Thanks to Nita I had visited most of the lower 48 states by accompanying her to conferences.  Those were great trips; however, sleeping in a hotel is not the same as sleeping on the ground.  For years I tent camped in nearby states in a Sears tent and then a Wal-Mart tent.  Close to the time I retired I bought a yellow and taupe two-man REI tent.  I have put it down on the soil of 47 of these United States and in Ontario, Canada.

To me that feels profound.  My head has been on the dirt of all of lower 48 states except Rhode Island.  I have hiked around, listened to the sounds, talked to people, and observed the flora and fauna of all those states.  Name a state.  Give me a few seconds.  There, now, I have a bundle of sensory experiences that comes to mind.  When I read or listen to the news and hear a story about California or Montana, or Maine, I go to where I tented.  My connection is as solid and firm as was the dirt I slept on.

I have two composition books filled with journal notes on my tent camping.  Using it, I was able to go back and add state names to some of the images I took and have stored in iPhoto.  Using search in iPhoto, I can find at least one image from every state and track down other associated images by checking the date in the information feature. At dmforrest.smugmug.com I can also go back to many of the places I camped.  Somewhere along my travels I started photographing my REI tent.  I like those unspectacular photos best in a way because they take me specifically to the dirt I occupied.

I fell into collecting states in 2012 by deciding to tent my way out west to see Elle in Colorado.  At first I stopped off for the first long day driving I-40 in Arkansas just past Memphis, Tennessee.  I got interested in the notion of camping in all of the states.  Interstates 80, 70, 40, 20, and 10 all head west.  I went straight up to Michigan once to trace the Canadian border and bend down through the Dakotas to Colorado.  I have traced the Gulf Coast and the Mexican border to get there, too. My list of camped in states grew and I was hooked on filling them all in.

My reading of history has led me to Civil War camp; that is to go to locations like Harper’s Ferry, Antietam,  Corinth, and Vicksburg.  I once traveled to Dayton, Ohio, based on my reading of David McCullough’s book about the Wright Brothers; I circled back through Kitty Hawk on that trip.  Camping near Springfield, Illinois, came from reading about Lincoln.  I like connecting reading and camping.

I sometimes take a notion to intensely camp through an area like every campground along the Blue Ridge Parkway or all the front country camping grounds in the Great Smokey Mountain National Park.   I have made annual camping trips to camp at Stephen C. Foster State Park in the Okeefeenokee Swamp, one of the quietest, darkest places on the East Coast.

My current big tent-camping idea is to trace America’s volcanos, an idea that came from a book I read and from pitching my tent in Craters of the Moon National Monument in southern Idaho last year.  The coarse black volcanic sand there will wear your shoes out.  Ruts from wagon train wheels still trace the pioneers route.  Likely I would follow the wagon train route to enter California to turn up to and maybe into Canada to see volcanoes.  Mount Saint Helens interests me in particular.  Being where continents split and magma shot out of the Earth to form what we now call a country somehow centers me. even more than standing by a free-flowing river.  I would like to travel with some roadside geology books and learn to see where I am in a new way.

Of course, I am always striving to fill in my ambition to visit all of our National Parks.  Stringing together a series of cities and towns I would like to walk around in is another vague idea I have in mind.  My thought is to always try to be just two weeks on the road, moving at a fast pace to get back to Nita.  I so wish she were able to travel with me.

 

 

Now my guilt is centered on my feeling of having too much.  I have a house worth something like $200,000 and three vehicles.  Other than utilities I have no payments.  Between Social Security and our state pensions, Nita and I have an income of about $75,000 a year.

I own more stuff than I need.  When I go to a store, I try be prudent, but I do not have to pinch pennies.  I suppose my  default is to save.  I have been poor during phases of my life and I have always been a person who refrained from gratuitous purchases.   I keep thinking I should buy a smartphone or a tablet because I think people are supposed to own those now.

