ALMOST DONE - THANK YOU FOR BEING PATIENT . . .
“Say DAD”
Then louder still
“ Say DADDY “
“Say POPPA”
It was Jackson Kelley’s mother, young, smooth and happy.
………………………………………………………………………………..
Feuilleton 2 of 20
1948 - KITCHEN INTERIOR - the new pink and blue “Baby Book
“Say POPPA”
It was Jackson Kelley’s mother, young, smooth and happy. Her hair was long, full,
shiny brown and healthy. It bounced slightly as her face moved close and her smile urged him to
speak. The umber brown color was almost gone. Her pale pink skin and rosy cheeks came through
and filled his vision. The perfumed smell of her skin made him happy. The cheeriness of the
kitchen, pinks, yellows, and reds lifted all things as sun light came through the window, bouncing
up off the flowered pink and gray linoleum kitchen floor.
“POPP-PAH” she mouthed carefully for him, slowing her lip formations so he could
learn. Jackson studied her fresh red lipstick as she spoke. Learn and Progress. Pro-Gress,
Move-Forward. Just like the new world of his mother and father - just as they were moving
forward. Just like the rest of the Free World. It was all so new. They weren't even mother and
father a short while ago. Jackson was their first. Until then they were just Mary and Joe, a young
couple, new in love in old Detroit. Mary’s hazel eyes twinkled now as she tried:
“DADD-DEEEEE”, with even more love in her smile.
A smile of love and honesty with a slight gap-toothed naiveté came from this happy young woman. Mary had moved from living and working on her father's chicken farm to renting this first small apartment in the big city of Detroit. She was happy in her new “home” and even though her young husband talked of working harder to get them a place of their own, a real house …. she was happy already.
“Say DAD” Jackson heard her say most pleasantly once again.
And so he tried, his small lips moved haphazardly, in concert with his clumsy lively arms, hands,
and fingers.
“DA…” he shouted loudly with an abrupt bodily jump up ... followed immediately by
shocked silence. He was shocked. She was shocked. The moment was stuck there between
them as the voices on the radio in the kitchen filled the empty air.
“NEXT WEEK ON THE YOUNG DOCTOR MALONE,
WE WILL FIND OUT THE TRUTH ABOUT.....”
And it went on and on, the radio, with a live organist playing too, this popular show in the years
just after the end of WORLD WAR II. But neither Jackson nor his mother heard the end of the
radio announcer's word's as she said loudly and satisfyingly to Jackson,
“GOOD BOY”
“That's right”….”DA”............”yes, DAH-DAH”
Mary reached behind her, away from Jackson and toward the shining ribbed metal edges of their
red kitchen table for his new pink and blue “Baby Book”. To write down the first words with the
date and time at which they were spoken by her lovely son.
“Just wait until Dah-Dah comes home to hear his son say DAH”, she said to him.
Mary wrote it down in the book. Jackson sat there, burbling and yammering inside and out. Jackson knew he had done something right because she was surprised. He had stopped her. And now she loved him even more. He would do it again. He was intoxicated with that love. This feeling and hunger for her love and appreciation spurred him on. Each of his own personal discoveries, right through into the upbeat and shiny 1950's - each of these discoveries really did amaze Jackson. He learned to love the feeling of DISCOVERY itself. The pleasure of learning something new for the very first time truly excited him.
All these new things had come from the destruction of many old things. These good times here and now were following bad times elsewhere, but little was said about those where Jackson lived. Ending the painful war years was hard and indescribably difficult. The United States had used massive new weapons to flatten a target city, killing tens of thousands of civilians in a way that no one on earth had ever seen before in the entire history of human beings on Earth.
(“Everyone was in shock.”)
( “While the enemy was still reeling the United States struck again.”)
Specific cities were chosen that had been relatively untouched during the war. The American Target Committee wanted it to be "sufficiently spectacular to be internationally recognized when the publicity was released."
The bomb exploded over Japan’s Hiroshima’s population of 350,000. Over 70,000 died immediately from the horrific explosion and another 70,000 died from radiation within five years.
One Japanese survivor described the awful damage to people that he had seen:
“The appearance of people . . . all had skin blackened by burns. . . . no hair because their hair was
burned, and at a glance you couldn't tell whether you were looking at them from in front or in back.
