"Craycraft Communique" by Galen Green; 2008

Galen Green
816.807.4957
Tuesday
February 12, 2008
(Abraham Lincoln’s
& Charles Darwin’s
199th birthday &
Scott Turow’s 59th)


Craycraft Communiqué #08-0001


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For all our days are passed away in thy wrath:
we spend our years as a tale that is told.
So teach us to number our days,
that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

-- Psalm 90: 9 & 12 (KJV)

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“Take care of all your memories”
Said my friend, Mick
“For you cannot relive them
And remember when you’re out there
Tryin’ to heal the sick
That you must always
First forgive them.”

-- Bob Dylan, “Open the Door, Homer” (1975)

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“Then is it wisdom, as it seems to me,
To make a virtue of necessity, …

-- Chaucer, from the Knight’s Tale

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Dear Rick,

I’ve been thinking about Rollo Millspaugh lately. I was trying to remember whether it was you or someone else who was with me that evening I dropped by the supermarket at Grove & Kellogg where Rollo worked as a stock boy – just to say hello, to thumb through a few magazines and to maybe grab a bit of junk food – a few hours before Rollo was killed. Was it you? If so, what can you help me recall about that evening and about that last brief visit with poor Rollo? I want to get as much of this as possible down on paper before my memory starts to fail me even worse than it already has.

I don’t even recall precisely the year or the season, but it must have been a pleasant evening for a walk around the neighborhood – the kind that you and I often enjoyed together, back then when we were still in high school. Would it have been junior year or senior – or the summer in between?

Anyway, Rollo Millspaugh was one of the first people my own age and whom I knew fairly well to die so senselessly, so violently and so young. Do you remember him at all? He looked a little like Greg Benjamin, but not nearly so blond. The only class I ever had with him was Mr. Allen’s 5th period American History. I remember Rollo, who was about as obnoxious as Greg, though not nearly as urbane, trying to tell me what I think must have been some sort of sexual “joke” about masturbation, before class one afternoon. I laughed and nodded knowingly; but the truth is that I couldn’t quite figure out what he was getting at; the whole thing just didn’t quite make any sense. I suspect that Rollo had me pegged as a hopeless “square,” which, I’m confident you can confirm, I was not. I, on the other hand, tended to have Rollo pegged as being a young man “not quite right in the head,” as we used to say.

So, for the sake of our narrative here, let’s pretend that it was on a summer’s evening in 1966 that you and I dropped by that neighborhood supermarket to say hello to Rollo, who was wearing, if I recall correctly, one of those starched white grocer’s aprons which I myself had worn when I’d worked as a so-called “carry-out boy,” the previous summer at Mr. D’s IGA store at the west end of the Ken-Mar Shopping Center, around 13th & Oliver. That last evening of his life, Rollo was also wearing his usual winning smile. Despite the fact that I never got a chance to get to know him very well, it seemed to me at the time that he was genuinely “happy” – or was, at least, as happy as any high school student has ever been allowed to be.

The next time I saw Rollo was when I found myself gazing down at his corpse in its open casket. The mortician had done a splendid job of covering up the effects of the vehicular accident which had so abruptly snuffed out his rambunctious young life and crushed his handsome young skull. As anyone our age has undoubtedly learned long ago, there’s a world of difference between the experience of attending the funeral of someone who’s had the opportunity to grow up and have an adult life, to have known the agony and the ecstasy of the sort which you and I have each known, the tears and fears and cheers and beers of one’s 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, etc. . . and attending the funeral of someone who never has known and never ever ever ever will know any of what most of us tend to think of as a full existence. You may disagree with my characterization of it, but I know that you know what I’m getting at here.

As nearly as I can recall, this is how the Wichita Eagle summarized the circumstances of Rollo’s surprise visit from the Grim Reaper, how he went instantaneously from being the smiling stock boy in his starched white grocer’s apron to being the heavily made up corpse pretending to be asleep in his Sunday-go-to-meetin’ suit in the best casket his parents could afford:

After getting off work at the supermarket that last night of his life, Rollo had begun walking home along Kellogg, headed east. But he never made it. Instead, he evidently stopped off along the way at that funky little taco shop (on Kellogg), where he fatefully crossed paths with a friend of his, another of our East High classmates who was, himself, closing up for the night. His friend, as it turned out, had just purchased one of those unassuming low-horsepower little motor scooters, nowadays (42 years later) more often associated with the crowded marketplaces and alleyways of third-world countries. According to the article my mother pointed out to me in the newspaper, Rollo (being Rollo – at least for a few more seconds) hopped on this unassuming little Death Machine and proceeded to zip out of the driveway of the taco shop – without looking both ways (both lanes of Kellogg being all but deserted) – and straight into the path of the big truck delivering the bundled copies of that morning’s Wichita Eagle.

