Category: Philosophical Musings

ANIMAL HOUSE

Leading up to the summer of ’66, summers were just… summers— one hot and sweaty and dirty summer job after another. But in ‘66, my tiny resumé took a wide detour around the usual drudgery. I assumed the operation of the Sebec Lake Municipal Beach Concession located just five miles north of my hometown of Dover-Foxcroft. And one of the immediate benefits for me was the temperature-inversion. No more nearly passing out in the 101o oven of the Guilford Woolen Mill spinning room. No more getting sunburned behind the oily exhaust of a Briggs & Stratton, rock-spitting cemetery lawn mower.

Sure, sometimes it did get baking-hot inside that cinder-block beach concession stand, but (a) there was often at least a bit of a cool breeze that you could feel coming in off the lake if you stuck your head out the concession’s screened take-out windows far enough to feel it; (b) and hey, check out the work uniform dress code: swim trunks, tee shirt (or not), and flip-flops; and (c) with nothing more than a “Hey guys, I’ll be right back in a jiff,” I could just sprint down over the burning sand and plunge down into the cold blue water for a quick cool-off.

No, I certainly did not miss those hot, long-sleeve and long-pants khakis of summers previous.

In so many ways the summer of ‘66 was the most upbeat summer for me ever, one of those old Nat King Cole “lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer! Those days of soda, and pretzels, and beer!” You had the growls of those outboard motors buzzing the lake out there with water-skiers in tow. You had Coppertone and Off wafting in the breeze. And you had me, young, tan, and handsome to boot (no comments allowed at this time, thanks). In tip-top physical shape.

Now a “proprietor” of a business. An “employer” of employees. I mean, how respectable was that! And finally, getting to live in that gorgeous and luxurious all-expenses-paid, on-the-waterfront cottage.

In the meantime though, it still was a job, right along with my part-time Esso station gig. And despite all the obvious benefits, there turned out to be a lot more work and responsibilities to running the Concession than I’d imagined. But whatever it is you’re doing, you get used to it.

And I was getting used to it fast.

One blazing hot afternoon, I left the Concession and trotted down toward the water for that much-needed, cooling-off splash-dash. Then, wading back in toward the sand, however, I stopped short. Because there was a middle-aged man standing just off to my left, just standing-in-place knee-deep in the shallow water. He was wearing swim trunks and an anomalous, wrinkly-rumpled, long-sleeved white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. A live cigarette butt crimped between his index and middle finger was smoldering.

The weirdo from Lanpher’s Drug!

And the thing was, he was having this ‘conversation’ with a couple of confused-looking, yardstick-tall boys standing hip-deep before him. Curious and more than a little disturbed, I veered left and sloshed toward shore in a path close enough to brush elbows with the guy, easily close enough to hear what he was saying:

“No no no, I said my father was the moose. Not my mother. She was the owl.”

What?! What kind of a conversation was that?! What was going on there? (Point in fact. This is exactly what I heard him saying to them. I swear. Those three sentences burned themselves indelibly into my memory.) And I sure didn’t like the sound of it. But I was as confused by it, as much as stunned. I mean, what the hell was I supposed with that!? I had no idea. Was anybody supposed to do with it? Who knew? Could be an innocent enough conversation, I supposed. But it didn’t sound like it.

I scanned all around the throngs beached on their blankets and towels to see if I might spot anyone who looked like possibly concerned parents staring out at this little scene. But no, there were just too many people. I couldn’t spot anyone, so I picked my way back up the beach to the concession.

I had a high school kid working the windows with me that day, one Richard Dority. A really cool young man, capable in so many ways of helping me out. So I pointed out the little odd-ball, unsettling conversation going on down there in the water.

“Oh. Shit. That guy!” he said.

“What, you know him?”

“No. I don’t know him. Know of him. Only cause he’s been hanging out and spookin’ everybody here at the beach. He’s got serious screws loose.”

“He’s also been spooking everybody back in town. Especially at Lanpher’s.”

“I think he’s got a camp around here somewhere. He’s started showin’ up here regular last week.”

“Tell you what. We’re kinda quiet for the moment. Why don’t you take a break. Say a half hour or so. Go down there and see what you can find out. Well, unless you see me getting mobbed up here all of a sudden. But you know, check him out for a bit. Actually, there’s such a crowd all around’em right now, I don’t think there’s really anything to worry about. Safety in numbers an all that. But you might even maybe butt in and strike up a friendly little conversation with the two kids, you know? Just to let him know somebody’s paying attention to what’s going on.”

“Ooh. OK. Here I go.” Everything was an adventure to him. “Goin’ deep undercover here.” And grinning, off he went.

So that was it, then. The Man was here, eh? So. We had trouble. Right here in River City. And that starts with a ‘T’ and that…

But in the meantime, I just went on cruising forward through the summer, seeing myself in a different movie. Me as Troy Donahue in A Summer Place, with Phyllis as my Hollywood Sandra Dee co-star.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Business was pretty good that summer. We were swamped with business on those really hot, picture-book-perfect summer days. And and even on the overcast drizzling days, we surprisingly did some business. But. Downpours and thunder? We shut down.

Throughout June and July, because of our cigarette Smoking Man’s presence, his name came up periodically in conversation. (Though I know his name well, for purposes of common decency I’m not using it in this post. Even after 50+ years, chances are that some of his family might still live in the area.) But rumor had it he was sometimes hanging out in our very dimly lit men’s changing room, waiting behind the opening door for people coming in to towel off and change. And when their eyes had adjusted to the lack of light enough that they’d spot him in there with them, his signature response was always something like, “No, it’s alright. Don’t mind me…”

Yeah. That raised some feathers.

The police had been notified and they’d spoken with him and warned him to desist. Rumor had it he’d gotten beat up pretty badly one night over at the roller rink. Apparently, he’d said something one hot-blooded young man found offensive. I was just glad I hadn’t witnessed that.

So there was that stuff going on intermittently. But mostly, by the time the first two weeks of July had slipped behind us in the rear view mirror, I put all that out of mind. For me, it was all about the impending wedding closing in. That was all I could think about.

Honestly though, I was as nervous as the proverbial cat with the long tail in a room full of rocking chairs. Ours had been a tumultuous relationship anyway. I know we were both passionately head-over-heels crazy in love with each other, but… we did have a history of lots of lovers’ spats. And that was worrying me big-time in the three days before the wedding. Why?

Because there were a bunch of relatively wild yahoos hanging out on the beach that week (more acquaintances of mine rather than actual friends), who were claiming they were going to throw me a bachelor party. Not Would you like to have a bachelor party? but You are going to have a bachelor party. I didn’t like the sound of that. A frigging bachelor party was the last thing in the world I needed right then. I mean, hell, if Phyl caught wind that I was having a quote-unquote bachelor party on the very night before our wedding, I just knew what she’d be imagining: a drunken bash with a stripper rising up out of a cake if not worse!

And I just couldn’t have that! (a) I wasn’t a wild and crazy guy at all back then anyway, and (b) those party-wanters weren’t even good buddies of mine. Oh, I knew just what they were thinking: A bachelor party’ll give us a great excuse to get blotto. Tom’s got that camp on the beach (“that camp” meaning a place for them to booze it up…), a place our parents will never even guess where we are!).

Soon to become Animal House

First of all, I told them no thanks. Didn’t want one.

They said, “But it’s never up to the bachelor though, is it.”

I disagreed and put my foot down. “No. No party, and that’s final.”

They just laughed.

“Not funny,” I told them. “I’m NOT having any party! I don’t want one, and so I’m not having one! So just forget it. And like I said, that’s final. End of story!”

But these guys were crazy, and I knew it. They wanted a place to drink and that was all there was to it. The legal drinking age in the state was 21. Hell, I’d just turned 20 myself, and they were younger than me. And I’m sure they couldn’t care less if I were even there to host their little speakeasy or not. To them, the ‘bachelor’ in this scenario was immaterial. A party’s a party, right? Who even cares if there’s a bachelor or even a host there?

The thought of the whole thing made me sick to my stomach. What would Phyl think? How would she react if she found out?

I didn’t, however, really have a lot of time to dwell on it. There were oodles of wedding details to attend to. The wedding rehearsal. Getting the grange hall reception squared away. Picking up my tux. Making the Quebec City honeymoon hotel reservations over the phone. Making plans to switch vehicles at the last minute to throw any post-wedding followers off our trail. Etc. Etc.

So at the end of the last day before the wedding, I was totally exhausted by the time I rolled up to the camp around 9:30 that evening. And what’s the first thing I saw? Some yahoo I barely knew elbowing a case of Nastygansett in through the now-jimmied-wide-open-door that I’d left locked earlier.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Something woke me up early the next morning. I blinked open my eyes and found that I was upstairs. In bed. I began to crane my neck around to survey my shadowed surroundings, slant-lighted only by a tiny window situated high up behind my head. First thing I noticed? The sleeping forms seemingly everywhere, all over the floor. Soundly sleeping, snoring bodies. Oh God, I thought to myself. That’s right. The bachelor party.

First of all, please know this: I hadn’t drunk a single alcoholic drop the night before. It’s not that I wouldn’t liked to have. But by sipping the night away nursing a quart bottle of Moxie, I was basically striving to save my own skin. And what a boring night it had been for me. Watching what could have been my desperately needed, very restful, and contemplative evening quickly deteriorating into madness. And just looking at those little bastards now, I couldn’t get over how they hadn’t even had the courtesy or the frickin’ decency to haul their sad, besotted, little asses back home after they’d ruined not just my night, but perhaps even my future in the process.

Christ, I could just see it in my mind’s eye: the part where the minister says, “If anyone here today knows of any reason why these two should not be wedded in holy matrimony, speak now or forever hold your peace.” I mean, would Phyllis be the one? The one to turn to me at that point with blood in her jaundiced eyes and shock the entire congregation with her loud “Me! Me! I’ve got a reason!”?

Yes, just look at these little pigs, I was thinking to myself when suddenly… my eyes zeroed in on something that stopped my heart!

Standing upright at the other end of the room, the end that gave way to the crooked little staircase, was a large and menacing dark form! Six feet tall or more and heavy-set! And it was moving around slowly! What the hell was I seeing, moving slowly and furtively among the sleepers, looking down at them! Stopping to (Jesus!) bend right down silently at the waist and lowering its face down to just a couple of inches from each of their faces, examining them and one at a time and then… on to the next!

My first thought was the Cigarette Smoking Man! (Eeek!) But then No, too tall. My next thought? Serial killer! Selecting his first victim!

As my eyes adjusted and re-focused, I could pretty much make out the man’s face. And shit! Nobody I knew! What was a total stranger doing here?! I mean, think of it! There was some man, some giant of a man, somebody I didn’t even know, stalking his victims upstairs in my camp! And we had no phone! We had nothing! And then… horror of horrors!

I watched this fiend place both of his hands firmly down onto the chest of his first prey, right up close to his unsuspecting neck, and I thought, Oh Jesus Christ, here it comes! Here it comes! I didn’t wanna look! But…

This man, I saw then, had grasped two fistfuls of the sleeper’s shirtfront and was hauling his victim up, easily lifting him sound asleep right up, face-to-face, with himself. And I mean Jesus, if looks could kill…

“God damn it, Timmy!” he growled, and gave the boy a manful, wake-up shake. Timmy’s buttoned-up blood-shot eyes were trying to crank their eyelids open. “Do you have any idea just how goddamned worried your mother has been all goddamn night!!!!?”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The wedding wasn’t until 1:00. In the meantime, everybody was gone from the camp. I had time to kill, but not the slightest idea what to do with it. All I know is that I just climbed into my old ‘50 Pontiac and drove away.

And much later, by the time my subconscious somehow tractor-beamed me up into my parents’ driveway (where, oh yeah, my tux was waiting inside), all I could remember of that little odyssey was that I’d pulled up at some Shell station somewhere, told’em to filler-up, after which it turned out I’d won $2.00 off on my gas with some little scratch-off-ticket-promotion going they had going.

Stepping out of the car, the thought hit me like a left hook: Jeez! Had Phyllis heard about the stripper coming out of the cake and all yet…?

By the time I had my tuxedo on and was combing my hair in the mirror, I had one of my life’s worst migraine’s going. And I’d get some real humdingers back in those days.

Screenshot

Man, I desperately wanted to rush over to see Phyllis, throw myself at her feet, sob out my confession about the previous night, swear on ten stacks of Bibles I’d done everything possible in my power short of murder to stop the damn thing from happening, and that I hadn’t even had one friggin’…swig of damn beer! But in those days, they were practically psycho about not letting the groom lay eyes on the bride before the ceremony on the day of. Supposed to be bad luck, or something.

I remember sarcastically thinking, Bad luck? Oh gosh, golly, and gee! Wouldn’t I ever hate to have anything as bad as bad luck!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So there I was. 1:05 pm. A sweating lamb to the slaughter, standing at firing-squad-attention in front of the Methodist Church altar with the Best Man and witnesses to my left, bridesmaids to my right. If asked, I would have said, “Yes, I’ll take the blindfold.” I believe it occurred to me at one point that maybe I should just stop worrying about fainting, and perhaps just give in to it.

And then the moment of truth: “The Wedding March” started up. Oh, the migraine!

The ushers swung wide the two entrance doors. The migraine was killing me!

But oh my! There she suddenly was!

A picture of stunning beauty! Knock-out gorgeous!

Her stepfather, Elden, started escorting her up the aisle to ‘give her away.’

If only I could just get a good look at her eyes. Then I’d know. If some fool had blabbed!? Or if she’d not heard about it yet? And if not, would she just end up hearing about it right after the ceremony? And how screwed would I be then? Should I tell her right away?

Or was it already too late?

She was too far away yet to be sure of anything.

Writing this, I’m reminded of the famous short story, “The Lady or the Tiger.”

But the reason for all my unnecessary drama? Me!

I had a such long, long way to go before I was… a real grown up. Even at twenty, I was a still a little kid at heart. I still thought of life in terms of all the movies I’d grown up watching.

But the truth is, all the unprocessed weight of this gigantic transition happening to me right then and there that very day was crushing. Yes, I was dying to get married. But yes, I was afraid about whether or not I could ever really man up to the new role as… husband. Like my dad was a husband. And had been a husband forever. He who had fought in the war, which made him “a man,” and there I was, just a boy still. He who seemed to know everything about everything. And what did I know? Nothing! Nothing at all about hardly anything!

Dad had been helping me get through my piddling little life every step of the way so far! I mean, what did I know about taxes? What did I know about insurance? Would I really be able to make enough money to pay for college so I could make enough money to live on? Would I make it as a teacher? What if Phyllis got sick? What if I got sick? It was the damn weight of all of it!

And so internally, I was asking myself that afternoon, Do I really think I’m adult enough to drive my wife, Phyllis, all by ourselves all the way to French-speaking Canada with my crummy two little years of high school French? I mean, who did I think I was?

I was suffering a last minute, 1-day nervous breakdown-with-migraine.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

But guess what happened.

We went through all the clockwork motions of the ceremony, the exchanging of the vows, the slipping of the wedding ring onto the bride’s finger, performing ‘the old-you-may-kiss-the-bride.’ We actually became (for just a moment) that perfect, little, miniature bride and groom perched on the top tier of the wedding cake.

And then in a daze I drove us to the waiting grange hall reception, where we performed the cake-in-the-face, the garter thing, the tossing of the bouquet, all of it… also like clockwork.

After which, Mrs. Lyford and I sped away in our clunky, now-grotesquely festooned, old ‘50 Pontiac; ditched ‘The Grey Ghost’ in my parents’ driveway; hopped into my dad’s waiting, brand new, pre-luggage-loaded van…

and with Phyllis wearing the cutest, most prim and stunning little travel outfit imaginable… I drove my new, day #1 wife across the border to Canada.

And then, before we knew it, suddenly day #1 had already become day #2. And then day #2 became the next day. And the rest is (our) history.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

And what an unforgettable, happy little adventure Quebec City and Saint George turned out to be!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

We returned to our little hometown after the honeymoon as man and wife. We resumed our jobs, Phyl at the pharmacy, me at the Esso station, and the both of us manning the concession. We loved our crooked little honeymoon shack on the beach.

However, then reality had to go and stick its nose back in.

One morning at somewhere around 5:00 am, we were abruptly awakened by someone’s loud voice outside. It was a man’s voice, and whoever he was, it sounded oddly like he was making some sort of official announcement or proclamation to a large audience. And it was coming from the little diving-dock on the beach right outside, out in front of the camp:

“NAME?” (The man announces his name)

“AGE?” (The man announces his age)

“BIRTHPLACE?” (The man announces where he was born)

The man was giving the world his resumé, whether the world wanted it or not! We poked our heads out the door, and… what the hell? There he was. Our rumpled Cigarette Smoking Man. Apparently as mad as a hatter.

“CURRENT ADDRESS?“ (The man informs the world at large of his mailing address in Sangerville.)

“EDUCATION?” (And down he goes through the list, beginning with his primary school)

Et cetera. Et cetera.

And worst of all, after a fifteen-minute-long recitation, he broke into song:

“Beautiful dreamer… Wake unto me,

Starlight and dew drops are waiting for thee…

Sounds of the rude world heard in the day,

Lulled by the moonlight have all passed away…”

Et cetera.

These days, decades later, whenever that song happens to pop up on the radio or in the backdrop of some movie, Phyl and I pause, turn, look at each other eye-to-eye (spooked a little), and just know that we are both of us together back there once again, in that camp, gawking out the door at the sweaty little man with the smoldering cancer stick, standing there on that dock, staring defiantly into the rising sun and confirming beyond any doubt his existence on this planet, to God and anyone else he imagined was listening and hanging on his every word. I mean, even when someone good like Roy Orbison is the one singing it!

And see, this wasn’t a one-off. This was something that happened… let’s just say, a little too often.

But you know what? This man turned out to be, for us anyway, only a nuisance, basically. A Boo Radley that I feared and worried about at all times, but nothing ever came of it. I was still just young and inexperienced in the ways of the world, and was easily frightened.

Today we all know so much more about mental illness, enough so that I look back on this poor guy with empathy.

