A Fly Rod and Life

For the first time ever the fly line did exactly what I thought it should do as it looped backwards in a long folded arc and when I swept the fly rod forward with the rolling of my wrist I knew without seeing that the line with the small popper attached would follow the trajectory I had intended for it.  And so it did.  I watched as the line sailed forward following the direction of the tip of the pole and began to fall gently on the surface of the water.  The brown line stretched out away from the boat and directly toward the right side of the lily pad where I’d just seen a swirl on the surface of the water.  The red bodied and yellow feather tailed wooden popper came to rest exactly where I’d aimed.  And there it floated as I admired my skill at casting with a fly rod.

“Not half bad,” I thought to myself, “for being self-taught.”

How many times had I watched folks like Curt Gowdy or Jim McKay standing in the middle of some Colorado or Montana or Wyoming river fly fishing for trout and wondered what it would be like to pull out yards and yards of line, create that long loop and manage to drop the lure right where you wanted?

Well, now I knew.

The popper lay there motionless exactly where I’d seen what I was certain had to be a bluegill that had just sucked some hapless insect off the surface of the water.  It sat there for seconds and more seconds as I waited for what I knew had to be the perfect end to a perfect cast.  And I waited some more.

The problem with being self-taught in any expertise is that far too often you don’t really get all the little things that go along with making the big thing look so easy.  You know those little nuances that have been learned over years of trial and error and figuring out what works and what doesn’t.  When I watched this guy or that on television throwing their line out at their target spot it always seemed to me that no sooner had the lure landed than they were setting the hook in whatever it was they were fishing for.  It never occurred to me in my earliest of teens that what I was seeing came from hours of filming and then editing to get the exciting stuff out there on the air while the rest of it lay on the cutting room floor.  There would be cast upon cast until finally there was the one that landed just so and drifted past that rock where that rainbow was just waiting for its’ next meal.  It was all those other attempts at winning the prize that I never saw and thus came to believe that they were simply that much better than me. 

I’d never be that good.  I’d never be able to read a river like they could.  I’d never make that perfect cast to that perfect spot.  So why was I even trying?

But just now I’d made what I’d swear was the perfect cast to the perfect spot.  I waited as patiently as I could with nerves on edge and muscles taunt for that swirl I knew had to be coming.  And I waited.

There were just about enough things that I was doing wrong in that moment as any kid who thought he knew it all and then some could have been doing wrong.  For starters I probably shouldn’t have been out there in that slough behind Rothe’s Ice Plant in my father’s boat.  I shouldn’t have been standing up in that 14 foot aluminum boat with a 5 horse Johnson motor and trying to become an expert fly caster.  And I sure shouldn’t have had my father’s split bamboo fly rod with the South Bend automatic reel out there in the middle of the water backed up by the dam just northwest of 80 on the Lemonweir River.  I had raided my dad’s tackle box, sneaked out the door with his fly rod and reel which I’d never seen him use, pushed the boat off the bank of the river and paddled out to an opening in the lily pads maybe fifty yards from shore.  It was there that I was doing my best to become an expert fly fisherman and having zero luck.

On that warm summer day I was not alone on this particular piece of the Lemonweir River.  Some 100 yards off to the west was another boat with another fisherman standing up in their boat and casting not a fly rod but a good old casting rod and reel. Even from this distance it was obvious it was the sort of gear you used to go after the larger fish in this river, the walleye and the northern pike in particular though a bass might be found on occasion.  From the glint of the lure being used my guess was it was something metal and that almost had to mean they were using a Daredevil of one sort or another.  And that meant only one thing; they were looking for Northerns. Oh yes I had spent hours in the back of Robinson’s Hardware Store studying the array of lures all neatly packaged and organized and I was confident I knew my lures even from a distance.

From this distance I couldn’t be certain who the other fisherman was but I had a pretty good idea.  Even though the town was small by most anyone’s standards the fact was I didn’t, nor would I ever, know all the folks living there but sooner or later I’d hear something about just about everyone.  In this case I was pretty sure that the fisherman (these days the term fisherperson seems to be the acceptable description) almost certainly had to be Gertie.  One thing I knew about her was that she was a fisherman but I’d also heard other things that didn’t really make a lot of sense to me but because they were said in hushed tones I was fairly certain there was something “bad” about her.

