsbad, New Mexico was a tough one, I came to love the desert and the wide open spaces of the West. I also made several trips to Carlsbad Caverns, a truly amazing and beautiful cave system. When I lived there ('80-81), another cave, called The New Cave then, was just beginning to be explored. Now it's called Lechuguilla Cave, and is one of the largest cave systems in the world now, bigger than the original caverns that made the area famous.
