Like a Stone -

“ Alone I read, until the day was done - and I sat in regret, of all the things I had done. Of all that I have blessed, and all that I have cursed; dreams until my death - I will wander on…”
- Audioslave, Like a Stone

Most evenings are quiet in my humble home - save the small roar of music that emanates from my iPod. Hit ’Play’, and the worries of the day seem to wash away. Feeling like a balladeer of long ago, I have collected thousands of songs. Each has it’s own meaning and importance, and mood…

Hearing the old riff I tried to imitate with my friends before a crowd of drunkards - I remembered how I felt the first time I heard it. I don’t really like the whole song, just the part when it fades to an acoustic guitar and Chris Cornell conjures up my memory.

I sat in my recliner this evening, resting my weary bones from a long day falling creatively down a mountain. After a cold beer and a nice warm dinner, I sat back to reflect. Of my three rooms in my one bedroom apartment, that spot is my favorite. I can look upon the mementos and memories I have collected from a ‘safe’ vantage point…

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That old chair looks like it came from a thrift store - it’s worn ragged with years of abuse. My dad used to read me stories in it, my grandfather would doze off after Thanksgiving dinner in it, my mother would sip her coffee by the fire in it, my sister and I wasted many Saturday mornings watching cartoons in it - back when we both fit. I even remember feeding her a bottle of warm milk. I don’t actually remember it, but a picture my mom showed me gave me the memory. So, you see, I can’t part with it… despite the antagonism it poses to my ’chic’ bachelor pad.

Beside the chair sits my guitar - resting most days in the warmth of a cold Utah sun from my picture window. It comes alive most nights, when I try and shake off the cold Utah winter. My dad bought that for me on Christmas Eve my senior year of high school. He played once, yet lost the love somewhere long ago. That next Christmas morning, after all the gifts were open, my greediness of a younger age made me feel short-changed. I had some clothes, and a few trinkets - but where was the ‘big’ present??? We were living in “the Shack on Highway 119” - a rental home I despised because all of my friends thought my dad lost his job or something. It was a nondescript white mobile home right beside the road to my high school. I parked behind the house - hoping I wouldn’t acquire any new antagonists to the dire straits I was in at the time. Times were hard then, but good all the same… we were waiting until our new home was completed. There was a definite strain on finances, but we were content… On that Christmas morning, when the floor lay littered with paper - and my dad could see through his camera lens I was discontented with my loot. My father pointed to the back door. I thought he bought me a new car -- the reward he held for me was much more rewarding… The maple face and spruce neck, the amplifier and bronze strings - he saw me drooling when I played my first song on it. He looked at me, and said, “Son, this will be your best friend - through hard times and good times, music will always get you through.”

His words rang true across the years. She’s gathered a few scratches and dents from parties and drunken serenades, a couple of stickers from across the country - a few tears, a few spilt drinks, a few laughs -- all are stored in the wood, splinters, and strings…

Next to the guitar is my most prized possession - my books. Since childhood, I have always had some strange obsession with collecting written words. Whether I ever read them or not, just possessing them gives me some comfort knowing each has a purpose for a given situation. The Bible??? I have five… it’s probably the most useful. MacLean’s, “A River Runs Through It” is my second favorite. Then comes Hemingway, and my art collections, and history books, and a Twain anthology. They each have their place upon a less then respectable bookshelf… but I got it for ten bucks from a Colonel from Singapore attending the Staff Officer’s school at Maxwell. He couldn’t bring his things from home, so he purchased whatever he could. I like it just because of the story, even if it’s falling apart from the plastic screws and prefab plywood. The lamp I read by came from him too…

Then there is my coffee table. It’s seen better days too, but it has a very special meaning to me. It has stray marks of green, purple, and red - ancient crayon marks from the days my parents first knew of my gifts… I drew submarines with windows, dinosaurs, and elegant castles replete with dragons and damsels in distress. It sits just high enough to rest my feet after a long day, and high enough for a four-year-old to dream…

Upon my mantle is a deer skull - part of my peculiar decorations, it is a piece in my collection of Texas… I found it hunting alone one afternoon. I called it ‘hunting’. Really, I was wandering aimlessly with a loaded shotgun strung over my shoulder trying to decipher the means and direction of my travels; and the meaning of this cyclic life and death. There are also stones from the Llano River - I camped there, alone, drunk by a fire playing guitar. I fished awhile, but I was in search of something that weekend. I remember laying on the smooth river stones beneath the moonlight, staring at an ivory plateau glowing from the light of the moon. The water rushed by, the air was cool, and I passed out. -- Oh yeah, and there’s a coffee mug I bought in a thrift store in Junction, Texas (town on Llano River). Opposite is my tribute to Alabama - a wooden elephant, and my old license plate that was bent in an accident… a reminder not to let your friends drive your truck…

Above the elephant and deer skull is something equally peculiar… it seems out of place, but it holds a beloved story as well. It’s a rattlesnake skin, nailed to plywood covered in felt with brass tacks… I think we did a good job, not being taxidermists and all… we were just kids at 23, roomates and compatriots. We had to find inventive ways to pass the time in San Angelo, Texas - so Jon and I decided to pick up hunting as a hobby. There is nothing more beautiful than gun smoke rising to meet a dying sun on the plains of West Texas. The smell of sulfur, the purples and reds, the shadows of mountains, the sounds of breaking twigs as the deer begin to feed. We usually returned home empty handed, the conversations on life usually distracted us from any quarry. The dove is an amazing creature -- a symbol of peace, loved by God himself. So, when the opportune shots came - we each pretended to miss, hoping the other didn’t notice. One afternoon on the return home, we spotted a rattler crossing the road. We passed him by, but a glance in the rearview made us both wonder - “Why not?”

