Way Back When Our Faces Were Young And Thin

“Oh my damn!” we silently think to ourselves. “What the hell happened to YOU?! Your face. It blew up, yo! It’s… like ... you just swallowed a damn pumpkin!”


It’s so good to reconnect with old friends. Nothing quite beats that feeling of having shared many of the same experiences and memories, laughed at the same jokes, feared those same fears and shared an affinity mixed with a rich and varied history we have with another person. Yet, in our mind’s eye, when we see or think of those old friends, it’s usually in the way they were, the way they appeared when we last saw them. We don’t always allow for time to do that sly thing and hideous THING it does to all of us: It ages and matures us to the point where we barely recognize each other anymore.

I took particular notice of this last week as I attended a funeral for one of the old neighborhood's elder women. She was very much beloved and we all had warm stories and vivid memories of our adventures in her presence. For instance, for decades, each 4th of July, she would plan these elaborate barbecues where everyone who was anyone within the community regularly attended. She was quite the hostess, an expert chef/griller and her food was always top-shelf delicious. Her spacious backyard became the IN spot, the holiday jump-off, and the hottest place to be.

Rest in Peace, Miss Easter.


And so, with her passing, and because she was so beloved, people came from near and far to honor her memory. It was a wonderful thing to see. Many of these people were faces from my childhood and teen years. I had not laid eyes on some of them in about 20, 25, hell, even 30 years!


After the ceremony, people were stepping to me, as people usually tend to do at such events. They seemed to know my name, to remember me vividly, and that felt strange because these were people who I didn’t know, had no recall of ever knowing, and it caught me by complete surprise. But the biggest surprise came when they REINTRODUCED themselves to me.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking: Oh snap! Oh MY Damn! That’s YOU under all that?


Yes. I know I’m wrong, but that’s me just being real, mentally. I would never say it out loud. It’s just a bit astonishing to see someone you once knew has become this whole OTHER person physically. But it’s also another naked fact of life: Unless we have a plastic surgeon on speed dial, we don’t tend to get prettier or more handsome as we grow older. We change. The body shifts and it morphs. The pounds appear. The gray hairs sprout. The wrinkles settle in…



… and we are no longer the hotness, or the serene beauty queens…




… and awesome Adonis boys of yesterday.


Sad but true.


So as I’m conversing with this person from my previous life as a young buck, I began to do a visual survey by looking for signs of the person I once knew. That’s when it HIT me: Do the people we haven't seen in years all develop chubbier faces? I mean is this to be our true fate: Fat-face-did-ness?

(ponder)


Unless you happen to be naturally or unnaturally angular, maybe sporting a fatter, fleshier aspect is simply the way we tend to age. We don’t obsess about it… in fact, we hardly pay this much attention. However, when we see an unflattering picture of ourselves, and we silently recoil... then ummm... that's a problem. Also, when something happens, some watershed event or some benchmark episode occurs and it brings people together, it has the feel and vibe of a high school reunion, and it’s then we are suddenly face to face, eyeball-to-eyeball with our reality.

And it is then that we are reminded of how time changes the mugs of those people we knew long ago, back when we were young and we all had thinner faces.

This may just become my new reference point to measure how long I’ve known someone. Example: Hell, we go back, waaay back to when we BOTH had skinny faces!

But having noticed that one old friend’s (once thin) head was now a BIG, cheeky ballooning dome, that was just the beginning. It seemed as if people would appear out of the proverbial woodwork to remind me of this strange and growing phenomenon. So many of my old school friends showed up and ALL of them sported these rounder, chubbier faces (yes, myself included)... even the formerly skinny people... and suddenly I was left wondering "What's up with this?"




It can be gradual… so gradual as to be one of life’s more insidious occurrences. Stuff happens to us and we don’t even notice it. We’re too damn busy living our lives to pay any attention. And then, something happens, and it suddenly opens our eyes: “Oh my damn!” we silently think to ourselves:



“What the hell happened to YOU?! Your face. It blew up, yo! It’s… like ... you just swallowed a damn pumpkin!”


And please believe I’m not only cracking on the rest of them. I fully own up to my personal bout of pumpkin-headed fat-facedid-ness!




