Jack McCray, jazz advocate and Charleston icon, dies

BY ADAM PARKER

aparker@postandcourier.com

Jack Arthur McCray, an iconic figure in Charleston and jazz impresario who did more than anyone to assert the cultural significance of the music he loved, was found dead Wednesday evening in his Coming Street apartment. He was 64.
He died of natural causes, probably Monday night, according to the Charleston County Coroner’s office.
He had been coping with some health problems in recent months, friends and colleagues said, and complained recently of a cough and some numbness in a leg. On Oct. 30, his birthday, he was forced to cancel a family gathering because of sudden back pain.
“We tried to get him to see a doctor, but he wouldn’t go,” said Leah Suarez, executive director of Jazz Artists of Charleston, a presenting organization McCray helped found in 2008.
With a tendency toward self-effacement, McCray was an untiring advocate of jazz and helped create a “scene” in which local musicians could thrive. In recent years, he played a key role in establishing the Charleston Jazz Initiative, in partnership with College of Charleston arts management professor Karen Chandler.
The program, started in 2003, is just one method of institutionalizing and legitimizing a dynamic music history unique to South Carolina. The initiative has succeeded in archiving thousands of images, documents and recordings that, together, reveal the rich and important legacy of the area.
Jazz Artists of Charleston was formed by Suarez and other local musicians, with McCray serving as a rallying point. In late 2007, after years of promoting the growth of live performance in the area, McCray thought that the time was ripe for an institution that could formalize the presentation of jazz and capitalize on the jazz culture he had celebrated for so long, Suarez said.
A long-time writer at The Post and Courier, McCray began his journalism career in 1985 as a copy editor and writer on the sports desk, became an editor of the neighborhood editions, then turned his attention to arts and culture. He retired from the newspaper in 2008, accepting a buy-out, then went on to become a freelance jazz columnist for the newspaper’s weekly entertainment magazine, Charleston Scene.
Drummer Quentin Baxter first met McCray during a gig in 1993 at the Music Farm. McCray came for an interview and proceeded to ask unusual questions, Baxter said.
“He made you think,” Baxter said. “He asked penetrating questions about the music itself.”
He was writing not just about a particular gig but about the way that gig fit into the larger matrix of jazz in Charleston. It was a kind of dialectic, an ongoing conversation that helped to motivate local players, Baxter said.
“He made musicians feel as though Charleston was an important place, and the way he wrote, and how much he wrote, promoted the music to a point where managers of establishments wanted a piece of the pie.”
Before long, the musicians he supported would be playing regularly in restaurants, bars, theaters and festivals in the city.
Born in the Ansonborough neighborhood of Charleston during the Jim Crow era, McCray attended Buist Elementary then C.A. Brown High School, where he played trumpet in the band under George Kenney before transferring to Burke High School.
As a teenager, he spent summers with relatives in New York City, an experience that exposed him to a lively cultural scene that would influence his worldview and cement a love for the big city, according to long-time friend and writer Walter Rhett.
He attended Claflin College in Orangeburg in the late 1960s and was among the group of students protesting segregation and school policy in February 1968 when state troopers fired buckshot into the unarmed crowd. Filled with fear, and horrified at the bloody mayhem, McCray fled the scene as fast as his feet would carry him, toward the infirmary up the hill, he said in an interview earlier this year.
That event would become known as the Orangeburg Massacre.
Married in his 20s, he and his wife Sandra had two children, Terry and Krystal, before separating.
In the years that followed, McCray would cultivate long-lasting relationships with people of all stripes, advance his love of music, and advocate on behalf of young people. He was essentially a cultural anthropologist determined to show the connections between music of different regions, and between music and cultural identity.
“To be able to interact with so many different kinds of people on so many different levels was always amazing to me,” Chandler said. He was expert at explaining cultural evolution, she said. “But the way he was able to articulate it was so right on, so crystal clear. You never left a conversation with Jack saying, ‘I’m not sure what he meant by that.’ ”
When Osei Chandler (no relation to Karen) moved to Charleston from New York City in 1977, McCray was one of the first people he met, and the two men forged a lasting friendship.
Chandler soon was on WSCI radio hosting the Wednesday night Jam Session, a program devoted to jazz. McCray helped, sometimes acting as co-host. When Chandler was offered a second show, to feature Caribbean music, McCray began co-hosting more often, and eventually took over the jazz program, Chandler said.
The two men were on the air together several weeks ago for Chandler’s current reggae show called Root Music Karamu, and McCray lately had been expressing an interest in returning to the radio as a regular host, Chandler said.
In 1981, they started a soccer team called the Little Peles, which was part of Charleston’s youth soccer association and meant to provide urban black children a chance to play the game. Chandler was president and head coach. McCray, too, was a coach, and later a referee.
“He was probably the first black soccer referee in the state,” Chandler said, setting an important example for young people.
The team won the state championship that first season.
At about the same time, McCray’s interest in advancing the cause of jazz was crystallizing. A 1979 jam session in the Green Room of the Dock Street Theatre led to a slot in the 1980 Piccolo Spoleto Festival. The series — 14 events in 10 days — was called “Jazz After Hours.” Many people guessed it would flop, but patrons lined up around the corner of Market Street waiting to hear innovative jazz, co-organizer Osei Chandler said.
“Then what he did was he assembled local jazz musicians for a series of jam sessions all around town,” Chandler said. “These cats were cab drivers, school band leaders, other retired musicians.” There was a core group with others invited to sit in. “That was phenomenal.”
Mayor Joe Riley called McCray a lost “treasure” and his death a loss for the community.
“He was such a fine, friendly, happy, genuinely nice person, with a wonderful smile that was genuine and spirited and nourishing for anyone who came in touch with him,” Riley said.
He worked hard to prove that Charleston’s musical tradition was an essential part of American history and that the city, which produced the famous Jenkins Orphanage Band, deserved to be recognized along with New Orleans as a seat of jazz, Riley said. “And his work and study was quite convincing.”
The Jenkins band produced musicians who played in Charleston and who went elsewhere, taking the local jazz sensibility elsewhere to influence others, he said.
Karen Chandler said her friend was a deep thinker who read voraciously and emerged over the years as “Charleston’s cultural icon.”
He was a visionary and optimist who, decades ago and despite many obstacles thrown in his path, dared to imagine a Charleston cultural landscape at the center of which proudly stood jazz, she said.
“If there’s anything that we take from all of this sadness, it’s that (we) have created it and have to continue it, in his honor and memory.”
Rhett said the notion that music and community are inseparable is at the core of McCray’s philosophy.
“This is one of the few times that I’ve actually been angry at God,” he said. “Jack’s death for me resonated through every level of life and spirit. Who am I going to brainstorm with? Who’s going to be the living library for Charleston? How am I going to un-archive all the ideas that he didn’t write down?”
In jazz, Rhett said, musical expression depends not only on sound. It requires silence, too. It requires a space in which sound and energy, wit, love and joy can swirl freely.
“Jack’s death is the ultimate space,” he said.

