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WRITING BY CHARLEY GROTH

All my life I've been a writer. Some of what I've written has been published, and some has not. I've decided to post some of it here. There are just a few things here now, but as time permits I'll post more.

Click on the titles below to view the selections. I hope you enjoy them!

CONTENTS

Click HERE For She's A Loud One Click HERE For Othering Click HERE For Jerry Lee Click HERE For Soul of the Autoharp Click HERE For Louis Armstrong Is 100 Years Old Click HERE For Untitled (Evening Over A Store) Click HERE For When Gardenias Bloom Or Scroll Down To View

SHE'S A LOUD ONE Copyright (c) 1975 by Charles C. Groth. Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyrighted With all rights reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.

"One thing you can say for sure about that fiddle, now, Charley: She's a loud one." I agreed. We stood beside my truck in Bill Garrick's front yard, tilting our hat brims into unceasing wind that scores the high, bone-dry plain slanting up from Las Cruces, New Mexico and into the Black Range mountains to the north. In a few months I'd swing by Bill's shacky house out there in the desert, just to say hello, and he'd be gone--house empty, windows broken, no dogs or chickens in the yard. I'd never hear from him, or of him, again. Of course I realized Bill didn't want to sell his fiddle. He felt he had to do it. His wife, a big fat sloppy woman with crooked yellow teeth and wide splayed feet who waddled around in those thin print housedresses no-one should wear, had laid down the law. God did not approve of fiddle music, she had decided. She also felt he didn't approve of Bill Grimes working in the beer joints and dance halls where fiddles were played. If he wanted to live with her, the fiddle had to go. Incredibly, it seemed he did want to live with her. I think Bill had been through enough rough times and had had Jack Daniels as his only companion for long enough that right then he wanted peace and quiet and harmony with his woman more than anything else--more, even, than his music. So the fiddle had to go. Apache-looking weathered face unreadable, he looked up at me, eyes narrowed, cigarette blowing apart in the corner of his mouth, and held out a worn black case patched with strips of that old-style black gummy electrical tape. I pulled a fold of bills out of my trouser pocket, handed it to him, and put the fiddle case under my arm. It wasn't a bit good, taking a man's music like that. I didn't like it--but at least now we both knew the old German fiddle wouldn't end up hanging dirty and cracked on some pawnshop wall, or worse, gutted open and filled with begonias or made into a bedlamp. I thought maybe he'd want it back someday. Bill didn't count the money. I didn't open the case. You didn't do those things and get along in the west, back in those days. Bill Garrick had the heart and the talent for music, and he'd put in the time. When I first knew him, twenty-odd years before I bought his fiddle, he was in his middle forties and already in deteriorating health, coughing constantly, smoking handrolled only, the cheapest tobacco he could find. Music, though, flowed through the little guy like a big river. Even in the depths of his worst losses to whiskey, he could make fine strong music. His version of Raggedy Anne was one of the hottest anywhere. So was his Orange Blossom Special. His takes on the old Bob Wills ballads could make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. Bill stood about 5'7" and couldn't have weighed over 125 pounds counting the big ring of keys that always dangled from the belt loops of his blue jeans, but he was all fence wire and fishing poles. He could wear most other musicians out without breaking a sweat himself. Like a lot of people native to the west, Bill kept a close mouth and tended strictly to his own business. Every once in a while, though, a few stories would slip out past his sparky smoke. "Now you know that Battle of New Orleans", he allowed one day--"I played on that. That's me on there, on the bass. Done a couple of others, too, up in Nashville." A couple of others. Bill had been a hot hand, played music with Ernest Tubb, Marty Robbins when he was still in the west, Waylon Jennings when he was a boy starting out in the joints down on Speedway in Tucson, Arizona. "Waylon, Waylon," Bill chuckled, "he was quite a kid." "That Chet Atkins, Charley," Bill told me one day as we stood before a long urinal in some joint along the Mexican border, "now to me he seems like a mighty peculiar fella to work for--but he sure can pick, though." Bill Garrick told his life story without saying a word, every time he climbed on a bandstand. In his gaudy western shirts, tight faded jeans riding low on his hips, big well-worn belt buckle glinting in the lights, squinting around smoke curling from his perpetual cigarette, he looked like he knew what he was doing--and he did. (To Be Continued As Typing Time Permits!)

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OTHERING Copyright (c) 1978 by Charles C. Groth. Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyrighted With all rights reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.

I can feel my leaving in me, Going in me, running through me; I can feel retreat into the mountains of my dreams And the dreams of deserts In my youthful heart. The end of all this is upon me; I embrace it, Sweet silver sleeping bears: Pickup odyssey, sunmetal climb, Cactus in the drywash of my heart. An interest in othering.

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JERRY LEE Copyright (c) 1986 by Charles C. Groth. Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyrighted With all rights reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.

I saw Jerry Lee on television a while back; My God the man looked bad. Coarse dry yellow apple skin and an old man's Pursey mouth... But he was still pumping, Jerry Lee He was still pumping, big piano pounding; He looked bad (that pursey mouth), But Jerry Lee, I swear he was still Rocking and rolling, And his heat melted part of my television set. Nothing machine-made about Jerry Lee; Looks like an old man of the mountain now, But Jerry, he's still pouring that good-hearted music Straight from the bottle. Blew the damned technopop stink right out of my house. He looks bad, Jerry Lee, no doubt about it; I stayed away from mirrors for days afterward. He's tired--but he's hanging in there, Thanking God and raising hell. Maybe things really will be all right.

