Monthly Archives: June 2021

June 30, 2021

There were more water incursions in the truck yesterday. Actually, it didn’t come from outside so incursions is probably the wrong word. One of my half-gallon containers of water tipped over. The lid didn’t come off but it leaked enough to get the bottom of my mattress wet and a large part of my sheets. Lesson learned: keep water in cab. 

Most of yesterday morning was spent at another laundromat. This time I found an old school version operating with quarters. A new school version Price is Right was playing on the TV. Did I mention that Elijah was on the Price is Right in the 1970s? He has had more than his share of 15 minutes of fame. Here is the full episode he was on:

I had a nice chat in the laundromat with the lady running the place and a couple of customers. I forgot how a laundromat can be a hub of community for people.

I’m now in a McDonald’s—one of my many offices along with libraries. I’ve heard a number of people talk about how a cup of coffee at Mickey D’s is part of their community engagement. I’m curious how people make connections beyond the internet. 

I got a little even with the Wyndham Gardens Tallahassee. I stayed in their parking lot last night bringing my average cost down to $44/night. (It was $88 for one night.) As is often the case with vengeance, it doesn’t pay. At 2:30 in the morning a trash truck came and set off an atomic boom picking up and dropping a huge, beige-colored dumpster forty feet from my head. The piercing, back-up warning sound lasered away any vestiges of sleep. Being next to the four lane Apalachee Parkway wasn’t great either, but I did manage to get five or six hours of mosquito free shut eye in between all the commotion. Don’t park near dumpsters!

More big news about making old connections! I was able to hook up with my first, best friend in Tallahassee. Tracy was the son of my mom’s boss, Victoria Warner, a sociology/social work professor at Florida A and M, the historically black university here in Tallahassee. Mom was the department’s secretary.

The Warners were a big family of 2 girls and 3 boys—Claire the oldest, Tracy the youngest. All the children were just about grown when I met them, but there was at least a decade between Tracy and his next oldest sibling. He was the real baby. 

I can’t tell you how much it means to reconnect with this person. Tracy is two years older than me and was always a head or more taller. He felt like a big brother. I admired him and probably did my best to annoy him at times. The oldest sibling Claire confirmed my memory of myself.

“I was a little demon, wasn’t I,” I said to her yesterday. 

“Oh, yes you were,” she said. 

Claire answered the door at their old homestead when I showed up yesterday. I had driven by the house several times the day before just to scope things out—hoping I’d see someone in the driveway. What were the chances someone I knew would be there after all these years? The last time I’d seen a Warner was around 1987 when I came back to Tallahassee during a vacation away from college. I sat with Mrs. Warner and reminisced about old times though the times were only about 17 years old then—not the 48 years they are now. Mrs. Warner passed in 2006.

I went to the front door though I knew no one ever entered the house that way. After knocking on the door I backed up to be able to hear the sidedoor at the same time. I heard a creek come from there and backed up some more to see an older woman come into view. 

“Can I help you,” she said?

“I’m Eric Robertson, an old friend of the Warners. I used to play here as a child when my family came to visit. I’m wondering if any of the Warners are still around?”

“I’m a Warner,” she said.

“Joyce?” I asked. 

“No, Claire.”

The fact that Claire existed had slipped my mind, but it came back as soon as she said her name. I didn’t have a lot to do with the older siblings. I was a pipsqueak five-year-old running around their knees, probably getting in the way more than anything else. 

“What were your daddy and momma’s name?”

“Reva Jo and Warren,” I said. 

“Oh my goodness. Little Eric Robertson,” Claire said.

She invited me in.

“Wow, this brings back all kinds of memories,” I said walking into the kitchen. Everything was exactly the same. 

“Go wherever you want. I’m going to call Tracy so you can talk to him.”

A memory I always associated with that kitchen came to mind—something about St. Joseph’s aspirin. (It’s not a candy even though it’s pink and it tastes sweet.)

In the living room I looked at the modern (1970s) offset shelves that once displayed dozens and dozens of trophies. The Warners are a family of high achievers. Joyce was a Miss Black America. There were trophies for everything, football, baseball, basketball, track and field. 

I talked with Tracy and we set a time for me to check in later and try to make a plan to get together. I wasn’t sure if he was excited to see me or not. I followed Claire into a room that had been an alternate living room that was never used when I was there as a child. Now this was her bedroom and she had a big, comfy chair in there with a tv. As if I were being dropped back in time, Bonanza was playing on the tube. 

We caught up about family and work.  She told me about her twins. One died in 2014 and she said her mind hasn’t been right since. 

Twins! I suddenly remembered those babies and looking down into their bubble-producing faces. 

“What year did you have the twins,” I asked. 

“1971!”

When I left, Claire said, “I always loved your mama.”

I told her I still missed her, which I guess will always be true. 

The day before a hawk had crossed my path and flown up to a dormitory window at Florida A and M. I always associate birds with my mom, especially hawks which she once rehabilitated with an organization in Hattiesburg. As part of that work she raised mice in a little house behind ours. Hundreds of white mice!

Tracy and I met at a local brew pub that night. He was much more ebullient in person. I immediately felt comfortable with him. 

After years working with incarcerated youth including being the director of several programs, Tracy started a second career eight years ago selling Cadillacs, Buicks and GMCs. A long conversation ensued with the restaurant manager who had just bought a new Cadillac. Tracy had such an easy rapport with the man, it was like listening to long-time friends talk. The manager ended up comping our meal.  

The father of Tracy and his four siblings was always a mystery to me. As a child, all I knew of him was the portrait of a man in military uniform on their wall. He was deceased and because I knew he had been in Vietnam I assumed he had died there. 

