Meet me in the Moonlight

Songs have a way of creeping into people, some you only have to hear ever couple of years to recognize as something special, a song that strikes at some memory or feeling, songs so real that they scrape the mud off your consciousness. Meet Me in the Moonlight is one of those songs. I first heard the song on a compilation CD that serves as a soundtrack to the Bluegrass documentary High and Lonesome. The cut from the compilation is clearly recorded live and its one of the most exciting early bluegrass recordings I can think of. I wish to God I knew when and where the Stanley Brothers recorded this masterpiece. I imagine some hot night, bugs zipping around a under lighted stage somewhere in the Valley of Virginia. Carter Stanley's strong vocal is a perfect indication of why many consider him to be the classic voice of early Bluegrass. Good ears will hear Ralph tell the fiddle player to cut his run by announcing, "ok". Own this version of the song and it will haunt you.

Meet me by the moonlight love meet me
Meet me by the moonlight alone alone
I have a sad story to tell you
All down by the moonlight alone

I've always loved you my darling
You said I've never been true
I'd do anything just to please you
I'd die any day just for you

I have a ship on the ocean
All lined with silver and gold
And before my little darling shall suffer
I'll have the ship anchored and sold

If I had wings like an angel
Over these prison walls I would fly
I'd fly to the arms of my darling
And there I'd be willing to die


After digging into the sources of Meet Me in the Moonlight I discovered it was recorded by the Carter Family. I imagine this is where the Stanley's found the song, both families being native to Southwest Virginia. Ralph talks of working with and knowing A.P. Carter in and around Bristol in the 1940s in his autobiography. The Carter Family version, though not as memorable to me is worth a listen to. Like most Carter family tunes, it has a classic homeliness that begins quaint but finishes as if some immortal source is responsible for its very origin.

It doesn't take long for an amateur Internet sleuth to find, not surprisingly, that the song has far deeper roots than the Carter Family. The song came to the United States from England, as early at 1812. Long history for a good song, but then again, this song is so good that it had to have floated up and down the steep humid hills of Virginia long before the Carters or the Stanleys found it.

The Lost Story

I spent my K-12 years in diocesan catholic schools. Though there was nothing posh or ultra privileged about my education I have a certain affinity to stories about private schools. Private school literature can be separated into two distinct groups. The first is about Catholics being brought up in strict middle class Catholic schools where the clergy mocked and beat you. The second is about America’s thriving post WWII Northeast boarding school culture. The boarding school genre is by far the most popular and every couple of years another movie or book revisits this familiar battleground (Dead Poets Society, Catcher in the Rye, Old School).

Yet, the best story ever written about private schools, and in this case private boarding schools is a story that I read numerous times in grade school but have never been able to locate again. When I was in 7th and 8th grade at Aquinas School, late 1980s, there was a cart full of paperbacks that students were encouraged to pick off of for silent reading periods. On this cart was an anthology of American contemporary short stories. The word contemporary is a bit misleading here because like most things at Aquinas School (and most catholic schools) the library and most material was donated. Thus the “contemporary” title was probably describing a book written in the 1960s.

In this particular anthology was a story about a young man attending a boarding school north of Richmond, Virginia. The crux of the story revolved around a student who cheats during a translation portion of a Latin examination. I remember that the translation dealt with Roman engineers building temporary bridges so troops could cross rivers and streams. The story had wonderful inner dialogue and may have been narrated in the first person. After the exam releases the suspense and tension rise to a fever pitch as the student is called to the headmaster’s office to be discovered and then sent back to his room as his father is sought. The climax of the story is the father confronting the son, clearing out his room and the long, silent ride back home.

There are a thousand more details that I remember about this story but I won’t belabor the reader with a story I couldn’t tell you the title of or the author. The fact is that I loved this story. I'm not going to psychoanalyze why, but it really moved me. For whatever reason it has been on my mind lately and I thought I would share this memory in the off chance that one of you might help me figure it out. I have tried a million different ways to Google the plot in hopes of finding the story, but to no avail.

Flat Stanley came to Lewistown

Flat Stanley was in Lewistown this past November and he even stopped by FHS. Flat enjoyed his time here and he even got to get some bird hunting in.

