VANDALIA: THE FIRST VISIT
Vagabond Journal: February, 2003

February 2, 2003
Today at 8:00 a.m. I left Dekalb, Illinois, where I'd visited overnight; I headed south for Vandalia. Along the way I noted that a week and a half ago as I was leaving Rugby it was nearly twenty degrees below zero. Today in Pana, Illinois, I saw a fellow in black leather out for a ride on his motorcycle - and he wasn't the first biker I'd seen.

At Oconee, north of Vandalia, Nokomis Road heads off west towards Nokomis. The Douglas County Historical Society in Alexandria, Minnesota, is on Nokomis Street. What is this Nokomis? Must I actually read Longfellow's "The Song of Hiawatha" to find out? Nokomis, the mother of Wenonah? Wenonah, a settlement just a few miles north of Nokomis, Illinois? Related to Wenona, Illinois, south of Magnolia? Oh, it's a terrible net to be caught in. We won't go there today.

Entering Fayette County from the north on Highway 51, I see trees massed in all directions like banks of hills rolling away. I saw such a thickness of trees a little farther to the north, too, north of Macon, like a wall of trees in the distance. The heaviness of trees, I think, would make the North Dakotans claustrophobic, ay? Rugby, North Dakota, stands at the very edge of the middle west, and if the middle west is about anything it is about knowing and accepting limits, accepting such a stockade of trees. As Jerry Rocheleau suggested, out towards Rugby too many trees will make a fellow nervous. What's as important as knowing our middle western limits, I suppose, is accept-ing them. And understanding that the great wheel turns in its own due course - seed and green shoot, mature stalk and ripe head of grain, the harvest and the litter of harvest, and the land turning back for another season. The turn and return of everything. I write this the day after the shuttle Columbia burned up over Texas trying to re-enter the earth's atmosphere, twenty minutes from touchdown in Florida. Seven of humankind's astronauts died, seven of our star-men and star-women. God bless them, God bless them all.

I arrived in Vandalia about 12:30 p.m. I took lunch - General Tso's chicken - at the Chinese restaurant out where Interstate 70, Highway 51, and Highway 40 all congeal. It was as good a batch of General Tso's chicken as I've been served anywhere, in a place devoted mostly to take-out, with plastic silverware and foam plates, cans of pop, Formica table tops. The place is a little hidden treasure for those of us who like a sauce that bites back.

There really is a heat wave. I had to take my coat off and leave it in the car for the walk into the restaurant for lunch. This is not North Dakota.

When I stepped back outside into the lovely afternoon, I wondered if Vandalia is migrating north and west along the Interstate. Fast food places, the grocery store, the motels at the intersection of I-70 and Highway 51.

Walmart and Ponderosa and another development of businesses along Highway 40 a mile or so to the west. Downtown I count - what - eight store fronts that look empty along the main drag, which is Gallatin Street, not Main Street. There are a couple braces of nice Harley Davidsons in front of a watering hole downtown. There are some ups and downs to the topography of Vandalia, some turns and curves, twists and bends, as if the city were a major river town, when all I see is the Kaskaskia. Perhaps the Kaskasia is more major than I think.

I cross what I'll call the "Going to the Sun Bridge" near the original Illinois statehouse downtown. When was this bridge built, why was it built to point you at the sky as you start to cross, why hasn't it been replaced? A set of railroad tracks passes beneath. If one is headed north, there is a stop sign right at the end of the bridge, where the cross street has the right of way. Why is that, I wonder. The history of a place is written in such cues of landscape.

I wonder - what is the Vandalia Railroad and where does it go? The building that houses the office of the Vandalia Railroad looks like the kind of building where a poet would have his office, if poets had offices. The building appears to sit very near the edge of city property. The Vandalia Railroad's tracks, they look aged and rusting rather than shiny with use, they don't appear to connect to the mainline that runs east and west through Vandalia. The little railroad that could, with an office building fit for poets. I'll have to find out more.

My fortune cookie at lunch said: "Time is precious, but truth is more precious than time." I spent a couple hours walking the streets of Vandalia, trying to get the lay of the city. Fellows on their Harley Davidsons waved at me as they passed. Drivers in passing cars waved. Friendly folks.

When I stopped at Walmart out on Highway 40 to buy some blank audio tapes, though, I heard some fellow not treating his woman very nice. I kept walking back to my car, I sat in the car making notes for a bit, I heard another fellow yelling at his woman. I know one can't generalize from a couple of instances, yet a poet always wants a single instance to be all the time. I need more experience.

People in Vandalia speak broadly and a little more slowly than the folks of Rugby, North Dakota; you wouldn't mistake any of the people from Vandalia for Canadians, ay?

***

I'm to stay tonight and tomorrow night at the Brazle Inn, a bed and breakfast out in the country northwest of Brownstown. Late enough in the afternoon, I headed in that direction. When I arrived, I was greeted by Vernon Brazle, who had one wing in a contraption to keep it from moving. He'd had surgery on his left shoulder January 3rd. He had been icing his shoulder when I came to the door. His wife Judy was upstairs making up my bed.

Judy came downstairs and we talked. She comes from a railroad family of long standing. Her great-grandfather had moved from the upper peninsula of Michigan to Lincoln, Nebraska, where he worked as a farm hand, then got on with the railroad. When the workers on the railway out of Danville, Illinois, went out on strike, Great-grandfather came east to Danville as a strike-breaker. His grandson, Judy's father, would be the union president of those same crews two generations later. Great-grandfather, the scab worker, was eventually killed in a railway accident; his grandson, the union president, Judy's father, was killed in another train accident. Would this be the Danville train?

Judy and Vernon met at the University of Illinois. Vernon was raised on a homestead just across the creek from the bed and breakfast. When I'm offered my choice of rooms upstairs, the one commemorating the railroad side of the family or the one with farm implements that Vernon's dad had used and quilts that his mother had made, I pick the more local farm implements and quilts. I always picked the local; that's part of my problem, I suppose - insisting the local is important. That's how I ended up on this Vagabond expedition, isn't it?

***

February 3, 2003
I met Panzi Blackwell at the radio station this morning about 8:00 a.m., to appear on her radio show "Party Line" 8:15-9:00 a.m. along with the radio professional Dan Michael. I also met Panzi's husband Bill Blackwell who was at the station, he waited for Panzi during the program. I received a tape of the program afterwards from Panzi so I'll have the memories of Vandalia that she spoke of on the air.

Linda Hanabarger, my Vandalia contact, stopped at the radio station briefly after the program and said hello. She was downtown to print out some materials she needed for a presentation in Springfield, Illinois. Her printer at home had stopped working. Linda's voice had stopped working too - she had a bad case of laryngitis - unfortunate, in the face of her impending presentation. The show goes on.

Afterwards, Panzi, Bill, and I went out to Jay's Inn Restaurant for either a late breakfast (second for me) or early lunch - Bill and Panzi insisted on buying. Love is food in Vandalia, too.

Panzi grew up in Vandalia. She was born on the banks of the Kaskaskia River and has never moved farther away than Brownstown where she and Bill live now, fulfilling Panzi's dream of living in the woods. They have two miniature horses, a burro, five dogs, a goose, a cat. What am I missing?

Panzi gave me tips on several people in Vandalia I need to talk to.

Panzi came to writing about 1986. The woman who'd been doing the Brownstown locals had retired and the Vandalia Leader-Union needed a correspondent. She said she'd give it a try, which she did. Then the editor of the Effingham daily paper asked her to write a feature - "Fayette Focus" - once a month for his paper. So the editor of the Leader-Union asked her to do a feature once a week, "Fayette Faces." Finally John Harris, manager of WPBM Radio, asked her to do the "Party Line" program and she said she'd give it a try. She thought she'd do it for six months and now it has been two years. She came to the task of free-lance writer with a varied background - working in hospital and nursing home and shoe factory and whatever else that I've missed. She has never taken any journalism classes, she simply has a knack for telling people's stories.

