A Death in the Country

 

A Death in the Country

by

Kenny A. Chaffin

All Rights Reserved © 2013 Kenny A. Chaffin

            America has been eviscerated and no one noticed. Our small towns are dead, or dying. As I look around what was once the vibrant town square of my home town there is nothing, the shops are boarded up or have ratty looking second-hand shops. There are nasty looking, too-steep wooden ramps mounted on the four or six steps (depending on which side of the square you are on) leading up to the sidewalks in front of the dirty windows, the boarded up shops and the dregs of those few souls still trying to somehow make a go of it with an indoor garage sale. Only two legitimate businesses are there, The Madill Record and the bank – now renamed but  in the same place, with the same ‘drive through building’ banking where I had my first checking account, my first car loan from the then First National Bank of Madill.

            The square was once a vibrant center of commerce, civilization and communion. There was the TG&Y 5-cent store, The Corner Barber Shop with its spinning red, white and blue barber pole, the Dry Goods store, The Madill Flower Shop, Parrish Plumbing, the Art and Nick-Nack shop, Rexall Drug Store and another dozen smaller shops selling everything from garden seeds and gardening trinkets to a watch shop. It’s all gone, all boarded up, all broken windows and falling down facades. And we wonder why angry displaced troubled adolescents shoot up our schools, our theaters and each other.

            Our stores have been replaced by Wal-Mart, Kmart, Target, Safeway, Kroger and Amazon. We are homogenized and categorized and targeted and sold by the daily assault of media that tells us what we need to know, who we are and what to pick up from the grocery store. We no longer know the clerk behind the scanner which tallies and totals and assigns and tracks all your purchases even though that clerk may be the single mother that lives next door with her parents because we no longer talk to our neighbors and that clerk has been instructed by corporate training to never get personal with the customers and if she does she will lose her job, her way to feed her son and her American Dream of finishing night school, getting a degree in nursing from the community college because there are a thousand others waiting behind her to take that job.

            The daily news is full of doom and gloom, there is no hope, unemployment is up, earnings are down, the stock market tanked and homes are being repossessed. Oh and the CEO of Leman Brothers got a 5.6 billion dollar incentive bonus. Good news for him.

            Everything we see on TV, everything we hear on Radio is targeted to tell us who we are, what we should do, what products we should buy and how we should feel about Uzbekistan. Oh and let’s throw in a little high-calorie “Dancing with the Stars” or “Meth Dealing for Christ.”

            We no longer have time to discuss the weather, politics or new products with the Dry Goods seller or the neighbors we meet in the store, because there is no store, and we don’t talk. We don’t know what others think or feel, we don’t share our day-to-day trials and tribulations with our neighbors or friends we’re too busy getting to work or dropping the kid off for music lessons or hockey or football or picking them up and grabbing dinner from McDonalds so we can get home in time to watch “Lost.”

            WAKE UP PEOPLE!  We are all ‘lost.’ We’ve lost our way, we’ve become sheep, herded and guided and fleeced. No one knows who they are, only who they are told to be and when someone breaks out of the trance it is all too often a Nathan Dunlap or a Adam Lanza or a James Holmes. It’s 1984. We’ve forgotten how to live, how to communicate, how to support one another. We are dying from the inside out. Just look at our small towns.

             

About the Author

Kenny A. Chaffin writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction and has published poems and fiction in Vision Magazine, The Bay Review, Caney River Reader, WritersHood, Star*Line, MiPo, Melange and Ad Astra and has published nonfiction in The Writer, The Electron, Writers Journal and Today’s Family. He grew up in southern Oklahoma and now lives in Denver, CO where he works hard to make enough of a living to support two cats, numerous wild birds and a bevy of squirrels. His poetry collections No Longer Dressed in Black, The Poet of Utah Park, The Joy of Science, A Fleeting Existence, a collection of science essays How do we Know, and a memoir of growing up on an Oklahoma farm - Growing Up Stories are all available at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B007S3SMY8. He may be contacted through his website at http://www.kacweb.com. 

