A Lumpy Bed and Other Places to Not Sleep

By Howard Hull

The 77 essays in this book have been written by a man who has lived 84 years and an old cat that has shared his painting studio for a long time. There are no earth shaking events in them. Also, there are no murders, abusive husbands or wives, drunken drivers, blood spatters, cutup body parts, galloping horses, town tamers, or crooked sheriffs.
Rather, they are descriptions of small segments of daily happenings. They are about living and loving and good relationships with all kinds of people. And about buying groceries, riding buses, walking in deep snow, military service, teaching students, sports, walking the road, making paintings, and the joy of putting words together to form thoughts. Above all, it is a book for a quiet evening of thoughtful reading.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jul 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524620301

Howard Hull

Howard Hull grew up in the coal fields of McDowell County, West Virginia. After graduation from Welch High School in 1950, he enlisted in the United States Air Force. He spent eight years as a weatherman in Europe and the United States, and was honorably discharged in 1958. In 1960 and ’61 he received the B.S. and M.A. degrees in Art and Education from Middle Tennessee State University. In 1965 he received the ED.S. degree from George Peabody College in Art Education. From 1961 through 1963 he taught in the public schools of Tennessee. From 1963 through 1964 he taught at Northwestern Louisiana State University and from 1965 until his retirement in 1999 from the University of Tennessee. He is now a Professor Emeritus of Art Education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is a painter, college maker, and writer of short stories, books, and articles about education in the arts.

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© 2016 Howard Hull. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 07/26/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5246-2031-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-2030-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016911964

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Title Page

The essays in this book are products of the author’s real or imagined experiences. Any relationship to actual persons or events is purely coincidental and in no way is an attempt to recreate the life of any individual living or deceased.

For my father

Who read to me when I was a child.

Also by Howard Hull

GREED and other stories

Smoke Rings

Woman of the Years

Dakota Rose

Tennessee Post Office Murals

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Kathy Hunt, my guru, for using her expertise in keeping me from injuring my computer when I was trying to write something for this book that wasn’t getting said in a way that it ought to be said, even if I was going to say it whether I needed to or not.

Sometimes I wish I lived on Pearly Smith Road, just so I could say I did.

Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Preface

Where I Slept—or Didn’t

West Virginia Paintings

Sex Education

Tug River

The Well

Party Times

Marjorie Elmore

Riding the Bus

The Table

Sports

The New Yorkers

Aunts

A. J. Wade

Shelly Jarrett

Basic Training

David LeDoux

Dr. Greever

Mitchell Neilson

Bendel Wilson

The Position at the University of Tennessee

The Beginning

Lakemont

Teaching

Lunch

Painting Claxton

Fog

Strawberries

Smoke

The Street Girl

Jack Jamison

Ice Cream

Painting at Fisk

Stuff in the Gallery

Sculpture

Studio Assistant (Cat writes)

The Fall

30 Day Rehab (Cat writes)

Leaving Rehab

A Rare Day

Table Talk

The Tree Cutting

Studio (Cat writes)

Paintings (Cat writes)

Composition (Cat Writes)

$1000 Painting (Cat writes)

Visiting John Warrior

The Show

Sport Coat

Chevette

Are we there yet?

Emily

Please Take My Pulse

Buckshot and Annie

Polecat

What Do I See?

Casablanca

Down to Chumley’s House

The Road

Buying Groceries

Old Movies

Big Buddy (Cat writes)

Reunions

Alaska Couple

Waiting Room Number 22

Vonore

Mail

Mall Traffic

Big Dump

Cleaning the Bathroom

Lizard

How to Wash A Cat

Newly Obrien

Horse Teeth (Cat writes)

The Yard (Cat writes)

Painting and Process

Zaccagnini (Cat writes)

Thoughts about Natchitoches

Preface

It is three o’clock in the morning—any morning. I am at home in my lumpy bed. I can’t sleep. I’ve been that way for years. Now that I am really old the condition of my condition has gotten worse. Sometimes I get out of bed and go into the kitchen and sit at the table in the dark and listen to a talk show person tell me what is going on in the world, and what should be done about it. I do not believe him, but it is a way of passing the time for an hour or so. Then I go back to bed and don’t sleep some more. As I lie there on my back I look at the ceiling for a while. After a bit I close my eyes and think about some of the things I have done during my 84 years of life. I call it time travel. And I guess that is as good a term as any other. Anyhow, it works for me. It is a pleasant activity, and gives me something to write about when I am working on a book—as I am now.