Last night Tracy told me his father died of a heart attack at the age of 39, a few months before Tracy was born. He was not in the military when he died but back in Tallahassee working.

Tracy showed me recently discovered photos of his mom and dad that he now had downloaded on his cell phone.  The beautiful photos are a series of snapshots of the young couple laughing and holding each other dressed sharply in the fashion of the day.

It’s hard to remember sometimes that we were all once young. We have all lived many lives. 

Well…a rolling stone gathers no moss and as much as I like the hanging grey moss in Tallahassee I feel like I need to put some miles toward my next destination where I will take a break and continue this story of Tallahassee, how I reconnected with the Warners and memories about my life here. I’ve been from McDonald’s to visit Tracy’s in his home near Wakulla Springs, back to Tallahassee and the Main Library and now I sit at a Denny’s, the first place I could think of that might still be open. It’s 11:15 p.m. This place closes at midnight and I need to put some pictures with this. Then, a little night driving is in order. 

Good night for now.

June 29, 2021

You know how yesterday I was thinking about getting a room but decided against it? Why spend 80 or 100 bucks, I said.

Well, a tiredness overcame me later in the day while noshing on some pizza. With urban boondocking I’ve found that I need several power naps throughout the day—especially if I’m highway driving. Nothing so forcefully says You-Need-A-Nap-Now like speeding down the road and feeling like Linda Blair is turning green and twisting her head 360 degrees inside you. 

The need for sleep is an animal that won’t be ignored and seems to come on me with a vengeance when operating heavy machinery or driving a car. (I’ve never operated heavy machinery, I’m just pretty sure it would be tough to swing a crane deprived of sleep.) Masticating pizza with too little sleep is doable though. There has to be the imminent danger of death or someone else’s death for sleep to call me out like a possessed demon. Choking on stringy cheese just doesn’t qualify. 

So I ruminated some more and it seemed like a good time to throw in the towel—or use someone else’s. I was ready for that shower after all and I was better able to rationalize this extravagance because of a district email I received from my employer saying I was receiving $1500 for something. I couldn’t really understand why I was receiving $1500 but my interest in that sort of detail is more acute when I’m being charged money rather than given it. Which brings me to the next chapter in my journal which is titled:

Wyndham Garden Tallahassee, How Do I Hate Thee: Let Me Count the Ways. 

Except I’m going to spare you and not count the ways. I think it says enough that when I began to count the ways to the front desk clerk he began his sentence with, “Well, we aren’t really a Wyndham hotel…”.

The shower was nice at least, although, I did have a foot shoot out on the slippery tub bottom which almost led to a back injury that would have ended this trip forever and, possibly, made it so that I would have to drive a wheelchair with a toggle in my mouth. 

I’m trying to remember that there are many wonderful things about Tallahassee and it’s just that this hotel is not one of them, nor the laundromat I went to where I was required to purchase a plastic card for a dollar and then put money on it for the machines that charge 1.99 or 2.99 for wash loads and .52 for every eight minutes on the dryer. Come on people! I don’t mind being ripped off just do it honestly in numbers divisible by five!

Okay, I know that my first-world problems are petty. It’s just, at this point, I kinda wish they were more second-world problems and that I’d decided to stay in my truck and remain smelly. 

Let me move on.

I lived in Tallahassee  four years. My family did most of its moving—at least the state to state kind—in the summer. I think that’s true for a lot of families who have children and don’t want to yank kids out of school in the middle of the year. Plus, my dad was in the school business. 

So my birthday being July 8, I was a new four-years-old when we got here and an old seven-years-old when we left. Keeping track of my ages helps me keep track of where I was and what school I was going to at any given time. 

I went to a preschool when we lived at 1234 Pepper Drive, our first place in Tallahassee. A woman with very long fingernails liked to yank me around a lot. Apparently I was a bad kid. Also, nap time was torture and they played Hush Little Baby Don’t Say a Word every day on repeat. I used to lay on my cot unable to sleep thinking what a spoiled brat that kid was—Daddy buying her everything.

Remember how I said I seem to remember the bad things? I suppose trauma makes them memorable. At 1234 Pepper Drive there were three traumas: sitting in a red ant pile, trying to pet a fuzzy bumble bee and sticking my thumb in one of those old-timey metal fans that have about three curved wires as a front grate. I remember what I was saying when I stuck my thumb in there. 

“Want me to turn off the fan?” I asked the adults while indicating the fan behind me with my thumb. 

It must have been one of those kid things where I wanted to touch a button or click a switch because there is no good reason to turn a fan off in Tallahassee. You pretty much want fans on most of the year. 

I met an interesting woman while looking for my house. Cathryn has one of the homes on Pepper and she is really into Tallahassee history. I’d found a home that looked like the one we rented but its address was in the 2000s. There were no homes with addresses in the 1000s. I asked Cathryn about this and she confirmed that all those homes were in a flood zone and were torn down about 25 years ago. Some houses across the street from where our old house used to be are built on stilts. (We’ve gotten downpours every day I’ve been here.) 

According to Cathryn the neighborhood was developed in the late 1940s and red-lined then as a blacks-only neighborhood. The area was called Elberta Empire after the Elberta Crate and Box company where many or the residents worked. At the time the wages were good. When we arrived in the summer of 1969 ownership of the company had changed and workers were in the midst of a strike—which proved to be successful—for better working conditions and wages. 

Cathryn says there is a huge demand for small, affordable homes in Tallahassee. From what I’ve seen, this city has been good at keeping old neighborhoods like Elberta Empire. 

