The Scrapyard of History

Last week I took a load of scrap metal to Anniston Scrap, which is a couple of blocks from Broad Street in downtown Rome. There is one several miles closer to us, but I chose Anniston, as I have in the past, for nostalgia. Anniston Scrap used to be owned by my great uncle, my paternal grandmother’s brother, Charlie Carnes.

I had 580 pounds, which netted us a cool $27.55, for which I got a check. The scrap metal business used to be a pretty informal thing, but these days you have to show identification and sign a statement that you actually own the scrap you’re bringing in.

Anniston Scrap has been right where it is now for probably a century. Here is a Google Earth view of downtown Rome.

downtown rome

My father worked there off and on as a kid. When you come with a load of scrap metal, you drive up onto the same set of scales that were there when I went there with my father, more than 50 years ago. The office is the same. I think the dirt on the floors and walls is the same.

anniston metal

The office is the building at upper left with the shiny roof. Some of the buildings adjacent to the scrapyard are not faring very well.

To dump the scrap, you drive right into the yard and toss everything onto a big pile of metal things surrounded by a retaining wall of old appliances. I added some paint cans, a box of rusty nails, my broken stationary bicycle, my father’s old cast-iron table saw, and a large amount of unidentifiable things.

I have taken scrap metal there three times since my mother died. It had been a very long time since I had been into the office. I asked the woman behind the counter if she had heard of Charlie Carnes. She hadn’t. I told her he used to own the scrap yard a long time ago. She didn’t seem impressed.

There is a scene in the movie Nebraska that reminded me of my visit to the scrap yard. Bruce Dern plays an elderly man who thinks he has won a million dollars in a contest like the Publisher’s Clearing House lottery. On his way to pick up his jackpot his son and he stop in their old hometown, where they visit the garage the old man used to own. He asks the current owners if they recognized his or his partner’s names. They had never heard of them.

But that’s the way things go. Old times get tossed onto a pile of useless scrap and forgotten.

An intersection to be avoided

A wide cross section of Rome’s population shops at Walmart. There are white people, black people, Hispanic people and oriental people. There are people who are probably on the lower economic rungs, and there are those on the upper rungs. There are newborn babies, taken care of by their parents, of course, and some so aged that they should be taken care of by their children, or maybe even their grandchildren. I’m afraid that our steady exposure to all these different segments of society has turned me into a racist.

I’m afraid of old, white men.

I shouldn’t be afraid of old, white men. It’s wrong to judge every one of them just because of the actions of a few. After all, I am an old, white man. It’s just that some old, white men make me uncomfortable, uneasy, almost afraid. It’s the ones who are wearing pistols on their hips. We have seen at least four men carrying pistols in Walmart in the last couple of months, and three were old, white men. Now I notice old, white men in the store. I check them out. I look them up and down. I look for that gun riding up on their high-waisted pants. If I see one in the frozen foods aisle, I feel an urge to back away slowly and carefully and then dive into the ethnic food aisle. Leah wants to confront them, to ask them just why they’re carrying. But I don’t think it’s a good idea. Even a little lady like Leah might seem menacing to a scared, old, white man carrying a loaded pistol; who knows?

I don’t have anything against guns. I have been around them all my life and still have some. I like things that make loud noises, and I like knocking tin cans off rocks at 50 paces. (“Tin cans” – I told you I’m old.) And I have nothing against old, white men. Usually the greatest danger they pose is that they will bore you with stories of their glory days, just like I do. But these particular old, white men are different, and I’m afraid the set of old, white men who carry pistols is going to intersect at Walmart with another set of people.

Most Walmart customers, like most people in general, are friendly and polite. They say “Sorry” when they cut you off with their buggies, and they thank you if you hand them a can from a high shelf. But one night we saw the other kind. He was a large, white man who was very angry that someone had cut in front of him in line. He was loud, belligerent and profane, and he kept it up long after any normal person would have stopped in embarrassment. It got so bad that the manager told the man to take it outside. I’m just afraid that one day, the scared, old, white man with a gun is going to meet the aggressively loud, spoiling-for-a-fight, angry man at the checkout, and someone is going to pay for Georgia’s carry-anywhere law.

I don’t want to be there, and I especially don’t want Leah to be there.