They held their arms bent forward. . . and their skin - not only on their hands, but on their faces and
bodies too - hung down. . . . If there had been only one or two such people . . . perhaps I would not
have had such a strong impression. But wherever I walked I met these people. . . . Many of them
died along the road - I can still picture them in my mind -- like walking ghosts.”
Far away from all that, in Detroit, Jackson was a very lucky little human. The last parts of the more traditional world from the 1920's-30's-40's all fell away as innovation, advancement, progress, and change were forced through the ragged holes of those times. Spreading and enveloping these new people in their new families in this still new land. Even public rest rooms were evolving into stylish constructions. Jackson found this out when he had to go. But one could observe some LATRINALIAin the public facilities. In the men’s room at least, Jackson never saw the inside of a ladies’ room, but there was always a scrawled message in at least one of the men’s stalls - or just in one’s line of vision over the wall mounted urinal. The message always made in earnest. Some hatred, passion, urge or jealous recrimination. Jackson understood the quick impulsive broad-hand markings but not the meticulously scratched or ink written ones. How did they find the uninterrupted time to make these marks? The more things changed in Jackson’s world the more public rest room graffiti seemed noticeable.
As changes grew so did Jackson. He felt it was all a normal thing. He did not know that it wasn’t normal at
all – not for for all time. Jackson did not know that it meant that his future would never be the same kind of
normal, ever again.
…………………………………………………………………………..
FUTURE PRESENT: feverish memories in delirium on hot pavement :
Perhaps we really should have found Jackson Kelley on the largest, darkest movie screen instead. Inside the emptiest moment of the longest silent escape. He had always only wanted a very simple peaceful existence – peaceful calm and enjoyable – a breakfast on some balcony overlooking green leaf tree tops in warm sun.
But then, one loud explosion, of a giant HAND-CLAP in our ear.
( http://www.batanga.com/es/songs/como-te-extrano-bobi-cespedes) BRIGHT-WHITE flash, right on time with
that one HAND-CLAP. STRONG CLEAR TRUMPET, DRIVING KEYBOARD with
DARK THROBS of thick PERCUSSION behind it – last century jungle edge music,
Afro-Cuban pulsing through golden thick drifting smog of future present.
Old Jackson down on the cement. Remembering, with pain in his stomach making its way
through slashed scar tissue skin, remembering cuts and deaths and worse. The remembering forced
its way up into painful present to help Jackson try to comprehend. His own young family had not
really learned painful histories of their own older wider deeper family’s past.
Why bother with all of that when there was so much new life to be lived. His own family ignored
him as much as the rest of the world. But he knew. Jackson knew at least a little about his two
grandfathers, and about their grandfathers, both from other older times and from countries that
had pain or cuts and death to force them to move – to move on.
(“Would have made a great story though, a tragedy maybe.”)
(“Too sad, too serious, they won’t have it, they won’t care.”)
( “You know what he said, right? That guy Oscar Wilde said:
“If you’re going to tell them the truth,
you better make them laugh, or they will kill you.” )
(“Can’t help it – it is what it is.”)
MOVIE CLAPPERBOARD SLATE UPDATED - NO CLAPPER ANYMORE, JUST A PULSE LIGHT AND L.E.D.
DIGITAL READOUT WITH A PIECE OF OLD DULL BRUISED SILVER GAFFER’S TAPE – ALL HAND
MARKED UP WITH RECYCLABLE BLACK FELT PEN THAT READS :
“THOSE THAT CAME BEFORE”
Jackson’s mother Mary’s father had come out of England. He, Charlie, came from a family poor
but more fortunate than other working class people labouring through crippling British poverty,
hunger, and disease on the River Thames in the London during the reign of mighty and imperious
Queen Victoria after her beloved husband, Albert, passed away. Economic forces being what they
were at the time, grandfather Charlie went over to North America at eleven years old, working his way through Canada first, alone. Growing into manhood then coming over the international river boundary on his own, to the thriving city of Detroit. While still a young man and before leaving Canada, Charlie had joined the socialist CCF in the DIRTY THIRTIES depression prairie lands of western Canada. But disillusioned and still hungry Charlie finally ended up a 1950’s slum landlord in old Detroit, across the dirty polluted river border between the United States and the
British Commonwealth’s Dominion of Canada.
(“What a fucking hypocrite! First he’s for the people,
then he screws the people outta their money for low-class living.”)
(“No, no - you don’t understand – he lived through hard times and …”)
(“Don’t gimme that, the low-class slum landlord after the money of poor people,
after the money the poor people got from their Uncle Sam – jeez, what a scum bag.”)