June 28, 2021

I got into Tallahassee last night after dark. Not the ideal situation for the urban boondocker, but I got a late start leaving Hattiesburg. These daily posts can be time-consuming what with loading pictures and all. Plus at my station at the McDonald’s in Hattiesburg (wifi and an electrical plug) there was an interesting fellow also using the booth in front of me as his personal office and workstation. He was houseless and was holding down the table while his partner panhandled outside. Kind of a rough life it sounds like. He was interested in discussing the bible and at the same time talking about the wrongs of how he was treated at some churches he frequented. 

There were a lot of intense thunderstorms on the way here. Most only lasted a few minutes. Nothing like southern Florida, Alabama and Mississippi for those intense showers. We are in the tropics here. Humidity is high, but at least the rains have kept it cool. I’d never thought about it, but I didn’t go into Georgia driving here. The Florida pan-hands you right over to Alabama skipping Georgia altogether for the driver. While I have travelled extensively in the South, most of the roads I’ve taken all led to eastern Tennessee where my nuclear family has roots. No matter the state I was living in, Tennessee was usually the destination. This particular path—Hattiesburg to Tallahassee never happened in my youth.

I was looking for a Taco Bell when I came into town: predictable food and wi-fi. And I can get veggie tacos now that I’m back on the beef wagon. (I never really got that term “on the wagon”. Does that mean that you are delivering the stuff to others and don’t have time to partake yourself? Seems like if you are on the wagon you’d want to have a little bit of whatever you are delivering.)

Anyway, I made it to the Bell at 9:50 with ten minutes to spare since I don’t like going through the drive-thru and that’s all that’s open after 10. The Bell was conveniently located to a Walmart so I went there after and picked up some groceries. I was in the nick of time for that place too since they close at 11 on a Sunday here. Top on my list of groceries were raisins as my oatmeal has been wanting. 

Apparently a lot of people boondock at Walmarts, but I’d have to be pretty hard up to do that. The parking lots look kind of sketchy and exposed to me. I guess all that space would be convenient if I was hauling a trailer.  

I did use the Walmart lot for getting the truck and myself prepped for bed though. I like to do this before I find my place so I’m not busy attracting attention. I basically just want to be able to park and then hop in the back when I get somewhere. So I opened up my tailgate and boudoir for the whole world to see as I did my nightly ablutions. 

First I stretched across my mattress and untied all my curtains for easy closing later. (Closing the side curtains and putting up the velcroed front and back curtains is the one thing I do at my campsite since driving with those closed isn’t so safe. An alternative is to do this somewhere very close to the campspot and then just roll in completely prepared, but I didn’t want to take that extra step since I still needed to find a place.) 

Next I straightened up the bedroom throwing away trash, finding my headlamp, stuffing some books and putting them out of the way in the cab. (As many times as I’ve imagined doing some bedtime reading it just doesn’t seem to happen—not wild about using the headlamp too much since that reveals me and usually I’m just too tired anyway.) 

Finally I washed my face with my musty smelling washcloth and brushed and flossed my teeth. I had a shower back in Hattiesburg at Elijah’s a few nights ago. I can probably go a day or two longer without offending people who come within smelling distance. Likely I’ll go to a gym here. I was thinking about getting a room again like I did once so far, but then thought, why spend 80 or 100 bucks? I like this urban boondocking and I’d rather eat some nice meals if I’m going to spend money on anything besides gas and other necessities. 

Leaving Walmart I went looking for a spot. I checked a Cracker Barrel first. I’ve never stayed at one, but like Walmart, people, especially with trailers, often stay there and I wanted to check it out. An app on my phone tells which Walmarts and Cracker Barrels allow overnight stays. The app said this one did not, but comments below contradicted that.  In a dark area of the Barrel’s lower lot was a motorhome and a truck with a camper, but I didn’t feel like joining. Seemed like three might get someone’s attention whereas two or twenty wouldn’t. I just go on instinct for these things. 

I cruised through three or four motel lots looking for something but they were all too brightly lit or only had spaces right in front of doors or parking on unlevel ground. One had possibilities but two guys were talking to each other nearby from their pickup truck windows. Being as it was night and this area of the city seemed unfamiliar to me I didn’t want to go looking for apartment complexes or other alternatives. 

The last place I drove through had a dark spot at the end of a row. It was only about fifty feet from the front door, but all was quiet. I found some weird holes in the bushes behind me after backing in and checking out my parking job. It looked as if some land campers might use a spot there. It was hard to tell in the dark, but the bushes looked like they led to some trails and a jungly kind of hillside below. It didn’t matter though since I lock myself in tight once I’m in my truck and I feel pretty secure with my bearspray and knife, though who knows if I could effectively use either if I had to? 

I waited for a maintenance worker to finish organizing his truck and tying up some garbage and then I slipped out of the cab and back to the camper shell. I unvelcroed my sandals, slipped them off and climbed over the tailgate (I don’t like how forcefully I have to slam it to get it to latch). I slid my windows open, closed all my curtains, turned on my fan and took off everything but my skivvies. I placed my keys on the ledge of my camper with my cell phone and finally my glasses. It was night-night time. Oh…and the parking lot? It was Marriott again. 

June 27, 2021

The goal today is to get out of Hattiesburg. That’s not an easy thing to do given all the things I’d like to write about. Denton still has pots brewing on the back burner, so geez, let me get a meal cooked here. 

Last night I slept in a USM campus lot. Just when I thought this urban boondocking is becoming easier a campus police officer did two drive-bys checking me out this morning. But hey, he/she didn’t hassle me. Just doing their job. I’ve gotten in the habit of picking up some trash wherever I boondock. I figure if I leave it a little better than when I show up I’m building a little good karma. 