Mostly, what I have written for this book is in first person. If I decide to write in second person I let the cat do it. She likes to write—and is quite good at it. In this book of essays I appear as Ray Canfield, and my wife, Novella, as Lana, just as we are in other books I have written. I have also used different names for some of the other people that have found their way into these pages. For instance, Dr. John Robertson becomes Dr. John Warrior, and another of my colleagues, Professor Paul Watkins appears as Dude Wilson. I have my reasons for doing that, and do not feel the need to explain why.

The majority of the essays are factual in nature. In several of them, however, my imagination has taken control of my senses. When that occurs, and I tend to deviate from what is generally considered as reality I don’t get concerned. I care deeply about writing and painting. It is what I have done, and what I will do. Beyond that, what can I say? I am who I am, and that is all I am.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, I have been involved in visual art since I was a young boy in elementary school during the 1940s. As I listened to my teachers talk about nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs I drew P-47 Thunderbolts, P-51 Mustangs, and B-17 Flying Fortresses. Dog fights and Bombing Runs were more exciting to me than paragraphs and phrases. I loved the sculptured bodies and sleek shapes of the wings, rudders, and ailerons of the airplanes.

From the rudimentary drawings in those elementary classrooms and old rigid desks with names carved on them by students of past years it was only a short distance across the dirt playground to the junior high and high school classes where I took mechanical drawing courses, and became skilled enough to construct models of balsa wood and tissue paper, and fly them off the porch until they crashed into a tree or some other immovable object. At the time it never occurred to me that I was working toward a future that involved teaching and creating art. They were just airplanes—and I enjoyed making them.

After graduating from Welch High School in McDowell County, West Virginia in May of 1950 I enlisted in the United States Air Force, and eventually became involved in analyzing data and drawing isobars and frontal boundaries on weather maps. After six years of doing that as a member of detachments on bases in Europe and the United States I enrolled in a couple of commercial art courses while I was stationed at at Berry Field in Nashville, Tennessee. The instructor was very good, and I enjoyed them. I was hooked! Two years later I was honorably discharged as a staff sergeant and began study toward a degree in visual art at Middle Tennessee State College in nearby Murfreesboro. That day in June of 1958 was the beginning of a life in art that has been more rewarding than I could have imagined! Many of the essays that I have written in this slim volume are a reflection of that busy and productive life.

Where I Slept—or Didn’t

At the age of 84 the bed I sleep on is king size. The mattress has a hump in the middle so that I sleep going downhill on one side of the hump while Lana sleeps going downhill on the other side. It isn’t very comfortable, and I don’t sleep well—but maybe at 84 I wouldn’t sleep well anywhere. A long time ago when we had a flat mattress we used to sleep with our bodies touching. I enjoyed that very much. Now that we have a mattress with a hump in it, we just reach across the hump and shake hands before we go to sleep. I don’t say anything to her because she couldn’t hear me anyhow. She has already removed her processor that attaches to her head and facilitates hearing by her cochlear implant. If a burglar came into the house she wouldn’t hear that either—but I would. I have ears like a fox. She bought a pistol so she could shoot the burglar if I woke her up. I hope I don’t have to do that. The blood would get on our highly polished wood floor and I would have to clean it up. I’d probably have a hard time getting back to sleep.

A few years ago a couple of yellow jackets came up through the bricks and got in the bed and stung Lana. She thought it was a spider bite but it wasn’t. The yellow jackets had built a nest in the ground outside of the house. It took a while for us to figure that out and destroy it. Since our mattress was several years old she decided to buy a new one for our king size bed. So, we went to Pease Furniture Company on old Maryville Highway and told Greg, the salesperson, we wanted a good mattress for a king size bed. He sold me one that did not have a hump in it. Now it does. Greg is a nice man. He did not know that our mattress would eventually have a lumpy hump in it. He could not forecast future lumps or humps. He is married to the daughter of Willie Pease, who is now deceased. We liked Willie a lot. We always got good deals from him. I don’t think we ever did need a king size bed. The regular mattress worked just as well for whatever were going to do—which we did a lot of when we were younger.

