Katie Almost

One


When was the very first time for you? That first time when you suddenly realized that what you thought you knew about how life wasn’t even close to the reality of it all? That moment in your history that suddenly tells you there’s something more in life than what you’ve known until that instant when some flash of insight just creates a new world of possibilities you’d never before even had the ability to consider? That moment when who you’d been until that moment was the final moment of being who you were and though there was no way of knowing who you might become the simple truth was you’d never, ever look at the world around you or yourself again the same way?

For me it was one of those nothing special days in Mrs. Nichol’s sixth grade class. Before that I’d never given it much of a thought as I recall but even today I remember that day, that first time, like it was only a moment ago. Oh sure I knew that there was something different about girls but the truth was it wasn’t something that interested me all that much until that day when the door to the classroom opened and the principle walked in to introduce us to our new classmate.

I don’t remember exactly the words he used but it was something along the lines of, “This is Mary Jo Gilberts and she will be your new classmate.”

That’s when I literally fell out of my desk and fell in love for the very first time. Not a way to impress anyone for sure but I guess I made some sort of impression because though the steps to carrying her books home for her are now long forgotten I actually did find myself wanting to be with her and around her and way too many other things suddenly took a backseat to what I’d found inside myself while I was picking myself up off the floor and setting back into my chair that day. And I did carry her books and I want to say I held her hand and I want to say I kissed her but I’m not sure about that one though you’d think I should remember such a thing.

Some two years later I remember laying on the gym floor after having made a diving catch for the ball during a whiffle ball game and having broken two fingers only to see her laughing and seemingly at me. It’s rather intriguing now to think that both vivid memories of her have me on the floor. Foreshadowing does come to mind.


That was the start of it, the start of a life of looking at women through eyes I would come to realize that at times I wish I didn’t have. Women left marks on my soul and not only marks but scars that unfortunately for those that would come after never really healed and so through no fault of their own became the recipients of thoughts and actions that were never their doing until they would do what they would do and then leave their memories and the things that came with their leaving. Each parting left another reason to never try again and yet there’s always been a constant yearning to once again fall off that chair because in the end the falling is what makes it all worthwhile.


Two


Have you ever fallen in love with a song? Have you ever heard a song that changes something inside you to the point that you’ll never be quite the same again because of it?

It was a campfire at Young’s Farm in Dewey, Arizona one night and a man that I would one day call friend was singing in the circle. It came his turn and he sang a song that would change my world. The song he sang had been written by Ian Tyson and Tom Russell and titled “Navajo Rug” and in years to come it would become something of a theme song for me. That night when Tony Norris sang that song I saw the words and I saw someone I’d never seen before; I saw Katie who in that moment became the woman I knew was out there somewhere and more importantly was out there for me.

Over the years since that night I have sung that song countless times and always told the story of hearing Tony singing it and being so taken by it that I got him to go back to the Bean Tree with me and got him to sing it once again as I recorded it. A day or so later I’d learned it and added it to my playlist. And every time I’ve sung it since I tell the folks that I keep looking for Katie.

That song became a part of me and has remained so over the years. The requests for me to do the song, the times when the audience will just join in on the chorus, the times when I’ve stood on stage with fellow performers and all are smiling and singing are memories I will always cherish thanks to that night when Tony Norris sang “Navajo Rug” the way he did.

Why a song? What’s so special about that song? The answer is oh so simple and yet so damn complicated one wonders how it could ever be explained clearly. It’s like the times when I have the privilege of doing the song with one of my favorite local artists, Andy Hurlbut, and she and I turn to look at each other and I do believe we get it each in our own way. I’ve never talked to Andy about it but it seems to me that she sees some of the same things in the song that I do from her perspective and when we turn toward each other and sing that chorus we smile.

You see there’s a part of the song that talks about Katie saving a Navajo Rug out of a fire. That rug is the one that she and he had made love on. And in that moment of the song I always find myself thinking how I wish I might have meant enough to someone that in the end they would make sure they kept something of us. And in that moment I always find myself wanting to find her, to find my Katie, and mean that much to her.


Three


She’ll never read this, of that I’m certain, and so she’ll never know the mark she’s left on my soul. It’s OK for any number of reasons but the fact that in that moment I felt myself in the presence of “my Katie” needs to be remembered for the lessons I learned in the moment.