I just wonder why I have to worry about that in a supposedly civilized country.

 

 

 

… a foreign country

I have been thinking about the past a lot lately. That’s an old man’s exercise. I don’t consider myself “old” but maybe old is as old does. In any event, I find myself doing it.

Leah and I ate lunch Saturday at one of those fast-food chicken places. It was on Martha Berry Boulevard, known in the old days as Avenue C, five streets or about two real blocks from where my father grew up. Our table was at a window facing that direction. I saw a few large trees that might have been around back in the day when my father called it “the old home place.” But probably not.

My grandmother died years ago, and the old home place was sold and torn down for doctors’ offices. It was so long ago that now even the doctors’ offices are gone, burned to the ground. A couple of magnolia trees survive in what used to be the front yard, but the huge pecans that were behind the house are gone.

Almost everything else is gone, too. One house separated my grandmother’s from the old Fourth Ward School, where my father and I both attended elementary school. The school, a three-story red brick block with tender-dry wood floors, is long gone – doctors’ offices, you know. John’s general store, where we bought goodies before school (Luden’s cough drops or those wax, bottle-shaped containers that held about two sips of colored sugar water) was beside the school. It’s gone. The BPOE that was on a hill a block from my grandmother’s house is a Japanese restaurant.

All of those things continue to exist as a ghost-like overlay when I look at where they used to be. But they’re not real, not even real ghosts.

About a mile north from my grandmother’s house, out along Martha Berry Boulevard, a turn to the west leads to where I grew up, 19 Redmond Road. Our parents drove us to Fourth Ward School from that house, and a bus took us home. Every once in a great while I walked that long mile home. It seemed like an epic trek in those days, that little mile. I walk the dogs down the mountain further than that every day now.

Our old house is also gone, along with the two others to the immediate east. Where our house was there is now a nephrology center. Where the other two houses were there is a parking lot, and a little further towards Martha Berry there are doctors’ offices.

Our yard was not huge, but in our little boy world, my brother and I divided it into at least three separate zones. We played mostly in the zone nearest the house. We could throw a rock across that space. Sometimes we went a little further away towards the brick grill my father built, but for some reason, the wooded far end of the yard seemed like a distant place we only passed through on the way to some other place.

Off to the east “the woods” separated the first three houses on Redmond Road from Martha Berry Boulevard. The woods were not large, probably less than an acre, but they, too, had zones. Just inside the woods we knew the paths and built our forts. Deeper into the woods the paths were less familiar, and by the time we explored as far as Martha Berry Boulevard, something we almost never did, the paths evoked a slight tinge of discomfort because of their unfamiliarity. There was a large, abandoned house out of a Stephen King novel at the edge of the woods. I don’t remember any sense of foreboding, but we never went close to it. It’s gone, now, replaced by parking spaces for the doctors’ offices.

About four diagonal blocks from our house, the steep hill we all dreaded when we rode our bikes to the city playground has subsided to a gentle slope. I don’t know what kind of tectonic process does that.

A few hundred yards further out Redmond Road, most of the giant pine trees the road passed through have been replaced by a hospital and doctors’ offices. I think I see a trend. Behind the doctors’ offices there is an assisted living facility where my mother spent a few months before going home to die. Just on the other side there is a four-lane highway that separates my old neighborhood from Berry College, where we rode many a summer mile on our bikes. We drive that highway often to get to town. For a long time I used to look towards the end of the building where my mother had stayed, but I don’t do that so much any more. I guess that’s because I usually take another route now.

Our house on Redmond Road is the one my subconscious considered home, not the house my parents built around 1967 and where my mother died last year. The Redmond Road house appeared regularly in dreams of home for many years after I left it.

For some reason, the place where my old home stood doesn’t have any ghosts. And now even that house is foreign to my dreams.

Spheres of awareness

We all have certain things we know about. We know about what we do for work, what we’re interested in, what we see on the news, what we read about, whatever seeps into our memory over time. Let’s call all our accumulated knowledge a sphere of awareness.

Once years ago I read a review of a movie called “The Star Chamber,” which was about a group of judges and police who decided whether to unofficially execute criminals who managed to avoid conviction. The reviewer wondered why the science-fictiony name “Star Chamber” was used. I was surprised that she had never heard of the original Star Chamber, which was a royal court of last resort in England where the king could right what he considered to be mistakes in the regular court system. The Star Chamber was in my sphere of awareness, but not hers.