According to the next morning’s edition of that very same newspaper, Rollo’s skull had been crushed, and he had died instantly. (One moment we’re here, and in the next instant, we’re dead forever.) As I say, Margaret pointed that article out to me. She and Harry were more or less lying in wait for me the kitchen table when I came downstairs to breakfast the morning that it appeared. My guess is that the newspaper’s chief motive in bothering to cover Rollo’s death was to quell any loose talk to the effect that their delivery driver may have, in some way, been at fault. Harry & Margaret’s transparent eagerness to share the tragic news with me was obviously a spontaneous addendum to their tireless campaign to keep their eldest son – The Toolmaker’s Other Son (me) – off of motorcycles (which they referred to as “suicycles”), as well as away from guns. (One of Harry’s brothers, Harley, had accidentally shot to death another of their brothers, Tommy, when they were small children on the Kansas prairie, several years before Harry was born. My father was, thereby, generally believed to have been a so-called “replacement child” – not at all an uncommon phenomenon, as I’m sure you’re aware.)


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So, why have I been thinking about Rollo Millspaugh lately? I’m honestly not sure why. He and I were never close. In a very real sense, I hardly knew him. And had his life not ended when it did, I seriously doubt that anything like a deep friendship would ever have developed between us. There was simply inadequate basis for it. Moreover, Rollo would most certainly never have fit in comfortably with any of my other friends – not you nor Novinski, Washburn, Ross, Newkirk, Wade, etc. . . . nor the Daniels Gang nor Eldridge, Batchelor, Freeman, Marlman, Adams and my other musical friends nor Art Dunbar, John Garvey, Kate Schulte and the other leading characters in my post-high school life nor James and Bill Nelson and the crowd of liberals, literati and academics who hung out at their spacious white stucco Mediterranean-style house, there on the southwest corner of 1st & Roosevelt, during our anti-war, civil rights, fiery feminist undergraduate years. In other words, at the risk of my sounding shamefully cliquish, Rollo Millspaugh was not “one of us;” although, admittedly, at the time, I think it’s fair to say that we weren’t even aware that there was an “us,” much less any-one who was “not-us.”

No. It’s nothing to do with my missing someone with whom I was once close and who’s been dead now for more than half my life. Instead, I suspect that it has far more to do with what Rollo Millspaugh and untimely demise symbolizes within the dark recesses of my psyche. And, given the timeframe of my flashing back to all of that relatively emotionless imagery, I’m going to make an educated guess that the recent event which triggered my thinking about Rollo Millspaugh lately was the young lady next door hanging herself last week.

As I was leaving for work the day they found her, I noticed three navy-blue police cruisers , two white C.S.I. vans and an ambulance, parked downstairs in the parking lot in front of our building, but with nobody in sight (except for the lounging ambulance crew) and no yellow “Crime Scene” tape anywhere around. As I was pulling out of my parking space, I called Marie on my cell phone and suggested that she take a look out our second-floor front window to see what she might be able to find out. Later that afternoon, she phoned me at work to share with me the fruits of her diligent window duty.

Before we get to that, however, let me back up to say that Marie’s apartment on Chestnut Circle is in the furthest back in the woods of the many units in the Chestnut Hills complex, which was built, sometime back in the early 1970’s, on what had previously been a golf course. We live in the most peaceful, secluded corner of what had been “the rough.” Very pleasant, with a rear balcony that looks out onto a placid little meadow and the woods surrounding it, with a little brook winding through the trees. Our unit has twelve apartments in it. A year or so ago, a nice quiet 20-something lesbian couple moved into the apartment on the other side of the wall from both our bedroom and our office. Then, maybe six months ago, the one with dog and the pick-up left, at the same time that a huge pile of junk suddenly appeared smack-dab in the middle of the basement floor, as though someone were planning a yard sale. The Chestnut Hills maintenance staff finally dragged it all out to the dumpster.