(Top): The more angular Lin…




(Bottom): The current, more fat-facedid Lin…




There are some days I’ll accidentally catch a glimpse in the mirror to find I'm repulsed... because suddenly I possess these mad puffy-verging-on-Dizzy Gillespie-type cheeks!

EGAD!




WTF?


This is all very odd because, most of the elderly people I know tend to have thin, sunken-in faces. So, perhaps this is all a part of that whole middle-age-spread concept… and IF we live to become older and more elderly, we can at least look forward to a frailer face, and thinner physique.

Who knows.


It’s reached almost epidemic in proportion as it effects the people I know personally. When did it happen that so many of us became afflicted with this dreaded disease of: Fat-Facedid-ness? It seems we are not our physical selves anymore… no… we just become these older people with BIG faces.


Don’t believe me? Go on, do your own visual survey. Trust me, it won’t always be pretty. But it will be LIFE!


One.

*About Black Fedoras And Summer Sunday Rides With My Father

He knew how to wear a hat.

Trust me... that’s not always an easy (hat-) trick, when you’re a Black man, trying *not* to look like a pimp, a mack, a dandy, a fop or a player. My father was neither of those, yet he could rock a mean hat. Some cats just have it like that, instinctively.


My father possessed that uniquely smooth and utterly rare gift of slipping on a chapeau and becoming this cool and mysteriously enigmatic character. Though barely 5’8, he always stood taller in his fedora. It seemed as if his posture changed and he became this whole other Larger Being… at least, in my eyes.

I was discussing this phenom with my mom yesterday, as we were approaching yet another Father’s Day without his presence. Because his absence remains very much a FELT experience, she seemed determined to remember to be sad. And while I could only validate that emotion for her, an extended appointment with sadness was not placed upon my schedule. Instead, I spoke of a certain bronze-colored Oldsmobile Delta 88; how my father would take the family for long rides on summer Sunday afternoons, and how, from the backseat, in his fedora, he resembled some quietly Elegant Black King to my eyes.

When he died there inside that ER, a nurse brought his possessions into the waiting room. Perhaps she thought it would be too much for my mother to handle, so she signaled me into a quiet corner and she handed me his gold retirement watch, and his wedding band.

I tried like hell not to breakdown, fall to my knees, and weep like some little suddenly fatherless child, especially there in that setting. Although my brother publicly lost it, I'd somehow retained my stoic older bother composure. It was a very strange and rainy December day. It felt even stranger to me, holding those articles in my hand, as if the were supposed to somehow now represent this man I’d fondly called, “Da.”

A day or so after this, in a quieter, less hectic moment, I presented those articles to my mother. I hugged her tightly and for the longest time. Mind you, I still hadn’t cried, but I’d been meaning to. Curiously, that time would come much later.

After the funeral and after all the guests, after the food was consumed, and the stories were told, and the emotions displayed, after the hubbub and the shows of sympathy, when everything sat quietly in its own haunted space, my mother asked if wanted anything of my father’s.

I thought for a minute about the car (which never was my style) and the clothes (ditto, and were way too small), and finally, I said,

“You know that black fedora? The one he wore back in the day when he’d take us on those Sunday drives? I think I’d like to have that hat.”

Maybe it seemed like a peculiarly atypical request. But then, that was just me, being me. I was always her ‘strange poet son,’ and so she just shrugged, went into the closet they’d shared for over 35 years, fetched that hat, and she handed it to me.

I’ve placed it upon the top shelf in my closet. I hardly ever wear it. Over the years, I’ve thought of it as a kind of trophy to the modesty of his life, his quiet elegance; his one slice of mysterious cool, and his subtle sense of royalty.


And so, on Father’s Day, in lieu of tears, and instead of episodes in sadness, I slipped on that black fedora, and tried like hell to mirror my father’s style-- not pimp, not mack, not player, not fop, not dandy.

You know, just a Black man, in a black chapeau, with a smooth gift for becoming a cool and mysteriously enigmatic character.




That’s it. That’s all.


Happy Father’s Day to all you father’s out there, whether bio, step, adoptive, cat daddies or big daddies… and a Very Happy Father’s Day in Heaven to YOU, Da.


