Just a Little Extra Time

Originally read at the

CELEBRATION OF LIFE FOR

BESSIE LOUISE IGLEHART

on October 26th, 2024 at

Jesus is The Answer Ministries

Pittsburgh, PA

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Amen, family.

We’re gathered here today to give honor to God, church, Pastor and congregation, and to offer up our gratitude for the many blessings that we have received. With the blessing of my sisters, Lesha and Gloria, It’s my honor and privilege to be here today to offer a reflection on our one and only mother, Bessie Louise Iglehart.

I’ve chosen to call this a “reflection” rather than a “eulogy” because that feels to me like a far truer descriptor. Bessie didn’t like funerals - at all - and she rarely attended them. As you can see, she hasn’t even come to her own! Bessie much preferred to celebrate life and to expend her energy in support of the living, and in this she was unwaveringly faithful. It didn’t feel right to me to compose words that focused on our mother being dead when she was so fixated on life. Also, in every way imaginable, I embody Bessie’s essence: I look like her, I have her mannerisms, I even laugh like her. When I was a kid, some relatives even called me “Little Bessie” when I got flustered, and eventually I had to concede that, okay, I was Little Bessie. As such, I’m not really offering up a reflection of Bessie, today -- I am a reflection of Bessie, every day.

And it’s my hope to bring to you now a personal understanding of who and what Bessie has been in her many roles during her lifetime, and what she would have wanted her legacy to be. Her life was so full, and our relationship so intricate, that I could speak about her here for hours…but I won’t. Instead, I’ll try to keep this on point, and I’ll do my best to watch the time.

A Fact Written in Twilight

Photo of Bessie Louise, age 31, taken by my father,

Floyd Walker, at Pittsburgh's Buhl Plantarium in 1970.

THE TWILIGHT HOURS are good for reflection, where abstract thoughts and memories buried fathoms deep for decades come washing ashore on waves of tears. I hope you don't mind if I share some of these thoughts with you. There will come a point very soon where I'll be speaking about my mother Bessie's physical life in the past tense. But for now, she's still here, and I'd like to honor her by writing about the experience of being in her orbit for so long.

How the Rest is Remembered

Originally read at The FREE ASSOCIATION Reading Series

on March 5th, 2023 at Alphabet City, Pittsburgh, PA

Five years ago, almost to the day, our opening writer read at FARS to share part of his own story as a child who’d lived for a short time at McIntyre Shelter, a youth compound that existed for decades in the North Hills.

His previous FARS story was titled “How the West Was Lost” and revolved around a toy he’d coveted and briefly owned, a Johnny West cowboy action figure. Today, he returns and invites you to join him as he takes us back to McIntyre Shelter and explores the memory of things lost in Pittsburgh.

This is “How the Rest is Remembered” by Marcel Lamont Walker.

WHAT'D I MISS?

How does a Broadway creation, birthed in a nation

By a rapper-slash-writer, prove to be tighter and brighter than anything that preceded it?

Our country, man, we needed it; in these desperate times we found a message in rhymes

From a show-stopping

Son of an immigrant who was imminently

Positioned to go farther by working harder and being a lot smarter

By being a self-starter, at 35 he avoided becoming just a martyr

Thanks to his rampant creativity, he knew that someday

Across the Great White Way he could make something better

Something more colors of people could bring to life together

He was making cultural history as a trend-setter

The box office got to popping and all the jaws they dropped

Our man saw his future rise, rising high non-stop

Audiences responded, even better yet, they bonded

The message corresponded with what they didn’t know they wanted

Well the word got around, they said

“This show is insane, man!”

Saved money for tickets knowing it was off the chain, man

Won all the awards, critical and popular acclaim

And the world now knows his name. What’s his name, man?

How The West Was Lost

Originally read at The FREE ASSOCIATION Reading Series
on February 18th, 2018 at Alphabet City, Pittsburgh, PA

BY THE MID-1970s, my little family had already registered considerable mileage migrating around Pittsburgh, living in various neighborhoods. I remember when my mother, younger sister, and I moved into the two-story, two bedroom house on Lyric Street in East Liberty. It was rented to our mother by her sister, in an effort to provide a measure of stability for the three of us. Later, this became four, when my youngest sister was born in the living room. Sometimes the head count grew to five, when our father would come to live with us for a while, though this was always temporary. All told, I was a happy kid.