I routinely call out BS in movies involving the military, usually because of hair that’s too long, but sometimes because apparently the writers don’t know how low-ranking personnel treat high-ranking personnel. I worked for nearly 30 years in missile defense, and I had lots of contact with soldiers, so lots of military things are in my sphere of awareness.

Leah and I usually watch the Today Show as we eat breakfast (or at least we have it on while we eat). On Thursday, there was a great example of things out of my sphere of awareness, and things out of the hosts’ spheres of awareness. The first thing was a segment about “one of the most popular boy bands in the world” called One Direction. There is an upcoming movie about their “epic tour”. The entertainment reporter for USA Today said that One Direction is “just huge right now, they’re humongous.”

I know what One Direction is because I think I saw them once on the Today Show or the Tonight Show or somewhere, but I am totally oblivious to what they are doing right now, probably because I’m one of those people who never read People magazine outside the dentist’s office. One Direction is within my sphere of awareness, but just at the margins.

And then the reporter started talking about another new movie called “The Imitation Game.” It’s about a “Nazi code breaker”, a “mathematician who figures out how to break this Nazi code.”

As soon as she said “Nazi code breaker” I knew she meant someone who broke the Nazi code rather than a Nazi who broke a code, and I knew she was talking about Alan Turing.

They mentioned Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays Turing, and Keira Knightly, who plays one of his assistants, but they never mentioned Turning’s name. My impression was that they did not know who this person was. From this I assume that Alan Turing is not in the hosts’ spheres of awareness.

Alan Turing is one of the most famous computer scientists in history. His Turing machine developed the very concept of computing and computer algorithms we use today. The Turing test is one of the foundational concepts of artificial intelligence. And aside from all that, some people consider Alan Turing to have made perhaps the largest contribution to the Allied victory over Nazi Germany of any single individual when he and his team broke the Nazi military code*.

Since his death he has received widespread recognition. According to Wikipedia, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most important people of the 20th Century.

Given all that, I was a little surprised that Alan Turing was apparently outside these peoples’ spheres of awareness. But different people know different things. They would probably consider me hopelessly ignorant of current culture because I don’t follow One Direction.

 

* Despite his contributions, the British government prosecuted Turing in 1952 for homosexuality. He pleaded guilty and was given probation with the condition that he take a female hormone that rendered him impotent and caused other physical changes. He lost his security clearance and could no longer work as a government cryptanalyst. He died two years later, apparently of cyanide poisoning, either by suicide or by accident. In 2009 the British government apologized for their persecution of Turing.

 

Mmmm.

Leah and I don’t talk about politics to other people. We pretty much agree with each other about that kind of thing, so we talk to each other, and sometimes we talk to the TV, but not to other people. So why do so many other people talk about politics to us, thinking that we must agree with what they say?

Leah’s 92-year old uncle wants to complain about getting Obama out of office. A store owner tells us the real estate market is not going to improve until Obama is out of office. A Walmart worker tells us he wants to burn all the cardboard boxes he’s breaking down and to heck with global warming; he doesn’t believe in global warming anyway. A neighbor blames Obama for health insurance increases and says Obamacare keeps poor people from getting health insurance.

I don’t think we actually invite any of the comments we keep hearing. We don’t encourage them, but they keep coming anyway. We don’t argue. We don’t engage them in conversation. We just say something like, “Mmmm,” and keep on going. We may talk about later it between ourselves, but not with them.

I don’t point out that Obama was elected for a second term and he’ll be out as soon as he completes it. I don’t point out that the real estate market is actually improving after a precipitous decline that started before Obama was elected. I don’t point out that burning cardboard boxes doesn’t add any carbon to the global carbon cycle like burning gasoline does, or that climatologists have spent their lives working on climatology and probably know about global warming better than nonscientists. I don’t point out that poor people can get assistance to help pay their health insurance premiums.

I suppose they assume that everyone in town agrees with them. After all, Georgia is every bit as solidly Republican today as it was Democratic 40 or 50 years ago. And I’m an old, white guy from Georgia, so I must be a Republican, too.

But you know what they say about assuming things.