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SOUL OF THE AUTOHARP Copyright (c) 1990 by Charles C. Groth. Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyrighted With all rights reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.

By the time Harry returned his rake and broom to their places in the shed, darkness had begun to settle on the streets of Midview. New England's air had taken on a frigid edge as the sun set, a deep cold warning of snow just a few weeks away. The icy air prodded fiercely at arthritis in Harry's back and knees. Pulling his worn sweater closed, he made his way, not rapidly, but still as quickly as possible, around the house and up porch stairs grown steep in his advancing years. Turning on the top step, learning against the bannister to catch his breath, he looked out over his front yard. He'd done a pretty good afternoon's work, he decided, for a man of seventy-eight years. Thick drifts of fallen maple leaves had covered the property. He'd raked them into half a dozen big piles, ready for tomorrow, when his son would come with a pickup truck to haul them away. Harry had also swept all the sidewalks he felt were his responsibility, and his porch. He'd collected the sweepings in peach baskets. Jack would take those too. He was a good son. He'd laugh his big laugh when he saw so much work done and say "Pop, you're old but you ain't dead yet!" Problem was, most of the time Harry wished he were dead. Since Marta had so suddenly left him, a year and three months before, his life had reduced itself to little more than impatient waiting. To Harry, his life did not seem worth living, alone. Never in their more than forty years together had he seriously considered the notion that Marta might be the first of them to go. Couldn't happen. Not healthy, happy Marta. Not Marta. Harry had planned meticulously and worked very hard to make sure she'd have a good life when he was in the ground. All papers had been signed. Every arrangement had been made. Then, one summer morning, without any warning or even a suspicion that trouble might be in the wind, an artery in Marta's brain had burst. The next afternoon, she had gone. (To Be Continued As Typing Time Permits!)

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LOUIS ARMSTRONG IS 100 YEARS OLD Copyright (c) 2000 by Charles C. Groth. Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyrighted With all rights reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.

Louis Armstrong is 100 years old tonight, and I Am aging too. No lamentations, though, Listening to Satch invent jazz on NPR. Far off by the Beltway, deep in D.C., You are listening too. Our paths, grown long from cornfield starts, Have not been similar. I went with a band, and I've heard you've tried your hand at other things--- But in the tangled Potomac lowlands tonight, That horn cuts through. That same horn! That horn I hear by the Suwannee; That same horn you hear. By God that same horn we used to hear--or Would have heard, had we known to listen, In our dirtroad childhood homeland. That same horn! Friends lost to each other these forty years, We are swept together tonight On a molten silver cascade of love Pouring forth from that horn. Miles are defeated. Time is evaporated. We are captured, As the great genius casts his spell. How do you do it, Louis? Who else but you Will ever know? Louis Armstrong is 100 years old tonight, and we Are not, quite. Together, enmeshed in the mystery, we hear him. There is that horn, Living, laughing, strong, bright, sweet eternal call: Satch invents jazz on NPR. In a shabby bedroom Back o' Town, Young Louis lies on his cot. Fingers moving slightly, eyes wide in the dark, He listens to that horn.

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UNTITLED (EVENING OVER A STORE) Copyright (c) 1979 by Charles C. Groth. Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyrighted With all rights reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.

Evening over a store; Neon frosted icewater glass porthole, Dead street scene showing. Winos frozen, brown bags to lips, Caught in the jaws of inertia While cocoon-keepers weave, Each encapsulated, Snuggled away from edges and corners.

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Once upon a time a young girl came to me for mandolin lessons. She was one of the "different ones"--one of us. I could see that right away. I tried to be a voice of sanity in her life--an adult who could assure her it was fine for her to be herself, and someone who held out hope to her that she would find her way and make her friends and have every chance to live a good and satisfying life. The years have whirled away, as I'm noticing they are increasingly wont to do, and today that former student is twenty-seven. She lives in Los Angeles, and enjoys that good life I hoped she'd go find for herself. Whenever she's in town, this dear friend comes to visit me. As it happens, she loves the big and very old gardenia bush in my front yard--and interestingly, the gardenias are almost always in bloom when she comes to visit. Once again recently the gardenias burst into bloom, and she arrived at my door. I was so happy to see her and see how well she is doing in her life that I wrote a poem about it. Her name is Carmel France.

WHEN GARDENIAS BLOOM Copyright (c) 2001 by Charles C. Groth. Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyrighted With all rights reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.

She comes when gardenias bloom, Long lithe woman, Beautiful and confident. Her tumbling black hair, and Other faint echoes, remain To remind him of a confused young girl once known. They laugh, in a rare visit, His tendency to dote imperfectly controlled. He listens as she tells her tales, Proud of her and of her pathfinding, Knowing she has flown afar, Complimented that she still takes time to call. She comes when gardenias bloom, A different one, Recognized the moment they met. As the stream of years becomes a torrent He grows old. He holds her dear, and She blooms, like the white gardenias.

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