A Martian Odyssey (poem)

A Martian Odyssey

There are no clouds in the Martian sky

Curiosity cries at night

when no one hears her silent tears

when no one feels her pain

The sunsets are as thin as the air

no sounds are heard from afar

she cries for Sojourner the oldest here

whose time was cut so short

She wishes to visit him and the others

her brothers and sisters on Mars

but the signal directs, the command is clear

she turns towards Mount Sharp

Kenny A. Chaffin – 8/10/13

From my poetry collection - The Poet of Utah Park available from
Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EKOTNA0

Mess Duty

 

Mess Duty

by

Kenny A. Chaffin

All Rights Reserved © 2013 Kenny A. Chaffin

We’d been out killin’ gooks all night. I hate fuckin’ night patrol. It was on fuckin’ night patrol when they got Billy. Right through the fuckin’ head! His fuckin’ brains spattered right in my eyes. And then after mucking in the swamp all night I get fuckin’ mess duty! Break the eggs, scrape the pans, dump the slop and peel the fuckin’ potatoes. Hell this is nineteen fuckin’ sixty-nine you’d think they’d freeze dry all this shit.

I was out back of the mess tent when sarge stuck his head out, “Get the hell in here, Johnson.” What the hell I thought, did I forget to julian the fuckin’ radishes or what?

Half the platoon was in there all staring at the TV in the corner. The signal kept breaking up, I couldn't tell what the hell was going on, all noise and flickering and beeping. “What the fuck?”

            “Shut up,” someone said.

            I shrugged. I could hear the guns firing from the ships in the bay, like they always were, but it was never this quiet here in camp. The flickering image looked like some guy climbing down a ladder, some strange contraption on his back. It was deathly silent, just the deep throated barrrom, barrrom of the big guns far off. The TV was silent then a high pitched beep and what sounded like the guy struggling to breathe. He took another step, the image flashed bright white. I thought the shells from the guns might have got him but the grainy picture came back, more beeps, a squeal and then static like through our field radios. The picture went black and flickered some more and then you could hear him, “That’s one small step for [crackle] man, one giant leap for mankind.”

            It was all too surreal; I went outside for a smoke. Here we are in the fuckin’ jungle killing gooks in the swamp and that fucker just stepped on the Moon. We came in peace for all mankind. Fuckin’ A we did!

About the Author

Kenny A. Chaffin writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction and has published poems and fiction in Vision Magazine, The Bay Review, Caney River Reader, WritersHood, Star*Line, MiPo, Melange and Ad Astra and has published nonfiction in The Writer, The Electron, Writers Journal and Today’s Family. He grew up in southern Oklahoma and now lives in Denver, CO where he works hard to make enough of a living to support two cats, numerous wild birds and a bevy of squirrels. His poetry collections No Longer Dressed in Black and The Poet of Utah Park and his collection of science essays How do we Know are available at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B007S3SMY8. He may be contacted through his website at http://www.kacweb.com. 

It’s War I Tell You!

by

Kenny A. Chaffin

All Rights Reserved © 2013 Kenny A. Chaffin

They attack my bird feeders, steal the peanuts from the bluejays, run on the fence, chitter and chatter taunting the dog and chase each other up one tree and down the other. Certain tree limbs are like an interstate highway to them apparently.  I cut one big branch down yesterday in my continued attempt to keep the trees under control.

Later I look out the window and see a squirrel run up the tree and come to a screeching halt at the cut branch, he looked like I’d just killed his dog. He clamors around checking out the cut and seeming very confused before sadly heading back down and leaping to the fence to continue his squirrely mission.