Reach Adam Parker at 937-5902. Visit him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/aparkerwriter.

Ray Huff: Learning on the job at the Clemson Architecture Center of Charleston

A shorter version of this story appeared in The Post and Courier on Saturday, Oct. 1, 2011.

BY ADAM PARKER

Architecture can seem a stuffy, impenetrable profession, concerned mostly with compass-drawn angles, blueprints and balsa wood models.

It’s an intellectual profession dependent on refined aesthetic sensibilities, practical applications and jargon that some people find a little forbidding and impersonal, words like praxis, tectonic and spaciality.

Architects calculate. They must figure out how to integrate green space, how to obtain permits and conform to municipal rules, how to combine building elements into a pleasant and utilitarian whole.

But really, good architecture is all about people — that’s what builders and designers like to say.

It’s about making life better, providing services, enhancing culture, creating and beautifying the visual landscape. It’s about collaboration and vision, creative thinking and problem solving and, at its best, art.

In South Carolina, this conception of architecture is well represented by Clemson University’s Charleston Architecture Center and its director Ray Huff.

The center, which got its start in 1989 as way for Clemson to offer students an urban experience, had Huff as its first director.

An arm of Clemson’s School of Design and Building, the center is one of three city-based branches. The others are in Barcelona, Spain, and Genoa, Italy.

“The main idea is to provide our students with a vibrant urban experience that compliments their academic experience on the main campus, which is quite rural in nature,” said John Jacques, director of the Clemson Advancement Foundation, the school’s fundraising arm, and former architecture professor and chair of the faculty.

Jacques, a long-time friend of Huff (the two attended Clemson together as students in the late 1960s and early 1970s), helped establish the center. He said Huff had already distinguished himself as a practicing architect when he was made director of the center.

“He had received national attention by that time,” Jacques said. “And because of that, and because of his longstanding high regard within the community, the dean at the time (Jim Barker, now Clemson president) and I thought he would be a great choice.”

After running the center for its first decade, Huff committed himself to private practice (though he continued to teach), handing the reins to Rob Miller. Miller presided over the center until last year, when he was recruited by the University of Arizona to become chairman of its architecture department.

When Clemson launched a national search for a new director, Huff threw his hat in the ring and was selected. A new Huff era began last fall.

* * *

Huff was born in Orangeburg, in 1948, grew up in Charleston and attended Burke High School.

“I decided that, because I could draw, architecture sounded pretty good,” he said.

So he enrolled at Clemson University in the fall of 1966, a few months after Harvey Gantt, the Charleston native who desegregated the institution, left.

Of the university’s 5,500 students at the time, 5,000 were male and 12 were black, Huff said.

An artistic inclination prodded Huff in the direction of the counter culture, but his was not an activist’s youth. Huff was more interested in thinking about the civil rights movement and its implications, not in facing the water hoses, he said.

He became interested in transcendental mediation and communal living, in art and family, he said. But mostly, Huff was focused on architecture.

“Ray was and always has been a very thoughtful, personable and highly creative individual,” Jacques said of his friend. “He was not reluctant to weigh in on all sorts of discussions, conversations and debates that characterized that time period. And in all cases, he weighed in with an even-handed approach to the problems at hand. He was absolutely brilliant in his response to what was going on at the time.”

What was going on at the time was social unrest, a war in Vietnam, and the maturation of modernism as a dominant architectural style, one Huff embraced.

Across the street from the Ft. Lauderdale house he shared with a dozen others stood the firm of Donald Singer, a respected architect, and Huff, though he had a day job, offered to work for Singer for free in the evenings.

“It was remarkable,” Huff said. The untamed young apprentice got focused.

In 1972, he returned to Clemson, started Synergy Architects and soon began teaching. Six years later he was in Charleston, close to family, developing a new practice at the corner of Cumberland and East Bay streets. His career was on a roll.

In 1997, Mario Gooden joined the practice, and the two partners plotted their future. They had good name recognition thanks to a number of awards they’d won, articles they’d published and audiences they’d addressed. But the pair had never been driven by market demands, so they tended “to be the odd men out,” Huff said.

Their goals were to establish an international presence and to mesh architecture with culture, especially by pursuing public projects that impacted society. They hosted competitions, then started winning them. That improved their standing, and they decided a few years ago to open an office in New York City, which Gooden runs.

