The Hare Scrables and Real Life Survival

It's a little disconcerting looking down and seeing a stitched wound on your belly.  It reminds me of war time, but never have I fought in a war.  Fighting in some way is not far from my sensibilities, because when I dream almost always I dream in vivid, stark, realistic pictures of my own survival.  There is a plot, a scenario, often that lands me squarely on the ground of a foreign domestic community that requires me to operate at my political best.  I learned politics while working for the cruise lines.  It would have been nice if I had inherited this knowledge, because it would have come in handy attending both Ramsey Street Elementary School and Washington Drive Junior High School.  Each were predominantly black schools in Fayetteville, and the Fayettevillel City school system only recently had become racially integrated.  I remember exactly when the first black children were "bussed" across town to Belvedere Elementary School which later was renamed Margaret Willis.  The children were chocolate chips.  They dotted the otherwise vanilla ice cream of our school.  When I was bussed to Ramsey Street and later Washington Drive, I had no idea of the reason why.  It was because our neighborhood of Greenwood Homes, behind Eutaw Shopping Center, was a stone's throw from them.  If one flew as the crow flew, it only would take a few minutes to travel from this neighborhood to either of these schools.  The same was true of E.E. Smith Senior High School, where my mother taught home economics.  Only recently have I discovered this.  While embarking upon a leisurely Sunday afternoon motorcycle drive on my Honda CB-250, I decided to explore this line of demarkation between white and black Fayetteville.  It not only is delineated by the local water shed,  also more traditionally it is delineated by railroad tracks like most southern towns.  You have heard the phrase, "The wrong side of the tracks."  Google Satellite is indispensable for research.  Just as the internet began as a network of academic data bases for the advancement of nuclear science, our world wide web still remains a convenient and far reaching institution for the advancement of knowledge.  I wish American society would reinforce this concept.  After moving back to Fayetteville after playing piano on ships for over a decade, I became fascinated with the city planning of a town named after the Marquis de Lafayette.  It is intriguing to map the rolling neighborhoods of Fayettenam, as they unfold naturally along the the preexistent water shed.  This line of demarkation between Greenwood Homes and Murchison Road is both the CSX-T railroad spur servicing Fort Bragg and Little Cross Creek.  Little Cross Creek is a tributary of Glenville Lake, and all of its surrounding landscape is dense foliage.  It only was my clever junior high school buddies who figured this out back in the day.  While each day as I sat on the school bus tooling down Pamalee Drive I took in the scenery, it only was now after using Google Satellite that I made this discovery.  When I was bussed to Ramsey Street, it was not of such consequences to me.  When you are a child, it would seem race was not such an issue.  I was not bullied, and I had acceptance because my sister also was attending this school.  The teachers seemed to know me all ready.  I was the president of my fourth grade class, and I made straight A's on my last report card in sixth grade under Mrs. Smith.  Washington Drive Junior High School on the other hand was a nightmare.  When we started school in this ghetto neighborhood, I had no friends of which to speak.  Each day on her way to E.E. Smith my mother would drop me off on the school ground early in the morning.  I knew no one.  There were gangs of people standing around both black and white.  I felt alienated, and my only recourse was to offer another neighborhood friend a ride to school with us each day.  He was my cover, and it worked for the most part.  I tried to work my way into a cool clique, but they would not have me.  It took many months before I became friends with a few guys in one of these cliques.  It happened, because I was both smart and artistic.  It didn't hurt, that I all ready was a good musician giving me a head start playing trumpet in the school band.  I lived in fear for the majority of the two years I spent at "Drive."  I was bullied regularly, and unlike the members of the cool cliques I did not yet possess political skills that enabled me to disappear into the crowd.  Often I heard, "Hey boy, give me some money."  I heard the rumor that Steve Crumbly was going to kick my ass after band.  It didn't happen.  I had a large, sharp, metal desk bolt whizz past my ear during homeroom.  It was thrown by a member of the Lee family resembling the albino thug in the film "The Firm."  It was frightening, because how were we to know its intent?  Certainly a large bolt hurling at high velocity could have caused irreparable harm to my head.  I made a mental note of it and continued with my tortured junior high school life.  For the most part I was afraid.  My subconscious dreams today allow me to solve these issues remaining both self-sufficient and alive.  My dreams often encapsulate an entire plot.  The most interesting involved the mafia in Columbus, Ohio and their insistence I skipped town with a satchel full of their money.  I didn't skip town.  I wrecked my white Toyota Tercel wagon driving too fast through the winding curves of North Columbus ending up at Duke University Hospital a year later.  I awoke fully fixed surgeries and all, but the mob insisted that the statute of limitations on their case were moot as soon as I set foot back in Cowtown.  It became my political directive to keep them at bay (since I didn't have their money) and to continue with my musical career.  As in all of my dreams I have weapons of my own purchasing, but I know first and foremost the way to succeed in life is to not make waves.  I do not antagonize local yocals, I attempt be their friends, but at the same time I thwart their advances lawlessly against me.  It is a more interesting existence than when I wake up.