(“But the DEPRESSION had scarred him badly, had taught him to…”)
(“Taught him to what? Screw people? Yah, that’s what he got good at, ain’t it?”)
Grandfather Charlie met Jackson’s sweet grandmother Alice in Halifax, Nova Scotia, before
he left Canada for the United States. Little Alice had been working in a small candy making
establishment in Halifax, just after her town in eastern Canada was rebuilt. Alice’s town of
Halifax was rebuilt after the World War One tragedy that befell its people. A munitions ship
violently exploded, destroying most of the seaport. Young Alice had survived this. Thousands of
the people were there one day - gone the next. They were dead and burned or frozen in the frigid
cold night after the terrible explosion. From that sad day until the later sadder atomic bombing of
Hiroshima in World War Two, this Halifax detonation had the sorry distinction of being the very
largest ever known; killing the most people in a man-made blast in all of recorded history.
But that’s where they met – in Halifax.
(“He’s a drifter. A ne’er-do-well. She’ll regret it.”)
(“Aye, but he is handsome and tall though.”)
When rebuilt Halifax was, and maybe still is to this day, very properly class structured from the all
pervasive British influence over the people that lived there. Alice was lower working class. She met Charlie in the candy making factory after he drifted into town. The rest, as the Nova Scotian side of the family says, is history. Charlie and Alice picked up and left the small seaport for their own land locked egg and chicken farming, then moved even further - all the way to the aging degraded city buildings that defined slum apartment building ownership in Detroit years later.
(“Ain’t it funny how people forget where they came from and just go ahead and screw people to get ahead,
to get on top, to be the boss instead of the slave, funny ain’t it?”)
(“If I were really British, which I am not, I’d take umbrage sir – but since I am from Detroit,
y’better just shut the fuck up – besides, the other one never ever forgot where HE came from”)
The other grandfather, on Jackson Kelley’s father’s side, had a rougher ride to freedom.
He came from that troubled place with many Turkish Empire hazards - poor old Armenia.
(“Remember, even old Winston Churchill mumbled through his brandy and cigars that the
British military landings in Turkey during the horror show called Gallipoli triggered the
bloody genocide of the Armenian population inside the aging Ottoman Empire back in 1915.”)
This other grandfather had been born the same year that Ellis Island opened in New York as a
gateway to the USA for new immigrants. Jackson’s paternal grandfather came over from his
old country as JIRAIR KARAYAN, but had his name changed by impatiently rushed and greatly
overworked American immigration agent from Jirair to “Jerry Kelley”, cursing Jackson with a
family name that would always be spelled incorrectly no matter where he went.
(“Oh great, an ARMO . . . now THAT’S just we needed, another damn ARMO.”)
(“You really are hard to get through to, aren’t you . . . just listen, listen.”)
Jirair as a young man wrote simple poems on the backs of book pages and other scraps of paper.
When leaving his homeland his writing had the feeling of sincere poetry, written in English
not Armenian. He arrived in the vibrant city of New York just as he ceased being a teenager,
although teenagers had not really been invented yet. At 20 years of age he came to seek refuge and
opportunity in America. If Jirair - now Jerry Kelley - had not come when he did, he would most
certainly have been murdered by Turkish forces that ruled his homeland.
Jirair came from Tokat, an old Armenian city in north central Turkey. It was an important city
in ancient Roman times. It declined under Byzantines only to revive again after capture by
Ottoman Turks in the 1400’s. But by the 1900’s it might as well have been called the ATRO-CITY
for all the bloody horrors committed there. All knowledge about the desperate plight of
Jackson’s grandfather, and all of the family members on his father’s side, came not from Jackson’s father nor family remembrances of any kind by any of Jackson’s relatives. No one talked. Not at all. It all came from various texts that Jackson read later about the massacre. The massacre that Turkey had insisted for so many years had never happened at all. The horrific descriptive details of this so painstakingly pulled together in Peter Balakian’s writings taught Jackson much.
As Jackson read Balakian’s work in BLACK DOG OF FATE he learned what had happened. Why
people ran from old Armenia. He learned how he came to be born in North America rather than
Tokat, Turkey. Jackson read that the bloody Armenian Massacre by the Turks had started in the
1900's when secret meetings began to be held by the Turks. One of the Turkish doctors at these
meetings said,
"If we are going to do something like the Adana massacre,
the result will do us more harm than good."
