Let Me Follow You Down--Nobility

[Lightning Rod]

this piece was sent to me by a longtime friend

Nobility by any other name…..
Valentines Day 2007
by Arresdi


“Baby let me follow you down,
baby let me follow you down
Well,
I'll do anythin
in this god almighty world
If you just let me follow you down.
Can I come home with you,
baby
can I come home with you ?
Yes,
I'll do anything
in this god almighty world
If you just let me come home with you.

Baby let me follow you down,
baby let me follow you down
Well,
I'll do anything
in this god almighty world
If you just let me follow you down.

Yes I'll do anything in this god almighty world
if you just let me follow you down.”

Song by Eric von Schmidt
sung by Bob Dylan on the self titled ‘Bob Dylan’ album



Nobility by any other name…..

We are all just animals, exquisite expressions of carbon biology.
No genius that has ever lived so far could have designed us.
We are absolutely incredibly complex mechanical,
hydraulic, electrical, chemical and sentient products of nature.
We are all just animals, equipped with self congratulatory awareness.
We are the animated product of so many biological trials and errors
over an unbelievably long stretch of quiet biological laboratory time
that we are constantly mistaking ourselves for the end product,
when likely we are either a temporary new minor improvement
or another catastrophic failure along the way, soon to be dispensed with.
But nonetheless, the bottom line here is that we are just animals.

Other animals, less linguistic than humans, often display a nobility,
anthropomorphically speaking, that is part of their instinctual hard wiring.
Humans construct architectures around linguistic institutions to give each
other medals when they behave as nobly as animals…. linguistic constructs
like religion, morality, philosophy, history, clan, country. Other animals
just do it. Then, they sniff the air for reconnaissance and they move on to
the next time consuming daily activity.

We tease, pretend, plan, dream, flirt, act, perform, create in order to
attract others into our web of a relationship. Some call it lovers courting.

We are instinctually attracted to others in an illogical desire to have the
object of our desire in our arms in the passionate thrill of sexual energy.
Some say, falling in love.

Birds do it, bees do it, dogs do it, bears do it, raccoons and
fireflies do it, even fish in the deep blue but quickly warming sea do it.
We all love to hump
each other. Maybe we all hump to love each other? Let us thank nature for
some small favors.

Some animals are known to display an unaccountable nobility toward others.
Dolphins are famous for it. Wales also occasionally will inexplicably allow
small weak species like humans to swim along with them. A whale could
flick their tail and turn a human into tomato paste. Elephants mourn their
lost ones and stay with them in some noble display of respect. And I don’t
have to tell anyone about the nobility of many wolf breeds that we call dogs.

So we are indeed animals. Unlike our non humanoid cousins, we are capable of immense cruelty beyond imagination. Well actually, human imagination is the only limit, isn’t it? And we are capable of a nobility also that sometimes
defies
reason.

My very humble opinion is that the only a couple of expressions that
single out humans from the great herds of other animals. One is the
amazing creative drive that produces thousands of kinds of enjoyable
music and the other is the eloquence of the language of physics. As
for love, I don’t know where exactly love fits into the programming
language that includes all our other instincts.

Ok, so with that long and dull prelude to a sad song which I can’t
possibly write for you. I’m here to talk about love. Not the St.
Valentine’s chocolate box , card carrying mass protest against
loneliness that happens yearly on February Fourteenth. I’m here to
bring up the hard wired nobility that our animal architecture
sometimes commits. Somewhere down the line, the word love will by
default be the description of what this story describes, taken of
course, with liberal and anthropomorphic poetic license.


The nobility of friendship

Debra, one of my coworkers, is from a small town in central Texas,
Ennis. Please pronounce the town’s name like ‘tennis’ not like
‘penis’.

Her grandparents Hattie and Lee Lowy lived on the outskirts of Ennis
back in the mid
seventies when they were both in their mid seventies themselves. They
lived in Garrett, Texas in a small mobile home park for elderly types
owned by one Leo Christian, who himself occupied a 14’ x 70’ single wide
home. Garrett is now just off Interstate 45, before that it was US 75.
When Hattie and Lee lived there everyone called it Highway 5 because US 75 had not been completed from Galveston all the way up to Sherman yet and there were old parts that still were the original Highway 5 that went
through every little town that might have a gas station and a roadside
diner. Them was the days for a road trip in Texas. You could eat your way
across the Texarkana to El Paso 1,400 miles of Highway 80 in four days
and never eat the same thing twice.

Hattie and Lee lived on Social Security, barely. Leo the park owner
did too, barely. So, he allowed everyone to have a pretty big garden
at the back of the pasture if they so wished. Everybody in the park
had a garden. Everybody appreciated the taste of fresh food from the
garden. Most everyone of the thirty five souls that lived at Leo
Christian’s park had grown up on a farm. Industrialization, World War
II, corporate farming and the temporary conveniences of city life had
conspired to keep them all from the luxury of retiring on a real
farm. Leo’s mobile home park out in the pastures of Garrett, Texas
down by Old Whiney Creek was as close to retiring on a real farm as
any of them was going to get.

Hattie was Lee’s first true girlfriend. Lee had only had two
sweethearts and Hattie was a warm and lovely human being that
eclipsed the other girl that first ever caught his eye. They had been
married now for 55 years. After the war they moved to Grand Prairie,
Texas and finished raising up the family they started back in 1924,
by 1965 they were ready to hear coyotes and geese in the distance
during winter nights again. Garrett was as good a place as any to
hear coyotes yipping and hear geese honking in the middle of cold and
drizzly November nights.