Were I to describe “my Katie” to you I have a fairly good idea of just how I might have described her up until that night. The truth is there are a couple women who I might use as something of a template and build from there. Of course there would be Mary with her auburn hair, blue eyes and Cowboy Coffee. And there was for a very brief time in my life a woman who should have stayed in my life for as long as I could have kept her but the truth is I was so screwed up I walked away from one of possibly the best things I ever had. Her name was Barbara and the honest truth is that she is the only woman whose kiss still stays with me. The two of them and in bits and pieces others that have shared their time in my world might very well ultimately end up making up this imaginary Katie that I have created in my mind.

I’d never thought my vision of “Katie” was shortsighted but I was to learn that I had not considered all the possibilities out there and because of my lack of vision I was to learn a lesson that for me was far more valuable than most that I’ve learned over the years.



Four


For several years now I’ve been blessed to have a regular gig at a resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. Over that time when I’ve been paying attention several remarkable things have happened to me that have made me so very grateful for the opportunity to share my stories and songs with the folks that stay there. The thing is that sometimes things don’t look to me like they’re going to be anything special and so that’s when I have to remember something a very talented friend of mine once told me. Sue Harris is a beautiful woman, a top notch performer and a wise woman to boot and one night while talking about the size of the audience she told me something I’ve never forgotten.

“Wally, you never know who is sitting out there and so you need to bring your best each and every time,” she admonished me and I still hear her words today.

Over the years I’ve had my share of one person sitting and maybe or maybe not listening to me. One night a man from Zaire who thought of cowboy music as Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell. Another evening there was a man seemingly paying no intention to me and writing in his journal. The story around him is one that I will tell for the rest of my days. And then there was this evening when the only one in the room was one woman sitting at the computer with her cell phone pressed to her ear.

“Remember what Sue told you,” is the mantra I kept repeating to myself.

And so I sang to the woman with the cell phone and the computer and the occasional person or couple checking in or waiting for the shuttle.
On most evenings when there is no one sitting there listening to me I tend to simply go into my practice mode and do songs that I don’t usually do in my regular hour long performance. It’s a good time to see how a song feels out in the open and outside the confines of the doublewide. I never get too crazy but what I normally find myself doing is the songs that I like that I never do because they don’t work in the program.

And so I sang to a woman with a cell phone and a computer.

The good thing for me in singing to her is that she’s an attractive woman without a doubt (yes I admit to being a jerk) and combined with her voice I have to admit I was hoping that maybe, just maybe, she’d pay me the least little bit of attention. So I kept an eye on her but she never seemed to waiver from that computer screen until I sang “Happy Trails” and went to put my guitar away.

“You’re all done?” she turned to me and asked.


Five


I believe there are moments in one’s life when there really are two paths to choose and most of the time we don’t see the choices until sometime after we’ve made our choice. Still, once in a while if we just pause for that moment maybe we will see it and we can know that we really do have a choice. And so it was in this moment.

“You made me feel like I was sitting at a campfire somewhere out in the desert,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said, “that’s really a part of what I try to do.”

“I really enjoyed it. You are really good.” She said to me from her chair in front of the computer.

Somewhere along the way I came to the place where I decided to get past some of my insecurities and simply do whatever it is that feels right in the moment and I can honestly say that thus far it’s been a good choice to go with those feelings.

“I have to tell you, you have a lovely voice,” I said to her.

I’ll never forget the look, “Really?” she asked.

“Yeah, really,” I said to her in total honesty.

For me there was a connection that was can I say both physical and spiritual in that moment as she looked me square in the eyes? I’ll likely do my best to hold on to those deep brown eyes forever.

And so we talked and then she was sitting on one of the couches in front of me and I sang and we talked and I told a story and sang and we talked. All the while I knew she was someone special and all the while her eyes never seemed to leave mine and though I admit to shifting my gaze a time or two there was no place I wanted to be looking other than in her eyes.

I should have done several things that evening and done them with no expectations but instead I did nothing. I should have offered to take her out to dinner when she said she was hungry. I should have asked her name or given her my card. I should have said something more and seen what happened with no expectations but I didn’t.

As we said good night she hugged me and rested her head on my shoulder. All I did was tell her I hoped I’d see her again though even then I knew I never will.
For an evening, for a moment in time, I believe that I looked into the eyes of “my Katie” for reasons other than that Navajo Rug.