In the doctor’s words at these meetings he said:
"The Turks must not leave a single Armenian alive in our country;
we must kill the Armenian name."
This Evil, from the Devil?, allowed by God? – this evil would affect the generations of new Armenians that would survive this plan, but at that time things did look absolutely final for Armenians. The Turks voted that not a single Armenian should be left alive. As they began to murder, the Turks realized that they could not kill all the Armenians in one slaughter so they also created an artificial famine to help finish them off.
Many Armenians died of hunger, or were forced by hunger to eat carcasses of dead animals.
Turkish soldiers spared no one, not even children, because Turkey worried about anger and
vengeance being carried forward by any of the young that escaped. This extreme murderous
genocidal nationalistic patriotism was not new. It had happened before, and it has happened
afterward. It has been waged on all sorts of different groups by those in power. What the Turks
did to Jackson’s immediate relatives, family, and friends he learned was no better nor worse
than what Americans did to the native peoples of North America while following their very own
self-stated glorious American Manifest Destiny during those days in history.
(“Hold on you little shit, don’t go bad mouthing the USA just ‘cause y’got it in for the Turks …. hell, the
USA is NUMBER ONE and those damn Turks just can’t get it together anyway. What about those
damned Chinese Commies that starved 30 million of their own to death?
And the ARMO’s, shit . . . big-ass gold chains and LA mafioso and more . . . who needs ‘em anyway? “)
No, not as simple as just Turks committing genocide. Jackson came to understand more about the interlocking variables of EMPIRES. Declining empires being replaced by rising new empires were at the heart of this tragedy, and perhaps every other tragedy like this. The very old degenerating Ottoman Empire was a deadly stew of new Young Turks making their violent young way through the guts of other empires with several different religions. The newer younger empires of the Russians, Germans, and British were all eyeing the rich remaining assets of the aging Ottoman Empire. This was further confused by three belief systems marbled together into one vast conflict – Christian, Muslim, and New Secular.
The conflict at Gallipoli served as a symbol of all that could go wrong when the pieces combine in the wrong way at the wrong time. Over 500,000 people destroyed in that confrontation alone. The pressures created by the young empires lusting after the old empire murdered hundreds of thousands of soldiers as well as millions of Armenians.
Jackson modified his resentment and wrath against the Turks to now include Germans, British, and Russians – the imperial leadership of those empires were the ones really responsible – with their never ending greed and murderous manifest destinies.
“Did this greed come from fear?” Jackson wondered. Hard to know. Real reasons for horrific things are always hidden or quietly tucked away. Now, at this time in North America, Jackson thought that perhaps the people of the U.S.A., once so confident and self assured, were also now afraid – possibly more afraid than any other people of any other nation on Earth. The Americans were, Jackson thought, afraid because they had so much to lose now, and because of all the collective guilt carried for mass murdering all the tribal peoples - to take their rich land and its wealth - along with pitifully cruel enslavement of Africans that they stole to build their great early American wealth and power across the ocean from the criminally raided homes.
(“Oh, all that’s over now. We all live in the Post Racial period.
We have black leaders in politics. And we just don’t want
to hear about it anymore, O.K.?” )
Jackson recalled days from his own youth when all Americans agreed with their government that
the tiny rogue island nation of Cuba must be stopped. The U.S.A. was pissed that this new little
fledgling government of rebels that disliked and kicked out rich American commercial interests.
How could they exist at all in theirAmerican hemisphere, most especially after the Americans had already “liberated” them from the powerful nations of Europe back in the Rough Rider days of good old Teddy Roosevelt. The word ‘empire’ was used less and less.
(“Now just you stop right there mister. Them damn Cubans were wrong – hell, even the
ones we let in messed it all up. Miami never got anything good from all that except for that old
MIAMI VICE TV show, right?”)
The American population, the actual people of America, always in a state of guilty fear stoked white hot by the various ruling American governments and corporations, were kept busy and distracted by the ever increasing never ending onslaught of Entertainment and rampant expanding Consumerism. Jackson knew they did not need nor really enjoy any of this all that much, but it did keep most of them distracted from what their government and the large body of corporations that ran their government were actually doing at home and out there in the world. They were actually continuously expanding, taking, raping, and killing to increase profits and seize control of wider and wider areas until they even began the probably immoral acquisition beyond the planet, into spaces around, above, and beyond the Earth.
