End of the Yellow Brick Road

On April 9, 2010, Mienhardt Raabe, one of the last surviving Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz died at the age of 94 after his heart stopped as “averred by a local coroner”, according to a clever Wikipedia writer.  

Why clever? Because Raabe who played a Munchkin coroner in the classic film’s fantasy Emerald City, had one uncredited 13-second line concerning the death of the Wicked Witch of the East:  

                              “As a coroner I must aver

                              I thoroughly examined her

                              And she’s not only merely dead

                              She’s really, most sincerely dead.”

My bet is that the irony would not have been lost on Raabe.  As a youth, he did not believe there were other small people until he visited the Midget Village at Chicago’s Century of Progress in 1933.  Raabe, who was about 42 inches tall, worked for many years as a spokesman for the giant meat products (read hot dogs) company Oscar Mayer where he was known as “Little Oscar, the World’s Smallest Chef.”  Raabe drove the first Wienermobile, an idea attributed to Carl Mayer, the company founder’s nephew. 

But Raabe was bigger than just using his size for entertainment and to make a living.  He had an accounting degree and an MBA.  He served as a pilot in the Civil Air Patrol during World War II, and was married for 50 years to a woman his height who died in a car accident in 1997.

Raabe’s version of the Oz Yellow Brick Road ended at Penney Farms, a North Florida retirement community dating back to 1926 when J.C. Penney for department store fame planned to develop a village for experimental farming.  The town was incorporated in 1927 and the stock market crash of 1929 caused Penney to scale back his plans.  Plan B for the magnate was retirement community for retired ministers.  Today the 192- acre retirement community houses Christian laypeople as well as clergy.

It’s an old Florida story—built during the boom just before the crash—and it’s an old Florida scene driving along state road 16 south of Jacksonville and heading west from ST. Augustine.  The dark green shade from the trees lining the road sets off the oranges and earth tones of the one-story concrete block homes.  The white glare reflected from piles of limestone gravel on the north side of 16 makes the country road look dark, cool and ancient.  It is a palette that colored 1950s Florida:  green trees surrounding jalousied porches.  The orange colors of the old buildings offer a warm counterpoint to the cool shade.  The scene might fit nicely into a gray scale rendering for the black-and-white Kansas scene in the Wizard of Oz although the leafy North Florida setting is its own version of an Emerald City.  

One Florida obituary, sadly, led to another and I found one for another Munchkin Karl Slover, who played a trumpeter in The Wizard of Oz.  He was born in what is now the Czech Republic.  At eight years old, he was about two feet tall eventually growing to four feet five inches.  His six and a half foot father buried Karl in the backyard up to his neck, subjected him to limb stretching exercises to promote growth and eventually sold him to a group called the Singing Midgets.   After Oz, Slover spent later years training dogs to play the piano and toured a Children’s birthday party circuit with his musical dogs, according to an online Tampa Bay Time obituary.  Slover, who lived in St. Petersburg, Florida, died November 15, 2011.

Raabe, Slover and Penney Farms are just three back roads stories that connect to larger worlds and different times.  Most of my facts are from Wikipedia and the Tampa Bay Times online newspaper.  Quick looks—and even small stories—are a little like the first viewing of The Wizard of Oz, the film that focused a generation’s dreams.  These glimpses can pave the way (like the Yellow Brick Road?) to closer looks and deeper perceptions of unusual lives.

A Most Magical Place

The most magical place in Florida is Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ home. It’s an old Cracker farmhouse, quiet and hot, surrounded by orange groves and the certain sense time has stopped.

The only way to get there is to suspend time and space. And to come from the north is to cross the Styx, a slow muddy river between Ocala horse country and the college town of Gainesville in North Florida. The Styx—the river of hate-- is one of five rivers that divide the land of the living from the land of the dead in Greek mythology. The other rivers of forgetfulness, fire, lamentation and woe did not hold a big enough place in classic Greek mythology to impress the early settlers who played the name game in north Florida.  The fact that land is hot and snaky as hell south of the river probably played into the river’s title.   