The Saturday before Thanksgiving 1974 Hattie went to the garden to try
to get the very last of the late peas and squash that might still be
usable for Thanksgiving dinner over at their son Frank’s house in
Ennis. Frank, Frank’s wife Laura and their pregnant sixteen
year old daughter Debra (the Debra that I work with now) were going to
downtown Ennis to shop for Thanksgiving dinner and they were headed to
Hattie and Lee’s to ask if they wanted to go into town with them.

Just about then Leo saw Hattie walking past his trailer headed to the
garden singing a gospel song quietly, as always when she was walking by
herself. Lee was back on the little porch of their mobile home
sharpening the cutlery for carving the Thanksgiving bird. Leo could
see Hattie working in the garden but Lee couldn’t from their place. And
when Leo noticed that Hattie was not visible over in the garden he
looked at the garden to see where Hattie had gone. Then he saw her
laying on the ground next to her basket. Leo ran to Hattie and saw the
face of totally pale and drawn woman that had been lively and singing
10 minutes before. He went back to his trailer and called the police
and told them that they needed to sent an ambulance right a way to
Leo’s Mobile Park , that Mrs. Lowy was down in the garden and looking
mighty, mighty bad. Then he went over to Lee’s trailer to get Lee and
some blankets to put over Hattie. Lee took off running as fast as a
seventy six year old guy does under the circumstances. When he gets to
Hattie. Well, Hattie was breathing her last couple of breaths. She
looked at Lee and just smiled and nodded her head slightly. Lee Lowy
says to Hattie Lowy, ‘oh no, no, don’t go Hattie, don’t go Hattie’. Leo
put the blankets on Hattie and pulled them up to her chin. Lee leaned
over her and kissed Hattie on her cheeks several times. Her breathing
stopped. There was no color left in her face.

Frank and Debra come in the front door asking out loud if
they want to go shopping in Ennis that morning. They walk through the
trailer calling names all the way outside the back of the trailer
saying Mom, Dad? They get over by Leo’s trailer and see Lee and Leo
kneeling with their backs to them. Frank starts running like a
sprinter in a race toward Lee and Leo, Debra right behind not running
like a sprinter but for an eight month pregnant girl she’s keeping up
pretty good. Frank gets to them only to see Hattie and realize his
mom is gone. He kneels down next to Lee to ask him what happened when
he realizes that Lee is starring vacantly at Hattie. And Lee isn’t
breathing either. Lee is holding Hattie but Lee is gone too. Frank
lays him down and feels his pulse. None. Frank feels Hattie’s pulse.
None. Frank does his best to give some sort of CPR that he learned in
the Army to Hattie. By the time that the ambulance gets there the
reality has already
set in.

Of course, as civil servants are want to do, the local coroner wanted
an autopsy to see if there might have been a double suicide or worse, a mercy murder and suicide combo kind of scandal that might justify 15 minutes of fame for him.
But alas, the coroner found that Hattie had died of a huge aortic aneurysm that burst causing her to bleed to death within several minutes. And Lee, well the coroner said he couldn’t really tell. He couldn’t see any major disease or other internal causes for such a sudden death. So he pronounced that Lee died of natural causes.

They buried both of them on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving that
year. It was overcast and dreary. At the burial site Canadian geese honked constantly inside the low hanging clouds as they like to do during stormy weather. As Debra tells it not many tears were shed at the ceremony or the burial. She says that there was this sense amongst every one that it was all right what had happened. That it seemed that no one could be so sad that they could not appreciate that they were witnesses to some poetic tragedy that was more powerful than loss, more encompassing than their emotional void, more in tune with the physics of instincts (ok, ok, ok, I said that, not Debra) and somehow balanced in some natural way that none could express quite right. But apparently everyone found that tears seemed to be out of place in the context of what had happened to Hattie and Lee.

It’s like, you don’t really feel sorry for that elephant standing
guard over its dead one.

A giant standing there for days and days without eating or drinking,
fiercely fighting off hyenas, lions and vultures. The lone animal on the
savanna unafraid that the local poacher will come shoot it where it
stands guard in its loneliness, standing there until it too falls dead
from starvation , observing the final duty to the fallen one. The reality
was that the standing elephant was dead the minute its loved one fell and
failed to ever get up again. An unspoken instinctual commitment had to
unfold. That’s the way it works sometimes. Elephants are just more patient
than Lee Lowy was. An unspoken instinctual commitment unfolded
immediately. That’s the way it works sometimes.

So there is this saying that the grandchildren and great
grandchildren of Hattie and Lee Lowy repeat now and then. They will
occasionally say, ‘Granny died of a torn heart and Grandpa died of a
broken heart’. It reminds them of the longer version of the story
that is part of their own clan’s recent mythology .

So, I thought that I was going to write something about the nobility
of human devotion. But it’s just about St. Valentine’s day and I’ll let you name it
anything you want.
.
But for this St. Valentine’s Day
I hope you find an elephant with a big and noble heart
to love and hold you until the very end of you days together.


“Baby let me follow you down,
baby let me follow you down
Well, I'll do anything
anything, anything in this god almighty world
If you just let me follow you down.

Yes I'll do anything in this god almighty world
Babe if you just let me follow you down.”

[creativesoul]

always like the stuff you post

[hester_prynne]

fuckin great read LROD, thank you so much for that, I totally enjoyed every word.....
Beautiful.
H

[wannabeguru]

I really got to taste you on the cabaradio show (which was awesome ALSO). i second CS ...this is awesome. I can hardly beleieve that this has only now three comments!! Whew. This was SOME WORDS, man. Thanks.