Home and Hexabarger

Being a preacher's kid, I come from almost everywhere ("and nowhere," a cognate army brat would hasten to add, with my nodding assent). Huntington Indiana. Kidron Ohio. Churubusco Indiana. Franklin Pennsylvania. Tulsa Oklahoma. Franklin (again) -- actually, Congress Hill above the borough. Then Kingwood Pennsylvania, the northern edge of an odd place called, oddly, "Hexie." 

Huntington is where my parents went to an evangelical college, met, married, had me and then graduated. Dan Quayle is also from Hungtington, but I left as a toddler, so we never met.

Kidron is where my Mennonite grandparents, +Carl and Lena, ran a weekly village newspaper on a linotype and a flat press ... where my polio-ridden grandfather limped with a 50lb cassette of type to the linotype everytime he wanted to change the font and where he blocked out every page with a huge rubber mallet and a score of spacers ... where my all-wise grandmother made paste out of flour and water and wrapped individuals copies for the mail, and took them all in a red wagon to the post office next door. Kidron is where Lehman Hardware has made international business news by selling Amish ware to consumers who are trying to set down roots in something more tangible than the internet. You can get a gas refrigerator there, I kid you not.

Churubusco was named after an important American victory (in 1847) in the Mexican-American War. The little Hoosier village calls itself "Turtle Town USA." I never met any turtles there. I have a much better chance now at doing so, since I live next door to a borough called "Turtle Creek." My dad's parish rented, for a rectory, the bottom floor of a big old red brick farmhouse.

Congress Hill sits on top of Bully Hill, which rises up from picturesque Franklin. It is said, though I don't believe it, that George Washington himself hiked up Bully Hill and declaimed, huffing and puffing from the climb, "That was a bully of a hill." Hence the name.

Tulsa is wellknown on the map. I loved my neighborhood there: nowadays, the magic sheen of memory has been scoured away on the images from Google Earth, through which demigodlike I swoop down from the ether and look at blasted images of shadows which are not meant for human consumption. My neighborhood is peppered by stunted shrubs and brownish grass: gone, from this angle, are the leafy catulpa trees and the buffalo grass lawns and the curbs we used to brake our bicycle tires, since we were going too fast on bikes too big to reach down our bare feet without a curb to stand on. Dad's church, on the corner of Joplin and Haskell, was a white cinderblock affair, cooled off by electric fans and hand fans with Warner Sallman's ubiquitous "Head of Christ" emblazoned on one side of the pasteboard glued to a tongue-depresser. The building belongs, now, to another denomination, another mission. But it still stands, replete with the musty smell of cinderblock in the hot south, and uprooted out of Oklahoman dirt and transfigured in memory, there I still hear the echoes of Ira Stanphill's "Unworthy" on hot summer Sunday nights.

All these places meet and meld as my memories get older and continue to age in the oaken cask of my head. Memory gets older and becomes more complex.

I have learned that complexity can be good or bad. There is, of course, the bad complexity of degeneration. This is often mistaken for evolution. It seems to be more creative, but actually reveals itself as more scripted, more determined, more reprobate.

But the other complexity is beautiful, and not just in the eye of the beholder.

So memories can coruscate together in the surface waters of the consciousness, and there I hear "This is My Father's World" under the dappled gold light of a maple bower, in the limbs I climbed on Congress Hill, on Pone Lane. There, bobbing like the forlorn red and white float I used, in futility, for fishing, I see locusts waking up from a seven-year slumber in Tulsa and menacing funnel clouds glowering in the southwest sky on Palm Sunday. I see dad underhand tossing a white ball to my bat, hitting it before I could swing, just to boost my confidence, and my dog Rocky's tail wagging at the success of it by our big brick house.

But the most memory comes from Hexie, because there is where I learned to love the trees and the hills, the sky and the stars and the old roads of mystery that reached back far into the hollows and valleys.

When I turned fifty a few years back, I understood, finally, that a man must treasure and garden his memory, and that memory must be rooted in a home, a single place that is addressed in the stars, on a certain land.

For memory rooted in home makes for a beautiful kind of complexity, and the good certainty that is sometimes called faith.

I am reading now a book dad got me for Christmas about my home, a haunted placed called Hexie. The book is called, eponymously, A Place Called Hexie. At least two spectral women traipsed up and down the land generations ago, enough to set gossip wagging now for over a hundred years. We had a little vale called "Spooky Valley" that was cool on the hot muggy days in August on my bicycled newspaper route. We played basketball in barns, furnished with special rules so you didn't accidentally fall into the muck of the calves' stall. We milked cows, baled hay, picked the always-growing rocks out of fields.

Hexie grows in beauty everytime I drive back.

Hexabarger is my home that my memory flies to. It is the shore of my conscious sea.

I have written before about Hexie: a Christmas poem, rooted there; and this Halloween remembrance (that's full of legend, as opposed to the factual reporting in Sam Miller's good book).

Meanwhile, I'm reading Hexie, and I'm stuck in a time machine. It's a good way to prepare, old-fashioned, for the Julian Christmas Day.

Comments

[Eric John]

Sometimes I wonder whether that special place/time that lives in one's memory will forever remain only that - memory. For me, there is a place in California where my beloved Great Uncle and Aunt lived - it was hot under the oaks in summer, and they had a basement office/room accessible only from a long stair outside down the side of the stucco house where it was perpetually and magically cool and secret.

The place exists, but no longer as it once was, for the garages along the back alley where we played have burned down, and many of the big oaks have been felled, or rotted and perished. And, I know, that perhaps there was a boy who knew the place before me, before there were roads, or houses, and for whom the magic was a different place/time.

One wonders whether, in eternal memory, such times and places merge and are again renewed, impossibly, or whether it will only forever be enshrined in this imperfect will-o'-the-wisp memory.

[Darlene]

Memories are odd devices, made of the stuff which can play tricks with reality. Sometimes we re-fashion the memories so as to silence that reality laced with pain and heartache. From time to time the cacophony of those unpleasantries somehow manages to pierce the fairy tale story that we have concocted in our minds, once again reminding us of the fallen nature of things which crept into our lives, lived out in those most near and dear to us. Lived out within the one we know best, ourselves.

Oh yes, there is beauty amidst the ugliness else how could we survive? And perhaps that is the wonderment of it all. In spite of all that has entered into this world through a foolish choice, one that perpetuates itself over and over again, still there are beautiful memories, ones untainted by that transgression, ones that blossom forth reflecting the image of God.