Jackson learned the Armenian Genocide had been going on for years before its official start
date of 1916, and that it continued even when it was thought by the rest of the world to be
officially over. Although persecution, torture, and killings happened earlier, the first official
massacres began in the early months of 1915 when the Turks began to brutally and systematically
eliminate the Armenian race, and in 1916 the Turkish government decided to destroy every
Armenian still alive in Turkey.
( This is crazy, this sick murderous violence is crazy – why do we humans do it? )
( Shut up, just shut up. )
Jackson sadly thought of all opposing teams of humans he had seen. Those he had lived and worked with - Reds and Whites, Browns and Whites, Yellow and Whites, Blacks and Whites. Jackson in Canada even saw Whites and Whites, British and the French. Later still, Blacks against Blacks, Yellows against Yellows, and Browns against Browns. Why did humans do this? What purpose was being served? What was achieved? Why?
(“Don’t be such a dumbass, we are better than them dammit.”)
(“God wants us to be on top, because we are better.”)
(“Dumbass.”)
Jackson felt it might be better when the machines took over, but, but for now, while we were still in charge - when it begins and gathers speed and momentum, it is hard to stop.
In 1916 the Armenians serving in the Turkish Imperial Armies were taken by Turkish officers to remote
places out of public sight and shot dead. The Turks murdered doctors and their own
government officials if they were of Armenian blood. Photographs of those horrible times
times show hanged Armenian doctors and physicians with their Turkish hangmen standing
on the platforms above them. Most males fifteen years of age and under were murdered. The Turks tortured and degraded the women of Armenia. Beaten, raped, starved, and murdered - thousands of Armenians corpses lined the roads to all provinces in Turkey.
( Stop, please stop – enough - it is too much )
Balakian’s work in BLACK DOG OF FATE gave accounts, tragic accounts. One Muslim
traveler described his nine hour journey from Malatia to Sivas as utterly gruesome with hundreds
of thousands of Armenians lying with tortured limbs severed from bodies. German travelers
described distorted corpses of starved Armenians. For months murdered Armenians were observed floating down the Euphrates River. Male corpses mutilated with sexual organs cut off and females ripped open. German eyewitnesses said remains of Armenians were stranded on the banks of the rivers and later devoured by animals of the area.
( Enough – PLEASE – no more ! )
Jackson Kelley learned slowly that reasons for all horrific atrocities were hidden away. People did not talk
openly. And if they did, many did not really know or admit real reasons for the horrendous violence done to
others. In almost every case, in almost every situation from oldest Rome to Olde London to newer
Washington D.C., these inhumane barbarous behaviors were about Power, if not about both Power and
Wealth. Power and Wealth for already wealthy people in the attacking country who stood to benefit from
the outcome of savage actions. Kelley came to understand that all conflicts, wars, and genocide that brag
and beat their chest about providing or defending or delivering FREEDOM to poor, already weak victims are
really always only about Power and Wealth for the already wealthy back home. All horrific episodes born
of fear – fear of missing out on even more Power and Wealth – fear of losing Power and Wealth. And
Jackson came to know that Americans were quite possibly among the most fearful people on the planet.
( HEY – watch who you are calling what, you mongrel drifter you . . . )
When Jackson could shake off the horror and sadness, he tried in vain to consider this rationally.
It never seemed to come up in the media or in all the heartfelt conversations or debates, but
people knew a global audit was needed. A clear global audit to determine who benefits from
these horror shows. A global audit that would account for the profit and wealth being made.
A global audit to show annually maybe quarterly just exactly who became wealthier as soldiers
and mothers and children and old grandparents were savagely murdered in the many and constant
bloody global wars. Everyone knew this could be done, but no one had the resources or information to do it independently. And there was another problem. After all the legitimate greed chasers were accounted for, that left the transnational criminals. In fact legit corps used transnational criminals to hide borderline or over the borderline activities, and the silent TCO ( Transnational Criminal Organization) was untouchable. It was obscene. War for new wealth and fast wealth transfer at these high human costs was obscene. The employment of criminals to destroy and exploit was obscene. But the obscenity was starting to feel convertible, changeable, malleable. The criminal use of technology was catching up and outpacing all but the most advanced military governing groups. The technology itself was beginning to notice. And some humans were seeing this happen. Or feeling it. The latest generation of cutfitti showed it. The days of cute KILROYhumor graffiti were gone for Jackson. The early graffiti of KILROY, universal in its range and humor and coverage, embodied some measure of HOPE for peace against the bad guys. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Kilroy_WikiWorld.png.