One Love.


Your son,

Lin



* repost

Preview From: Like Litter In The Wind A New Novel by L.M. Ross

Gig Swinton was my father.

His version of a mental/spiritual/physical breakdown was full of flying blind rages, smashing glasses and silent tears. He would fight with my mother over the smallest things, but she seemed to take it all in stride. My father was in pain…and my mother, she understood pain and war and the pain that came after war.

Gig was so torn apart by The Kid’s death that he’d go to that secret place inside his own darkness. Often he’s just leave, leave his space, leave conversations, completely abandon our family and retreat to parts unknown. Sometimes he’d take his horn to our fire escape and blow such long and angry decibels into the wounded night…only what he played, it didn’t sound like music anymore. It sounded like the noise of a wild and fractured heart. The Kid’s passing had thoroughly trounced his spirit and kicked him in what was left of that heart.

I don’t think anything before had so emotionally collapsed my father’s spirit. He was never quite the same man after that sad day. Even that carefree way he’d had, that breezy jazzy bounce so inherent in the swagger of his walk had abandoned him now. He stood among the rest who’d gathered on the wind-driven street to say their final good-byes. Seeing his kid brother’s coffin, draped in the American flag, only made the rage so much deeper and wilder.

Dakota, no doubt, feared for his sanity, and she worried just a little about what Gig’s moods were doing to me. I didn’t know what was wrong, back then, but something about that strangely brooding red-eyed man who shared a room with my mother began to scare me.

To deliver me safely from my father’s feverish fits of unpredictability and brewing madness, my mother devised a special plan. I loved my mother, but trust me, Dakota Swinton was a woman so full of secrets and private plans. This one plan was to ship me off to Virginia. Virginia, where the summers were much quieter and ‘safer’ and a kid like me would have half a chance at some semblance of normalcy.

She made it all sound like some fantastic adventure would be awaiting me there, a Disneyland of live cows, pigs, horses, and chickens, and people who would love me simply because I was family.

Family love was a given, since we all had the same blood running through our veins. She presented this idea in a way that made it sound like something I needed, an escapade I would be forever grateful for, once I’d made it to that magical place called Virginia.

However, before leaving, early one morning, she awakened and bathed me, dressed me up in my Sunday’s best. My mother had made a key and strategic decision: she was taking me to church.



Church?


While my parents weren’t exactly heathens, neither Gig or Dakota ever knew any preachers, pastors, reverends or rabbis on a personal basis. The name of God was used, at best, as a wild exclamation in our home. Now, my mother was taking me to church, escorting me to ‘God’s house,’ as she put it. This seemed a very strange move to me...but this was to be a primer, a preview of upcoming events, because one couldn’t reside in my great Aunt Bessie’s home unless they’d attended church regularly.




This place of stained glass and praise, this temple of high ceilings and higher voices raised in celebration and ceremony was all at once, strange, and yet riveting to my senses.





Before the pulpit stood an older gray man with a stooped and waning posture he’d undoubtedly attained from carrying the weight of his faith and the faith of the whole congregation on his back for years. But his voice remained and it was as mighty and piercing as a clarion horn, delivering this song of salvation. His voice, his urgent words, and the force of his sermon would rock and sway the bodies of those who had come to listen.

I turned, I fidgeted, and I looked around to see all kinds of people in attendance. Faces and bodies of those I’d seen on the street were now scrubbed clean and dressed impeccably. I even saw my mother’s friend Miss Lola. At least, I thought it was Miss Lola, though her hair looked glossy and different somehow. Mama informed me it was a wig.



The women who’d gathered there donned wide brimmed feathered hats and cooled themselves with paper fans, bearing the image of Jesus Christ. Some of them brought their children, babies, and grandkids that restlessly tussled inside their seats or else they gazed around the room, like me.

But the music, oh, that music was so freeing and moving, so loud and triumphant that at times it was almost frightening and yet so warming to the soul!

The people around me all sang along and even my mother raised her voice, though she didn’t seem to know all the lyrics to the songs.