* * *

At the center, David Pastre, who oversees the design-build studio, shows off the inventive bathroom experiments: a sink made from a Chinese wok, window levelers that open and close thanks to a pulley device rigged to the sliding door, cast concrete panels that hide hand-fashioned plumbing, reused materials that once served entirely different purposes.

All of this the students made.

Throughout the building on Franklin Street, which once housed the Jenkins Orphanage, furniture is crafted to solve particular design problems. A small library must double as a conference room, so once of the center’s students designed mobile shelving and a mobile librarian desk that slides on casters to and from the wall.

There’s a 2,000-square-foot workshop now operational on Simons Street nearby, and Huff is starting to think about the day when the center can relocate to a larger, more comfortable building to be constructed on a George Street lot owned Clemson.

The students, who range from undergraduate juniors to first-year graduate students, spend dedicate a semester to living in Charleston and working on a project from conception to completion. The studio has a mix of students who specialize in architecture, landscape architecture, design, construction and now, thanks to a partnership with the College of Charleston, historic preservation.

The experience is “structured around the idea of bridging the gap between practice and academia,” Huff explained. Students, who pursue regular course work at the College, benefit from direct experience, working closely with people in the local design and architecture community and getting opportunities to test their ideas in the real world.

It’s called “service learning,” Pastre said.

Students at the Clemson Architecture Center have built bike storage for the Civic Design Center in front of the Gaillard. They have worked with the College of Charleston’s Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art on a public information kiosk and outdoor movie screen made for the 2010 “Bluesphere: Earth Art Expo,” and Richard McMahan’s Mini Museum, installed in the rotunda of the Addlestone Library in 2008.

They have worked with Charleston’s Parks Department to renovate green space. They have designed the Nkabom Centre for Skills Training and Formal Education for Project Okurase, a Lowcountry initiative that addresses the HIV/AIDS crisis in Ghana by working to regenerate communities and teach self-sufficiency.

And they’ve worked with the Medical University to assess how its campus could become more user-friendly, greener and comfortable — “a healing environment.”

“Higher education is very entrepreneurial these days,” Huff said. “You’ve got to respond to the needs not being met in the community.”

* * *

This semester, students in the design-build studio are working on an effort to improve Corinne Jones Park, a city playground, also called Hester Park, in the Wagner Terrace neighborhood.

They’ve performed an in-depth analysis of the site, evaluating current amenities, usage and traffic, and have come up with a detailed master plan. Currently, they are creating models and renderings in the studio, and working with community stakeholders to prepare for an imminent appearance before the city’s Design and Review Board, which must approve the project.

They hope to have the renovated park finished by Thanksgiving, Pastre said.

Matt Compton, deputy director of parks operations for the city of Charleston, said the longstanding relationship between the city and Clemson has born fruit many times over.

“We are happy to reap the benefits of their talents and energy,” Compton said. “They work with us on any number of things, from temporary displays to permanent installations. It’s always nice to work with the students because they aren’t jaded.”

The Parks Department also has worked with Huff + Gooden, especially when they need an “outside-of-the-box approach,” Compton said. The firm designed the Herbert Hassel Pool Building on Fishburne Street and came up with wonderful solution for a local firehouse that never got built, he said.
Some of the firm's other projects include the Malcolm C. Hursey and Mary Ford elementary schools in North Charleston and the Early Childhood Development Center on Wentworth Street.

* * *

The group dynamic in the studio is palpable.

“We stress collaborative learning here,” Huff says, unnecessarily.

Huff and Pastre are the two full-time professors on hand each day, but seven lecturers — professionals culled form the local community — cycle through on a regular basis, offering lessons rooted in experience.

And the exposure to working professionals is what sets the center apart, Jacques said.

“But what they cherish most about having the chance to work with him is that he’s treating them as fellow students,” Jacques said. “He lets them know he’s learning from them, too.”

Joseph Martin, a 25-year old graduate student, worked for a design-build firm in Indianapolis before enrolling at Clemson and joining the team at the center this semester.

“I haven’t slept much, so it’s going well,” he said. Part of a group of three working one aspect of the park project, Martin said the term started with a flurry of ideas that were narrowed down to three broad concepts and then refined further.

Barrett Armstrong, 22, a student of landscape architecture, said the relaxed environment belies a constant energy.

“To an outsider, it looks like we sit around doodling all the time,” Armstrong said. “But there’s a lot of thought that goes into it.”

Richard Chalupa, a 24-year-old landscape architecture student, said the studio experience at Clemson involves much more than theoretical learning.

“The best part of this studio is we’re going to build,” he said.

Werner Herzog reads "Go the F**k to Sleep"

Responses to the P&C article, "Being gay in Charleston"

On Sunday, July 31, The Post and Courier published a long 1A feature article about "Being gay in Charleston," accompanied by three short profiles of gay couples. Needless to say, it drew much comment, including this thoughtful response from College of Charleston philosophy professor Richard Nunan, published here with permission. Nunan's letter prompted a response from the Rev. Peter C. Moore of St. Michael's Church in Charleston, and that in turn triggered religion professor Charles Lippy to write a letter to the editor (which, alas, was not published in The Post and Courier). The entire string is available here...

---

Yvonne Wenger’s & Adam Parker’s thoughtful two-page Sunday spread on ‘Being Gay in Charleston’ was noteworthy as a sign of changing times. A decade ago, it would probably have been unthinkable for the Post & Courier to devote so much ink to this topic, and to do it so sympathetically. (It hasn’t even been five years yet since the SC electorate ratified our state constitutional amendment prohibiting recognition of gay marriages.)

But the article and sidebars also catalog just how far we still have to travel before we can put virulent homophobia to rest in South Carolina, and in the nation. Apart from our local and national indifference to the core meaning of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, what troubles me most about the substantial hostility we still see directed toward lesbians, gay men, and transgendered individuals is the defense of such hostility in terms of religious “authority”.