About the Author

Kenny A. Chaffin writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction and has published poems and fiction in Vision Magazine, The Bay Review, Caney River Reader, WritersHood, Star*Line, MiPo, Melange and Ad Astra and has published nonfiction in The Writer, The Electron, Writers Journal and Today’s Family. He grew up in southern Oklahoma and now lives in Denver, CO where he works hard to make enough of a living to support two cats, numerous wild birds and a bevy of squirrels. His poetry collections No Longer Dressed in Black and The Poet of Utah Park and his collection of science essays How do we Know are available at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B007S3SMY8. He may be contacted through his website at http://www.kacweb.com. 

The Blanket (excerpt from Growing Up Stories)

 

The Blanket

(From: Growing Up Stories - True Stories of a Brown Dirt Boy)

by

Kenny A. Chaffin

All Rights Reserved © 2013 Kenny A. Chaffin

I have this beautiful handmade blanket and on many a winter evening I snuggle down into my favorite chair and pull it on top of me to ward off the chill. Tipton, my cat is always there to claim his place in my lap. A good book completes the scene. This particular evening however I find myself taken by the fancy stitching holding the muted colorful squares together. Those wonderful warm flannel browns, reds, oranges and a bit of bright green and yellow thrown in for flair and all embroidered with fancy intertwined x’s of stitches. I think of the work that must have gone into making this blanket – certainly tens if not hundreds of hours. First the selecting of the red flannel backing, picking the complimentary colors and textures for the squares, choosing the many-colored embroidery threads, then the cutting of the squares, three inches on a side followed by the real work of selecting squares and connecting them stitch by stitch in their multi-colored pattern. In my mind I imagine the quilt in progress on her lap, as it is now on mine, her eyes peering through the Walgreens’ over-the-counter glasses at the stitching as her fingers push and pull the needles in and out wrapping the threads around and back to form the interconnected x’s holding the squares. Tipton purrs and wriggles, happy to be in a warm lap, snoozing as I read the letters of the name she so carefully stitched at the edge of the blanket so many years ago – P. Chaffin 88.

I never thanked her enough.

About the Author

Kenny A. Chaffin writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction and has published poems and fiction in Vision Magazine, The Bay Review, Caney River Reader, WritersHood, Star*Line, MiPo, Melange and Ad Astra and has published nonfiction in The Writer, The Electron, Writers Journal and Today’s Family. He grew up in southern Oklahoma and now lives in Denver, CO where he works hard to make enough of a living to support two cats, numerous wild birds and a bevy of squirrels. His poetry collections No Longer Dressed in Black and The Poet of Utah Park and his collection of science essays How do we Know are available at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B007S3SMY8. He may be contacted through his website at http://www.kacweb.com. 

Burial

 

Burial

by

Kenny A. Chaffin

All Rights Reserved © 2013 Kenny A. Chaffin

            Burial, what a strange custom. What a strange people we are to put so much of our energy into it. To put our dead in deep dark holes in the ground after their special preparations and ceremonies and then to install inscribed stone tablets to create an altar of sorts; a place to return to and to relive the loss, and the grief. How maladjusted we as a society have become, how out of touch with death -- a normal part of life yet something we take extreme measures with to hide it from ourselves and to pretend it doesn’t exist.

            I saw a piece on TV last night about Neanderthals and how the scientists have just discovered that they may have ritually buried their dead some 30,000+ years ago. Digging a shallow grave or covering the body with stones and with perhaps an offering of animal paws, bones or trinkets.

            According to statistics from the Cremation Association of North America as of 2010 over 40% are cremated on average with a whopping 68% in the state of Nevada. It seems cost may be a driving factor as the national average for burial is $7,300 (including embalming, casket, vault , etc.), while the national average for a cremation is $1,650. Now this does not account for those who keep their dead mother sitting in her favorite chair watching her favorite TV programs and even though I can identify with that desire to avoid change, they are in very small percentage points.

