I have had to recreate myself at the age of 71. Here's a bit about my hometown, dancing, cajun dancing, wanting to be an artist.
Friends and Kin It’s June 2, 2006, and Baton Rouge is at it’s finest. It is borderline summer and the mornings are cool enough for a long walk before eight. The magnolias are magnificent with those huge, thick leaves of deep green, loaded with the great white blossoms so pungent the air around them is an redolent envelope filled with their spicy fragrance. The crepe myrtles are also amazing this year. Some of the trees are just huge puffs of watermelon hued blossoms. There was a drought for a month or so and finally we have had rain and the grass, shrubs and trees sprang forth with vibrant green that blesses the eyes and soothes the soul.
I think this rant will be a bit biographical and personal, and serves as more of a diary entry than an essay. It is more of a personal journal entry for my grandchildren to read about how I got from there to here. So, dear reader, if you want to quit reading right now, please do so for this may not be interesting at all to you.
My wife Amelia and I, with our friends and associates in ELG Charles and Karen Hatcher, are going to Steamboat Springs next Wednesday for our national convention. We will return the following Saturday when my daughter Shannon will bring my grandkids, Jeff, Austin and Krystalyn for a few days. I will want to spend some time with them and get them together with my two other grandsons, Jack and Cole, who live in Denham Springs with my son John and daughter in law Erin. Then Amelia and I are going to Clearwater to end off some cycles we have been working on for some time which will result in our going to the Freewinds, a cruise ship in the Caribbean, to complete. This may take a month or more, so I will be off this line for the entire time. Karen and some of the other originators who work with us will hold the helm while we are gone. So this means I am in a kind of neutral here until we leave in three weeks.
I will still do the How Money Works seminar at the Hampton Inn on the 15th, and Karen will handle the business generated at that meeting until we return. I will be studying for my securities license during this time as well. I am so impressed with Karen. I am blessed to have her as an associate.
When I return I intend to get the business in high gear with some major goals for it before the end of the year. Also I am going to set up a publishing company for my novels, Brillig Press, and sell them on a website through PayPal and printed through a POD (print on demand) publisher Lightning Source which will receive an order and print one or many books and send them out immediately. It is not an expensive deal, and they make the books available to Amazon and all the major distributors such as Engram and Forest Sales, which will make the books available through major bookstores. I am excited about this. I will have control of the whole affair rather than suffering the agony of going through a conventional publisher which may or may not take it, and if they do they may not get it out, and if they do and it doesn’t sell in two weeks it goes to the back list and soon sells for fifty cents on the clearance table at Books A Million.
Starting from scratch, moving out of a forty three year career as a successful but really unhappy lawyer as a lawyer, with no transferable skills, at the age of 70, has been a challenge. I refused to “get a job”, for I have always worked for myself and I found Equity Leadership Group which is an ambitious undertaking to compress all available financial services---mortgages, insurance, investments—into one effort and product. Help a family get a good mortgage, save them money, pay their debt, create reserves and help them with their insurance and investments. It is exciting and has a great future. Recreating myself is hard, as I was accustomed to being at the top of my profession and I had to start all over at the bottom of another endeavor entirely that I knew absolutely nothing about. And it has been slow going, slower than I could tolerate at times for I wanted to be on top again immediately. I became depressed. Then I realized yesterday that the primary reason the business hadn’t boomed was that I hadn’t fully taken off the lawyer suit. I hadn’t fully been able to move into the new and out of the old, and the old was squashing and holding me down.
It is just an idea, I know, but it was an anchor in the past and I had to become this new beingness---. But ideas or beliefs are everything and control every facet of one’s life. They contain the whole worldview. I could so easily become a full time artist or writer, for I am that already. And I could be good, but how good in terms of making a living from it? However, I am afraid I am not good enough, lucky enough, to hit a home run in the arts to sustain my financial needs. So I am tearing out the hook from the past, which wasn’t a good hook and never was me from the beginning. I think they knew. Like the strange bird in the nest, I didn’t belong there anyway and while I tried to mingle and match with the other birds there, I could never hide my real identity although I flourished there in many ways—but never in ways of the heart. I was an interloper that didn’t belong yet used it to make lots of money to the despair and envy of many who could see through my façade. I wonder how many lawyers really don’t belong there, but like me, went into it because there seemed to be nothing else at the time they went to college.
