We regular kids did not know what made them special.  We only saw them rarely:  kids as big as high schoolers whose bodies moved clumsily, whose voices were too loud, who seemed unintelligible. We did not know how to relate to them.  We only knew they had problems that they were not normal.  We were happy for them to stay in their own little world.  We stared if they crossed our path or moved hesitantly and quickly past them if we encountered one of them in the hallway.

One unusual day they came out to recess at the same time we did.  I hated recess in third grade.  My best friend had been assigned a different teacher who was notoriously stingy with recess so I rarely saw him.   Miles, the arbiter and architect of the male half of the social order in Ms. Kazian’s class had decided I was to be in exile.  This meant I often wandered the playground (a three acre span of asphalt parking lot) by myself .

On this day I was wearing my camouflage.  Many of the boys had a basic set of US military jungle camo, though some had the more rare British desert or Special Forces Tiger Stripe variety.  I had finally gotten my set of camo that Christmas and I loved it.

All in camo and playing by myself I caught the attention of some bigger kids from fourth or fifth grade.  They began picking on me and hassling me for no good reason.   They started making fun of my camouflage.  Slowly they circled in toward me, egging each other on with their insults and laughter.  They smelled blood, and I knew I was in trouble.  I was cornered in a lonely part of the playground.  My nine year old bones could feel the violence coming.  The two older boys drew closer until they were in my face barking insults and crowding me– then there was a push.

Out of nowhere this much bigger and taller boy swooped in and drove off my attackers.  When I looked at him I saw that it was one of the Special Ed kids. My savior was part of this odd group of people that I was afraid of that I found strange and threatening.  He had rushed in and defended me for no other reason than he saw a kid being bullied.  We made eye contact and simply nodded acknowledging that every thing was okay now.  As we walked away from each other my little heart filled with shame as I remembered how I had thought of these people and how wrong I had been.  I resolved not to make fun of the Special Ed kids or think badly of them any more.

Even now, when someone makes fun of someone for being a “retard” or when I fail to perfectly keep my own childhood resolution, I feel a pang of conscience and think of my playground hero.  I think of him, and all that his act of kindness taught me.

It was cool for August, the sky was an unbounded sapphire and the light was crystalline. As I walked I was caressed by the cool air, and I found myself in a moment when unseen tumblers fell into place and the day opened before me in exquisite beauty. Everything was suspended in the light and the blue. Memories flooded back of other times when the light of a day came from places other than the sun. I recall a charmed spring when I sat at an open window my imagination wandering through Cather’s Nebraska grasslands or a time sitting on a boulder strewn Cape Ann beach watching the breakers as I fell in love.

At the same time the coolness of the air reminded me of the day’s passing, of the inevitability of winter and the moment’s too soon evaporation. And it is an exquisite reminder of my own mortality. This is all fleeting. I am both elated and sad and I can only reach out with my feelings toward something I may never full apprehend, my consciousness grasping at a nameless mystery before the light recedes into the silence and the dust.

I am moved to mourn as I feel the moment’s loveliness retreating from me. And I am presented with a choice: whether to suffer and futilely protest –and regret—the passing of the day, or to unclench and give the day its freedom allowing it to pass over me and through me in its momentary resplendence.

So I decide.

As I walk the light quickly changes and again I am only on a city sidewalk. I step in a puddle left by an over-zealous water-sprinkler. I nod to the morning smokers I pass every day outside the old-age home. I descend the stairs to the subway and I go to work.

“Saigon . . . Shit.  I was still in Saigon .”

That word.  Saigon .  It’s like a word from a fairy tale or a nightmare, a make believe place redolent of exotic magic and sudden danger.  A word that remains only on sun-bleached maps and in fading memories.  A place that had existed on a frontier of conflict and destruction whose liminal status made anything possible.  At a distance, at least partially, this is how I experienced it.  Born in the year the massive city finally fell to forces that threatened and beleaguered it for thirty years, I was at my mother’s breast when the long struggle in Vietnam ended on the battlefield, when Saigon fell.

Growing up in the 80′s I was continually reminded of Saigon .  As a nation we were still not reconciled to Saigon ‘s disappearance or our role in its vanishing or its uncomfortable place in our collective consciousness.  In 1982, as a child whose television consisted primarily of PBS I watched the multi-part documentary Vietnam:  A Television History. Even at a young age, I knew America had lost. The possibility of loss in the midst of Cold War provoked an uncomfortable anxiety.  At the same time, my curiosity about history and the thunder of helicopters over jungle canopy and the chaos of firefights enthralled me.