Journalism is a pool I swim in.  I read it daily and like big national and international stories.  Last night as usual I watched the PBS Newshour.  Their stories take me places and I derive considerable satisfaction from traveling via reporting.  Last night I saw the second part of coverage of a refuge camp for refugees from Mogul, Iraq.  The reporter focused on children who were enjoying the novelty of playing and being able to go outside.  Some were drawing on paper for the first time in years.

They got into my head.  Why should the accidental circumstance of my birth in an affluent country give me such a tremendous advantage?  I am a mid-twentieth century born white person who was a child in the 1950s.  The world has always been my oyster.  I got farther than either of my parents in life.  Neither Harold nor Leona had a high school education.  I could have gone way further had I been more ambitious.  My public service side held my love of a big income in check.

As child I was separated from my father several times.  Those times were lean.  I was married at eighteen and lived with my in-laws for a while.  During my first few years of marriage, Nita and I truly counted every cent, but I have never know true poverty or hopelessness.  Why should I have so much?  I guess I expect struggle.  I suppose my immersion in the kind of journalism I get from The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Newshour, and The New York Times has widened my perspective so much that I am self-conscious about not having to struggle.

Once when I was visiting my Grandmother Irvin on Leheigh Lane in Altoona, I walked around the neighborhood, stopped at each mail box, and raised the flags.  Was I eight or nine?  My mail at 513 West Church Street, Saluda, SC, was left in a box attached to the house.  I did not understand that raising flags on mailboxes was a big deal.  For sure I got into deep trouble.  The scolding was unnecessary.  I felt terribly guilty.  I can’t laugh about it even now.  I should have known better.

When I was in high school, maybe the tenth grade, I joined a fund for struggling children in foreign countries.  I received a photo of my child and sent money every month.  The subscription was similar to my Book of the Month Club enrollment.  I received literature that reported progress.  I kept that up for several years.  Why?  Guilt, I suppose.

My second term paper at Saluda High School came during my junior year.  Its thesis was something like “Hawthorne’s personal sense of guilt is evident in “Young Goodman Brown”, The House of Seven Gables, and The Scarlet Letter.  Where did that come from?  I tried to follow certain autobiographical facts from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s life as they related to themes and characters in his fiction.

I think that some humans are born with a strong sense of morality that attaches to guilt.  My mind runs to George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and Major Barbara: both are clever studies on morality and social responsibility.  My years in Baptist Sunday School, Training Union, and Vacation Bible School come to mind.  Maybe my guilt is part of being born at the perfect time in the best country.  The serious idealism of the 1950s gave way to social activism as I grew into adulthood.  Ralph Nader and Martin Luther King were the heroes that replaced Johnny Unitas and Mickey Mantle as I hit puberty.

I suppose the cultural nuts and bolts of my guilt are derived from having lived through good times in a culture that seems to have affluence as its highest goal.  I think that the notion of being judged superior for having accumulated wealth is hollow.  Maybe my guilt is my curse of self-awareness in this new age of admiration of billionaires or maybe it is biological.  It unsettles me.

 

Stays in my pocket since last week.  It costs $1.07.

What it does for me is take me out of myself for a second or so.  If I toss it high enough, I am lost in its trajectory for several seconds.  I sometimes bounce it off a wall.  When I get a chance, I toss it back and forth with Nita.

I suppose it is ineffable how the rubber sphere takes me back to the solid red versions I had as a child.  My new one is yellow with orange stripes.  As a child I was seldom without a ball of some sort.  I remember bouncing a basketball from my house on West Church street to the outdoor basketball court at Saluda Elementary.  I would shoot at one goal and then another and take the long way home bouncing all the way.  My knuckles swelled to twice their correct size.

I returned to ball throwing a couple of decades ago at Northwestern High School.  I think I found my first ball and jus started tossing it to relieve tension.  For a while tossing it at my door between classes as I monitored upstairs A-hall became a habit.  I would just lean against a wall and toss.  Inevitably a student would smile and become involved in play.  I loved catching a student looking my way so that I could toss it over.

Sun watches me now as I toss it outdoors but I know better than to allow her to have it.  Her tail begins to wag just seeing it come out.