But anyway, it turned out that this man, this unfortunately rather disturbed little man, was to become a part of our lives for the remainder of that summer. The summer that was both christened and baptized by the dunking of a high-speed, getaway-wannabe car in the waters of Sebec Lake. The summer of our very first “home,” the beautiful and rent-free honeymoon cottage. The summer of a cleaner and much more enjoyable part-time employment for me. The summer of The Attack of the Invasive “Bachelor Party” and its nothing-burger after-effects. The summer of our wedding, and the honeymoon trip to Quebec City (which felt to us country bumpkins like…well, Paris). And finally, the summer soundtracked by ‘our song,’ “Beautiful Dreamer.”

And when the summer of ‘66 fizzled out at the end, Phyllis and I packed our bags and headed off to our second of many homes to come, the College Apartments in Farmington, Maine. And to our life-long adventure together with all its joys, all its painful twists and turns, and finally its blessed happy-ever-after. Leaving the Cigarette Smoking Man to Dover-Foxcroft…

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

You know, as I’ve been working on this episode over the last week, I’ve been re-hashing-over all these memories with my bride of 57 years, 58 years this coming July 30th. And I was trying to impress on her, yet once again, just how heavily that dumbass, so-called “bachelor party” had weighed on me during those final sweaty hours leading up to our wedding ceremony. And once again, she laughed it off and re-reminded me that no, she’d never even had a clue about that. And that any look of serious concern I’d spotted in her eyes that morning was pretty likely only that she, like me, was also reeling a bit under the momentousness of the big steps she was undertaking in her life.

And you know what.

Phyllis is still the sweetest little bride ever… (sigh)

home

Subscribing only means that whenever I post a new episode here, you will get an email with a link to that post. Subscribing is cost-free, and you can unsubscribe at any time…

CROOKED MAN, CROOKED HOUSE II: The Cigarette Smoking Man

I will forever remember Lanpher’s Drug Store in the 60’s as our special little oasis/after-school hangout, and that sweet bevy of 30-something ladies who worked the lunch counter as a blessing to us kids. All actual mothers themselves, they felt to us (in our high-school-drama, soap-opera lives) like post-Cub Scout den mothers or something, who were always there to listen and to take us under their comforting, little mother hen wings. And actually, I’m embarrassed to say we felt we were God’s gift to those women (Berle, Del, Marilyn, and Martha) because back then it was all about us, wasn’t it— we were just so interesting, right?

MARILYN PENNINGTON and BERYL DOW

But I mean just kids, and yet we were made to feel welcomed at that long lunch counter to gab our afternoons away, even though we had very little money to spend. Looking back now, I’m seeing it as a kind of young kids’ Cheers bar…

“Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name
And they’re always glad you came…”

Plus, there were always a couple of attractive high school girls hired to work behind the counter as well, one of whom turned out to be my Phyllis (sigh!). And you wanna know what’s a dreamy fantasy for a guy my age back then? Having your cute little soda-jerk girlfriend, the girl you’re gonna marry in a few weeks, fuss over you and bring you the root beer Coke you just ordered. (double sigh!)

But to me at least, the whole place felt like “family.” I spent so much time there, weekends included. I even got to become somewhat of a friend of one of the salesmen who’d show up there every two weeks or so to take the orders for the candy bars, chips, and crackers, etc. needed to keep the soda fountain stocked. Later, I’d be giving him weekly orders to stock the Sebec Lake Beach Concession that was to turn out to be my main summer job in 1966.

Plus there was this one, odd, little, wonderful man, Bob Buzzell, who was as much a part of the scene as we were. I think he must’ve retired early with a disability of some sort, because he was there just about every day. We thought of him as old but, to us back then of course, every adult was “old.”

BOB BUZZELL and MARILYN PENNINGTON

Bob Buzzell was a character and a half. A cheerful little elf, always entertaining everybody with his corny jokes and cool stories about the past. He was like an uncle to us; everybody loved him. But the one special thing about him that really bowled us kids over (although you’ll likely find it nearly impossible to believe it by looking at him in the photo below), was watching this guy go zipping around the roller rink floor out at the lake on his skates like some teenager. He’d skate fast, he’d skate backwards, he’d spin around in tight circles, and out-skate all the high school kids to shame. Of course he wouldn’t last out there as long as we could, so perhaps he was a little old. But it was a friend, and it was always a joy to watch him.

My whole point here is that, after school, Lanpher’s Drug felt like a little home away from home. It was so very comforting to hang out there with your friends. A place that was just… well, a haven in our little town. A place that was always felt secure and… safe.

Until it didn’t.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

One afternoon I strolled in to find the place really packed. All the counter bar stools (OK, soda fountain stools) were taken, and there were even a few kids standing, crowding the seats from behind while they talked it up. The jukebox was playing, so that was a good sign. Normally due to the lack of available quarters among us, it simply sat there silent as a piece of furniture. So apparently somebody had some cash at least. Myself, over time I’d dropped uncountable hard-to-come-by quarters down its slot, mostly to listen to “He’s a Rebel” by The Crystals and The Cheers’ “Black Denim Trousers” over and over again.

The Seeburg jukebox

But what a crowd that day. I was there only to dally a little with Phyl a bit, so I was feeling pretty impatient while having to wait for a seat. But as I was running my eyes up and down the line of crowded stools, hoping to spot somebody who might be getting ready to give up his seat and leave, my gaze came to a stop on someone who, for some reason, just didn’t seem to rightly belong in that shoulder-to-shoulder, Lanpher’s soda fountain crowd. I’d never seen the guy before. And I was struck right away with an unsettling What’s-Wrong-With-This-Picture? sensation.

For one thing, everybody else was seated back-to to me, facing the counter-length mirror on the back wall. But this guy sat facing my way with his back resting against the counter. But in that crowd wearing jeans, shorts, tee shirts, penny loafers, and sneakers, here sat a man, forty-ish probably (there was a touch of salt-and-pepper gray at his temples), in a white short sleeve dress shirt, slacks, and black shoes.

Cigarette Smoking Man (OK, yeah, I stole this one from The X-Files)

So there was that. But that was only a small part of the first impression he made on me. Where do I start? His shirt and matted hair was damp with perspiration. With a butt-filled-to-overflowing ash tray on the counter behind him, he was smoking like a fiend, gingerly pinching the last half-inch of a smoldering cigarette between a thumb and forefinger. Though smiling, he was definitely radiating nervousness? So in no way whatsoever was he a part of this young crowd he’d sandwiched himself into? And finally, I’m not sure exactly why, he looked to me like some sweating-like-a-pig Richard Burton.

But then I saw Phyllis, her eyes locked on mine, furtively nodding for me to meet her down at the far end of the counter. She looked uptight. That made me tense up. I made my way down there.

“What’s up?”

“That man’s been here for hours. Just sitting there, sipping on Cokes and smoking his cigarettes. And endlessly playing songs on the jukebox. He’s making us all really nervous back here.”

“Hours? Yikes. So… who is he anyway?”

“That’s just it. We don’t know. Nobody does. He just showed up. But I think something’s… I mean, I don’t know what, but something’s wrong with him. And he smells bad. All sweaty. And he acts funny.”

“Have you told your boss? You probably ought to.”

“Mr. Lanpher’s not in today.”

“Oh great!”

“Yeah.”

“That’s not good.”

“No it really isn’t. So… could you, you know, stick around for a while? I’d really feel better if you’d stay here.”

“Well sure, Phyl. Of course I will!”

Jeez, my beautiful little majorette girlfriend? It was like she was suddenly this… damsel in distress! Like in the movies. My beautiful and demure princess being threatened by the dragon! And she was asking me…imploring me… to be her knight in shining armor?! Her Saint George?

“You got it,” I assured her. “I’m staying right here and keeping an eye on him. For as long as it takes. Till the end of your shift. Don’t you worry. And then I’m walking you home.”

‘You’ll be safe with me,’ a wannabe-gruff voice that sounded more than a little like me growled inside my head. And I say, “wannabe-gruff” because truth is— there was something really off and disturbing about this ‘dragon.’ He was setting off alarms in my gut big-time. I mean, he was a grown man after all, wasn’t he. And what was I? Just a damned frightened kid when you got right down to it. And I knew very well way down deep inside that… hell, I was no fighter! I hated to own it, but I was more a Barney Fife than any Prince Valiant. Which was, of course, one of my darkest and best-kept secrets. And I wanted to keep it that way.

But what’d I do? I pasted on my best Marshall Matt Dillon face, moseyed on over to the jukebox, casually leaned up against it, and began keeping a dark stare focused gun-hard on him. Whenever he happened to look up my way, there was the best hairy eyeball I could muster waiting for him. (Hell, even Barney used to get away with it every once in a while.)

Eventually, a stool right next to him opened up, as the crowd was pretty much thinned out by then. So I nonchalantly stood up, surreptitiously stepped across the aisle, pretended to examine the band-aid display for a minute or two, and then came over and eased myself down onto it.

Man, he did really stink. An overpowering mix of swampy, armpit, sweat-stink a la cologne engulfed me. He was toxic. For a guy who dressed pretty sharp, you’d think he might want to take a shower every now and then, but apparently… no.

So, I braved myself to talk with him a little. As little as possible. Mostly monosyllables. Managed to pry his name out of him. Got him to tell me a few things about himself. Him, being a professor at the UMass Amherst. On a sabbatical leave. Professor of what, I didn’t ask. Currently living in Sangerville, a tiny town about eight miles or so from Dover. But he was really making me nervous so, you know, I didn’t come right out and ask him if he was a pervert or rapist or anything. I cut the conversation short and jockeyed my butt down a few stools for some oxygen and to get closer to my little damsel in distress.

It seemed he’d never leave, although of course he finally did. So yeah. I’d lucked out. Walked her home. Me, the conquering hero…

But after that you’d never know when you strolled in if you’d find him occupying one of Lanpher’s soda fountain stools or not, since he started hanging out there like that a couple or so days a week. And yes, there always hung over him the lingering presence of that undefined, swamp-gassy foreboding. Although there was never sufficient grounds for the management to ask him to leave or anything. I mean, he really wasn’t loitering, was he, not as long as he kept guzzling the Cokes and pumping those sweaty quarters down the throat of that Seeburg jukebox.

But it’s just that there never seemed to be any good reason you could put your finger on for why he preferred to be there, of all places. And then too, things were so different back in the early 60’s. Pretty much all moms were stuck at home throughout the day, trapped in their domestic ‘cages’ of housewife drudgery, while most dads were out there all day somewhere, busy earning a living. So honestly? There were hardly any parents ever shopping the pharmacy aisles during after-school hours to ever eyeball the creep with the kids.

But to us kids, he was just an oddity. One of those local head-scratchers in this crazy old world. And since I didn’t know doodly about much at that point of my life, I simply dismissed it out of hand after a while.

And why wouldn’t I? It was mid-June, 1966, and I was cruising straight ahead into those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. Phyl working the soda fountain. Me pumping gas part-time across the street. And, oh yeah, me just beginning to take on my new Concession job duties at the Sebec Lake Municipal Beach.

We had a lot on our plate that summer.

But of course, more pressing than all of the new changes piling up, the two of us were eyeing our wedding at the end of July. I mean, we had our eyes on the adventure of a lifetime, didn’t we: THE REST OF OUR LIVES! It was all we could think about. Try to imagine our excitement and anticipation.

And hell, even fear! What, you think I wasn’t at least a little terrified, as well? Oh baby, I was! Would I be able to measure up as a husband, as a man? Would I be able to protect my princess? Would I be able to provide enough money? Would I be able to learn all the things that a husband needs to learn?

It was pretty daunting.

So something as odd and inconsequential as Lanpher’s Pharmacy’s stinky cigarette smoking man was totally off my radar.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Until he wasn’t, that is…

Next time: The Strange Summer of ’66.

Home

It costs nothing to subscribe. All that happens is that whenever I post a new episode, you’ll get an email with a link to this site, tomlyford.com .

THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN… IN A CROOKED LITTLE HOUSE

1966.

The summer we got married.

At the end of July, the 30th.

I’d just turned 20, Phyllis 18. Just kids really, like a lot of newlyweds. And no, it wasn’t a shotgun wedding. I got married because I was over-the-moon-crazy-in-love with my steady girlfriend of nearly four years. And in love with love itself, of course. Me, the hopeless romantic.

And you know, it’s not like we had any money to speak of. We just didn’t know any better. Phyl had just graduated from high school. And that August I’d be resuming my education as the now-married, man-boy, college junior. But we both had summer part-time jobs.

Her, clerking and soda-jerking over at Lanphers Drug Store and me, still gas-pump-jockeying across the street at Huey Cole’s Esso.


However, I’d also just lucked just out in securing a second additional job that summer, a very competitively-sought-after job in our little town. It was like winning the lottery. The ideal beach bum job.

Running the Municipal Beach Concession for the summer!

Of course when I signed on to that, I had no idea how much of eight-days-a-week work and responsibility it was going to require. Every week re-ordering the Styrofoam cups, paper plates, napkins and paper towels, cigarettes, hotdogs, hamburger, buns, chips and pretzels, sodas, candy bars, ice cream products, pastries, coffee and condiments— you name it. Plus having to show up there at such ungodly early hours some mornings to meet the various delivery trucks in order to get all those ordered goods inside and stored away. To pay the bills. To keep the books. To hire part-time help. And to always be doing those pesky bank runs back into town to keep myself supplied with the necessary stash of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, half dollars, and long green for making change.

A helluva lotta work. Especially for me, being one of the laziest little louts you’d ever want to meet back then. But guess what. Even if I had fully and completely realized beforehand just how much slaving away would be required, I still would’ve jumped at the chance to get it. Because the job came with one very unique and delicious perk. One of those offers you just can’t refuse.

It came with a quaint little rent-free camp! Right there smack-dab on the frickin’ beach!

And for me, the guy who’d otherwise have remained trapped and living under his parents’ thumbs at home all summer long? And for three whole months! An answer to a prayer!

Oh, I would be so envied.

And ta-DAH! Here she is. Just feast your eyes:

OK, “quaint” as my chosen adjective is a bit if a stretch. Kinda brings out the ‘bum’ in the expression ‘beach bum,’ doesn’t it. And how about those little luxury ‘yachts’ lying right out there in the front yard. Don’t they just have “poor man’s adventure” written all over them (provided I could scrounge up a couple of oars).

But to me? At that time? With my big-little-kid psyche peeking out through the eyes of my young-adult-looking boy-body? Jackpot! It was like I was finally getting that little “No Girls Allowed” clubhouse I’d dreamed of building back as a 10-year-old! I mean, weren’t the old bargain-basement Shangri-La sugar-plums just a-dancing around in my head.

But yes, that beach was mine, ladies and gentlemen! Day and night.

And then there was one other reason for me to feel happy about that job. Somehow my best friend, Neil Mallett, had always managed to skunk me by falling into so much better, and more desirable, summer jobs than I ever had. For instance one summer he landed two primo jobs. If I remember correctly (and I believe I do), during the daytime he was being paid good money for simply sitting in a chair in some underground Civil Defense bunker, just on the slight, off-chance that some major crisis alert might start blaring out over their Conelrad two-way radio, which of course it never did. So… you know, all I could imagine was him snoozing in some chair over there, and reading paperbacks.

But that was nothing compared to his night-owl job: being paid good money just to sleep, damnit! That’s right, you read that correctly. He was employed to sleep nights over at the Lary Funeral Home.

I’m guessing there must’ve been some regulation or other that required a living, breathing human being to be stationed on the premises at all times, maybe to alert the authorities if one of the corpses suddenly sat up, or perhaps it was to ward off the modern-day body snatchers. Whatever.

But just think how that had been leaving me feeling when there I was out there in the hot sun sweating my life away mowing cemetery lawns, or slaving on the 2:00 to 10:00 second shift (me missing out on prime dating time with my steady girl!) in the hellishly hot Guilford Woolen Mill spinning room, eh?

So anyway… you can perhaps see just how vindicating this might feel— me, suddenly emerging as The Cool Hand Luke of the Beach…?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So of course I moved right in immediately with all the necessities: sleeping bag, pillow and towels from home, stack of paper plates and cups, plastic ware, and my swimming trunks. And oh yeah: stupidly, with a box full of my college textbooks. Why? Oh, only because there was one rough-single-board shelf spiked to one of the walls, and I thought, Jeez, look. There’s a shelf. Oughtta have some books on that shelf. You know, for decor. For looks. (I mean, I wasn’t actually planning on reading any of them or anything.) Duh!

But turns out, the place obviously hadn’t been built by someone with carpenter skills. My shelf had been crudely nailed a bit crookedly to the crooked wall, so the books would slide off and fall to the floor in a heap every half hour or so (including in the middle of the night!).

Turned out the place did have a bed upstairs at least (Yay!) accessible by some rickety, cramped, and crooked little stairs. Also it turned out the place didn’t even have running water. So… consequently it also turned out the place didn’t have a bathroom either, which meant long nocturnal trudges across the cold midnight sand and up a little rise to the public restrooms in the parking lot. Turned out too the place didn’t have a phone jack, which irritatingly meant that to call somebody back in town I’d hafta dig up some coins and trot over to the lone phone booth located next to the concession building.

But guess what. It turned out the place did have electricity, so it wouldn’t be totally like Thoreau’s Walden Pond after all! Wow. That made all the difference in the world.

So yeah. I went to sleep that first night, a barefoot beach bum in his own little bachelor pad, happy as a hobo in an empty boxcar.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I can’t say the job didn’t have its stressful moments (OK, make that hours), but on the whole I was having a very happy summer. It was a social thing for me. I loved gabbing with the customers through the order/take-out windows, many of whom were re-visiting Foxcroft Academy alumni with whom I shared a common past. And then there were the visiting snowbirds from away, many of those with whom I was already acquainted as well. Plus I’d hired a couple of part-time helpers and had developed a good and friendly relationship with them.

But you know what the best thing was? I didn’t have a frickin’ boss! I… was the boss of me! Something I’d never experienced before (and, unfortunately, something I was never to experience again throughout my employable future). Oh yeah, I did currently have a boss at the gas station, but I liked him a lot, as everybody did.