Neither Marie nor I ever met either member of this quiet couple, and I don’t remember seeing either of them more than three or four times, and only for a few seconds, and always at a distance. In this respect, their story’s sad ending was a bit reminiscent of that early Paul Simon song about the tenant whom nobody knows committing suicide by turning on the gas, etc. Except that the young lady who lived on the other side of the wall from us hanged herself instead.

As I was starting to say a while ago, Marie left several messages on my cell phone voice mail, later that afternoon, to share with me the fruits of her diligent window duty. The young lady had evidently worked at a bar in Westport, so that the bar's manager evidently became concerned when she didn't show up for work. Chestnut Hills’ management office was then evidently asked to send someone over with a master key to check on her, and found her hanging from (of all places) the central fixture on the ceiling fan in her dining room. It was only as I was driving home from work several hours later that it dawned on me that she'd probably been hanging there for at least a couple of days, not more than ten feet away from us, on the other side of our bedroom wall.


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Rollo Millspaugh's death at an early age was not, however, the only memory to be dredged up by our neighbor's recent suicide. Depending on our life circumstances, I suppose it's a good guess that most of us over the age of 50 have been visited by more than ample opportunity to witness the deaths of some of our fellow human beings, in a variety of manifestations. For example, assuming that you've read the copy I recently sent you of my tenth installment of what I've been tentatively titling my autobiographical Mandle-Oz Memorandum, an episodic psychosocial essay presented ostensibly as an open letter to another of our East High classmates and a close friend of mine in early childhood, Dr. Shannon Mandle . . . assuming that you've read it, you're already aware that part of my professional time between 1996 and 2005 was devoted to schlepping dead folks around in various Kansas City area hospitals. Trust me: it's a therapeutic experience -- for the schlepper, at least, if not so much for the schleppee.

But I also consider it to be a good guess that, with most of us, the degree to which Death's Bright Angel's hand upon one of our fellow creatures impacts our deeper self is largely determined by context, as well as by the more obvious factor of our relationship to the decedent. With few exceptions -- infants and children in particular -- handling the recently deceased soon became an exercise in mental discipline. As long as each of these lifeless human bodies, each with its special story, was something I was dealing with within that professional hospital context, then the necessary distancing process usually occurred without emotional (or existential) complication; although I confess that I never did entirely manage to overcome my impulse to get uncontrollably choked up whenever I found myself in close proximity to a dead child or infant. It must have been something primal -- certainly subconscious.

I mention this issue of context here because of another close encounter with the dead -- other than the Rollo Millspaugh episode -- which our neighbor's suicide appears to have re-awakened within my memory. Since Marie was with me at the time, we were revisiting said close encounter earlier this week in conversation. As nearly as either of us could recall, it occurred on an unseasonably temperate March afternoon in 1997. We'd decided to go for a walk through nearby Mount Moriah Cemetery, a rare opportunity to stretch our legs and to shake off some of the winter funk.

Let me explain a couple of things very briefly. First of all, KCMO has some lovely cemeteries, accommodating such distinguished residents as Satchel Paige and Charlie Parker – so that a cemetery stroll is commonplace in these parts. Secondly, Mount Moriah had always proved especially inviting to us, because of its gently rolling landscape and its close proximity to Marie’s Chestnut Hills apartment complex. On the warmish March afternoon in question, then, we decided to cut a path back into a kind of hedged-round area, off in the cemetery’s far northeast corner – “the turf less traveled,” so to speak.

Because it happened to be an apt afternoon for taking an impromptu nap on the grass, I’ll have to admit that I didn’t think twice about the elderly lady lying on her side on the ground, maybe twenty feet away from us. It was Marie who stopped and stared and then said to me something like, “Galen, I don’t think that person’s asleep.” So, employing my finely hones investigatory skills, I yelled as loudly as I could at the supine figure: “Hey, wake up!” I’m sure you’re way ahead of me on this, Rick, so I’ll begin the next sentence with the words “of course.”

Of course, the figure on the ground didn’t so much as flinch. So I crept up closer, so as not to disturb the flies crawling all over her eyelashes. “Oops!” says I. “Only a dead person would allow that many flies to take up residence on her eyelashes!” Before you ask, let me defend my professional reputation by interjecting here that, no, I didn’t actually walk up to her and shake her. The unresponsiveness, the aggregation of busy flies and the faintly greenish pallor of her face in the afternoon sunlight were sufficient to convince both Marie and me that our new acquaintance had long since “gone to Glory.”