One image, the execution of a suspected Viet Cong on Saigon ‘s streets traumatized me.  As a child I had no words, no categories for the sudden, livid brutality that appeared so quickly on my television screen.  It was one thing to see real life “Cowboys and Indians” gunning it out in the forest or gunships firing into a tree line, but this, this execution that was both personal and utterly cold roiled my guts.  I was overwhelmed with a revelation about the world that my eight year old eyes were not ready to see.  This image still stands in my memory and my mind’s eye as a moment of horror forever happening and forever suspended in time.

In 1985 our National Geographic arrived in the mail featuring the Vietnam Memorial.  It was something I had seen on the news but only in passing.  The wall itself was dark and imposing, a scar in the ground.  Like Vietnam it was mysterious, encapsulating the ineffable within its dark granite while reflecting the images of old soldiers whose wounds and sorrows were stretched in pain across their faces.  Wounds evident even to a kid like me.

As child of the 1980s the Vietnam War was not over.  It was continually being re-fought in the rhetoric of politicians, at the movies and on TV.  Ronald Reagan and Chuck Norris held out hope that some of our soldiers were still there, and were, like our decisive victory, still missing in action.  History was not final.  Our experience of Vietnam could be rescued.  Our men could be saved as long as courageous men –men unsullied by politics– true believers like Colonel Braddock and John Rambo were willing to go back to Vietnam .  Perhaps then our war could be won.  We did not have to lose, and through Braddock and Rambo we could even experience victory.  These fictional heroes would return to Vietnam again and again to demonstrate America , and the American soldier’s, physical and moral superiority.

Not all cinematic visions of the 1980′s attempted to provide viewers with a vicarious sense of victory.  Platoon and Full Metal Jacket explored moral poles of military conflict and the ambiguity of the reality between them, while Hamburger Hill reflected on the arbitrariness and futility of the struggle in Vietnam .

In spite of the many explorations and interpretations of Vietnam on film, nothing could seem to provide an encompassing explanation of what had happened there. They all addressed the national wound differently, but the wound remained.  The (first) Gulf War may have restored our national confidence and the passing of time may have eased the poignancy of Vietnam’s pain, but the possibility of dealing publicly with the issues of Vietnam in any way other than art was effaced by Reagan’s reappraisal and the conservative embrace of the conflict into black and white categories:  Our soldiers were always honorable.  Our cause was always just.  It was the weak and the misled that caused us to suffer defeat.

Within this narrative we had not lost, not really. We had only been forced out by dopey, pacifist hippies and vacillating politicians.  It was not conceivable that a Third-World country could have driven a superpower from its shores, but the conservative narrative of defeat-snatched-from-victory still conflicts with images of crowded, overwhelmed helicopters fleeing the American embassy in Saigon and leaves us with a cognitive dissonance rife with questions.

In spite of our recent military adventures, in spite of counternarratives, questions remain.  Saigon hovers at the edge of our national memory, accusing us from the past, desiring satisfaction.  Saigon whispers “how?” and “why?”  Saigon remains a word that invokes the bleak hangover of Vietnam that lingered through my childhood so that part of me, part of us, part of our national self, is still left behind– in the shadow of Saigon .

The Mills loomed large for my family.  My grandparents worked for years in the mills.  They had moved from the nowhere towns of the Carolina foothills to the factory town of Greenville.  These mills had been sifting down from New England for over a half-century in order to benefit from the cheap, third-world labor of the South.  Mills came to dominate the local economy. Greenville would, with reason, eventually declare itself, “The Textile Capital of the World.”

The communities of the mills were etched in the memory of my grandparents as place names and neighborhoods. Mills had provided employment, shelter and community.  Even after my grandfather moved to the more affluent eastside, his mind was still oriented to the geography of the mill.   My grandfather would refer to Judson or Poe Mill or Woodside as landmarks and placeholders in Greenville ‘s landscape when they had been silent and shuttered for twenty years and more.

This silence was echoed by the “Old” Textile Hall.  Built downtown adjacent to the business district for the Southern Textile Exposition in 1917 the Hall had become a vacant monument to Greenville ‘s manufacturing glory and a symbol of its decline.  In 1972 they built what was called the “New” Textile Hall.  The “New” hall was simply a convention center, lacking in architectural charm as well as authenticity.  As the relevance of calling it a “Textile” hall disappeared to the point of embarrassment the city fathers renamed it the Palmetto Exhibition Center.