In Sunday’s article this approach was represented by the Rev. John Van Deventer, pastor of Johns Island Presbyterian, who dresses up that hostility in the language of “loving the sinner while hating the sin.” While this high-minded abstraction may sound more tolerant than the fulminations we sometimes hear from the pulpit, I think the distinction is actually lost on most of us.

To call someone a ‘sinner’ in this sense is to question their moral integrity, their capacity for self control, and for reasoned judgment. In my experience at least, rightly or wrongly, people tend to judge other people by their actions and by the perceived cut of their character. They do not withhold judgment for the sake of some abstract distinction between the sinner himself or herself, and their perceptions of that individual’s actions and character. Self-professed Christians appear to be just as freely disposed as others to conflate sin and sinner.

The only exceptions I’ve noticed, among both Christians and non-Christians, arise when observers believe there to be some temporary divergence between character and action, so that the action is perceived to be atypical of the character. Forgiveness is then more or less readily granted to agents who express remorse for their isolated transgressions, or the desire to modify the “degenerate” elements of character which provoked the transgressions.

Neither sexual orientation nor gender identity qualify as such exceptions, since they constitute sustained dispositions, not temporary aberrations. So in these cases, to “hate the sin” is also, unfortunately, to hate the sinner.

Of course, it is quite contentious to insist that scriptural authority entails that same-sex orientation, or action on that orientation, is always (or mostly?) sinful. There are plenty of revisionist biblical scholars who are not disposed to read passages in Genesis, Leviticus, and Paul in the way that perhaps Rev. Van Deventer reads them. Nineteenth century clerical defenders of the institution of slavery spoke with equal authority about the meaning of God’s curse on “the children of Ham”. The depth of their conviction did not make them right, and certainly did not do much for the moral integrity of Christianity at the time.

It is also contentious to suggest, as Rev. Van Deventer does, that “the problem with homosexuality...is it’s loved turned inward on itself.” Long-term monogamous same-sex relationships strike me as being just as strongly other-oriented as long-term monogamous heterosexual relationships. It defies common sense to suggest otherwise. When thinking about cases of “love turned inward” (toward ones own perceived interests, narrowly conceived?), one might do better to reflect on the implications of Paul’s recommendation that women should be subservient to their husbands (Ephesians 5: 22-24 or 1 Timothy 2 11:12).

The truth is that scriptural passages have been subject to a wide range of interpretations over the years, enlisted in the service of various social doctrines and theories of human nature devised long after the contended passages were originally written. I’ve written about two such competing theories of human nature which I believe to inform the differences between Evangelical and Catholic forms of hostility to same-sex relationships,* differences which have precious little to do with scriptural authority, and a great deal to do with how some latter-day religious theorists think the world should be viewed. This is often the case. It sometimes leads to the achievement of great social good, but it is unfortunately equally likely to lead to great social harm.

Richard Nunan
Professor of Philosophy
College of Charleston

*The article in question appears in the 2010 volume of Biblical Theology Bulletin, and is available for public download at:
http://btb.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/40/1/37?ijkey=qr5Yzw3szSL8w&keytype=ref&siteid=spbtb&utm_source=eNewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1J22

* * * 

Tolerance can't trump theology

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Professor Richard Nunan is right that at times Christians have been intolerant of people with homophile sexual desires for reasons other than specifically Christian ones. But his association of changing views of homosexuality with changing views of slavery and women betrays a lack of biblical understanding.
Views of women and slavery have changed in part because people rediscovered the true meaning of Scripture that layers of culture and tradition had obscured.
Paul's great statement that "in Christ there is neither male nor female, slave nor free" (Gal. 3:28) shows how far in advance of its culture the Bible really was. But his argument that because revisionist scholars have a variety of interpretations about the biblical passages about homosexuality the church should stop calling it "sinful" fails to recognize that these agenda-driven scholars have not gained universal acceptance of their views.
These "revisionist" scholars, are just that -- eager to bend Scripture to say something it doesn't say. Which of them, for example, has been willing to engage Dr. Robert Gagnon's landmark volume "The Bible and Homosexual Practice"?
Their widespread silence in dealing with his comprehensive analysis of what the Bible actually says on this subject is deafening. (See www.robgagnon.net)
Furthermore, Prof. Nunan fails to distinguish between "sexual orientation" and sexual practice. Do we not make such a distinction in dealing with an orientation towards gambling, alcoholism, anger, overeating, or lying? Even though we recognize the cultural, and even perhaps inherited, factors that may influence these tendencies, is it intolerant to call the activities that flow from them sinful? On his reasoning, because of some people's orientation we should stop calling fornication, pedophilia, incest, and polygamy wrong.
I would also question Prof. Nunan's assumption that those with homophile tendencies desire "long-term monogamous" relationships. While some do, the number of sexual partners in the homosexual community exponentially exceeds that among heterosexuals.
Andrew Sullivan is doubtless right when he writes in The New Republic, "There is something baleful about the attempt to educate homosexuals and lesbians into an uncritical acceptance of a stifling model of heterosexual normality."
Then finally, Prof. Nunan makes the uncritical assumption that to identify certain behavior as "sinful" is to demean a person's character.
Quite the opposite. It is to affirm the value of the person. It is precisely because God "loves the sinner" that God "hates the sin." Sin destroys. That's why we need redemption. It is because of the Bible's high view of our humanity that it takes a dim view of those actions that mar the imagio dei within us all.
Tolerance is good as a pastoral impetus. But it is not a particularly useful as a theological foundation. The church should help people with same-sex attraction find hope and, when possible, healing. But it should also continue to identify as sinful those actions that rob us of our full humanity.