For a college town, Hattiesburg has too many parking lots. There are beginning signs of a bike culture here. Elijah has plans for his next column (he writes one for The Pinebelt News) to talk about sidewalks. The main thoroughfare, Hardy Street, is basically one plant and grass lawn landscape broken up by lots of concrete business entrances. Makes it hard to walk down the street. Elijah praises a local restaurant entrepreneur (maybe baron is a better word—he has six successful eateries in town) who is putting sidewalks in front of his restaurants next to the street. 

I’ve also noticed a lot of new traffic calming efforts in town, especially in the form of planted medians. These are all first step efforts to give pedestrians and bicyclist a larger share in our car-dominated culture, making the landscape safer and more accessible. 

—————

The oppressor controls the historical narrative. 

Elijah just wrote an article about the Tulsa, Oklahoma Massacre of 1921. It has a full page spread in The Pinebelt News. He credits popular culture for clueing him in—specifically the tv series The Watchman and Lovecraft Country. In these past few days I’ve learned some history about Hattiesburg I never knew. Why is that local history so often denied public education students?

Goula is the word used by the black community to describe the section of town Elijah grew up in. We theorized the etymology of the word may derive from  the coastal African Americans in SC and Georgia named the Gullah, many of whom, to this day, retain an African accent. Someone I just met in a McDonalds thinks it derives from Pascagoula Street which is in the vicinity and also a Mississippi coastal city. Looking on a map the Leaf River flows into the Pascagoula River, so Goula may simply be an earlier name for the Leaf River.

The name I was familiar with for the black section of town was the quarters (sometimes called the bottoms). I went over the railroad tracks to this section to take my mom’s beer cans to the recycling center, to get our yard pecans shelled by a company with a special machine, and in the tenth grade riding the bus to school everyday. 

There are many fewer houses in the flood zone area of the black neighborhoods that existed when I was here.  The city doesn’t issue permits for homes there anymore. A large new park in the Goula borders the Leaf River and has open spaces for games, a stage, and natural wetland areas with trails to walk through and observe nature as it is without human interference. The area is becoming less and less “the black section” of town and more and more just “town”. While we were at the park two helmeted bicyclist came through. 

“Look, those are white people,” I said to Elijah.

“No they aren’t. Wait, they are white. The first person is but the…wait, she’s white too.” 

Hattiesburg proper is now majority African American and that population isn’t confined to one specific area. A black mayor was in office for four terms (16 years) until recently. (I’ll let Elijah talk about his feelings concerning this individual.) 

A few days ago Elijah showed me where the house he grew up in had been. There were only a few bricks buried in the ground that were left. It wasn’t a flood that took it away but a tornado that touched down about four years ago. Elijah hadn’t lived there for a long time. His mother sold it many years before.

Down at the old city hall there is a confederate statue praising the men and women of the confederacy. I’m not sure what should be done with these old monuments. My first instinct is to have them taken down and destroyed, but there are some good arguments for leaving and contextualizing them.

I was aware of the long history of voter suppression here. In the historical timeline blacks have been able to vote only a few years compared to the hundreds they weren’t.  But there was right-to-vote activism that I never knew about.

A few feet away from that confederate statue is a new statue of Vernon Dahmer, a mixed race community leader who died at the hands of the KKK trying to give people the vote. That’s a start to balancing things out. Elijah was at the unveiling of the statue shortly before the pandemic hit. A new park is named after Dahmer too. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon_Dahmer

“Things are changing Eric!” 

Elijah emphasized this over and over again during my time here. His positivity is infectious. I was suddenly learning all these new stories. Each contained differing levels of inspiration and horror. But cracking open the vaults of history and letting in the light is where healing comes from, not hiding it away. 

The story of Clyde Kennard hit me like a blow to the guts. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyde_Kennard

Hattiesburg has begun to shed light on these stories with the new Sixth Street Museum District.

It’s blocks away from where Elijah grew up and went to school at Eureka Elementary, a segregated all black elementary school that has been renovated as an African American History Museum. Elijah’s mom was a teacher there and later the principal. Elijah had her for third grade.

“She made me call her Mrs. Jones like all the other kids,” he said. At recess he could call her Mo’Dea, a black conjunction for Mother Dear. In Tyler Perry’s popular movies it is Madea, but Elijah takes issue with that spelling. I told him he should see if he can get a consulting job with Perry and straighten him out.

Expect a second email today with more pictures of the Sixth Street Museum District.

June 26, 2021

I had a good night’s sleep last night at the Marriott. Not inside, but out in the parking lot. Actually, it was my best urban boondocking experience yet.  I may go back again tonight though that breaks urban boondocking protocol. Staying in the same place more than once can attract unwanted attention and I wasn’t being overly discreet this morning. I actually got out my stove and boiled water for tea in my little corner of the lot. At least it was early and there wasn’t much activity.

I’ve been at the Hattiesburg public library most of the day. It’s a new, spacious library. The old brick library downtown is now a museum.  Elijah wasn’t allowed in it when he was a kid. He was born in 1956—just nine years before me—but schools and many other public facilities remained segregated in Hattiesburg until 1965 and beyond. Elijah’s library was a small, segregated, non-public room in the African American USO club near his house.

Despite the racism Elijah has witnessed in his many years here (and in Los Angeles) he is one of Hattiesburg’s most vocal supporters. He closely follows local politics and doesn’t vote or advocate voting along race lines. He can pick a no-good con in any shade. 