As a child I was captivated by these relics of the past, these hulks of red brick lined with large, faceless windows standing quietly behind walls of chain-link fence. I could not understand how so much human activity, how the energy and time of so many people could end in silence and dereliction.  These buildings had stood at the heart of communities and transformed a small, pleasant burg into an industrial capital.  Even after they closed, the brick of these places still radiated a lingering civic pride and identity, an identity formed by what now existed only in the past.

I never saw the inside of a working mill until I visited the Lowell National Historical Park in Massachusetts.  There along with the exhibits, they had two machines running.  They were machines from the era my grandparents would have been working there.  The mill always present at the edges of their stories was suddenly  in front of me.  Even with only two machines operating, the room was deafening.  I could imagine clearly my grandmother as a young woman standing at the loom, cotton stuffed into her ears while she made the same endlessly repetitive motions day after day beside scores of other women, while porters carried things in and out and children kept things swept and cleared away.

At the end of the shift, the mill would empty out.  Men head to the bars and billiard halls or perhaps to a Textile League baseball game.  My grandfather would speak of how the Lord saved him from pool and drink during his years at the mill.  When my family bought a house with a pool table, we discovered my sixty year old grandfather could still run the table on us when he had not played pool in over thirty years.  My brothers and I could only imagine the rakish hustler he must have been back on the mill hill.

My grandfather died in the same hospital I was born in.  In sight of the mills, the mills that shaped him, shaped a town, shaped a region.  Meanwhile, brick chimneys stand silently over the communities they created while the names of the mills continue to fade from their water towers and our memories.

In my world, the champion of this view was our music minister, a snow-maned anti-rock crusader named Frank Garlock. He wrote books, gave lectures and actively and ardently argued in “bible-believing” churches across America that Rock was destructive, promoted vice, undermined the gospel, failed to glorify God and acted as a corrosive moral force wherever it surfaced. In was inherently and irredeemably immoral.

My parents dutifully followed the church’s instructions. Rock and Roll was banned in our house. When I asked for and received a small boom box,* I was given Tchaikovsky’s Greatest Hits (Volumes 1 & 2), Haydn and Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, but no Michael Jackson, no Cyndi Lauper no Duran Duran.

All my friends talked about it. They had MTV and parents who were not rigorous about enforcing the church’s doctrine at home. I remember my cousin wearing his be-zippered Michael Jackson jacket over to our house one Christmas when I barely knew who Michael Jackson was. Meanwhile, Thriller, the greatest pop album of my generation was devouring the culture.

Even with a boom box, I was not free to listen to rock music. I had no earphones and my little brothers would have ratted me out at the first opportunity. The most raucous thing I could listen to were Beethoven’s Symphonies. My radio choice was limited to WMUU –Bob Jones flagship radio station. A station that not only played no upbeat music, but played the most boring classical music possible.

Finally, at last, I prevailed upon my mother to purchase me a pair of radio-headphones. They were a big, red bulky pair of GPX headphones with the radio built right in available for $10 at Eckerd Drug. Victory! Once in bed, I would pull my headphones out from under my bed and pop them on. Even in my room, I could not listen too loud for fear I would be caught. There in the darkness of my room I was free to listen to rock music, but I was not just listening I was studying. Mentally, I was trying to note, to recall and remember what I had listened to so that I would not feel ignorant among my friends at a school, so I could particpate in the subterranean conversations about this blacklisted form of music.

Knowing what was playing in the Top 40 was amazing. Being able to say to classmates that “Yeah, that Bon Jovi song was awesome.” or “You’re right. I hate Phil Collins, too.” relieved a tremendous amount of social pressure. I still could not comment on music videos, but at least I was not completely in the dark.

Between sixth and seventh grade, I made a vow before God at the behest of evangelist Tom Farrell to never listen to Rock Music again. I did not mean to. My friend had grabbed me and we went forward with everyone else before I quite knew what was going on. During this same era our youth group began showing a series of videos hosted by a “cool” ex-rocker guy meant to persuade us of the insidious, demonic horrors of Rock Music.

The videos introduced me to bands that my sheltered, naive self had not discovered: The Who, Queen and Led Zeppelin as well as darker, more “sinister” bands like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest. It seemed a small price to pay to listen to sermonizing between the quick, informative clips of this music I had never heard before. Part of the video’s problem was its crippling earnestness, as well as its belief in backmasking. It played a clip from Queen over and over whose subliminal message purported to say, “Start to Smoke Marijuana.” It sounded more like cats fighting in the alley. It was not convincing.