The Historians Dilemma

A decade and a half ago, when I was learning to be a "historian" at Radford University I took a class called Hist 295. Dr. Ferrari who did her best to show me how to use libraries, court house documents and other repositories to find the crucial and raw primary material that makes history work. Yet, I remember what she really emphasized was the need to find those personal documents, the letters or diaries, the notes in the margin of a book read long ago. That was the fodder that makes history alive, personal and real.

Last night while walking the dog around the frog ponds I had what I am sure is not a new Epiphany. In this digital world, where or how will the historians putting together the lives of Americans mine to construct that personal and private world. Where do we deposit our tweets, wall posts, emails, texts and the other dimensions of our lives to that others may glimpse into our world when we are gone? I can remember writing long and dramatic emails to friends during the whirlwind of love when I was a young man. How and where would I attempt to find those now. More importantly how would the historian of the future find them without the passwords and permissions required in this digital world?

Rehberg v Tester

News today that Dennis Rehberg intends to bring in Minnesota Republican and Tea Party aficionado Michele Bachmann to help him announce his entrance into the 2012 Montana Senate race. It is unknown how this will play out in the long run but on its face this appears as a very poor decision.

Jon Tester is a populist candidate with no strong ideological bent. For the strongly independent and libertarian Montana electorate his politics stand in sharp contrast to someone like Michele Bachmann. Time will tell but I feel this is a moment that will come back to haunt Rehberg.

The Honor of Egypt

Like millions I have been intently watching the situation in Egypt and that anxiety brewed over into desperation today as the all too familiar government repression began today. In what seems like a textbook repeat of the Green Revolution in Iran it appears as if the government is going to use sympathetic civilian actors (or plain clothed government agents to handle the dirty work).

I suppose that for a brief moment on Monday or Tuesday it appeared as if a non-violent transfer of power was possible. I wanted to believe that the proud Egyptian people has voted with their bodies and encouraged Mubarek to give up control. As always those thoughts seem idealistic and naive just a few hours after I was thinking them.

One has to wonder what the end game is here. The international community has lost whatever long standing loyalty for Mubarek. A loyalty that perhaps he deserves for so long standing as a pro western voice against extremism. Certainly today's events will convince the world that the government of Egypt is the fraud that Egyptians have been protesting all week.

The Spring Classics

From the 2nd to last week in March to the last weekend in April is a special time of year. Sure, American fans are supposed to flock exclusively to the Tour in July. In 1988 I stumbled upon a CBS broadcast of Paris-Roubaix and I was captivated. The classics are one day races staring with Milan San Remo in Italy and ending this weekend with Liege Bastogne Liege in Belgium. These are not races for the weak, usually the strongest win and the conditions the races are held under, cold rain in Belgium, cobblestone climbs in Flanders and dirt roads in Northern France all create some of the best bike racing in the world. Here's a look at this year's Paris Roubaix.

Justice Jackson spinning in his grave

Read a curious story in today's Washington Post about a suburban Washington DC school that recently used school resource police officers to escort a student out of a classroom for refusing to say the pledge of allegiance. Clearly this teacher has never heard of the Pledge of Allegiance cases of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Justice Jackson wrote the majority opinion in the West Virginia case that ruled schools could not mandate that students said the pledge. The most compelling argument Jackson makes is as follows

The case is made difficult not because the principles of its decision are obscure but because the flag involved is our own. Nevertheless, we apply the limitations of the Constitution with no fear that freedom to be intellectually and spiritually diverse or even contrary will disintegrate the social organization. To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds. We can have intellectual individualism and the rich cultural diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes. When they are so harmless to others or to the State as those we deal with here, the price is not too great. But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order. If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.

I have been teaching for eight years and only once have I had a student consistently refuse to say the pledge. The year was 2004/05 and when I asked her privately why she chose not to stand for the pledge she told me that it was her silent dissent against the Iraq war, which at the time was spiraling out of control. Her peers never directly challenged her on her beliefs or actions.

The teacher in question should be forced to apologize to the student and be made to write the highlighted sentence from the Jackson opinion 100 times on the dry erase board.

We Want America Back!

I dare you to listen to the spoken word segment in the middle of this stirring song and not be moved to immediately start homeschooling your children.