“Hattiesburg has changed Eric. There are a lot of things happening here. This is a progressive little city. We are like what Austin is to Texas,” he said. “We’ve always been ahead of the curve.” 

Race defines place for a lot of Americans. Maybe not so much anymore, but certainly when I lived here.

When we moved here from Texas, my parents bought an old home on Main Street, close to downtown. It was the first time they’d bought a house since their first home in Tallahassee. I thought maybe that was a good sign we’d stop moving around so much. And we did. I completed junior and high school here and had my first three semesters at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM).  

Main street was the dividing line for blacks and whites then, though there was an apartment building across the street from us that was mostly black. Most whites lived west of Main. The older neighborhoods were closer to downtown and newer developments further out Hardy Street.

Behind Main Street, crossing over the the railroad tracks the land dipped downhill and during heavy, extended rains the Leaf River would rise above its banks and spill across the land. 

“What did you do when it flooded,” I asked Elijah. 

“We moved out.”

“Would you put your furniture up high?”

“Either that or took it with us. Things like tvs.”

“How long would you be gone,” I asked?

“Maybe two weeks. The smell took a few months to go away,” he said. 

June 25, 2021

I’m back for my second nap in the back of my truck parked at the public library in Hattiesburg. I’ve been trying to write about Hattiesburg, Elijah Jones and the whirlwind tour he gave me last night and this morning, but I think the two margaritas, the old fashioned, five cigarets and a special Elijah nightcap involving rum, watermelon vodka and a blend of guava, mango and Hawaiian Punch has my brain dialed to dim. Oh, and I’ve already failed at not having beef. Didn’t I proclaim abstinence just yesterday?

Last night was celebratory so a little overindulgence is to be expected since I haven’t seen Elijah in 42 years. I was just 13. He was 23. I think some of you have heard the story. 

Elijah worked at the 7-11 down the street and I would go there to buy candy and then hang out with him. We became friends and he took me to see the movie Superman. A black man and a white boy was an odd pairing at the time in Mississippi.  Maybe it still is, but not the black and white part anymore. Things have changed for the better. Much better.

When Elijah quit working at the 7-11 all those years ago I wondered what happened to him. Little did I know he had just moved to help open a brand new store across town where he became the manager. Hattiesburg had five 7-11s at that time. Now it has none. They’ve all become plain old gas stations or various quicky-type markets, all without exception looking somewhat run down. The red and green-striped marquees are gone or painted over. 

Elijah isn’t sure why all the 7-11s are gone. Every other chain and franchise in the world seems to be bustling in Hattiesburg these days. The business section of old Hardy Street has been extended more than four miles west past I-59 since I was here. There are Targets, Bed Bath and Beyond, Home Depot, Office Depots, three Walmarts. Even Wells Fargo has made its way here.  All that area was farmland before. 

Elijah ponders what his life might have been like if he had stayed with 7-11 instead of hitching his wagon to the Richard Simmons enterprise. His mom was a go-getter and Elijah says he got that from her. The Southland Corporation that owned 7-11 was huge and Elijah believes he would have climbed pretty high in that environment. He got a degree in radio and television from the University of Southern Mississippi with a minor in journalism. That, no doubt, came in handy for what he ended up doing instead.

The last year he was with 7-11 Elijah started working on his weight. 

“I had been avoiding going to the doctor,” he told me. “When I finally had a reason that made me go they weighed me. This was at the hospital. They had to take me up to the maternity ward because they didn’t have a scale big enough to measure me on the regular floor. I was so embarrassed that I was up there with all those white ladies with their new babies.”

Elijah related how he thought he weighed around 300 pounds: 

“When I got on the scale I saw it go right past 300. Then it went past 400. Then 450. When it got to 484 and finally stopped I couldn’t believe it. I tell you Eric, that night when I went home I sat down on my bed and just cried. But something changed inside me. Instead of giving up I got angry.”  

The next time I laid eyes on Elijah it wasn’t in-person but on tv. For some reason (Elijah says it was destiny) I was watching the Richard Simmons exercise show. Simmons was a spectacle but not part of my normal repertoire of Gilligan’s Island, I Love Lucy and a half dozen other syndicated reruns. When I saw a thin black man come from behind a screen on the television stage holding up a pair of bluejeans with a waistband the size of a lawn-and-leaf garbage bag I ran close to the tv. He was introduced as Elijah Jones. He had lost so much weight it was hard to recognize him, but I could see it was him through his eyes and his toothy side-smile that makes him look like one of the animated kids from Schoolhouse Rock.

After the television shoot Elijah hung around Los Angeles for a week. During that time a position working on the show opened up. Elijah had gone back to see the show as an audience member. The crew was at a loss for how to fill this low-level yet important position on short notice when somebody said, “Hey Elijah is still here. He could do that job.”

So that was the beginning of Elijah’s time with what he calls the Richard Simmons Empire. He ended up working 37 years with Richard Simmons working his way up to becoming his manager.

If anyone wants the scoop on Simmons you don’t need to listen to what the New York Times calls the morally suspect podcast Missing Richard Simmons. I can tell you. He’s done with fame…and it sounds like people in general. Elijah is upset by the loss of a very close (nonsexual) friendship. It’s likely that Elijah was his closest friend—at least for some period of time. But it sounds like Simmons has quit all his friendships except for a very few people who work for and help take care of him.  

But back to the story of Elijah and me. It was one that I thought was through until about a decade ago when I met the writer Beth Lisick. She was working on a book that eventually came out titled, Helping Me Help Myself. In talking about it she mentioned that she had taken one of Richard Simmons’ Cruise to Loose Caribbean Tours to relate in a chapter of this book she was writing about self-improvement fads. I asked if she met a black man named Elijah on the cruise. Yes! He was Simmons’ right hand man. “They were almost inseparable,” she said. 