But that tagging, that mark making had long ago become sadly antique.
(“But you digress, dammit. Jackson was still learning about the dying Armenian side of his family.
We know that as Jackson discovered more about the sad history of his own original family,
his own people, he actually lost sleep, right?”)
( “NO, no more – stop.” )
( “Almost – almost – but not yet” )
Gruesome reports found in Balakian’s very thorough BLACK DOG OF FATE book
( http://www.amazon.com/Black-Dog-Fate-American-Uncovers/dp/0767902548) told of Armenian bodies plucked of hair, with bleeding breasts and genitals cut off, bloodied feet hammered with nails as if the Turks had been shoeing horses. And those Armenian people that could not face the torture threw themselves and their children into rivers to drown. Their remains neither buried nor mourned - just left to be eaten by wild dogs and vultures. Millions of doomedArmenians brought to their death. Many Armenians left their unsafe homeland quickly to avoid this murder - to obtain some safety. They went to places in the United States and Europe.
Jackson’s own grandfather Jirair, who arrived at Ellis Island in New York in 1913 when he
turned 20 years old, quietly said many years later :
“I am proud to call myself an Armenian and so should you be. We Armenians got through
the toughest times and despite the Turkish efforts to eliminate our race we beat the odds
and are here today to prove it.”
Yes, he did survive. All family and friends back there gone. No one would admit or even hint at what actually happened to them, but there was new hope in this newer generation, even if it
was to be of mixed blood in this new mixed up land. The Turks had behaved in a brutal way
that was not new. Similar events of horrible death had happened for years.
As far back as the 1500’s it had been written:
“If an injury has to be done to a man
it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.”
But all those older days seemed finished now. Not talked about in the prosperous 1950’s, at least not in North America, at least for some of the people living in North America. In other parts of the Earth a large Soviet force invaded small Budapest in Hungary. Hungarian resistance there continued as 2,000 Hungarians and 700 Soviet troops were killed fighting. 200,000 poor Hungarians fled their homes as refugees. In Russia, the new enemy for Jackson’s U.S.A. homeland, Khrushchev denounced Stalin. After Stalin's death, new small round Khrushchev emerged victorious in the Soviet Union. He delivered his "Secret Speech" denouncing Stalin's purges and ushered in a less repressive era in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. His domestic policies, aimed at bettering the lives of ordinary citizens, were often ineffective, creating more troubles for its citizens.
But the empires were all still at it. Jackson knew no one learned these things in school. He had pieced the events together from person to person conversations. He could not even verify on the web any longer due to automated web surveillance, funded by marketing research firms fronting for their commercial clients.
The conversations and sad weeping stories came mostly from international immigrants. Stories about the Suez Crisis – the Tripartite Aggression - the offensive war by France, the United Kingdom, and Israel against Egypt. It was less than one day after Israel invaded Egypt that Britain and France issued a joint ultimatum to Egypt and Israel, and then began to bomb Cairo. The two attacks were planned in collusion - France as the instigator, Britain as belated partner, and Israel as the willing trigger. But it was hard to verify in any so-called factual objective database.
Anglo-French forces withdrew but Israeli forces remained, prolonging the crisis. When fully reopened to international shipping other repercussions still continued. The multi nation attack followed Egypt’s decision to nationalize the Suez Canal, which they decided immediately after the withdrawal of an offer by Britain and the United States to fund the building of the new Aswan Dam – because they were concerned about Egypt's new ties with the Soviet Union and its recognizing the nation of China too.
Empires, empires, empires.
The aims of the attack - to regain Western control of the canal and to precipitate the fall of President Nasser from power as his policies were threatening the strategic/commercial interests of those three other invading nations.
But for Jackson, and his young family in the new land, none of this was talked about much. The old world troubles faded away for them even as the buildings they lived and worked in began to change. The thick dark wooden moldings, leaded glass windows, tasteful contrasting mosaics and ornate ceiling medallions of the Old World were vanishing everywhere, except in the poorer sections across the nation - where they proceeded to age badly through impoverished neglect. Jackson Kelley remembered those traditional architectural visual elements being haughtily sneered at as “old-fashioned dust-catchers.
(“Oh, our new place will have clean lines, very modern, the future is here.”)
(“I know, I know, we are getting rid of that old dining set and going with
that neat sleek clean teak wood Scandinavian dining furniture.”)
