Missing Berkerley

In September of last year, I lost a close friend I'd known since college to cancer. Even though there was considerable space between each of our encounters, it always felt like our contact was constant. He was one of those people you could have a conversation with and if it got interrupted, you could resume  right where you left off-- even if years had passed. He was also one of the most positive people I’ve ever known in my life. Even when things were going askew, he always seemed to find a better way of looking at things and to smile his way through rather than getting angry.

After he passed, I began a short story based on my friendship with him and using several real-life incidents in the tale. It's not a secret that most writers mine their own experiences when writing. For me, this was different, as I emotionally relived each of the adventures as I wrote them. For that reason, I found it necessary to put the story down after completing each individual section to allow for my recovery.

When I finished, I read the story and then rearranged things into a better sequence several times to make the story flow smoother and better explain what a great human being my friend was. Rewrites are not unusual either, but in this case, I spent months rewriting, wanting to get it just right and to honor my friend with my best effort. 

Earlier this month, I took a road trip, part of which was to visit another college friend. Because of that, I felt compelled to finish the story, which now was over a year in work. I completed it a week before my trip and shared the first draft of The Last Time I Saw Godfrey. Even though it hadn’t been to my editor yet, the response was quite positive and it’ll be published as part of the last volume of my short story anthology.

Losing a friend is difficult, but being able to turn that emotionally traumatic time into something positive is a good thing. While I was creating, I was reliving the best parts of our friendship that lasted almost four decades. I could also ponder the admiration I had for someone I consider a great human and celebrate his immortality because of all the positive vibes he left behind.

Just after I started writing, someone told me that being a friend with an author guaranteed your own immortality because at some point they would include you in something they wrote. Having spent a lot of time creating the written word, I am in full agreement with that sentiment. I only hope I did my friend justice.

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The Broken White Line

 

I love to travel. Anyone who has ever read more than a few entries of this blog knows that. After being raised as a military brat traveling coast-to-coast and all over Europe, I went into the Air Force and hit some of the same places in the states and Europe before heading to the Pacific. From there, I moved on to a DOD civilian job, which also kept me exploring new lands. To me, it is one of the most mind and heart-expanding things a person can ever do and we are lucky that being citizens of the United States we can almost travel at will anywhere around the world.

My favorite form of travel is the road trip. Jumping in the car or on a motorcycle with my backpack and a small suitcase, I'm ready to go almost anywhere. It isn't just the destination I enjoy; it is the miles on the road. Even if I travel the same road many times, I always discover something new. It is amazing the things that are out there to see and do and even better, the unique and interesting people you meet along the way.

Right now, I'm preparing to make a quick road trip to see some family and friends. At the tail end of the trip is a goodbye to a friend who passed last year and whose funeral I could not get to because of prior commitments. I'll also be picking up a few bottles of bourbon that have been sitting in a charred wooden keg aging for the last seven years. As you can, tell, the trip is a hodgepodge of things and people that will all be enjoyable and one somber moment that will allow me to take a moment to let someone know how much I appreciated them in my life. Oh, did I mention I was also getting some bodywork done on my car while on the road? When I fill a trip up with things, I fill it.

The saddest part of this trip is that my usual traveling companion, MacBeth, will not be going with me. It's the first time in a long time I'll be crossing multiple state lines without him in the backseat reminding me to stop now and then to stretch my legs or letting me know when it's time to find a field so we can play fetch. That part I'm not looking forward to but, it reminds me of how special a puppy he truly was.

In the words of Gil Favor... Head 'em up, move them out.

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Buried in a Closet

When we moved from Oklahoma to Virginia, I encountered the first school that had a guitar class as an elective, and I jumped on it. I’ve talked about that class before in this blog, and once again today I’ll talk about it without ever giving the class its due. Sorry, Ms. Wagner. Someday.

As part of our lessons, we were provided with handwritten mimeographed sheets of lyrics and chords. When they were passed out everyone in the class would take a quick sniff of that unforgettable mimeograph smell before looking at what we were about to learn. Some of the music introduced new chords or picking styles, others were collections of music by a particular composer or band that we were learning for one of our school concerts. 

Early on, I’d stuff these sheets into a pocket folder. When the sheer volume of sheets became unwieldy, I got a four-subject spiral notebook and glued all the sheets into it. Of course, our teacher was never kind enough to hand the songs out alphabetically during the three years I was in her class, so the pages were in a very random order. Add to that, the Xerox copies of sheet music, lyrics for songs I was working on, and songs I figured out by ear -- the songbook grew quickly. By the end of high school, the book was thick and had become a priceless possession since it contained almost my entire repertoire.