It struck me as quite strange that as a tween in 1978 I’d had a short friendship with a 7-11 clerk in Hattiesburg, Mississippi and now in 2009 I was meeting a person at a bowling alley in Albany, CA who had met the person I knew as a kid. I had to reach out to Elijah. 

I went to the Richard Simmons website and in a contact box I typed in a message asking if someone named Elijah worked for Richard Simmons. I said my name is Eric Robertson and I knew him when he worked at 7-11. He took me to see Superman.

The person who read the message contacted Elijah and well, here we are today.  

p.s.—After my second nap it started raining. Yesterday when Elijah and I ate dinner there was a downpour that must have lasted thirty minutes. The street was a river. When I checked the back of my camper last night there was water again! That’s after adding caulk around all the windows in New Orleans. Fortunately, after my second nap in the library parking lot it started raining again and I was here to find the culprit of the leak. It’s coming in around a brake light at the top back of the shell. Easy fix with more goo!

p.s.s.-Bonus. I’m still out here in the library parking lot. It’s 6:43 and they’ve been closed since 5:00 but the wi-fi is still working!

June 24, 2021

I’m a bit of a mess right now. Ironic since I’m staying in the beautiful uptown New Orleans home of my college girlfriend Julie and her fiancée Dave and not in the truck. Denton overwhelmed me a bit. If I don’t get to that issue in this journal entry I will. I’ve already done plenty of writing about it. I just need to hone it into something that a person might actually like to read. 

But beyond the flood of thoughts and ideas around my Denton visit, there are things that have needed more immediate attention here in New Orleans. Julie and Dave went out to do exercise at their gyms this morning and I began to use that time for packing up and for calling Apple support to fix some email issues I’ve been having. In between downloading a new security recommendation I went out to my truck to start arranging things for leaving today and found there have been water incursions in the last few days of downpours. Remember what I said about bad things being good for jogging memories? Now the thought came into my head very clearly from when I was working on my truck—make sure to caulk those windows on the camper shell after you put them back in. 

Now I’ve got my mattress out of the truck standing up in Julie and Dave’s back yard with notebooks lined up on a ladder that hangs on their back fence. It’s the only place I could find the sun hitting. There are lots of beautiful live oaks and other trees in this neighborhood, but with all the shade and 99.999% humidity, it’s hard to dry things out. I’m sure they will come back any moment and wonder why Jed Clampett and his hillbilly family has taken over their yard and left the doors and tailgate open on a truck in front of their house. Thank goodness I know Julie well. I’m pretty sure my predicament will illicit a good laugh. 

Rain has been a theme this week. I left Denton in a downpour on Monday. Downpours mean traffic accidents and I was in a jam on I-35 going west about to go do a little more sleuthing to find the Shady Oaks Ranch. I was sitting there not moving much for 15 minutes. When I finally inched my way close enough to an exit, I went down the ramp, under the freeway and got back on the interstate going the other way. That’s one of the nice things about urban boondocking. Traffic jam? Exit town and don’t look back. 

Actually, I probably will look back. My understanding of Denton is just not done yet. I really would like to find out what happened to the Shady Oaks Ranch on my way back to California in August. I know this much from trying to find the ranch Monday morning: that Northeast area has been chopped up. It’s still rural, but the rural is corralled and in the process of becoming contained. There is literally an interstate circle around the city now. No big news here. You’ve all heard of bypasses and getting on “the loop” to avoid downtowns. Well, now fingers are making their way off the loop. When enough fingers make their way off the loop then the city might make a second loop. On google maps cities start to look like bomb blasts or craters with the concentric rings of freeways and more concrete than plant life. 

This is a good time to clarify something. In the course of talking with a librarian at the North Denton Library branch she clued me in that the greater Denton metropolis of Denton County has a population of approximately 950,000 people. The 150,000 I quoted earlier is only for the city proper. This explains the insane growth which I haven’t really given you a good visual for yet. Unfortunately I’m starting to feel a bit like the cloth that gets pulled together when a loose string is pulled. All the places I’m visiting are stacking up and although I’ve made time to write about them I haven’t had enough time to stretch them out, pat them down and make them presentable like a well-set table. That is the challenge in the coming weeks while still visiting Hattiesburg, Tallahassee, Winchester and Sewanee. 

“Take it bird by bird buddy, bird by bird.” I hear Anne Lamott’s long dead father talk to me and I’m letting him help me out here. I need a long sigh of relief…and maybe a beer.

——–

Before I left Denton I had a happy discovery. Londonderry Lane Apartments is not the only place that remains. The KOA I lived in after Shady Oaks is still there, albeit called by another name: Destiny Dallas RV Resort.

The office staff at the RV Resort let me drive through to see my old haunt. It’s now only for long-term camping and the host did not want me walking through because she thought it might make some residents nervous. 

Most places aren’t improved by age, but the old KOA looked better than ever. They do a good job with upkeep but the main reason is nature—the trees are twice as big and twice as many as when I was living there 44 years ago.

I became a very good pool player in the gameroom at the KOA. I looked through the window glad to see they still have a table. A groundskeeper—a Vietnam vet who would have acid flash backs while he was on the riding mower—gave me a few handfuls of quarters painted with red nail polish every few weeks. 

“Use these quarters on the pool table—not for candy or anything else,” he said. 