So yeah, my summer of ‘65 was shaping up to be a pretty hunky-dory time. I loved feeling the dead cold sand under my bare feet on a hot night, while checking out the moon reflecting off the water. And my God, the stars! Wow. So unbelievably bright in all that darkness. And then of course there was often the music pumping out across the water from the roller rink off in the distance, soundtracking my halcyon nights. (Of course, I had to be learn to be careful and to watch where I was stepping at night while crossing the beach, as there was often the hazard of disturbing those… night-time lovers out there in the dark. Sitting together on blankets. Lying together on blankets. Not worrying about sunburns.)

And a big plus was having my BFF, Neil Mallett, come out and stay with me some nights. Yes, we’d been buddies since meeting each other for the first time in 9th grade. Alphabetical order had seen to that: Lyford and Mallett. Since we were both taking the same college prep classes and since every single teacher back then lacked the creativity to try seating their kids in any configuration other than alphabetical order, Neil always ended up sitting right behind me in every class.

He and I had had so many experiences together. High school hijinks. Haying with his family on his farm. Playing our guitars. Double-dating, with his girlfriend-at-the-time being my girlfriend’s best friend. So yeah, the walks and talks we enjoyed together out at the lake felt so very comfortable in the days getting closer and closer to my wedding, after which poor Phyllis would have to join me in the ramshackle hovel I was currently calling home.

Something else: you never knew what crazy little ‘adventure’ might just pop up in your life, living out there next to the water among all the wealthy summer folks. I’ll share one with you right now in this post, and re-cap some of the other weird happenings in my upcoming Part II…

OK, one night, very shortly after I’d moved myself in, one of Neil’s-and-my leisurely night-time strolls got totally upended by something really bizarre. And later, it turned out that this particular little happenchance was really just the harbinger for a string of other unusual happenings waiting in the wings of the weeks to come…

So the road leading down to the Municipal Beach is known as Mile Hill. And as late at night as it was that night, close to midnight, there would be little or no traffic on it. Meaning that our world was deafeningly silent— the only exception being the occasional call of a loon.

Suddenly, however, that silence started getting ripped to shreds by some lone, unexpected racket coming from way up at the top of the hill: some vehicle roaring like a banshee with the pedal to the metal on a speed-limit-45 road, just a-barreling down in the dark like Robert Mitchum with his Ballad of Thunder Road’s revenuers hot on his tails. And gauging by the rising Doppler effect, we realized it would likely be on us in half a minute, or less. What the hell was going on?!

Now here’s the thing. Both Mallett and I well knew the geography all about where we were standing, which happened to be right beside the municipal boat ramp that drops straight down into the lake. Moreover, what was now weighing especially and urgently on our minds right then was the fact that Mile Hill completely dead-ends directly at the top the boat ramp. So of course normally drivers slow right down to make the left turn onto the rustic dirt road that accessed all of the many camps populating the waterfront, or simply to ease into one of the few available boat-ramp parking spaces.

But see, this car was a rogue fourth-of-July-rocket wannabe! Incoming fast! I’m talking Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen’s Hot-Rod-Lincoln”-fast!

Now, we’d sidled ourselves right up next to the boat ramp for a good view, and had just begun gawking expectedly up the road when… whoa-Jesus, here it came! Two demonic headlight-eyes looping ’round the bend and flying straight toward us like the proverbial bat outta hell, leaving us just enough time (say three seconds!) for our bodies to autonomically execute our twin-matador sidesteps! Whew!

Jesus H, but what a sight to behold! The car not plowing down our ramp but launching itself airborne right off the top of the it! (Now there’s an image I’ll never shake for the rest of my life!) And then of course The Big KER-SPLOOSH!– it doing its heavy, grille-first nose-dive like some breached killer whale disappearing back down into an ink-black sea! Only in this case (just for the blink of a second or two) bizarrely illuminating a thirty- or forty-foot arc of Sebec Lake’s floor bed with all its rocks and sand and small boulders off to each side… before buoying back up level on the water’s surface.

It was… magnificent!

After splash-down, the car had boated out quite a few yards but was now just sort of lolling in place out there, taking on water fast with both its front doors now opened, and settling down onto that sandy bottom. It wasn’t deep enough out there for it to sink totally out of sight however.

Its two occupants, after climbing out, were standing out there on either side now, armpit-deep and looking pretty confused and disoriented.

“What the hell were you thinking,” I yelled out to them, the two of us now standing atop the ramp, “barreling down here 70 or 80 miles an hour?”

They both gawked at us for a moment, motionless. Then they looked down and studied their egregious, opened-door car with the water up to the top of the steering wheel. And then back at us. “Where the hell are we?” the driver yelled back. A question that got Neil and I to share a frown at each other for a moment.

“You don’t… know?” Neil asked.

To which the response was, “This is the road to Millinocket isn’t it?”

“Uhmmm… no, not even close.” I said.

“This is the Lake Road,” Neil told them, “which is… well, you know, the road to the lake that you’re standing in at the moment.”

“Christ!” said one of them, hard to tell which one in the dark. “Well, I mean, the friggin’ sign said Millinocket. Comin’ through Dover, the signs… both of ’em… definitely both of ’em said Millinocket!”

“Oh, OK. Now I see what you did. You just missed the third sign. The one just before the post office. Would’ve been a right-pointing arrow. With Milo and Millinocket on it. You missed that one. And you were already on the Lake Road to begin with…”

“Yeah, and at your speed, it’d be easy to miss,” Neil said.

“So, you guys just gonna stand there all night?” I asked. “Don’t you wanna come in out of the water or anything?”

They did. They started wading in toward us. “Jesus, we gotta get this car the hell outta here! Hey, can you guys help us? You got a truck? With a chain, maybe?”

“No. But I do have a ‘50 Pontiac. With a straight-eight under the hood and a lot of power. But no chain. All I got’s a nylon rope.”

“That’ll work. Got get it.”

“No. It won’t. Rope’s too thin. It’ll just snap.”

“Better than nuthin’. C’mon, man. We gotta at least try!” They were pretty desperate. “We gotta get these wheels back on the road. Now! Please. You gotta give us a hand!”

I was actually starting to think about it. But by then I’d noticed two things about our guys. The first being that they were obviously drunk, big-time. That was obvious. No surprise. The second, that their faces now oddly seemed to be flickering on-and-off, blue. Took me a second to square that in my mind. But of course it was a patrol car having just cruised ’round the bend and slicing up the whole night with its blue strobes flashing.

So… yeah, this had been one of them high-speed chases you hear about. In a few more seconds, the cops had pulled in right behind us. “Well, I could try.” I said. “But the boys in blue here?”

“Oh… fuck!”

“Yeah. They’ll get your car towed right out of there in a jiffy.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Oh well. It was just one of those odd but unforgettable moments like so many others that have inserted themselves into my life every now and again. Oh yes, my mind has so many such mini-‘adventures’ like this tucked away, little vignettes that have tended to sprinkle a little added spice into my life from time to time.

So Neil and I answered the few questions asked of us by the cops, and then we got to watch our out-of-town ‘visitors’ get handcuffed and escorted to the rear door of the waiting patrol car. But it was really getting late, so we didn’t hang around to wait for the tow truck to show up and haul the vehicle back out and onto dry land. We were tired.

And so off we went, strolling ourselves back across the cold sand in the dark, back toward my recent little home away from home.

It had been an interesting evening. To say the least. We both marveled over what it must have been like, barreling down that long hill shitfaced at such a high speed and then all of a sudden: WHAM!

I mean, try to imagine it! You find yourself unexpectedly diving nose-first while witnessing an inexplicable lake opening itself right up in your headlights like Moses’ parting Red Sea, and giving you a surreal and stunning glass-bottom-boat, freeze-frame flash of an unexpected lake floor!.

What a night. A night to remember. For them and us. But especially them.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Looking back on it now, I kinda picture that little happening as the opening scene of some 1960’s beach-party-movie. Or, better and more realistically still, the once Perfect and Proper Ceremonial Christening (like the bottle of champagne shattered across the bow of a new ship) that it was, of the beginning of my new life as the summer beach bum, with that unimaginable string of even more abnormalities that were waiting for me in the wings of the weeks to come…

I mean “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.” But can you say ‘the bachelor-party-from-hell?‘ Can you say ‘the mental patient at the door?‘ See you in Part II…?

home

THE AMERICA THAT MADE AMERICA FAMOUS

“We were the kids that made America famous, the kind of kids that long since drove our parents to despair.

We were lazy long hairs dropping out,lost confused, and copping out, convinced our futures were in doubt and trying not to care…

We all lived the life that made America famous. Our cops would make a point to shadow us around our town…”     

— from Harry Chapin’s “What Made America Famous”

If you taught high school English in public schools for at least as long as I did and (for the most part) enjoyed it, you’ve likely found your mind traveling back from time to time to a parade of remembered faces you once ended up reacting with every weekday (for nine months at a pop). And then… well, just imagine the range of expressions that must have drifted across your face at one time or another. I mean, English being a required subject and all meant that every single kid in the school had to populate those English department classrooms, from the infamous Welcome Back Kotter “sweat hogs” to la crème de la crème. So yeah, that’s a lot of faces.

But if by chance you didn’t (for the most part) enjoy it, if you perhaps felt compelled to erect some ironclad emotional barrier between yourself and, say, those really challenging Kotter kids you felt you had nothing in common with, the ones for whom a college-they-could-never-afford-anyway loomed as the last possible thing on earth they could expect in their seemingly, already-cement-hardened futures, then I believe you may really have missed out on something. Something big perhaps.

Sure, it’s a common thing: teachers vying and hoping for the “best classes.” And I admit it, that’s the way I started out. I mean, being handed the list of the English classes you’re being assigned to teach each year is like Draft Day in the NFL. Of course you want the winners. Because they’ll be the ones most like you, won’t they. The ones you’ll feel the most comfortable with, the ones you’ll better understand and can more easily identify with and who, in turn, will most likely understand and more easily identify with you. The ones more likely to put up with your English Grammar and Composition, your Shakespeare, and your Poetry.

But… what the hell are you ever supposed to do with all those hands-on kids? Those shop-boys-with-the-grease-under-their-fingernail ‘English classes (well, besides wheedling them into grease-and-oil-changing your car over in the shop for cheap)? And those desperate and unhappy girls for whom the only seeming path out of the continuing hell of their blue-collar parents’ captivity is to get themselves pregnant and married as fast as they can? Or with all those future blue-collar hamburger-flippers and lifetime-convenience-store-clerk boys and girls, those future fathers and child-bearing mothers who will continue re-populating the town by making even more hamburger-flippers and lifetime-convenience-store-clerk boys and girls? 

I’m talkin’ all the probable poetry-and-classic-literature-haters here. What do you have that they’ll ever need or find useful? But especially, whatever the hell do you have to offer to that one particular, rogue, all-boy class of junior members of the local biker gang, the Exiles, that I had to deal with?

You see what I mean? You feeling me?

Well, turns out the answer to that is… only yourself. You as the real person you are. That’s what you have to offer. Because that’s all you really have to work with, isn’t it. I mean it. And that begins by first having to sort of surrender to them right at the beginning. Surrendering and just embracing the fact that… well, of course they’re poetry-and-classic-literature-haters. Why wouldn’t they be? You’d be too, if you were in their shoes. And you and them? You’re stuck with each other.

Remember this? “In order to begin working out a solution to any problem, first you have to clearly identify and state exactly what the problem is.”

My advice to would-be public high school English teachers? Rather than beginning by going all-out NAZI on these more-experienced-than-you little ‘soldiers’ in the cold war against teachers (and oh I pity you if that’s gonna be your style) (which wouldn’t work anyway unless, that is, they were in the Army Basic Training and you just happened to be their Drill Instructor), you’re gonna be much better off beginning by actually listening to their bitching about the school. And about English classes in general.

And let that be your starting point, your springboard. Surprise’em by letting’em know you enjoy hearing about how much they despise school and your subject. That’ll throw’em off-guard. And besides, their honest, unvarnished opinions on the subject really can be… entertaining sometimes. Especially if you encourage them to be really honest at it. And you know what?

You’ll likely end up discovering that you honestly do harbor some common ground with them, despite what you’d perhaps prefer to think. Because all human beings do have common denominators. So yeah, in the long run I found it best to get to get right to work, digging down, and finding out just what those are. Tell them stories (talkin’ honest stories here) about your life and the bitching you did in school about your teachers and your crappy classes. Get’em to tell you some of their stories, assuring them that what they have to tell you…  well, you  know … “whatever happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” (with the very big exception always being, of course, that by law, if it turns out that anything that’s divulged happens to include information indicative of some possible harm to themselves or others, etc. that has to be reported— yeah, you have to make that perfectly clearly to them right up front). But…really listen. Their stories are bound to be crazy-interesting. Probably a lot more interesting than yours. At least, that was my experience.

And you know what then? You’ll be on your way to respecting their points of view. And once you begin showing them your respect, you’ll already have begun garnering some of theirs. And then voila: I promise you that walking in through that damn classroom door each and every morning won’t feel nearly as much like such a real chore any more. Because you just might’ve started to (drum roll, please!) like them. It’s amazing.

And something else: I accidentally discovered that my particular kids (talkin’ my junior Exiles who, by the way, are featured exclusively back in one of my earlier posts titled “Bummer”– you should go back and read it) had a lot to teach me with their eventual honesty. Plus, I found those kids all pretty damned humorous and entertaining as well, if you want to know the truth.

Now yeah, yeah, yeah— sure, I know I’m coming across like some Yoda here, some wise old owl blowing his own horn and purporting to have all the answers. Truth is… it took me some years and many failures to wind up with the amount of the answers I finally did learn. I was pretty mistake-prone in all of the above in my first years. But way back, some very wise and passionate home economics teacher/colleague taught me this wise, old adage that really helped to set me on the path to sanity as a public school teacher: “No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” Yeah. Sounds corny. But think about it.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

BRAT PACKS

Cafeteria Duty with its Breakfast Club diversity

was always so much more vibrant than the

funereal dining doldrums of the faculty lounge,

what with the geek squad, the cheering squad,

the Romeos and Juliets, the Bettys and Veronicas,

the Dungeons and Dragons die-hards, a Ferris Bueller

or two thrown in, and possibly even a

future Stephen King seated at those tables

All those God’s-little-gifts-to-teachers whose

youthful honesty and sit-down-stand-up comedy

kept me in stitches and my aging soul decades

younger over the long career years

me, with half my life already slipped behind,

but them still with the Big Promise of Everything,

the whole damn shootin’ match, still looming

like some mirage in the desert up ahead– 

yes, all of us unique salt-of-the-earth

stereotypes… breaking bread together

around the salt and pepper shakers,

spicing up each other’s lives…

from TO DIVERSITY AND DEMOCRACY: A TOAST!

Here’s to those too few and far-between bastions of diversity we’ve occasionally stumbled

upon over time… those vibrant, spice-of-life oases of heterogeneity in our deserts of

conformity: our talk-like-us flocks, our act-like-us herds, our pre-fab, chameleon-career lives—

And here’s to the public schools
of years gone by where slide-ruled, pocket-protectored

eggheads communed in cafeterias across the tables from Streetcar-Named-Desire Stellas

in the Archie-and-Jughead-hijinks melting pot, all waiting together in the lunch line of life

for the big segregation crapshoot of becoming somebody…  some day…

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

But for now, back again to these particular song lyrics (which you’ll be invited to listen to shortly) from my featured singer/songwriter’s song, “What Made America Famous”:

“We were the kids that made America famous, the kind of kids that long since drove our parents to despair.

We were lazy long hairs dropping out,lost confused, and copping out,
convinced our futures were in doubt and trying not to care…

We all lived the life that made America famous. Our cops would make a point to shadow us around our town…”     

Listening to these lines has always sent a crooked, sardonic smile crawling across my face. Because they’ve always reminded me of some of the more challenging little Kotters I had at Mexico (ME) High School throughout the 70’s. Me, watching from a distance the little on-going cold war between the boys in blue and a number of my rebel-without-a-cause ‘students.’ Yeah. No love lost there.

See, weekends and after school my boys insisted on hanging out on downtown street corners, the most popular being the one right out in front of a pastry shop. Which of course was where the cops habitually roosted. And which consequently was where said cops were kept their busiest, busting up and dispersing just such “unlicensed assemblies,” mostly on the grounds that, well, it just didn’t look good for the town. And OK, truth be told those boys did make some shoppers nervous, of course.

Actually I have to admit they made my wife a little nervous. You know, we’d be strolling down the sidewalk on a sunny afternoon and up ahead we’d spy between eight and a dozen toughs leaning up against a store front like something straight out of Marlon Brando’s The Wild One (well, with the exception of that one biker-dude who usually had his cute, 12-inch-tall, curly-tailed pug-on-a-leash (rather than the pit bull guard dog you might expect to see accompanying a badass like him ).

“UH-oh,” she’d whisper in my ear, “think maybe we oughtta turn back around? Or cross the road?”

“Nah,” I’d tell her, “you’re with me, so you’re safe. Me? I’m protected by The Mark of the Phantom. They won’t bother us.”

Right after which a couple of the bigger ones (looking pretty ominous, sporting their shades and tattoos) might just playfully block our way for a moment and challenge, “Now just where do you two think you’re going…?”

To which my quick and witty comeback would always be something like, “Oh, I dunno. Straight through you if you decide not to move and instead wanna end up pickin’ broken glass outta eyes for the next two hours.”

And then of course there’d be the light-hearted little shadow-boxing horseplay between me and them (you know, that dumbass male bonding thing) but we’d always end up sailing right through them unscathed. And why? Because they’d learned to like me by then. And why was that? Because they’d realized that for some unfathomable… whatever-reason, they could tell I’d honestly taken a shine to them. Which in their world… for a teacher… was unheard of.

But anyway, after the near-daily shepherding-of-the-kids-off-the-sidewalks routine, the cops would mosey themselves on into the pastry shop, ostensibly turning a deaf ear to the retreating catcalls behind them referencing the ‘fat-ass’ physiques of a couple of those doughnut-devouring stereotypes.

However, that’s just what the kids would do overtly.

Covertly, the retaliation strategies they’d come up with could’ve earned them a place among the French Resistance Forces during World War II. The worst one being (in my opinion) to move their gathering on down the street to where the patrol cars were parked in order to (wait for it) set that poor, shivering, little pug right onto the hood of one of them— specifically the one with the drug-sniffing German shepherd left waiting inside.