We grabbed some beers and started cleaning the skin -- our neighbors in the apartment complex had their doubts, but thought the adventurous Air Force boys could pull it off…
We prepared everything perfectly, trying to do some justice for the life we mutually took - and regretted taking. We were just kids then, almost a year ago now… In the middle of my greatest battle, this became a symbol of something indescribable… defeating fear, and being proud to show it on my wall.

After the moments of reflection, it is time to retire - to renew my heart and spirit to take on another day. I lay my head upon the pillow, but never without a final glimpse at a tattered photograph on my nightstand… I found it a few years back, in a rare moment when I was proud of my mother’s role as a ‘packrat‘.

I was in college then, my mind on things greater than childhood. I would come home most weekends, only to find that the bedroom that was once mine was growing increasingly cluttered with my mother’s “collections”. Upon retrospection, I know she was trying to fill the void her son left behind when he set off to find his fame and fortune. I am still broke, and the room is still as empty as it ever was.

I was dying to sleep - after a Friday night with Bobby and the boys, my head still rang with a loud guitar and the pains of a well-deserved hangover. But, there’s no sleep for the weary - especially when your bed is strewn with old photographs. I tried to gather them neatly, and in some order - but there is no method to my mother’s madness.

One fell to the floor, a picture of a blonde-headed seven-year-old… knee-bent, eyes focused, trying his best to emulate “Rambo” with his plastic M-16 and survival knife.

He died a few years later, a night I will never forget. My cousin, my brother, my next-door neighbor, my companion, my friend. That plane fell from the sky, and shattered my heart forever. It hurts still to write about it now… to know that the lone survivor was not my cousin, but a kid that found himself in the justice system years later after a string of juvenile offenses. I forgive him, and I digress…

Scott love Alabama football, and jet-fighters… he even had a cheap guitar we both used to try and play, against his contraband “Guns and Roses” cassette tape my uncle gave us…

Did I choose this life unconsciously? Am I living for someone I tried so hard to forget???

That half-acre where we built a thousand fortresses seemed like the ‘Hundred-Acre Wood’ of the A.A. Milne tales of ‘Winnie the Pooh’ and Christopher Robin… it burned down, ignited by the fuel of a small Cessna bound for Bessemer Airport on a foggy Saturday night…

Before my eyes close a final time, I usually roll over once or twice -- trying to find that perfect spot where one can become comatose…

Before closing, they focus on a yellow stick of fiberglass with a cork-wood handle, and wire eyes… Hanging on hooks beneath a Monet print of the Red Boats of Argenteuil…My grandfather’s flyrod. He didn’t want it, it hid behind some aluminum siding against the walls of his old boathouse. I see where my mother acquired her packing instincts. Tools, two rusted boats, the smell of gasoline, fish scales, nets, rod’s and reels equipped for any fish under the sun, a couple of refrigerators, old newspapers, the sound of crickets, some forgotten birds’ nests, and a one-bedroom apartment on the second floor intended to house my crazy uncle… Even he was too sane to live there.

I had seen my buddy Al Babcock fly-fishing the summer I was an orientation counselor in Tuscaloosa. It looked like a pleasant dance that one undertook alone… I was hooked, quite literally. I have always been attracted to art of any kind. Music. Drawing. Painting. Fishing. I believe art is any form of activity one undertakes with the sole intention of pleasing our heavenly father with motions of the physical sense intended to spark the deepest emotional responses he himself created. The movement of line through the air in the crispest curve, the gentle display, the strike, and of course the frying pan.

PaPaw Jack was thrilled I took it home. He later told me my mother would take the same rod in her red canoe on Lay Lake to catch bass and bream… while she was 7-months pregnant with yours truly.

I hope he is still around when I shake off this uniform… At 74, I am sure he has a few fights left in him… I love that man. I spent two of my greatest summers with that yellow stick, taming the scaly beasts of the Little Cahaba River of Shelby County. My father was inspired by my inspiration, he too partook in this new ancient art - and was equally hooked. I still taste the warm beer and laughter we shared together there. I remember the emergency room trip we shared when I caught a 185-pound dum-bass - me. I even remember the last afternoon I spent with a close friend before his passing on a tragic fourth of July… he had never been fishing. I let him use my granddad’s pole. He laughed.

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I have nothing more to give that has not already been taken - save hope. And, that which remains is taped, tacked, or nailed to my walls. Walls that display yours truly - and, I judge my visitors by their response. I appreciate their compliments, and despise their critiques. This house is me, this house is mine. Alone, most evenings, I sit and read - until the day is done.

I wonder how I got here, but I am surrounded by reminders. Reminding me always that I am like a stone, forever rolling down the road, collecting more and more the farther it goes…

-B