David Cameron Writes

 In 1882, Oscar Wilde visited the mining town of Leadville, CO. In the town's Silver Dollar saloon, he noted a sign over the piano. He later wrote, "I saw [over the piano] the only rational method of art criticism, I have come across." I wrote the following poem about the Silver Dollar Saloon and the sign, and it was recently published in the August, 2024 Issue of Saddlebag Dispatches.   The Silver Dollar   I swing the doors expecting a waft of stale beer and rancid sweat; shabby, not shiny like a new brass spittoon.   But the Silver Dollar Saloon fairly gleams. It’s the place to be seen for all the wrong reasons, iniquity’s playground, an outlaw’s oasis.   Yet, empty it echoes—a hollow shell and vacant vessel of dreams deferred where trouble dogs each patron’s steps,   my steps as well. Alone, I sit at piano plunking out notes, a scrap of a song I cobbled together those nights I barely slept;   a s...

The Dreaded Goathead         I loved living in Abuquerque, NM for seven years. The high desert of the southwest had a stark beauty very different from the lush greenery and banks of forsythia and hedges of azaleas of my native North Carolina. There were devilish goatheads in New Mexico, but at least we didn't have kudzu. These are two poems I've written about New Mexico. "Back in New Mexico" was published by the February, 2024 (Eighth) Issue of Abandoned Mine.  https://www.abandonedmine.org/eighth-issue-february-2024 Back in New Mexico David Cameron I step on a goathead tricorn devil lacerating my heel injecting desert sizzle and chile fire until I hop hop hop hop and fall on a cholla that hugs me with outstretched arms lighting me up like tequila shots burning my eyes with salty tears heaving piñon sighs still high from the way the mountains pink like melon and now I think I’m back. Back in New Mexico.   Shades of Brown High desert seems sepia, a mono...

  Loren was a member of the Navaho nation, otherwise called Diné by those who are members. He was a frequent visitor to the church I served in Albuquerque. I think he was unhoused, though he may have had minimal shelter somewhere. He would usually have a piece of cardboard on which he had drawn stylized symbols combining Native American symbols like an eagle feather with Hallmark card art like a valentine heart. He sometimes wanted to talk, but he usually just wanted to sell his art for $5 and leave.  One Sunday he came by the church five minutes before worship started. I was already robed and at the door greeting arriving church members and guests. He came and wanted to talk. I apologized that I couldn't at the moment, but I invited him to either join us for worship or go back to the reception area and have a cup of coffee and a cookie. He grew angry that I couldn't talk right then, so he started yelling, "Fuck Jesus! Fuck Jesus!" I couldn't reflect on the conten...

 This is my love letter to New Mexico. The chile harvest in Hatch, NM was always a statewide celebration as chiles were distributed through the state and roasted in large rotating metal baskets over gas flames in gas station parking lots and other sites throughout town. The fragrance of roasting chiles has recently been approved as the state aroma of NM.  Chlle Heaven was published in Rural Fiction Magazine. https://RuralFictionMagazine.com It was the farthest north she had ever been, but it was nowhere near as far north as Clementina wanted to go. She had learned from maps that north was up. She had learned from lying on her back looking at clouds that the sky was up. She had learned in science class that the moon was in the sky up beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. She had learned in church that heaven was up somewhere beyond the moon—even beyond the stars. Clementina wanted to go north to heaven and see her abuela; stand beside her again at the cracked Formica-...

  On September 11, 2001, members of the terrorist group al-Qaeda, crashed airplanes into the towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, the third one heroically diverted by passengers. Twenty-two years later, I think of the families who were affected by this tragedy and know they still grieve. In no way do I mean to infer they should be over their grief, but I do wish for them rest. This short fiction was written in response to a prompt inviting me to use " As soon as Harriet entered the building, she headed to the seventh floor" as the opening sentence.                                                                                                     ...

  In late August, 2023, a white racist male murdered three black citizens at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, FL. The shooting claimed the lives of Angela Michelle Carr, 52, Anolt Joseph “AJ” Laguerre Jr., 19, and Jerrald Gallion, 29. CNN: The first 911 call went out at 1:09 p.m., seconds before the third victim, Gallion, walked into the store with his girlfriend.    Last Words Imagine the curtain is falling on your last day and you are down to the closing second of your life.   Imagine your last breath, the final pulsing zing firing the neural pathways of your desire and longing.   Imagine your last impression, the ultimate glance, the concluding image projected on your optic screen.   What words would you crave? What would be the crowning sounds you long to hear as ending comes?   A distinctly articulated declaration of love?   A soft, gentle whisper of peace and farewell?   A brave assurance your fa...