When I was very small my family lived at Indian Creek below Coalwood Road and adjacent to the mines where my father worked. He once told me I slept in a bed with iron bedsteads when I was a small boy. When I was 12 and we had moved to a new house on Premier Mountain I slept in a cot in a tiny room at the back of our house. My four sisters slept somewhere else in the house. I don’t know where. At other times during my teenage years I slept in my Grandpa’s bed with him while Uncle Homer was in Europe fighting the Nazis. My grandmother had died before I was born. Grandpa and I would lie in bed and listen to Gang Busters and the Green Hornet on the radio. In the morning he’d cook us breakfast on the potbelly stove with two eyes on the top. Once he took me to Hillsville, Virginia on a Greyhound Bus to visit his brother Edward. They lived on a farm and grew cabbage for a living. Large flatbed trucks would move through the patch while farm workers would load baskets of cabbages onto them. My time there was very boring. They had no electricity and lit the house with kerosene lamps. Everyone went to bed shortly after dark. I slept on a cornshuck mattress with grandpa. On Sunday morning we walked miles and miles to a biblical foot washing. I think they were Baptists. I’m not sure. I was very tired of being there by the time we left to go back home. I never had my feet washed.

At the age of 18 I had my first train ride. I traveled from Welch, West Virginia to Lackland Air Force Base at San Antonio, Texas. The train left Welch in the morning and went by way of Cincinnati, Ohio, and St. Louis, Missouri. That night I slept in a Pullman car. I went to sleep in Texas, and when I woke up I was still riding through Texas. We wouldn’t get to Lackland until that afternoon. I suppose I slept well. At that age I could sleep anywhere. That evening, I saw my first open bay sleeping arrangement. I had never thought about sleeping in a large space with a lot of people that I did not know before. It was the first time that I encountered double decker military bunk beds. Since I was six foot three, I naturally inherited the top bunk. If I stretched out, my feet stuck over the end. Before the week was out, I had learned to make up the bunk properly. That included how to fold hospital corners, how to make the olive drab blanket so tight it would make a quarter bounce if the Flight Chief dropped one on it. Throughout the next eight years of military service I would spend a large amount of time sleeping on bunks too short for me. I was lucky. I knew that it was a great deal better than lying on a piece of frozen ground in Korea with someone shooting at me.

Many times I slept sitting up on buses as I rode through the night going from one base to another. If I had a seat by myself, that was easy, but sometimes I’d be asleep and someone would slip into the seat beside me. Once, I woke up to find a black lady sitting next me. That was okay, but when she woke up and moved there was a greasy spot on the shoulder of my khaki uniform shirt where her hair had been. I had to have it dry-cleaned. At Chanute Air Force Base at Rantoul, Illinois I slept in an open bay. When I arrived for weather school in September it was still warm and pleasant. I went to a local high school football game. It brought back many memories. By December, there was snow on the ground and the barracks were very cold and drafty. Wind blew through the cracks with a vengeance. I slept in all my clothes with a heavy wool overcoat on top of the blanket.

At Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., my next duty station, the open bay was broken up into cubicles, but the bunks were the same as the others. From there I went to Fort Dix, New Jersey as a transient before going to Europe. Again, it was the open bay and bunks. I was on an English ship for the 13 day crossing to Germany. I slept very little. When I did, it was in an arrangement of several hammock type beds, one above the other in a stack five high. There was little room to turn over without coming in contact with the person above me. Consequently, I slept on my back, and for the most part was uncomfortable.

After arriving in Bremerhaven, in late May of 1951 I rode a troop train to southern Germany. Two weeks later I was in Wiesbaden where I slept on bunks in former German army quarters for a couple of nights. After that, it was on to Orly Field, Paris where again, bunks were the order of the day. Only this time, the open bay was a quanset hut—imagine a giant barrel cut in half vertically and placed side by side. For the next three months I spent the time that I was in the hut either sleeping, sitting, or bent over because there wasn’t room to straighten up. The first week that I was there a buddy I had known at Bolling who had arrived at Orly several weeks before me took me to a bar in the Pigalle section of Paris called the Blue Train. Late that night I went to sleep in a regular bed with a French girl. Sometime the following morning a man walked into the room. To say the least, I was startled until she said, Cherie, don’t worry about him. He is just my boyfriend. He said something in French, set a bag down on the dresser and left quickly. With the thought in my mind that he might come back, I was out of bed, into my clothes, and after a hasty goodbye kiss was out the door and down the street. Although I would spend a few more nights at the Hotel de Paris during the next year and a half, I never saw her again.