Ron Paul Revolution alive and well!

Good news! I returned home from a blue bird skiing day to find out that the straw poll at the CPAC conference has chosen Ron Paul as their 2012 presidential candidate of choice. Fergus County was a win for Ron Paul in the 2008 GOP caucus.

I feared that the days where I could spend twenty minutes listening to a Paul supporter speak blissfully of the return of “Constitutional Government” were over. The look of confusion when I tell them Social Security, Medicaid, compulsory public education, and a myriad of other services don’t quite line up a strict interpretation of Article I Section 8 is one of my favorite joys. I just hope the Seventy Four year old Paul makes it to 2012.

Local Bookstores....a reminder.

My family found itself in Bozeman this week and we had some time to kill waiting for some haircuts. We wondered into the Country Bookshelf a local, independent bookstore. The first thing that was such a blessing was the complete lack of any Disney merchandise in the entire store. My daughter has fallen hard for the princess line from Disney and clearly the child consumer psychologists have dialed into exactly what crap kids will die for. Yet, we have a house full of cheap, plastic Disney princess stuff at it all gets tired.

While my daughter was growing crazy in the kid's books I certainly enjoyed viewing the featured books. Not the "New in Paperback", "Buy two get one free" generic displays all too common at B&N or Borders, but the truly interesting displays full of independent publishers and foreign selections.

But to me the selling point came after a short interaction with a the cashier. I had recently read an article in the New Yorker about new Arab novels being translated and sold in the United States. Somehow this article came up in the brief conversation I was having with this young lady and she immediately lead me to all of the books that were mentioned in the article.

Needless to say we left thankful and impressed. Support you local independent bookseller, you will thank me later.

RIP Franco Ballerini

Heard some sad news last week. Retired Italian cyclist Franco Ballerini was killed in a rally car race. My first memories of Ballerini date back to when he rode with the powerful Mapei squad. One of the strangest and controversial wins include the 1996 Paris Roubaix in which Mapei took four of the top five places. Looking back on it with fresh eyes focused with the late 90s and 2000s doping scandals I think it is safe to say that perhaps Mapei's domination of the sport wasn't totally natural. Regardless they sure were exciting to watch.

I remember well Ballerini's last Paris Roubiax, I'm not sure if he was on Mapei then or not, I believe he moved across to Lampre towards the end of his career. Anyway, he finished well off the pace, and as the winner was hoisting the winning cobble aloft there was Ballerini riding around the velodrome in a last tribute, his jersey unzipped and the words "Merci Roubaix" on his undershirt. Classy.

Ballerini was not finished with cycling when he retired as a rider. For many years he served as the coach of the Italian National team for the World Championships. Perhaps is greatest success came in his first year, 2002 when he brilliantly coached Mario Cipollini to victory.

He was a great rider and its a shame he had to die such a sudden and tragic death, he leaves behind his wife and two children. Below is a short tribute to the man, its in Italian I believe, but you will get a glimpse of this great rider.

Firewood

When I was a kid having a fire in the fireplace was a pretty big deal. When we bought our home in Lewistown I was pretty well pleased that we had an efficient fireplace upstairs and a wood fired furnace downstairs. I've been experimenting over the past couple of winters with exclusively using the fire to heat my home. Its a lot of work but work that I find rewarding. There is something intrinsically pleasing with a fire cracking in the fireplace for me.



This fall I bought a semi lumber truck load of wood with a couple of other friends. On Saturday we met up to cut and split some wood. It started snowing but the Stanley Thermos was full of hot coffee and a morning of labor always pleases my week long fluorescent light weariness

What is the Metaxy?

I often ask my students who their heroes are. Most can name parents, as they should, and many times I hear about other family members. I’m usually incredulous when a student can’t name anyone as a hero, mentor or inspiration. We all need someone that we know, that we can observe tackling the everyday tasks, to look up to and I pity those who have not had that experience.