If you remember how pool works you know the looser pays. As I got better and better I was sticking fewer and fewer of those red quarters in the pool table and the groundskeeper, or whoever was making money off the table, was making more and more off me—their little eleven year old hustler. 

Another memorable moment at the KOA was when a famous lion tamer came through with all his big cats in a paneled big rig trailer. The lion tamer camped across from our spot on the back row of the campgrounds. (These spots were reserved for long-term residents.) He was a bleached-blond man in his late fifties who walked around with his shirt off showing the hundreds of white scars of varying length and angle that stood out from his tan body. 

I smelled the big beasts before I saw them. They were in their trailer at the front of the grounds. The panels had been lifted and propped open with long boards. I felt sorry for the big cats. There was a double-deck of eight barred cages each containing a single lion or tiger. It was a hot day and most were flopped over panting.

As a final note I’ve decided to stop eating beef…or at least to cut way back. Seeing a truck load of cattle on their way to the slaughter house did it. Of course, I’ve seen that many times on the road, but something about their soulful eyes this time…

June 22, 2021

My sister and I lived in a tent for a year as children. It was a big, heavy, green canvas thing. Folded it weighed about sixty pounds. On the interior were poles to help it stand—sort of like columns in a grand house, if you have a generous imagination. In the upright position it sort of looked like a capital letter M raised in the middle and squished down on the sides. Like this:

In the sixth grade I was, for the first time, one of the shortest kids in class—if not the shortest. Little did I know this distinction would last through the tenth grade. At least the height allowed me to stand up without bending in the middle of our tent. My sister didn’t have that luxury. 

As a teenage girl coming into her own toward the end of 9th grade she probably wasn’t as happy as I was about this Tom Sawyer-like adventure. Nevertheless, we managed to coexist—me on the right side and she on the left. She may have had a moment where she felt like she needed to clarify the demarkation, but the devision was pretty clear given the rectangular footprint and the egress flap in the middle. 

The history of how we ended up living in the tent goes like this: 

We were in the ramshackle farm house. My parents (while working full time jobs) were intent on getting back to the land as so many young people of their generation were. Rodale’s Organic Gardening and The Whole Earth Catalog were popular publications around my house. The farm had been a small, working dairy in its day. The old house, with sagging and uneven floors, sat on 14-acres of land with three barns including the low-ceilinged milk barn with it’s rough concrete floor and feeding trough and seven iron head clamps for the cows. They bought a Red Jersey milk cow which I had the pleasure of naming Fern after the book my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Ann Hall, was reading us: Where the Red Fern Grows. We had a quarter horse named Sugar, laying hens and two calves bound for slaughter when they became steer. Fern had birthed Bo and we bought a black Angus to join the suckling. Triangle was named for the white mark on his forehead. 

My parents planted an impressive quarter-acre garden with bountiful crops of beans, tomatoes, okra, and potatoes to name a few. The year and a half or so spent on the farm was an intense time of real and metaphorical fruition. My parents had a knack for this life for sure, but given the demands of their regular jobs it wasn’t likely they could keep milking a cow twice a day forever, not to mention keep up with all the other tasks of a working farm.  Besides, change and adventure seemed to be their greatest love. 

My fifth grade friend and classmate, Donald,  told me that his family was moving back to California and that their Texas ranch house was coming up for rent. His dad was an airline pilot for American Airlines. He may have been doing training out of the new Dallas International Airport. They could well afford the rental on a house that was actually a modern mansion. 

I told my parents that we should move into it. Mom and Dad had already been apprised of its wonders by a few visits I’d had to Donald’s.  I was surprised when they thought about and enthusiastically agreed. 

The house sat in a valley down a half-mile long dirt driveway off Teasley Lane a mile or so past a neighborhood of affluent homes.  It was where Teasley changed from a main neighborhood feeder vein for south side of Denton into a rural highway. It’s where country began again.

The half-mile long, dirt drive leading to the property ended at a pad of perfectly smooth white concrete that wrapped around to a three-car garage. The mansion was an all-electric wonder with wall to wall powder-blue shag carpeting, central vacuuming with hoses that plugged into the wall, five bedrooms, a thousand square foot living room with anteroom, five bathrooms each with silent-flush toilets, a swimming pool, a grand patio with an eight foot circular fountain and an immaculately clipped pure green lawn that spanned the homes long front and curved around to the pool. So perfect was that carpet of green that it must have contained enough glyphosate to evaporate any weed seed floating through the air even before it landed.  

This manufactured eden sat like an island in the middle of a vast acreage of fenced off grasslands which rippled with the wind and measured time in the shadow of clouds drifting across it. Hundreds of acres spanned the North and South and to the West there was a lake stocked with bluegill, bass and crappie. A back pond on the East side contained catfish and water moccasin. The pond sat in a basin just before the land sloped up to a thin forest behind which sat, hidden from view, a state school where severely mentally disabled people were institutionalized.

Little sound, except that made by nature, made it to this island. From the lake at the front of the property you could hear thirsty engine manifolds sucking air as drivers put a heavy foot to the floor speeding away from suburbia. For a viewer,  a car’s forward momentum could look like a mirage in the distance. It might seem as if a land rocket was making ground, pulsing unevenly, through curtains of warm air.

This is all the long way around to saying that my parents, for the experience of living in Shangri-La, blew all their money. The electric bill alone was $300/month. That’s 1976 dollars. Along with the rent,  it was way beyond their means. Dad also bought a used, but almost new, Cadillac to balance the picture of him as a wealthy oil tycoon or cattleman. 

I’m not sure what blew all their money meant—whether they used up all their savings or went into debt—but their solution to get back on track was to buy a 19-foot-long pull trailer, find a place to haul it and stick us alongside the camper in a tent. 