And that’s how it was in that little town, in that impoverished county, in that state and most of the nation in those days.  If a person was somehow different according to those around them then there was going to be problems and nothing anyone did was going to change that.  The looks and the whispers would go on and on and in the end I’m not so sure that even the strong could truly survive.

I went back to my fly rod and the popper I’d thought I’d so expertly laid out there for that pound plus bluegill that I knew was circling somewhere just beneath those lily pads and right under my lure.  I twitched the line ever so lightly causing the popper to dance on the water just a bit as if injured and ready to be Mr. Bluegills’ next meal.  Nothing happened.  So it was called a popper for reason so let’s see what happens if I give it a short, sharp tug.

“Gullup,” is what I heard which  pleased me but ultimately seemed completely unimpressive to that state record bluegill I knew had to be lurking out there and was only there to taunt me.  And taunt me it did as again and again I cast to this spot and that spot out there around those lily pads and every time the same result, nothing.

I was certain I’d heard my dad say something one time about Gertie being about the best fisherman there was out there on the Lemonweir and I’d finally worn myself out enough that I was thinking I needed a new plan but I had nothing.  Maybe I could row over to where she was and if she was as good as my dad said she was I might get some pointers and before you knew that state record bluegill would be mine.  That’s what was going through my head as I sat there more than a little frustrated and watching back over my shoulder to see Gertie casting and reeling her lure in over and over again.  She kept at it with an obvious purpose as if she knew that sooner rather than later that river would give up one of its’ treasures from beneath the waters’ surface.

I didn’t know her and being young and not knowing someone older than yourself and wanting to just go up and talk to them was not done I had been told time and time again and in fact it could be a very dangerous thing to do.  You didn’t talk to strangers no matter what and that was simply that.  And so I didn’t give in to what my gut was telling me which was to hoist up my anchor and just row over to her, introduce myself and ask her how I was supposed use this fly rod and the popper out there at the end of my line.  Somehow I knew that she would know and I would be the better for having asked and learned from the expert.  Still, she was the unknown and for me that meant danger.

And so I sat there anchored in one place while behind me Gertie would take an push an oar and turn her boat one way and then the other oar to shift slightly the other all the while working with the little bit of current that was in this bit of back water.  She was slowly working her way toward the main channel but she was in no hurry.  There was this patch of lily pads to cast to and around and there was that old log that had made it to this spot in the river that needed more than a little examining with her Daredevil.  And she would cast, wait a moment and then begin to reel the lure back to her with a quick twitch of the pole this way and a jerk of the pole the other.

“I should go,” I thought to myself and grabbed the rope to pull up the anchor.  I wasn’t going to catch anything today and I wasn’t going to go ask Gertie if she could help me.  She was getting closer now anyways and I was probably in her way so I really should go.

She’d drifted within thirty yards of where I’d been trying my level best to coax the new state record bluegill from when I turned to look at her.  She was wearing bib overalls with short hair and wearing a ball cap.  Women didn’t wear ball caps as far as I knew.  And so now I knew for certain that she was different, that the whispers had something to them and I probably didn’t want to get too close to her.

I sit back and grabbed the oars to head for the safety of shore when suddenly I hear her grunt and her pole suddenly dropped toward the waters’ surface.  She pulled back and the water erupted twenty feet out from her boat.  The battle is brief and somehow amazingly efficient as I watch her reach for her net and with one hand on the pole and the other on the net she lifts the Northern Pike out of the water and into her boat.  Today I would say it was all very businesslike and nothing like the sorts of fish versus fisherman I’d seen on television.  But in that moment I didn’t have words for what I’d just witnessed.

And almost as quickly she lifted her catch up out of the net with the lure still in its mouth and her fingers in its gills.  She held it up to me, this young boy who was afraid to even come close to her, and standing there in her overalls and baseball cap she smiled at me.

There are so many moments in life you wish you could relive and maybe, just maybe, you might do something different.  That was one of those moments when I wish the prejudice and fear that had been placed in me by a world of simple people with unfounded fears and prejudices of their own might have been replaced by a courage I couldn't find within me.  But the truth is I know I wouldn’t have done anything different.  I would have done exactly what I’d been programmed to do when faced with something or someone different and that was to row back to the shore as quickly as I could and find the safety of solid ground and believe that I was safe.