When a ball is in the air, the mind goes to it and it only.  I seem to stop time and step out of my self momentarily.  Every other thought becomes secondary.  The aerial suspension forces my concentration on the pending convergence with my hands.

I like skipping out of myself.  Were I in Congress, I would like to toss one to an angry Republican so that we could come together for a brief spell.

 

 

I rarely lose my temper these days.  I think I am too old to let myself get worked up.  Today was an exception.

For the second time a neighbor’s pit bull put its teeth into the side of my dog Sun’s neck.  Sun did what she did about two years ago.  She remained still, only growling a bit.  She seems to know not to fight in general and not to fight from such a position.  I stepped back the full length of the leash.  The female of the house realized what her dog was doing and hollered “Brindle” repeatedly and came running.  She picked up the smaller white dog and continued hollering as she retreated with the small dog.

Her hollering brought the man of the house out.  About ten feet short of the street scene he was able to call Brindle off.  We were on the side opposite of their home and aligned with the home that comes before becoming aligned with their house.  We were more than fifteen feet from an imaginary street zone that would have fronted their house.  Just like last time.

The sun was out on this freezing day and Sun and were taking our usual short block, one-mile walk afternoon walk.  I was enjoying the blue sky and the melting snow.  Just like the last time, the attack was a bolt from out of nowhere.  I should have looked as I rounded the corner to glance toward the house as I usually do.  I have intercepted my dog-walking on occasions when I saw that the pit bull was out, a rarity.  It is usually to be heard barking indoors.  If I see the dog,  I turn around.

What caused my mini-volcano to emerge was the lack of contrition or apology.  As I began to move away, I stopped to complain loudly about their not controlling their dog.  “I have right to walk down the street!” I hollered.  Then I kept on going for three or four sentences. “What kind of citizens are you?” came out as a scream.  I think I said something about dangerous pit bulls in my third utterance.

The lady went ballistic on me.  I countered with “What if my dog or I had been hurt?”  (Sun was fine.)  Because Sun was not injured, she saw no wrong.  Neither the lady or the man expressed regret.  I think that is why I was so angry.  They should have been apologetic.

The man said what he said he had said last time.  “If you would just let your dog come play with Brindle, all would be fine.”  I walked away speechless.  I do not remember his saying that last time when Brindle attacked when I was walking with Brian Nakosone and Sun.  Today’s episode was nearly a carbon copy of last time.

I do not plan to bring Sun into their yard or even close on the street.  I have no appetite for a dog play date with Brindle. A hundred yards later brought me to the corner and Ragin Lane.  My thoughts were centered on my rare outburst.  I rarely lose my temper, but I am glad I did.  I hope some his close neighbors witnessed the little street theater that I acted out.  Losing my temper felt strange but therapeutic.  Maybe humans are designed to lose tempers from time to time.  I used to pretend to lose mine with a class at school.  Doing so seemed to wake them up a bit, though any teacher who regularly loses his temper would not last long in teaching.

Pit bulls are dangerous.  Their defensive owners are dangerous.  In a skinny minute I would put my dog down if it were malicious.  A dog is an animal.  People should not be threatened by the malicious breed. In November an elderly man was attacked by two pit bulls belonging to two separate owners in York as he decorated his yard for Christmas.  He spent about two weeks in the hospital and faces more surgery.  Mayor Eddie Lee conducted a hearing to try to enact an ordinance governing malicious dogs.  It went nowhere as pit owners came out 100 strong to defend their breed.

Rare is the day when there is not a story about a murder in the Charlotte area.  Rare is a week without a story about a pit bull attack in our area. Guns are tolerated.  Pit bulls are tolerated.  I just do not see how so many can be blind to common sense.  Putting pit bulls and guns ahead of citizenship is not rationale.  What goes on in their heads?  I suppose Brindle was cuddled and given a treat.  I am OK and Sun takes aggression in stride, but lunatics inhabit suburbia.

