A Dream About Lightning Bugs

by Ben Folds

  I think that visit to the psychologist is what prompted Mama to start reading to me every night, something she did regularly for a few years. I became just as interested in reading Greek mythology, memorizing and organizing the gods and the mortal characters, as I was in sorting my 45-rpm records. It’s like the way some little boys memorize all the Pokémon characters. Soon I loved astronomy and took a shine to all things atomic. The table of elements was catnip for an obsessive little boy who liked lists and numbers. A few years later, Mama doubled down on her objection to the doctor’s prognosis, starting me in first grade a year early. I was the youngest one in the class. My hyper-focus and inability to deal with interruption, along with a variety of other odd behaviors, might have easily been seen as a sign of something to worry about. But my parents never made me feel there was anything wrong with me.

  Mama herself had an artistic streak, which didn’t fit neatly in a world of the Southern working class and the filthy-mouthed construction workers who often featured in our lives. She became a defense attorney of sorts for my creative leanings, exposing me to music, taking me to youth orchestra, and validating artistic interests that might otherwise have been deemed frivolous in a workingman’s house. Because in the 1970s, in the blue-collar South, “artsy” things would normally have been written off as being “for queers.” She recognized that I had art in my bones and I think that’s why she defied the child psychologist. It was in defense of creativity. She saw my flunking of the doctor’s test as proof of my imagination. I reminded her of herself.

  My mother wasn’t a stage mom or anything, though. I don’t remember my parents ever telling me to practice. When I began piano and drums in fourth grade, I became my own taskmaster. My parents bent in the wind like reeds as I terrorized the household with painfully long sessions of repeated phrases at the piano or snare drum. And I had horrible temper tantrums when I felt I wasn’t getting it right. Breaking of furniture, thrown sticks, shredded music.

  I’m not aware of anyone else in my family who played music seriously. Well, there was my aunt Sharon, who I hardly viewed as a musician at all. In my young unearned snobbery, I wrote her off. But actually she’d majored in music. I thought she had an awful warble of a voice and a rushing brutish tone on the piano, and I distanced myself from her as I learned music. The feeling turned out to be mutual. When I began playing piano and making up songs, Aunt Sharon told me my music was noise pollution and that I didn’t need to bother writing songs, because “no good music has been made since the nineteenth century.” We had forgotten the art of composition long ago, she said, and a piano-pounding nine-year-old wasn’t going to be the one to revive it. Despite all this, I should mention that she did show me how to notate one of my songs and she explained what a key center was, and that was certainly something. A big something. She also spent a lot of her life documenting shape-note singing in the Appalachians, so hey there, young Ben—chill about this woman. She’s your aunt, for Christ’s sake. And she made a difference. And then there was my uncle Jim, who had a knack for music and had learned a few Leon Russell piano riffs by ear. He never had lessons or training, but it was helpful to see an adult enjoying music. He also took great interest in the songs I wrote when I was just a kid, and that went a long way.

  My mother, Scotty Folds, 1967

  Mama was, and is, a talented visual artist but never a lover of the spotlight. Around the time I was in kindergarten, she put some of her stuff in local art contests and won. She began to get a lot of interest in her work, which was very exciting. At least Papa thought so, and he started planning how they could make a business of selling her art. Imagine that! Art putting food on the table! Right up there with honest work! But upon being offered money for her watercolor paintings, she quit making art altogether. She didn’t make another piece that I’m aware of for at least three decades. She recently returned to her art, but she sticks to markers on a dry-erase board. Wax on, wax off. She drags an eraser over it when she’s done, and it’s gone.

  Chuck on the left. Me on the right, putting a record on my doggie-themed turntable, 1972.

  ERASE AND REWIND

  I NEVER MET EITHER ONE of my grandfathers, but both my grandmothers were a strong presence in my life. They were each widowed very young, so Mama and Papa had single working mothers and tragic fathers in common. My grandmother on my father’s side was Emma, and to my brother and me, she was Ma-Maw. Ma-Maw looked a lot like Loretta Lynn. She wore a different-color wig each day, piled high like Marge Simpson’s. She had a massive boob job in her fifties, took disco lessons, and taught me “the Hustle”—a popular 1970s’ disco dance that had its own song. Or maybe it was the other way around. She and her second husband, Rocky, lived in an apartment, and for a few years, in a trailer park. That was my favorite. Their double-wide trailer had mirrors on each interior wall to make it look bigger. It made four people look like sixteen, which is why it was my favorite.