My path never crossed Gertie’s again.  I never saw her on the river and I never knew what she did in her life.  I do seem to recall that she got a photograph of her and that Northern Pike in the local newspaper as I would that summer with a sucker I caught just below the dam that was almost as big as me.  But mine was a sucker and Gertie’s was a Northern Pike in that four foot range and everyone knew who the fisherman was.

The fly rod and the reel now reside with me and the truth is I’ve never caught a thing with it though I cherish them dearly.  I love the memory of pulling out the line and first with a large swing of the wrist and arm and then smaller, more gentle ones, I would work the line and the lure as close to my desired target as I possibly could.  The flow and the rhythm and watching the line curl up and out only to softly, almost silently fall out and away from me on the waters’ surface.

Still more than that I love what that fly rod taught me all those years ago though it took me a very long time to understand what I’d been taught.  I learned that those moments to learn, to experience something new in my life, to drop my defenses and take a chance, to let go of my fear if only for a moment come seldom at best.  To have simply smiled back at the woman wearing the overalls and baseball cap, holding her catch up to me and smiling at me might have broken down walls that would instead remain upright and strong for years to come. 

I never knew the real story of Gertie but I came to understand that the things that had been whispered, whether I understood what they meant or not, didn’t matter when it came to the person.  I could very likely have learned a lot about fishing from Gertie had I only rowed over to her when my gut told me it was the right thing to do.  Yeah, I might have learned a lot about fishing and maybe a bit about life as well.

Dad said she was the best fisherman on the river but that smile as she held that fish up for me to see said she was a whole lot more than that.

The Man I Thought Had Died Speaks

I'll be honest with you, I really wish I was one of those sophisticated, educated and experienced folks who writes for a living and knows just how to put all the words together. I'm not and I'm never going to be but I do have stories to tell, moments that touch the very depths of me. The truth is that in those moments when I am left with tears in my eyes and a humbleness within my soul that begs the question whether or not I am worthy of such moments I sometimes hear a voice that softly speaks to me and says it's alright to share. To be honest with you I worry about that voice and so more often than not I keep those moments to myself.

But there are times when I don't.


Why do you end up where you end up? What is it that finds you one day staring at yourself and wondering how in hell you ever wound up where you are?

The good Lord knows I could point fingers in just about enough directions that it would take a NASA engineer to figure out where I was really pointing. And in the end that might not be even close to the real reason for most all of it. Life happens and that's about as much as can be said most often. You do what you do and sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't.

And yes I do know what I'm talking about because the simple, unvarnished truth of it all is that it didn't work out for me. I missed the mark so many times that I'm pretty sure that even the powers that be stopped counting. There were road signs along the way that literally glowed at me and yet I ultimately walked, sometimes damn near sprinted, right on by them. Why? Now that's the question isn't it?

Life happens and the only thing I know for certain is that it can't be viewed forward but there sure seems to be a hell of a good view through the rear view mirror.


In days now long gone he'd been a farmer. Nowadays I know that's what he'd still call himself but the truth is he isn't. These days he's a man who's been retired for a few years and when the winter comes to the Midwest he and his bride of 52 years travel south to Arizona and a timeshare in Scottsdale. And that's where I met him several years ago. And that's where I came to think of him as a friend. I'd missed him and his wife a year ago and I'd heard that he'd had some health issues. The truth is I'd heard he'd had a stroke and that was as much as I knew. In fact the way the news came to me I thought that he hadn't made it. There was no way that I knew of to figure out the truth of it all and so as this season of the "Snowbird" came into being again with no sightings of them I thought the worst and accepted it.

She was taking some things out of her car as I was passing by and it struck me that she looked familiar. The number of people I see week in and week out has left me realizing that there's a whole lot of folks out there that look like other folks and then she called out, "Wally".

"Oh my God it's her!" I thought to myself.

I find myself thinking that I'm so proud of her to come back here on her own and all of that when she invites me in and says that he'd love to see me if I have the time. Do I have the time?!!? Yeah, I have the time.

And that's how I found myself talking to a man I thought had died.

The funny thing about it is that as he told me that at one point he just said it was time to let go and move on but he didn't. I'm not sure why but that's when we began to talk about some of the things that, when you get right down to the bottom line of everything, really matter. The things that we all do tend to gloss over and yet are so much of the honesty of life. We talked about what he has come to realize matters, really matters, and how the rest is just (my words here) fluff and distraction.

To hear this man who'd likely always depended on little more than himself as he turned to his wife with tears in his eyes and talk of how he'd come to realize how much she meant to him and how much he loves her for who she is and what she does each and every day for him was humbling.

