Episode Forty-One: The Interview-Sparks

In this longer interview, we find out what a prophet looks like. It looks like this: a man on the margins who combines Shakespeare & Tony Stark, who discusses quantum physics and elves in the same breath, and who is named Sparks.

Transcript

Welcome to season 5 of Bite-Sized Blessings.

Both episode 41 and 42 are near and dear to my heart.

And that's because both guests,

Sparks in episode 41 and Samah Tokmachi in episode 42,

Have known each other since Samah was 8 years old.

I find their friendship to be enchanting,

Wonderful,

And a good reason to wake up every morning.

You never know what each day is going to bring you.

Also,

Following this episode,

We play little Louis Armstrong.

And once you listen to episode 41,

I think you'll understand why.

And now,

Without further ado,

Season 5 of Bite-Sized Blessings.

I remember I joined the Lutheran Church here back in the last century,

And people were testifying.

And I said,

I'd like to say something.

I said,

I don't believe in Jesus Christ in this place,

God.

So quiet,

You could have dropped a button and heard it land.

I said,

I don't have to believe.

I am living proof.

You are,

You remind me a bit of one of the elders of Valinor.

Who are they?

I've never heard of them.

Have you ever,

You've never heard of the long home of the elves?

Valinor?

Oh yes,

Yes,

Yes,

Yes,

Yes.

You remind me a little bit of Elbereth,

The lady of the stars.

Oh,

That is a huge compliment.

I will take it.

I don't see any stars around you right now,

But that may be my vision is skewed.

My vision might be clouded by some spell.

But my voice isn't.

I was born and raised in Chicago,

Illinois,

On the South Side during Jim Crow,

Which began to be the law of the land in 1878.

Oh,

Well.

Shortly after Reconstruction,

I was an only child and a latch key child at that.

That sounds like it was probably before they even had the term latch key kid,

Because I remember when they started talking about like the 80s,

I think.

Well,

Trust me,

I was not a kid anymore in the 80s,

But from certainly 1956 until 1960 I was a latch key child.

So both your parents worked?

No,

My mother was unique in that she was a major player in income tax land.

They would send people from Washington,

D.

C.

To have conferences with her instead of taking her to Washington,

D.

C.

She was famous.

Did she work for the government?

The federal government.

Income tax.

Yay,

Everyone loves to talk about income taxes,

Right?

Although when I was involved here in Santa Fe with the legend Lone Ranger,

I got a scam call who claimed that I had underpaid my income tax and had to give them my bank information and blah,

Blah,

Blah.

And I said,

Hey,

Hit pause right now.

I said,

My mother wrote those rules and regulations.

I can sense from a couple of the stories you've told me that you take no prisoners.

Well,

Some prisoners I have no choice in taking.

For example,

I was born two months early and this was 1946 when being a premature was a death sentence.

However,

Since I'm talking to you now,

Obviously that sentence has not yet been levied because of all people,

Jesus Christ decided I had work to do.

And I couldn't do it very easily or convincingly from the Silver City.

So it decided I needed to accumulate life experience to make it better for me to achieve my task here.

My father was a no account asshole.

Who married my mother at 20 and was divorced to 21.

She used to give him money to go look for work.

He go to the movies and she found out because he had this habit of getting bottled Coca-Cola and putting peanuts in it.

And he choked on it.

They took him to Cook County Hospital.

And when she showed up,

She gave him what was known at that time as a Creole slap.

That's where your fingertips touched the ground and your the flat of your palm touches their head.

And two weeks later,

They were divorced.

What happened was that she was awarded twenty five dollars a month as child support and he never paid a penny.

Ever.

It was a blessing to me because could you imagine having someone like that trying to actually rear a child shiftless no account.

Did your grandmother also live in Chicago?

Yes,

We live with them for the first at least the first 10 years.

I'm aware of.

I had a nanny named Ponto.

She was a mixture between a St.

Bernard.

And a farm dog,

Kylie.

She treated me like one of her pup,

One of her litter,

Which was loving and protective.

My second question is,

Did you grow up in a religious household?

Did your.

Yes.

In Baptist.

Did you enjoy going to church?

I'm so curious.

Well,

Until I realized that the minister was a hypocrite and was more interested in getting his Cadillac replaced by donations from the the congregation and having sex with the women in the choir.

Oh,

My gosh.

How when did you realize that?

Well,

I was a precocious child,

So it was probably somewhere between nine and twelve.

And I remember having a conversation with my grandmother about it and she went to talk to him and she she read him the riot app so that he started losing his hair.

She she's put it this way.