When she was asked to do the radio show, she'd told John Harris she wouldn't be good on radio because she sounds like Ma Kettle when she talks. "John said I didn't sound that bad," Panzi recalled. "Notice he didn't say I sounded good." There is a little southern backroad twang in her speech.

Panzi jokes that she has lied about her age for so long that she can't remember the true dates of events in her life any longer.

Panzi's husband, Bill, was raised on a farm west of Vandalia, he worked in Vandalia's street department and retired from that recently. He wasn't even retired a week when he thought maybe he had made a mistake - "I didn't have to go to work, but I was bushed." He seems very patient about Panzi's habit of bringing home stray animals, sometimes two at a time. He runs a few head of long horn cattle himself.

*

I arrived at the weekly Evergreen Outreach get-together at the big meeting room in Vandalia's United Methodist Church just before the wave crested, which is to say I was there fifteen minutes early, about 12:45 p.m. I had time to meet Phyllis Rames and a few other people, then took a seat among the crowd of a hundred. The afternoon program opened with a rendition of the Outreach song, new words put to a familiar tune; followed by another song, again new words to a familiar tune. Evergreen Outreach is twenty-three years old, it brings together old folks from assisted living facilities, nursing homes, and the hospital's long term facilities, along with a group of Vandalia's handicapped.

"Inclusion," Phyllis Rames would say, is the theme of her life; and those who come to Evergreen Outreach seem to appreciate being included.

Phyllis is an original brick in the Evergreen edifice. She has a Master's degree in English and has taught part-time at St. Elmo High School, Greenville College, and Graham Correctional Center in Hillsboro, Illinois, but never let her job get in the way of her Monday appointment at Evergreen Outreach. Her first business has always been family, she said, then Evergreen Outreach, then teaching English part-time.

Phyllis's husband was a family practitioner in Vandalia from the 1950s until he retired just this past December. He was a practicing family doctor in a world headed more and more towards managed care medical clinics and medical specialization. I arranged an interview for Wednesday with Phyllis and her husband when we'll talk about Evergreen Outreach and the career of a family doctor in a small town in rural America.

I also set up interviews with some of the people I met. One is tomorrow with Mary Peyton Meyer, 93, at the Hospital's Long Term Care facility. She said she would have to miss her exercises to talk with me. She is from St. Peter originally, she has lived in the country all her life.

Delbert Cothern played a couple of songs on harmonica for the Evergreen group. A lot of people have told me to talk to Delbert. He has been paralyzed since he was a young man. On a dare he had dived into the river without putting his arms out in front of him on the dive, and his collision with the river bottom paralyzed his legs for life. He sat in a wheel chair dressed in blue overalls, the microphone in front of him, he said "I'm gonna play an old fiddle tune here called 'Silver Bells,'" and his harmonica took off like an accordion, as lively as a fiddle would be. Then he said: "Now here's a waltz," and it's 1-2-3, 1-2-3. Where did he learn his songs? Was he interested in music before he was paralyzed, or did that come later? What has sustained him over the years? When I asked Delbert if I could interview him tomorrow, there was a playful dance of light in his eyes as if to say, "Silly boy," but he said yes.

I set interviews with Pauline ("I'm the last of the Sampson family") Hicks and Beulah ("Every hour is spoken for") Brown, a very busy volunteer. I took down the names and phone numbers of a few other people I'll want to talk to - Beverly Hood, who sang "Let There Be Peace on Earth" to a room that could not be silent; people had to share the sense of community by talking or they had to sing along, they could not contain themselves.

I'll want to talk to Floyd Meseke. He had been a farmer in the area. When he'd heard a radio program about the Evergreen Outreach program, Phyllis told me, he had called her and said: "When I retire, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to volunteer on transportation at Evergreen Outreach." And so he has.

And Joan Kelly, from London, with quite a British accent still. She has lived in London, she lived three years in Los Angeles, she came to Vandalia, and "I would never leave Vandalia."

Inge Compton, one of the piano players for the program, came here from Austria and stayed even when she divorced.

I was sitting next to Mary Peyton Meyer at the program, and when they came around handing out bells for the songs with bell-orchestra accompaniment, she made sure I got one of them. She didn't want to play it herself, she was sure I'd understand the instructions and would do just fine. There was really no arguing with her, she'd made up her mind. Phyllis Rames was up on stage, and when she held up a card that had the same color on it as my bell, that's when I was to ring the bell. The first song she had selected for the bell orchestra today was "Let There Be Peace on Earth," which Beverly Hood had sung earlier. "Bev and I must be thinking of the same thing - peace in the world," Phyllis said. She started the tape recorder, she held up the cards in time to the music, the bells rang out "Let There Be Peace on Earth." Then we did "Amazing Grace." By the third song I was having such a good time with the bell I don't remember the name of the song. My bell was red; whenever I rang it, a "C" note pealed out, joining the notes of two or three other bells to form a chord.

When it was my turn to speak to the folks gathered for Evergreen Outreach, I told them I couldn't help recognizing the sense of community in the room. The lively conversation. Singing, ringing of bells. Applause for those with birthdays, for the winners from the Olympic Corner of the room. Paintings proudly displayed on the stage. Everyone was welcome, they all seemed to feel included.

I told them about my Vagabond project, that I was already setting up interviews with people in the room. There was a glow in the crowd, pride that the people of Vandalia were being included. When I finished, a few people took the microphone on the pretext of asking a question. One of them led us through a version of "God Bless America," ragged but right. Others offered suggestions of people in Vandalia I should interview.

Even when the program was over, even as those in wheel chairs were being lifted hydraulically up into the Operation OUTING bus, I had a hard time leaving. Phyllis and I were talking, Phyllis was pointing out some of the volunteers without whom the Evergreen Outreach program could not operate.

Finally I walked out into a rainy mid-afternoon. I headed down to City Hall looking for John Feightner of the Main Street program - he was not in his office. If I want to find him there this week, I'll have to get there before noon. Then - on the half chance they'd do it - I went to the Evans Library next to City Hall to see if I could get a library card so I could check out The Talk of Vandalia by Joseph P. Lyford, which stirred up the talk in Vandalia when it was published in 1962 by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Well, I couldn't get a library card, and after trying to figure ways to get someone else to check it out for me, librarian Candy Zeman checked it out on her own card and gave me the book to take back to Brazle Inn to read. She didn't have to do that, but she did. Then she introduced me to the three women working with the genealogical materials and historical books belonging to the Genealogical Society. I got a tour of those resources. "This is like dying and going to heaven," I said. One of the women gave me a look as if to say "Obviously you're not trying to label them and secure them and keep them in order." And she'd be right - instead, I was reaping the benefit of her work and all the other volunteers who give their time and energy to make such resources available for the rest of us.

Finally, I left the library, it was raining, I tucked The Talk of Vandalia which had been entrusted to my care into the protection of a notebook and headed for my car. I've sat here for more than an hour scratching notes, fogging up the windows, enduring a deluge of downpour, then a gentle rain. Then the rain stops. It was fifty degrees this morning as I drove into Vandalia, it is supposed to be ten degrees by the time I drive in tomorrow morning.

It's 5:00 p.m. now. I think I'll go up to the Playground Cafe and get some supper - the Songwriters' Group will be playing there, I think, about 7:00 p.m.

*

Multiple choice: Playground Cafe is: (a) a coffee shop with fancy lattes and espressos, with a sideline of Italian subs or pizza when needed; (b) an extension of Guiseppi's Pizza next door; or (c) an extension of a family's living room with couch, Nintendo game, and three middle school or junior high girls being sassy with each other, especially the one with the red hair. The dad had to come in and quiet them down. A young fellow, not much more than high school age, seemed to be minding the store next door and said he was training a waitress. I ordered an Italian sub and a diet Pepsi. Later he asked if I was "that writer fellow." Later still he told me my meal was "on the house." Food is love in Vandalia, too.

I wonder how much being "that writer fellow" changes people's reactions to me - what they tell me, what they do (or don't do) while I'm around?

