Category: history

A Workshop Made to Order for SOTLJ Readers

The Brazosport Fine Arts Council is sponsoring a workshop by Ron Rozelle that is designed to help people with memoir writing.

It will be held online with remote sessions via Zoom. Mr. Rozelle is a published memoirist and historian. I have signed up and I hope readers of sotlj.com will also sign up. If you are serious about writing interestingly of your own life for the sake of your children, grandchildren or just for the sake of satisfying your ego, it will be worth a hundred bucks or so. (It will be $125 if you are not a member of BFAC.)

Mr. Rozelle has done it successfully and I am sure he can help us. Here is a link to the workshop information and registration. Please join me there on January 2.

I can see us all having a great time and learning a lot from Mr. Rozelle and from each other. The writing should make for some interesting sharing among some of the most interesting people who inhabit this charming South of Town place we call home. I know a few of you who read here and I know that you have had interesting lives and careers. I would like know more about you.

If you don’t know Ron Rozelle, just Google the name or, better yet, put it into an Amazon book search. You can read samples of some of his writing. And you will wish you were able to write like him.

https://bcfas.org/event/ron-rozelle-memoir-workshop/2022-01-02/

Sehon Warneke, the Legend of Lake Hardware

When I was growing up in Houston’s industrial suburbs, “town” meant Houston and more specifically, the downtown district. You know – tall buildings. After relocating to Lake Jackson in 1982, I never lost that almost automatic reference to “town” as my way to refer to Houston. And it was easy to tell old friends that we had moved south of town to a place called Lake Jackson, hence this journal goes under the heading of South of Town, Lake Jackson.

Lake Jackson was a bit of a culture shock. After all, I was nearing forty and had never experienced life in a small-town on an extended basis. People were polite. They smiled as they took turns, even at the uncontrolled intersections in its curvy, crazy little downtown.

But the single most shocking thing I saw happened in a little store three short blocks from my house, the Lake Hardware store on Oyster Creek. (It’s no longer there. Fire took it a week ahead of 9/11, but they quickly re-located and re-built.) You need a lot of little things when you move into a new residence. There were all the little things that broke, new things that needed to be installed, and the tools and supplies to handle all the jobs of homeownership. I had quickly learned that Lake Hardware was the place to go.

Continue reading “Sehon Warneke, the Legend of Lake Hardware”

My Lockdown Binge: Downton Abbey.

While others may have felt cut off from the rest of the world during the lockdown year, I was using it to catch up the things other Americans were doing in the 2010s. Back then, some of the Americans I know best were studying the lifestyle of early 20th Century British peerage as revealed in Masterpiece Theater’s Downton Abbey.

Having lately been of a mind to ask the Brits come run things again, I thought maybe I should catch up. I have dropped that notion since the successful election of a candidate faithful to democracy and rule of law. Still, we may yet have a need if the skewing of the census has the intended result.

So, I binge-watched Downton Abbey. I had avoided it even as the rest of my family in three different states bathed in it every week for six years. It seemed too much like soap opera. Will Edith attempt to attract another of Lady Mary’s suitors in their lifelong drama of sibling rivalry? Will Cousin Violet succeed in imposing her will on “those other Crawleys” and find a way to keep the fortune under His Lordship’s control? That sort of thing.

Even as members of my family urged it on me, I had resisted until the most wise Amazon Prime algorithm informed me that I should watch it. I have learned to trust the Algorithm. It knows what I buy, what I browse, what I watch and listen to and read. (Thankfully I don’t have one of those speakers that report private conversations to Mr. Bezos.) With all that information to crank through the Algorithm, I felt that Amazon must know, better than I know myself, that Downton Abbey was right for me and I was right for Downton Abbey.

So I spent a few weeks watching one or two episodes a night until, about four or five episodes in, I caught myself talking to the characters on the screen, advising them what to do or, more often, what not to do. To the gentlemen — be careful around Lady Edith. Or to anyone — watch out when Lady Cora dip-tilts her head forward and to the side a notch and peers at you through her eyebrows. And since that is the way way Lady Cora looked at everyone all the time for all six years of the series, I suppose the message was to always be careful around her. She can drag a secret out of anyone and she can’t keep one longer than one episode.

On the subject of secrets, the entire household — from lord to footman — seemed to fuel their lives around secrets. They simply couldn’t be level with one another. It made for a dysfunctional family upstairs and a toxic workplace downstairs, but they all loved their king. There you have all the makings of a good soap opera and a stable society where people can live together in peace and happy servitude.

After watching the assault on the Capitol by Trump’s brown shirts, the soap opera life of the Earl’s household seems an attractive alternative to rule by the Bad Boys. Maybe the Queen would have us back as members in good standing of the empire. At any place in the social strata, peer to pig farmer, life would surely be better than under rule of the American insurrectionists.