That’s the condensed version of how we ended up in a tent—first at the Shady Oaks Ranch followed six months later by the Denton K.O.A.

June 21, 2021

Two weeks ago, when I was in the Trinity Alps I opened a can of smoked baby clams to eat with some crackers. Inside, I was shocked to find that there were only four clams and they weren’t babies at all. They tasted okay but lacked a little of the delicacy of the smaller ones. When I was in Moab I opened another can. This one was filled with the expected babies— about 10 or 12 clams in all—tender and delicious. Last night I opened a third can. This can had about 30 or 40 tiny, baby clams in it. They weren’t as delectable as those medium babies that I’ve come to expect. They hadn’t developed much innards and were mostly skin. There was also a little sand in them. I ate ‘em anyway. 

I tell you this story to ask which can of clams do you think Denton is like? Well…(drumroll please)….it’s like the first can of clams with the big ones, except the can is the size of a picnic table. 

It seems that everyone in Denton or coming to Denton wants to own a McMansion that is packed into a McMansion development with outdoor malls. I don’t mean to disparage these homes. They are beautiful and look to be well-built. But they are big and they have obliterated the farms and ranches that were here when I was here 47 to 42 years ago.  I looked up the current population of Denton which is close to 150,000. That’s three times the size when I lived here. 

On the positive side, I’ve seen quite a bit of diversity. An old Asian man jogging in the park waved at me this morning followed by a middle-aged East Indian man who was also jogging and said hi. A young African American man was busking yesterday on the town square playing some sort of electronic beat box. It was slightly better than annoying which lead me to believe there is an appropriate level of tolerance in this town. I also noticed black families and other minorities in some of the upscale neighborhoods I drove through. 

I’m composing this journal entry this morning at Evers Park. I’ve made an oatmeal breakfast and tea here for the past two mornings. I boondocked Saturday night in the back parking lot of the last apartments I lived in when Steve Martin was putting arrows in his head. Last night I slept in front of some apartments between one of my old elementary schools and my best friend’s house in the fifth grade when “Rock the Boat” could be counted on in the roller rink I went to with him. ( Mike moved to Minnesota the summer before sixth grade—making our friendship brief and intense in the scheme of things.)

The mosquitos have gotten a piece of me each night. I’m reminded of that drawing I’ve seen on signs at mass transit train stations. It shows the profile of a yellow stick figure staring down with a dotted line going from the pupil of his eye to a couple of lines on the ground with arrows indicating the space between the lines. The sign says, “Mind the gap”. 

My gap is the space between the tail of my pickup and the end of my camper shell. The shell is about an inch and a half longer than the truck bed and that’s where those little buggers are getting in. I stuff a blanket in but there are still holes. I’ll have to find a solution. 

I’m just telling you this to avoid the hard topic of talking about place here in Denton. The change is just overwhelming. I tried to write about it yesterday but I was dissatisfied and tired of my efforts. I’m trying to remember Anne Lamott’s advice on writing in her book bird by bird, which is, just what the title says, to take it one bird at a time. (Contrary to what you might think of the title the book is about writing not birding. But just let me say that the Great-tailed Grackle’s are out in abundance here in Evers Park. Yesterday I saw one chasing a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher.) 

But back to the topic. On another day I will try to describe what the change is like her in Denton, but for now let me summarize where I am with the six places I lived from ages 8 to 13. In order they are:

First apartment—haven’t found it and probably won’t due to the fact that by the time I arrived in Denton I had developed an acute near-sightedness that went undiagnosed for that first year. For all practical purposes I was blind to distance and lived and went to school on little floating clouds surrounded by the fog of the more general world. Getting glasses in fourth grade was life-changing. It felt like a chorus of angels were singing to me when I first put the new glasses on my face and went running across a grass lawn. Suddenly I could see individual grass blades and my whole body was foreshortened as if my eyes were cameras pointed at my churning legs. At home, on my top bunk, the textured ceiling two feet from my face turned from a soft, rolling landscape to sharp mountains with deep cut valleys.

The Ramshackle Farm House—Gone. House and Farm.

The Texas Ranch House Mansion—Gone. Mansion and Ranch.

The Shady Oaks Ranch—Gone from what I can surmise. Further exploration required. 

The Denton KOA—Gone. There is a KOA out in Sanger, but I can safely say the KOA I lived in is gone though I still need to go by there to see the land. 

Londonderry Lane Apartments—Still there but now named Forest Ridge Apartment Homes. Some newer apartments around the corner are named Londonderry Oaks. I really think they should have kept the original name. It is on a street named Londonderry Lane after all. What strikes me as funny is that the place I lived in with the least character is now the only place I lived in Denton that I can gaze on to help spark memory. 

The plan today is to try to suss out these last places that I’m not clear about. I did reconnoiter the general area of The Shady Oaks Ranch this morning after suddenly becoming aware of where I was and how to get there. Becoming clear about where I was involved suddenly remembering an unintentional, yet hurtful, insult I overheard about the cheap, plastic skate board I’d just successfully petitioned my dad to buy for me at a five and dime-type store we were in. It’s strange how many memories about place are linked to negative memories. Does my brain need some fine tuning or is this just the natural order of things? The other place I will look for today is the land that held the Denton KOA where I learned to be a pool shark—pool as in billiards. Although, come to think of it, I did play my share of sharks and minnows in the campground swimming pool. 

I may leave Denton tonight and get some distance toward New Orleans where I’m going tomorrow. Might even treat myself to a motel room and the shower I’m due for.