Lamar Howell's Weblog

THE LOST-AND-FOUND CORVETTE

Today a man with the water dept was working across the street. When he saw me he yelled out “Do you want to sell that corvette?” I couldn’t believe that he had recognized my son’s 77 midnight purple Corvette 90% of which was hidden underneath the gray cover and the random things I had piled on it. There’s a reason he recognized it–he was the guy who sold it to my son eight years ago. I cleaned off the car, took off the cover, and he stood there marveling at his long-gone treasure. “I’ve never seen another one like it anywhere,” he said.

That’s how God sees each of us today. Under the careless deposits of things left unfinished, things tossed, maybe forgotten, lies a self-made defensive cover over the priceless irreplaceable treasure of a devoted life. It is something we’ve protected from the dust of disappointment, and the inactivity of lost opportunities. But someone still sees and values it. It’s God. He can recognize it even from a small exposed corner by its color, its contour. He recognizes it because it is the design of his dreams.

Men, underneath the embarrassing load of non-related things piled onto our dreams lies a reserve of head-turning, explosive, tree-uprooting power. Underneath the garage dust of spiritual neglect is the hard shiny luster of the true extension of our personalities – a spirit-empowered true warrior, or darkhorse, of God. My wish and I believe God’s desire is that we will all find our true passion again and rehearse it every time we meet together as men, by the way we honor and respect the real man of God who may be undercover.

“Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when His is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.”

I want to own
a piece of the river where I grew up,
just so I can be on my own land
near the water’s edge.
There, to touch the smooth stones,
to listen to the water breaking over the dam
and cascading into waves and suds.

I want a build a cabin, a retreat near that river
where I can be a child again.
This time I’ll be care-free,
and rediscover its wonders.

What is drawing me back to that river
in a homely nearly-abandoned town?
Once I’m settled in
this longing may pass.
Then I may yearn for the place of my birth,
to go back there
and see the grasses blowing in wide fields
resting, held fast by orange clay.

There is no river, only springs
my father once told me about-
Coffee springs was the name.
Perhaps the water is brown
like the name of the county
‘Coffee County’
But for now I have no sentiment
for Alabama.

I want to go back to Deep River
and feel its pulse in the heart of North Carolina

That’s how old the child
trapped inside me is right now.
But, the child is getting younger.

I just got my book DEEP RIVER: The Little League Years into print. It’s available at http://www.lulu.com for about $17 including taxes and shipping and handling.

You can also call my cell 817.247-2215 and request a copy

or email joneshowell@yahoo.com

Pay me by PAYPAL or a personal check.

Call me Ishmael

Hate me if you will

Wish me into oblivion

I will not go like a hidden son

Because I am meant to exist

I feel my destiny

You call me a mistake

I am not

I am the fruit of the designs

of the great-grandmother of Judah,

I was mocked by her jealousy

She embittered her husband’s very son

I was undone by her

while my father looked away

I was mocked and rejected

but found by Yahweh in the rocky desert

He followed the hollow sounds of abandonment,

gave me sweet water

To wash down the sharp iron dust of rejection

There God gave me a destiny

a hope toward which I must plod

The Angel of the Lord

promised me greatness

progeny

Kings and Princes

among my descendants

His presence guided me in my youth

God gave me skill

made me an expert archer

To find the mark

and bring down the prey

As if to say

He wants my life sustained

God gave me a wife

and children

The best of Egypt

The richness of the Nile

I will find my way back

to Abraham

To the God of Abraham

and my God

Embraced as a worthy son

Dying to live and forgive

and be forgiven

Hate me if you will

But do not ignore me

Call me Ishmael.

Deep River: The Little League Years

order from lulu.com, or call or write me

joneshowell@yahoo.com ,  817.247-2215 cell

Biographical novel

by Jones Lamar Howell

Young Jones has just watched his mother die, and when his rebellious sister Caroline takes control of the household in place of the troubled father, the family begins to disintegrate. Jones finds meaning for his life through his new passion for Little League baseball, his odd friendships in the small town, and his somewhat mystical link to nearby Deep River.

Besides his respectable classmate Mark, Jones befriends Buford the simpleton, and the future-criminal Donnie. He also has dealings with some of the quirky townspeople, such as Donut the town drunk and his sissy brother Calvin, and the blue-haired street evangelist Sister Shaw.

When Dick Clark and Merle Haggard come to make a movie about bootlegging during the Depression – with Deep River in the setting – Jones finds time apart from baseball to learn about the history of Ramseur and to observe its citizens’ uproarious attempts at fame.

Besides being a place for adventure, the river becomes a retreat from family conflicts, especially after Jones sights an enormous osprey there. When the bird appears in his dreams he sees this as a sign of destiny. He feels conflicted, however, because in his dreams the bird is always in danger.

The family is not short on troubles when Stacy the Worm calls on Caroline. A love triangle in the movie oddly parallels what Jones sees happening in his own family. Jones despises Caroline’s behavior and her mistreatment of their weak-minded sister Jeanette, but is too timid to stand up to her. When a paralyzing illness strikes Caroline, long-buried sentiments about their mother’s death come to the surface, with talk of Caroline being under a curse.