Later, as two of the girls were updating with grease pencils some of the signs listing coffees and other offerings, they talked to each other laconically. You wonder if their language rolls with a touch of the local twang, or is it simply the infinite boredom of junior high that bends their speech? They didn't seem to be sisters, for one of them asked: "What time do you have to go home?"

When the songwriters gathered, there were three people singing. One was an older woman named Cindy who sang a couple original songs on her turn, then turned to songs that belonged to others; she's a good guitar player, too.

A fellow named Forbes, whose first name I didn't catch, sang his own songs; they all sounded like country songs but he has a wickedness in his words. One song about how much a fellow's wife loved him had more to do with him robbing a bank in her dress and wig, killing a teller; that she swung by the neck at the end of a rope by song's end, that's how much she loved him. Forbes has 500-some songs, most of them, I gather, turning on some bit of slyness. He spent his career with the National Weather Service. After retirement he and his wife moved back to Vandalia from out near Billings, Montana.

Ed Taylor, Jr., was the youngster among the three musicians, yet was the leader of the songwriters who'd gathered. His first song was lovely praise for one's hometown - "Main Street Is Alive." A later song also seemed to speak to the loveliness of being where you are. The final song he sang was by request, it was almost a hymn, "Have Faith."

As the songwriters played and sang, girls played a video game in the corner, Forbes' cousin Stanley Forbes sat next to me talking about family history - Pauline Sampson Hicks is his aunt. On the carpet, a baby played quietly, happy as you please, at one point staring intently at Ed Young as if she'd not ever seen anyone quite like him. The songwriters talked freely with each other and with those enjoying the music. I thought I heard someone call the young fellow who gave me supper by his name, Tom. During the music, drinks were provided to musicians and listeners alike, no charge, at least they didn't let me pay. Towards the end, a tasty order of special breadsticks the size of a large pizza was brought out and served, and you'd be a Scrooge not to enjoy a piece or two. Food is love.

The last song of the evening was Taylor's "Have Faith," like a good night prayer, and we headed home for rest, preparing to face another day.

***

February 4, 2003
Delbert Cothern faces another day every day. He was paralyzed when he was sixteen years old, diving into Ramsey Creek on a family outing. He and a cousin kept challenging each other to dive into the river with hands at the back of the head instead of extended to split the water as they entered. Once more Delbert dove in with hands behind his head and this time hit bottom; he broke his neck and has been paralyzed since.

That was back in the late 1930s, I suppose. Before the accident Delbert was the typical farm kid and would rather be outdoors than anywhere. After the accident he lay motionless in bed for months on end. His folks had to move off the farm and into town because Delbert's sweat glands had shut down, he needed to stay in front of an electric fan to stay cool, and the farm didn't have electricity yet. His father opened a garage in town and went into the car repair business. His mother worked at the hospital. With effort, Delbert eventually could get around on crutches and could move well enough that he did most of the housekeeping for his parents. Out of the money his mother paid him for doing the housework, Delbert saved enough to buy two acres out in the country. His parents put a trailer house on the property and Delbert and his parents moved there. Delbert kept a large garden on the acreage. He couldn't walk, but he could stand without support. He would hoe as much as he could reach from one place, he'd use the hoe as a crutch and move forward, he'd hoe some more. Through the years he kept the freezer and cupboards stocked with food from the garden; he would bury the potatoes, onions, and carrots in a hole in the garden covered over with straw to keep these root vegetables for use all through the winter.

When his grandfather died, Delbert's father inherited the house in Ramsey; Delbert and his parents moved there, though Delbert didn't really like living so close to neighbors. Delbert's mother died perhaps twenty-five years ago, his father lived until 1997. In 1987 Delbert fell and broke his leg and it didn't want to heal. Eventually, in 1996, he moved into the Cherrywood facility.

Delbert is the harmonica player I heard at Evergreen Outreach yesterday. He comes from a musical family and taught himself mandolin when he was a youngster. He told me he was a little guy for his age and the mandolin was just the right size for him. He learned his licks from Roy Acuff's mandolin player on Grand Ole Opry, but didn't copy him exactly.

After the accident that crippled him, Delbert no longer could play mandolin. His paralysis and weakness meant that if he were to continue playing music he'd have to learn an instrument he could play with one hand. He took up the harmonica and taught himself old fiddle tunes and traditional bluegrass on harmonica. He'd always been something of a shy country boy, so when a friend who played guitar out around the area asked Delbert to play out with him, Delbert had declined, he didn't think he could do that. But, bit by bit, playing in front of bigger and bigger audiences, Delbert has lost his shyness and now, he said, he'd just as soon play for a hundred as for ten. He has played in Illinois Old Time Music Harmonica Championships, coming in as high as second. He won a national championship in 1988 at Avoca, Iowa, tearing off renditions of "Soldier's Joy" and "Silver Bells" and a waltz. He has also competed at a contest somewhere in Kentucky or Tennessee but hasn't been able to come in higher than fourth there; that championship, Delbert said, draws a lot of great harmonica players from Nashville, and they are tough to beat.

Delbert has a four-track recorder set up in his room in the nursing home and stays busy learning new songs, writing songs of his own, and recording them. He teaches himself more fiddle tunes by taking a recorder to fiddle contests, recording the competitions, bringing the tape home and teaching himself the songs he wants to learn. He has hopes that one or two of his own songs might soon be recorded by a country artist he has made the acquaintance of. On the 13-song tape of his music that Delbert has released, Just an Old Man and His Old Music: Old Timey Type Music No. 1, he refers himself "Ol' Delbert." There is harmonica on the tape, of course, there is singing and talking and whistling; many of the songs he recorded are his own compositions, he introduces them with his Ol' Delbert drawl. Sometimes he sings harmony with himself. He makes copies of the tapes to sell as the need arises and earns only enough, he said, "for a little pocket money." He's not so much interested in the money as in the music, I think. It's telling that he's got a four-track recorder in his room, and no television - "I always gotta be doing some-thing," he said, "and I'd rather be making music than anything else."

Does Delbert think he's an inspiration to others? "Well, I hope so, but I don't know if I am." He's not one to brag, not about his music, not about the example he sets for the rest of us.
Ol' Delbert keeps on making music.

*

I had a lovely lunch with the Vandalia Rotary Club today at Ponderosa. I felt welcomed. Just as soon as they entered the room, I think, every member walked up to me to introduce himself or herself and welcome me individually. I had half an hour to talk to the Rotary; I don't know how long I took, but I guess we got out of there on time. The Rotarians asked some questions afterwards, including the shrewd one about "How are you supporting this project?" I had to admit that in addition to using up my retirement, it's mostly my wife who makes this possible, and some twenty-five folks who have made monetary contributions to the success of the endeavor. I talked for a while afterwards about legal issues and law enforcement in the county with Vandalia's state's attorney, Stephen Friedel. I promised I'd interview him on my next trip to Vandalia. I also talked some with Dave Bell from the Vandalia Leader-Union, who is originally from Eagle Grove, Iowa, not that far from my old stomping grounds.

*

In the afternoon I interviewed Mary Peyton Meyer, who has been a Fayette County resident all of her life. What is her claim to fame? Well, she taught in area schools for forty-seven years. She's 97 years old and still mows her own very large lawn, "and down around the pond, that usually takes me half a day." In 1921 (that's not a misprint) Mary started writing local items for the Vandalia paper about Frogtown, a crossroads in the county, and she still does it today. That is eighty-two years of writing local items. "I get paid $15.00 a week whether it's five lines or five hundred lines," she said.

And then Mary has been on Johnny Carson. A producer for the show called her up and said she'd heard Mary has been writing for the Vandalia paper since 1921, would she come be on the Tonight Show and talk to Johnny? Mary said she was flown to California first class, a limousine picked her up at the airport and took her to her hotel, picked her up at the hotel to take her to the show. Mary had gotten her hair done special before leaving for the show, "but that wasn't good enough for them, they had to do it again." In the dressing room, the producer told her, "Now Johnny will try to get ahead of you, don't you let him, you just say what you have to say and don't let him get ahead."