Because oh, that canine locked in there didn’t like that little pipsqueak “hood ornament” rattling its toenails on the patrol car paint job one bit! And according to them (I never witnessed it myself, of course) that dog would be going bat-shit wild in there, leaping amok around the interior, and trying to bust out of the car to get at the lot of them, his berserk talons all the while just a-tearing the old stuffing right out of the upholstery!

Oh I’m sure they were exaggerating in their glory… but they sure loved telling me all about it.

However the most devious (or should I say most deviant) strategy they’d come up with was the ‘secret seeding’ of the police station flower garden with marijuana seedlings at night. The custodian there, who also served as the part-time gardener, ended up unwittingly watering and caring for them for quite some time. Right up until the moment one of Mexico’s finest eventually spotted the embarrassing extracurricular green and glorious growth among the camouflage.

Now that one made the Police Log in the local paper. And I’ve gotta say, they were oh so proud of themselves!

Vive la resistance!   

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Now of course this Harry Chapin song that I’m honestly dying to share with you in a moment, “What Made America Famous,” isn’t about my little biker friends, per se.  Rather it’s about America’s signature civil conflict between the “hard hats” and the “long hairs” that indelibly marked the 1960’s and ‘70’s. Think of the musical Hair. Think Easy Rider. But no, more than that, this ballad is all about about human decency. Pure and simple.

But first, allow me to share this particular little memory I’ve been holding onto over the decades:

So… I’m sitting in a warm, old-fashion barber shop on a frigid night in January, 1965. Whenever another customer sidles in through the door, an icy gust sparkled with blowing snowflakes shoulders its way in right behind him. There are five or six of us waiting to have our ‘ears lowered.’ I’m the youngest here, a college kid matriculated at the local state teachers college, the only one there not balding or with a head of white hair. It’s busy, but there are two barbers buzzing and clipping away, so my wait won’t be long.

So I’m just sitting back and contenting myself with listening to the old gents jawing away. Cackling about that ‘new streaker craze.’  Ruminating over the shipping off of American troops to Viet Nam. Weighing in on Muhammed Ali’s defeat over Sonny Liston, and who the hell does he think he is anyway, calling himself Muhammed like that, for Christ’s sake? This is much livelier than sitting me just sitting alone in my dorm room, poring over my World History text.

Suddenly whoosh! The door blows open. And standing half-in and half-out is a smiling young man with almost shoulder-length, snowflake-flecked hair. And he’s wearing a faded old Army field jacket.

“What’re the chances of getting a haircut tonight?”

I catch both barbers glaring at him. “Zero!” the older says. “Now get the hell outta here and close that fucking door!”

I’m shocked. But the young man acknowledges that he’s letting the weather in so, still all smiles, he steps inside and closes the door behind him. “No, seriously.”

“What? I don’t look serious? You didn’t hear me say ‘No?‘”

“But c’mon, why not?”

“Jesus, look around. Can’t you see the crowd we got in here tonight?”

“Well, if that’s it, I don’t mind waiting…”

“Beat it, kid!”

“Hey, come on. I gotta get a haircut. How much will it cost? I’ll be glad to even pay extra. Just tell me how much.”

The old guy studies him. “Fifty bucks.”

“What? Fifty…”

“And that’s only if. If… you take a bath, and shampoo the lice outta your hair first.”

“Lice?” No longer smiling now.

“See, we don’t do hippies in here, pal. Now beat it!”

The kid looked around the shop. At the grinning old men. At uncomfortable me.  And then back at the barber. The kid’s got a pretty good glare going himself now. “Jesus Christ. I just wanted to get a fucking…  Hippie!? Alright then! Fuck YOU!”

He turns on his heel, yanks the door open, and storms back out into the snow, purposely leaving the door open. Open wide.

I’m feeling bad for the kid. But I realize too that where the old fellas are coming from is their definition of patriotism. It leaves me feeling uneasy. Kinda confused. I mean, my dad flew missions in a B-29 during World War II and, man, I’m super-proud of him. And you know… I’m only a sophomore, but I’ve been entertaining some thoughts about perhaps enlisting myself, in the Air Force after college.

But this whole thing just leaves me feeling… not knowing what to think.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So anyway, the song and lyrics I’ve got waiting for you below I feel skillfully and emotionally capture the conflict I came to know back then as the long hairs vs. the hard hats. And there’s a recurring single line in the lyrics that pretty much kinda sums up my little barbershop example in a nutshell:

“There’s something burning somewhere.”

Please. Take a listen and follow along. I believe you will find it a powerful experience. I know I always do…

Home



“LOOKIN’ FOR THE OLD BLUE OX…”

You know who I envy in this life? Let me tell you. The Songwriters. And yes, I just capitalized the word Songwriters because I hold them in such high esteem. But at the same time, who I don’t envy so much are the so-called ‘songwriters’ (lower case ‘s‘). I’m talkin’ those ‘songwriters’ who are in it solely (and often soullessly) for the money and quick fame. See, I sorta need to feel the signature of the writers’ souls along with their unique talents in their offerings. Not that I can blame anybody for just wanting to earn a living. You know, live and let live. I just don’t find myself envying anybody who writes crap, even crap that sells big. That’s all.

Take the Beatles. The Beatles began as songwriters (small ‘s‘), not Songwriters. In my humble opinion. Oh, and I’m the first to admit, they became Songwriters Extraordinaire. “Eleanor Rigby.” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” “A Day in the Life.” “Being for the Benefit of Mister Kite.” “In My Life.” Because hey, please know I grew to love the Beatles.

But what an overwhelming disappointment it was when the very the first song I heard by them in November of ’63 was “I Want to Hod Your Hand.” I mean, really, just how creative are these lyrics?

Oh yeah, I’ll tell you something,
I think you’ll understand,
Then I’ll say that something,
I wanna hold your hand,
I wanna hold your hand,
I wanna hold your hand.

Oh please say to me
You’ll let me be your man,
And please say to me,
You’ll let me hold your hand,
Now let me hold your hand,
I wanna hold your hand.

And when I touch you
I feel happy inside,
It’s such a feeling
That my love I can’t hide,
I can’t hide, I can’t hide.

Yeah, you got that something,
I think you’ll understand,
When I feel that something,
I wanna hold your hand,
I wanna hold your hand,
I wanna hold your hand.

And when I touch you
I feel happy inside,
It’s such a feeling
That my love I can’t hide,
I can’t hide, I can’t hide.

Yeah, you got that something,
I think you’ll understand,
When I feel that something,
I wanna hold your hand,
I wanna hold your hand,
I wanna hold your hand.

“Nuff said.

In my life, (now there’s a real Beatles’ song) I’ve tried my hand at poetry. I was inspired by the so many poets and poems I’d fallen in love with. But, to become a poet, you pretty much have to start out at the bottom, don’t you.

So I was clerking at the local library, when this sweet little old lady began pestering me every other week to join her poetry writers group. And yeah, sure, I’d been struggling with… ‘my poetry’ for a long while, but only privately. I had no self-confidence. I had never shared any of it. The thought of sharing felt… risky.

But one day I just threw in the towel, gave in to her persistence, and said “OK, OK OK!” I showed up with a very humble poem. But a safe (for me) poem. And by safe, I mean I felt it was a somewhat fairly clever little thing I’d concocted… but mostly because it rhymed. Because I just for some reason assumed that all these oldsters would exclusively be into the rhyming poems. OK me, I’d moved pretty much exclusively into free verse by then, but… I mean,hey, I didn’t know who the hell these old buzzards were, circled around the library table like a séance. And I definitely didn’t want to risk having one I really cared about getting shot down.

And then, finally: it was my turn to read. So OK, I cleared my throat three or four times; took, and held, the required deep breath; and then nervously proceded headlong to read what I’d brought.

When done, I looked up. Everyone was silently looking at me, and some were nodding, which made me sigh in relief. But then that little old poetry mistress who ran the group locked onto me with her suddenly mischievous, beady little eyes and said, “Why, that’s… doggerel,” followed by “and doggerel is poetry written by dogs!“

To my chagrin and terror, everybody burst out laughing!

Turned out, this lady had pulled the same stunt on everybody who ever joined the group. It was sort of a first-day initiation of hers. And (who woulda thunk it?) after a little period of adjustment, it turned out that this lady and I were destined to become a great lifelong friends. I even dedicated my first full-length memoir to Anne Kucera.

But she was right, wasn’t she. So much so-called ‘poetry’ really is doggerel. And if I had known this poetry-written-by-dogs expression back in 1963, that’s exactly how I would’ve assessed the Beatles’ “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” And yes, sure, I got it that that particular little ditty sounded pretty lively and all, and I noted that sure, all the girls were doing the Elvis thing, screaming and fainting, so they were definitely a phenom, but… I mean, just look at those pathetic lyrics. I’m sorry, but the Beatles began as doggerel songwriters (lower case s). Case closed.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Now… here we go. And OK… I admit it. I’m still on my juke box kick. So here comes a song. Hey, I can’t help it. I’m really just very passionate about the special singer/songwriter music I’ve meticulously collected over my lifetime because… well, because of the effects that music has had, and still has, on me. So I’m not going to apologize for wanting, actually needing, to share some of the best of it.

And right now, please trust me– I have a songwriter, and a song of his, in mind that I want to share with you, hoping you’ll be willing to give it a shot. But first, allow me to refer you back to the song, “Christmas in the Trenches,” featured in one of my recent posts titled “A Single Song for All Humanity.” The lyrics of that song tell of something big and important, something unusual and truthful and heartfelt… something well worth experiencing. Which is what I look for in the music I collect. And I’d be willing to bet real money that those of you who did listen to “Christmas in the Trenches” were also pretty powerfully moved. As I was. Because lyrics like those in that piece are a humane and generous gift… to you, to all of us, from a real bona fide (capital ‘S‘) Songwriter. A rare gift.

However, today’s gift isn’t about some big and important 3-day event that has established its place in the annals of world history. Rather it’s about a seemingly small five-minute encounter. And it’s not really about the encounter per se as much as it is about what this little, universal encounter reveals.

Today’s gift is a unique, poignant piece, composed by one of the more talented singer/songwriters catalogued in my vast juke box: the international singer/songwriter David Mallett from Sebec, Maine. Dave’s compositions have been recorded by a number of famous recording artists from John Denver, Kathy Mattea, Emmylou Harris, to Arlo Guthrie. You’ll likely know him from his signature song, “The Garden Song,” (a.k.a. “Inch by Inch”) popularized and sung (in a number of languages) throughout the world.

But he’s composed so many other long-time perrenial favorites as well, such as “Fire,” commemorating the Mallett family’s long ago loss of their homestead in a calamitous conflagration; and then of course “The Ballad of the Saint Anne’s Reel,” which has been happily adopted as the official folk anthem of Prince Edward Island and the surrounding Maritimes provinces of Canada.

Famous American singer/songwriter David Mallett

Now, I gotta admit this one comes with a title that’s a little bit unexpected, one that might raise the eyebrows of someone scanning the playlist of songs on Dave’s The Artist in Me CD for the first time. It’s titled “The Old Blue Ox.” However (much needed spoiler alert here) the title is definitely not referencing the famous, fictional tall tale of Paul Bunyan and Babe, the Big Blue Ox, which is more than likely the only “blue ox” most Americans would be familiar with. And like me, you may never have realized that there really is such a thing as a ‘blue ox.’ I mean, I had to look it up for myself: “Blue Ox: a blue brindle cow or ox which is usually the result of a roan Shorthorn which is bred to a black and white Holstein.”

OK. Yeah. I mean, Who knew?

Well, the apparent answer to that is… farmers (and alas, no farmer, me). But yes, farmers are very likely to know of this breed.

The Blue Ox

OK: time to relax. So breathe… and now lean back to get comfy in your chair and try to imagine you’ve just been puttering about your house for the afternoon, a house situated in a rural part of Maine’s farmlands, when suddenly there comes a knock at your door. You open it to find… on your doorstep… one sad, confused, little old gentleman leaning on his cane…

"THE OLD BLUE OX"

"Good afternoon, I'm lookin' for
the old blue ox," he said,

And he said, "I don't believe it,
but I heard my father's dead.

And just where is the Curtis place?
My God how things have changed!"

He was a little ol' man, he was almost blind,
and he was walkin' with a cane.
 
"Now I know this is the place,
because I climbed the Severance Hill,

I'd know that hill in a hundred years,
and how her rule and will."

"Earl Parkman moved away," I said, 
"Will Green, he died you know,

And Willis Pratt has grown a man,
and gone on years ago."
 
Now our conversation was quite short,
five minutes at the most,

But he stood before me like a boy,
and conjured up the ghosts

Of friends and kin folk from an older,
and a slower time,

How fifty years, disappeared 
like minutes in his mind.
 
"The blue ox was gone the day I left,
been gone a week or so,

And I've come around to fetch him home,
cause I always did you know.

Pa will be glad." He started off,
and I stood and watched him go,

Down the way to yesterday 
lookin' hard and lookin' slow.
 
Now apple trees just wither,
and barns grow old and fall,

And ancient lady's sit in rockin'
chairs, wrapped in their shawls.

But this old fella does the things,
the things he has to do,

He's lookin' for his past,
he might stop and talk to you.

"Good afternoon, I'm lookin' for
the old blue ox," he said,

He said, "I don't believe it,
but I heard my father's dead.

And just where is the Curtis place?
My God how things have changed."

He was a little ol' man he was almost blind
and he was walkin' with a cane.

What this song does is deliver a bittersweet little punch to my heart, leaving me with a warm and kind of teary-eyed smile every time I listen to it. So no, it’s not exactly a happy song, although the vocals and the jaunty instrumental accompaniment combine to nearly disguise it as such. But yeah… I really love this one.

I love the artful way it’s written. Because in no more than a handful of lyrics, it hands us such an easy-to-grasp foreshadowing of a reality that very likely awaits us, but one we seldom consciously imagine will ever touch us: that some time in the near or far future, maybe right in the middle of us just happily going about our lives, with everything moving pretty much right along all hunky-dory… it’ll eventually come. Very much like a sudden and unexpected knock at the door:

Somebody we know and probably care about, and maybe even love and depend on, will have just been diagnosed with the reality of dementia. Because shit happens…

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Our extended family has owned a lake-front cottage since the 1940’s, the ownership of which has been passed down within the family from generation to generation. One sunny, blue-sky, summer afternoon back fifteen years or so, a number of us were lounging out on the cottage’s porch that overlooks the lake. And all of a sudden my mom said something that didn’t seem very logical at all. “What a beautiful lake this is. It must have a name. So, what’s the name of this lake?”

Suddenly that had us all sitting up a little straighter in our chairs. And after a short pause, someone said the obvious. “Why… Sebec Lake, of course. You know that, Violet. Sebec Lake.”

My mom thought about that and then simply said, “Oh.” But then, after a lengthy pause, she spoke again. “And this is such a nice camp.”

“Yes. It is,” we all agreed.

“So… whose camp is this? Who owns it?”

That question brought a much longer and more uncomfortable silence to the porch gathering, as we all looked to one another in… well, astonishment. Then Dad, flummoxed and nervous, looked her right in the eye and said sternly, “Why, you do, Violet. This is your camp. You own it!”

“What… me?” she laughed in disbelief. “Me? I own it…? Oh no, I don’t think so. How could that be?”

And that was that. Our ‘knock at the door.’ And it was unnerving. Frightful. Oh I mean, sure, looking back, there’d been signs. Of course there had. Road bumps had been coming up in conversations quite a lot with her actually, which we’d find frustrating, but... still… we’d just pooh-pooh them into the background, log them under the category of ‘just natural aging,’ just a little forgetfulness here and there which can be expected.

But… that was our knock at the door. The end of any more hopeful denial.

It took years for her dementia to play out in our lives. Years to go from that first cottage-porch incident to the point of her often confusing our dad, her husband, with her long-dead father. To the point of her packing up her little suitcase at home most nights, parking it right by the front door, and continually asking us when was somebody, anybody, ever going to get around to taking her home, to ‘her house’ so she could go to bed? But once in a while there’d be little periods of time when the old, real Violet would just pop right back in among us. Of course this was all devastating, long past the time we finally had to move her into the local nursing home and right up until the day passed.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Now I swear I certainly did not decide to write about this topic to depress anybody, and I sincerely hope I haven’t done that. It’s simply that I treasure my collection of unique and creative singer/songwriter recordings so much that I’m kinda driven to share them, because to me they’ve always been such an important lifeline to my inner peace, comfort, sanity, and even knowledge. Because my God, they cover just about all genres. Humor and comedy. Tragedy. Romance. Novelty. Philosophy. Nostalgia. Politics. Protest. Spoken word. History. You name it. And I can’t help feeling that the experience of them is just way too valuable a commodity for me alone to greedily keep, them just languishing here on the dusty CD shelves in my little apartment and in my PC’s digital ‘jukebox vaults.’ They need to be shared. And I feel a real need to put them out there for you, too, to discover.

Yeah. I know. How very Don Quixote of me, right?

But I find the talent and craft of these songwriters irresistable. I mean, just take another look at this one, “The Old Blue Ox.” Look at the dialogue between the little old man and the narrator:

“Now our conversation was quite short,
five minutes at the most,
But he stood before me like a boy,
and conjured up the ghosts
Of friends and kin folk from an older,
and a slower time,
How fifty years, disappeared
like minutes in his mind.”

Yes, clinically it’s just one man conversing with some unfortunate old fella locked in the grip of his dementia, but the tiny encounter is painted within these lyrics with an almost paranormal feel about it. Like one of them is a ghost… or… like they’re both two time-travelers, each ensconsed in his own time-period-‘reality,’ but somehow briefly communicating with one another straight through a… wormhole maybe that has suddenly pierced the nexus of their two worlds?

How spooky is that! And how intriguing…

But that’s what it was like sometimes, talking to my mom. I soon came to understand very well that she was speaking to me from a long-dead world of sepia-toned, black-and-white photographs and the living ghosts of her brothers and sister. And I was speaking to her from a magical science-ficton world of cell phones, iPads, and remote controls lying around all over the living room furniture. How amazing.