  Back in the 1940s, a fifteen-year-old Ma-Maw married my biological grandfather, Glenn Folds. He was, by most accounts, good-looking and extremely charming. Glenn was a traveling John Deere tractor salesman from the metropolis of Martinsville, Virginia, who, at thirty-five years old, swept teenaged Ma-Maw off her hillbilly feet, rescuing her from a life in a poor coal-mining town in West Virginia. And, yes, it all sounds quite romantic, up until the part where Glenn turns out to be a mentally ill child abuser.

  When Papa was a young boy, Glenn used to say some scary shit to him at bedtime, like, “Tonight’s the night. I’m going to take us all to see Jesus.” And then he just sat by the bed with a knife, or a gun, staring. He often told Ma-Maw that after taking the kids to “see Jesus” he would turn the barrel next on her and then himself. It would be awesome. They would all be together in heaven.

  I heard these stories straight from Ma-Maw. When I was in college, I decided to drop by her place with a notebook and interview her about Glenn, because his name was never uttered in our house and I wanted to know more about him. She was surprisingly open about it all, recounting some really incredible, funny, and tragic stories. Over the course of our all-day interview, my perception of Ma-Maw, and time itself, shifted. She became a young lady for whom many days and years had passed. I’d always thought grandmothers were born old. It was one of those rare times when the past suddenly seemed present.

  Ma-Maw seemed very comfortable with her humble beginnings, her class, and who she’d decided to become. She apologized to no one for her daily wigs or her fake boobs. She didn’t try to pretend it was her real hair and her real body. She owned it. She always reminded me of Dolly Parton that way, never making a secret of the “work” she’d had done.

  Ma-Maw felt that my father survived the ordeal of his abusive upbringing with his mind intact in part because Glenn mercifully disappeared for months on end, landing in jail in one state or another—once for beating up five cops on the side of a highway. His absence was a respite, a break from the abuse. But it also left Ma-Maw a struggling single working mother. One morning, while Ma-Maw was busy working overtime at a drugstore, my father was accidentally shot with a .22 rifle while camping with friends and nearly died. He was fifteen years old. The local Greensboro newspaper, assuming he would be dead by time of printing, prematurely ran my father’s obituary, making Papa one of the few who could quote Mark Twain, “The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” and not be joking.

  The doctor, who had come straight from treating wounded soldiers in the jungles of Vietnam, said that three-quarters of Papa’s lungs would need to be removed in the morning, barring some kind of miracle. So Ma-Maw, who was quite creative, sat at Papa’s hospital bed the whole night, prompting him to visualize little ants crawling into his lungs, taking the infection out piece by piece. All night, Papa dreamed of the ants taking out the bad and bringing in the good. By morning, his condition improved enough to avoid lung removal. Papa believes he was healed by creative
visualization, the power of the mind. Ma-Maw, who later converted to Mormonism, changed her story a little, and would later chalk it up to the power of Jesus.

  As a teenager, Papa worked to distance himself from his father, who would often drop into his life at school or work and embarrass him somehow. Much later, when I was six, Glenn appeared at our house unannounced. I was asleep, so I missed it, but it seems Glenn made a move on my mother (!) when Papa left them alone for five minutes to go to the bathroom. Papa threw him out and told him that if he came around again, he would kill him. Dean Folds is pretty dry, matter-of-fact, and convincing without ever raising his voice. Not long after that incident, Glenn Folds hanged himself in a motel. Papa didn’t attend the funeral, taking us instead to play Putt-Putt across from the mall.