 

One of my best compositions is about the houses I have lived in.  I wrote it about ten years ago and have it and other autobiographical compositions stored in my computer and printed out for storage in my fire box.  My thinking is that someday someone might want to access what I was like, what I thought. (My first blog entry, Why I Created danielforrest.org explains that in more detail.)

In thinking back through all my houses, I traveled back into my self and came to realize who I was in those spaces.  Will remembering myself through offices work?  I am not sure but I have private reason for choosing the subject.

I have done some thinking on the subject from my viewing of Mad Men.  It is a superb television series that springs from its office setting.  Don Drapper and all of the characters were who they were in large part through that office work setting.  Of course, being a large advertising agency in NYC in the 1960s meant that offices were hierarchal: size, placement, and decor mattered and related to status.  Copywriters and women did not have offices.

Mars Inc. comes to mind, too.  The largest candy maker in the world has an open office design without hierarchal designation of any sort.  The CEO does not even have a special parking spot.  I could go on about this giant confectionary company that arose out of supplying candy that would not easily melt to WW I soldiers, but its office philosophy is part of is excellence.

As a small boy I reported to work at C.B.Forrest and Sons at the corner of West Church and Main Streets downtown Saluda.  My regular job was to make suit boxes up and fill the two bins on either side of the triple mirror in the suit department.  They were dove gray with a medium blue C.B. Forrest logo.  I knew I was done when both bins were full as high as I could reach.  For that work I received a quarter.  If my father Harold was not too busy, he would walk over with a customer to chat me up.  I remember looking up at him in to see the yellow tape measure that always hung around his neck and crossed over the starched white shirt that he came home at lunch to change fresh at lunch daily.

The store office area interested me but I knew better than to linger in that tight space just inside the Church Street entrance.  A huge walnut desk with dozens of cubby holes and filling cabinets formed the wall to the store.  Once inside the space the only way to see out was to look down into the women’s department.  Most likely Mrs. Edwards would be watching me.  Sometimes, though, she would be busy with a customer and I would stare at the massive desk piled high with invoices.  It was a fascinating one-person space to a ten-year-old boy.

To move me on Harold or his father C.B. would show up and out the door I went to contemplate what to do with my new wealth.  Part of it would be invested in Mars Inc. for sure, but leftover change would go far in the Five and Dime across the street.

At thirteen I went seriously to work at the Red and White Supermarket two doors west up Church street just past Truman Trotter’s barber shop.  Its office there, like the slightly bigger one in the new store we moved into three years later, was about the size of two sheets of plyboard raised up off floor high enough to require a two-tread step for entry.  It overlooked the cash registers. I do not recall every entering the space but I do remember standing near the step to collect a brown perpendicular pay envelope that held something like twenty dollars for my week’s worth.  Johnny Wheeler and I would be rush out on Saturday nights to get into Simon Wolf’s wee dry goods store to consider the purchase of a garment like a sweater.  Simon was one of those merchants who stayed open past 9 p.m. to capture the remnants of the Saturday crowd.  Hard to believe that I aspired to be a clothes horse!

Certain office spaces from Saluda come to mind.  I will never forget Mrs. Nelle Taylor’s office just past the school office at Saluda High School.  I would go into the main office when required to do my turn at daily devotion with a big silver microphone held up to my chin, but I never spent time there.  Mrs. Taylor’s office was just down the front hall adjacent to the main office  before the first classroom.  It was about ten-feet wide and had an outer and inner area.  I went into the inner area twice.  Once to be told that my dad killed himself and once to receive a talk about college applications.

In some vague ways I see an office here or there at Newberry College or USC Columbia.  I put myself through college with my own earnings and the $8,333.00 split of my dad’s insurance money.  Rarely did I enter into an office at college and most were closets stacked with books occupied by professors who reluctantly took time to initial a document that I had to have signed.  I used one college handbook–I wish I had it back–to matriculate through three years of USC.  It had my notes and was to me a kind of Bible that I studied.  I remember showing sections of it to Nita.