In front of the choir, there stood a zaftig woman with a voice as mighty as the spirit in that room. She pitched that voice as high as a sparrow in flight, and then she made curve unexpectedly and she went low as an eagle touching down on a landing of gravel. It was the first time I could remember the sound of a human voice giving me chills, actual goose-flesh as she sang in her robust and moving crescendo.

“Lawd, I swear that girl sounds just like Miss Mahalia Jackson!” someone said from the pew behind us.




So this resounding noise was gospel. And the Pure Gospel this was! It made some people shout, “Hallelujah!” It made some fan themselves even faster, while others leapt quickly from their seats, as if their bodies were suddenly charged by bolts of electricity. It made Miss Lola shake and shuffle so wildly, she almost lost her wig. Some people ran up and down the aisle, screaming while raising their hands to the heavens. And strangest of all, it made some people fall to their knees, roll around on the floor, wildly weeping and speaking in a bizarre and rambling tongue.

“Why are they cryin’, Mommy?”
“They’re cryin’ because… they can feel God in the room, son.”

Oh. God was there, indeed. It must have been God's Spirit lodged and working inside each of them… Even Miss Lola. It was He swaying their heads, their necks and shoulders. It was He pitching their voices higher. It was God cryptically pulling the strings of their postures, and God was The Light in those faces with the rolling-back eyes. God was the ventriloquist who placed His hand up their spinal columns and made them speak in chattering tongues. God was jerking the bones and the working in the lungs of those people dancing, singing, shouting and hollering ‘Praise the Lawd!’ God was so involved, He was showing up and showing out in this overwhelming sound filling that church. Yes! God was so deep within this music.

I found it odd that my parents had never played these kinds of songs in our home before. Gospel, along with Country Western received no Swinton love. In a home so full of music, those genres were somehow excluded from their usual play list. Yet as a child, sitting there in the pews, though I didn’t quite understand it entirely, something in the power, the tempo, and the spirits of those who sang it, moved me to clap so enthusiastically in my seat.

My mother looked at me and smiled. “Now you can tell Aunt Bessie you go to church on Sundays,” she winked.

And so, after the maiden launch of my first religious experience, I was sent away to the ‘safety’ of Virginia.

My mother, yes, Dakota Swinton, rode the Greyhound bus with me to Richmond. Along the way, as my eyes gazed at the people reading, walking the aisle, or sleeping and snoring around me, she tapped my hand and she told me, “Don’t stare! It’s rude! Never stare at people, son! You stare too long, and before you know it, they get the wrong idea.”

Parents say things and expect a child to understand, to actually comprehend their hidden meaning. Some things they say, children do understand, and others they don’t, because their parents never provide a real cogent reason why. They simply expect you to remember that thing they said or warned you about. But as a child, I liked staring at people. They told me stories with their bodies, their expressions, and with the mystifying things that lay written in their eyes.

So I stared at people, hoping to read, to get a glimpse of their silent stories. I didn’t listen to my mother’s warning, and perhaps that would explain my later punishment.
***

When something terrible happens to a child, a part of him is never the same again. Whatever was new and innocent...whatever lay trusting within that gentle spirit gets shattered—mutilated beyond repair. It fractures and without a voice, without proper love and repair that spirit will slowly begin to splinter.

And when a season turns and the world grows colder, a sudden shift in the breeze can break that spirit in two. It can be such a small thing, or some catastrophic twist in nature that snaps it like twigs…and life as we knew it could fly away, like so much litter in the wind.





** From The Forthcoming Novel “Like Litter In The Wind” By L.M. Ross

imprisoned, age seven

imprisoned, age seven



it is frozen

inside a sepia photograph. & i

am forever

its imprisoned child.

the dark brown child

grimacing inside, when the white

photographer demanded


"smile..." this is what

"happy" looked like

at seven. after

my father

brushed & greased my

defiant, black hair

into some semblance of


a part. tied a noose around my neck... &

fashioned from my squirming,

crying, wildness this

upright afro-

american child.


& so...

half-heartedly

slyly, then rebelliously, i

became "him"... this

little brown clown of

robotic assimilation.


posed, frozed in his

best sunday clothes, until

he did not look, or feel

or even smell like me.



"smile..." you little fool


this one's for

prosperity.






One.



 
© 2006 by L.M.Ross moaningmanblues