When the alarm goes off on my cell phone, the sound lingers, sometimes for hours, after I’ve turned the sound off. It’s like a ghost effect of digital sound. That didn’t happen back in the day of analog alarm clocks–the sound was done when it ended. It’s like those photographs on the cell phone that shift while I look at them, where I see movement, even though it’s a still photograph. Digital ghost effects.
When I graduated from Zachary High School in 1976, my grandmother Eloise Beyette, my mother’s mother, gave me a radio alarm clock to take to college with me. It was my first radio alarm clock, and it was fancy. A big Zenith with stereo sound. I loved it, and I loved the way the radio sounded. Most of all, I loved that the alarm could be set in 20-minute increments. That’s the feature I used the most. I took 20-minute naps all through college. My grandmother’s gift trained me so thoroughly that after a while I could take a 20-minute nap without setting the alarm. My body shifted automatically into wake-up mode at 20 minutes. I’ve retained that ability throughout my life. A lingering body knowledge.
My grandmother, who I called “Grandma Cecil” all her life–Cecil was her husband’s first name, and we called him “Grandpa Cecil”--for reasons that must have made sense to my tiny child’s mind, and the name just stuck–it was years before I knew their actual names–my grandmother bought this magical alarm clock at Worthley’s Appliances in Tomball, Texas, where she bought all her appliances, and where she carried a credit, probably all her life. Money was precious and rare in ways that were elemental, local, and deep in the bone. This vast global world of digital money and easy credit in an amorphous cloud of unknowing with its illusory wealth and insatiable greed did not exist yet, was only a wisp of a dream, a faint, unimaginable desire for things to be easier, more prosperous, more comfortable.
After all, they had a home. They had land, over 100 acres of piney woods with a creek fed by a natural spring and ponds carved out of the land and filled by the spring. Red dirt and pine trees and lakes and rivers, gardens, deer, bobcats, squirrels, and the occasional panther. And always fire ants and copperheads. Sometimes coral snakes, water moccasins too. Taking care of their land and their home and their family, cooking, cleaning, growing food, fishing, that’s what it was all about. They had their own well and water tank, which they maintained. They built bridges over the creek when it crossed pathways through the woods. They selectively cut trees for lumber and maintenance. They had minnow tanks, catfish ponds, and a mushroom cellar. They had a deep freeze off the back of the house. They filled it every year by purchasing a cow, which was slaughtered for them. They had a pantry filled floor to ceiling with canned goods my grandmother canned from their garden–green beans, pickles–dill and sweet, tomatoes, peaches, pears, okra, beets–the best beets ever–a cornucopia of sparkling colors in mason jars stacked high and orderly.
They had the kind of wealth that rarely exists now. But they didn’t have much money. It was a sacrifice and an accomplishment for my grandmother to give me that radio-alarm clock, and I am eternally grateful–a legacy that lingers. It shaped me, literally shaping my sense of time, and giving me a deep sense of my value and how loved I was and how my family was with me, even if our lives and destinies were quite different, that they were somehow always with me.
As I watched and pondered Kendrick Lamar’s half-time show, which they would’ve watched on their big old console Zenith TV if they were still alive and such a TV were still operable, and which they would’ve shook their heads at in total bewilderment, as I watched his operatic performance and many videos dissecting its symbolism, the music and images lingered, playing in my mind over and over. Uncle Sam looking and sounding deranged and dissociated and completely out of touch and out of sync with what was actually happening–an old, ineffective, Uncle Tom-like, accommodationist, reactionary man. Kendrick Lamar crouched in a warrior stance almost mumbling to himself in a rapid fire incantation, like a shaman, not meant to be understood except by the initiated, calling forth his people, emerging from under the car, and swarming. Kendrick Lamar advancing forward down the field, defying the game, like a panther coming straight at you. So much himself that he couldn’t be denied. So much forward momentum that he couldn’t be contained. Naming and describing the game and defying the game in the very act of playing it. Sounding the alarm with a lingering effect.
The United States of Derangement.