I think it’s said that when the student is ready the teacher will appear. There’s more than one thing I likely should have done that evening but the truth is there were years of other thinking in one way or another that held me back. She was from Virginia so how would that work? She was maybe younger than she “should” be for a guy my age. The thing is I was comfortable with her from the moment we began to talk and as I sang to her I wanted her to hear me and I wanted to touch her inside where it really matters. I actually sat there seeing me walking along with her on my arm. An old man’s folly?, perhaps but I don’t look at it that way.

And then there’s the really pathetic little secret about all of it that in the end shows me that in some ways I’ve grown far more than I’d ever imagined. Yeah, I’d always had “my Katie” figured out more or less in most ways and all the things all of us take for granted and never think twice about. And yet here was “my Katie” hugging me and resting her head on my shoulder and she was black.


I learned more than a little about myself that evening and some of it was very good.

A Pebble for a Pond

It’s been a couple weeks of quiet reflection on my part. No stunning revelations or the like but a moment or two here and there along the way where I realize that perhaps I’m not the person I sometimes want to think I am. Then there are moments like tonight when I’m forcibly jerked from any concepts I have about myself into a never before realized place in what may ultimately be the scheme of things. I’m not going to sit here and try to tell anyone that I’ve suddenly become aware of what it’s all about because I haven’t but I have finally grasped an oft times shared concept I’ve had about myself for many years; I am the pebble that from time to time is dropped into the still pond that causes the ripples to wash up on the shore and move a grain or grains of sand.

I often ask the folks in the audience if they’ve ever had a song get stuck in their heads, one of those tunes that just won’t go away, and of course most people say yes they’ve had the experience. Then I tell them the story about me and a song that just won’t get out of my head:

The song snuck up on me out of nowhere and it simply wouldn’t leave me alone. It was a song I’d done years ago and for some reason had just let slip out of my repertoire for no good reason. Well, now the song was back and back in a big time way refusing to go away to the point that I was beginning to wonder if I was going just a bit mad. I asked the folks on Facebook about it and someone wrote back telling me it’s called an earworm. Well, I had an earworm of enormous proportions and finally decided I would have to relearn the song and one day perform it.

A few days later I was performing my normal gig at the Scottsdale Villa Mirage but this particular evening there was only one guy there and he was sitting at a table writing in a journal and not seeming to be paying any attention to me. Nights like that are the ones I use to pull out my notebook and practice some tunes that I’ve been working on but don’t feel completely confident about performing in front of an audience and so out came the 3 ring binder. I played a couple songs from the book, the fella kept writing and the earworm reappeared. Only one guy not paying any attention to me so why not haul out the old song and give it a go I decided and so I sang it seemingly to no one but myself.

When I finished the song the man at the table put down his pen, looked up at me and said, “That’s exactly what I needed to hear.”

He wanted to know about the song, what the name of it was, who sang it and where could he find it and so I told him it was a tune I’d learned off of a Michael Martin Murphy CD and the name of the song was “What Am I Doing Here?” He wrote down what I told him and he shared some of what he’d been going through over the past year or so, none of which I could really connect with the song though that didn’t matter since it meant something to him.

So I finish my story about the night and the song by telling folks that if they ever get an earworm to learn the song and then sometime just walk up to someone you think might need to hear a song and sing it to them because you never know but what it just might be exactly what that person needs to hear at that moment.
I’ve been sharing that story for about a year now and have often wondered about the guy I sang to that night. We’d not exchanged addresses or anything and we’d both gone on our separate ways until tonight.


I’m back at my usual Thursday night gig getting ready from the looks of things to do a bit of practicing once again. This time no earworms and for the moment no audience though sometimes folks come in fashionably late. Just finished tuning up the guitar when a guy walks up to me with a big smile on his face and says, “You don’t remember me do you?”

Most every week there are new faces though I’ve been doing the Villa Mirage long enough now that I recognize return guests now and again but his face wasn’t one that seemed to generate any memories.

“No, I’m sorry but I can’t say as I recall,” I tell him honestly.

“You sang me a song a year ago,” he says to me.

Something sort of comes back to me and I ask, “Were you the guy sitting over at that table that night and asked me about that song?”

“That was me,” he said “and you have no idea what that night meant to me.”