What finally liberated me to listen to rock music, in my head as well as my soul, was PBS. A big fan of PBS, I happened to catch a lecture on music theory. The speaker was a scrawny man with unfortunate 70′s curls, tinted eye glasses and a light blue blazer standing stock still at a podium before a neutral background. Beginning with Gospel, Blues and Jazz he proceeded to trace the evolution of Rock and Roll from Chuck Berry to AC/DC. He was measured. He was reasoned. He calmly established his points illustrating how bands adopted and altered the styles of musicians preceding them.

When he finished, I was amazed. This nerdy music theorist had presented a revolutionary picture of Rock Music to me. His picture of Rock and Roll trumped the fearful rants of pleading and impassioned pastors and the moralizing vitriol of music ministers. It was not a spell originating from a Satanic mind, it was notes, rhythm, instrumentation, patterns, structures always being tweaked and adapted by new musicians. It was not hellish seduction; it was art.

Not only did this dull, spectacled scholar give me a deeper appreciation of music, It exposed a chink in the worldview and authority of my religious teachers. They were not merely wrong, but were hysterical and raving by comparison to PBS’s bland music professor whose intellectual rigor dismantled Rock and put it back together again.

In some respect, my pastors were right. Rock did lead me to rebel and to question authority: their authority. Authority that was wrongheaded, ill-informed and misguided because as the song says:

God gave rock and roll to you, gave rock and roll to you
Gave rock and roll to everyone
God gave rock and roll to you, gave rock and roll to you
Put it in the soul of everyone

*An archaic device, often carried on the shoulder as a wardrobe accoutrement and powered by an environmentally destructive number of ‘D’ batteries.

Here he was now, unconscious, breathing his last. His food supply had already been shut off as his organs gradually failed. My Mom and my Aunt were by his bed. I was standing nearby along with my Dad. We were playing a compact disc of old fashioned hymns hoping the music might somehow reach him that it might soothe him in his final moments. He breathed his last as “Peace in the Valley” transitioned into “Nearer my God to Thee.”

And then he was gone.

We stayed with his body a while. Embraced one another, were disturbed by an inappropriate and over zealous hospital chaplain and were finally sent down to family lounge so the nurses could do what they needed to do.

I went back to the room by myself. Papa was already cold and sallow. It did not seem possible that life had ever been present here. I kissed him on the forehead, and then I noticed it.

There it was: a glistening tear, just below the corner of his eye. My heart suddenly writhed. I did not know what to do. My first thought was of my mother. I did not want her to think that his very last moment was one of sadness or pain. I could not leave it there.

I wiped it away with my index finger, where it clung: the last trace that this cold, sallow body was once my Papa. How could I get rid of it? No one else was in the room with me, but to wipe it on my jeans or onto the bed sheets seemed wrong –profane. I did the only think I could do. The only thing I felt honored the moment. I placed the tear on my tongue. It was communion. I felt blessed and selfish simultaneously as I took this last trace of my Papa’s life into myself.

It was salty, and a Bible memory came into my head. “And the Israelites came to a place called Mara because the water was bitter.” The recollection seemed to fit my sorrow, but no mystical connection was formed, no final vision of my grandfather came to me only his body’s final signal to the world. A signal that I could not read, did not want to read, to reduce.

I am sure there is a purely medical explanation. Just like my Papa’s life could be reduced to DNA and mitochondria, to army discharge papers or to a factoid in decennial census tables; just as his death could be explained as the cessation of bodily functions.

Can I let it be so? Perhaps if I had not participated in that moment, perhaps if my knowledge of medicine or biology was more extensive it would not have been so cruel, so shocking like a small cold dagger in my heart. It would not have created a sense of fear, sorrow or wonder, but it did create such a sense, and I must wonder.

Did my Papa at the end, who was so sure of heaven, realize in his mind’s sunset that there would be no Savior to welcome him to the golden streets? Or was the final spasm of his heart painful beyond words? Or did he, who so hoped for heaven, realize how very much he loved being alive in this world? The only world any of us can be certain of.

When I saw him again at the funeral home he was covered in the embalmer’s pancake make-up, more mannequin than man. We surreally give closure to the grieving by making the dead appear as life-like as possible.

At the conclusion of the biblical passage about Mara there is a non-sequitur, the Lord speaks, promising that if the Israelites do what is right the Lord will be their healer. We need healing after tasting life’s bitter waters.

No one knows what happens after death whether our souls ascend to heaven, whether the strands that comprise us dissipate to reincarnate at some later time or if we just rot, rot, rot. All we can do, all we can truly know is that it is possible to reach out, to wipe away the tears of the grieving here and now.

