Home

I have lived in the heart of New York City for many years but home to me is a crumbling shack and 11 acres of useless land high up on a swaybacked mountain called The Hump in Southern West Virginia. From the front porch you can see the New River making a long gentle curve before it plunges down the ancient New River Gorge, one of God's little geologic masterpieces. You can also see the forever-to-be unincorporated village of Sandstone--a general store, a handful of houses, a railroad track wedged into a hundred yard strip of flat land between the river and the mountains.

My father was born on this spot on this mountain and his father and mother lived here for most of their 80 plus years--never once traveling more than 100 miles from this quiet place. My dad and his siblings played here in the endless yard--the giant, slowly dying oak tree was a pup then. He used to ride an old gentle work horse named Smokey who would run like a yearling across the great field with him laughing and clinging to his bare back. The boys helped my granddad make whiskey in stills hidden in the woods. My grandfather was the best bootlegger in Summers County--a skill that proved to be most useful during the Great Depression. People could always find a couple of dollars for a jar of homemade corn mash.

My grandfather's father lived here, too. He was a schoolteacher and amateur geologist who insisted that the top of this mountain contained a lot of coal and even some gold. The people who convinced him otherwise made a fair amount of money. His father's homeplace was down the ridge. He was a real Irishman who had met my great-great grandmother on the boat on the way over and fallen in love. Unfortunately, both were indentured servants who had paid for their passage by agreeing to work for different sponsors in Franklin County, Virginia. When their eight years were up, they got married and moved to this mountain. He was a big man who was once attacked by a bobcat and killed it with a pocket knife and his bare hands.

Most of these folks are buried a quarter-mile up the road in a cemetery on a windy ridge that is called Bee Tree knob. From almost anywhere on the mountain on a fall or winter day, you can hear the wind howling through the live oaks that encircle the little graveyard.

I normally come here only once a year but I carry it with me everywhere I go. It is my place-- my connection to the past--which is what I think southerners are talking about when they speak of a sense of place. Scarlett O'Hara knew she always had it. Blance du Bois and Quentin Compson knew that they had lost it. In fact, most Southern literature is about this loss which was not just of a war but a culture.

My place is no Tara but it is magical. I know there are no ghosts and even here the dead stay buried but sometimes as I sit here in the twilight watching the fireflies and the darkness gathering at the edge of the woods I think of my dad and look across the great field and see--silhouetted against the dying red sky--a rundown old logging horse, ridden by a boy, running as if for life itself.

Mingus and Me

I saw Charlie Mingus play one night at the Five Spot Cafe in 1963. First day of the first time I was ever in New York. Ron Carter and some of the Miles Davis crowd were on first but I couldn't take my eyes off Mingus as he sat alone eating during the set. Elegant man in a sharp grey suit but something coiled and dark--like a loaded pistol sitting on a chair. You know it's deadly just because it's there.

Then he took the stage. One, two, three...Toshiko Akiyoshi starts "A Foggy Day" on piano. A few bars and Mingus stopped playing. 30 second pause. One, two, three, a few bars, same thing. Mingus put his bass down and disappeared into the kitchen, emerging a minute or two later carrying a large, butcher knife. He made a show of doing something with a string and laid the knife down on a table in front of him.

One, two, three...stop. Mingus picked up the knife and walked to a table where a guy was so busy talking to his girlfriend that he didn't see him coming. Suddenly, he realizes there is a 10-inch knife stuck in the middle of the wooden table in front of him. Mingus glared as the couple grabbed their coats and ran for their lives. The concert continued as if nothing had happened.

So, this is the big city, I thought. Cool.

Remembering Monsieur Chene

My friend Armand Chene would have been 100-years-old on Saturday. We had a lunch date but he won’t be there. Monsieur Chene died quickly and apparently painlessly a a few months back when his great heart simply gave out. He called out to his wife, fell to the floor, and by the time she got there he had lost consciousness. It was an exit strategy that neatly matched the way he lived—no whining, no big regrets, no neediness, no fuss.

Unlike some of our neighbors, Armand was not famous or fabulously wealthy but he was something much more important than that--he was a genuinely happy man, grateful to have lived nearly a century so amazingly free of the debilitating diseases that reduce most of us to pain and bitterness and confusion in our later years. The mischievous glint of the professional boulevardier that sparkled in his eyes to the end brought a smile to everyone he encountered.

He was born in Paris at a time when men with horses came around in the evening to light the gas lamps. Before he was 10-years-old, his mother died when a careless doctor left a scalpel inside after an operation. His father was a vagabond who had disappeared. Too proud to beg, without a coat or underwear, he survived by doing odd jobs for fellow residents of a poor Jewish quarter of Paris and sleeping in basements. Once my wife and I ran into him on the street and he had a tear in his eye and he told us he was thinking of his earliest memory: his mother, standing naked, bathed in gaslight at a neighborhood communal bath and “she was so beautiful.” No one loved women more. He used to say to his son "When you touch your mother, touch her with a rose."

He moved to America in the 1920s but never lost his Maurice Chevalier accent. Perhaps his enduring optimism came from the realization that he had missed the century’s two biggest killers—World wars I and II—simply by being too young for the first, too old for the latter. Maybe, it was because he waited until after he turned 50 to get married and get a job, having spent many of his earlier years cruising the Cote d’Azur in an MG. The handsome, rakish-looking man that beams back from his old photographs suggests that his permanent smile was well-earned on the beach on Cannes and in the gambling halls of Monaco. Despite its unpromising beginning, he had led a charmed life and he knew it.

Whatever his secret was, he was never less than “formidable” when asked. His mind was clear and he walked upright with the gait of a 70-year-old. Once I saw him stumble going out the door and he wheeled in mock fury and said “Ooo push me?”

I saw him for the last time on the morning of the day before he died. He looked especially fit, had a new haircut, a boater hat and seersucker jacket. His pants were new and, of course, he was wearing a tie although he was just going to the grocery store across the street. I told him how great he looked and he said: ‘Well, you know. It’s getting harder and harder.” I hugged him and now I’m glad I did.