South

The South

I may have been born in Camden, N.J., but my heart and aesthetics are in the South. I like the food. I like the weather. I like the beaches. I think the women are beautiful. I like the fishing and I like the poetry. And I married a southern belle. And Jane was the belle of the ball and everything else in my life.

Jane is a quarter Cherokee Indian, a quarter Asian, a quarter Irish, and a quarter European (German). And I am Jewish and my grandparents were European and Russian. Here is young Jane and young Hank.

Talk about polymorphism, the positive maintenance of variety for variety's sake (Dawkins, "Ancestor's Tale" 2004), with an emphasis on positive.

Jane was originally from South Carolina, a very small place called Woodruff. She was raised there, where her father's people are from, including Grandma Landford, who was a full blooded Cherokee Indian who I met once, who would not let me take her picture because she, like many Cherokee native-Americans believed a photograph would somehow capture her soul.

Apparently, she had relatives on some Indian Reservation because Jane remembers visiting with them and sometimes staying there. This was when she was very young, before they moved to North Carolina.

Jane's mother had brothers who was close, and other family in Eastern North Carolina around Wilson and they lived with an aunt (Spivey) for part of the time. That was when as a child Jane worked their farm, picking cotton, cropping tobacco, helping to put up hams in their smoke house, and whatever else they would do on a southern farm.

Today when they have a family reunion on her mother's side there will be hundreds (as many as 300 hundred) relatives show up. And they are all mixed up. There are blacks, some Asians, other Jews and Catholics, but mostly Southern Baptists.

Jane introduced me to a whole different world. She was poor but enriched with deep and sincere feelings about life and she cared about important things. There was nothing fake about her. She was the real thing.

Here we are, Jane and I, back in North Carolina when we both lived there in the decade of the 80s, before we moved back down to South Florida in the 90s. Today we live in the country again, on about 10 acres in Central Florida with our son, Richard and our three Chihuahuas.

reason and unreason
From Cicero and Lucretius
Wrapped in togas
Struggling between reason and unreason
Battles fought in ancient times
And fought again and again.

History, a register of cruelty
Vertiginous world
Optimistic metaphors
insulting and depressing.

I believe everything is ultimately capable of being explained, that everything is capable of a scientific explanation, and at the appropriate time everything will be explained? In the narrative that follows, I plan to provide a few glimpses of a journey, but not all of the details, which would bore you to death. I will instead present some insight into a transformation of views and struggle toward an awareness of my own personal existence and my attempt along the way to discover an explanation for everything.