But hey, I’m guess beginning to sound like the cursed old seafarer in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” aren’t I. (Can’t shut up.) So let me just sum up with a single statement regarding not only all of the (in my opinion) crème de la crème lyricists I keep in my collection, but especially this particular Dave Mallett’s song, “The Old Blue Ox”:

This song transcends the simple term ‘song’; what it is, actually, is a slice of pure Literature suitable for inclusion in any American literary anthology.

So that’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

And now I’ll end with some scribbling I penned years ago, having been inspired by “The Old Blue Ox.” Thanks for reading.

“Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”

You took it for granted…

just assumed Memory Lane

would forever remain

your Yellow Brick Road…

overlooking, way back then,

those sleepy seeds borne

on the winds of time

sewing themselves

between the cobblestones, and then

all those little spearheads–

the crabgrass, unsheathing itself

underfoot… choking the undergrowth of

Memory Lane in an overgrowth primeval–

and now you’ve gone missing in the outback

of your own hardening cerebral arteries…  

all your Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs

disappearing like hourglass-sand

down the little rabbit holes,

leaving you needing a damn macheté

to hack your way in circles

through the foliage of

your own life’s back pages…

unable to find the forest

hiding in your trees

home

ON PEGGY LEE, ONE OLD SONG, & ME

I fell in love with Peggy Lee in 1955. It was love at first sight. She was a tall, blonde bombshell. Thirty-five years old.

Me, I was nine. And short for my age.

Your humble author, Tom Lyford (1946–20??)

Some kids get a crush on a teacher. Never happened to me though. Why? Because all my teachers up to that point were wrinkly, mean, old bats who didn’t even like kids, especially boys!

So… I got a crush on sex symbol instead.

And so how did I ‘meet’ the famous Ms. Lee? Well, I’d seen the animated Walt Disney movie The Lady and the Tramp earlier that year. Of course, I had no idea who Peggy Lee even was, let alone that she’d played some part in that film’s production.

However, one night a couple months later, The Wonderful World of Disney aired a half-hour documentary on the making of that movie. And part of that program focused on the producing of that film’s soundtrack, with clips showing some of the behind-the-scenes work going on in the sound studio.

And there she was.

Now see, in the movie there are a pair of villainous, female Siamese cats named Si and Am. And together they sing this catchy little duet called “We Are Siamese, If You Please.” I was fascinated!

And I learned from the documentary that both of their voices were recorded by the same person: one Peggy Lee. And me being only nine, and it being way back in the mid-fifties when just about nobody had a clue about anything technological, I was confused as to how she could possibly have sung both of those voices at the same time! I mean, one person, yet two harmonizing voices? At the same time?

That she could do that seemed… magical… so (along with the fact that she was obviously some beautiful fairytale princess) she beat out Roy Rogers’ wife, Dale Evans, and Superman’s Lois Lane in the pageant of my current, preadolescent heart throbs.

Very soon after, I went to work pestering my parents to buy me the set of little, yellow, plastic, 78 rpm Disney records featuring the music from The Lady and the Tramp. And they’d succumbed. Then I practically wore out the single with Ms. Lee singing “We are Siamese.”

Plus… I used to think about her a lot of the time. I mean a lot of the time. Like I said, I had a crush.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

OK. So, time went by, as it always does. Well, only a year, actually. And then, suddenly, there she was again in my life. Only this time as a disembodied voice coming over the radio! And it wasn’t some silly little ditty she was crooning this time. No sir!

By 1956, I’d become quite the little radio head. Mom and Dad had got me this small blue AM radio, and that had become my lifeline to the phantom Boy Friend-and-Girl Friend World that I was aspiring to enter. And with an extension cord, I’d snaked it right in under my bed, so at night I only had to lean down over the bedside and work the magic of the dial. So many stations. So many pop love songs. And yeah, I was learning fast that… there was a lot to BE learned by paying close attention to what the popular artists were actually crooning about in between the lines of the lyrics.

Now unfortunately Mom harbored some very repressive holdover-tendancies from her early, churchy, holy-roller-days’-upbringing, especially where the subject of ‘the birds and the bees‘ were concerned. So that meant that there were often fragments of mysterious (to me) conversations I’d overhear from the big people talking in the next room, say– topics that I quickly learned I hadn’t better show any interest in finding out about, not if I knew what was good for me.

For instance, one day I stopped the family dinner-table chitchat cold in its tracks by just innocently asking, right in front of God and everybody, “Uhhmmm, hey, what’s sex, anyway?” Man oh man, did I ever get rousted right out of my chair and summarily dragged straight into my room! “You know very well what it is!” she accused, just before slamming my door and leaving me, the new prison inmate, lost and confused… and contemplating, I do? I already know what it IS? How can I already know what it is when…I don’t KNOW what it is?

But radio broadcasts? They didn’t give one rat’s patooty about absolute censorship, at least like Mom did. Oh it was still the repressive 50’s and all so, yeah, they didn’t actually spell everything right out or anything (like that), but there were hints all through the music everywhere. So yes, you could get… hints… and then your job was to try your darndest to imagine what they must be singing about in between those lyrics’ lines…

It was like trying to crack a secret code. But– enquiring minds needed to know. At least mine did. So that was a mission I was usually on.

So one day I bought Johnny Otis’s 1958 hit 45, “Willie Does the Hand Jive.” And when Mom first heard me playing it, she got as prickly as some old wet hen. She just assumed it just had to be referring to something deliciously naughty. (Turns out it really wasn’t though.)

“I know a cat named Way Out Willie…

Got a cool little chick named Rocking Millie…

He can walk and stroll and Susie-Q

And do that crazy hand-jive too…

Hand jive! Hand jive! Hand jive…

Doin’ that crazy hand jive!”

“Don’t think I don’t know what that’s about!” she growled.

“What?! Jeez, Ma! I think it’s just some new dance they’re doing!”

She definitely wasn’t crazy about that song! Which meant I really liked it, even though I didn’t have clue #1 about what the hand jive might even look like. But, since any message it contained (which it actually didn’t) appeared too crafty for even her to figure out or put her finger on (i.e., it didn’t contain any blatant “blaspheming” like, you know, the actual word “SEX”), her argument was too weak to even get off the ground. So I got to keep that 45.

But you can see what I was up against…

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So one day in the steamy summer of ‘1958, Peggy Lee’s signature new siren song came a-wafting right over the old WABI AM airwaves. Yes, I’m talking about that sweaty, hypnotic, little finger-snapping number. You know the one: Fever.” And boy, did I ever do a double-take first time I heard that song! (Actually I pretty much continued doing double-takes every time I heard it after that.) And whenever that song played on the radio (which was just about every hour on every station across America!), I’d just find myself ever-so-slowly swaying back and forth in time to its slow rhythm. I couldn’t help it. It just seemed to happen on its own. The song had me in its thrall every time.

And oh, those were some pretty intriguing lyrics for a ten-year old little monk locked in his monastery cell, like I was. And for the first time in my little life, I was listening to a song that projected… atmosphere! I mean “Fever” took me somewhere. Somewhere else. Somewhere dark and delicious and private. Somewhere (I had no doubt) that I wasn’t supposed to be. But somewhere I perversely… liked.

I listened to that song over and over and over. And my inquisitive, prurient little mind worked tirelessly on decoding its coded secrets.

“They give you fever… when you kiss them
Fever if you live and learn…
Fever! Till you sizzle!
And what a lovely way to burn...”

My brain talking to me: Fever? When you kiss them? Fever if you live and learn…? Sizzle…? Oh please… let me ‘live and learn’ and ‘sizzle!‘ But… BURN…? In what way could burning ever be… lovely? I sorta wanted to find out, you know? And… would I ever… catch that particular “fever’?

(I really kinda hoped I would.)

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

And then fourteen more years passed. And in 1969, Peggy Lee recorded another blockbuster. And just like “Fever,” this one too locked right onto me and wouldn’t let go. But by then I was a college senior, and the attraction had nothing to do with a physical or romantic crush. This time, oddly, it was purely… philosophical.

It was a dark song titled, “Is That All There Is?” Please listen and follow along:

I remember when I was a little girl
Our house caught on fire
I’ll never forget the look on my father’s face
As he gathered me up in his arms and
Raced through the burning building out to the pavement
And I stood there shivering in my pajamas and
Watched the whole world go up in flames
And when it was all over, I said to myself
“Is that all there is to a fire”

Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is, my friends
Then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is

And when I was twelve years old
My daddy took me to the circus
“The Greatest Show on Earth”
There were clowns and elephants and dancing bears
And a beautiful lady in pink tights flew high above our heads
And as I sat there watching
I had the feeling that something was missing
I don’t know what
But when it was all over, I said to myself
“Is that all there is to the circus?”

Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is, my friends
Then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is

And then I fell in love
With the most wonderful boy in the world
We’d take long walks down by the river
Or just sit for hours gazing into each other’s eyes
We were so very much in love
And then one day, he went away
And I thought I’d die, but I didn’t
And when I didn’t, I said to myself
“Is that all there is to love?”

Is that all there is
Is that all there is
If that’s all there is, my friends
Then let’s keep…

I know what you must be saying to yourselves
“If that’s the way she feels about it
Why doesn’t she just end it all?”
Oh, no, not me
I’m not ready for that final disappointment
‘Cause I know just as well as I’m standing here talking to you
That when that final moment comes and I’m breathing my last breath
I’ll be saying to myself…

Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is, my friends
Then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all… there is…

So, when I first listened to this song, I remember thinking, Wow! Your house burns down around you and you’re, what, not even impressed?

I could understand not being enthusiastic about a circus, because, personally, I wasn’t much of a fan of those things anyway.

But, Jeez! Your lover drops you and moves away? I couldn’t believe that anyone could just blow off that pain. I mean, I’d had that experience. And it had been a killer.

And then, to top it off, guessing that your own suicide just might be… yeah, right, too boring to even bother with? I mean, she actually laughed that off in the song. How jaded was she?

But then again, after listening to it over and over (which I did) and dwelling on it… well, after a while, I sort of got it. I could see how for some people that could be possible. Because looking within, I realized that if I were honest with myself (which I hardly ever was) well, it wasn’t as if I wasn’t exactly unfamiliar with depression, was it. I mean, I’d harbored some pretty dark thoughts myself, hadn’t I. And written some very dark and depressed poetry as a result. And in fact, philosophically I was really no stranger to the sense of meaninglessness in the world I saw myself living in.

So for me, the effect of this song was actually like merely slipping two or three extra shots of cappuccino into my mug of already pretty-rugged black coffee. And small wonder. Turned out the song was inspired by, and directly based on, a famous existential short story titled “Disillusionment,” written in 1896 by the famous existential philosopher Thomas Mann (1875-1955)– a man for whom Shakespeare’s quotation, “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” pretty much summed up his take on life.

And me at that time? I was already (in my angry-young-college-man-youth-days) a budding little existentialist myself. Partly, I admit, because I was young and callow, and because existentialism was in vogue at that time with the college set, and like a little kid in a candy shop I guess I just wanted to try everything going. But then it had really caught on. Because my existentialism had actually gotten its first jump-start when I was a freshman back in ’64. I had enjoyed a well-acted performance of the play, “No Exit,” by the even more famous existentialist, Jean Paul Sartre. And alas, for me “No Exit” was a gateway drug.

I suddenly couldn’t get my sweaty little hands on enough Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre after that. And there’s an atheistic side of Existentialism, quite evident in “Is That All There Is?” So of course I flirted with atheism, but that outlook never really took complete root in my life, though I give it credit for having tried. But throughout the rest of college and for a fairly long while after that, I was just one more dark, little, agnostic, run-of-the-mill, wannabe-card-carrying “existentialist.”

Today at 77, I yam what I yam. I’m what I’ve eaten, what I’ve read, what I’ve watched, what I’ve listened to, and… the sum-total of everything I’ve ever experienced. And those old experiences? Man oh man, didn’t they just keep on barreling down the pike at me like cars and trucks the opposite lane, imperceptibly chipping away, nickel and dime-ing the reshaping of my overall personality and psyche a day at a time.

Today, each little chip is just a faded, barely-remembered memory-scar in my rearview mirror.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So yeah, looking back it was hardly any biggie that I just happened to catch The Lady and the Tramp, and then discover that documentary with Peggy overdubbing her voice-overs in the sound studio.

It’s just something that happened. Something that managed to get my attention when I was at a very impressionable age. And… inadvertently pinned the soon-to-become-influential Ms. Lee on my map.

And then as things do, one thing (my little Peggy Lee crush) led to another little thing (my bigger little Peggy Lee fever) and Hey, Presto! my sexual awareness got a precocious little jump-start. Which eventually did lead me down the road to…

Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is, my friends
Then let’s keep…

… and then, perhaps, on to my own, honorary, self-awarded, red-neck ‘PHD’ in ‘Philosophy.’

In the meantime, there have been busloads of other regular people and other celebrity artists rolling down my highway as well. And some of the latter and their works have sort of saved my ‘sanity’ from time to time. Looking back at the lowest points of the depression in my life and remembering how the arts and the artists have unwittingly served me as my phantom medical staff, I’ve often said that I’ve had to rely on ‘the kindness of strangers’…on the virtual anesthesia of the Dead Poets and Living Artists Society… on the spiritual transfusions of the Leroi Jonses, the Kurt Vonneguts, the Leonard Cohens, Janis Joplins & Lawrence Ferlinghettis and all those brothers and sisters of mercy moonlighting as my tireless, albeit unwitting, personal psychiatric staff, keeping me on spiritual ‘life’ support, and dosing me with their daily regimens of music, cinema, fiction, & poetry…“

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

OK. All that aside, I’ve always really loved “Is That All There Is?” and I always will.

But on another note, a radically different and almost completely unrelated note, I can’t help but say that there is something… funny about how this song secured its foothold in the top-100 charts (I’m talking ‘odd-funny’ here, not ‘funny-funny’). And it’s this:

I mean, c’mon, way back in that decade where most of the other pop-recording-singer/songwriters were dreaming up successful pap like “Sugar, Sugar,” “The Yellow Polka-dot Bikini” and “Who Wears Short Shorts”??? Like who back then … who in their right mind… would ever even think to come up with a dark, existential, and atheistic piece like “Is That All There Is?” and then push it as a candidate for a top-40 hit song?

I mean, this song is from far out in left field, isn’t it? Like… you can’t dance to it. Well… I guess you could waltz to it, if you really tried. There is an orchestra in the background. But it’s mostly a spoken-word ‘song.’

And yet… a hit song it became. It actually peaked at #11 on the pop charts, which means at one time or another it was edging out the likes of its very strange bedfellows, Tony Joe White’s “Polk Salad Annie” and “Gitarzan” by Ray Stevens. And surprising as this might be, Peggy Lee and her “Is That All There Is?” took the Grammy in 1970 for Best Contemporary Female Vocal Performance, beating out Helen Reddy, Carole King, and Dionne Warwick.

I mean, according to Google, its success was reportedly “even a surprise for Capitol Records who, despite publishing it, predicted the song was too odd and esoteric to ever make it as a hit.”

So I’m asking rhetorically, Who woulda thunk it?? Besides me, I mean. Because… hey, I LOVE the song. It’s been a life-long favorite.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

And now here you are, asking, “Is that… all there is…?”

Yep.

That’s it.

That’s all there is.

home

A SINGLE SONG FOR ALL HUMANITY

When it comes to me and music, basically I’m a lyrics man. Of course I do love a good melody and I appeciate a skilled and creative arrangement, but my favorite music primarily comes from the recordings of talented singer-songwriters (with the emphasis on songwriters) like Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt, a duo I saw in concert out in Albuquerque years ago; Harry Chapin; Bill Morrissey; Tracy Chapman; David Mallett; Randy Newman; Kate Campbell; Greg Brown; Mary Chapin Carpenter; Arlo Guthrie, Bob Dylan; etc. [and yes, I do live in the past]).

And in the same way I can’t stand watching a poorly scripted movie (where you know fifteen minutes into it what the ending will be, and which feels like some flick you’ve seen a dozen times before), I tend to embrace songs whose lyrics are seriously creative  and cleverly written. Lyrics that wake me up and surprise me with their uniqueness, lyrics that take me places either where I have never been before or places I have been but are described in such more perfect ways than I ever could.

Along with this, I discovered long ago that I’m a romantic at heart where lyrics are concerned. And no, I’m not talking about a fondness for boy-meets-girls romances. It’s just that what I hope to find are lyrics that are powerful in some way, lyrics that tell a story or describe a situation that will make me deeply feel something. I want to be punched in the breadbasket and heart by the lyrics.

That being said, the story told in the following narrative ballad is not fiction. It’s inspired by an actual historical event that went down on Christmas Day, 1914, during World War I. You’ve probably read about the senseless and inhumane carnage of the trench warfare that both the British and the Germans endured on a daily basis for so long. Or perhaps, like me, you may have read one or more of the handful of non-fiction books that cover this incredible event. And actually you may, in fact, have already experienced these lyrics before, as the song is a well-known ballad.

After the song plays, I will share a few additional details that I’ve garnered from historical accounts of that unimaginable day (which actually ended up being more like two-and-a-half days) .

The song is titled “Christmas in the Trenches” and was written and recorded by singer/songwriter John McCutcheon circa 1984.

So, are your emotional seatbelts fastened securely?

“CHRISTMAS IN THE TRENCHES”

My name is Francis Tolliver. I come from Liverpool
Two years ago the war was waiting for me after school
To Belgium and to Flanders, to Germany to here
I fought for King and country I love dear

It was Christmas in the trenches where the frost so bitter hung
The frozen field of France were still, no Christmas song was sung
Our families back in England were toasting us that day
Their brave and glorious lads so far away

I was lyin’ with my mess-mates on the cold and rocky ground
When across the lines of battle came a most peculiar sound
Says I “Now listen up me boys”, each soldier strained to hear
As one young German voice sang out so clear

“He’s singin’ bloody well you know”, my partner says to me
Soon one by one each German voice joined in in harmony
The cannons rested silent. The gas cloud rolled no more
As Christmas brought us respite from the war

As soon as they were finished, a reverent pause was spent
‘God rest ye merry, gentlemen’ struck up some lads from Kent
The next they sang was ‘Stille Nacht”. “Tis ‘Silent Night'” says I
And in two tongues one song filled up that sky

“There’s someone comin’ towards us,” the front-line sentry cried
All sights were fixed on one lone figure trudging from their side
His truce flag, like a Christmas star, shone on that plain so bright
As he bravely strode, unarmed, into the night

Then one by one on either side walked into no-mans-land
With neither gun nor bayonet we met there hand to hand
We shared some secret brandy and wished each other well
And in a flare-lit soccer game we gave ’em hell


We traded chocolates, cigarettes and photgraphs from home
These sons and fathers far away from families of their own
Young Sanders played his squeeze box and they had a violin
This curious and unlikely band of men

Soon daylight stole upon us and France was France once more
With sad farewells we each began to settle back to war
But the question haunted every heart that lived that wonderous night
“Whose family have I fixed within my sights?”