Being a military brat, I know how to hang onto things through a move and I held onto that songbook while moving in and out of several dormitories during college, and apartments thereafter. Then the songbook went with me to Germany and on every temporary duty trip I went on as well. While I was in Germany, I noticed the mimeographed pages had begun to fade so I started to transfer everything from the book. When my shifts were quiet, I’d type out a few songs at a time. While I made a serious dent in the contents of the songbook, I didn't finish it.  

While in Guam, I began typing out the songs again – then I made a mistake -- I let a friend who I used to jam with borrow the songbook. Pat was a customs cop and someone I trusted. I trusted him until he returned to the US and took my book with him. The only solace I had was that between what I had typed out in Germany and the further work I did in Guam I lost very little.

Fast forward a dozen years. I was in the final year of my career with the Air Force and working as a reservist in headquarters at Scott Air Force Base. One day, I was heading down a crowded stairwell when felt a tap on the shoulder. I turned around, and there was Pat. After a few minutes of catching up, he brings mentioned that he still had my songbook and wanted to get it back to me. Being eager to get it back, I offered to go over to his house that afternoon and pick it up. Sure enough, I went to his house and was presented with the songbook along with a few beers and a couple of hours of reminiscing about our time in Guam. We even played a few songs together before I left.

Okay, so how is this relevant today? I was looking for something in a closet and came across my songbook. I pulled it out and thumbed through it for an hour or so, remembering all the songs, folks I had played them with, and of course, Ms. Wagner, my high school guitar teacher who was responsible for most of the songbook’s content. It was a great escape.

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Thirteen Years without Slumbering

 

On September 9th 2009 at 1342, I posted the first entry to this blog. It was a relatively short missive that included a quick story from my adolescence. No pictures or video, but it was a start and something I’d been meaning to do. I wanted to capture and share things I was thinking about and doing. The whole concept started when I came across an abandoned blog while surfing the net written by Old Guy. 

In the thirteen years since posting the first entry, I have posted 355 more. That’s a lot of words, it would’ve been even more if I religiously wrote in the blog every two weeks like I originally planned. But life got in the way, which is okay -- it gave me something to write about. Over the years, almost half a million people have dropped by to read what I’ve written. Thanks to improved counting utilities, I now know a couple of thousand people from all over the world read my new entries every week. I like the thought of being read; I think most people like to be heard.

As I move forward, I note positively that most of this year I’ve been publishing an entry every week. Some of them are poignant, others are just kinda silly, but that’s okay that is what a blog is all about. I’m not publishing a newspaper here (although I included something I wrote for the Rolling Stone). Either way, I hope you have found at least some of my words make you go Hmm.

 

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Submitted for Your Approval

 

Whenever I talk about my favorite authors, there is one person I invariably leave out who is without a doubt at the top of my favorite list: Rod Serling. I think it is because I have him pigeonholed off to the side as the narrator of TV show and it is only when I am giving the subject full attention that the fact he wrote most of the TV shows he narrated comes to mind. Long before M. Night Shyamalan created his first ending with a twist, Rod not only brought the style to the screen brilliantly—–many of the episodes he wrote are the Master Class of how it's done.
 

Rod Serling popped into the front of my consciousness recently after I caught a rerun of one of his brilliant Twilight Zone episodes while flipping through channels. Some situations in the episode did not age well because the science in the episode was obviously dated. However, the nature of human behavior remained constant and therefore the episode still had relevance. I'd seen that episode a few times before, so the ending did not catch me by surprise, but even though I knew the ending I tried to find hints he might've inserted leading to the very non Hollywood ending. For me, it was a lesson in good storytelling.
 
I will often wander through the Internet after being reminded of something from my past, for new information that wasn't available earlier in my life. In doing so, I came across an interview that Mike Wallace did with him prior to the premier of the Twilight Zone. Previously, I'd never seen Rod Serling outside of the shows he produced, so this was also the first time I had ever seen him speak about something other than an introduction to his show or a preview of the next episode.
 
What makes this interview extremely worthwhile were the comments he made about censorship and creative control of content on television. Even back then, shows were being manipulated by sponsors and a select group of people who decided it was their business what would be available. This interview gave me a deeper admiration for the man, beyond the words he put on a piece of paper.

"It has forever been thus: So long as we write what we think, then all the other freedoms - all of them - may remain intact. And it is then that writing becomes a weapon of truth, an article of faith, an act of courage." Rod Serling
 
I freely admit several of the stories in Pimping Out My Sister-In-Law were written using techniques I picked up from Rod Serling. Just like every other writer, I blend the styles I observe and enjoy while reading into the things I compose.
 
I am waiting now for a copy of his biography to arrive. Since this was written by his daughter, it probably gives a better insight than anything written by someone outside of his family. It'll be interesting to learn more about this brilliant writer and the convictions that made him create a TV show that is still entertaining and meaningful over fifty years later.

