Your Own Back Yard – Michael Gillan Maxwell

I’ve come to the conclusion that it is actually beneficial to have people think you’re a little crazy. Then you can be certain that the people that hang in there with you are either true friends, or really crazy themselves. It takes away a lot of the guess work.

My short, short nonfiction piece is up on the online lit ‘zine “Orion headless”.
http://orionheadless.com/swimming-in-the-lagoon/

Blog Entry-November 22, 2011

Remembering the Kennedy Assassination and Reflections on the 60’s, The End of Innocence and the Dawn of a New Age

Today is November 22, 2011. It is Thanksgiving week in America. On this day in history in 1963, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35^th president of the United States of America, was assassinated as he rode in an uncovered car in a motorcade through downtown Dallas, Texas. He was 46. I was 13.

There are moments that are frozen in time, when you remember where you were and what you were doing when you learned about some cataclysmic, life-changing event. During my lifetime, some of those events have included the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the Challenger and Columbia Space Shuttle explosions and the horrific events of 9/11.  As with those, I remember this moment also with some clarity.

I was in my 8^th grade classroom at St. Monica School. It was just after lunch and the Franciscan nun who was our school principal came into our classroom to inform our teacher that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Both women were in tears and although we had not yet been informed, we all knew something horrible had happened.

It was Friday, and I went on a scheduled camping trip with my Boy Scout troop that weekend. We went to someone’s cabin on a horse farm. My sleeping bag was old and worn and I absolutely froze my ass off that first night as I tried to sleep on the hard floor of the cabin. I slept the next night in a horse stall. There was hay to make it a bit softer and a horse blanket to make it a bit warmer, but not much. We rode horses. Although I had been on horses before, I didn’t really technically know how to ride. I just kind of made it up as I went. I remember the mixed feelings of exhilaration and fear as my horse sprinted balls to the walls at a full gallop as it ran for the barn. I don’t know how I managed to hang on, but I did. That afternoon we played in a muddy ravine and had an epic mud fight. The weather was cold, raw, damp and gloomy and I remember the adults speaking together in hushed tones and the overall pall cast by the news of the assassination. It left the nation reeling in shock and it felt like time stood still for days on end.

There was continuous television coverage on the only three networks we had at the time. I got home from the trip on Sunday and watched Lee Harvey Oswald get shot and killed by Jack Ruby on live television. School was cancelled that Monday and my family and the nation watched the requiem mass and the state funeral on TV. It was the end of innocence, the end of my childhood and the early days of the turbulent 60’s.

Much had happened already in the first three years of the decade: the birth of the Civil Rights Movement, Berlin Wall, Bay of Pigs invasion, Cuban Missile Crisis, Cold War, Peace Corps, Space Race, the deepening of the Vietnam conflict, and the seeds of what would grow to become Sadaam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, and construction of the Kinzua Dam which flooded 10,000 acres (4,047 ha) of Seneca nation land that they occupied under the Treaty of 1794.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy was like a gate swinging open for everything else that was soon to follow: the Civil Rights Movement, race riots, the horrific carnage of the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., the Anti-War Movement, the Weather Underground, Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary, Rock and Roll, LSD, cultural upheaval, Haight Ashbury and the Hippies, High School, College, Protests, Woodstock, Easy Rider, men on the moon, Richard Nixon,  “dis-illusionment” in the true Buddhist sense of the word, and my own awakening and shift in consciousness as I left the Catholic Church, embraced a new awareness, left home, tuned in, turned on and dropped out and eventually left the country altogether at the end of the decade. As a Nation, we were never the same as we had been. As a person, I was never the same either. Everything and everybody was, once and for all, irrevocably different. We weren’t in Kansas anymore.

Today is Tuesday November 22, 2011. It is Thanksgiving week in America. I feel as though we stand ready for a great shift in consciousness that will by far surpass that which began in the 60’s and continued in the decades that followed. I am grateful for all that I have: family, friends, health, home, food, warmth, shelter, freedom, this beautiful area, the earth and my mental and creative faculties. It is a momentous time to be alive and physically incarnated on planet Earth, Third Stone From the Sun; in a galaxy we call the Milky Way.

I wish you all

Love, Light and Blessings!

MGM

November 22, 2011

I set fire to my first building on my 28^th birthday. It wasn’t something I got out of bed in the morning and spontaneously decided to do for the fun of it. It just kind of happened. I’ll never forget the acrid stench of creosote covered roof beams going up in smoke.