It was Christmas in the trenches where the frost so bitter hung
The frozen fields of France were warmed as songs of peace were sung
For the walls they’d kept between us to exact the work of war
Had been crumbled and were gone for ever more

My name is Francis Tolliver. In Liverpool I dwell
Each Christmas come since World War One I’ve learned its lessons well
That the ones who call the shots won’t be among the dead and lame
And on each end of the rifle we’re the same

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I can barely imagine the sheer human need and relief that the combatants on either side felt when they had tentatively stepped across the barbed wire barriers and into each other’s camps only to find… regular blokes just like themselves! And so both sides did share around their cigarettes and chocolates and souvenirs. And then of course… soccer! Wouldn’t that be a nice way to wage war? With a soccer match?

But the thing that delightfully still surprises me from my reading is the following unbelievable scenario:

While the cats are away, the mice will play. Both war parties (consisting of the privates, corporals, and sergeants) had been virtually left to themselves by their majors and colonels for hours at a time that day, leaving the ‘grunts’ to fight it out as best they could for just a while on their own. I mean, hey, it was Christmas. So it’s pretty likely the superiors were snug and safe, somewhere well enough behind the respective enemy lines, and drinking up their Christmas toasts to one another. Because rank does have its privileges.

But here’s the truth of it: all of the soldiers on both sides, in the name of the Christmas spirit, had deserted their posts! The soldiers on both sides had just committed treason, a crime punishable by the firing squad! But… they had done it anyway because… well, it just seemed like the thing to do. At the time. I guess you just had to have been there. And more importantly, because war is senselss and stupid. And life is precious. And… OK, sure, because the cats were away.

But of course any time “the cats are away,” there’s a risk that the cats might just come back! And guess what! Their superior officers did come back. They came back from time to time to inspect their troops, measure any progress or lack of it, to see how their trench fortifications were holding up, and maybe even to count casualties.

And just what did these superior officers on either side discover?

Absolutely… nothing. Everything… as usual. And why?

(Now, I know this is going to sound like a poorly written, silly episode of HOGAN’S HEROES, but…)

Because the grunts on both sides had posted lookouts just for their officers returning. And when the alarm sounded, alerting them that officers were incoming (!), why the men just scampered right back behind their sandbagged posts like good little boys, manned their rifles and machine guns once again, and opened fire on one another! Funny thing was though, their respective ‘aims’ ‘seem’ to have gotten so bad all of a sudden that they apparently couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn.

No casualties.

But it LOOKED good. It was theater. And then of course, they all scampered righ back to their little yuletide party after the brass had departed once again.

It. Just. Doesn’t. Seem. Possible…

Does it.

You know in John McCutcheon’s introduction in the above video, I honestly just love his sweet anecdote of that little bevy of ex-German soldiers who “were THERE seventy-five years before,” showing up at John McCutcheon’s concerts to hear ‘their‘ story… being validated… in his song.

Just one of the many books that have covered this most unique military occuerence in the history of the Twentieth Century

What follows below was taken from a page posted on this url: https://blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/2020/12/good-will-toward-men-the-great-wars-christmas-truce/

The fighting in Europe had been growing for almost five months when Pope Benedict tried to arrange a truce between nations in early December 1914 for Christmas. But his efforts failed when Russia declined the truce. The notorious trenches of World War I were filled with weary, cold soldiers. But along the British and German lines, a sudden rise of the Christmas Spirit among the soldiers created a phenomenon that wasn’t seen for the rest of the war—the soldiers decided not to fight on Christmas. Stories of this unofficial Christmas Truce were published in newspapers around the world.*

The Chicago Herald printed part of a letter from a British soldier describing what took place. “On Christmas eve we were shouting across ‘Merry Christmas!’ The Germans shouted, ‘Don’t shoot till New Year’s day!’ Christmas morning the weather was foggy and there was no firing. We started wandering over toward the German lines. When the mist cleared we saw the Germans doing the same thing.”

Climbing from their trenches onto the battle-scarred “no man’s land,” British and German soldiers shook hands, swapped cigarettes and jokes, and even played football. “We all have wives and children…we’re just the same kind of men as you are,” one German said.

Gifts were exchanged between soldiers: pies, wine, cigars and cigarettes, chocolates, pictures, newspapers. Whatever they had with them in the trenches. Some even exchanged names and addresses to reconnect after the war! “We exchanged souvenirs; I got a German ribbon and photo of the Crown Prince of Bavaria. The Germans opposite us were awfully decent fellows—Saxons, intelligent, respectable-looking men. I had quite a decent talk with three or four and have two names and addresses in my notebook.” (New York Times, December 31, 1914, World War History: Newspaper Clippings 1914 to 1926.)

The day would be remembered and memorialized as a moment of peace during the long First World War. A day when soldiers put aside their orders and listened instead to their common decency and humanity. As one German soldier noted, “You are the same religion as we, and today is the day of peace.”

SIGH !

home

I, JUKE BOX (Please play me…)

People say you are what you eat. I say you’re what you consume (just my short way of saying you are what you eat, what you read, what you watch, what you listen to, and whatever you experience). Because anything and everything that crawls its way into, and gets processed by, your brain becomes a part of you, after which your outlook is never quite the same. Because the ever-growing sum-total of your experience both alters and continuously filters the way you perceive and understand the world you’re living in.

(The above wisdom , courtesy of my vast and venerable 77-years of life experience on the planet, and… you’re welcome.)

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Now, here it is, let’s begin:

Music has always had its way with me. Has practically owned me. All my life. Not that that’s a bad thing. Probably because I was born into a household with the kitchen radio playing pretty much non-stop, its rhythms and vocals rocking me in the crib as soon as I was brought home from the maternity ward. Likely even before that, as I suspect I was grooving to WABI am’s top 40 while still in Mom’s buffered-but-not-totally-soundproofed womb.

And as a side-effect, I’ve developed this condition I call Juke Box Brain Syndrome (JBBS). It’s this often annoying (just ask my wife) tic whereby any random word or phrase spoken in any random conversation I’m having (with you or anyone else) just might act as a trigger, very much like a quarter dropping down the slot of some back-to-the-60’s juke box to play a song. But instead… it’s me. I am that ‘juke box.’ And I have no control over the trigger.

Typical Example: So we’re barreling down I-95, Phyllis driving and pushing 75 in a 70 zone like everybody else when suddenly some car rockets past us in the passing lane! Phyl exclaims, “Whoa! That guy’s gotta be doing 85, 90, 95 miles per hour, if not a hundred!” And then, click!

See, that’s the ‘quarter’ dropping into me, the ‘juke box’ and then, me, bowing to something like a post-hypnotic suggestion, I obediently sing (you could almost say ‘play’) a couple of lines from a song. Weirdly, the song this time turnd out to be from one of those little, yellow, plastic, 78 rpm records I had as a kid back in the 1950s. It’s titled, “The Taxi That Hurried”:

“This is the way he likes to drive, 70, 80, 95…

fast as fire engines go, compared to taxis they are slow.”

Now yes, it’s true, a couple of lines from Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” would have much been less annoying.

Screenshot

But see, it’s never up to me. I don’t consciously choose the songs. They just come of their own accord, from the song vault somewhere in my decades-long memory.

Later in the day, in some other conversation, some other word is apt to bring up a line or two from Leonard Cohen, Doris Day, The Beatles, Dolly Parton, Tom Jones, or ABBA. Who knows? It’s like I have Song-Lyrics Tourette Syndrome. And oh, I know… so many many songs. Songs from prctically all genres. (Well except for gospel. And rap. And hip hop. I guess I’m too old for hip hop and rap, being a curmudgeon now. You know– today, having been born in the mid-1940s is like having come from another planet.)

(By the way, I can’t help being hung up on wondering if I’m the only one on the planet suffering from JBBS. I mean, surely there must be others. So please. Let me know in the comments if you, or anyone else you know, also suffers from JBBS. I will appreciate it.)

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So my CD shelf and five computers and cellphone and brain are brimming, bursting at the seams with my lifelong music collection. But fortunately, this go-to jukebox in my head has saved my sanity so many times. The songs have acted as everything from my prozac (for when I’ve been down and depressed) to my much-needed comedy channel, laughter being the best medicine. My mental health owes so much it to this affliction.

And so what I would like to do here… no, what I’m going to do here…is share with you a few of the songs from my personal comedy vault that have often tickled my fancy and pasted a silly smile on my mug over the years, despite me.

So consider this a free, unrequested playlist offered from my JBB to your brain, a sample JBB pot pourri, if you will. I have no guarantee that you’ll listen in, (hope you do give it a shot) but if you do… you’ll know something about why I’ve adopted this first one, “I’m Different” by Randy Newman, as my personal theme song.

(I’m including the lyrics so you can follow along.)

“I’M DIFFERENT”

“I’m Different “

“I’M DIFFERENT”    by Randy Newman

I’m different and I don’t care who knows it
Somethin’ about me’s not the same, yeah
I’m different and that’s how it goes
Ain’t gonna play your goddamn game

Got a different way a walkin’

I got a different kind of smile

I got a different way a talkin’

drives the women kind of wild (… kind of wild)

He’s different and he don’t care who knows it
Somethin’ about him it’s not the same
He’s different and that’s how it goes
And he’s not gonna play your gosh darn game

I ain’t sayin’ I’m better than you are

But maybe I am

I only know that when I look in the mirror

I like the man (We like the man)

I’m different and I don’t care who knows it
Somethin’ about me’s not the same
I’m different and that’s how it goes
Ain’t gonna play your goddamn game

When I walk down the street in the mornin’
Blue birds are singin’ in the tall oak tree
They sing a little song for the people

And they sing a little song for me (La-la-la-la) (Thanks, fellas)

(He’s different and he don’t care who knows it
Somethin’ about him’s not the same
He’s different and that’s how it goes
Ain’t gonna play your gosh darn game)

I’m different and I don’t care who knows it
Somethin’ about me’s    not the same
I’m different and that’s how it goes
Ain’t gonna play no boss man’s game

I can’t tell you how many people over my lifetime have informed me that I’m “different.”And each and every time I heartily thank them.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Now, I spent 34 years here in this state of Maine enduring life as a career high school English teacher. And as you might imagine, getting and keeping the attention of the typical high school English student for 50 minutes every day is no easy task. It takes a magician, if you really want to know the truth. However, early on I discovered the music really doth have “charms to soothe the savage breast.” (-William Congreve [1670-1929] {whoever the hell he was}).

So now, here’s where being ‘different’ can pay off. Ever since my Mad Magazine-reading early childhood, I’ve been attracted to some pretty bizarre novelty songs, many of which came were played weekly on something called The Doctor Demento Show on the radio. I found Doctor D’s playlists a frickin’ gold mine for stuff that could really catch your typical high school student off guard.

And wheneveer I found myself bogged down trying to keep them awake while trying to teach what a metaphor is… Johnny Cash stepped right up to the plate:

“FLUSHED FROM THE BATHROOM OF YOUR HEART”

From the backdoor of your life you swept me out dear
In the bread line of your dreams I lost my place
At the table of your love I got the brush off
At the Indianapolis of your heart I lost the race

I’ve been washed down the sink of your conscience
In the theater of your love I lost my part
And now you say you’ve got me out of your conscience
I’ve been flushed from the bathroom of your heart

In the garbage disposal of your dreams I’ve been ground up dear

On the river of your plans I’m up the creek
Up the elevator of your future I’ve been shafted
On the calendar of your events I’m last week

I’ve been washed down the sink of your conscience
In the theater of your love I lost my part
And now you say you’ve got me out of your conscience
I’ve been flushed from the bathroom of your heart

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

As a teacher, I assigned the kids a lot of creative writing, which I guess is what I loved teaching the most. Usually every year I would have my kids write an original short story. This would include employing the basics of the short story, such as CONCRETE DETAIL, CHARACTER SKETCH, PLOT, CONFLICT, COMPLICATIONS, CLIMAX, etc.

In the early stages of the project, I watched kids struggling with not enough detail or too much detail that was unrelated to the PLOT. I’d coach, “Try not to just use any DETAILS that are unnecessary.Only use specific details that will support the PLOT by helping to move the story right along to the CLIMAX.

“And secondly, the most essential key to a good short story is CONFLICT”. So I would prompt them: “Can you imagine a story without useful DETAILS, or (heaven forbid!) without a CONFLICT? I mean, what would that even look like? How boring would that be?

“Well here, let’ me show you’s find out. Here’s a little song by Bob Dylan.” And boy, would the kids ever really perk right up at his name. “Like wow, Bob Dylan! This class is really gonna rock!”

Unfortunately for them, this particular Bob Dylan song was going to be a real nothingburger, Dylan’s most comically boring recording ever. Which was my point. I mean, just look at the limpid title for starters:

“CLOTHES LINE SAGA”

“CLOTHES LINE SAGA”

After a while we took in the clothes
Nobody said very much
Just some old wild shirts and a couple pairs of pants
Which nobody really wanted to touch
Mama come in and picked up a book
An’ Papa asked her what it was
Someone else asked, “What do you care?”
Papa said, “Well, just because”
Then they started to take back their clothes
Hang ’em on the line
It was January the thirtieth
And everybody was feelin’ fine

The next day everybody got up
Seeing if the clothes were dry
The dogs were barking, a neighbor passed
Mama, of course, she said, “Hi”
“Have you heard the news?” he said with a grin
“The Vice-President’s gone mad!”
“Where?” “Downtown” “When?” “Last night”
“Hmm, say, that’s too bad”
“Well, there’s nothing we can do about it,” said the neighbor
“It’s just something we’re gonna have to forget”
“Yes, I guess so,” said Ma
Then she asked me if the clothes were still wet

I reached up, touched my shirt
And the neighbor said, “Are those clothes yours?”
I said, “Some of them, not all of them”
He said, “Ya always help out around here with the chores?”
I said, “Sometime, not all the time”
Then my neighbor, he blew his nose
Just as Papa yelled outside
“Mama wants you to come back in the house and bring them clothes”
(Woo-hoo)
Well, I just do what I’m told
So, I did it, of course
I went back in the house and Mama met me
And then I shut all the doors

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Back in 2009, my wife and I were fortunate to score front row seats at a concert in Albuquerque, NM. The concert featured the duo of Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt, both singer/songwriters. Both songwriters had a very good sense of humor, as was illustrated in some of their music.

This next song, “Old People” by singer/songwriter John Hiatt, makes me feel grateful because (ahem) I’m not one of them yet…

“OLD PEOPLE”

Old people are pushy
They don’t have much time
They’ll shove you at the coffee shop
Cut ahead in the buffet line

They’ll buy two for a dollar and 50
Then they’ll argue with the checkout girl
They’ve lived so much behind them
They’re tryin’ to slow down this goddamn world

Old people are pushy
Well, they’re not mushy
Old people are pushy ’cause life ain’t cushy

Old people are pushy
They’ll drive how they want to drive
And go as slow as they want to
They don’t care who stays alive

And they’ll kiss that little grand baby
Up and down the back and all around the front
They don’t care what you think of them
That baby has got something that they want

Old people are pushy, well they’re not mushy
Old people are pushy, cause life ain’t cushy
(Old people are pushy, they aren’t mushy)
(Old people are pushy, cause life ain’t cushy)

Old people are pushy, cause you don’t know how they feel
And when you pretend you do
Well they know it’s not real
Pretty soon it’s gonna be all over
Good enough reason not to let you pass
They done seem like sweet, little old people
But they are not about to kiss your ass

Old people are pushy, well they’re not mushy
Old people are pushy, cause life ain’t cushy
Old people are pushy, (old people are pushy)
Old people are pushy, (old people are pushy)
Old people are pushy, (old people are pushy)
‘Cause life ain’t cushy
Old people are pushy,
Old people are pushy
Old people are pushy
Cause life ain’t cushy

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Lyle Lovett also has a quirky sense of humor. He has written some very serious and beautiful songs in his lifetime, but songs like this one, “Don’t Touch My Hat” always put a Lyle Lovett smile on my mug…

“DON’T TOUCH MY HAT”

Man you better let go
You can’t hold on to
What belongs to me
And don’t belong to you

I caught you looking
With your roving eye
So Mister you don’t have to act
So surprised

If it’s her you want
I don’t care about that
You can have my girl
But don’t touch my hat

I grew up lonesome
On the open range
And that cold North wind
Can make a man feel strange

My John B. Stetson
Was my only friend
And we’ve stuck together
Through many a woman

So if it’s her you want
I don’t care about that
You can have my girl
But don’t touch my hat

My mama told me
Son, to be polite
Take your hat off
When you walk inside

But the winds of change
They fill the air
And you can’t set your hat down
Just anywhere

So if you plead not guilty
I’ll be the judge
We don’t need no jury
To decide because

I wear a seven
And you’re out of order
‘Cause I can tell from here
You’re a seven and a quarter

But if it’s her you want
I don’t care about that
You can have my girl
But don’t touch my hat

If it’s her you want
I don’t care about that
You can have my girl
But don’t touch my hat

No it never complains
And it never cries
And it looks so good
And it fits just right

But if it’s her you want
I don’t care about that
You can have my girl
But don’t touch my hat

You can have my girl
But don’t touch my hat
You can have my girl
But don’t touch my hat

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The following story/song was written by one of my favorite songwriters of all time, Harry Chapin, the man who wrote “Cat’s in the Cradle” and so many more. Humor comes in many forms. There are very different flavors of humor. In this case, the humor’s kinda grim. But man, what this wordsmith does with words! WARNING: Fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen. You are going for one hell of a ride…

“30,000 POUNDS… OF BANANAS”

It was just after dark when the truck started down
The hill that leads into Scranton Pennsylvania.
Carrying thirty thousand pounds of bananas.
Carrying thirty thousand pounds (hit it Big John) of bananas.