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and her first husband Charles Rawlings arrived from the cool north.  Born in 1896, Majorie wrote stories from the age of five or six.  Her early childhood was privileged. Her father was a patent office lawyer in Washington DC but his heart and his daughter were often at his farm outside in Maryland. Marjorie was a Daddy’s Girl. Her relationship with her Mother was difficult.  She grew up while women were getting the vote and graduated from the University of Wisconsin and married her college sweetheart when he returned from World War I.  The marriage was troubled, and when Marjorie received a small inheritance from the sale of her father’s farm, she consulted her husband’s brothers who lived in north Florida about a place to live. They helped her choose a working orange grove with a house dating back to the 1890s situated between Orange and Lochloosa Lakes.  It was also moonshine country.   By this time—1928—it was Prohibition and she was already a heavy drinker.  Although she and her husband held good reporter jobs in Louisville and Rochester, Majorie wasn’t able to write creatively in an urban setting.

 By the 1930s, the marriage and Marjorie’s husband headed south.  They divorced amicably in 1933 when Majorie’s first book, South Moon Under, a Pulitzer finalist, was published. Accounts differ, but Majorie almost certainly suffered psychological abuse and possibly personal abuse.  

South Moon Under details the life of a moonshining family and also lays out the effects of corrupt laws on people and land.  Timber companies and turpentine camps were taking over the old agrarian lifestyle. Marjorie felt at home in the old ways.  By the time Charles left, she could hunt, fish and drink shine with the boys and was attuned to the Black matriarchy that ran life at the Creek.  These were her safety nets when the bottom dropped out of the stock market in 1929.

The Yearling was published in 1939 and became a Pulitzer Prize winner the same year.  Better fortune followed but Marjorie was still enthralled by the silence and peace of Cross Creek. She survived a lawsuit by a good friend at the Creek, married a second time, weathered World War II writing to young soldiers every day and attempted with partial success to write more books. She began to change own attitudes toward race largely due a personal and professional friendship with Zora Neal Hurston, a brilliant Black novelist who also wrote about a small Florida community.

 She died at the age of 57 of a cerebral hemorrhage.

But she leaves us with our own journey.

We imagine ourselves at tourists in Miami in the early 1940s, staring at a paper Florida map placemats in a diner.  Drawings of mermaids and pirates on Florida’s west coast strike us as elementary school myths.  Instead of I-95, 441, A1A, US1 and county roads are flowing like the Karmic Rivers of birth, old age and sickness and death away from the Fountain of Youth near Tampa. 

We choose 441 as our ticket out. This is the Route 66 of Florida.  Decades later Tom Petty wrote about it in his song “American Girl”.

       “She was an American Girl raised on promises…She stood alone on the balcony. Yeah she could hear the cars roll by out on 441 like waves crashing on a beach.”

Exhaust shimmer and green lights combine to carry us past Palm Beach mansions.  The Magic Kingdom we are seeking isn’t in Orlando and it doesn’t exist in our 1940s mental continuum.  We think about gator farms as we skirt Big Daddy Don Garlits Drag Racing Museum and a small strip club named Café Risqué, both imaginary at this point.  Now we enter County Road 325, the River Styx is right around the bend near One-Beer Road, and we are home.

The heat is prehistoric and clocks have stopped.  Our busy imagination is still.  We slip three bucks a carload into the honor system box, and as we enter, we pass a Rawling’s quote talking about the enchantment of Cross Creek.

In the book Cross Creek published in 1942, she hinted at the force of nature which is the flip side of rural peace.

       “All life is a balance, when it is not a battle, between the forces of creation and the forces of destruction, between love and hate, between life and death. Perhaps it is impossible to say where one ends and the other begins, for even creation and destruction are relative.” Rawlings wrote.

Because we have taken house tour so many times, we just sit on a wooden bench in partial shade and listen to insects crank up a dissonant concert,  Flowers, chickens and the wind in the trees are different from the flowers, chickens and wind we noted during our last visit.  The markers morph into one standard light sound and noise show as we wait.  After a while, we walk slowly in the heat around the rusted, parked 1940 Oldsmobile and read a sundial showing high noon:  Grow Old Along with Me.  The Best is Yet to Be.”  These words surround a gnomon shaped like a man carrying a scythe.  Is the part of the sundial that throws the shadow figure the Grim Reaper or just Father Time?

The Pulitzer Prize in the house probably hasn’t moved since our last visit, but we can tell time passes because in the right season, the blossoms on old orange trees smell like perfume.

It is time to return to our own time.  The route is efficient and boring.  Because we are heading south we avoid the Styx.  We have not aged but the magic of Cross Creek has not been able to return our youth. The magic has, however, stilled the ticking internal clock that measures what we do, when we do it and how our accomplishments measure up to each other and eternity.

Wiser, if not older, our mental vacation has given us a way home.