And when I told him that I knew he'd do the same for her if things were different I will never ever forget how he looked right at her and said, "Yes I would." And there could be no doubt about the sincerity of his words.

I listened and I did my best to take in what I was hearing from both of them and I know that I've already lost much of what was shared. Still, what lingers for me is what came toward the end of our conversation; the feeling from both of them that so much of what we always tell ourselves is important simply isn't.

I read something from Willie Nelson about how one is happy in their life. I'll paraphrase very poorly but admit that this is how I took what he said, "If you want to be happy in your life then be happy in this moment for this moment is all you have. If you are happy in this moment then you are happy in your life."

We think we need to be this or that and we need to have this and that and if only we can have this other thing over there then... And yet what I learned today from a man who thought he was dead and the woman standing beside him is that what you really need is each other.


Over the days and weeks to come I'll be blessed to have moments when I will sit and talk with the two of them again. I will do my best to listen.

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.

Caualties of Caring

It's one of those things I'm surprised my mind latched onto, but it had. I found myself wandering and wondering within about events from long ago and lessons that seemed so obvious, to me at least...

I watched the couple as they walked through the parking lot away from the movie theater and toward their truck. There could be little doubt that the hormones were flowing within both of them. They walked so close together and in such perfect harmony that they shouted to the world the definition of being joined at the hip. There was little doubt that they were very much in lust, but something told me it was more than that, and my suspicion was confirmed when they got to the old Ford pickup. He opened the door for her, and she climbed into the lifted truck and onto the bench seat with the heavy Indian blanket seat cover. He walked around and climbed in behind the wheel. She slid next to him, kissed him and then slid back to the passenger side to put her seat belt on. In a moment the engine came to life, headlights lit their way, and they were gone as I smiled, recalling times now distant…

"I'm wasting my time with you," he said as I tried to do something I'd never done before--drive a car. In the end the high school driving instructor's comments to me were mainly that I was about as bad a driver as he'd ever encountered and that there was nothing he could do with me. There would be no more driving lessons for me as far as he was concerned, and he doubted I'd ever get a driver's license.

The conversation at home that followed is long forgotten but finding me behind the wheel of dad's car out on the gravel of Hog Island Road with dad as the passenger isn't. As I held the steering wheel in a death grip, he calmly talked about how I had to pay attention to everything around me, but most of all I had to be aware of where I was in relationship to the objects around me. The philosophy of a man who earned his living driving the biggest vehicle out there on the highways was to know where I was at all times. This was something I would eventually forget, but not before I became the first of my high school class to get a driver's license.

One of my dreams in those days was to become a NASCAR driver, so the words of my high school driving instructor had struck a rather sensitive nerve. I suspect it was a very real motivation for "The Flight of the Family Ford" over the next two-plus years. Thus it began; one more teenager driving his parents' car on the streets, roads and highways of Wisconsin seeking his freedom and identity in a world that secretly desired neither for him.

How or why a shaped and painted piece of metal becomes an extension and a declaration of just who a person is mystifies me, yet I believe it to be a truth. I think of my truck sitting out in the drive today and realize how much it symbolizes who I am: a dependable if somewhat worn-down soul. Back in the 50s and the 60s it was no less the truth. What you drove was a direct reflection of who you were. So being much of anything special while driving a '64 Ford Custom was more than a little difficult, and Lord knows as a sixteen-year-old boy, special is the only thing I wanted to be.

If there was no other alternative than the one way you could be special while driving your dad's car, it was to have your girl sitting beside you. Of course, having a girl in the first place was an important part of the equation, and in my case I was blessed at different times over the next years with three lovely women who sat beside me, and so perhaps in the best way of all, I was the "coolest of the cool" even though I wasn't driving a Mustang or an SS 396. I drove along all the while feeling the presence of another at my side, and in those moments life was good.

High school ended one day, and not all that much later I found myself in the Navy and very far away from that little town. It was on a destroyer in Charleston, South Carolina that I would meet someone who would become one of the most important people to me. To this day I don't recall how we met, but on a destroyer that had been commissioned at the end of WWII, a sailor knew everyone from the captain on down.

