Brian Jay Jones

I was shopping at Home Depot the other day, looking much as I do on any hot afternoon when I’ve been working in the yard and decide to take “just a moment” to run to the big orange box to pick something up: sunburnt, baseball cap on backwards, sleeveless black t-shirt (this one reading “Some Adult Assistance May Be Required”), workboots and shorts . . . yeah, I’m the very portrait of dashing, I know. 

Anyway,  I was standing in the hardware section, looking like a mess and fiddling with various thicknesses of chains, when a woman walked up to me with a very panicked look on her face.  “Can you help me out here?” she begged, laying her hands on me. “My husband sent me down here for ‘2 standard screws’ and I don’t know what that means.”

Well, I’m hardly mechanically-inclined, but I do know what a standard screw looks like.  So after a few moments of searching, I handed her an 85 cent bag containing exactly two screws.

“Thank you,” she said, beaming. “Now, can you tell me where I can find electrical outlets?”

I stammered something about how I thought they were over on the left side of the building, near the bugspray, but I wasn’t sure.  She gave me a look first of confusion, then of surprise.  “Oh!” she said, an almost visible light bulb coming on over her head. “I’m sorry, I thought you worked here.”

Now, as I mentioned at the outset, I looked nothing like a person who worked at Home Depot.  In fact, I looked like a vagrant.  But that happens to me a lot.  I think I just have One of Those Faces.

I’m also the Guy Who Always Gets Asked For Directions.  If you’ve been reading this blog even casually, you know what a laugh that is — I can get lost walking around the block.  Yet, I can be standing in the middle of a crowded city block in a foreign city, and there’s a one hundred percent chance that a complete stranger will come marching up to me and ask for directions.  Even when I explain that “I’m not from around here,” many will still take out a map, spread it out on the hood of a nearby car, and ask me to help them read it and figure out where they are.  And like an oaf, I’ll lean over the map — which is not only usually in a foreign language, but also looks as if it’s been used to mop up Sunny D — and try to figure out where we are, and how they can get where they need to go.  Usually I end up apologizing to them, feeling guilty that  I was of no assistance whatsoever.  I have no idea why they asked me for directions in the first place; I just have one of those faces.

I once exited an office building amidst a crowd of fifteen coworkers, all of us walking together in one large group to go to lunch two blocks away.  With a committed group mentality, we stepped off the curb against the red light, jaywalking en masse across C Street, one great blob of humanity.  Guess who was the only one to get pulled out of the crowd by a passing police officer and cited for jaywalking?  Yup.  The guy with One of Those Faces. 

Perhaps the my finest hour was in a crowded McDonald’s, just north of D.C.  My pal Mike and I were driving to New York one Memorial Day weekend, and had stopped at Mickey D’s for something to eat — along with, it turns out, a busload of people on their way to the District for the holiday weekend.  As I stood patiently in line amid this enormous sea of people, a longhaired fellow in shredded clothes came staggering in the side door, wove his way through the crowd, steered past several crowded, overflowing tables, and planted himself squarely in front of me and began shouting directly into my face.  This went on for perhaps two minutes, when he suddenly stopped and strode out of the restaurant, ignoring everyone.

Mike shook his head, laughing.  “I know you say that happens all the time,” he said, ” but I’m not sure I would’ve believed that had I not seen it.”

But it does happen to me all the time.  I just have One of Those Faces.

Maryland State Senate President Mike Miller has asked that a state commission take a look at Maryland’s official state song to determine whether its lyrics should be changed or, more radically, that a new state song be adopted.

Why the fuss?  Well, Maryland’s state song — “Maryland, My Maryland” — while it wasn’t formally adopted as the state song until 1939, was written in 1861 by a loyal Confederate, who called for his home state to rise up and fight the Union.  It was penned by James Ryder Randall, a Baltimore-born journalist who was teaching in Lousiana in April 1861, when he heard the news that the first Union troops had marched through Baltimore on their way to protect Washington, D.C.  During the Civil War, Maryland was a border state, officially loyal to the Union — but in the early years of the Civil War, it was torn between Confederate and Union tendencies.  And no place was more torn than Baltimore, where residents rioted as the Union troops made their way through the city.