                  “I’m tired,” Lester said as he pulled his old heap to the grassy verge of the flat, two-lane country road. “You drive.” He slipped the manual gearshift on the steering column into neutral, left the car running, opened his door, and slowly unfolded to stand outside the car. He walked around to the passenger side, jerked open my door, and stood there as I looked up at him like a ‘possum caught in the headlights. I was 12 and had never driven anything but my Dad’s old tractor and a homemade go-cart. You’d think I’d be thrilled that my grandfather had just offered me the holy grail of adolescence. I was terrified.   Granddaddy was my mother’s father. He’d been in the battle of Meuse-Argonne in World War I, the largest and deadliest military offensive in U.S. history lasting from mid-September to Armistice Day on November 11, 1918. By the time I was 12, however, Granddaddy lived about seven ...

  Ronnie Biggers played an iconic role in my life. He was the first black child I knew in school. It was the fall of 1965, and we were entering the fourth grade, the first year Central Elementary in Gastonia, NC integrated. I wrote a poem recently about the opportunity to know Ronnie, who was, as I recall, the only black child in our class. My memory is fuzzy, but I clearly remember the day he and I put our arms side by side and reflected on the superficial identifiers “black” and “white.”   Yesterday I attended a lunch at The Free Clinics in Hendersonville celebrating Juneteenth. The Free Clinics is an organization that marshals the services of paid and volunteer health care providers to serve uninsured residents with physical and mental health care. I’ve been elected to their board, and I was there at lunch with my family and other board members and paid staff.   The director started off with a history of Juneteenth and the continuing racial inj...

  Thoughts of my father are like a waking dream. I hear the whine of his lathe running in the garage at home where he and Mom lived nearly fifty years, and I see my father’s back in the dim glow of a bare, sixty-watt bulb. He’s wearing his old, faded work shirt and striped engineer’s hat, and he’s bent over the lathe making wood chips fly. He was often at his lathe creating small wooden gifts to give to newlyweds or young parents or anyone who might appreciate a set of three finely turned, highly polished walnut or maple or cherry biscuit cutters in graduated sizes.   One of my earliest memories of my father is from when I was four, maybe five. I’m sitting on his lap, peeling dried wood glue from his fingers. I didn’t know it then, but I realized later that he put extra glue on his hands and allowed it to dry before coming in from his workshop. It gave him an excuse to invite me onto his lap and “help” him get the glue off his fingers.   Dad was ...

  “Where’s Cameron? Anybody seen Cameron?” The Ashbrook High J.V. basketball team was stowing gear under the bus, ready to travel to a rare Saturday afternoon game. Coach was getting a headcount. A second check and still no Cameron. I wasn’t worried. I knew where I was. It’s been my habit to disappear at times, if not physically, at least mentally. My mother used to praise my capacity to entertain myself. She could give me the cardboard tube from a roll of paper towels, scissors, colored construction paper, crayons, and glue, and I would sit quietly on the floor in the den or at the dining room table and disappear into myself. I’m sure it was a great relief to Mom to get some quiet time. I remember sitting in class in the sixth grade after we returned from the library with books we had been allowed to check out. Like my mother, I’m guessing my favorite teacher Ms. Page wanted a little “me time,” so she told us to get out a library book and read. The next thing I knew, Ms. Page call...

    They say an intense fire creates its own weather. Tom was testing that theory by holding a flat paper towel above the campfire flame and watching it lift in the updraft created by the mini-conflagration. The paper’s rising mesmerized him, and he was bored.   That morning, my Boy Scout troop had hiked to a man made pond and cooked lunch so we could knock out a few requirements for Hiking and Cooking merit badges in half a day. We built our cooking fire on a sandy rise by the pond bordered by a stand of scruffy loblolly pines. It was an ugly spot. The September Saturday was one of those hot, late summer days where the sun is too bright and the noon heat pricks the back of your neck. I was ready to go home and ride my bike, so I was trying to tidy up. Tom loved fire, so he was burning the leftover sticks we had gathered for fuel.   The paper towel Tom waved over the flame suddenly ignited. It burned his fingers, and he let go. The glowing pa...

