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    I Can't Believe I Ended Up in Berkeley: Remembering a Country Boyhood
    I Can't Believe I Ended Up in Berkeley: Remembering a Country Boyhood
    I Can't Believe I Ended Up in Berkeley: Remembering a Country Boyhood
    Ebook137 pages1 hour

    I Can't Believe I Ended Up in Berkeley: Remembering a Country Boyhood

    By Ron Parker

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    About this ebook

    This book is a collection of stories and poems, written over a period of forty years or so, about what it was like to grow up in the 1940s and 50s in rural southern Michigan. It tells stories of a life of hunting and trapping, of working on the farm when horses still pulled hay wagons, of bagging flour ground on stones powered by the flow of Fleming Creek, of attending a one-room country school where three generations of Parkers had learned to read and write. All this is written from the perspective of one who moved to Berkeley, California in the iconic 1960s and continues to live there today.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateJan 25, 2020
    ISBN9781543999921
    I Can't Believe I Ended Up in Berkeley: Remembering a Country Boyhood
    Author

    Ron Parker

    I live in the north west of England and write mostly adult mysteries, though I have also written a (loosely) sci-fi book for kids and a non fiction book on child care. From this you will gther that my background is in the field of child care, though I have been retired from that for some time.Until recently, I was involved with the Scout Movement, and was secretary of my local tenants & residents group. Nowadays, my time is spent writing and looking after my cat, Peggy.

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      Book preview

      I Can't Believe I Ended Up in Berkeley - Ron Parker

      I Can’t Believe I Ended Up in Berkeley

      Remembering a Country Boyhood

      Ron Parker

      ISBN (Print Edition): 978-1-54399-991-4

      ISBN (eBook Edition): 978-1-54399-992-1

      © 2020. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

      Back Row: Great-Grandpa Pettibone, Grandma Parker, Great-Grandma Pettibone

      Front Row: Great-Grandpa Parker, Great-Grandma Parker, Uncle Everette, Grandpa Parker

      Contents

      Introduction

      Speaking Plainly

      Weeds and Words

      Modifiers

      Land of Opportunity

      Arrowheads and Eagle Feathers

      Grandpa’s Stories

      Grinding

      Two Views

      Milking

      Come On Up

      Fourteen

      Elder Brother

      Failed Inheritance

      The Family Line

      Dreams of Mink

      Roadkill Redux

      Sacrifice

      Oblivious

      Parker Orchestra: Soundtrack of My Youth

      Christmas

      Promise of the Earth

      Great-Grandma Pettibone

      Geddes School

      Class in English Class

      Extra Credit

      Parting Shot

      Working Class

      Downstream

      Glen

      The Old Snapper

      The Night Grandpa Died

      Settled Estate

      Introduction

      To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields—these are as much as a man can fully experience.

      Landmarks, Robert McFarland

      (Penguin Books: UK, 2016)

      Most of my first eighteen years were lived within four square miles that encompassed the Parker farm and flour mill, stretches of Fleming Creek and the Huron River, the one-room Geddes School and the Dixboro Methodist Church. I shared that milieu with one great-grandmother, two grandparents, a great uncle and a great aunt, five uncles, four aunts, six cousins (two of which were double-cousins) a younger brother and sister and my parents. Even after I began to ride the school bus into Ann Arbor for junior high and high school, the formative parts of my life were still confined to that smaller world.

      In many respects, the values, attitudes and perspectives of our rural context were a generation behind the rest of the culture. Every week or two we ventured into town for necessities or to sell pigs or weaner calves, but mostly, town was an exotic foreign land to be avoided. City kids had paper routes; we had traplines. Riding-horses were for rich people; ours pulled a wagon or a plow. They went to the symphony, we to dances at the Grange Hall.

      I went to a small Methodist college that encouraged many of the perspectives and values I was raised with. Then, I moved to Berkeley in the Sixties. Even though this was a shock to my system, I found this new context congenial to my ways of thinking, enough so that I have stayed for more than fifty years.

      In recent years, as I edge toward eighty, I find many of the attitudes and intuitions that were laid down in those early years resurfacing in my psyche. That foundation in a simpler time is still very much a part of who I am.

      What follows is neither history nor biography. I’ve made no attempt to tell the whole story. It’s a loose collection of poems and stories—some brief, some more extended—I’ve written over a period of forty years or so. Some have been revised a bit to fit the style of this collection, but for the most part they are simply what I remember of the events that shaped me.

      In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it. Wherever liberties have been taken with names, dates, places, events, and conversations, or with the identities, motivations, and interrelation-ships of family members and historical personages, the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon.

      Moonglow: A Novel, Michael Chabon, (Harper: New York, 2016)

      Speaking Plainly

      I was raised

      on short,

      homely words.

      We built houses,

      farmed red clay, 

      mucked out the barn,

      hunted rabbits

      in lingo of 

      rural working folk.

      When we spoke,

      you knew 

      just what

      we meant.

      First in my family to matriculate

      to the exalted realms of higher education,

      I immersed myself in academia,

      declared a major in philosophy, 

      then steeped my avaricious brain

      in metaphysics and epistemology.

      I earned advanced degrees

      and learned the elevated discourse

      of my cultured colleagues.

      I always felt

      like I was

      faking it.

      Now,

      poems of

      old age

      reach back;

      sparse words

      speak straight 

      to simple 

      facts of life.

      George Parker

      Weeds and Words

      Got weeds

      in your planter box

      again.

      A gruff voice mutters from the photograph above my desk.

      I know.

      Better get ‘em out.

      "No one else cares 

      or sees them."

      Shouldn’t be there.

      A thin pane of wavy glass divides the weedy box on the deck outside from the clutter of the desk inside. On the wall, my grandfather watches from his own dark frame.

      Weeds tell you

      ‘bout the character of a man.

      "I’ve been meaning to get them out."

      Y’know where good intentions lead.

      He lectures me on intentions. I’ve got a doctorate in philosophy, taught ethics in a university. He quit Geddes school after the sixth grade, worked on the farm. What does he know?

      "They’ll just grow again.

      Why you gotta’ keep after ‘em.

      His life was a war on weeds. I see him, in low light of a summer evening, after the chores are done, family resting on the porch swing; he heads down the fence row to cut the hated bull thistles and burdock.

      His scythe rests on his shoulder, it’s curving blade matching the contour of his bent back, the whetstone in the hip pocket of his blue overalls. 

      As shadows lengthen and dusk surrounds us on the screened-in porch, the solitary figure down toward the river slips from view. When it’s too dark to see beyond the well house, there’s a lull in the conversation, and we hear the gentle ring of the whetstone, sharpening the scythe before he brings it home.

      "I’ll hire someone to do the yard

      and weed the planter box."

      Never paid for nothin’

      I could do myself,

      that was pretty much everything.

      "I guess that’s why 

      I haven’t hired anyone."

      One summer evening—I’m twelve years old—I follow Grandpa to the old ice-house where he keeps his tools, ask if I can help. He looks at me sharply, considers something, points to an old scythe hanging on a nail next to his.

      Use that one.

      Don’t cut your leg off.

      I take it down, leery of its long thin blade.

      Hold on.

      Take this whetstone.

      Keepin’ it sharp’s half the job.

      I slide the well-worn whetstone into the hip pocket of my jeans, let him lead the way across the field to where he left off last night. The sharp smell of pipe smoke merges with the scent of dry wheat stubble. He is silent until we reach the fence.

      You start here.

      That scythe is good and sharp.

      Keep it that way,

      if you want to do any good.

      I wait until he turns his back, watch the

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