I was warned over and over not to go into the arts because there was no security, so, abandoning my own integrity and afraid I was not good enough, I went for what actually provided lots of money for years in the law business but I was a stranger in a strange land and never happy. I violated my own code of honor by trying to become something that I could never really be. The reason I went to law school in the first place was that my uncle Hugh Wimberly, my opinion leader and icon, a savant, funny as hell WW II marine sergeant who served in the South Pacific, wanted to be a lawyer and would have been a good one, and since he was not able to be one I became one. For him. Poor reason to fulfill someone else’s dream and abandon my own. Go figure. There was no art or music in my little country town of Castor, Louisiana, as it was culturally starved part of the country. Though you couldn’t call it “redneck”, for it wasn’t, though the whole area was white anglo-saxon protestant stock, for when I was growing up there we had a decent school and good, dedicated teachers and our principal, E.R. Minchew, had a masters of Speech and was a stranger in a strange land himself. Few people read, I don’t remember homes having music or art of any kind. There was no TV and the radio was AM. We could listen to “Lets Pretend,” a fairy tale hour on Saturday mornings, or “Jack Armstrong, The All American Boy,” “The Shadow,” “Suspense.” We played baseball and basketball and had no band or music in school at all, and no fine arts or even such things as chemistry or anything technical. Minchew exposed us country boys and girls to the outside world by taking us to speech tournaments in Shreveport, Ruston, Baton Rouge, Hammond, Natchitoches where we saw how it could be outside of our little town. I am grateful for that. The spot of light to me was Hugh, who read books, and my mother who read poetry and would have me read poems to her from her book she kept by her bed.
These were the days of innocence. The music of the late forties and fifties was popular music and big bands, and we got a fuzzy TV when I was a senior in high school. There was the Hit Parade, where they played popular hits of the day with singers like Gisele McKinzie, Dick Haymes, advertising Lucky Strike Cigarettes, LSMFT (Lucky Strikes Means Fine Tobacco), and Phillip Morris with Little Johnny the Hotel Bell Captain who held his white gloved hand along side his face calling out “Call For Phillip Mooorrrris!”
I learned to impersonate singers and had an act that became an after dinner speech I won every contest in the category called “I am glad to be an American,” where I talked in German, British, French, Spanish and Swedish dialects and impersonated Bing Crosby (When the blue of the night meets the gold of the day) Frankie Laine, (Riders in the Sky) Vaughn Monroe, (Racing with the Moon) Billy Ekstine, (I Apologize). I had an amazing range and could sing in a baritone like those singers above, and kick it to a falsetto like Bill Kenny with the Ink spots (Maybe, If I didn’t Care, Who do you know in Heaven, Daddy’s Little Girl) or Betty Boop (button up your overcoat). I was told over and over to continue this. There was a piano teacher ten miles distance, Mrs. Davenport, who taught classical. I took when I was in the fourth grade, quit and started again when I got my drivers license and could drive myself. I took another year and busted my thumb playing baseball and quit. But I could play Clair De La Lune, Liebestraum, and could work my way through most tough pieces and play them well, but never learned what I wanted to learn and that was to just sit down and play. That grieves me to this day. I have a closet full of music I can read and play, classical and most anything, but there is no satisfaction for it is all rote in a way.
My daddy had his teeth pulled when he was twenty one, mama lost her teeth when she was twenty five, and during my first year of college I had all of my teeth pulled. Most of my contemporaries in Castor lost their teeth early. Mama took my sister Susan, who lives in Houston, to a dentist in Shreveport over and over and saved her teeth. In those days there were no high speed drills or such things as root canals and dentists filled teeth or pulled them. My granddaddy, Dr. Chester Sledge, was a dentist. I remember his drill that heated up in your mouth. When they put in my dentures my singing career came to an end for I developed a sinus drip right after I went to LSU having installed the false teeth and couldn’t sing without having to clear my throat. I hated that. I was headed to one career and this stopped that. I have literally lost my voice now from non use, but occasionally it clears up and I can hit those low and high notes again. So I play piano when I get a chance and am learning a little about improvisation. I haven’t painted a picture in years. Painting gave me the biggest rush of all.
In Castor, there was no dancing at all. As a senior, I wanted to get a square dance started so we could start having that as something to do on weekends and it looked like great fun. There was nothing whatsoever to do in that little town at anytime. But there were some who went to Red Flat Apostolic Church that raised such a fuss about dancing we couldn’t get the square dance off the ground. The fuss was such that I was considered a real trouble maker and possibly something evil.
There was no stoplight. Castor was a cross roads, with a railroad track, five stores, two service stations, a café, a hotel, barbershop, beauty shop (mama’s and Lorraine Joyner’s) a post office. There were three lights on standards that illuminated the downtown at night. A railroad ran through town and there were several freight trains that came through at high speed and a couple of passenger trains. (I am attaching a short story here called “A Good Day” you may find interesting---a kind of biographical sketch told by a little black boy riding to town on a wagon load of cotton in 1942)
We were fifty miles from Shreveport, which, in those days, was a pretty long ride. I remember when they paved the road through town. By the time I graduated from High School, most of the roads had been paved through town. Before that the roads were gravel. The town had a cotton gin and a big sawmill four miles down the road. You could hear the engines, the saws whining and the lumber slapping as it was stacked at all hours of the day, and during ginning season the thumping of the big engine at the gin.