And maybe this is the simple wisdom revealed in Downton Abbey: pig farmers and peers had something in common that bonded them into happy little towns that made British society work. Wrestling sows in the mud was a livelihood for one and, for the other, a duty involved in preserving the ancestral line and estate.

Well, I’m being unkind to Lady Mary. Strike that last sentence.

Rage and Rampage: Is It Really About Mental Health?

Friday night, Brazosport Center Stages opened its production of “An Iliad,” a play by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare. The play is an examination of the hold of rage over humankind and its expression throughout history as lust for war and blood. The opening night performance was provided with eerily apt real-life bookends by mass murderers in Atlanta and Boulder, one three days before our play opened and the next three days after.

Not the same, you say. One person with an automatic weapon is not the same as a war that pits populations against one another with all the force of their intelligence, technology, industry and wealth. I grant you that, in its scale, it is not the same. But the fundamental driving power of rage is the same.

In the case of the single shooter with the automatic weapon, he feels empowered to do what only armies could do in the past. And his weapon is the product of his society’s technology and wealth. (I considered the pronoun and I’m sorry to say for mass killings the masculine seldom fails.)

The New York Times offers a study that shows an undeniable connection between the availability of guns and mass killing. And the phenomenon is global. Societies with more guns produce more mass shootings.

After mass killings there is inevitably discussion of mental health as a possible factor. Of course, sick people sometimes do evil things. But it is our collective mental health that seems to be the problem. If there can be such a thing as societal or national mental health, perhaps the mental health argument makes sense.

In that case, we might say that a nation is insane when it produces large quantities of weapons of war and makes them easily available and, in fact, guarantees them as a right. Will the Second Amendment be read by our now right-wing court to guarantee the right to own and drive around in a military tank?  

Imagine if the nut groups that invaded the Capitol on January 6 had crowd funded the purchase of a few tanks? How better to express one’s rage than with a few old German battle tanks? That, of course, would require a more expansive reading of the constitution but our court as it now stands seems up to the job.

Meanwhile, we go about our days. I have grandchildren who live less than a mile from the King Soopers store where ten people died this Monday (March 22). It has been their family’s regular shopping spot for ten years.

Now their parents have the job of trying to explain what has happened, to make them feel safe, to inspire in them the courage to live their lives, and to help them understand what must be done to reclaim their country as a desirable place to live and raise their children someday. I do not envy them the task.

A Big Ol’ Howdy from Neanderthalia

West Neanderthalia to be exact.

Photo caricature of Gov. Greg Abbott by DonkeyHotey from Flickr

They said we all died out when the climate changed 40,000 years ago. But the truth is (alternative fact here), we settled in the American south.

Over in East Neanderthalia they do more catfish noodlin’ to get by. Here in West Neanderthalia, we eat the cows, listen to country music, and drink our beer regular. None of that crafty ale stuff. And somethin’ we learned a long time ago — never trust anybody wearin’ a mask. They’ll steal your cows.

Government was late comin’ to Neanderthalia and we can’t wait to be rid of it. Durn nuisance.

As long as we have it, though, we keep it under control and make sure we don’t have to do anything we don’t want to. Like wash your hands, wear masks and dodge around tryin’ to keep from changin’ the climate.

Hell, we made through that bad spell 40,000 years ago, we can beat this one, too. We’re survivalists. We just stock in the Goya beans and keep on votin’ for Republicans. Weather gets too bad, we’ll just move back into a cave somewhere. Sleepin’ in a cave won’t be no problem. Got me one a them My Pillows.

Speakin’ of caves, there’s a big ‘un over in New Mexico. But we have to wait. They have bad government over there. Been votin’ for Democrats. We’ll just stay here and keep on racin’ with East Neanderthalia to see who gets to the bottom first.

Gotta go. Heard they’re inauguratin’ our guy today for his second term. Gonna stop that steal this time. Can’t make it to DC but it’ll be on cable news.

Say Their Names: Solemn Reminders of the Cost of Systemic Racism

The MLK Celebration Committee of Southern Brazoria County and the Brazosport Center for the Arts and Sciences have teamed to present the Say Their Names Memorial in celebration of Black History Month.

The communicative power of simplicity, silence and visual presence has been matched, at least in my experience, only by the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. The first thing that struck me was the number of memorial pillars arranged in The Center’s outdoor viewing area.

Then you see that there are photographs memorializing other victims on each of the four sides of the pillars. Fifty pillars, 200 victims. And, of course, they could not include, or even know, the thousands of victims of lynchings and other fatal injustices Black Americans have suffered in this country.

The presentation touches one deeply as you see the beautiful faces of Americans, young and old, who had no place to look for justice when confronted with the reality of America’s deep and persisting racism.

Please go, see and feel the presence of these Americans. Their years were stolen but their memories live as an ever-present reminder of the miles we have to travel before we become the nation we must become. The memorial is at the Brazosport Center for the Arts and Sciences at 400 College Drive in Clute. It will remain there through March 13, 2021.