August Wilson has left the house.

1727 Bedford Ave. Hill District, formerly Bella's Market on the ground floor + the 2 room, cold-water flat of the 7 member Kittel (later Bedford) family in which August Wilson was the 4th of 6 children.

So today I am ruminating on the meaning of family. Of the most ridiculous of contrived holiday bullshit that the United States has made up (and they've done a bit of it too). I'd riff here also about Kwaanza + Hanukkah, but they're not really my axe to grind. Everybody wanted in on the action after the Thanksgiving + Xmas thing, I guess.

I'm just talking turkey about Family. I grew up in this mixed up, messed up brew that I didn't think- I knew was Strange Brew. Then I started listening to others. Looking + listening deeply. Yeah, I was from Strange Fruit, but I was a part, a mere piece of the Fruit Cocktail. And yes that former word probably had a lot to do with the Salad.

I posted up the pictures from August Wilson's birthplace to illustrate what I call the FU Family. I had long awaited this journey to the Hill. Not because of Hill St. Blues (for even though it was set up there in those yonder Hills, it was written by an elite Anglo dude from NYC who happened to go to Carnegie in the 60's), but because like me and Franco Harris (yes, I once loved Franco AND the Steelers), August was a mixed-race baby. Yeah, yeah, yeah Barack was thrown into the mix, but he came on the scene so much later and never was a "poor black chil'." I had seen my first Wilson play in the 80's, and quickly ditched Lillian Hellman as my favorite playwright. I wanted to touch something of August's just as his plays had touched something in me.

Sorrow- it grabbed me in the plays, all of the ones I had seen, and it grabbed me on the Hill. A deep, deep visceral sorrow for the plight of the tribe from which I hail, but not for which I stayed. Staying was uncertain death, and I rathered the certain kind that comes with an ageing process and a life lived well. I had a life not lived well for a very short time and it SO sucked, I wanted it no more. So I packed my heart, and soul and went North. August left too. And as I stood at 1727 Bedford Ave I wondered if he ever came back. Or ever really left? I mean 9 out of 10 plays set in on this Hill! 

Did he ever come back here and get mad? Get mad at Fredrick Kittel? Wonder at what were Fred + Daisy thinking back in the 40's on that hill. We know what they were doing because there was spawn as proof. Not one, not two, but SIX. How long did the German baker stick around? Was it too tough to stay together? Because of societal pressures, or internal, or both? Will we ever know, or is the story now "whitewashed" (hee,hee,hee)? They stayed married into August's teen yrs. despite not necessarily being together. So many questions about that Hill. Now it is only 6% white and the rest black, but I imagine a time when the reverse was true. The Great Migration and White Flight, right. I know the history, I just can't pinpoint the intersections. How and When? Always- how and when? 

Was it hard for August, the white looking black, up there on the Hill? How did he prove himself? Prowess? At what? Was writing in his blood, his soul, festering in the despair of an impoverished hill? Did he have role models and why did he marry a Black Muslim? He converted to Islam for the marriage? What's up with that? Was there a movement afoot up there? 

But he divorced and left. August the autodidact, went West. Hung with that other crowd (whispered to be white) and even married white. Perhaps it was the cafe society of St. Paul that drew him. The need for a literary crowd. Perhaps he just couldn't get that on the Hill. So for 9 yrs. he was married to a white woman in St. Paul, and hung with a theater company, and wrote plays. Then, his time with the company and wife must have run their course, because he just up and continued West. He really was heeding the call to "Go West Young Man."

He found another theater company and wife, both of which once again had that white thing going on. I wonder if he, like me, because of the lightness of our skin, just found it easier to hang with folks who knew the roots, saw the soul, and disregarded all the rest. Problem being, when you go that route, it really is hard going back home. He produced a black child there in 1970. He produced a white child 27 years later. I so wonder what they think of each other. Do they even converse? What do they really share besides distant and likely altered dna. Is it possible that life experience can alter the genes? I mean really, is one the same at 20 as they are at 47? If change happens, at what level? Hmmm...

Family. Odd that it is all about the dna. According to who? Oh yeah, the biologists. Those studiers of all things cellular. The make-up, the movement, the creations. Family creations. Not the messes, hurt feelings, pain, anguish, and sometimes just out-and-out misery. No, it's all about the dna. 

So then another mystery pops up. August got the big C diagnosis in June of his 60th yr. on planet Earth. Not a good diagnosis, not much longer to be here. So did he plan in those 4 months he got? What did he think about? Who did he reach out to? In the end, was it all about family? If so, then I ask myself this: How the hell did he end up in Greenwood Cemetery? Now, there are 42 cemeteries in Seattle where he'd lived for the last 15 yrs. of his life with a wife and daughter. Why not there?

Greenwood Cemetery is a cemetery in the Pittsburgh suburb of O'Hara Township, Pennsylvania, United States. The cemetery was opened in 1874 and is located approximately six miles northeast of Downtown Pittsburgh at 321 Kittanning Pike321. What the hell were you thinking August, What? You got memorialized at Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall, one of the oldest historic landmarks in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Why there? You didn't even complete your military service! The funeral service included Wynton Marsalis playing the trumpet, and actors, such as Charles Dutton and Phylicia Rashad, reading monologues from your plays. The clutch of recognition had begun. But you staged this play. You were the playwright, you created the scenes. You even wrote the famous final scene that is in fact now being performed in NYC, How I Learned What I Learned. I guess I'll have to go to New York (again) next for some of those answers I crave.

O'Hara Township is a suburb of about 9,000 humans, of which over 95% is white, and .84% black (that'd be >1 for our visual readers). 

So here he rests, roils, rolls, rocks, does whatever dead bodies do (I think they just decompose.

I thought the marker unremarkable, the quote disingenuis. Even if he wrote it himself, I was disappointed. Was he really right there? Well, okay yes- literally, he probably still was. Especially if he got the super-duper deluxe, hermatically sealed deal, then in 2013, 8 years since his death, then he still probably was there. So I had a little chat with him. 

Why August? Why here? Such a displaced place to call your final home. I just want to tell you, I don't like it. The gorgeous old brick farmhouse and the funky old hearse in its makeshift garage are cool, as was the man who without a moments hesitation agreed to guide us to this hillside to find you. But this is bullshit. Way out here, Pittsburgh'ish I say. A hill, yes, but definitely NOT the Hill District. Maybe you didn't belong there, you inbetweener. Maybe you were always an outsider looking in. Maybe your later choices of an Anglo world forever solidified the chasm that already existed. What were they saying on that other Hill in the ensuing 27 years that you were gone? Were they mad at you for abadoning them, just as your Anglo/German dad abandoned you? Did you know August that everyone is grabbing pieces of you now. Theaters named after you (I just love that NYC gave you one), centers, and even historic markers. But did you see that rundown piece of shit property that everyone swore to rehab and make something out of? It's a downright dirty shame. Word on the street (not the ones around this hill), word up on The Hill is that there is a black woman who has a catering business who has the support to start a cafe at your birthsite. But of course there was all this talk of a museum too. Sometimes people are so full of bullshit August, it's really sickening. They're grabbing onto your genius like it is their own. And it isn't even in your DNA! I'll let you go rest in peace dude. I just wanted you to know that "I feel you." Or perhaps it should be, "I feel like you." Or just- I get it. We don't share DNA, just wavelengths, and in my FU Family schema, that's all we need. I can call you my brother, my family, my home.