He was a young driver,
Just out on his second job.
And he was carrying the next day’s pasty fruits
For everyone in that coal-scarred city
Where children played without despair
In backyard slag-piles and folks manage to eat each day
Just about thirty thousand pounds of bananas.
Yes, just about thirty thousand pounds (scream it again, John) .

He passed a sign that he should have seen,
Saying “shift to low gear, a fifty dollar fine my friend.”
He was thinking perhaps about the warm-breathed woman
Who was waiting at the journey’s end.
He started down the two mile drop,
The curving road that wound from the top of the hill.
He was pushing on through the shortening miles that ran down to the depot.
Just a few more miles to go,
Then he’d go home and have her ease his long, cramped day away.
And the smell of thirty thousand pounds of bananas.
Yes the smell of thirty thousand pounds of bananas.

He was picking speed as the city spread its twinkling lights below him.
But he paid no heed as the shivering thoughts of the nights’
Delights went through him.
His foot nudged the brakes to slow him down.
But the pedal floored easy without a sound.
He said “Christ!”
It was funny how he had named the only man who could save him now.
He was trapped inside a dead-end hellslide,
Riding on his fear-hunched back
Was every one of those yellow green
I’m telling you thirty thousand pounds of bananas.
Yes, there were thirty thousand pounds of bananas.

He barely made the sweeping curve that led into the steepest grade.
And he missed the thankful passing bus at ninety miles an hour.
And he said “God, make it a dream!”
As he rode his last ride down.
And he said “God, make it a dream!”
As he rode his last ride down.
And he sideswiped nineteen neat parked cars,
Clipped off thirteen telephone poles,
Hit two houses, bruised eight trees,
And Blue-Crossed seven people.
It was then he lost his head,
Not to mention an arm or two before he stopped.
And he smeared for four hundred yards
Along the hill that leads into Scranton, Pennsylvania.
All those thirty thousand pounds of bananas.

You know the man who told me about it on the bus,
As it went up the hill out of Scranton, Pennsylvania,
He shrugged his shoulders, he shook his head,
And he said (and this is exactly what he said)
“Boy that sure must’ve been something.
Just imagine thirty thousand pounds of bananas.
Yes, there were thirty thousand pounds of mashed bananas.
Of bananas. Just bananas. Thirty thousand pounds.
Of bananas. not no driver now. Just bananas!”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

(Iris Dement and John Prine:)

After that one, let’s end on a quirky-sweet “love’ song by John Prine and Iris Dement… “In Spite of Ourselves”

This duet with Iris Dement was written with Iris in mind. Prine’s wife said she called Iris to tease her
about the song and Dement said it took a lot of courage to sing some of the lines the first few times.

She don’t like her eggs all runny
She thinks crossin’ her legs is funny
She looks down her nose at money
She gets it on like the Easter Bunny
She’s my baby I’m her honey
I’m never gonna let her go

He ain’t got laid in a month of Sundays
I caught him once and he was sniffin’ my undies
He ain’t real sharp but he gets things done
Drinks his beer like it’s oxygen
He’s my baby
And I’m his honey
Never gonna let him go

In spite of ourselves
We’ll end up a’sittin’ on a rainbow
Against all odds
Honey, we’re the big door prize
We’re gonna spite our noses
Right off of our faces
There won’t be nothin’ but big old hearts
Dancin’ in our eyes.

She thinks all my jokes are corny
Convict movies make her horny
She likes ketchup on her scrambled eggs
Swears like a sailor when shaves her legs
She takes a lickin’
And keeps on tickin’
I’m never gonna let her go.

He’s got more balls than a big brass monkey
He’s a whacked out weirdo and a lovebug junkie
Sly as a fox and crazy as a loon
Payday comes and he’s howlin’ at the moon
He’s my baby I don’t mean maybe
Never gonna let him go

In spite of ourselves
We’ll end up a sittin’ on a rainbow
Against all odds
Honey, we’re the big door prize
We’re gonna spite our noses
Right off of our faces
There won’t be nothin’ but big old hearts
Dancin’ in our eyes.
There won’t be nothin’ but big old hearts
Dancin’ in our eyes.

(spoken) In spite of ourselves

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So yeah… Now you know a little more about me, and where me brain’s been.

Stay tuned if you dare for Part II, coming soon, wherein I will share with you music from my stash that I feel is not only creatively composed,but has been honestly impactful and instructive in my life.

Thank you for Listening.

home

THE ONE GAZING BACK AT YOU (From Your Mirror)

I was 16 years old when Rod Serling knocked me out with a Twilight Zone episode titled “In His Image.” That was way back in 1963.

For any younger readers out there (though it’s doubtful I even have any of those), I imagine 1963 probably would sound like The Dark Ages. A world where the phone booths down the street were the closest thing to your nonexistent cell phones you could ever find.  A world where there was no such thing as dialing 9-1-1. A world where cars didn’t have seat belts and the automatic shift transmission in cars would’ve been a wondrous and rare thing to behold.  Where gangly aluminum TV antennae roosted atop the roof of every single house in town. And a world wherein they were still showing a lot of movies and TV shows in black and white. In fact, “In His Image” was aired in black and white.

Anyway, I’m dying to re-tell you about that episode, so let’s begin with the plot.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Main character, Alan, enters a New York City subway station very late at night. Oddly, the only other person there is an old woman, a religious fanatic, who feverishly presses one of her pamphlets into his hands. But Alan is suddenly being overwhelmed by excruciatingly loud electronic tones ringing in his head, and irrationally he believes this woman is responsible. He pleads with her to stop it, to get away from him, and leave him the hell alone!

And of course utterly confused and frozen in fear by his violent in-your-face reaction, she just stands there like a deer in the headlights gaping at him. Exasperated in psychotic desperation, he impulsively shoves her down and away! Unfortunately onto the tracks and into the path of a speeding subway train.

An hour later, and amazingly with no memory of the incident whatsoever, he calmly arrives at the apartment of Jessica, his fiancée—whom he’s known for only four days, mind you… (Say what?!?)

Together, they start the long drive back to Alan’s hometown. And during the drive Alan, exhausted, dozes off. In his fitful sleep, he begins muttering something about “WALTER.” When awakened, Jessica asks him, “Who is this ‘Walter’?”

He responds with, “What do you mean? I don’t know anyone of that name.”

Long story short: they arrive, and Alan is met by a number of discomforting surprises: (1) There are buildings he’s never seen before in town, buildings which apparently must have been erected in the single week he’s been gone; (2) His key no longer fits the lock on his Aunt Mildred’s front door, as it should; (3) The stranger who answers the door claims he’s never heard of any Mildred; (4) The university he works at is now nothing but an empty field; (5) It turns out that people he remembers seeing and talking to only a week before have been dead for years; and last but not least, (6) In the local graveyard, he discovers his parents’ gravestones are gone and have been replaced by those of some Walter Ryder and his wife. 

Jessica doesn’t know what to make of this! Of course she’s disturbed, but … she loves Alan. She figures there must be some rational explanation, right?

While driving back to New York, however, Alan once again begins hearing the tones in his head , only much worse this time! Suddenly filled with a murderous rage, he orders Jessica to stop! She does! Then leaps from the car, and commands her to drive on. OK. She doesn’t have to be asked twice! Off she goes! But omigod! In the rearview mirror she spies him running behind her car, and brandishing a large rock.

Suddenly another car rounds the bend, striking Alan! However, he luckily survives the impact but is left with a large open-gash injury to his arm. Although there is no pain, when he looks down into the torn and gaping wound in his wrist… there is also no blood or bone!

Instead… only twinkling lights amid a confusing tangle of multi-colored wires and transistors below his skin! Alan freaks!

Quickly he covers his gaping wound with a cloth. Then hitches a ride back to his New York apartment where, poring over a phonebook, he manages to find a listing for a Walter Ryder, Jr. Aha! So he hails a cab, goes to the listed address, disconcertingly discovers that his key does fit this door, and warily steps inside. And abruptly  comes face to face with his exact double!

A very shy and lonely man named Walter Ryder, Jr.!

OK, you can surely anticipate the frenetic conversation that must follow here: the desperate questions Alan will have to demand answers to…

Here are a few intriguing lines of dialogue from the tail-end of Mr. Serling’s script:

Alan: Well… What do you mean? Who am I then?

Walter: You’re… nobody.

Alan: No! Stop it, Walter! That’s not true!

Walter: Well, Alan, answer me this, then: who is this watch I’m wearing, hmmm? And who is the refrigerator in the kitchen? Don’t you understand?

Alan: No. No. No! I do not understand!

Walter: Well…you’re a machine, Alan. A mechanical device.

Alan: What?! I don’t believe that! I can’t!

Walter: And I can’t blame you, Alan. I wouldn’t believe it either. But it’s the truth. The fact is, you were born a long time ago. In my head.

Alan: What?!

Walter: Now, all kids have dreams, don’t they? Well, you were mine. You know. The others thought about… joining the army or flying to Mars, but they finally grew up and forgot their dreams. I didn’t. I thought about one thing only and longed for one thing always. Just one.  A perfect artificial man. Not a robot. A duplicate of a human being. Well, it seemed harmless, not even very imaginative for a child. But then you see, I became an adult. Only somewhere along the way—like most geniuses— I forgot to grow up. I kept my dream. And I created you, Alan. Is that straight enough for you?

Believe you me, that was one fun and entertaining episode back then in those days. But for me, it didn’t stop at fun and entertaining. That little drama saw me kissing my 1960’s Ozzie-and-Harriet Show worldview goodbye in the rearview. The Twilight Zone had become catnip for my imagination.

After which I began gradually re-taking an inventory of this… reflection, this ‘individual’ staring back at me from the bathroom mirror. Going over and over in my head what I’d learned about anatomy in Health class and electronics in high school General Science. No, no, no, I didn’t think for a moment that I believed I was… you know, a robot or anything like that. No, of course not…

Of course I suppose if you really were a robot, you probably wouldn’t know…

But at the same time, wasn’t that kid in the mirror a fella…

֍who is “electronically” wired-up inside­— all axons and dendrites, synapses, mini-volts and amps?

֍whose hard-shell skull acts as the protective housing for the soft-tissue computer-thingy that’s basically running the whole show?

֍whose heart is actually kind of an electronic blood and oxygen pump?

֍whose nose and mouth can be seen as ‘vents’ for oxygen and fuel intake?

֍whose pie-hole is pretty much a “food/fuel” processor, a Cuisinart blender with its grinding, tearing, crushing teeth?

֍whose sensorial eyes, nose, tongue, fingers, and ears electronically send their five-senses reports to the brain?

֍whose four bio-mechanical limbs provide for (a) mobility and (b) reach for procuring “fuel?”

֍whose four fingers and opposable thumb at the ends of each of the two upper limbs serve to retrieve the necessary operational “fuel” and transfer said “fuel” into the pie-hole?

֍whose stomach is a virtual chemistry-set fuel tank that breaks down and refines the “fuel?”

֍whose liquid waste byproduct is syphoned off and away by a run-off hose assembly?

֍whose intestines massage the byproduct gases and spent fuel rods toward and out of an exhaust vent?

֍who comes with spare parts: the extra brain hemisphere, eye, lung, kidney, arm, leg, ovary and/or testicle?

֍and who, like most machines, comes with a limited warranty?

Yeah. You know. Just sayin’. Is all.

But… something else too. You know, every once in a while, some little thing or other happens to me that takes me back to those comparisons. For instance, one thing that’s been bugging me off and on ever since I was a kid is that maybe twice or so a year, I suddenly become aware of a brief, mysterious, nearly subliminal tone. I could be reading, say, or bicycling, or be in the middle of a conversation when all of a sudden, there it goes. Right out of the blue, hmmmmmm…

Sometimes in my left ear, sometimes my right, but never both at once. And it only lasts thirty seconds at the most before fading out. Damned if I have any idea what causes that, but I can tell you what it reminds me of. In primary and junior high school, an audiologist would visit for our annual hearing tests for, you know, our health records. He’d place a big, black, heavy set of headphones over our little ears and play us tones that would range all over the map from easily audible to almost inaudible to not audible at all. That’s what this phenomenon sounds like! Either that or a muffled, low-volume TV test-pattern hum from the 50’s.

It still happens to this day, but I’ve grown accustomed to it by now, and usually just joke about it to myself— Just the old brain uploading its periodical software update from the aliens. Or…who knows… maybe I really am a freakin’ robot…

Llike Alan.

Eeek!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

OK. Here’s a little something I scribbled back around 2005. After I’d just barely turned sixty.

I, ROBOT

I sing the body electric… state-of-the-art

luxury sports utility vehicle of the species

Nothing like me ever was. Built to

last, to take a licking and keep on

ticking…

Modeled after the redundancy principle—

extra kidney, lung, eye, hand, foot, brain hemisphere—

the five senses hardwired into software-bundled hardware,

and connected in spaghetti-tangles of fiber-optic nerves

to the mother of all motherboards!

My each and every cell vacuum-packed with its own

copy of the spiro-encrypted, double-helixed,

micro-schematic blueprint. Each digit stamped

with its own encrypted, model-identifying, swirl-pattern ‘scan code’


O I am the quintessential, self-replicating, self-healing,

self-cleaning, psycho-medical, chemico-robotic

Circuit City wonder— drop me on an alien

planet and watch me replicate myself,

invent the wheel, steal fire from the Titans, change the water into

wine, and… when there’s enough

typewriters, and enough

time… I will compose

Hamlet

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Hmmm. Yeah. Robots. And Artificial Intelligence (A.I.).

Ever since before the 1950’s, the subject of robotics has been burrowing its technological head like a worm into the global consciousness. Sci-fi movies and TV shows. Automated machinery taking human workers’ factory jobs. And decade after decade, ever more state-of-the-art robotic and A.I. toys and novelties piling up under our Christmas trees. Rock’em Sock’em boxing robots. Children’s cute little robot “pets.” Roomba robo-vac vacuum cleaners. Digital chess player software that can check-mate any of you John Henry wannabe chess-masters out there, unless you formerly ask it to give you a sporting chance. And of course those nondescript little devices we plug into our living room wall sockets which, with the Open Sesame cry of Hey Google! are standing ready to do our bidding , anything and everything from controlling our thermostats to playing us a Tom Waits tune upon demand like some damn jukebox.

“So, put another nickel in

In the nickelodeon

All I want is lovin’ you

And music, music, music”

On news network broadcasts, we’ve long marveled at bomb squad robots approaching suspicious “packages” left on sidewalks; we’ve watched documentaries extolling the never-ending progress of anything from the newest, most improved, and more-lifelike-ever sex doll “bots” to cyber-soldier warfare robots for combat. I’ve watched the testing of frightening stainless-titanium “dogs” right out of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and those teeny, tiny, CIA flying robot “mosquitoes” with spy-cams. Driverless cars (and even driverless 22-wheelers now) tooling down our open highways, constantly taking digital correspondence-school drivers’-ed classes as they roll. And meanwhile, all of us continue to be plagued every day and all day by ad-agencies’ A.I.s phoning and texting us, goading us into finally surrendering to that unwanted new car warranty.

And talk about a brave new world, today living among us is a large, ever-growing population of cyborgs (cyborgs being organisms that have restored function or enhanced abilities due to the addition of some artificial component or technology).

So, me? I’m a cyborg by definition. Because I’m looking at the world through artificial lenses and listening to my Tom Waits collection through hearing aids. Now, today, many totally deaf people today can actually hear, thanks to cochlear ear implants. We’ve come such a long way since the Helen Keller days. And literally millions of people around the globe are not only walking about on stainless steel knee and hip replacements, but are also using robotic hands and feet with natural flexing fingers and toes. And artificial hearts! Plus wonder of all wonders, today if you want we have robotic organic 3-D “printers” that will ‘print’ you up a brand-new, fully-functioning liver for your next transplant!  To us in our seventies, it’s feels like the future has already fallen behind us into the past. 

So hey, what do I know about all this? Not much. Not technically. But like most baby boomers, I‘ve grown up on a long, steady diet of science fiction movies. And these days, you can actually learn a lot about robotics and A.I. from cinema. In the old days, not so much.

Sci-fi thrillers in the ‘50’ were so off-the-wall bad, they were known by the derogatory term, schlock. But we didn’t know that then. And as a kid I tried to watch every one of those that came to town at the local theater. Too many of those actually, and way way before I was old enough not to be traumatized. As a result of my helpless obsession, I ended up suffering from an acute case of juvenile robot-phobia.

For instance Gog (That’s G-O-G, Gog). Gog came out in 1954 when I was only eight and scared the living bejesus out of me! The movie is set in a top-secret underground military research facility where scientists are experimenting with cryogenics as a method of slowing down astronauts’ metabolism for space travel hibernation. The entire base is coordinated by a single supercomputer, NOVAC, and its two robot minions, Gog and Magog. And therein lies the problem.

An invisible ufo hovering above the installation has gained remote control over Gog. And since the E.T.s on board are dead-set against allowing  earthlings to go rocketing hither and thither through their space,  an onset of mysterious and ‘unexplainable’ deadly mishaps have been happening. Like this one:

When one absent-minded scientist haplessly returns, after hours, to the soundproofed cryogenic lab to retrieve something he’s left there, in horror we watch the pressurized door automatically closing slowly behind him… like a Venus Fly-trap! Of course it takes a fumbling moment or three for him to catch on to the fact that he’s been… sealed in, but by then it’s too late.

We watch the thermostat dial on the control panel in the empty observation room outside nefariously turning counter-clockwise, ultimately plunging the room temperature downward toward the ultimate freezing point (−346 °F). And he panics of course (as did we eight year olds in the audience, having already noticed the deadly white frost crawling relentlessly down the liquid nitrogen pipes)! Sure, he bangs his fists, and even a hammer against the plate-glass lab window. And of course, he cries for help, but… by then it’s too late in the afternoon as all of his co-workers are home. And by now, ice crystals have begun icing his eyebrows and moustache. The gruesome process takes about three on-screen minutes, after which our man in the white lab coat, now a greyish-blue “corpsicle,” topples like a felled tree trunk.

