LETTERS FROM HOME: TALKING ABOUT DRUMS AND NECESSARY EVILS

Jan. 26, 1994

Dear Patty,

Lacey, our neighbor's Rottweiler-hound dog, is at my feet. She drops by from time to time for pats and dog bones before resuming her rounds of horse stalls and hiding places. She signals she's leaving by rotating her head from side to side, which sets up a flapping of ears that resounds through the house and threatens to achieve liftoff. In a twinkle she's gone.

The barn has a new resident: Fanny, an 8-week-old pygmy goat. Our neighbor Margie says pygmy goats are known to have a calming effect on horses, and I can see why. She is pure gentleness. You pick her up and can't find a reason to put her down. Pygmy goats for Bosnia and Chechnya.

DC and I have been in Missouri for four months now. A few routines have taken hold. She goes to work early, I work late. I wake up to the sound of Kathy Smith working out in the living room. I go swimming.

We meet for dinner, and again for the 10 o'clock news.

Lately we talk about houses. And 30- versus 15-year mortgages. And roofs. And tuck-pointing. And lots of other things that have never moved me to conversation before.

Those kinds of words used to give me a headache. Now they're a necessary evil, the demon gate you have to pass through to get to the promised land: home ownership: American dream or nightmare?

Today I learned that points represent money you give the bank for no reason I can ascertain. The bank also charges you for applying for a loan, which is equivalent to how the St. Louis Rams are selling seats: You pay for the privilege of buying.

No, you pay because you have no choice.

The rest of the adult world knows this is the way things work, of course, and has resigned itself to paying banks two or three times the actual cost of a house -- even at relatively low interest rates. I'm a home-loan neophyte so I get to be appalled.

The San Francisco Examiner used to have a columnist who wrote regularly about banking unfairnesses. I don't remember what he was complaining about, only that I didn't care. Nobody cares except when it's time to pay the freight.

DC thinks my attitude toward money needs improving. It, too, is a necessary evil to me. She insisted I open an account at a different bank because I tend to count on the automated teller to balance my checkbook.

Recently I met an African missionary who only has to worry about saving souls among a tribe that fights with poison-tipped arrows.

He showed me a talking drum from Ghana. I'd heard one played before. It's struck with a hooked mallet, and a single drum is capable of a variety of pitches. Kind of fun, I always thought.

But the missionary explained that the tribal languages are tonal, meaning people actually can speak to each other through the drum.

Think of all those silly expeditionary movies where the Great White Hunter asks his trusted guide what the drums are saying. I always imagined a native Morse code. Or something in the intensity that meant the natives were restless. All along, the drums were carrying on a real conversation.

No doubt about usury and poison arrows.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.