"Whenever Johnny had something to say," Mary remembered, "I had an answer right quick." Johnny asked her how she controlled unruly boys in the classroom; before Johnny knew it, Mary's face was inches from his and she'd blasted him LOUD with the whistle that was always her classroom companion. You can imagine Johnny's look of surprise.

How many people lived in Frogtown, Johnny wanted to know. "It's about twelve people," Mary said, "it'll be thirteen when you come with us." Johnny had been teasing Mary that he would move to Frogtown, "but I didn't believe a word of it, I gave it right back to him."

When I met her Mary had recently broken her ankle falling down the steps at her back door and was in a wheel chair. "Just as soon as this gets healed up," she said, "I'll go back to living in my own home and mowing my own lawn."

"O Lord," she said, "it seems like I have so many friends and so many people who know me. When they come up and say 'Mrs. Meyer," then I know it's one of my students from Brownstown. They all know me and I don't know who they are. How could I? They all look so different now and how many children do you suppose I taught in forty-seven years?"

*

The "Meet the Author" reception sponsored by the Fayette County Genealogical/Historical Society was scheduled from 5:30-7:00 p.m. There was coffee and punch and cookies. When I was introduced, it seemed as if every chair in the room was filled, and still a few more came in later. I made an informal presentation, speaking from a sitting position, making the connections between writing my memoir, Curlew:Home, and coming to the Vagabond project. As I listened to myself talk, it sounded as if the growth of the Vagabond idea was a clear and logical extension of concerns I'd raised when I returned in my writing to the place and time I'd grown up. Of course, the development of the Vagabond idea does make clear and logical sense, given my concern for place and people of a place. Yet I'd never gained the picture of it all at once, it came in fits and starts and pieces, I know it did. But you cannot reconstruct that piecemeal sense of it once you begin to see the thing whole. And every day with every new experience my conception of it is re-shaped.

As at my presentation in Alexandria, there were good questions and soon enough people were sharing their memories of Vandalia with each other, surprising each other with such tidbits as "the brewery stored beer kegs in the basement of my building." Many people in the room didn't even know that Vandalia had once had a brewery.

At the end of the reception, I sold some copies of Curlew:Home. Linda Hanabarger presented me with a copy of Vandalia, Illinois by Brenda Baptist Protz, which I'd seen the night before at the gathering of songwriters, Stan Forbes had a copy of it. He was at this reception, too. I said to him, "I was jealous of you yesterday, having that book. I'm not jealous of you now."
They had a hard time getting us out of the library at 7:00 p.m., closing time, but eventually we herded ourselves into the cold night air.

Katie Thaman, the features editor for the Leader-Union, had been at my presentation to the Rotary Club and she had also been at this reception. She said she had a few questions she wanted to follow up on with me. When could we do that? Well, my car was parked right in front of the Leader-Union office, the office was only a few doors down the street from the library. "If you can get into the office," I said, "we can do it now." Having worked in the printing business, I insisted on seeing the Goss Community presses in the pressroom before we sat down for the interview, which ended up as much conversation as Q&A. Katie shared with me her perspective on community journalism in Vandalia and her perspective on some of the people I'd be talking to, based on her experiences profiling them for the Leader-Union. Eventually Katie expects to end up at a bigger newspaper in a big city but she is not ready to make such a move because her position at the Leader-Union allows her to learn so much about so many aspects of journalism. "I'm not yet ready to specialize and confine myself to only one aspect of this work," she said.

She appreciates that in a community like Vandalia, she gets constant feedback on her work. "If you screw up, you hear about it," she said, "but much more often people are complimenting you, saying what a nice article that was."

*

February 6, 2003
My first interview yesterday was with Pauline Sampson Hicks. When she answered my knock on her apartment door, she was just taking her hair out of curlers. It turns out she'd expected me to interview her Tuesday morning, while I had it on my calendar for Wednesday. In any case, she was gracious enough to sit down with me and talk about her family history and her life.
Her parents were among the part of the family that moved to Vandalia from Effingham back in the early part of the twentieth century. Her Uncle John served a short term as Vandalia's mayor about 1918. Her uncles established various businesses in Vandalia and prospered. Her father was a carpenter and was less prosperous than his brothers. The Great Depression hit her family hard, such that she was not sent to high school after she finished the eighth grade.

Pauline left Vandalia for a life in Phoenix with her husband who devoted his life to a music ministry in his church. Pauline herself, to overcome the lack of a high school education, went to business school then to college in Arizona, finishing a degree and working for twenty-some years as a youth probation officer in Phoenix. Many of Pauline's relatives moved to Phoenix on the strength of the base Pauline and her husband had established there. Her sister, Stanley Forbes' mother, was one of them; remember, I met Stanley Forbes at the Monday night songwriters' session at the Playground Cafe.

Pauline's work and her husband's afforded them long summer vacations during which they returned to Vandalia year after year to spend time at a cottage on Lake Vandalia. "Vandalia kept calling us back," Pauline says. She'd left Vandalia, but she couldn't stay away. When she and her husband retired, they returned to live in Vandalia, yet they spent some years, too, in Florida, and other states. It was always to Vandalia they returned.

Pauline cared for her husband in later years as his eyesight diminished and Alzheimer's worsened; at the end she moved to Jefferson City, Missouri, so a son who lived there could help care for her husband, too. Eventually the Alzheimer's progressed to the point that Pauline's husband spent the last ten years of his life in a nursing home. When he died, it was to Vandalia that Pauline returned.

Pauline remembered that during the Great Depression, her mother took care of the financial matters and was always able to find a few more dollars when needed in the sugar bowl where she kept her money. In her own life, Pauline took care of financial affairs in similar fashion, except for eight or ten months after her husband had questioned one of her financial decisions. She'd said "OK, here, you do it." Keeping track of figures was difficult for her husband as his eyesight was already poor; after a time she relented and took back keeping the family's books.
"Anyway, my husband was a musician," Pauline said, tipping her head as if to suggest he was as dreamy and impractical as a poet. Dreamy or not, her husband agreed with Pauline that they should all along be putting money away for the future so that today Pauline is at least comfortable in her retirement.

She can't really explain why and how Vandalia has kept pulling her back, but it has, it kept attracting her, it was her home town, and now once again it's her home.

*

Overheard at the Vandalia Senior Center: "It's pretty out there but don't plan on planting your garden yet." It's February 5, 2003. Even in Vandalia, it's still winter.

*

I was at the Senior Center to interview Beulah Brown.

"I was in college at Eastern Illinois University," she recalled. "The superintendent from Vandalia was in summer school with me. I didn't that know. Then he approached me about coming here as a third grade teacher. I was thrilled, but too poor to make the move. I was in Effingham. I taught the McCoy School in Effingham County. It was a 'model' school, starting to serve hot lunches. The children and myself cooked our meals at noon. Teaching at McCoy School, I could live at home and pay back what I owed for my education. This was in the 1940s."

"I continued at McCoy School for two years," Beulah said. "Then the superintendent from Vandalia hunted me up again. 'Are you sure you wouldn't like to come to Vandalia?' he asked. At that time the town and the school were both progressing faster than Effingham was. Now it's the reverse. By that time I had paid my debt and saved some money. I came to Vandalia for $100 a month and I paid $25 a month rent. Quite a friendship evolved out of that experience. The superintendent and his wife, the principal and his wife, and my husband and I all got together once a month for forty years."

Buelah's husband Dave had been the farm loan manager at First National Bank. "His sister taught in the same building as I did," Beulah said, explaining how they'd met. "She invited me to go to church with them, and from then on I couldn't get rid of him. We went together two and a half years. He was Lincoln-esque, 6'4" and as straight up and down as you could make them. He was a special, special person. He had the opportunity to become the Allis Chalmers Implement dealer in Brownstown. This was the time of World War II."