            Now you might think these people who keep grandma around after her demise are strange, but I suspect an alien culture or even some cultures here on our own planet might look at our burial practices and go WTF? I know I do. My feeling is that our beliefs, emotions, and actions with respect to death are what drive things. The first is that we feel and many believe we will live forever, we will go on despite our bodies dying and the second is that we want to keep our loved ones alive, we refuse to admit that they are actually gone forever. Both these things are linked to our being conscious, self-conscious and self-aware. These things too form the basis for many of our human religious beliefs. It is almost impossible to separate death from belief in the supernatural due to these innate human characteristics.

            I can’t help but think of the science fiction novel I read long ago – Cemetery World by Clifford D. Simak where the entire Earth has become an expensive, elite graveyard to the galaxy. Sometimes I feel that is how our world is going. Certainly no crisis yet, but I wonder at all the space taken up by cemeteries and I have seen many times in my six decades graveyards expanding, annexing, adding or opening new areas across town in perpetuity. What is perpetuity anyway, humans are so fleeting, we are here for only microseconds, nanoseconds compared to the Earth, the Universe. It’s almost as if we are nothing, not even the blink of an eye on a gnat. Someday the sun will expand and engulf the Earth vaporizing it and rending all atoms on and in it apart and consuming them to be returned to the universe in some 10 billion years. What then of those bodies (long gone) buried today six feet under? I ask myself what kind of sense does this even make as in my mind I watch my mother’s casket slowly lowered into the grave. I wait as everyone leaves -- returning to their homes, their jobs, their lives, I drop a handful of dark clotted soil onto the casket and listen for the echo it makes while the grave diggers stand by to cover her over.

About the Author

Kenny A. Chaffin writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction and has published poems and fiction in Vision Magazine, The Bay Review, Caney River Reader, WritersHood, Star*Line, MiPo, Melange and Ad Astra and has published nonfiction in The Writer, The Electron, Writers Journal and Today’s Family. He grew up in southern Oklahoma and now lives in Denver, CO where he works hard to make enough of a living to support two cats, numerous wild birds and a bevy of squirrels. His poetry collections No Longer Dressed in Black and The Poet of Utah Park and his collection of science essays How do we Know are available at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B007S3SMY8. He may be contacted through his website at http://www.kacweb.com. 

Becoming a Man (excerpt from Growing Up Stories)

 

Becoming a Man

(From: Growing Up Stories - True Stories of a Brown Dirt Boy)

by

Kenny A. Chaffin

All Rights Reserved © 2012 Kenny A. Chaffin

As can happen in life I ended up in a bit of a tough spot at age sixteen. A couple of years after my parents’ divorce – that was bad enough, living with mom, dealing with dad – but then mom moved us to Ardmore a nearby town due to work. It was some thirty miles away -- new school, new city, new life. I did my best, but it wasn’t working. The kids seemed weird and cliquish and I just didn’t fit. I was an honors student in Madill and that definitely gave me some advantages that were not immediately available in the new school. It tore me up inside and I’m sure it did mom as well, but after a few weeks she agreed to let me move back to Madill and live with my dad so I could graduate with honors and with my friends. My younger brother and sister both stayed with her. My brother helped her as best he could even moving a second time to Oklahoma City and graduating from a high school there. My sister followed a path similar to me by eventually moving back to Madill.

So, I moved in with my Dad at Grandpa Sid’s house. That in itself was kind of surreal -- three generations of bachelor Chaffins all under one roof. You might think it couldn’t possibly last and of course it didn’t. Grandpa Sid caught me smoking in the bathroom and the sleeping arrangement was cumbersome – I slept on a hide-a-bed in the living room which had to be made ready at bed time and put away at breakfast time and along with trying to do homework while a Southern Baptist fire-and-brimstone radio preacher screamed full blast into Grandpa Sid’s deaf ears it was all more than I could handle.