No office comes to mind in my time in the U.S. Army and South Carolina National Guard, but in 1972 I became a teacher at Rawlinson Road Junior High School on West Main Street in Rock Hill for ten years. Its office is clear in my mind decades later.  I usually arrived an hour early to find principal Mike Pinson at the secretary’s desk typing the daily memo on a purple ditto master sheet, which allowed no room for mistakes.  Never did he fail to break his concentration to cheerily greet me.  Without doubt I never encountered a better educator on any level than that hard-driving red-head who gave up a career in chemistry to help children, including my son Chris.

Across from the narrow main area which was fronted by a store window type display that always showcased some club or school activity as smartly as a Belks window, was the nurse’s station with a tiny bathroom.  Straight down the hall a visitor came to three offices on the left and one big room on the right, the ISS room (in school suspension area lovingly lorded over by Mrs. Isom) on the right.

Mr. Pinson rarely set foot in his office during the day.  His rule was to teach one class for some teacher every day, drop in on others, and constantly move about.  Occasionally he would call me into his office to witness.  I hated that.  Striking an adolescent with a wooden paddle required an outside adult to be named on the yellow discipline form.  He made the witnessing short by nodding as soon as it was over and saying, “Thank you, Mr. Forrest.”  I always signed quickly, avoided speaking and staring in order to keep the embarrassment brief.

My classrooms at Rawlinson Road for ten years and at Northwestern for more than two decades were my offices for most of my work career.  I usually was free to use them during my planning period but I was rarely totally alone.  Study hall students with English problems visited most days.  I do remember enjoying the degree of privacy that my classrooms afforded me and missed that alone time when I taught Adult Ed at the Career Development Center and English at York Technical College.  My office in those places was the hallway or any unlocked, unoccupied room that I found.

I remember Superintendent Jeff Savage’s office on East Main Street in Rock Hill vividly from my visits there being in the mid 1970s.  It was on the left-hand side of the ground floor of what had been a large two-story home.  To get to it one moved past a receptionist into his private secretary’s office and then into Mr. Savage’s office.  Befitting a man of his girth and position, he was to be found sitting behind a very big dark desk.  He did not get up when I went in there with my friend Scottie Edwards to say that the pay raise proposal was inadequate and class sizes had grown too large. “You are crazy as hell, boy,” I remember him saying to me in one meeting.  I shakily held my ground and he came to explain his position which had to do with how the York County delegation and York County Superintendent had his hands tied in regard to purse strings.

Inspired by the power of our newly created Rock Hill Education Association, we respectfully marched on by winning over County Superintendent Williamson and the delegation members including Sam Mendenhall, Bob McFadden, Coleman Poag, and Sammy Fewell. I addressed the board that year and in later years to ask for smaller classes and more money.  We played our part in making Rock Hill District #3 one of the highest paying districts in the state.   In later years when superintendents became slippery public relations experts, I came to admire Savage’s bluntness.

Nita and I lived at 1281 India Hook Road when Chris was in high school and Danielle was attending Richmond Drive Elementary School.  I attempted to establish a home office there by placing boards across the coat closet to create a desk.  I sat in there with the door closed and did some work.  We kept our records in there.  It was a bad office because it was windowless, ventless, and too small.  I do not like remembering it because I made one of the worst discoveries of my life there.

Now I sit in our office area in my home on 728 Ragin Lane.  It was originally a carport for the first owner and then a solid black and orange office for plumbing supplies big enough for storage and a secretary who helped Bill Bufford keep records and make sales.  With Curt Shoaf’s invaluable help, we turned it into a bedroom for Danielle for the first few years of our rehabbing this old 1955 ranch home.  Upon my retirement my first big project was to tear out the drop ceiling, build shelves, and paint. I enjoy my time here because I have windows, space, and privacy.

“Office” brings up endless ideas.  I think that iPhones are a kind of new office and I think workers who have the benefit of privacy to concentrate are more productive.   I have only recently had the luxury of a nice office; it is important to me because I can isolate myself and think in here.  Work space matters.