"We were married in 1946," Beulah continued. "I quit teaching in 1949 and helped keep books for the business. I had two daughters. I taught here for five years, and for two years before that. It was in my blood. But I thought I should take care of the girls. I drove the oldest daughter to kindergarten in St. Elmo. By the time the second daughter was ready for school, the new superintendent in Vandalia called and said 'Would you come and teach? School starts in three days and I don't have a teacher.' I talked it over with Dave. The superintendent would have to make some concessions. I'd get to bring my daughter with me and I'd teach my own daughter."

"My first classes were large, thirty-nine kids, and no curriculum," Beulah remembered. "I had to write my own curriculum."

Her husband was an adventuresome fellow. He bought a new car, drove it up to Alaska, sold the car, and flew home. "Then he did it again," Beulah said. "Then he said he wanted to take the family up there, the summer before I started teaching again. A construction company up there wanted a big dump truck. He put one car in the back of the dump truck and I drove one with the two girls. We'd meet at mile marker posts. We sold the dump truck and the new station wagon right away. We kept the other car and drove all over Alaska where you could drive. Then we stayed in a two room apartment in Anchorage. Back then Anchorage had two paved streets. At the end of August, we sold the car and flew home. The fellow we sold the car to drove us to the airport, we didn't even have to get a taxi."

When her husband sold his Allis Chalmers business, he went into politics. He ran for County Treasurer but was defeated by fifty votes. He accepted a deputy sheriff position. "I had never before seen him with a gun in his hand," Beulah said. Then he accepted a position transporting prisoners from the correctional institution to Chicago.

"We still lived in Brownstown," Beulah said. "We'd pass each other on the road, that was about it." In 1959 they moved back to Vandalia, to the house where she lives now. She continued teaching, twenty nine years of teaching kindergarten.

On October 11, 1970, her husband had a massive cerebral hemorrhage and passed away. "Two weeks earlier," said Beulah, "we had taken both our daughters to Southern Illinois University, one was a freshman, the other a junior. We had to take two cars, I was driving one and Dave was driving the other, one girl in each car. Halfway there, we switched which girl we had in which car. Before we got home, he wanted to run over to the festival at Altamont, I think he didn't want to go home because there was no one in the house."

"The girls had just come home for their first weekend," she said. "We were going to a big political doings at Altamont. We picked up some friends to go to the barbecue. He was fine, we got our plates, he said he was hungry, he took one bite and that was it."

"I was left with everything to finish," Beulah said, "I saw the girls through college and they both got their Master's degrees. I continued to teach until 1996. Since then I've lost our elder daughter who left two lovely daughters of her own. The other daughter moved to Texas for her husband's job. I thought my world would come to an end. But it has worked out fine. I have four grandsons, too, very fine boys, attending Oberlin, Miami University at Oxford, Ohio, Texas A&M, and a high school senior already accepted at Texas A&M. Since my daughter's death, the whole family has made it to my house for a few hours every Christmas, every year."

"I remember we tapped maple trees in our neighborhood," Beulah said. "I used to dash home to see how much sap we'd collected in our buckets. You'd cook and cook and cook."

"I love to travel," she told me. "I've been to all fifty states and several foreign countries. I'd travel more but my sister had a serious stroke five and a half years ago, we brought her here for long term care. I live three blocks away and I go every morning and every night to help care for her. I call on a lot of people who are home-bound, take them soup and cookies. I have always taught Sunday school. I have a wonderful group of older women I keep in touch with, some of them are over 90 years old."

"Each day something develops that I can help somebody," Beulah said. "I like people. The impulse to help people? We are supposed to serve people. Things just happen that I'm supposed to do something for somebody. Each day I pray for Him to guide me. I'm a pink lady at the hospital, a volunteer. People say 'we need someone to help with activities, would you?' and I say 'Sure.'"

"I visit a lot of people in the hospital because I know them," Beulah said. "I take them magazines, sherbet. I work the blood bank each time it's here, also I give blood. You know what - you feel much healthier if you give your blood. At least I do."

"I came to Vandalia in 1943-1944 and I stayed," Beulah said. "I enjoy it here. I'd take my grandsons, we'd go downtown. Everywhere people would want to stop and talk to me. My grandsons said: 'Grammy, we can't get home because everybody knows you.'"

"You help people and people help you," she said.

"Lincoln Park. I really wanted that park and worked on that. I was not the only one. It takes a lot of people to do things. When you volunteer, people will say 'Well, she does, I should...."
"Vandalia is friendly," she said. "The community is willing to help you."

*

I also interviewed Barney Wright at the Senior Center. Barney told me he was the first baby born in Vandalia's Mark Greer Hospital. He had worked at Cain's Drug Store for Mr. Cain from 1950 until 1969 when Cain died. At that point Barney took over operation of the business until his retirement in 1985. Cain had established the business in 1937. When Barney retired, the business continued - pharmacist Darryl Tjaden took over and remains the only druggist downtown. Barney had employed Tjaden as a pharmacist just out of school, he remembered. "He still had to take his board exam when I hired him."

Barney got his own pharmacy license after World War II on the GI Bill by correspondence course. Actually getting his license took him about nine years. He was in the last group of students able to take pharmacy by correspondence and get their license while working with an established pharmacist. Thereafter he had to take continuing education courses to stay current with changes in the business. He said he has seen a lot of changes - a lot more red tape, more new medicines. "When I first started," he noted, "there were hardly any prepared medications, you had to mix them yourself."

At one point Barney looked over at my notebook where I was scribbling hurried notes. "You write a lot better than the doctors do," he observed.

What had attracted him to the business? "My wife was working there behind the counter. She wasn't my wife yet. She was 16, I was 21. I had just gotten out of service. Mr. Cain offered me twice as much money as I was making at the time."

Cain had been a World War I veteran and had gotten his license the same way Barney got his, by correspondence and in association with an established druggist. "He talked me into doing what he'd done," Barney said. "He was more like a father to me than my own dad."

Barney said the drug store had provided a good living for his family over the years. The business was a Walgreen agency when it started. There had been a food counter and soda fountain in it, and books were sold. "I still hear people talk about that soda fountain," Barney said; he took it out when he remodeled the place in 1973. "Some old coffee drinkers didn't like it that I remodeled. They had been able to spend a whole morning drinking a nickel cup of coffee."

*

I had lunch at the Senior Center and met many of the folks gathered there for ham and sweet potato, lima beans, and something called "sin salad," which is something you'd find at an Iowa picnic under another name. I gave a short presentation about my Vagabond project; it had to be short, you don't want to get caught between folks and their bingo.

*

I spent a good part of the afternoon with Don and Phyllis Rames at their home on 7th Street. I was interested in talking with Don because he spent nearly all the years of his practice of medicine as a family doctor in Vandalia. From 1956 to 1984 he practiced obstetrics as well as general medicine, delivering more than 2000 babies over those years. He told me it was gratifying to deliver a baby, then years later to deliver her daughter, and years after that to deliver her granddaughter. He said his relationship with his patients was more than a doctor-patient relationship - "these people were my friends." The high point of his practice was sharing their joy at the birth of a baby, new life, promise of the future, hope for tomorrow. The hard part - "telling a friend he or she had cancer and talking with them about everything that entailed." Don got to share Vandalia's joys, he also shared its sorrows.

How did medicine change over the forty-six years of his practice? Malpractice claims drove up the cost of insurance such that he had to leave obstetrics in 1984 even though he loved the work. "Some people think every baby is guaranteed to be a perfect baby," Don said, "and that's not the case. And it's not always the doctor's fault. Lawyers are quick to file suit, whatever the merits of the case, and insurance rates go up." Government regulation, Medicare, and insurance have also affected the practice of medicine.

How else did medicine change? When Don was looking to set up practice in the mid-50s, rural areas of the middle west were generally well-supplied with physicians. Today, he said, there are fewer doctors who wish to practice in rural America. Federal incentives are now used to draw doctors to under-served areas.

There was also less night and weekend work now than there used to be, Don said. Partly, he hasn't been called to deliver babies in the middle of the night since 1984; partly, he hadn't had to answer emergency calls in recent years now that there's a 24-hour emergency room at the hospital. In addition, several doctors have banded together to cover each other's weekend calls on a rotating basis, with the result that physicians can now depend on some time off.