PETER C. MOORE
Associate for Discipleship
St. Michael's Church
Meeting Street
Charleston

* * *

As a relative newcomer to Charleston, I hesitate to comment on the Rev. Peter Moore's August 31 letter for it apparently is part of an ongoing acrimonious exchange concerning religion and homosexuality. However, as a retired religious studies professor, I must challenge some of Moore's assumptions.

Moore accepts current biblical scholarship that has challenged centuries of sexist and racist interpretations of scripture, claiming that they revealed the "true meaning" of texts long obscured by tradition. Betraying inconsistency at best, he refuses to consider that fresh insight on passages dealing with sexuality, not just homosexuality, might also reveal scripture's true meaning.

Essentially Moore buys interpretations that support his biases. After all it is not fashionable to be racist or sexist. But he rejects those that challenge his biases. It is still culturally acceptable to label homosexuality as an "other" to be scorned.

Yet as our understanding of race and gender have changed over the millennia, so, too, has our understanding of sexuality. In the world of ancient Mediterranean cultures that nurtured the biblical traditions, twenty-first century ideas of consensual, committed same-gender relationships were simply not part of the worldview of the day. Practices such as pederasty and temple prostitution had some credibility in "pagan" circles. And, as numerous writers have pointed out, the Christian New Testament never records an instance when Jesus himself addressed issues of homosexuality.

Moore also makes a strained distinction between orientation and practice, arguing that acceptance of orientation mandates acceptance of all practices associated with it. That is pure hogwash. Many with a heterosexual orientation--which Moore sees as the only acceptable one--engage in practices such as spousal abuse that most would see as wrong and hurtful.

Let's face it. Human beings, whether heterosexual or homosexual are imperfect creatures. None has a claim on perfection, and those who hold their personal views as indicative of the divine will might need forgiveness for arrogance and egocentrism.

We live in a diverse world, whether we like it or not. To affirm diversity is not to say "anything goes" but to ask, even when we are uncomfortable, what word the divine might be speaking to us in and through all the diversity. The danger is assuming our own prejudices encapsulate absolute truth.

Charles H. Lippy, Ph.D.
LeRoy A. Martin Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies Emeritus
Uniersity of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Flight Dangers

I hadn’t been paying attention.
It didn’t register when, on Aug. 10, 2006, the Transportation Security Administration decided that gels, ointments, lotions, liquids and aerosols represented a potential danger and therefore should be intercepted and confiscated at airport security checkpoints.
It was summer. It was hot. I was working on a couple of stories about the failures of government. I mean, I really can’t be all things to all people.
Then, about six weeks later, on Sept. 26, the TSA relented. A little. Now it was permitting passengers to bring most gels, ointments, lotions, liquids and aerosols — so long as the quantity of each did not exceed three ounces, and so long as each three-ounce-or-less container of gel, ointment, lotion, liquid or aerosol was deposited in a transparent, sealable plastic bag.
At the time, I was working diligently on stories about violent crime and worker exploitation; I was struggling to get enough sleep what with the need to beat the 7:40 a.m. public school bell; I was still too hot and busy scratching my mosquito bites, so this TSA announcement, too, went unnoticed.
To my great peril.
For soon I would come to know first hand what it means to be a true security threat.

Charleston International Airport, June 11, approaching TSA officials after standing in line at the security checkpoint for 10 minutes. AirTran Airways, the “low-cost” Atlanta-based airline that recently added Charleston to its routes, provides a seductive online check-in option. Reservations can be made, seats selected, boarding passes with bar codes printed out, all in the luxurious comfort of your home office. Saves time. Puts you and your carry-ons in the security checkpoint line faster than you can say “Zacarias Moussaoui.”