She said it's one thing to believe in God.

And it's another thing to believe in somebody that says that God talks through them and only through them.

You were about nine,

Anywhere from nine to eleven when you realize this hypocrisy.

Did you still have to attend church after that?

No,

I certainly had to attend Bible reading.

And I'm going to assume that was taught by someone different.

Grandma,

Grandma Mabel Keeling.

We used to have spirited debates.

I put forward the proposition that even the devil could be forgiven if indeed.

He admitted what he had done was not what he should have done and God would open heaven to him and grandma.

My God,

I thought she was going to burst in the flame.

Oh,

No.

Anybody that's in hell stays there,

Whether they run it or not.

She was a Creole chef.

She she cooked for all the blues and jazz people that made the diaspora to Chicago.

She was a very good friend of Louis Armstrong.

And he was a constant figure in her life and therefore mine.

We had a the word is called enclave.

It was like 10 square blocks of people who started out living and born and raised in New Orleans,

And ended up in the Windy City,

Freezing our butts off in the winter.

But we would,

We would have these block parties that started shortly after spring arrived and lasted until just after Thanksgiving.

Every adult was every child's pair,

Which of course meant we couldn't get away with anything.

But it also meant that we were absolutely safe.

Yes,

Yes,

Yes.

And I'm going to assume there was lots of great music at these parties.

Oh,

Please.

Yes,

Ma'am.

And that's an understatement.

It was basically at that time the blues players and intelligence here were like the tribal elders,

And they tried to convince folks to get out while they had a chance,

And people who had property and animals and so forth,

Resisted to the very end that it was their lives,

Their,

Their household homesteads and everything were burned to the ground their animals were taken.

It was similar to what happened to the Japanese.

During World War Two,

When everything they had was taking and said that was the federal government doing it.

It was the Klan and everything else there.

But that's how we ended up in a 10 square block enclave in Chicago.

I was just,

I was thinking that maybe your grandmother learned her,

Her incredible cooking skills down in New Orleans.

Oh yes,

She was famous.

As I said,

And that fame continued.

Since her skills got better under the adversity in Chicago,

Compared to what was available in the south.

Did she ever do a cookbook.

No,

She never even told my mother how to cook.

I learned how to cook by being her helper chasing headless chickens around the courtyard and and seeing how she had hung herbs,

Some rafters.

We had icebox and ice came down a chute into the wooden icebox.

And she had cauldrons for cooking gumbo and and so forth and so on.

She,

She taught me a trick that I still remember,

She would get a live fish.

It was this particular kind of fish.

It was a bottom feeder.

Instead of muddy.

I remember that it was the same thing with oysters,

And they got so fat that their,

Their,

Their shells wouldn't close.

And he would put salt in the water until it reminded her of the Gulf in its flavor.

And they would get so,

So fat and plump that their shells wouldn't close.

I remember I joined the Lutheran Church here.

Back in the last century,

And people were testifying,

And I said I'd like to say something.

I said I don't believe in Jesus Christ in place got so quiet.

You could have dropped a button and herded land.

I said I don't have to believe I am living proof.

And I told him about how premature infants in 1946.

It was a death sentence they didn't have respirators.

They sent me home in a wooden shoe box and it is the same for any other child who managed to hold on to life for at least a week seven days,

And then that that shoe box will be put in the oven with with explanations,

Absolutely impossible to mistake.

You don't put the baby in the shoe box in the oven.

You get potholders right and you get get it out.

And you said in a windy area,

Then you you you put blankets in it so that it could absorb the heat directly from the shoe box.

And then you put the baby in it.

Making sure that that you touch the box itself,

Which is this this impromptu cradle and and and the blankets to make sure that they're not too hot.

Yes,

I would think it's important to specify don't put the baby in the oven.

Well,

They had first hand experience of people that should have known,

Because they were white and did it anyway.

Oh my god.

Well,

Yes.

Remember this is the early 20th century we're talking about medicine was a joke.

It was the first time I saw a UFO,

I was,

I guess you call a pet of the main downtown library.

I read all the children's books I read all the young adult books and then I graduated to the adult books.

And I was walking towards the library.

And I'd reached the subway.

And I saw the cloud had gone between myself and,

And the sun.

And I noticed this group,

They were just high schoolers,

But they were looking up.

So I looked up.

And here was this elongated triangular shape,

Maybe two to 300 feet above us,

Which was headed north with no sound and against the wind,

And we all looked at each other and look back at it until it went out of sight and when it went out of sight.

It went above the skyscrapers that were,

We were approaching and continued until it was not visible to the eye anymore.