However, even at six years old, I knew innately that something was off with our family. Specifically, something wasn’t quite right with my mother’s skewed perspective of the world. She loved her children with a ferocious volatility, but would turn on friends and loved ones at the barest provocation. Sometimes even we weren’t spared her wrath, which could be terrifying to the uninitiated, and tiresome to those who were. We weren’t so much a nuclear family as a family that was prone to going nuclear for the most mundane of reasons. Still, we kids were very close to our mother, even when her behavior was unstable, which was frequent.

Like most six-year old boys, I also looked up to our father, even though he typically wasn’t in the picture; he was a photographer so he preferred to instead take most of the pictures. That’s more than a metaphor: He wasn’t built for helping to maintain much day-to-day familial structure, so he existed at the periphery of our world, observing but not guiding. Sometimes he’d live with us for a week or month or so, otherwise he lived with his own mother in the Hill District. He was usually on-call as a special visitor more than anything else, and I looked forward to his visits. To make up for his absences, he frequently came bearing gifts. This was how I became exposed to comic books, which would chart my path through everything that was to come. Other times, he brought us toys.

Judy Penzer & The Art of Deepening the Mystery

Me working on my SPACE mural
Photo by Jami Marlowe

"The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery." - Francis Bacon

THE RELATIVE DISTANCE of memories is a peculiar phenomenon of aging. Think back to when you were a child and how every minute between holidays felt like a month. For most of us, birthdays were the best thing imaginable, our own personal holiday where time and space and gravity bent in our direction. There was a perceived upgrade in status that came with being another year older; we were allowed more and more autonomy of our lives. But in time, most of us discover that our youthful perceptions are warped by inexperience, and every upgrade comes with more and more responsibility. By the time most of us have reached our early twenties, that precipice between the so-called freedom of youth and previously-coveted responsibility of adulthood, we’re just starting to sense the shift in our perception of time.

It happens incrementally, barely noticeable at first. The event we thought occurred a year ago was actually two years ago. A movie sequel is released and we suddenly realize it’s been more years than we thought since the previous installment came out. Someone’s name gets mentioned and it takes a second to recall who they are, then you wonder how you could have ever forgotten that person. Or someone’s name is mentioned and you immediately know who they are, but you suddenly realize how long it’s been since you’ve been in touch. Then the occurrences pick up the pace, but we don’t notice. Babies are born, then they’re talking, then they’re tweens, and we remember buying them outdated gifts for birthdays long passed. In our twenties, we are fully-formed adults in the eyes of twelve-year olds, even though we know we’re nowhere close to that. For them, as it had been for us, minutes are months, but for us now months streak by like minutes, and the clock ticks on. The time swirls into a temporal mural with memories as the paint, and one’s lifetime as the wall it’s applied to.

44 Is A Magic Number: Part One

Prologue: A Personal History of Before and After

There are two kinds of occurrences that can be said to change the world: There are the types which unfold over time, which we often see coming, and there are the unexpected types which happen in an instant. It’s hard to say which ones ultimately leave the more lasting societal impact. That would be a subjective conclusion anyway. What these types of occurrences have in common is that they divide our history into before and after. Ask anyone who is old enough if they remember life before and after certain things happened, and you’ll most likely get a story that defines the person as well as the day and age in which it took place.

I remember watching the earliest news reports about the Iranian hostage crisis in November of 1979. I was much too young to grasp the politics that swirled around that story, but I knew it was serious, and it was protracted. I also remember the sense of elation when it was announced, immediately after Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, that they had been released. A little over two months later, upon returning home from a trip to downtown with my mother and sisters, I flicked on the television and, before it even warmed up enough for the picture to appear, you could hear the newscasters had interrupted programming to tell us the president had been shot. These two back-to-back events, one long-in-coming and the other happening out of nowhere, had the lasting effect of increasing Reagan’s larger-than-life persona to an extent that carried over long past his presidency into the present day.

I also remember, in 1984, when Jesse Jackson launched his first campaign for the presidency. I was still too young to understand the intricacies of his platform and politics (although at least some of that probably speaks to the trickle-down understanding of politics most Americans still experience), but I definitely felt the newness of that candidacy, and how it had the possibility of unlocking something we’d never seen before. Of course, that quality of the unknown didn’t inspire everyone, and many of us possessed an intimate understanding of where that resistance came from.