I should say right here and now, that it’s not what you’re thinking. I was actually a hippie potter living on an old farm in upstate New York. I had started a pottery studio with a buddy of mine from Colorado. I’ve heard that the best business partnerships are struck between adversaries. I really didn’t know what that meant until I went into business with a friend. We started the studio together as best of friends. We parted ways under quite different circumstances. But that’s another story for another time. Let’s get back to the burning building.

We were firing the large stoneware kiln on a blazing hot day in late July, July 27^th, to be exact. I remember because it was my birthday. That kiln was fired by propane up to temperatures reaching nearly 2300 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s a lot of heat, fire, smoke and flame, in case you’re wondering. There are a couple of times during the process where the air supply is choked off in order to create certain types of effects with the clay and glazes. This is called putting the kiln “into reduction.” When this is done, it creates a rather dramatic outpouring of flame and black smoke. The fire seeks oxygen, and as a result, flames were licking our through every crevice and crack in the bricked up door and out of the burner ports. To the uninitiated it looks literally like a house on fire. However this looks a lot more dramatic and dangerous than it really is. Except if there happens to be anything flammable near the kiln. In this case, there was, and it happened to be the roof of our kiln shed. The shed was constructed from old building materials that had been salvaged from a warehouse demolition. The roof beams were precariously close to the kiln and that was the day they caught on fire. The only thing that prevented the whole structure and studio from going up in flames was that the aged and weathered beams had been treated in creosote. At one time it was a common practice to treat telephone poles, railroad ties and building timbers with creosote as an actual fire retardant.

Our fellow potters congratulated us as having officially “arrived.” There is a bit of folklore that all potters are closet pyromaniacs and that you aren’t really a legitimate potter until you set fire to your first building. As time went by I repeated my flirtation with fire by accidentally setting fire to my gloves, bandanas, and my hair. I even started a wildfire when I plunged a red hot pot into the dry grass. My wife was nine months pregnant at the time and I’ll never forget the sight of her in that delicate condition beating back the flames with a blanket.

It was not until years later that I performed my crowning achievement in this arena. I was teaching Ceramics at a local college. It was towards the end of a long firing and I put the kiln into reduction, which produced the expected conflagration complete with dramatic amounts of flame and thick black smoke. This process could take as long as half an hour. I was expecting guests for dinner that evening, so I thought I’d have enough time to run across the street to my house and get a couple of things done. As I worked in my kitchen, I heard the sound of sirens approaching, but it really didn’t consciously register. A few minutes later as I left my house to return to the studio, I saw that fire trucks and emergency vehicles had cordoned off the entire block. Much to my dismay I saw a crew of burly firefighters in full turnout gear advancing towards the kiln yard with a fire hose.

I sprinted balls to the walls, across the soccer field between my house and the kiln yard, screaming at the top of my lungs for them to stop. I don’t know how I did it, but I managed to cover the distance and barge through the crew of firefighters and emergency personnel to reach them just before they hit the kiln with a torrent of cold water. It would have created an unimaginable cataclysm of steam, exploding bricks, burst gas pipes, shattering pottery and kiln shelves and God knows what else.

“Stop! Stop! What are you doing?” “Stand back! We got a report of a structure fire! That brick shed’s on fire! We gotta put it out!” “No! That’s a kiln – it’s a pottery kiln – that’s what’s supposed to happen – everything’s under control!” “ Where’s the main shut off? Turn it off!”

I complied by turning off the main gas supply. The flames and smoke receded and the interior of kiln glowed red hot through the cracks in the bricked up door. “Twenty three years on the force and I ain’t never seen nothing like it – you’re lucky the security guard spotted the fire and called it in. You coulda burnt down the whole college!” I offered apologies and assurances, insisted that there never had been any real danger and that I’d see to it that everything was safely turned off and locked up. They looked at me like I was from Mars. I looked over in disbelief at the security guard who seemed full of himself with the heroic act he thought he had just performed.

I waited for every one to leave and I also pretended to leave. I locked the gate and went into the Art Building. After I was sure that everyone had left and the coast was really clear, I did the only thing any self-respecting potter and firebug would do. I finished the job. You can’t do that properly without plenty of heat, fire, smoke and flame. I started the kiln back up and finished the firing.