I fished and hunted, literally lived in the woods, spending all night on the lake setting out hooks and lines, sitting around the fire rolling cigarettes, smoking pipes and cigars, waking at daybreak and swimming in those warm waters not afraid of those big garfish or snakes or anything. Just being Huck Finns. Glorious. We would have a blanket and sleep with our heads on a root and never think anything about the discomfort of inconvenience, for there was nothing else.
We never missed any activity for there always seemed to be something to do, even without TV. We would slip off and smoke roll your owns or chew tobacco. That was the worst thing we ever did except when I was able to drive we would steal watermelons on Saturday night. Once my buddy had a big watermelon under each arm and stepping across a barb wire fence, got his jeans hung on the barb and it pulled his pants down just as the only car coming down the road the whole night topped the hill and caught him in the beam of the headlights. We were good kids otherwise, and were expected to do things like this, and we did what our parents and the teachers said to do. It seems, looking back fifty five years ago, the years having fuzzed things I may not want to remember, that those were halcyon days.
When I did learn to dance, it was tough for it wasn’t natural to me at first until I finally relaxed and learned some basics. I learned after I was forty or so. It took a while for it to click and when I learned it was so easy. I am a waltzing fool. I love to watch my partner's face while we dance---whoever she is, she always has a beatific look---smiling like her face will break--women love to dance and when they find a partner who will dance with them they have a kind of fulfillment. My cousin, Edward Flay Sledge, reputed to be one of the best dancers in Baton Rouge, said, with a bit of a leer, "dancing opens doors."
When M ichele and I parted after nearly eighteen years, I stopped at the little Cajun Village, a mocked bunch of houses and buildings moved to a cross roads just off I-10 between New Orleans and BR. A bunch of people wer ehead into this big old barn looking building. curious, I went in and found they were giving Cajun dance lessons. I joined them and went for a few lessons everye Wednesday evening for few weeks. It was really fun and I learned alotl. the men would usually gather with their backs to one wall and the women stood or sat on the opposite wall, and as it turned out nearly of the men and women were fresh out of the marriage frying pan and the men though learning to dance could get them back into some pan and the women wanted to learn and make up for the lost time not dancing with an ex husband who refused to take her dancing.
When I danced with these women they wold start cussing that SOB of a husband. The men were stiff and uncertain and the women were hard and unforgiving. Having ridden inthat rodeo before I could feel their pain, having considerable pain of my own at the time. going to a Cajun dance hall you can see why one would want to know how to dance because they have a great time. Cajuns dance on Wednesday night, Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. This ist heir pattern, and it is jsut wonderful to seethose old octogenarians hitting the floor and doing that two step. Get out of the way or they will run you over. There is one little complex two step that really looks cool that I have never been able to master. They make it look so smooth and easy. And they are all smiling, being the musing and being the life they are.
When I read this poem from this morning’s The Writer’s Almanac, "The Best Slow Dancer" by David Wagoner from Traveling Light. © University of Illinois Press, it set this whole thread to going.
The Best Slow Dancer
Under the sagging clotheslines of crepe paper
By the second string of teachers and wallflowers
In the school gym across the key through the glitter
Of mirrored light three-second rule forever
Suspended you danced with her the best slow dancer
Who stood on tiptoe who almost wasn't there
In your arms like music she knew just how to answer
The question mark of your spine your hand in hers
The other touching that place between her shoulders
Trembling your countless feet lightfooted sure
To move as they wished wherever you might stagger
Without her she turned in time she knew where you were
In time she turned her body into yours
As you moved from thigh to secrets to breast yet never
Where you could be for all time never closer
Than your cheek against her temple her ear just under
Your lips that tried all evening long to tell her
You weren't the worst one not the boy whose mother
Had taught him to count to murmur over and over
One slide two slide three slide now no longer
The one in the hallway after class the scuffler
The double clubfoot gawker the mouth breather
With the wrong haircut who would never kiss her
But see her dancing off with someone or other
Older more clever smoother dreamier
Not waving a sister somebody else's partner
Lover while you went floating home through the air
To lie down lighter than air in a moonlit shimmer
Alone to whisper yourself to sleep remember.
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You're either living or you are dying. Take your pick.
L D Sledge Rantor
If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch. Если
Posted by: Alyssa Amateur | April 29, 2011 at 11:34 AM