After a moment’s consultation, Marie and I decided that the best way for us to proceed at that point (so as to minimize the likelihood that either the police or the media would screw up our evening together) was simply for us to walk back to the car, drive to the cemetery office (which was actually the Mount Moriah Funeral Home), calmly report what we’d found, leave our names and contact information, then park the car in an appropriately secluded spot approximately fifty yards from the old woman’s body, where we’d be able to espy the subsequent comings and goings. We didn’t have to wait long before the coroner’s van and several police cars made their way back into the hedged-round area. (On a recent return visit to the scene of our gruesome discovery, I was disappointed to find that all of those ornately winding hedges, elegantly arranged in the style of a tea garden on an English country estate, had been ripped out to make room for more graves.)

An hour or so after Marie and I had returned home from our very different sort of afternoon walk, we were visited by a police detective who asked us each a dozen or so predictable questions before my curiosity got the better of me and I found myself asking him questions. Who was this dead woman, anyway? And why was she dressed in church clothes, including a purse and a hat? How did she get to that spot and how did she die? His story (which I find flimsier each time I reconsider it, as the years pass) was that she was a psychiatric patient who’d walked away from a nursing facility, that she may have taken a cab to the cemetery, that she’d committed suicide by shooting herself with a handgun (something which – as I’m sure you’re well aware – females statistically very seldom do).

For the next week or so, Marie and I paid extra close attention to the local television news reports and the Kansas City Star’s Local News section, but nothing at all about our dead woman was reported. A couple of months later, I phoned KCPD’s Detective Division and left a message for our mysterious visitor, but he never returned my call. Marie and I had too many irons in the fire to pursue the matter any further. It was obvious that the powers that be had their reasons for keeping it out of the public eye; and neither Marie nor I wanted to become an inconvenient witness to a mob hit or to some prominent family’s potential embarrassment.


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It’s no great mystery why our neighbor’s suicide last week would re-awaken imagery and issues associated with our Mount Moriah Cemetery episode of a decade earlier or with the premature demise of Rollo Millspaugh of nearly a lifetime ago. Generally speaking, Death seems to have that effect on folks; one death reminds us of another, as well as of Death in general. Strange as it may seem to hear me say it at this point, however, I didn’t come here with the intention of talking about Death or about dead folks. All I set out to do here today, Rick, was to write you a letter, albeit a letter woven out of the loose strands of my memories of our shared experiences.

Nothing that any of us does has only one effect. Each individual struck note ripples through the air in every available direction. Likewise, nothing that any of us does is prompted by only one single motivation. (Although, I had a professor at seminary who was fond of saying, “I don’t trust more than one reason.” But he was an idiot.) We do what we do for a multitude of reasons; and everything we do causes a multitude of effects. Thus am I writing to you here today for a multitude of reasons; and thus do I live in the faith that whatever I end up writing cannot but have a multitude of effects, rippling through the ether of human events in every available direction.

We are not so-called “celebrities,” you and I. We are two childless old guys pushing 60 (pretty hard), born a week apart, partly raised a third of a mile apart, born and raised, as you yourself have recently suggested, under the same star – be that star named Wyatt Earp, Woody Guthrie, Harry Truman or the sign of somebody’s Bull. The point I started to make being that no one in the year 2050 is likely to bother to read anything at all concerning our lives, unless it is as anthropology, i.e. as psychosocial history. Thus have I been writing about my life and its context (human and otherwise) in the way that I have. Outside of my context, even the patientest reader is likely to view me as the cipher, the nebbish, the factotum, the tragicomic nonentity that I am. Viewed within my context, however, even the most jaded reader might possibly see me as The Happy Peasant Heretic [registered trademark; patent pending . . .] around whose puny existence the iron filings of human history once briefly gathered in an almost discernible pattern, just long enough to be crudely sketched by my memoirist’s feeble pen.

Instead of opening this letter to you by saying, “I’ve been thinking about Rollo Millspaugh lately,” I should have opened by saying, “Of course I know that it’s Eaton Hotel and not, as I carelessly misspelled it, the Easton Hotel.” I’m grateful to you for bringing that typo to my attention. And I’m wondering what other Wichitans and former Wichitans who read “Easton Hotel” must have thought of poor Galen’s seemingly faulty memory. For, faulty as my remembering mechanism might be on its way to becoming, each new day brings me another bucket-load of the bad news that my proofreading skills have grown faultier still.

