Well I'm going to attempt to Bar-B-Q a dead chicken on my fire-escape this afternoon. This in honor of the slave holding founding looters. Btw I made my own BBQ sauce. I used a recipe from my Dad's cook book.
He wrote all sorts of odds, and ends in the many notebooks he left behind. For example in a ledger from November 1957 he notes the various utility bills he'd paid. That as well as some itemized grocery lists.
Bread was .19 cents?!! Milk was .23 cents a bottle, and gas for our dear old Buick was .20 cents a gallon. Get this he notes a 'five pound' bag of oranges was .25 cents!!
He further wrote, "...new shoes for Sidney, I was seven,..$4.50" My heavens, and today kids demand $200. sneakers to keep up the the Crips in the school yard. Oh America where have you gone?
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For myself, I celebrated my former country's 235 birthday by cranking up the volume and playing Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_k-6FLfDkM, for want of better). It's the aural equivalent of Guernica - or to put it another way, if Picasso's Guernica had a sound track, Hendrix's music would be it. Happy Ben Tre! Happy Af-Pak! No danger of running out of barbecued kids from superior air power!
Great post Sidney..........Your sense of place and time are sdpot on. I enclose the following, written by my friend and fellow,poet Steven Mannihng:
My ode to growing up in America
An American Odyssey
I have travelled far and wide America;
And have waded in your oceans-East and West.
I have worked your mills and mines and truck farms;
I studied in your schools and universities
And then I took my rest.
My father and forefathers fought to keep you free;
My mother bore her children…taught them destiny.
I have stood with them in Church and learned their songs…
I have read the news…argued…
Infuriated at the wrongs.
When the time came, I at last joined to another,
And then I learned some more;
Raised our family together-fed and dressed them;
Still sometimes, I can’t wait until I’m out the door.
In the sands of Montauk
I remember seeing footprints that
Walt Whitman might have made;
At the base of little Round Top
I looked up to see another world’s end,
And (somehow) I was dismayed.
I have wandered in your cities without number,
Stared at motel ceilings without slumber,
Joined with people of the night in dingy barrooms –
Filled with wonder;
Mystified at how a tiny moth’s wings shake
Can move my soul like thunder.
I have stood atop twin towers
Above canyons that forgot the day;
And have leaned against the wall at Fillmore West
Watching children of a foreign culture play;
I have felt the clamor of Niagara,
And have soared two miles above the Great Salt Lake;
I have witnessed how the Mississippi introduces prairie,
And I still remember how
Old Faithful made a young man quake.
A life’s new chapters start
When a man begins to roam,
Still nothing in the world - large, small, or beautiful-
Can stir a wounded heart,
Like standing on the steps to home.
by Steven L. ManninG
Thanks both to Bodmin, and Anon. The poem is great, and Hendrix should be on the silver Half Dollar!
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