Technological advances have also meant better medical care for patients, yet Don would probably say that healing has as much to do with the physician's hand and care and concern - the relationship - as it does with new technology and new medicines. He doesn't say it but one senses that the comfort of the physician's hand was always of paramount importance in his practice, whatever the state of medical technology.

Phyllis Rames - ah, Phyllis. Ask people in Vandalia and they'll tell you she's the can-do lady, the ultimate volunteer, the one who can find people to help her make it happen. She exudes a strength and calmness and peace; determination seems to be her middle name. And, indeed, she has grown to strength and peace and determination. Early on, however, she was reserved and lonely and afraid. "When I was 13," Phyllis said, "I was forced to take over the household duties because of an increasingly tumul-tuous home life. My father was a family physician - an excellent one, by the way - who was a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. His extreme mood swings made me fearful of him. My mother - stellar home-maker and mother - had periodic bouts of mental illness." Phyllis feared what her father might do to her mother; she was embarrassed to think her family might have become "the talk of the town." She says she put a mask "firmly in place" that she was to wear for two decades. "Eventually, with the loving help of a wonderful Christian mentor, Helen, I developed a healthy, firm relationship with God, who has guided me since the mid-1970s in all that I have aspired to do."

When Don and Phyllis moved to Vandalia in 1956 and Don found fulfillment in the practice of medicine, Phyllis gave herself to the care of her four children. Yet inside she was lonely, very lonely. The mask was still firmly in place. Either the community didn't know how to reach out to the doctor's wife and welcome her in those early years or Phyllis didn't risk reaching out to her new neighbors. Perhaps her loneliness is the reason Phyllis decided to teach part-time in a high school, a college, a prison. As her self-confidence improved, her participation in the com-munity increased; her involvement with innovative com-munity services was underway - Friends of the Evans Public Library, Friends and Families of Fayette County Hospital, Evergreen Outreach, and Operation OUTING, which Phyllis calls "a bus ministry serving only nursing home residents." A support network began to lift her, she began to "give it all over to God," and within herself she finally became the person she is today.

"The key ministry in my life now is the Evergreen Outreach program," Phyllis said. The program, begun in 1979, brings old people out of nursing homes and handi-capped people out of sheltered workshops Monday after-noons for a few hours of sharing and joy and community in Wesley Hall at the United Methodist Church. Remem-bering the loneliness she'd felt, it's important to Phyllis that Evergreen Outreach be inclusive and welcoming. And though she hadn't thought about it before, she did say that the program gives people living in the regimented environment of nursing homes an opportunity to make decisions on their own. Do they want to come to Evergreen Outreach or not, do they want milk or coffee, cake or cookies, do they want to paint or to play cards, chat with their neighbors or just do nothing at all, sit and enjoy the sweep of noise and life around them? Evergreen Outreach is unique in that it brings people out of the nursing homes, brings them together for sharing and stimulation in different surroundings, rather than taking the program into the nursing home or sheltered workshop. "It's called 'acceptance,'" Phyllis said; she quoted a favorite statement from theologian Paul Tillich, "Accept the fact that you are accepted (by God) and when you experience that, you experience grace."

Doing so much and involved in so many things, by 1990 Phyllis was overwhelmed and went into mild depression. She could have taken medication to lift her from the depression but she was determined to lick it herself, and "by the grace of God," she did. She quotes 1 Corinthians 10:13: "God is faithful and He will not let you be tested beyond your strength."

"Probably people don't know it," she explained, "but I no longer say yes to everything. I can't do everything that I'm asked to. I ask myself the question - will this help people? - and if the answer is yes, I answer the call."

Phyllis always remembers the loneliness she felt and in everything she seeks to include and to welcome. She knows that in helping others, one helps oneself. She believes she would not have grown in all the ways she has if she hadn't given herself "over to the Lord's inspiration and direction" in 1979; the result has been service of others through Evergreen Outreach and the other programs she's been involved in.

*

When I got back to my room at Jay's Inn where I'm staying two nights, I found a note on my door from Mike Travelstead of the high school. I called him. We added two more classes to my schedule for Friday, so I'll be seeing a total of five classes: an Advanced Composition class and an Honors American Literature class today; Freshman Honors English, Sophomore Honors English, and another Advanced Composition class tomorrow. I'll have to change the time of the interview I've set up with Ed Taylor, Jr.

Later I got a phone call from John Feightner who had to cancel the Friday morning interview we have scheduled. We agreed to meet on Saturday.

*

I find that my gift is this: people will tell me things, the most intimate details of their lives. Phyllis Rames said it was so easy to talk to me, she felt so comfortable.

My responsibility is this: I must do the best I can with the information I'm given, I must carry the unspoken pledge of trust into all aspects of this work, I must tell the truth the best I am able, yet not betray anyone. I hope I am good enough a man for the task this is becoming.

***

February 7, 2003
I met Mike Travelstead, Mrs. Bradley, and Jamie Bowen yesterday; they are English teachers at Vandalia High School. I spoke to one of Mrs. Bradley's Advanced Composition classes and to Mike Bradley's Honors American Literature. I gave them a taste of my poetry with one from the Civil War letters, one from the farm series, and one from "Married to Prairie." Then I read some excerpts from Curlew:Home, the selection about setting off from Fairwater to return to Curlew, the passage about storm windows from "Her Most Perfect Day Ever," and paragraphs from my "Meditation at the Old Home Place" near the end of the book. I read two excerpts from Kissing Poetry's Sister, one about scuba diving from "Poet in the Water," the other being the first three paragraphs of the title essay explaining "kissing poetry's sister." I read a paragraph from Mary Morris's contribution to the anthology A Place Called Home and the first two entries from my "Morning Drive Journal," December 17, 1997, and December 18, 1997. And then - finally - I got to talking with the students about my Vagabond project, and about their keeping "place" journals for loading onto the Vagabond web site, possible publication in the Vagabond newsletter, and perhaps being quoted in the book. I told them that I want their journals to be vivid and detailed as the writing that I'd read to them, that I wanted them to write so an alien a thousand years from now could understand Vandalia through their eyes. I gave out business cards so that interested students could e-mail their journals to me - I don't want to have to re-type them.

The English teachers at Vandalia High School are the first in any of the Vagabond communities to take up my offer to speak to their students about my Vagabond project and about the students keeping place journals for publication on the web site. The teachers are offering "extra credit" in class for those students who keep such journals.

After I met the two classes I had lunch in the school cafeteria during fourth period with Mike Travelstead and met several other Vandalia teachers in two waves, as Mike also had fifth period free and we talked through much of fifth period as well.

If the ice and snow we got last night hasn't cancelled school today, I will meet Freshman Honors English at 12:05 p.m., Sophomore Honors at 1:45 p.m., and another Advanced Composition class at 2:30 p.m.

I stopped downtown after leaving the high school yesterday to change the time of my interview with Ed Taylor to 8:15 a.m. today, so I could get to all those classes at the high school. Then I drove sixteen miles west to record fifteen minutes of interview with Martha Radcliff at WGEL in Greenville.

We actually recorded some nineteen minutes of conversation but Martha said she would clean it up and tighten it up and speed it up slightly if she had to, to make it fit the fifteen-minute time slot. We had a wonderful conversation that got recorded, and wonderful conversation before and after the recorder was on. Martha offered some penetrating comments on Vandalia, the area, and the little differences between two communities as near to each other as Greenville and Vandalia. Martha is originally a city girl, one who has chosen to live in rural America because she wants to live here; she has a problem with folks who come into the rural communities thinking they are better than anybody else. It wasn't until I'd talked to Linda Hanabarger by phone back at my room - now I'm at Days Inn - that I understood something of Martha's background. Some ten years ago she and another woman started and tried to sustain an "alternative" paper in Vandalia, one that tended to lift the rug where we sweep all those things we don't like to talk about. The women weren't able to gather enough backing to carry the paper into the future and it folded.