  My grandmother on my mother’s side was Lois. My brother and I called her Grammy. Her first husband, Charles Kellam, my grandfather, was in the furniture business in High Point, North Carolina. A former North Carolina statewide high school wrestling champion standing five foot five, my grandfather is remembered for performing handstands on two Coke bottles—with his thumbs. I’m happy to remember him this way too, but I’m not sure I believe it. Sadly, Charles was a chronic alcoholic and died of liver complications at forty years old, just before my mother was born, leaving Lois to raise two girls alone.

  With her reddish wavy hair and her dark skin tone, Lois claimed to be part Cherokee. Having grown up dirt poor in Missouri, before the Great Depression, Lois, ashamed of her beginnings, always struggled to rewrite her story, even awkwardly affecting the mannerisms of wealth. After Lois’s death, my aunt Sharon got heavily into researching our ancestry and confirmed that Lois’s father was actually of African descent, with no trace of Cherokee. Lois spent her life covering her redneck past and her mixed racial heritage. She chose to forget that her parents dropped her alone off at an orphanage while her brothers and sisters grew up at home. And she, in turn, did the same to my mother and her sister.

  Mama was six years old. I always imagined that this dropping off was meant to be temporary, a way to get some space to restart Lois’s life after her husband’s death. Only, the months turned into years. Mama always called it a “boarding school,” the way her mother had chosen to characterize it, but Papa would always correct that. “It was an orphanage, Scotty.” It certainly was not a prep school in Connecticut full of rich kids. Photographs of Mama’s orphanage, with its shacks on a lawn of trampled brown grass, were stored in a box along with other photos from the same era, of Lois taking flying lessons with a gaggle of wealthy male suitors. Her children safely installed in “boarding school,” Lois eventually remarried, and Mama and Aunt Sharon returned to living at home at the end of high school.

  Chuck and I were never dropped off at an orphanage. We were never beaten or threatened in bed with a knife, never left in the woods with guns. Those histories weren’t mine. They were my parents’ and their parents’ histories. They might have been mine too if Mama and Papa hadn’t each done such an impressive reset. They acknowledged their past, forgave it, perhaps learned from it, but they didn’t try and rewrite it. They created a safe space, a clean slate, to bring up two kids.

  With this clean slate came a naïveté, a lack of form and formality, and a sort of all-around skepticism of convention that defined my upbringing. Rules, routines, and rituals were out the window. A family walk could mean hopping over fences with DO NOT ENTER signs. Mama would often allow me to be late to school if my favorite song was about to play on the radio. On the rare times we all ate together, there was no set dinnertime. I can imagine this sort of upbringing wouldn’t work for everyone. Some need borders and conventions more than others. And not everyone is a fan of improvisation.

  As a result of my unusual upbringing, I was sent home from school many times for disregarding the rules, and the teachers seemed as frustrated with my parents as they were with me. But my parents did teach me to be a hard worker and to be polite, in a “do unto others” sort of way. My manners are pretty old school sometimes. To this day, I always rise to greet company, open doors for others in public, smile at and acknowledge everyone. “Please,” “thank you,” and a lot of “yes, ma’am” and “yes, sir” from a bygone Southern era, peppered with lots of “shits” and “fucks.” I’ve always been an odd combination of polite, irreverent, hardworking, and utterly undisciplined.

  My parents’ era didn’t make a high art out of child-raising like we do today. And Mama and Papa were barely twenty when I came along, still children themselves, so they were just winging it.

  What the hell is this thing? A boy? Okay, put him in a cardboard box and let’s do this!

  Mama now seems mildly horrified by the photograph of the cardboard box that served as a cradle when I was an infant. I don’t care, though. Why not? Cardboard is light, cheap, and disposable, like a cradle should be. Because babies aren’t babies for long, and they don’t know the difference anyway. Put a pillow up in that shit and your baby will sleep like…well, a baby. Anyway, I’ve included that photograph in the book for fun.

  For equal and fair treatment, I’ve thrown in a nice shot of my father taking me for a drive when I was four months old. I was placed in catapult position in the front seat of a doorless convertible Jeep, with no seatbelts. Papa, driving, and my uncle Jim in the back seat, as they were off to play tennis. Papa admits there was also a six-pack of Budweiser beer in the paper bag in the back seat. At least there was a nice hard-plastic baby car seat for me. Still, no straps or seatbelt attachments, no door.