After three months at Orly I was transferred to Chateauroux 120 miles south of Paris as part of a contingent of air force personnel to reopen an old French Base. It was September, and still warm. Again, I would sleep in a bunk. A half dozen men and I were housed in a large tent. (Think MASH.) I suppose I felt like I was on an extended camping trip. When December arrived with its’ torrential rains and dreary skies the space between our tent and others just like it became a sea of mud. On most evenings there was a long line at the beer tent. By the end of January things were looking better. Some old French barracks had been refurbished and we moved from tent city into two person rooms. Morale improved considerably, but we still slept on bunks. They just moved them into the new quarters.

My next change of sleeping arrangement occurred during the spring of 1953 when I was transferred to Weather Central at Rhein-Main Air Force Base in Frankfurt, Germany. There, we slept in bunks, four to a room. Since there was a midnight curfew I was usually not in town after that hour. Occasionally, I missed the curfew and had to find somewhere to sleep until 6:00 a.m. One time I rode a street car home with a slender dark haired girl and slept in her bed with her. The following morning I dressed and walked into the kitchen where her mother was preparing breakfast. The girl, Martina, was standing in front of the sink naked. When I asked her what she was doing she said, I’m washing my pussy. After she finished, still naked, she, her mother, and I sat down at the table and ate a delicious breakfast. Her mother spoke perfect English with a British accent; and she seemed to enjoy talking with me. I certainly enjoyed it, but had a hard time keeping my eyes off Martina. I never saw her father. I suspect he had gotten up early and gone to work. I don’t think he and I would have had much to talk about anyhow.

Another time I was out after midnight and became involved with a girl named Gertrude Schultz, and ended up at her upstairs apartment. Her bed was a bit small, but we managed to sleep okay. For several weeks after that I would spend a night with her now and then. She was nice and we liked each other a lot. Sometimes I would take food with me and we would have a meal. Other times we might go to a movie or just sit and listen to some old records she had. Once, on a cold winter night she was not at home when I arrived there after midnight. Thinking she would awaken me when she came in, I went to sleep on the stairs. She did not come in. After a while I got cold and ripped the heavy drape from a window at the bottom of the stairs and used it as a blanket. At daylight I left. I never went back.

In March of 1954 I returned to the United States on a troop ship. Again, I slept in a hammock. It was not comfortable. After spending 87 miserable days at home I re-enlisted and was sent to Langley Air Force Base at Newport News, Virginia. While there I slept on a bunk in an open bay. As a Staff Sergeant, I expected a better arrangement, but it didn’t happen. At the beginning of August Sergeant Charles Grant and I were sent on temporary duty to Hancock Field at Syracuse, New York to provide weather service for the Air National Guard for two weeks of training. Charles had just purchased a new 1954 Chevrolet Bel Aire. We left early one morning and began a drive that would take us through Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and New York City. We arrived in the city about midnight. We needed a place to sleep, and couldn’t find one. Finally we went to a bar and had a beer. While we were there someone told us about a flophouse around the corner. For 50 cents each we found a couple of empty bunks in one corner and stretched out among the smells and snores of a room full of street denizens for an experience I will always remember, but have no wish to repeat. As I have said before; if you are tired enough you can sleep anywhere. From there we drove to Syracuse and slept in open bays for two weeks. In August, the nights can be cold in Syracuse. We managed to procure a couple of extra blankets from supply and that helped considerably. When the two weeks were over we drove back to Langley via Niagara Falls, Binghamton, New York, and Scranton, Pennsylvania where we slept in a regular bed that smelled of cigarettes in a ratty motel room with telephone numbers of women scribbled on the walls. Charles had a conversation with one of them. I didn’t.

In April of 1956 I transferred from Langley to Seymour-Johnson Air Force Base