Habits I had hoped to outgrow by age 61.

1.       Daydreams still plague me. My favorite daydream is G-rated:  I am minding my own business in an unlikely setting and somebody ASKS ME FOR MY OPINION.  The rest of the minute/day/ hour/ millennium is spent organizing my thoughts, fine-tuning my response and fielding possible different perspectives and questions.  Subjects range from exciting (cat training, for example or an anecdotal ramble concerning the gears on the English Racer bicycle of my youth) to just plain boring (politics, religion, etc.). I have noted that throughout my wide and superficial acquaintance—and that includes 140 Facebook friends—not one person mentions gear ratios of defunct bicycle companies or cats in the same breath as training. Politics are mentioned dogmatically.  I am basically afraid to air my views.  All the folks who have known me since childhood may come together in a mob of all races, creeds and colors and a few dubious genders to chase this Frankenstein out of town.  So it looks like I’ll be having a great dialog with myself on topics I know intimately for the next 60 years.  In about 15-20 years, I plan start talking to myself loudly and really enjoying my opinions.  By then I’ll be truly invisible to all but my caretakers.

2.      I STILL WANT A HORSE!  Yes, I know that is a stage endured by 12-year-old girls and their families. I know it is a psycho sexual stage that precedes puberty.  I know I wasted some fun years from 10 to 12 rereading the 1936 edition Breeds of Livestock in America which my Midwestern parents had brought to South Florida from Olathe, KS in an obscure attempt to hold onto their own childhoods.  But if you buy me a horse, I’ll do all the work.  You’ll just have to drive me to the stables.  And pay for lessons, vet bills and hay.   Pleeese.  And I want a swimming pool.

3.      Middle-aged Men On Ladders.  (See psycho sexual disclaimer attached to I STILL WANT A HORSE.) I want to thank my Nameless Friend for making me notice how attractive men look when climbing ladders to finish little home projects.  Fellas just look thinner, more muscular with longer legs when perched on, say, the third rung of a Home Depot Tall.   She used to call me so I could time my visits when her husband was painting and otherwise climbing the ladder of…success.  Unfortunately he has taken an out-of-town job probably unrelated to my semi-frequent visits, but I like to think their weekly rendezvous may include the occasional ladder.   My own DH seems to see ladders in a purely practical light:  When I stare at him as he’s trimming trees, he indicates through a subtle use of body language that I should continue my own projects.  Sometimes he just does not get me.   Another disclaimer:  If your partner is not a professional ladder climber, please restrict him to light housekeeping—spider web removal, chandelier dusting, etc.  The higher they go, the more likely those accidents can happen.  You don’t need him out of commission just when weekends are starting to be fun.

4.      Re-examining Basics:  Each night I re-think flossing.  Is it a government conspiracy to create a market for substandard parachute string?  Why and how does it really help? Well, the fact is that there is no downside to regular teeth flossing and time spent examining alternatives is wasted time.  I also wonder if baby shampoo really is milder.  Do multivitamins work? There are many basics—tangible and otherwise—that really don’t need examination.  Just get on with it.

.      Ending Blogs Abruptly:  Now that I have started down the track of re-evaluating flassing, daydreaming about George Clooney climbing a ladder to paint my ceiling after a day spent horsebackback riding and swimming, it's time to end all this speculation and just get on with it.

Punchlines

My favorite punch line is “This is the s*** that killed Elvis.”   It’s a sentimental favorite because it belongs to a story my youngest son, Kyle, told me shortly before he moved away from home and left me in an empty nest laughing at old jokes.

When my oldest son, Keith, left home to go play, there weren’t any stories or jokes.  He took an old voting machine he’d picked up somewhere and my Woodstock LP. He left his Social Security card, car insurance info and a very dirty carpet.

When Kyle decamped to start a life with a very fine girlfriend, he took everything he needed and made it a point to leave me laughing.  This is the kid that held my mother’s hand on the night she died until she told him to go home. His jump, more of a hop, into adulthood marked the beginning of my old age.

But the stories he left behind—or stops by to tell me—still make me laugh.  The time, for example when he and his best friend walked the mean streets of Fort Lauderdale trying to sell a chinchilla.  On the same walkabout a fellow tried to sell Kyle and his best friend Kyle a purebred pit bull puppy for $100.  No takers? Ok the puppy was a half breed, and the guy would settle for $50. Still no takers?  You get the idea.