One thing Martha said about Vandalia is that it's a city of volunteers, and she named Phyllis Rames as a leader among Vandalia's volunteers. But I guess we know that already.
I had supper at Ponderosa and as I was coming out after I'd finished I met Don and Phyllis Rames coming in. They'd been planning to go out of town for a meal but the sloppy weather and slippery roads made them think better of it.

I came back to my room and hunkered down myself. At one point I went back out to the car to get a shirt and was surprised how slippery the parking lot had gotten. I don't know what I'll find when I step out this morning.

*

I met Ed Taylor, Jr., at his store downtown on Gallatin Street about 8:20 a.m. today. He was just back from driving school bus. He said the roads weren't bad at all.

We talked for a full hour and a half - about his music and his life. The song about Main Street that I heard him sing on Monday night grew out of his childhood experience - he lived only a few blocks from downtown and spent a lot of time on Gallatin Street getting to know the merchants. (In Vandalia, Main Street is not the main street). He can't forget the smell of roasted peanuts in one of the stores, and being pricked by the bulk nails in his grandparents' hardware store. Ed is grateful to the fellow - Floyd - who had a little music store and taught him to play guitar. Ed was young enough that Floyd thought he should start with a smaller instrument, a mandolin. Ed wanted to play guitar. They compromised. Ed's parents bought him an electric guitar.

Ed has played in bands since his junior high school days in Vandalia - rock and roll, country rock, traditional country. Learning to play country, he says, he had to learn to play guitar. "Playing rock and roll we didn't have to be good so much as loud," Ed remembered. His first attempt to stick some licks into country songs were awful, but little by little he learned what he needed to know.

Ed didn't write his first song until he was 38 years old. He was going through a divorce, he felt awfully lonely, he sat down with his guitar and wrote one line, he concentrated on that one line. Then he worked on a line to rhyme with it, and he concentrated on that line. He continued working on the song for another two hours, line by line, until he had enough for a song.

Next morning he got up and picked up his guitar, he was going to try out the song. He cried for half an hour. He had been so focused on individual lines the night before while writing it that he hadn't really heard what he was saying til he put it all together the next day.

In all of his years playing music it had never occurred to Ed that a song was a piece of someone's life. Ed had the gift of music and now he was given the gift of songs. He wrote more songs. With the gift, he thinks, comes the responsibility to use it well, he feels he must use music for the good of others.

A lot of things changed in Ed's life about the time his wife divorced him - those were hard times "but I had to go through them to be what I am today."

Ed's family had been in the construction business and Ed had worked construction like the rest of his family. When the business was sold, Ed had the opportunity to work for the new owners but decided that if he was ever going to change his line of work, this was the time to do it. He opened his store. He ordered the instruments to stock the store and, when they arrived, it was like Christmas. Every instrument he took out of the box was like a present. Yet he also wondered: "What have I done?"

The Radio Shack side of the store is a small part of Ed's business; even selling instruments - mostly guitars, bass guitars, and drums - is secondary to Ed's main emphasis in the store - lessons. Every afternoon from the time school gets out til suppertime is scheduled full of lessons, Saturday all day is scheduled full, and there are other lessons fit in during the work week with adults who are learning an instrument.

Ed has had someone come in and say: "I've always wanted to learn to play guitar but I have never had the time. Now that I'm retired, I've got the time." So Ed will give the old man lessons for the man's self-enjoyment and will show the young kids how to play rock and roll. "When people get nervous about how well they play," Ed said, "I tell them it's not about how well you play but how much you enjoy playing." He has seen adults come in for a lesson tight from the stress of work, "and with only a few minutes of guitar-playing the tension goes out of them, they relax, they're really enjoying what they're doing."

Some time ago, Ed saw an advertisement for a Nashville "showcase" - he didn't know what it was all about but he put some songs on tape and wrote up a little biography, he was supposed to send his "publicity package." And he promptly forgot about it. Later he got a call from a woman who said he had been selected to showcase at such and such a club in Nashville. "They put three or four people each night in some ten clubs all around Nashville," Ed told me, "and each band or artist would get forty-five minutes or an hour to play their music. Well, I put some clothes in a bag and my guitar in the car and headed off for Nashville." As he was approaching the city, the highway bent around a hill and all of a sudden Nashville opened like a surprise before him. "Oh, my God, what have I done?" he wondered. "What am I doing here?" Yet it was a wonderful visit to Nashville. Ed got to meet a lot of other musicians, he got to sit in on their sound checks, he "got to hang around with some awfully good musicians."

"Ed, when are you going to move to Nashville?" they asked him. "I thought about it. It was really tempting. But I had responsibilities in Vandalia - a kid going off to college, one in high school, one in junior high. An ex-wife, a new husband-in-law."

"Here I was, being offered what I'd dreamed of, playing music in Nashville," Ed said, "and I decided, no, I'll accept my responsibilities. So I've stayed in Vandalia. Happiness is not about what you don't have. It's about what you have and what you do with what you have. I've played showcases on Beale Street in Memphis, and in St. Louis, as well as in Nashville, and I come back here and try to share the gift of music with people in Vandalia. Perhaps one of the people I have an effect on will go to Nashville as a result of my influence."

"I don't regret my choice to stay in Vandalia," Ed said.

***

February 8, 2003
In the afternoon yesterday I made my Vagabond presentation to three more classes at Vandalia High School - Freshman Honors, Sophomore Honors, and another Advanced Composition class. The presentations were pretty unremarkable, except to say that it is a little more difficult holding the attention of a class in the last period of the day on a Friday afternoon, especially when some of the students are a little behind schedule preparing their index cards for an upcoming paper and they're trying to catch up while you talk.

I arrived at Hanabargers' house about 5:45 p.m. for supper and immediately was whisked through the house by Ethan Allen Hanabarger, who is the most articulate 12-year-old I think I've ever met. At one point he laid out a narrative of all the pets the family has ever had, with all the exactness and seriousness of a trial lawyer summing up his complicated argument. I wondered whether it was because he was home-schooled that he is so articulate, but Linda said he has always been like that. He could talk with almost anyone, she said, and he often does.

The Hanabargers live in a house that is - I would say - ever-evolving, always in the process of being built. It's about process, not product. Linda's husband Dale said as much as seventy-five percent of the materials in the house are recycled. The doors come from Linda's grandfather's house, windows from an old factory being torn down in Vandalia, and so on. The place is heated mainly with wood - one highly efficient wood stove sits in the living room and there's a little heater in the area where they keep some three thousand record albums they've just sold to a fellow in Singapore.

Dale Hanabarger is a musician and a free spirit. Linda is a writer and a free spirit, always a writer, always finding pen and paper to record any new bit of information she learns about Vandalia. Discussion of things historical got so pronounced that by the end of a long evening of talk and music I asked whether they discuss history just as much when I'm not there as when I'm there. All agreed that they do, except Dale, who said that they talk about people from Wisconsin when I'm not there.

The Hanabargers' friend Kevin Bunn and his son Wyatt arrived for supper too. Salad and lasagna. Kevin and Wyatt were "batching it" that evening - Kevin's wife Chance McDade had gone to Washington, D.C., where her oldest son, Dillon McDade, who is in the Navy, was graduating into the White House Honor Guard. "You'll see him on TV - he's the 6'4" kid they put right up front," I'm told.

Supper was wonderful, the conversation around the table was stimulating, the coffee afterwards was dark and serious, my wife's kind of coffee definitely, it bit back.

We were sipping our coffee when Stan Forbes and his wife Charlene arrived, their daughter Carla and her two daughters, and Carla's boyfriend Dale McNutt. Dale brought his Martin guitar with him, Dale Hanabarger had his Guild six-string and a harmonica, we filled the kitchen with our presence and the musicians filled it with their music. At one point Dale H. taught Dale M. chords for a mandolin song, then took his mandolin out of the case. He took the banjo Kevin had loaned him out of the case, too, and played a version of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown." At some point I asked if any of them know what you've got when you've got a hundred banjo players at the bottom of the lake - "a good start." Someone else asked if any of us knew the best sound a banjo makes - "splash." I offered that they don't let banjos and accordions and trombones and bagpipes into heaven - ouch.