(“And the synthetics are all washable, and clean!”)
Almost all at once, in marched NEW Stainless Steel, Formica, Linoleums, and Wall-to-Wall
Carpets. What small amount of traditional carved solid wood furniture was left still standing
changed to something like Danish Modern. There were a few remaining North American
samples of the fine older architecture from more historical periods, but all of everything was
being built anew in order to be new. They all felt, most of them, that new was better.
That new provided more of everything for more people. Even crime itself was re-inventing as the old world gangs and corrupt union power brokers all moved greedily into the new corporate worlds too. The increasing amount of marks seen on walls were playfully mean and sexual,
“Call Suzie for a good time”, or combinations of homophobic and racist. Only the very beginnings of gang tags and cryptic communications were evolving. These times were new.
The old times held too many bad memories, especially when there was the intoxicating allure of the New Good Life for the New Everyman, and not too long after that for the Everywoman and Everychild too. They even called it The American Dream. They really did not know what it was, or where it was going, or even why. Maybe Sophia Loren knew, but she wasn’t talking.
……………………………………………………………………………
1950’s: INTERIOR AFTERNOON - painting rays on neighbor’s Maidenform bra
A newly printed flat shiny Sophia Loren magazine cover on a teak Danish modern wooden table in the corner of the room watched a young Jackson using her dark sexy photographic print eyes as he started life in the old city, but then grew up in new suburbs of that old city. Even at this young age Jackson could tell he now lived in a sharper, linear, more modern world than the stodgy, overly ornate and fussily complex past of heavy wood and stone. That old world that had changed already. Detroit, and all her sister cities, were all changing at the same time.
Metal.........Steel........Aluminum......Plastics.......Aircraft.....Automobiles......SPACECRAFT......
and even sputnik barbeques accompanied by new and modern synthetic tree hammocks, if you
had a tree or two as his family did then. Amidst all these changes one of the things young
Jackson Kelley accidentally learned about, unexpectedly........was LIGHT.
(“I thought I saw a thin blue line of light . . .”)
(“Yes, and it burned, I can smell it.”)
Inside the clean new suburban house with the pale blue ‘robin’s egg’ wall paint a small intense hot red spot of light from the tip of his father's lit Chesterfield cigarette… the 1950’s daylight coming through the big plate glass “PICTURE” window in the “LIVING ROOM”, as the sun edge-lit back-lit the pale smoke streams rising from his father’s cigarette in the shiny floor-standing metal ash tray with its spinner plunger that would centrifugally fling all old cig butts, ash, and burnt matches down into a lower fire proof metal chamber inside the ashtray, just below the gleaming metal top surface where the current burning cigarette rested hotly. All of this next to a sleek magazine rack with the glossy new publications bursting with inventions, predictions and improvements. Also one other special light - the light that Jackson had fallen in love with very early in his childhood. Small but brightly veined, warm yellow-orange-white light that came from his grandfather’s new tape recorder box.
“Oh Charlie, not the talking machine again.” Granma Alice would mutter sweetly.
The large portable reel-to-reel tape recorder box visited them almost as much as his grandparents
did. The pressed faux fabric exterior of the box made it look like a small suitcase ( or “grip” as
his grandparents continued to call it ). It opened up to reveal its tape reels moving and its
bright little audio level light monitor bulb pulsing with each pronunciation into the microphone.
When baby Jackson first saw it he was getting older, almost talking, living in the new place. The
older small happy apartment with feelings of the old world was abruptly exchanged for a brand
new small house in the brand new suburbs outside of Detroit, the old Motor City. Gone were the
red floral curtains, the red and white table cover, even the bulgy old radio that played while his
mother made delicious foods in that big dark blue speckled pot and pan.
Jackson’s grandfather’s tape recorder light bulb was now the central pulsing miniature nova in
the middle of these newly built geometrically clean rooms. Their pastel colors with semi-
gloss white ceilings for easy hand washing, with no interesting moldings at all, and stark bright
clean lighting fixtures throughout – this was HOME now.
“C'mon Light, C'mon”, little Jackson said loudly with his grandfather's encouragement.