But maybe there is room to wonder. Maybe one day our tears will be wiped away. Maybe, one day, our grief will be healed.

The kernel of this essay was conceived shortly after my grandfather’s death in January 2008.

It was a parking lot the church used on Sundays, capable of holding many Baptists. Its sole concession to its weekday function was that someone had spray-painted yellow bases on the blacktop. A sprawling lot bordered by interesting hedges with nooks and crannies.

Who knows how many how many pairs of Tuff Skin jeans I went through? Or how many times mom ironed dark blue patches from K-Mart onto their faded and hol(e)y fabric. Tuff Skins were Sears & Roebuck specials, an ultra-denim formulated for the rigors of childhood; perfect for protecting young knees from the unyielding, gritty surface of the playground.

It was impossible to play football there. Even as kids we knew that a football game on asphalt would be brutal. The preppy kids who brought their shiny new Brine-stamped soccer balls soon found them ragged. Wiffle balls would crack and a dropped plastic toy was a gonner.

But it was the perfect playground for kickball.

Who knows how many times I stood behind home plate: left leg back, arms hanging loose waiting to make contact, the one-two rhythm of the approach in my head. I can still hear the red rubber ball as it rolls toward me scratching and skipping over the hard surface. The anticipation. Here it comes. One-two-kick. For a millisecond the soft rubber envelopes my foot and then explodes with a dull, slappy thud into the playing field. And, being left footed, I tended to pull my kicks, I long to hear the sound of it coming to a stop with a metallic smack as it hits the aluminum building in right field.

There were other games. Games that would now get the school sued, shut down, or spawn gaggles of social workers to monitor us with government eyes. One of the best we called “Murderball.” It was Dodgeball to the nth degree. Take a dozen or so kickballs, twenty boys and a narrow space between the brick school and the aluminum lunch building and you get the idea. I could only hope to nail someone before being blindsided. I still remember my ear ringing the rest of the day after receiving a solid shot from Timothy Miller.

After lunch the tradition was to have races. The parking lot had a very slight downhill angle. At the base was a long, tall hedge. Our bellies still churning with cola and Little Debbies we would line up at the long stripe uniting the second set of parking spaces up from the bushes. A few of the races were epic. I particularly remember with pride the day my third grade class beat Ms. Baker’s fourth graders.

Besides its unforgiving surface there were other punishments too. Parking stripes were detention centers. A large section of spaces would be filled with kids who talked and misbehaved in class doing what we called “Standing-on-the-Line”. You could not speak to passer-by or move from your spot. Most offenders got 5-10, but some got 15. Only rarely would someone get 20 –virtually the entire recess. The minutes went by agonizingly slow when you were on-the-line.

There was a second, more active punishment: laps. Instead of time the guilty would have to run circuits of the parking lot. As I recall, the most laps ever meted out was a sentence to run laps for two consecutive recesses after the infamous Mandy Simmons extortion-incident, but five laps was the norm. Guys would run them quickly to get them out of the way; girls usually sauntered with a friend gossiping.

It was a hard lot for a hard school, a school that orbited the rigid Christian vehemence of Bob Jones University, but the playground, like the prison yard, offered a reprieve from those strictures. On the playground you could talk about anything –even taboos of sex and rock and roll. It was there I first heard Brad Martin oh so ignorantly describe sexual intercourse and where my friend Philip assured me of the awesomeness of AC/DC.

There is no actual playground now. The school moved to the rich, white suburbs and everything was sold, torn-down, redeveloped. Now I can only remember the torn Tuff Skins and bloody knees; the scraped hands that looked like they had glass on them; and the blur of children’s shouts and screams. And there is in my mind’s eye a child, running free across the Asphalt Playground.

This blog will likely be thematically the same.  I continue to be fascinated by memory and nostalgia, the traumas and the perceptions of times past/passed.  For me this is often centered on the milieu of Reagan and religion I was immersed in during my childhood in the Deep South.

Sometimes my entries are less serious and may cover things as diverse as being attacked by dogs or scatological problems in Asia Minor– just the usual quotidian mishaps we all have.

They tend to be a bit long, often broken up into more than one post as I am vain enough to try to write actual essays with nutritive value and to prevent my blog from being a quick bite of internet junk food.   My blog resists simply being a record of personal rants,  an index of internet fads or Twitterization.

Comments, even antipathetic ones, are welcome and encouraged as long as they are reasonable.  Comments are like bursts of warmth from the void of the internet and for a brief moment one is not alone in the endless abyss of cyberspace.

So there are your caveats and your introduction.  Welcome.