The only remaining living arrangement was to move in with my other grandparents – which would have been the better choice originally -- Grandad was retired from the oil field and drunk most of the time when he had social security money and Grandmama was a devout Christian who would do anything for her family – even putting up with him.  Despite all the turmoil I got back into the swing of things, getting caught up on my school work and beginning to feel a bit better about life. I had a room to myself at the back of the grandparent’s house (much better than a hide-a-bed in the living room) even if it was the throughway to the carport and back door and had the washer and dryer and two industrial size Frigidaire food freezers in it.  Think of having a bed in the utility room and you’ll get the idea. 

This room had been added on at the back of the house – where the original back door had been. There were temporary wooden steps down from that former back door to the carpet-covered concrete floor. The strangest thing was that the electrical power was supplied from the front porch light of the house. I guess it was easier to run an extension cord around the outside of the house than to connect it inside. The front porch light socket had an extender screwed into it – one of those with a pull-cord to turn the bulb on and two outlets on either side. An extension cord was plugged into that and routed around the outside of the house to provide power for my room. This meant that the front porch light switch had to be left turned on for my room to have power. Let it be evidenced from this that Grandad was clearly no electrician. The cotton pull-cord from the added socket had been extended and threaded through a hole drilled in the living room wall. This was anchored with a lead fishing weight straight out of the fishing tackle box. Pulling the cord would turn the front porch light on or off without affecting the power to my room. This was so weird, so Rube-Goldbergish with a pull-string to turn on the front porch light. Even now I shake my head in disbelief at the wackiness of it.

One night, not long after moving in I was in my room studying when the lights and power went off. I figured the breaker tripped. It was always happening in that old house. There were only two twenty-amp breakers for the whole house. I stepped out into the warm evening air and walked around to the front porch. The porch light was off (it was often left on in the evenings) so I checked it first by reaching up and pulling the pull-cord, but no light. That meant the breaker tripped, the bulb was burned out, or someone had turned the switch off inside the living room. I opened the front door just enough to slip my hand inside and check the switch. Sure enough it had been turned off. I flipped it back on and the porch light and the power came back. No big deal. I figured Grandad or Grandmama must have turned it off by accident when they went to bed. I went back to studying without thinking much more about it -- at least until the lights went off again.

Now I was annoyed and confused. Very strange, I thought. I went around again and instead of just reaching in and checking the switch as I had before, I opened the front door and turned the inside living room light on. A shock went through me. Standing there was Grandad, a shotgun in his hands and drunk splashed across his angry face. I froze not knowing what to think or do. I was sixteen years old. I’d never been in a situation remotely like this, never threatened with a gun before and certainly not by my own family.

Then, either teenage brashness or pure survival instinct took over. I grabbed the gun by its double barrel and stock before he could move and slammed into him. The smell of whiskey assaulted me as I shoved him backwards and jerked the gun out of his hands. He fell in a drunken sprawl on his butt -- banging his head on the gas stove before landing flat on the carpet. Despite my fear and the clearly threatening situation I hoped nothing was broken, that he was okay. I was overwhelmed and shocked with what had just happened and unsure of what I’d just done. Anger burned from me into his blood-shot eyes but that anger quickly turned to pity and sorrow as I saw what he had become. It all happened in a flash but in that instant and in those eyes I saw my own and knew we were the same, the same flesh, the same blood, the same life and I knew as we both did that something had just changed. I took the shells from the shotgun, laid it on the floor beside him and turned away. As I stepped towards the front door bile and shame welled up inside me and as I crossed that threshold I knew I’d taken a large and painful step towards manhood.

About the Author

Kenny A. Chaffin writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction and has published poems and fiction in Vision Magazine, The Bay Review, Caney River Reader, WritersHood, Star*Line, MiPo, Melange and Ad Astra and has published nonfiction in The Writer, The Electron, Writers Journal and Today’s Family. He grew up in southern Oklahoma and now lives in Denver, CO where he works hard to make enough of a living to support two cats, numerous wild birds and a bevy of squirrels. His poetry collections No Longer Dressed in Black and The Poet of Utah Park and his collection of science essays How do we Know are available at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B007S3SMY8. He may be contacted through his website at http://www.kacweb.com.