“Anyone in line with liquids or gels?” the security guard says.
“What did she say? Liquids? Um, is whiskey a liquid?” I ask my wife.
“Well, it’s sealed, right?” she replies. “It’s in your bag?”
It’s in my bag, my carry-on bag, packed among the clothes, protected from the inside edge by various socks and covered carefully with tee shirts. It’s 5:55 a.m. Our flight leaves for Florida at 6:15 a.m. The line to get to the gate is long.
“Any liquids, creams or gels?” the guard asks again, looking at me.
“Um. I’ve got a wrapped gift of scotch for my father, does that count?”
“It’s staying here.”
For a moment I am flustered, an insufficient quantity of caffeine, now significantly diluted, courses through my bloodstream. I’m thinking, I really need another cup of coffee. I’m thinking, What’s the big deal? Surely a sealed, clear bottle of precious single-malt scotch isn’t really a liquid. It’s, well, scotch.
“Is it more than three ounces?” the security official asks.
“It’s a bottle… a gift… for my father… for Father’s Day…”
“It’s staying here,” she says.
“No it’s not!” I protest, with a certain futility I am beginning to recognize. “Why not open the box?” I posit. “You can see for yourself it’s sealed.”
The scotch — a 12-year-old Macallan, aged in hand-picked sherry-seasoned oak casks from Spain — cost me 60 bucks and change. I am not about to make a gift of it to some lucky schmuck at the airport. I am not about to give it up. No way.
“You can try to check your bag,” another security guard suggests.
So I run, run like the wind, limping a little because of my sore foot and bad knee, my carry-on rolling behind me, the scotch sloshing inside.
Three women stand languorously at the counter with nothing to do. They are like perilous sirens perched on a sandbar, beckoning, promising nothing but disaster. I’m panting. I’m imploring them to take my bag, take it, take it away from me, please!
Too late, they tell me. One yawns. Another scrutinizes her fingernails. The computers are shut down, they say. No more bags can be checked.
The plane is scheduled to depart in 10 minutes. I huff. I puff. I start to speak… Then I’m thinking, Maybe I can find someone to hold my precious 60-dollar bottle of 12-year-old single-malt scotch whiskey for me while I’m away, you know, protect it, cradle it, admire it, store it in some safe unseen niche, and I can retrieve it upon my return. I run to the information desk. It’s 6:05 a.m. and no one is there. And I’m thinking, The return flight lands at the Charleston International Airport round midnight… Who would still be here at that hour? Who exactly could guard my precious 60-dollar bottle of 12-year-old single-malt scotch whiskey? Who might I rely on? I see no one. I can think of no one. I run down the hall, past the newsstand, back to the security checkpoint.
I confront another TSA officer. I am now desperate.
“Is there anyone who can keep the bottle safe for me while I’m away?” I ask him, knowing full well the rhetorical nature of my question.
A silent response: He shakes his head.
That’s when I curse.
“I would rather miss my #%&$! flight than give up my precious 60-dollar bottle of 12-year-old single-malt scotch, aged in hand-picked sherry-seasoned oak casks from Spain!” I scream.
“Watch your language,” the TSA officer says tersely.
Meanwhile, my wife and daughter have proceeded to the gate, boarded the plane. They don’t know my status. They don’t know if I’m coming or not. They are dismayed, distraught, discombobulated, disturbed. They have been dissed.
I have been dissed. I’m thinking, Who in his right mind could possibly take away a man’s bottle of precious single-malt scotch whiskey? It’s inconceivable. Well, it should be inconceivable, just as parting from my precious bottle of scotch is inconceivable to me.
And then I’m thinking about how silly this ban on gels, ointments, lotions, liquids and aerosols is. I mean, three ounces is OK, but 3.1 poses a threat? I can buy a bottle of water from a vendor just the other side of the security checkpoint and bring it onto the plane, but I have to give up the bottle of water I’m drinking now? I can get airport officials to load containers of gels, ointments, lotions, liquids and aerosols in the luggage compartment beneath my feet, but I can’t stow containers of gels, ointments, lotions, liquids and aerosols under the seat in front of me?
I mean, aren’t bombs usually detonated remotely?
And then I’m thinking about how removed I am from the world’s conflicts, from suicide bombings and neo-colonial catastrophe. I’m thinking about how successful the terrorists are in Iraq, how an average of 100 Iraqis are dying each day, how dozens of American soldiers are being killed each week. I’m thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the moral, spiritual and physical devastation it has wrought over the decades. I’m thinking about the poor in New Orleans and how they have been betrayed, how their right to a secure life has been denied. I’m thinking of people here in Charleston, struggling to survive.
I’m trying to figure out what, exactly, “homeland security” means.
It’s 6:15 now. It’s too late. I’ve lost the flight.
I wake my parents in Florida to explain the situation. Not very thoughtful of me, I know, I know.
I calm down. The fatalist in me is reconciled. I am here. I need to get there. I have a rolling bag with a bottle of scotch inside it.
I return to the three sirens. Calmly, I ask if they can put me on the next flight. They can. They are kind now, though still disinterested. They tell me to return at 9 a.m. to check in — to check my bag — to leave sufficient time to get through security.
I kill time. My wife calls from the stopover in Atlanta and I explain. I call my parents back. I tell them I leave Charleston at 10:30 a.m. I leave Atlanta at 3 p.m. I arrive in Florida at 4:30 p.m. It takes about 40 minutes to get to the house from the airport. We’ll be there in time for the cocktail hour, I assure my father.
Much, much later I am in Florida. My wife and daughter have been there since 9:45 a.m. My father makes his second trip to the airport.
As he pulls out of his driveway he rolls down his car window to make an announcement.
“I’m going to get my scotch,” he says.

Adam Parker
July 8, 2007

Dread Takes Several Forms

Dread takes several forms. It offers us an emotional range that begins with something slightly more acute than mere dislike and extends to a paralyzing fear of death.
Of course, death is at the bottom of it. Should we find ourselves disconcerted by the arrogant swagger of a grimy man in a loose-fitting overcoat making his way through an enclosed space, it could be because we think it’s possible he will pull out a long gun and spray the room with buckshot. If looking in the mirror we are repelled by a new abundance of gray hairs, or if we sense a collapsing vertebra as we walk the dog, it might be because such developments signify that we are a step or two closer to the abyss.
Tonight, though, dread came unexpectedly, and not because I feared my own demise. No, my dread—my wide-eyed moment of horror—was provoked by my 9-year-old daughter, Zoe, who I could see had, for the first time, truly comprehended the nature of mortality. Probably it was not a conscious awareness, a concrete thought in her mind that revealed the black beyond, but undoubtedly the shock and fear she expressed after a simple joke went mildly awry only could have been the reaction of someone whose life experience had just expanded enough to include a clear sense of the finite. It is a small trauma to recognize in one’s young child a nascent ability to recognize death—to recognize it and to fear it.
It was bedtime. I was lying next to her preparing to read a little from a collection of folk tales by Hans Christian Andersen. As usual, we were jostling, tickling one another, laughing, and throwing stuffed animals around before she settled down for deep sleep.
I placed her alarm clock at a distant corner of the small table in her room and joked that this would force her to get out of bed to turn it off when it beeped at 6:30 in the morning, an hour we both resented with all our might, but which demanded our respect lest the school bell beat us to the punch.
“Noooo, Dad, please,” she said, trying to get out of bed.
I told her I could probably reach it.
“Without touching the floor,” she said admonishingly.
I stretched, I reached, I quickly understood I would need to prop myself up with one arm while extending the other toward the clock. I gripped the bed frame with my right hand and moved the other hand across my body, my torso hanging over the edge. Of course I lost my balance and, with a thump and a smile, landed, back down, on the floor, narrowly missing the rounded corner of a little wooden commode.
Zoe froze with fear, managed to ask me if I was OK, then burst into tears and rushed to embrace me. Quickly I assured her I was fine, that the fall was not profound, that no pain was associated with it and that this was only a joke.
“But I thought you hit that corner,” she said, gasping. She thought I was injured; she thought my health, my wellbeing, my life was in danger. She had glimpsed an inevitably lonely future. Back on the bed, I reassured her. She snuggled close, placing her head on my breast. This is when I realized what had really happened. This is when the dread set in.
Nine years ago, when Zoe was born, our joy was overwhelming. It was a difficult pregnancy, and parenthood had been very much in question for several years. That our daughter emerged into the world was miraculous enough, but her beauty and fine temperament only added to our bliss.
But every bliss, in order to be bliss, must contain a note of dread. Ecstasy, as the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini knew so well, is what one feels the moment love’s arrow pierces the flesh, the consuming sensation whose ingredients include agony, like water so scalding it momentarily feels cold to the touch.
I remember the day soon after Zoe’s birth, before she could sleep through a night, when guilt and pain set in, for I realized I was partly responsible not only for what happiness and success my daughter might achieve in her life, but for any distress she might endure, for certain inevitable disappointments, for unavoidable suffering—and, ultimately, for her death.
I was especially mortified not at the idea that she would one day die, but that I would surely die so much sooner, that I would not be there to help her, to hold her, to try to comfort her, to love her. Oh cruel trick! To grant someone life only to abandon her in her time of greatest need! It is a thought I still cannot bear.
And lying in her bed, with the thick tome of folk tales resting on my gut, my worst fear was partly realized. My daughter, so full potential—her life still at its beginning, her thoughts enlarging, her awareness growing, her confidence blooming—my 9-year-old daughter was, in a sense, already beginning to die. True, she could not yet see the end, or imagine it with the calm rationale of a satiated materialist. But she now knew of the end, and that her path inexorably would take her there.
Awareness of a process tends to set it in motion. For a father, who can travel with his daughter only part of the way, this is no easy matter. It fills me with dread.