Other punch lines that dot the i in lives are the corny but great ones:  “I did NOT ask for a six-inch PIANIST, “says the man in the genie joke.  There are the shorthand jokes between people who have lived together for a long time.  My husband and I use a line from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams:  “Thanks for all the fish,” to say anything or nothing.

And there are the unspoken jokes between girlfriends when one look exchanged between middle-aged women in the presence of a bad toupee or amid the roar of a fully outfitted F250 pickup truck can spark a giggling fit reminiscent of a ninth-grade slumber party.

So the story with the Elvis punch line is really a story about a guy Kyle knows who ended up working for a moving company.  During a move, Kyle’s buddy didn’t hit it off with a company client, and in an effort to keep his job and make amends for a few sharp exchanges, the friend agreed to stay for a quick drink after work.  After taking a few sips, he reviewed the drink with the comment, “This is the s*** that killed Elvis.”  His host lost his temper, announced that pills killed Elvis and that was the end of that job.

Maybe the funny part is the way I try to work it into my life.  I keep retiree hours so when I’m sitting at World Famous Red’s, a  bar and social epicenter for straight folk in my neighborhood at 6 pm,  I comment to the barmaid and two old guys waiting for 9 pm and karaoke that the wine I’m drinking may have killed Elvis. Silence.  It may be a statement of fact concerning the wine, but being ignored in Red’s is a lonely feeling. 

Maybe I’ll tell them about the guy who asks a genie for a eight-inch p****.

Tiny Shiny Parts

Making jewelry is my hobby and challenge. I am a permanent novice with shaky metalworking skills, but my survival sense and memory are relatively intact and so I offer this summary, gleaned from Ganoskin, an internet forum for jewelers.  It is condensed from a thread that deals with finding shiny bits dropped during the exacting process of building a beautiful object out of ordinary parts.

1.       Drop tiny, shiny part.

2.        Freeze, listen for the ding when the part hits the floor, slap thighs together and stick out left foot to catch the falling object.

3.       Remove needle file from thigh where the unplanned slap has wedged it.

4.       Don’t catch object.

5.       While wearing magnifiers and an apron—if nothing else—drop into Downward Facing Dog.  Simultaneously apply tourniquet and call somebody who cares.  Amateurs, work up to this move.

6.       Take a small flashlight, and place it on the floor EXACTLY parallel to where the tiny shiny part may be and look for a diamond-like reflection.

7.       Don’t find part.

8.       Make a new tiny shiny object to replace the lost one.  Repeat as necessary.

Speed and proficiency at jewelry making increases dramatically as this process is repeated.  At some point, more sensitive jewelers decide to take a little break from making jewelry and decide to teach.  Of course, the class mantra is always, “Practice makes perfect.”

This checklist can apply to many of life’s little challenges with a few modifications. After a password for email which was set up three computers and a couple thousand generations of technology ago can’t be recalled on the computer or in your memory, you can try dropping to the floor in Downward Facing Dog to unplug and replug routers, and calling India for your secret password.

If you are lucky enough to get back into your email, reset your password completely.  Don’t record the new password just make a note that Kenneth in an ATT call center in Mumbai can help you.

To finish the process, always remember to clean up after yourself.  Chances are good that if you sweep the floor or clean out the computer info files you will find what you are seeking.  Of course, finding the tiny shiny part or the password is more frustrating a year later.

Cross Creek

The most magical place in Florida is Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ home in north Florida.  It’s an old Cracker farmhouse, quiet and hot, surrounded by orange groves and the certain sense that time has stopped.

 The only way to get there is to suspend time and space. And cross the Styx, a slow muddy river between Ocala horse country and the college town of Gainesville.

We imagine ourselves as tourists in Miami during the 1950s, staring at paper Florida map placemats in a diner.  Drawings of mermaids and pirates on Florida’s west coast strike us as elementary school myths.  Instead of I-95, I -75, the Turnpike and AIA flowing like the karmic rivers of birth, old age, sickness and death away from the Fountain of Youth near Tampa, the one road out and up is 441.  

This is the Route 66 of Florida.  Tom Petty wrote about it in his song “American Girl”.

“She was an American Girl raised on promises…She stood alone on the balcony. Yeah she could hear the cars roll by out on 441 like waves crashing on a beach.”