  Cardboard boxes were a big part of childhood. We moved so often that we never got around to unpacking all the boxes before moving to the next place. All of this moving was part of my parents’ livelihood. Besides their multiple day jobs, they built houses where we would live temporarily until some kind of tax period passed, at which time they could be sold for a profit. And the moves themselves were as informal as the rest of our life. I remember blankets being thrown over a desk, so we could move the desk and all its surface contents at once. Sometimes it’s just more efficient to leave everything on top of the furniture and go. When we got to the new house, we removed the blankets and straightened the pencils, stapler, and the coffee cups. If something broke, we threw it away.

  My family was constantly in motion, writing our own rules, while the surrounding neighbors, both the new ones and the ones we left behind, seemed permanently fixed. Fixed to their houses, their schedules, their churches, for generations past and to come. At least that was my perception. Their lives were writ on rock tablets, like in the cheesy paintings of Moses on their living room walls. Our life was more like Mama’s dry-erase board.

  Cardboard cradle

  Uncle Jimmy, Ben, Papa, 1966

  A WORKING-CLASS TOURIST IS

  SOMETHING TO BE

  WINSTON-SALEM, NORTH CAROLINA, WHERE I spent most of my childhood, boasted as wide a spectrum of social class as anyplace in America in the 1970s. From the lower class right up to the top with everything in between. For a variety of reasons, I experienced them all, living, studying, and working my way through the whole spectrum.

  We bounced from working-class to middle-class neighborhoods as we moved to a new house each year. I attended a thoroughly racially integrated school at the peak of Southern desegregation in the 1970s. And my time in youth orchestra and accelerated classes meant mixing with proper wealthy kids. In fact, Winston-Salem had an actual Old Money™ set, the kind that only really exists in select places in the South and cities in the northeast like New York or Boston, the rest of the country being too new for that. Winston-Salem was home to R. J. Reynolds Tobacco, purveyors of all things nicotine. That’s where Winston cigarettes, Salem cigarettes, and Camels come from. Hanes underwear, Krispy Kreme, and more industry than you could shake a hauserstick at started in Winston-Salem. Back in the 1920s, Winston-Salem was even chosen as the site for the prototype of the Emp
ire State Building, the more diminutive Reynolds Building. All this industry meant that Winston-Salem was also home to a lot of factory workers. “Millionaires and mill rats” living “side by side,” as my song “Jackson Cannery” goes (from Ben Folds Five, 1995).

  Darting around all these social classes, I did a lot of observing. I now think of myself as a social-class tourist—learning a little about each, but never quite at home in any of them. One day I was the nervous poor kid who didn’t know which was the salad fork, the next I was worried I’d get beat up for talking too fancy around the country kids. Little habits and words from one class rubbed off on me, giving it away that I didn’t belong to the other. I came to see being a part of any class, like any club, as being trapped. And I liked to roam. My family never traveled geographically outside of North Carolina, but I felt like a world traveler. Laugh all you want at their Hawaiian shirts and high black socks, but a tourist gets to appreciate and enjoy all the things the locals take for granted. And it can be a little lonely, but such is the perspective of a songwriter, and this kind of upbringing was excellent training ground.

  Yes, my family lived in some redneck neighborhoods, and yes, it’s true that there was a gun in every corner of our house. There were houses with yards stacked with old tires and neighbors who threatened to shoot each other because a dog knocked over their trash. Once, a redneck neighbor put a tiny pocket pistol against another redneck neighbor’s forehead and actually pulled the trigger. But it didn’t penetrate the skull. It just left the poor fellow’s face black and blue for six months. I even went to a country dentist whose office was in a cinder-block house on the edge of a pasture. The sounds of mooing cows could be heard outside the window as I looked up at a stained foam-tile ceiling, with country music blasting out of a transistor radio. This old farmer of a dentist filled fourteen cavities in one week after I got my braces off, one after the other with no novocaine or painkillers. I sensed he thought I looked too soft and classy—not quite football player enough.