Have you had an opportunity to read all ten installments of my Mandle-Oz Memorandum? As I started to explain earlier, each of those ten installments, while dressed up as ten autobiographical letters to Dr. Shannon, in fact constitutes one of ten short chapters of The Toolmaker’s Other Son, my memoir-in-progress. Thus, my sharing them with you was done in the same spirit in which I might have snail-mailed you photocopies, to your Alpha Farm address in the early 1980’s, of some of the song lyrics I was working on back then. Only the genre has changed. The spirit in which the Roaring Zeroes have caught me handing around, among a handful of special friends, these little essays I’m currently working on is the exact same spirit in which the Subversive Seventies once caught me handing around, among a handful of earlier friends, photocopies of those experimental poems and prose-poems I was forever struggling to get published (with mixed success) in little magazines and literary journals back then.

To be brutally accurate here, however, I suppose that I should amend my assertion that “only the genre has changed;” for the fact of the matter is that a great many factors have changed, over the past 35 or so years, most notably the means (i.e. the modes and media) by which we mere mortals communicate with one another – along with all that these new means/modes/media imply and ramify. It’s not so much that “the medium is the message” (a la Marshall McLuhan) as it is that the medium shapes the message, transforms the message, repackages the message. Thus, when all I’m wanting to do is to share my writing (i.e. my arts & crafts projects) with a few friends, the way I did back when we were starting out, the only feasible means available to me for doing so ends up transforming, repackaging and reshaping something (quite frankly) unique and beautiful and vibrant and alive into just another vapid, hackneyed blog (one of trillions!) cluttering up cyberspace.

Distinguishing Crap from Christmas, here in the Mythosphere of these Roaring Zeroes is, as I’m sure you’ve noticed a problem that’s by no means limited to cyberspace and the sharing of autographical essays via the Internet. Sorting things out was difficult enough during (let’s say) The Dark Ages (circa 600—1100 C.E.). Now that America is undergoing what I persist in calling (for lack of a better term) its Re-Endarkenment, however, the level of difficulty complicating our sorting-out process has been exacerbated by a multiplicity of state-of-the-art stumbling blocks, pitfalls and malfunctioning philosophical equipment. But you already knew that. And besides, that sounds to me like another can of worms for another fishing trip.

I sincerely hope that you’ll be interested in joining me on that (or some similar) trek, in the near future. As I started to say earlier, it seems to me that much mutual benefit could be derived from our sharing our individual reflections on our shared experiences (1964-1976), in some format or other – if you’re up for it. As for me, I hope to continue to compose and compile the type of “installments” you’re (hopefully) reading here at this very moment – the type which constitute the Mandle-Oz Memorandum I’ve been sharing via the Internet since last October.

I suspect that a tragically huge percentage of men and women who depart this world, as my parents and grandparents did, without ever having left behind any sort of written record of what it had been like to be them -- in their time, alive in the world – have done so because they simply put any such project off until tomorrow. In my own case, however, various reliable indicators, which I shan’t bother to name here, persist in warning me with ever increasing urgency and specificity that, for Galen Green, there very well may not be a tomorrow – at least not in the sense that my parents and grandparents evidently fooled themselves into believing there would be for them. Hence my haste in doing this now, instead of later.


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One of the fondest memories from my high school years – and one whose mental movie, crisp and vivid, revisits me often, is of the afternoon, probably in the autumn of 1965, when you first invited me to walk with you to your family’s house after school to listen to Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ album. Because I’d heard Dylan on the radio (KLEO?) singing “Like A Rollin’ Stone,” and because I’d recently purchased the sheet music to “Blowin’ in the Wind” and the song, “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (because I’d been smitten by Peter, Paul & Mary’s renderings of these two Dylan songs, which I’d heard on the radio), I was under the mistaken impression that I truly knew Dylan's work. It must have because I shared this misconception with you, in the course of some conversation at school, that you took pity on me and invited me over after school that day to hear the real deal.

It was as though the scales had fallen from my eyes. It was as though I'd suddenly discovered a secret passageway into another world that I'd strongly suspected was there all along, but inaccessible to me without the help of a "spirit guide." Like Alice stepping Through the Looking Glass, I felt myself mysteriously transported . . . well, you get the idea. Actually, it was more like coming home a place inside myself toward which I'd been traveling all my life -- all those 16.5 years. And then, as you see, it would be another 42.5 years before I'd get around to writing about it. Anyway, for that -- and for so much more -- please accept my eternal gratitude. I just wanted to say that (and, hopefully, a whole lot more), before the sands run out.