All through the music and the periods without music we were talking about history, constantly examining the pieces of the puzzle, trying to establish where each of them fit. Another bit of information about Vandalia? Linda wrote that down. At some point Stan Forbes told one of his outlandish stories, one that impelled Carla to make a motion as if she were turning the bill of an imaginary baseball cap around to the back of her head. So I asked the outlandish question about the mule that I'd heard from Richard Rocheleau in Rugby - "Where do mules come from?" The response is, of course, "a horse and a donkey." "Which one would be the female?" is the follow-up question, and when it spurred some discussion I told them what Rocheleau had told me - "it would be the one in front."

Dale H. said to Linda "I see you thought he was going to be serious. You almost got pen and paper to write that down, didn't you. It's the reporter in you."

Stan Forbes' two granddaughters had been in the other room. Soon they came to the kitchen and sang a couple songs for us, including "Angels Watching Over Me" that I'd heard on Monday night.

The music went on and on til midnight. Finally I had to hug Linda good night and say that my visit to Vandalia couldn't have been finer. As I stepped out of the house, headed for my motel room, the night was cold and crisp and the stars were brighter than I'd seen them for a very long time. I was tired but filled with the swirl of supper and music and comradery and more than a little history. Food is love, and music is love, and so is the unquenchable thirst to know who we are and who we were and who we might become.

*

I have interviewed Mary Truitt and have had a noon meal at Jay's Inn Restaurant. I'm sitting in the parking lot of Harmon's Market preparing to make some notes. John Feightner of the Main Street program is unable to talk with me today, so I suppose I really am done with interviews this trip. I am scheduled to have supper with Don and Phyllis Rames tonight. This afternoon I'll have to move into the Ramada Limited for my last night of lodging. I'll leave, I'm expecting, bright and early tomorrow morning.

*

Mary Truitt came to Vandalia in 1940 at age seven when her father, who worked for Illinois Power, was transferred in from Edwardsville. Her father worked for Illinois Power, then worked for the Coca Cola Bottling Company in Vandalia and handled a distribution route, then worked for one of the banks in the city as the vice-president in charge of loans. When a bank in St. Louis tried to hire Mary's father away, his boss here saw to it that he didn't leave Vandalia.

Mary's mother had been a teacher in rural schools, then she was "a housewife" when she married - women with children weren't allowed to teach. She was involved in the PTA and she enjoyed pinochle with her friends at the Tuesday Night Club.

Mary remembers registering for school in Vandalia, how imposing the big four-room school seemed to the young girl who had never seen one quite like it.

During World War II when schools were desperate for teachers, Mary's mother went back to teaching in rural schools with the understanding that she'd go back to school and get a college degree. Mary and her mother started their junior years of college at the same time - Mary at Carbondale, her mother at Greenville College.

Mary graduated with a degree in home economics and was recruited by the Milwaukee Public Schools, which is where she taught for thirty-five years. She recalled an incident during her career when she was teaching Home Economics for a variety of public and parochial schools on Milwaukee's near south side. At one of the Catholic colleges in Milwaukee the nun teaching a group of young women asked them what had gotten them interested in home economics as a career. First one, then another, then another, until there were five of them who said it was her eighth grade Home Ec teacher who had inspired her. First one then another until all of them said the teacher's name was Mary Truitt. The young women had not known each other in grade school but at this point they decided they needed to call Mary and take her out for a drink and thank her for what she'd given all five of them. Mary still stays in contact with one of those women. When she retired from her teaching career, she was the "university facilitator" at Riverside High in Milwaukee, a college-track school.

Her mother had been failing and the window of opportunity had opened for a good retirement, so Mary returned to Vandalia to care for her mother. Her father had died somewhat earlier. Mary was back in Vandalia only a few months when her mother died. Mary returned to teaching at Kaskaskia Community College and the correctional institution and she started involving herself in the life of the community. A friend who, early on, had told Mary to get involved in community organizations now wonders whether she should have; Mary is involved in that much.

Like her father, Mary has always been interested in history and tourism so she has served and continues to serve on various committees and commissions related to those interests. In 1990 she made some waves when she became the first woman to join the Vandalia Lions. Her father had been an avid Lion and Mary had been to several national and international events with him. So she knew what she was getting into. Yet gender was still an issue in Vandalia in 1990, Mary indicated, so at the first meeting she attended, she felt a little bit like she did when she was the only white person at a wedding where everyone else was black. Change comes slow. She has since served as the president of the Vandalia Lions and has welcomed additional female members to the group. Mary said the Rotary Club crossed the gender boundary in the 1990s, too, when first one woman, then another joined that organization.

I asked Mary about the community's reaction to the 1962 book The Talk of Vandalia by Joseph Lyford. She was able to observe the reaction from the distance of Milwaukee and she feels that Vandalia's reaction - "this isn't us, that's not how it is" - was mostly justified. Her parents were upset with the book. Mary made clear that it wasn't the "big" issues that upset people, it was the quotes and comments that, while not naming names and identifying people specifically, contained enough information that everyone knew who was meant; there were comments made in this fashion, she believes, that people felt were not true to Vandalia's reality.

My own sense, having read about two thirds of the book at this point, is that the issues raised in 1962 have yet to be resolved, that the problems then are still problems now. But I'm not a long time Vandalia resident, I'm not sensitive to the innuendoes and veiled criticisms that might have upset the community forty years ago. I'll have to re-read the book focusing on the "little" issues Mary mentioned, as opposed to the big ones I'd noticed right off.

Mary has received an award from the state of Illinois for all her contributions to the community "in public and behind the scenes and under the scenes." Mary has a sense of humor, you think, as large as her embrace, and at the same time you have to believe she's not one to suffer fools gladly. She's got her opinions about how things are, sure, but on such a divisive issue as "the bricks" - that is, replacing the surface of Gallatin Street with bricks instead of smooth concrete - she doesn't care much one way or the other about the bricks, she wants the community to move on and start making the whole downtown attractive to visitors, not just the street surface.

Mary seems to have made a wide and varied contribu-tion to Vandalia and you hope the community understands that and appreciates it. True, she may speak a little dif-ferent version of how things are, but we ought to embrace such people. Yet we don't always do that, do we, when what we hear threatens us and sounds like criticism? We tend to push away the people we don't agree with, rather than pulling them close to learn everything we can from those who see things we cannot.

*

I look up from my notebook, momentarily I don't know where I am - Illinois or Minnesota or North Dakota or where? It could be anywhere, everywhere. Oh, I'm still in the parking lot of Harmon's Market, I finally recognize. Yet the people I see look more like neighbors than strangers and still I don't know as much of them as I would wish. And I worry that my "poking about" might be seen by some as "prying," though I have not had a single instance in three communities to date of anyone suggesting that's the case. It was interesting last night talking to Linda Hanabarger about the day she received my initial letter about the Vagabond project. She said the thought had crossed her mind, "what if he's a homeless person looking for a place to stay?" At the outset no one has a single reason to believe a single word I say because at that point they've had no experience with me that allows them to develop trust. And yet, without fail, people do want to trust me, they give me intimate details from their lives and they expect that I'll handle those details as they should be handled. How do you ever say Thank You for a gift such as that?

***

February 9, 2003
Last night I had supper with Don and Phyllis Rames. They are lovely folks. Don is so practical - more silent, less worried about the ramifications of everything; Phyllis is introspective and analytical, given to pondering until she understands. I think both of them have been great assets to Vandalia. They are very interested in the progress of the Vagabond project, are eager to hear what I learn and what it will mean. We talked and ate and talked from 5:00 p.m. until 9:30 p.m. when I came back to my room for a night's sleep.

I'm packing my bags this morning. Now I'll swallow a cup of coffee quick, then I'm on my way again, headed towards home once more. It's great to go away, it's even better going home.