  I think a psychopath lives inside me. When Kathryn and I watch a murder mystery, I choose the most annoying character and say, “I hope he/she gets killed.” Usually, it’s because the character is a loud talker or a bossy-pants. Even darker still, I sometimes ruminate over the fantasy that a political figure I detest will be assassinated. I wouldn’t do it myself, of course, but I can imagine the setup, the fallout, and the momentary relief I would feel. Momentary, because only a fool or a true psychopath would fail to realize that such a breach could start a terrible chain reaction of violence.   From the moment I developed fine motor skills, I have had the impulse to shoot somebody. What fun it was to learn how to pick the weed with the tough, thin stalk and the firm, green torpedo at the end, loop the stalk around the torpedo, and pull. The torpedo pops off and flies about five feet—far enough to hit the person you’re aiming at.   Sticks we...

  God help me, I wanted Pop Tarts for breakfast. My mother would scramble eggs, fry up bacon or country ham, and bake biscuits fluffy as St. Peter’s pillow, and GOD HELP ME, I would pout and grumble and bring a dark cloud to the table until finally she gave in. She brought Pop Tarts home but could not resist exclaiming each time I tore open a package, “There is more nutrition in the cardboard box!”   In the narcissistic haze of my childhood, I thought Mom’s world revolved around feeding me. Having received a master’s degree in nutrition from Columbia University in New York, she put an enormous amount of effort into making sure we had the freshest, best food on our table. Foodies today would scoff at her southern cooking techniques, like adding sugar to a squash casserole. Bless their hearts; they can't help their ignorance. My early Pop Tart insanity aside, what I wouldn’t give now for a serving of that casserole, one of her biscuits with homemade strawbe...

  Be prepared. Boy Scout motto or not, I don’t think anything could have prepared me to pick up a sandwich from the stack on the camp picnic table, take a big bite, and find it featured peanut butter and American cheese between two slices of white bread. I looked at a kid named Brad, who had drawn lunch duty that day. I said, “Are you sure this was on the menu?” He waved the mimeographed lunch directions that accompanied our daily food allotment and pointed to the itemized list. Sure enough, it read, “Saturday Lunch: Apples, Peanut Butter and Cheese Sandwiches.” For want of an Oxford comma, things had turned ugly.   We were at a special training event for Boy Scout Senior Patrol Leaders from troops all over the Piedmont Council. I was only 14 and the appointed leader of a motley band that included boys as old as 16 and 17. I was tall for my age, so my crew didn’t know my secret.   I was supposed to help the boys learn to be effective in their posts...

                                                                                                   We were dirty the way little boys get when they stay outside all day. We kneeled side by side, staring intently at a small funnel-shaped depression in the sandy soil. I was the novice; he was my guide, and I was ready to be amazed.   My guide, Butch, was a childhood friend who, though we were both eight years old, seemed much more worldly than I. He had to be. He lived with his mother, an employee at the local dry cleaner, and his teenage sister. His father was gone a lot, I’m not sure why. I think he had a tough time finding work. They lived in a small, two-bedroom apartment that was one of a complex of single-story ...

    A story on the NPR program All Things Considered (May 11, 2023) told of research that reveals something new about Scalloped Hammerhead Sharks. It seems they close off their gills when diving deep in freezing cold water to keep their insides from icing up. In essence, they hold their breath.                                The Shark I envy the shark, gliding fast, propelled through water with barely a twitch — cool, so cool, with that thousand yard stare, never blinking back tears or winking in jest,  backing down dolphins, even killer whales, “You want a piece o’ me?   You want a piece o’ me?”   You never hear a shark gasp in surprise or cough in confusion or sigh with satisfaction. Instead of lungs he lets gills do the job of oxygen extraction while he slices the o...

  A great rescue occurred yesterday at the Goodwill store in West Asheville, NC. I was not a witness to the event though it happened right behind me. I did, however, hear the incident debriefed.   I was in my usual place near the entrance where they display couches and easy chairs for sale. I test the merchandise and read while keeping an eye on my son who likes to browse their VHS video collection.   My strategy, developed over many visits to the store, is to find a seat that is comfortable enough without being too attractive to prospective buyers so I won't have to move. Yesterday, I sat in a blue, vinyl-covered love seat I’ve sat in before. If you were looking to decorate in an early Waffle House motif, it would be a good buy.   I’m sitting there, and I'm near the end of a novel that’s gone on way too long. I hear two young men talking excitedly, and I look up, grateful for the distraction. One of the men is a beefy sort, with close-cr...