Exhaust shimmer and occasional green lights combine to carry us past Palm Beach mansions.  Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom in Orlando doesn’t exist in our 1950s mental continuum. Our thoughts turn more toward gator farms.   Soon we are skirting Big Daddy Don Garlit’s Drag Racing Museum and Café Risqué, a small strip club outside of Micanopy, both imaginary at this point.  Now we are on a two-lane road and are crossing the Styx, probably named by early settlers who thought the area was as hot and snaky as hell.  Now it’s time to pass One-Beer Road and we are home.

The heat is prehistoric and clocks have stopped. Our busy imagination is still.   We slip three bucks a carload in the honor system box. As we enter, we pass a Rawling’s quote talking about the enchantment of Cross Creek. In another venue, she hinted at the force of nature which is the flip side of the peace that can be found in Cross Creek and the surrounding swamp.

“All life is a balance, when it is not a battle, between the forces of creation and the forces of destruction, between love and hate, between life and death.  Perhaps it is impossible to say where one ends and the other begins, for even creation and destruction are relative.” Rawlings wrote.

Because we’ve taken the tour so many times, we just sit on a wooden bench in partial shade and listen to insects crank up a dissonant concert. Flowers, chickens and the wind in the trees are different from the flowers, chickens and wind we noted during our last visit. These markers morph into one standard sound, light and noise show as we wait. After a while, we will walk around the rusted parked 1940 Oldsmobile and read a sundial:  “Grow Old Along with Me.  The Best is Yet to Be.”  These words surround a 3-D figure carrying a scythe.  Is it the Grim Reaper or just Father Time? 

The Pulitzer Prize in the house hasn’t moved and the weather only changes once in awhile.  In the right season, the blossoms on old orange trees smell like perfume.

It’s time to go now, and return to our own time.  The route back is quick, efficient and a little boring.  No imaginary placemat maps and we avoid slow hot 441 in order to get back home as quickly as possible. Our vacation in a time warp hasn’t aged us, but it hasn’t returned us to our youthful selves. Just as the protagonist in the Yearling, we slip into the problems and privileges of adulthood.  The peace of the Florida backwoods which exists right now without us seems like a half-remembered piece of childhood.

Things Happen for a Reason?

Recently, a Facebook Friend wrote “Things happen for a reason.”

 After some superficial reflection, and taking into account that things weren’t defined, happen wasn’t specified and reason wasn’t made clear, I decided Things Happen for a Reason (with appropriate capitalization) is a pretty good everyday mantra. Many situations we face don’t need clarification, specification or clarity.  The job doesn’t materialize, the significant other is grouchy or the favored candidate loses the election.  Although there may be reasons, who cares?

Then I started to think harder and the mantra fell apart.  It’s true—at least according to basic Buddhism as I understand it—that karma is action (reason) and its consequence (things),and this process can span lifetimes and affect many other lives.  In that sense, the thought holds.

  But Buddha probably never met Everlee Shepherd Hambright.  Everlee, my husband’s late grandmother, was born in 1899 in Grover, NC.  She spent most of her life in a small house on the side of King’s Mountain, NC.  As she approached middle age which can be a particularly unreasonable time of life, she inexplicably dropped the r in Everlee and added an i and became Evielee (Ev-ee-lee) Hambright for the rest of her life. Around the same time, she constructed a wall of 1950’s era family photos. At the top of the pyramid, was a picture of young Elvis.  In the late 1970s, the empty lot next door which had always afforded her and her husband, George, a beautiful forest view was sold and a ball bearing plant was built blocking the pastoral beauty.  Evielee’s dilemma in my opinion was not to adjust to changing times, but how to find out about her new neighbor.  She finally decided to bake a pound cake and deliver to the plant.

We will never know the reasons for the dropped r, the fact that Elvis was King of the Family or how a pound cake was supposed to give her the opportunity to shed light on the mystery of a factory instead of a person as a neighbor.    We do know that Evielee coped with a changing world without moving from her home, her religion or herself.  How she accomplished these feats—the reasons behind each of the above actions—we can’t know and even Evielee may have been a bit mystified at her own actions.

After using Evielee to point out that middle-aged Things don’t always Happen for Reasons, I decided to not delve any further into mantras or mysteries.  After all, I live near Miami where odd and horrific crimes happen regularly without any special discernible causes.

  Although I passed eighth-grade science and can discuss shifting tectonic plates and earthquakes on a par with most seventh-grade science fair contestants, the loss of life and livelihood that accompany natural disasters still seem without reason to me.

So it is back to Facebook to discover the sayings, reasons and daily mantras that will point the way to my next  reason to write a small story.