Between visits with family – and sometimes the hated Stacy – to see Caroline in the hospital at far-away Chapel Hill, Jones continues to gain confidence through baseball. He experiences the highlight of his two years against the number one team in the league. He faces nineteen batters, striking out fourteen, and gets sweet revenge on those who mock his team. When he comes home with the exciting news, he is met by his drunken, enraged father who strikes him in the back with a shoe.  The next month Jones makes the all-star team, but their only game is anti-climactic and becomes a blur in his memory, the bruise in the middle of his back signaling a meaningless end to baseball.

Months after both baseball and the filming ends, Jones goes with his neighbors to a drive-in theater to bask in the glory of their very own movie, Killers Three. In the final scene of the movie, all the townspeople, even the weird ones, are seen huddling together as the audience for a fake Merle Haggard concert.

On Christmas Eve the town has a special meeting to recognize all who participated in the making of the film and to announce the re-opening of Ramseur’s refurbished theater. Jones attends the meeting and afterwards walks back home across Deep River. It begins to snow, and in the downy quiet, four days after his thirteenth birthday, Jones finds peace and a quiet understanding that his destiny will take him away from this town, and from the river that helped shape his life.

I asked

why I always try to reach the unreachable

He answered me

and the answer is always

Peace

And peace is enough

Peace is better than a show of power – it’s wisdom

Peace is fresher than a morning shower – it’s securing

More enduring than affirmation or denial

It’s the simple meal before the deathly trial

Peace precludes the bitter herbs of regret

the officious shadows of debt

Peace is not the river, it’s the river still

Peace is not the night

it’s the closing cloak of dark quiet

not the trailing off of sound

but the weighty crown and company

of silence.

I raise the white flag to my Conqueror,

then yield to the undertow of his compelling waves of mercy

I oil the rusty hardware of my soul and

brace for the pipewrench of the Master Craftsman;

I place myself between the jaws of the universe’s Nutcracker,

and  jettison the burned-out rockets of self-will and self-reliance;

Finally, I release the smoking brake of my descent down the mountain of control.

My heart – you broke it, sorta

You started with the aorta

then tugged at the veins and artery

and unplugged the main part of me.

You closed the right ventricle,

choked it tight, then you pulled

and shocked the valves

You shouldn’t have

interrupted the rhythm

and messed with ’em,

rushing from chamber to chamber.

Gosh, the danger!

But . . . that’s romance.

(I’m  not de-fibbing)

We take a chance when

we  give someone our heart.

This Christmas we will write a page of family history,

but not with paper and pen.

We’ll write it by looping the veins of a bloodline,

curving and crossing and dotting inner living flesh,

etching it with glances into pairs of blues and browns—

at once both tender and genuinely recognizable.

Our ink is the transparent salty elements

escaping roundly and fugitively from those eyes

and forming straight lines, falling, heavy with their own gravity

We’ll write this page with both hands and arms wide open,

holding on for a too-swiftly-passing moment,

then letting go—for fear of clutching

and needing, and letting each other know it—

before our cheeks pink up and flush with embarrassment.

Together we’ll sign off on that document,

with many silent intricately-woven motions of hand-passed dishes,

warm and colorful and care-filled.

Most of all we’ll seal that page with the cracking whispers

we feel escaping from quavering lips,

our hearts catching them before they hit the ground

or slide down the unresponsive wall onto the floor

God forbid that we should lose this page of family history

or place it in an attic of apathy,

a corner of complacency,

or even relegate it to the same dusty fate of common literature.

Rather, we painstakingly tack it invisibly and securely onto our hearts,

or slip it somewhere between Genesis and Revelation:

the very hearth of life

We must put it where it will forever remain,

and pledge to keep on writing

until every touch and word become part of that story

and that history becomes the very substance of eternity

 JLHowell MMXmas

I can retire in five months
A scary thought I ought not think
But I even dream about it.
What kind of flare or fanfare –
should I dare do something outlandish?
Some offhand humor or dance routine
might doom or diminish my chance
for another career if news got out
that I’d slid down an aircraft emergency shute
with two fresh whipcream-topped frappacinos,
or used the PA system to cuss out my boss
then sweetly tell my comrades “My bad,”
that I had turned from teacher to preacher.
I could use scores of plays on words
To conceal they way I’d call them nerds
or worse, morons or automatons.
Then I would be the renegade tetragrammaton in the movie Equilibrium 
who finally admitted he had emotions
and cried when he heard Beethoven.
Then, on my way to prison I’d laugh at them slovenly plodding
to their intellectual destruction
Nodding as they sign papers they never read and commit mass-logicide,
all the while turning aside to fake a smile,
pouring caffeine down into that machine they traded in their heart for,
telling themselves ‘it’s all for the money’
and ‘it’s a deal ’cause if I die here I won’t feel it.’
Is that the job I’m leaving,
Or my twisted way of perceiving it?
I don’t know, that’s why I writing this.