Adam Parker
Jan. 6, 2010

SEEKING

Even before we stepped foot in Central Park the pull could be felt, an indiscriminate allure impossible to pinpoint. Inexorably, we were drawn northward and westward along the East Side of Manhattan, past the Lipstick Building on Third Avenue, past the overpriced delis and new bus shelters, past the recently restored Plaza Hotel and horse-drawn carriages offering visitors a chance to see the vertical borough’s best saving grace — this vast, varied green space — slowly, from a perch above the tall wagon wheels.

Once safe inside, away from the motorized tumult and human-powered bustle of the street, my friend and I thought we would simply meander until we found an adequate lawn upon which to throw a Frisbee. We assumed we were meandering. We were not.

In 1992, my fifth year in the city, I discovered a treasure in Central Park. I found it between the Bethesda Fountain and the Loeb Boathouse, in a relatively populated part of the park where street performers stake a claim to one corner or another of the plaza, couples skim the surface of the little lake in pedal boats and others stand in line nearby waiting to pee. But there, among the park’s more active pedestrians, upon a grassy embankment few take the time to scrutinize, stood a cherry tree with something to say.

I realize I am anthropomorphizing, I understand that trees — even cherry trees with their sudden curves, brief flowering and hidden toughness — merely exist, grow, bear fruit, endure disease, crack and die. But it was difficult to look at this tree, my discovery, and fail to infer some significance. As with all things, the tree had been affected by its environment: it bore the signs of use. Moreover, it stood in this place, a nature preserve every inch of which had deliberately been made by human hands, a pliant rectangular park in the middle of a durable cityscape, at once a verdant antidote and a complement to the streets outside.

The cherry tree stood matter-of-factly: “Here I am.” Probably planted there a half-century ago, it was a mature specimen with thick limbs and a full if somewhat haphazard canopy of elliptical leaves. One limb, the first to have emerged from the knobby trunk, was embraceable. It arched thickly about five feet from the ground. A substantial portion of the thin bark near the trunk had been worn to the inside hardwood. An occasional climber had straddled the tree there, and over the years the spot had become increasingly smoother. A few people had etched their names into the surface. The limb at this spot was a source of illumination. Its inside glowed red, casting off a humble light as if in answer to the bombardments of a bright city. “You may do as you please,” the tree seemed to announce to no one in particular, “for I am content to glow red and have my bare skin patted by distracted passersby and the occasional seeker.”

It seemed to invite a caress. I was drawn irresistibly to the tree and, like others before me, I hoisted myself up. I sat in this nook straddling the large limb as a baby straddles his father’s thigh seeking an adventurous bounce and a higher view. And like a baby, I stretched forward to embrace the entire circumference of wood, unconcerned about who might take notice. I was hugging a tree in the middle of New York City. Upon this red limb, so near its glow, I was safe from the accidents and confrontations of cosmopolitan life, oblivious to bank accounts and traffic jams and the latest fashionable hangout.

I was, it seemed, very close to home.

So on this recent excursion, sixteen years later, when my friend and I found ourselves sitting on a bench by the bandshell, just steps from Bethesda Fountain, trying to figure out what a videographer on rollerblades hoped to achieve by filming a large, docile pack of dogs while onlookers gathered to gaze, it should have come as no surprise that we decided to proceed northward. Crossing the street and descending the wide stairs of the terrace, I remembered the tree.

But my friend remembered differently. Shortly after discovering the tree, I had introduced him and one or two others to it. It had been a beautiful tree, its attributes meant to be shared. If others had been granted the opportunity to admire it, the honors bestowed would have been well deserved. My friend now expressed doubt, unhindered by my confidence and enthusiasm. He did not remember visiting the old cherry tree here. He thought it was somewhere else. Indeed, along this bluff beside the fountain plaza, the tree I pictured in my mind could not be found. Yet I remembered it vividly, every aspect of it, every detail of its stolid urban triumph. Could I be mistaken? Is my memory reliable? This is a big park. Could the tree be rooted in another place, on a different bluff, by another fountain? No, I was sure it was here. Implausible though it sounds, could it have been moved? Was it destroyed?