His ‘granpar’ showed him how the light burned brighter when words were spoken directly into
the microphone of the tape recorder. His grandfather had purchased it for historical purposes - to
record the times and events of his family, to send audio tapes of close family to other distant
family so they could hear each other. This was better than the still unreliable and expensive
LONG DISTANCE telephone. When using the Long Distance telephone connection they would
time their Long Distance calls with a manual egg timer. If a Long Distance call came through on
their ringing home phone the family members would run toward the eldest person available
yelling,
“COME QUICK, IT IS A LONG DISTANCE CALL”
Because people still cared about the cost of phone calls back then, back when clocks still ticked
and phones still rang.
“C’MON LIGHT, C'MON!”
Jackson’s little boy voice spoke loudly, watching the light get brighter as he did, but still thinking
it was the visible heartbeat of a living thing, this tape recorder thing. So Jackson would go from
yelling:
“C'MON LIGHT, C'MON”
to pleading soulfully with the light bulb, saying
“Oh PUHHLEEEZE, Light……..Please C'mon!”
Of course his grandfather recorded this with glee. At least as much glee as his grandfather
allowed to escape from his large old worldly masculine personage. Later, when he did not come to visit so often, when Jackson and his brother were a little older they would ride their bicycles over to visit Granpar and Grandma. It was then; later during those days that he discovered you could actually GRAB light........and MOVE it.
Jackson had seen old black and white Hollywood World War II movies where the combat soldier used a piece of broken mirror in war torn European cities - all but reduced to rubble - to signal his unit in Morse code. After watching one of these old movies on the TV downstairs in their suburban basement, Jackson stood on his bed in his room upstairs. He got his chin and upper arms high enough to look out the long narrow modern windows that ran horizontally across the room at about the height of an adult's chin. These newer windows, great for lighting the room, but hard for children to see out of. He had seen the morning light angling through this long skinny horizontal rectangle of a bedroom window. He could see floating dust specs in the angled sunbeams - though not many as his mother cleaned this house EVERY day of the week, except Sunday. Jackson got his face up high enough to look out through the window across the new suburban lawned backyard to the rear of the back neighbor's house, beyond the new four month old galvanized chain link fence that divided their properties.
“Cap'n, can you read me Cap'n?” he muttered gravely and quietly in soldier voice,
bringing his mother's hand mirror up into position to send signals with. As Jackson reset
his physical stance to balance his weight he slipped slightly but caught and adjusted his bulk to
stabilize. During this, his eyes POPPED OPEN - as he wriggled his arms his eyes widened
again. The hand mirror had caught the sun's rays and when he slipped had painted those rays as a
hot bright spot moving across the back neighbor's brickwork on the house so far away. There was
no one there to say “GOOD BOY”. No one there to acknowledge loudly his achievement and
discovery. But he FELT excited. He felt great. Jackson had learned instantly. He had learned that sunlight can be grabbed and repositioned with great power and clarity over distances. Years later he was still relearning that discovery. The discovery made fine-tuningthe hand mirror position to poke the long light shaft into one of the dark rear-facing bedroom windows in the neighbor's home….to strike another wall mirror inside the room...lighting up the walls of that room...all through that narrow rectangular bedroom window...over 70 feet away. He remembered it again years later as an apprentice when it dawned on him to use Light as a solid substance in the primitive television production studios he worked in. Not just as a source of light, but as a solid OBJECT of light, to plan, compose, and place where it needed to go…. no longer just a bright thing that glowed in one’s eyes. Jackson didn’t know that solid light would also become an instrument of painful endings, once we had all learned how to cut and slice and kill. But on this day, having transported physical light across physical space, Jackson wallowed in joyous and exciting feeling of discovery. His hairs stood up on the back of his neck as he continued painting light rays in the neighbor’s room through their rear window facing him. The neighbor lady in the far away house, mother of two boys herself, entered her bedroom in her robe unaware of the light spot crawling the walls and ceiling of the room she was in. But when she lowered the robe revealing herself to Jackson in her white underwear his control on the mirror spotlight wavered and landed shakily on her firm right breast, clothed comfortably in its half of her white Maidenform bra. She looked down at the bright glowing breast and then swiveled her head toward the source of the light. Jackson stumbled, tumbled down and left his room quickly. As Jackson crossed the room to leave he felt the dark roving eyes of beautiful Sophia Loren tracking with him from her cover photograph on the LIFE magazine cover, lying flat on the seat of the chair in the bedroom where he had last left it. The photo on the cover was much more professional than the photo of Jackson and his brother and father, taken by his mother – at the picnic.
…………………………………………………
- how d'you like it, or not?
Send complaints and suggestions to
danphilips@rogers.com
- thanks.
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