I’ve spent the better part of my life questioning so many things about myself, who I am, why I do some of the things I do and don’t do others that I think maybe I should be doing, and I am a man who yearns for the knowledge that something, anything, that I do has at least a shred of significance in the world around me let alone the world as a whole. I continue to question myself, my motivations and my reason for being and the truth is that I’m not the sort of person who does well not knowing whether or not I really have a purpose here on earth. So the smiles, the laughs, the tears and the warm “thank you”s I get from performing and telling the stories is a vital part of keeping me together and keeping me going sometimes quite literally from day to day. I doubt I would have ever done well with my name in lights and all the rest of that but I do know that I do well sitting with a few folks three times or so a week and walking away with the echoes of folks saying they enjoyed the evening and the memories it all brought back. I do not perceive of myself as someone who changes lives only someone who sometimes takes folks away from the here and now for an hour or so and when it’s over they go their way and I go mine.


He stood there gripping my hand firmly, looking me square in the eyes and what he said next almost brought me to tears, “That song you sang that night saved my marriage and me.”


I am little more than a pebble and I know that to be the truth of it all for me. If I ever get another earworm I will learn the song and I will sing it to one soul or a thousand. It will matter not whether I ever know the grains of sand that may be moved upon some unseen shore but I will believe that there is a reason to share the song.

Tonight I was affirmed for doing what I do in a way that I would never have imagined. Tonight I got to see the results of allowing myself to be once again dropped into that still pond and not to be the wave but merely create the wave that ultimately moved a grain of sand upon the shore. Tonight was a good night.

An April Fool Story

“Don’t you dare come home with some slant eyed girl!”

Those were the last words I remember my mother saying to me as I stepped aboard the train that would carry me away from where I no longer wanted to be but not to where, had I been a stronger man, I truly knew I should have been going. I was a coward who would neither follow my heart nor disobey my mother.

April 1, 1969, nineteen years old, pissed off at the world like you couldn’t imagine, scared to my very core that what I was doing was completely wrong for me and believing that my options were limited to only one path, the path that this train would carry me on to Chicago, Illinois and the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. I was running scared because the only other option I could see in my college failed future was some rice patty in Vietnam and ducking bullets.

I didn’t believe in the war, perhaps more precisely how I perceived the US to be fighting or not fighting it, and my enlistment in the United States Navy was in no way my validation of anything other than the fact that I didn’t know what the hell I was doing in my life, for my life or to my life. No information, no knowledge, no insight is a dangerous thing for anyone but for a naïve nineteen year old coming from a small and nearly isolated town in south central Wisconsin the consequences can be potentially lethal if not bodily then certainly mentally.

The honest truth in that moment of stepping on that train was that the dreams of a boy were ripped away forever never to be replaced by anything much more than wishes and hopes.


I don’t remember much from that day, nothing about the train ride, who I sat beside, where the train stopped or how long the trip took. The next thing after my mothers’ words that I remember is being in a huge building with hundreds and hundreds of other “boys” and hearing someone way up in front of me at a microphone asking if anyone sang. Even in my ignorance I’d remembered hearing somewhere that you never volunteer for anything in the military but I found myself raising my hand.


A small room with a guy in a sailor’s suit not much older than me sitting at a piano and another guy in civilian dress were what I found next. Just like the days in high school with Mr. Segerstrom the guy at the piano played the scales and I sang the notes. In that moment in that little room singing scales beside a piano life had suddenly gone from overwhelming to rather comfortable. Next thing I knew I was declared a second tenor in a somewhat elite group consisting of sixteen recruits, The Blue Jackets Choir, and would spend the remainder or my time at Great Lakes singing for this, that and every Friday another graduation.

I would come to realize that I wanted to stay there forever but in a prior moment of fear and desperation I had made what would turn out to be one of many fatal errors in thinking that I would commit over the years to come. I had tested into the Navy’s Nuclear Electronics program which was a six year enlistment and I was to be trained in some of the most advanced technology of the day with the ultimate goal of serving my six year enlistment almost certainly aboard a nuclear powered submarine. The Navy wasn’t going to let me sing my six year enlistment away.

April 1, 1969 was a day of running away from what was an untenable reality to a totally unknown and unperceived future. Just a moment in time of doing what was the only thing I thought I could do and yet having no idea what the hell I was doing or what the consequences would ultimately be for me and others that would come to spend their days and years around me.