In the spring of 1994 I journeyed from my home in Northern Virginia to the New River Valley of Southwest Virginia to attend Radford University. I believe it was my second semester that I met Dr. Nick Pappas, professor of political science. Pappas is a whirlwind in the classroom, shocking and confusing his students to tackle large and at time mysterious topics. It was through his reading lists that I first encountered Plato, Simon Veil, and, of course, Eric Voegelin. Pappas had a teaching tool that I still remember fondly. I imagine he developed it slowly, over the decades of dealing with poorly read, apathetic 20 year olds. Pappas was the first teacher that ever I had that introduced me to the gray, the troubling middle ground between two poles that exist between difficult concepts, realities and life. Instead of being disappointed that we had no frame of reference for any thought produced in classical Greece, Pappas would rush in pretending that we did indeed have the reference. For instances this was a common introduction to a lecture.

“Class! We will remember that in book five the of The Republic Plato………….”

Alone in his office many times he would remind me of what Kant, or Hegel had said yet he certainly knew I had no clue. He used to use this trick in such an unassuming way that he made you feel like maybe you had done the reading, or had heard of whomever he was reminding you about. It really empowered the student and made him and the material accessible.

Pappas, in moments too few, would expose his life. Born in West Virginia he played high school sports at a time when the Washington DC area was rural, sparsely populated and he would make me laugh when talking about his idyllic memories of the place. Having grown up in Woodbridge he would often ask me about Quantico, where he attended Marine Corps Officer Candidate School. He was always shocked when I told him about how developed the area had become.

The rumor was that he turned down an opportunity to play in the NFL to join the Marines. It wasn’t soon after his enlistment that he was deployed to South Vietnam, Da Nang to be exact, in some of the first months of the USA’s 1965 escalation. Once and only once he told me about the night his Commanding Officer ordered Pappas to lead a reconnaissance outside the base perimeter to investigate reports that the enemy was laying mines. His response, “How will we know if they have?”

He was wounded, something that is mentioned in Philip Caputo’s classic, A Rumor of War. While researching this post I came across a recollection Pappas wrote for American Heritage Magazine.

COMMISERATOR IN CHIEF

In 1965 I spent eight months at Bethesda Naval Hospital recovering from shrapnel wounds and two broken legs received in Vietnam. One day that fall, our corpsmen announced that some of us were to be wheel-chaired to a meeting with the President of the United States. Lyndon B. Johnson was in Bethesda for a gallbladder operation, and we had seen the famous picture of him pointing at his scar, presumably to reassure the American people that he was healthy and fit to run the country.
The young lieutenants and enlisted men sat dressed in their blue hospital garb, awaiting a thank-you or even a pep talk. Many in that room had ghastly wounds or missing limbs from high explosives, bullets, or fire. The President drew himself up and announced, “I know just how you boys feel,” then went on to explain that he had just felt the surgeon’s knife. The room was absolutely quiet, no response except silent amazement being possible. Lady Bird Johnson broke the strange miasma hanging over the place. After a Secret Service agent briskly walked in and called her out, she returned, beaming like a possum up a persimmon tree, to announce that she had some good news. Her daughter Luci had just got her first B in college!
Did President Johnson’s eerie speech to his warriors represent some kind of inability to articulate his war, politically or strategically? As I think back, there was a kind of spiritual brokenness hanging over the man even at that early stage of the conflict.
The redeeming part of the day was furnished by my future wife, Pam, who arrived by Greyhound from West Virginia to visit me at the hospital. Without a pause she walked right through Johnson’s security and unhinged a. guard at an elevator with the simple question, “Does this thing go up?”
—Nick Pappas is a political science professor at Radford University in Radford, Virginia.

Nick Pappas has a lot to do with why I’m teaching today. I can thank him for exposing me to some of the truths of life.

One of the concepts that I keep returning to in life is the idea of the Metaxy. The word comes from Plato’s Symposium and is used to describe a middle ground or an in-between. Plato uses the Metaxy as a metaphor for man’s journey from becoming to being. Later the word was co-opted and I would claim empowered by Voegelin (who Pappas once saw, lecturing at UVA, but that’s another story). Voegelin used the Metaxy to mean the permanent place where man is in-between two poles of existence. I have come to use the word Metaxy as the difficult terrain where life’s realities are discovered, usually through hardship and pain. Not quite earth and not quite transcendence. The metaxy is a place, where we all must go to lead a life worth living.

Kite Flying, Jockey's Ridge, North Carolina

North of Denton, Montana, November 2009