And that was,

That was an extraordinary experience.

It went against all of the laws of aerodynamic,

Which I was familiar and I was new.

At the time,

Of course it was a primitive aerodynamic time but the fact that it was absolutely silent,

The way the Goodyear blimp would be,

But was proceeding very slowly to traverse the sky against the wind and remember Chicago was called the windy city for a reason.

I couldn't have been any older than 11.

These days,

The Defense Department has blown the whistle on UFOs,

Both that they exist and not just as singular or small groups for this whole fleet,

And that they go underwater,

And that they are re al all capital letters and exclamation points.

Given my background in science fiction.

I,

I was a believer before I had proof by repetitious incidents.

Have you had many in New Mexico.

Yes.

I told you about a royal hondo,

And how.

After midnight.

They would swarm like fireflies in the sky,

As if they were playing tag.

Well,

The most interesting was the first one with this this immense vehicle,

Two or 300 feet up in the air coming between the sun and and ourselves on the ground as clouds do on a sunny day,

And yet absolutely silent as it proceeds on its way against the wind.

I hadn't been witnessed by all these white people and myself.

And we were all in agreement because we talked afterwards.

After we went out of sight.

They commented most on the fact that it was absolutely silent and proceeding in one of the windier days of the city against the wind.

And when I was still at Antioch.

We were returning,

And I noticed out the left hand passenger window that there was a light that seemed to be pacing our car.

And I brought that to everyone else's attention,

And they agreed that it was light and then they said it was probably the airport light.

And no sooner had they said that,

Then the light went above a jet that was landing at the airport above it,

Mind you,

And then proceeded north in the blink of an eye and out of sight.

And of course that changed the whole tenor of the conversation.

I mean,

It was something that was well beyond their comprehension.

I have not seen a UFO yet.

I so hope to.

And I'm,

But I'm so glad that they're.

.

.

As long as you're alive,

The opportunities in this state are open.

I know New Mexico is such a hotbed for UFO activity.

People talk about it all the time.

Do you ever sit back and wonder,

Like,

Why you?

Have you just been in the right place at the right times to see these amazing sights?

Or do you ever wonder about that?

There's no such thing as coincidence.

And I have not yet met,

To my knowledge,

An extraterrestrial being that I could identify themselves as such,

With whom I could have a conversation of this level and ask questions.

However,

I look forward to that.

I fell in love with Sparks during the course of my interview.

I,

Too,

Was a pet of the library.

I spent so much time in the library in junior high,

They actually forced me out.

They forced me out of the library,

Yes,

And I had to go play with other kids at recess.

But I know what it's like to live in the worlds of Star Trek,

Science fiction,

Lord of the Rings,

Born Free.

I know what it's like to live in those worlds.

And I guess what it gave me,

And I think it gave Sparks,

Was a sense of possibility,

An enchantment with the world around us.

The idea that anything is possible,

And that really,

We're only limited by our imaginations.

I could go on and on about how much I love books,

How much I love reading.

But really,

It's time for me to say this.

Thank you for listening to Episode 41 of Bite-Sized Blessings,

The podcast all about the magic and spirit that surrounds us,

If only we open our eyes to it.

And whether you choose to listen to our Bite-Sized offerings for that five to ten minutes of freedom in your day,

Or the longer interviews,

We're grateful you're here.

I need to thank my wonderful guest today,

Sparks,

For sharing all of his amazing stories,

As well as the creators of the music used.

Frank Schroeder,

Chilled Music,

Kevin MacLeod,

Music L.

Files,

Dream Heaven,

And of course,

Louis Armstrong.

For complete attribution,

Please see the Bite-Sized Blessings website at bite-sized-blessings.

Com.

On the website,

You'll find links to other artists,

Books,

Of course,

And change makers I think will lift and inspire you.

Thank you for listening,

And here's my one request.

We should all be like Sparks,

In love with the world,

In love with possibility,

Enchanted with it.

We should all live in the world of imagination.

One blueberry hill.

Come climb the hill with me,

Baby.

We'll see what we will see.

I'll bring my horn with me.

I'll be with you where the berries are blue,

Yes.

Each afternoon we'll go,

Yeah.

Higher than the moon will go.

To our wedding in June we'll go.

By the deep,

By the deep,

By the dreary,

The wind,

And the willows play,

Yes.

I love sweet melody,

And all of these wild swimmers would never to be.

Though we wipe our hands,

Yes,

You've got to be still.

For you are my thrill,

Yeah,

Blueberry hill.

Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba.

Yeah,

Baby.