She wasn’t there that day, April 1, 1969, to watch me step on to that train and to leave her behind to deal with her own today and tomorrow. If she’d been there that day I’d not have the memory of my mother’s final words. I would have had her embrace, the smell of her hair, the feel of her skin, the vision of her beautiful blue eyes and auburn hair and the taste of her kiss. I’d like to think all these years later that had she been there that day standing beside me I might have actually screwed up the courage to say to all the world that what I was about to do was wrong, wrong for me in so many ways, and walked away from that train station with her hand in mine and the knowledge that what I was doing was the right thing for me and that in that moment I had passed from being merely a silly boy into the beginnings of manhood. But she wasn’t there and rational decisions were something I’d come to find I would seldom make.

No, she wasn’t there that day, April 1, 1969, and perhaps because of that there was nothing more that a silly boy could do but to use the ticket clutched in his hand and ride away from her with only his mother’s words echoing in his ears.



The thing is I’d actually known what I was doing when I did it otherwise I sure as hell wouldn’t have picked April Fools Day to leave my life behind and give it over to others that would try to convince me they had a right to it. Anyways that’s part of how I rationalize it away these days. It’s sort of like that cartoon I once saw of a mouse standing defiantly with the infamous middle digit raised in front of a hawk with talons spread wide and headed straight toward it; you may win but screw you anyways. And so not unlike that hapless mouse I decided that although that huge all powerful hawk did ultimately have the power to kill me “it” would never completely win and even more so take from me what I’d come to see as being who I wasn’t.

There are those who talk with pride of their years spent in the military serving “their” country and for each who makes that claim I tip my hat to them. For me the truth was that “my” country would have been more deserving of my admiration had it focused on things much closer to home, things that would have made a significant difference in the United States of America and not someplace half a world away. To this day I believe that for whatever reasons those that “lead” this nation have found it far more convenient to look outward rather than to look to inward. And so ultimately I fought against the system in my own pathetic way to the point that four years twenty seven days and twelve hours after April 1, 1969 I walked out of Brooklyn Naval Shipyard a “free” man.

To this day I find that I cannot forgive myself for the decision I made. Granted it was a decision made out of total ignorance and even at that I find it not that hard to look at others and wonder why in hell they didn’t say something, anything, and give me at least a little more to work with.

Others will tell of the positives that came from the years the government and the military stole from them but I will never be one to join that chorus. My song will forever be of loss, loss of so much that even today I find myself cringing at the thought of what I did in a moment of what I believed was the right thing to do, what was the expected thing to do, what was the patriotic thing to do. I will always tell anyone who might ever ask that I served for nothing and lost everything in return.



She’d served me Cowboy Coffee the night we met. In a moment she’d become my reason for being and the first time I’d ever truly understood what love really is. From that farm house outside a little Wisconsin town where we sat side by side drinking coffee one night to an evening in Charleston, South Carolina where we came together in an ultimate expression of our love for one another she had been my reason for being. She was all I cared about and all I wanted and when the talk of marriage had come up I said that I wouldn’t marry her until I could be with her all the time. It wasn’t what she wanted to hear and that day as I drove away from her parents’ farm house the words rang inside my head and cut clear through my heart.

I was home on leave and I knew something was wrong between us but it didn’t matter, I was back in Wisconsin, back on that couch we’d shared that first night, back beside her and things would be OK. Things had to be right; there were no options in my world.

“I have something to tell you,” she started, “I’m getting married.”

Yes I know, I’ve never been the sharpest steak knife in the drawer nor the brightest bulb around so my reply seemed completely obvious, “I know; we’re getting married.”

I don’t recall that there was a pause though I do want to remember that she looked away; “No, you don’t understand, I’m getting married to someone else. Someone I met at school.”


“They” had won in that instant though no one but I would have seen it in that way.


The only part of my world that I believed I still had any hope of holding on to had been ripped away from me because I was living in Athens, Greece thanks to the US of A and the one thing, the one someone that still meant something to me, was living in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. There was no way I could have fought for what I loved, what I wanted and what I needed. And so my world crumbled around me.


Today is yet another April 1, the day that’s been called April Fool’s Day, a day of fun and pranks and laughter more often than not at others’ expense, and a day that I will forever curse.

I followed my mothers’ bigoted demand and I brought no one home with me from where I’d been. No Asian beauty to go against my mother, no farm girl from just outside a little town in Wisconsin and no me.


Forty two years ago today I took a train ride away from me. On that day I was the April fool but it would take the passing of much time before I would realize just how much.