His name was Phil, and on this particular day we had gone over to a shipmate's house so Phil could take ownership of Robby's Fiat Spider. Two bucket seats, convertible and manual transmission were all part of the package, and for a couple of twenty-year-old sailors, life didn't get much better than that. Robby gave Phil the keys, and we were off to experience the freedom of sailors with wheels for the first time.
What I can tell you about that day can be summed up rather quickly; the top was down, the light was green, the radio wasn't turned up. Phil took the right lane because the traffic was stopped at the light and the lane was open. We cruised into the intersection only to see the grill of a Navy ambulance as it slammed into Phil's side of the car.

The mind really is a wondrous thing, and what others say about significant moments in their lives is for me true. Life really does slow down in that moment. I remember feeling the dashboard against my thighs as I was being propelled upward and out of my seat. Then my chest hit the top of the windshield. What I remember most in that brief instant are my glasses flying off my face and reaching out to catch them. Without a doubt it is the best catch I've ever made in my life. Having played first base all those years, I did make one or two dang good catches, but none to equal that one. As I fell back down into the seat, my only thought was Phil.

"You OK?" I asked as I looked over at him.

He looked back at me and said, "No." His eyes rolled back in his head, and his face streamed blood.

In a way it's funny thinking about it today. The guys in the ambulance that hit us jumped out, grabbed us, threw us in the back of the ambulance, hauled us to the hospital and patched us up. Phil ended up being all right though he did get more stitches than I, and I'd made the best catch of my life with those glasses somewhere just beyond the windshield of that little two-bucket-seats and no-seat-belts Fiat Spider.

She slid across the bench seat of my Ford Torino and up against me. It was that feeling I'd felt years before when someone special had pressed her body up against mine and I liked it a whole lot more than just a little. A very big part of me didn't want her to move, not one inch, and life would be good. And for a moment I held the feeling within me of that special someone sitting beside me, and so close that everyone knew that she was my girl. This time was different. This time was going to be forever and this time it didn't matter whether everyone knew or not because I thought I knew.

"We're not going anywhere until you slide back over and put on your seat belt," I said to her.

It was obvious in her eyes that she was taking my demands as a rejection of her affections. I doubt that I said the right thing to her, and to this day I suspect it was the start of a life together that was filled with doubt and questions. In the end it was never the rejection of a beautiful and intelligent young blonde's affections that caused me to, in a manner of speaking, push her away. The truth was twofold. I had heard that the center position in a car was the most dangerous place to be and that I was certain in that moment that I wanted her safe and in my life for the rest of my life.

As I eased in behind the wheel of my old truck, I thought about the couple driving away and how life never quite lives up to expectations. I thought about how keeping someone safe is never a one-way street, and simply because everyone is wearing a seat belt, there's no guarantee that there aren't going to be casualties.

Perceptions

On October 30, 1938 the Columbia Broadcasting System created a bit more than just a simple little stir in a nation gathered around their radios and listening to a program on Mercury Theater on the Air. It was the Halloween episode directed and narrated by Orson Welles and adapted from the H. G. Wells' novel War of the Worlds. The first two thirds of the radio broadcast was done as a news report of actual events, and for those tuning in midway through, the perception was that the earth was being invaded by aliens from outer space.

There are things in this world that, I suspect, will always be a constant for most everyone. One of those "universal truths" almost certainly would have to be that summers in the upper Midwest are always better than the winters for those who've reached the age of some sort of claim to responsibility. If you were a kid growing up in a little Wisconsin town, it likely didn't seem so much the truth only because there was fun to be found no matter the season. Winter had snow and sidewalks slick with hard packed snow, or better yet, ice which made for great sliding and "skating" without the luxury of ice skates. That old sled with the metal tracks worked on any incline from the lawn of the old boarding house next to the funeral home to the glorious hill beside the Methodist church. You didn't need much to find joy in yet another day even if it was only just above zero outside.

Of course, even for kids, summer has advantages that winter will never be able to duplicate. For one, the days are a whole lot longer and warmer, so the need to put on layer upon layer of clothes is done away with. I'm pretty sure that my standard summertime "uniform" as a kid was shorts, shirt and bare feet. I don't think there was any kind of problem with the folks being able to afford shoes, it just never seemed to be a part of what was required while outside and on the run. It didn't take long for the soles of my feet to get toughened up to the point that wearing holes in the bottoms of a pair of perfectly good shoes didn't seem to make much sense anyway. Of course, the downside to that were those miserable sandburs that always found their way into that really soft spot right between my big and second toe or right dead center in my heel. Then there was always that black asphalt on those days in July and August when I'd swear the whole street was melting, and not only were my feet going to end up being burnt off but also I was going to sink in up to my knees, and then how was I going to get out? The memory of that black and, normally hard-as-rock surface slowly oozing up between my toes, can still be felt and the footprint left behind still seen. Because of those days of leaving toe and heel prints in the asphalt when I one day heard about the La Brea tar pits way out in California, I had no problem believing that once you got yourself into that stuff, you weren't getting out.