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Back in high school, it always secretly puzzled me that you and Bill Daniels never seemed all that close. Part of the reason for my puzzlement was that you and Bill were probably my two closest male friends throughout much of my high school career, and I simply hadn't lived long enough to grasp the basic fact that I wasn't living inside an episode of Ozzie and Harriet, wherein my closest friends would also be each other's closest friends. I mention this here only because, in the process of writing about my grade school and high school experiences, I've been finding myself curious about and fascinated by the various vantage points of certain of my school chums and chumettes. At the time that it was happening -- that we were going through it together -- I was, of course (as is only natural), too preoccupied with making y bumbling way from one problem-solving exercise to another (and then to another, etc.) to stop and analyze the roses. Moreover, it's generally understood by prudent students that keeping one's nose out of other students' business in any academic milieu is simply sound survival strategy.

For me, at least, an irony obtains in this matter, in that I've spent virtually every waking hour (and then some), since graduating from high school, sticking my nose into everybody's business. That's what writers do -- as do urban anthropologists, mythoklastic therapists and human rights activists. And, for better or worse, I'm all four (and then some). Be that as it may, I'd be very interested in hearing anything you're willing to share, with regard to your personal take on high school and on any of our mutual friends and/or acquaintances from "back in the day," as the current expression goes. It should go without saying that I'll respect completely your privacy, just as I've consistently respected that of all the other friends whose confidences no one has ever caught me writing about.


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Before I go today, I want to say a word or two about the song lyric I'm including (below) as a "coda" to this installment. I'm sure that you're familiar with the classic American folksong, "Eyes On The Prize," most often associated with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950's and '60's. Over the years, as a result of my own wide-ranging involvements in human rights, environmentalist, feminist and anti-war movements, I've been exposed to dozens of renditions of "Eyes On The Prize." Starting in the fall of 1988, while still living in Wichita, I found myself involved in what was then called something like the Green Committees of Correspondence. Then, in the summer of 1990, a mere six weeks or so before my mother's untimely death, I found myself invited to perform several of my "Green" (mythoklastic environmentalist) songs at the Prairie Greens' annual gathering, just outside of Kansas City. "Eyes On The Prize" (the Green Version) was one of those songs.

In August of 1990, Margaret Green had a fatal heart attack while supposedly recovering at St. Joe's in Wichita from an earlier cardiac event. A month later, I put down the first month's rent on my first Kansas City apartment, at the Whitehall, across from the Nelson. My ties to the Greens lasted until 1997 when they began talking seriously about running Ralph Nader as a third-party candidate for President -- an exercise in self-deluding narcissistic nihilism which bore precisely the poisonous fruit I prophesied (at the top of my lungs) that it would.

Even though I escaped from what had become the Pseudo-Greens, in 1997, before I could have the (then) upcoming eight (8!!!) years of neo-feudalistic Re-Endarkenment pinned on me, I've continued to reap one especially precious benefit from my years of involvement with them: I met my partner, Marie J. Smith, at a Greens potluck at All Souls Unitarian Church, a month after moving to KC. We've been "a couple" now for nearly 16 years.

Let me know how you like the song. (I'm sure that you already know the tune.) I'm glad that we could have this time together, and I look forward to hearing from you.


Until Next Time, Stay Well,

Galen



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EYES ON THE PRIZE

(Green Version)


1. Bound and gagged by the powers that be,
gonna build a better world for you and me.
Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on!

I’m layin’ it down, and you don’t have to answer,
But the streets of this world are paved with cancer.
Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on!

REFRAIN: Hold on. Hold on.
Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on.

2. Grandkids a-comin’, better clean this joint;
otherwise, I’m a-wonderin’ what’s the point??
Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on!

Clean air, clean water, that’s what we need.
But that means we gotta curb the rich folks’ greed.
Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on!
(...repeat refrain...)

3. I don’t know, but I’ve been told
Capital Hill been bought and sold.
Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on!

That river of Denial, it’s a-chilly an’ wide.
If you wanna get across, you better get on our side.
Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on!
(...repeat refrain...)

4. Bound and gagged by the powers that be,
gonna build a better world for you and me.
Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on!

But inch-by-inch and hand-in-hand,
Sisters & Brothers, we can save this land.
Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on!
(...repeat refrain twice...)


Words by Galen Green, copyright 1989


/gg