My friend and I went searching. He was unwilling to relinquish the idea that the tree still existed somewhere among the forests of Central Park. I was unwilling to abandon my memory. And so I went along, hoping he was right, certain he was wrong, longing to reach into the past for just a moment and feel the smooth red surface with the palm of my hand.

“The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even grow, by incorporating extraneous features,” writes Primo Levi in his essay "The Memory of Offense." “Judges know this very well: almost never do two eyewitnesses of the same event describe it in the same way and with the same words, even if the event is recent and if neither of them has a personal interest in distorting it.” Recollections, Levi writes, are capable of killing. Severe physical or psychological trauma can never be shaken from one’s memory and sometimes cannot be survived either.

But memories can also appease or reassure. They can be called upon in an attempt to reassert one’s identity or worldview, or they can be summoned for comparison purposes. An object is remembered in a certain way, but what does one think about it, or its associations, now?

Perhaps the cherry tree is not a distorted memory at all. Bertrand Russell writes in his book "Problems of Philosophy" that memory is sometimes manufactured by the mind through trickery. “[T]here are cases of very firm belief in a memory which is wholly false,” Russell writes. “It is probable that, in these cases, what is really remembered, in the sense of being immediately before the mind, is something other than what is falsely believed in, though something generally associated with it. George IV is said to have at last believed that he was at the battle of Waterloo, because he had so often said that he was. In this case, what was immediately remembered was his repeated assertion; the belief in what he was asserting (if it existed) would be produced by association with the remembered assertion, and would therefore not be a genuine case of memory.” So maybe I never embraced the arched red limb of the Central Park tree. Maybe I never witnessed its patience and struggle. Maybe this tree is a figment of my imagination, an indication of longing, not experience; of metaphor, not fact.

Without memory’s treasure trove, we would have no friends, no opinions, no purpose. We would be a black hole, existing and not existing at the same time. Our recollections, however faulty, give life meaning. They are soul material.

The cherry tree that so impressed me sixteen years ago might not be in Central Park anymore. Or it might be somewhere unknown. Or it might be an altogether different tree. But I was surely here. I was in the place where I once played and loved, where I learned about life’s contradictions and joys, where I grew up, twisting from the earth like a cherry tree, reaching out to embrace the world. I was here in this lush landscape, being redeemed by Ice Age rock formations upon which this park was put, enjoying the company of an old friend.

Eventually, we found an open space to throw the Frisbee. Nearby there was a cherry tree, one limb, a little worn, arching toward the walking path. Someone had etched a few words into the bark. A lightning strike or some other violence had cracked the trunk at its base.
“Is this the tree?” my friend asked.

Today, I look out my window at a magnificent live oak, its trunk divided in two, its limbs bending knowingly this way and that, aware of one another, determined to show the best of themselves. The corrugated bark is a testament to the labors of growth, the perfect dome canopy a proud display, a positive “Here I am.”

It, too, has a thick, arched limb. It, too, stands implacably over its domain, satisfied with itself, content to be rooted. Perhaps I should climb up. Perhaps I should go to this tree, my tree, and embrace it. And from a higher perch, momentarily joined with another of nature’s wonders, in the company of squirrels and bluebirds, I could survey the land and reconsider my place upon it.

I could remember who I am.

Adam Parker
August 3, 2008

45

Could it be the halfway point?
Are you past it, or still shy?
In any case, the disappoint-
ment, I know, makes you want to cry.

The number’s always gonna grow
whether you move fast or slow.
Blame it on that apple tree
which bequeathed you your mortality.

Not long ago age forty-five
was considered very old.
To reach it and still be alive
was really something to behold.

The number’s always gonna grow
whether you’re to reap or sow.
Blame it on that deity
which bequeathed you your mortality.

Some consolation, I suppose,
is: Forty-five’s an age no sage
remembers well, or would depose.
Today, it’s merely middle-age.

The number’s always gonna grow
whether you’re to catch or throw.
Blame the abnormality
which caused you your mortality.



Adam Parker
April 2009

Everything belongs

Everything belongs to you:
The skater’s scrape,
the swinger’s bruise,
the quick escape,
the cunning ruse—
everything that’s of this place
that’s in your mind that’s on your face.

Everything belongs to you:
The schoolgirl’s cry,
the swimmer’s whoop,
the sad good-bye,
the social group—
everything that’s of this land
that’s in your mind that’s in your hand.

Everything belongs to you:
the dancer’s ache,
the player’s game,
the claimant’s stake,
the careful aim—
everything that’s of this world
that’s in your mind that you’ve unfurled.

Everything belongs to you:
The gasp that becomes the girl,
the girl that becomes the life,
the life that becomes what life
becomes for you, for her, for all.

The swinger is shared with the tree;
the swimmer is shared with the sea.



Adam Parker
May 2009

MANNA

My vital disbelief is shaken by the flesh of a tree.

Such a simple bulbous thing, mostly taken for granted,
this pale offspring protected by a downy, pungent skin,
its perfection intended, its noble purpose clear. Here,
for us, is no perfumed ornament, no mere sustenance.

The cupped palm is comforted, the hand glad to grasp and pull
and carry the pleasant weight of it, lolling, lingering
with gracious reward, a succulence, to ravish and please.

I eat of the fruit, no sin committed, only an impulse
that prompts the mind’s firing signals to trigger a thought:

I am, now, alive.



Adam Parker
July 19, 2008