Today I'd be hard pressed to tell you with certainty exactly when it happened since the days and years never have been the things that tend to stick solidly within my memories. Vague generalities usually seem more the norm for my memories, and I often marvel at how some folks seemed to remember days and dates with the precision of an atomic clock, though the truth is, I've sometimes wondered if they're merely better at believing they remember than I. In the end there are moments I remember mainly for the moment and the rest, the time, the day and all the rest are at the very best fuzzy smears around the edges of the memory. And so I did a bit of research, tried remembering the moment even a bit more clearly, and found a place on the web that pretty much validated what I've remembered all these years.

As a kid in "the Fifties" I didn't know that much about the world beyond the city limits of my town. In fact I'm not so sure I knew all that much about life two blocks over from my house and even less about what went on across US 12 & 16 other than that dad spent his fair share of time at any one of the three bars over there. At eight years of age, about all I knew with any certainty was that pretty much for sure we were all going to get attacked by the Soviet Union. We just called them "the evil Russians" most of the time, and the only way we could save ourselves from those terrible A-bombs of theirs was to duck under our desks when we saw the flash. I never really wondered what might happen to me if I wasn't at school and didn't have a desk close at hand to duck under. I guess I just figured that they'd only try to blow us up while I was in school. The rest of the time I figured I was pretty much safe.

So on that evening in July, you couldn't begin to imagine the thoughts that raced through my mind as we ran screaming toward the only safety close at hand, Sheila's house, four solid walls and a door that would slam shut once we got behind it. Thinking back on that moment I want to believe there was some undetermined mixture of fact and fantasy in both our minds as we ran hollering and screaming that the world was about to end. Then again we were kids who really had no idea of where reality ended and something else began; for us there still were no clear and defined boundaries on most things in our lives.
We'd been playing, Sheila and I, across the street from her house on the southwest corner of Division and Liberty streets. I'm not sure why, but it seems that most, if not all, of my earliest friends and playmates were girls. Sheila had a couple brothers, one older and one younger, but she and I were the same age. My mom and her mom were friends, so we spent time together doing whatever it was two kids might do on a summer's evening. In those days there wasn't a house there, and so that lot and the grass lawn around the old boarding house were fair game for running, falling, rolling and pretending big time. And I'm guessing that's exactly what we were doing as the sun was setting and the night sky was beginning to show itself.

I'm not sure who saw it first, but I know that neither of us could begin to comprehend what we were looking at. For more than a moment we stood there transfixed by the sheer beauty of what we were seeing and unable to move. Never before had we seen anything like it, and so there was nothing from our brief histories on earth to even come close to relating what we were seeing to other than those "evil Russians" and mushroom clouds. And so we stood there watching what we suddenly concluded was the beauty of our impending doom. So at that moment on that evening in July of 1957 in that little town in Wisconsin two kids, an eight-year-old girl and boy, turned on their heels and began running faster than they'd ever run in their lives away from what they'd just seen in the sky and toward the only safety they knew in the moment. In their minds and in that moment all that their teachers had tried to prepare them for what was coming to pass, and there was no school desk to hide under to save themselves.

The Menominee Indians of Wisconsin believed that the lights indicated the location of Manabai'wok (giants) who were the spirits of great hunters and fishermen. The Inuit of Alaska believed that the lights were the spirits of the animals they hunted: the seals, salmon, deer and beluga whales. Other aboriginal peoples believed that the lights were the spirits of their people.

Our mothers came out the front door at the sound of our screaming. In time we were reassured that the evil Russians weren't attacking; they were safe; we were safe at least for the moment.

The bomb never fell, the "evil Russians" never attacked, the Martians have yet to be found, and the Northern Lights are something we marvel at on the rare occasions that we see them. And still the feeling of being truly safe is an elusive thing at best. Those kids running toward the only safety they knew had no idea that perceptions are only that, perceptions.