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It Becomes Part of You, Even Though You Weren't Even There

Sometimes, you see an ad for an old movie or you come across one playing on TV, and even though you've never seen that movie you know what it is. For me, the most notable of those is The Last Picture Show. 

When my dad was assigned to Fort Sill, I hung out with a group of friends whose major source of entertainment was the base theater which was within walking distance of where we all lived. Actually, it was within biking distance but we were at the age when biking was no longer cool but walking as a group was. I wrote about this before, and pointed out that the real reason for going to the theater had nothing at all to do with the movie - it just served as a space for socializing.

We were always at the base theater for the late show on Friday, which was shown at 11 PM, and the really late show on Saturday night, which started at 1 AM Sunday morning. The admission was only a buck, popcorn another buck. We, as a group, would share a single soda since refills were free. I can't imagine any teenager now sharing a single soda between five or six people-- somehow we survived.

The base theater mostly showed films that were either B movies, like Chrome and Hot Leather, or anything by Bruce Lee.  But occasionally we would get a movie several years after release, like 2001: A Space Odyssey. Because all of us were seeing the movies together, it was a big part of our shared experience with lines from the movies making it into our conversations. It gave us a common history -- until I got strep throat. 

After spending Wednesday and Thursday at home sick, I wasn't allowed to go to the movies that weekend even though I had begun to feel better. I missed Billy Jack, which I caught on TV a couple of years later – – the other movie I missed was The Last Picture Show.

The Last Picture Show had won two Academy Awards after being nominated for eight to include Best Picture. Critics loved the artistry of a movie being released in the 70s that was filmed in black-and-white with a mono soundtrack. It's a story of people coming-of-age in a dying small town in North Texas. Lots of introspection and the angst at realizing that the blossom of youth was fading into the background and the need to be concerned about what is in front of you. A heavy movie for a group of eighth graders.

Among my male friends, the biggest takeaways from the movie was seeing Cybill Shepherd nude and the scenes where she loses her virginity to a guy she doesn't really care about because the guy she does care about doesn't date virgins. . Yes, it was rated R and junior high schoolers shouldn't have been allowed to buy tickets to begin with but that's the way it works sometimes.

As I said, I didn't get to go to the movie. TV standards being what they were for years after, I never had a chance to see it later either. Life went on, years passed -- then, thanks to things like HBO I was provided the opportunity to see The Last Picture Show in all his glory, unedited and uncensored. I just didn't. I was beyond it. My life had gone on and I put my adolescence in a box up on the shelf like most people. 

Last week I caught an ad for the film showing on a streaming service. Uncut, unedited, and uncensored. I passed. At this point, not seeing the movie has become part of my personal history left unexplored and I've decided to keep it that way. Sometimes, a movie left unseen is a better memory than one that was.

Besides Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? is on.

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Who's There? A Memory

Memories are curious things. Scientists have been trying to figure out for years how and why people experience sudden bursts of memory. Some are traceable to triggers like smells, sounds, particular music, or even touch. Then there are those memories that burst in with no connection to the present and you relive something from years past with no reference to how you got there. I found myself there this morning when I suddenly remembered the joke envelopes.

I went to my first sleep-away camp when I was about ten. It was a YMCA camp held at Lake Arrowhead in California. It seemed like there must've been a thousand kids there, but it was probably more like two or three hundred. Ten kids were in my cabin, with our adult leadership being provided by a middle-aged man who was normally a police detective. It was an interesting mix of kids, and after the first few hours, we were ready for the week ahead.

The days were filled with canoeing, archery, making lanyards, hiking, and everything you'd expect of a summer camp–including a campfire every night that introduced me to the world of storytelling. Daily after a communal lunch, we'd head back to our cabin where purchases from the canteen were distributed ––you had to complete a request and give it to your counselor by breakfast to get anything that day. Then, mail was passed out. 

My dad was in Vietnam, so the only parent I had in the United States was my mom. I got a letter from her daily and she used envelopes preprinted with colorful cartoons and jokes for that correspondence. I'm not talking about a single joke or cartoon, but dozens of them covering the envelope. Most were visual puns and knock-knock jokes. After reading the envelope, and before I read the letter, I'd pass the envelope around my cabinmates so they could see the jokes as well.

Looking back, since the camp only lasted about a week, getting a letter every day meant she sent them before I left for camp. It was a planned daily treat.

There are lots of significant events that parents give their children over the course of their lifetime. Just getting to go to camp was a big one. But then there are those little things parents do that almost pass by unnoticed until years later. They are the things that round out the bigger things and make them so much sweeter. 

Now that I'm a grandfather, I make sure those little things surround the bigger things. After all, since we don't understand memory anyway, I want to make sure those little spaces are filled with something happy when they pop up later.

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