Learning of the riots, Randall immediately wrote — by candlelight, so the story goes — a nine-stanza poem, urging his home state to rebel and secede from the Union. “Come!” Randall urges several times, at one point beckoning Maryland to “spurn the Northern scum!”  (Rightly, it is still considered to be the nation’s “most martial poem.”)

With some minor tweaking (mainly by adding “My Maryland” at the refrain), it was quickly set to the tune of “Lauriger Horatius” (the same tune as “O Tannenbaum”) and became a Southern anthem — supposedly, Southern troops played the song as they marched into Maryland to begin their campaign at Antietam.  Given the ultimate turn of events, however, Randall is often called “the Poet Laureate of the Lost Cause.”

Here, then, is the opening stanza of Randall’s poem:

The despot’s heel is on thy shore,
Maryland, My Maryland!
His torch is at thy temple door,
Maryland, My Maryland!
Avenge the patriotic gore
That flecked the streets of Baltimore,
And be the battle queen of yore,
Maryland! My Maryland!

The “despot” in the opening line is, of course, President Abraham Lincoln.  But Randall’s just warming up; by the sixth verse, the Confederacy — especially Maryland’s border state of Virginia — is pleading with its sister state to stand and be counted with the South:

Dear Mother! burst the tyrant’s chain,
Maryland, My Maryland!
Virginia should not call in vain,
Maryland, My Maryland!
She meets her sisters on the plain —
“Sic semper!” ’tis the proud refrain
That baffles minions back amain,
Arise in majesty again,
Maryland! My Maryland!

Randall brings things to a fever pitch by the eighth stanza:

Thou wilt not yield the Vandal toll,
Maryland, My Maryland!
Thou wilt not crook to his control,
Maryland, My Maryland!
Better the fire upon thee roll,
Better the blade, the shot, the bowl,
Than crucifixion of the soul,
Maryland! My Maryland!

You get the idea — and hence Maryland’s dilemma, and Senate President Miller’s request that the song be looked at for modifications.  Some verses — including the fiery eighth stanza — can probably be read broadly, urging, for instance, Maryland to always rise up and overcome any “Vandal toll.”  Other verses, however, with their explicit references to Baltimore, Virginia, and other specific events, are more problematic.  In context, it’s a tough song for Maryland to embrace; Maryland was never a Confederate state, so the song can’t really be said to be memorializing a part of Maryland’s official past. 

In fact, its adoption as the state song, nearly eighty years after the Civil War, seems more a choice of convenience than careful thought — the result of a statehouse discussion that went something like this:

Senator:  We need a good state song.  What should it be?

Delegate: Are there any songs that have the word “Maryland” in the title?

Senator:  There’s “Maryland, My Maryland.”  What about that one?

Delegate:  What’s it about?

Senator:  I don’t know, but, see, it’s got the word “Maryland” in it.

Delegate:  Works for me.  I vote aye.

Many people pointed out a similar problem when Reagan, and other politicians, adopted the song “Born In The USA” as a campaign song:  Apart from the song title and refrain, the song itself — a portrait of the darker side of the American dream — isn’t a terribly appropriate one to be campaigning with.

Ten years ago, Virginia struggled with this issue as well, when they decided that the slave minstrel song “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” — with its references to “darkeys” and “massa” — wasn’t the kind of image they wanted to project. Virginia shelved the tune, adopting it instead as the “state song emeritus,” and launched a contest to find a new state song. Unfortunately, in 2000, Virginia suspended the contest.  At the moment, then, Virginia has no state song.

Ultimately, I think this is a matter that does deserve some further thought. The hardest part will probably be coming up with words that rhyme with “Maryland.”