Yeah. Think about it. Me, eight years old.

Gog was my first robot. And I prayed it would be my last.

My second was Robbie, “Robbie the Robot.” He (or it) crept into my consciousness as part of the cast of the 1956 film, Forbidden Planet. Ten years old this time, but still spooked by the thought of the dangerous Metal Men. To me Robbie looked like a mechanical, ink-black Michelin Man, and more than just a tad too stranger-danger for preadolescent me.

Despite the discomfort Robbie engendered in me, however, the concept (primitive as it was back then) of what someday would be known as artificial intelligence was intriguing. Anyway, at least Robbie wasn’t anywhere near as terrifying as Gog though, and by ten I pretty much knew what everybody knew in those days: in reality, robots were never ever going to amount to anything more dangerous than that clunky old Wizard of Oz Tin Man.

Robbie the Robot

Still though. You never… really knew, did you.

My third (and, nostalgically speaking, my forever favorite of all time) was the one simply and unimaginatively known as “Robot,” or “the Robot.” He (well, it spoke with a man’s voice) was one of the main characters in the ensemble cast of the Lost in Space series, which aired from 1965 through ‘68.

“Robot” functioned both as the bodyguard for the crew and the on-board technician most responsible for completing the mission of finding the crew’s way back to earth. Although endowed with superhuman strength and futuristic weaponry, he also exhibited such comfortably human trappings as laughter, singing, an occasional sadness, and an entertainingly snide sarcasm that often bordered on mockery.

But most endearing of all was the manner with which “Robot” went about executing his third assignment, being the protective “nanny” for Will, the youngest member of the crew.

His frenetic “Danger, Will Robinson!” accompanied by his flailing arms, still remains a familiar iconic echo in today’s pop culture.

And if Will Robinson loved him, then he was OK in my book.

But it was those outwardly human characteristics that gave me my first real inkling of what a creative artificial intelligence might, or could, actually look like… or be like someday, in the impossibly faraway future. 

And finally, I must give a tip of my hat to all the robots featured in Isaac Asimov’s 1950 collection of short stories titled I, Robot, which I discovered later as a young adult. What a read, what a hoot that book was, and perhaps still is. As it was for me with Lost in Space, Asimov’s not-taking-himself-or-his-premises-too-seriously was such a delight.

Plus, as the budding sci-fi aficionado I was becoming by then, I was fascinated by the three, fail-safe, Universal Laws of Robotics Asimov came up with.

֍First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

֍Second Law:  A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law

֍Third Law:  A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws

My opinion? All artificial intelligences in real life should only be allowed to be created with these safety protocols required. Of course, we all know that’s never going to happen, don’t we, since we can never trust our scientists and technicians to actually have the common-sense-wherewithal to do that. If we could, then such a fate as The Terminator’s “Rise of the Machines” could be completely avoided.

What? Don’t think something like “The Rise of the Machines” is a realistic possibility? Wow. And Mom nicknamed me “The Doubting Thomas.”

Ever hear of Stephen Hawking, probably the most respected and eminent physicist the world has known this side of Einstein? Well, guess what: after he died, he left us with the following dire warning: “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. Efforts to create thinking machines pose a threat to our very existence. It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded.”

I take his warning to heart. Not just because of his reputation as a genius in physics, but because I see our human race as a hollow species of sheep who’ll complacently allow the biggest, greediest, most unthinking monsters-in-charge to run, and ruin, everything. I mean, hey, if there’s quick money to be made by allowing an army of sentient, self-replicating machines free-reign, then… Jesus H, it’s time we go looking for a Sarah Conner.

But hey, listen, I’m no Paul Revere here. No, what’s on my mind has much more to do with the idea of our own inner (I’m gonna call it) ‘programming.’Our inner biological programming (think gut feelings) that’s always on the alert for threats to our personal danger.

Like this scenario: OK, I just know the ice on this pond is probably way to too thin to be safe. You know what?  I’m taking my skates and going home. Or Jeez, this one:. This too-overly-friendly dude is creeping me out. I know it may sound crazy, but I’m kinda getting the vibe he could be a serial killer or something. Gonna end this conversation now. I’m so outta here!

Alright, here’s a personal example. From me:

Another weird little phenomenon has gotten my attention off and on ever since I was a kid. It happens whenever I’ve somehow managed to find myself perched up on some extremely high place, somebody’s roof, say, a really tall ladder or, God forbid, the edge of a steep cliff. Especially when, against my better judgement, I can’t help myself from looking down! Because that’s when something very peculiar always happens. Sure, there’s the terror, pure and simple. Hair standing up on the back of my neck. Muscles freezing up in a full-body lockjaw as I imagine myself in an arm-pin-wheeling freefall with the ground rushing up at me at E=MC2. And vertigo? Of course, every time.

But there is something else, a very peculiar “something else” going on a little embarrassingly… (Man, I can’t believe I’m actually going to try to describe this thing.) Oh, let’s just say that… down below…down there… down there in my…you know, “nether region?” Alright: my groin. OK, OK! My gonads. Whenever I’m teetering on a high perch of any kind, I always get this uncomfortable and urgent sensation, a physical feeling. Think…pressure. A buzzing pressure. Down there. A slightly nauseating, invisible-hand squeeze of the scrotum that’s got a subliminal, joyless, joy-buzzer buzz to it that dizzies me, leaving me weak the knees.

Yup. That’s my old nads haranguing me with THE ALARM! They don’t speak English, so of course they communicate in biological “language.” I’ve experienced it often enough over the years, that I can easily translate it for you. Here it is:

“Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!  Stop lookin’ down, fool! Whattaya think you’re doin’? Back up right NOW! Get us off this diving board! Get us off the edge of this cliff!

Listen! The two of us? Down here? OK, we got this one job, see? It’s called PROCREATION PROTECTION, alright? It’s called tryin’ to save your sorry-ass species from extinction, is all!

What, you never heard of a little somethin’ called “The Darwin Awards?”

Yeah. My nads can be very sarcastic…

And what’s that but the “voice” of ‘programming‘ talking? All living things are ‘programmed’ like this for the survival of the individual so that the survival of future generations of the species can be guaranteed. My gonads are obviously wired up and always on the ready to trigger that extreme, automatic, Darwinian fear of falling… the same way a common house cat’s programmed to be terrified of cucumbers.

Oh, what, didn’t know about cukes and cats?  Well… apparently cats have a vestigial fear of snakes, whose rather cylindrical bodies are similar, in a way, to cucumbers. I’m no expert, but it’s apparently due to an embedded leftover memory burned into their DNA from generations long ago, back when snakes preyed upon their ancestors in the jungle. However, what I am an expert on is YouTube videos, so I can expertly advise you that, for a good time, go straight to YouTube and key in “cucumber and cat.” Then sit back and marvel at dozens of videos featuring prankster cat owners sneaking a cucumber onto the floor directly behind their cute little fur balls. You won’t believe the acrobatic conniption-fit responses.

(OK, actually I’ve put a great link for this down at the end of this post. So when you get there, go ahead. Knock yourself out.)

But furthermore, my nads’ Fear-of-Falling programming also includes the additional strategy of flooding my brain with a rush of irrational delusions. Like… ok, gravity isn’t satisfied with just sucking me down, no, but like some Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea giant squid, I’m become positive it’s roped its invisible tentacles around my ankles and has begun tractor-hauling me forward as well as downward! Yes, gravity tugging me horizontally! I’m sure of it!

Gravity (with a capital G) is Evil Incarnate. It just can’t wait to reward me with a Darwin Award toe-tag. And yeah, I can get how crazy that sounds, but…

Gravity is not our friend, boys and girls.

But OK. Back to my thesis here, my big message: Instinct Equals Biological Programming.

Instincts are the products of our digital cerebral clockworks, controlling all living things’ behaviors. The ones and zeroes behind bears hibernating. The ones and zeros behind new-born ducklings “imprinting” on the first biological entity they encounter. The ones and zeros behind Killdeer just knowing to lead predators away from its nesting eggs with its comically-feigned, broken-winged limping. Or the cicada nymphs knowing to climb down that tree trunk to burrow into the earth and suck the liquids of plant roots for exactly seventeen years. Or the fun-to-watch, high-stepping mating dances of the Blue-Footed Boobies, where the Boobies with the biggest and bluest feet get the girl every time.

Cats purring to manifest contentment, dogs wagging tails to manifest happiness, and human males…? Well, human males haplessly manifesting sexual interest in a way that once made the iconic 1940’s movie star Mae West ask, “So, is that a rocket in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”

(sorry…)

But you know, these behaviors don’t get learned in school. You ask me, the universe is just one colossal, highly engineered cuckoo clock…

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So anyway, thanks for reading; and here’s your reward: just one af many, many YouTube cat-cucumber videos out there. Enjoy.

Home

DUDS: BOMB THREATS THAT BOMBED   —PART THE LAST

Mexico High School— Mexico, Maine… mid-1970’s

Author’s note: OK, dear reader, hang on— I’m going to tell you a true story which, when you read it, you’ll very likely doubt the veracity of it. It does read like fiction, I know. But it IS a true story. And since it happened in the late-70’s (pretty sure it happened right around 1977 or ‘78), that means that there are probably a couple hundred or so ex-students left out there who lived it, right along with me. Perhaps they will remember it with slight differences and from different points of view. But please, if you are one of them, please jump on board in the comments section to (a) verify it, and (b) make any corrections you find that need to be made. Thank you    — Mr. L

Remember me?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Catching Up— As a result of the latest bomb threat at the high school students had been told, via the intercom, that the gymnasium had been cleared and that each classroom would be called down to the gym, one at a time, in order to allow their particular classroom to be cleared. “Leave all coats, textbooks, and backpacks at your desks. Once your classroom has been cleared, you will be returned to your classroom, and then the next classroom will be called down.”

However, when I finally got to shepherd my homeroom kids to the gym’s entrance, my stewardship of them was abruptly commandeered from me by a handful of police officers who lined my kids up for a frisking, ostensibly looking for “bombs” but so much more likely looking for drugs. I was told to move on into the gymnasium by myself, and when I did that… there were three-quarters of our student body, sullen and nearly silent, all seated and languishing there in the bleachers. So… nobody but nobody had been returned to their classrooms after all!

And that statement that one of my boys had uttered back in the classroom, just after the first announcement had been made? “There ain’t been any bomb scare!” Well, he’d been right! This was something else entirely.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

You know what stung? The fact that I, a teacher who had been working hand in hand with the cops all along, hadn’t been told anything about the plan to use a bomb scare as an excuse to pull off a major drug bust. It rankled, to be honest. But my position in the whole scheme of things was nothing more than that of a little a cog in the machine, was it. So yeah, it wasn’t up to me. And of course the rationale of their whole plan was this: IF (while in the process of responding to a bomb threat, and searching for a bomb or bomb-making materials) we just happen to stumble onto some illicit contraband concealed on one person, then we have probable cause.

So guess what. The cops netted lots of pot that morning. Lots of it! And put a lot of kids in a world of hurt with their little sting op— you know, having to wait for their parents to be informed, and waiting to find out the legal consequences were going to end up being.

Actually though, they missed a ton of pot, too. I don’t know how, whether a lot of the kids on the walk-up toward the gym saw the little trap awaiting them and quickly stuffed their stashes into their underwear or shoes or whatever, but… the custodians who had to sweep the gym floor later that day claimed it must have been raining nickel bags under the bleachers, for all the weed they found after pushing the collapsible bleachers back in place.

Wonder if any of them pocketed a little of it for themselves…

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

OK, let’s just take a minute and sum up what had happened here, and what had been happening. Let’s break it down. Here we had this high school which seemed… no, which had been, a sort of normal institution when the school year began. All classes going as normal. Activities like cheerleading, sports, school plays, band concerts and the like. All pretty normal. A typical school.

And then someone calls in a bomb threat as a prank, most likely one of the kids. A way to get out of school for a day, perhaps. It happens. Most schools experience them from time to time. More then, than now however, because back then they didn’t have a way to trace all phone calls in the entire world.

But then, just to wow his buddies and show what a daring smart ass he was, he pulls the same stunt again. The. Very. Next. Day.  I mean, how cool was that, eh? Pretty ballsy cool! Only that second prank, unbeknownst to him, was actually a domino. A domino that got pushed and fell against another domino which, in turn, fell against the next domino like dominoes do, inadvertently triggering (what else?)… the “Domino Effect.” And then the metaphorical dominoes continued tumbling, one day by one day, one after the other, nickel and diming the days into four weeks, leaving the students and teachers of the school positioned in the middle of the whole thing like some ping-pong-table net in a tournament between the perp(s) and the administration.

Class time was missing big time. Homework was hard to take seriously anymore because the students’ minds, hell even the teachers’ minds, were now so firmly fixed on The Daily Question: ‘When will the bomb threat come today?’ And before you knew it, the Domino Effect had morphed into a virtual addiction. So the school had fallen ill. With a nightmare fever dream where everything had become way too chaotic and unmanageable for practically anything to get done. With everybody growing edgier and edgier, the edginess building and building until… eventually… something  had to give!

And then something did!

BANG!  

Everything was blown sky high in the volcanic eruption of a drug bust.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The student body was left shell-shocked the rest of that morning. Like the walking wounded. We had just weathered a high-end Richter-scale “earthquake” and no one, except maybe the cops and the administration, had a reliable tally on the extent of the damages just yet. But rumors were flying. And the last thing the building felt like by the way, from my point of view at least, was a freakin’ school. It was Crazy Town, with the dust constantly settling all around us.

But on the other hand, the drug bust was cathartic at the same time. Because at least SOMETHING had finally happened! Painful as it was, it did sort of feel like somebody had just lanced a months-long-festering boil. Somehow it seemed possible that everything, the whole damn shootin’ match, might just finally be over, because how could anybody really muster up the will and the energy to call in another one, after all this?

Or was that just wishful thinking?

And then it turned out that yes, it was wishful thinking. Because it’ ain’t’s never over till it’s over. Not that somebody called in another bomb threat. No, but that madness had just taken a new and unexpected turn.

Once the reading-the-riot-act assembly in the gym had finally come to a close, we were all dismissed to go back to our homerooms to await the announcement for how the normal schedule for that day would turn out to be amended. (Normal?  Did I actually use the word ‘normal?’) However, nobody really felt a pressing need to proceed in any real hurry. So the big lobby filled up with kids and teachers and a cop or two, all of us just milling around like zombies. Time and Schedule just didn’t seem to be real anymore. It was so weird. That point of the morning seemed to feel like the end of some movie where all of the action had finally wound up, but the final credits were continuing to roll on and on.

And one of the possible items in those credits might have included the following:

Score— Bomb Threatener: 300+. Administration: 1000

And then, as unlikely as it could possibly seem… believe it or not, something ELSE happened…

There was one young man in the student body who held the distinct reputation of being your basic high school drug dealer. Kind of a scary little outlaw, he was. And whenever it had come to all the Mickey Mouse school rules— one of which was, of course, always getting to school on time— this kid had managed to sneer his way around that one from seventh grade through senior year, because rules like those? They applied to the sheep, never to him. So everyone had, more or less, gotten used to him being perpetually tardy.

And this day was no exception.

After all the insanity of the last couple of hours, a car pulled up and parked outside next to the curb. It was visible to any of us who happened to be looking out through the lobby’s tall glass panels that fronted the entrance. But it’s not like we actually noticed it so much. It’s like a couple of the cops did. And didn’t they just go a-charging out through those entry doors to get at him!

His mom was just dropping him off per usual, and he’d barely managed to get one foot out the car door and onto the pavement before… they’d grabbed him! In mere moments he was frisked, divested of his illegal contraband (baggies of pot), and taken into custody.

Now, this was a biggie for the cops! They’d wanted him for a while , but they’d always had to wait. Because they needed to do it right if they were going to have an arrest that would stand up in court. With evidence. Now… thanks to their little bomb scare cum drug bust scheme, they had achieved “probable cause,” hadn’t they!  So as far as they were concerned, it would be Celebration Time at the police station that night. Whoopee!

Only guess what!

They.   Didn’t.   Have.   Probable.   Cause.

In their excitement and enthusiasm to nab their known dealer, the one they’d been wanting to pounce on for so long, they had inadvertently jumped the gun. If only they had waited until our young man had placed one foot inside our building, then their police-station-celebration wouldn’t have to be turned inside-out into a wake. Then their rationale would have passed muster, their rationale being ‘Hey, see, we got this bomb threat for the high school so we have to search everywhere and everyone inside said high school for said bomb. And if, and only if, in so doing, we just happen to find incidental contraband on one of said persons, well we then have legal “probable cause” to detain and charge said persons.’

But of course, they hadn’t realized that yet. And it would take some time to sink in. Basically right up until the moment the top brass at the station got contacted by the boy’s brand new lawyers, which didn’t take all that long at all. And guess who his new lawyers were. SURPRISE! The American Civil Liberties Union! Yes, those lawyers, those… nobody-expects-the-Spanish-Inquisition lawyers. Those guys.

And now the inevitable question was ‘So… why is it you felt you were within your legal rights to search an individual who (a) not only wasn’t in the building at the time of the search, but more so (b) hasn’t even managed to walk himself inside said building yet? So both the police and the school administration were finding themselves dancing lightly on eggshells and feeling a little vulnerable to becoming seriously entangled in the snarl of an unwanted legal court battle (i.e., can you say ‘law suit’?).

And then on top of that, finally someone had to go and bring up the issue of the veracity, the believability, of the ‘alleged’ phone threat that had started the whole morning— i.e., was there really a bomb threat called in this time, or was it just a some fabricated ploy to try to finally and conveiently squash all the bomb-scare madness?

Yes, once you’ve got the ACLU afoot, step lightly! Like the Incredible Hulk, you won’t like the ACLU when it’s angry…

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

THE AFTERMATH

OK. It had to seem that our little epidemic must have run its course by then. Well, as far as anyone having the will or energy to phone in another bomb threat, yes, that certainly wasn’t going to happen again for a long, long while.

Yet a dark cloud of anger and exhaustion had settled over the school and, for that matter, the whole community. The academic kids weren’t happy with the toll the entire disaster had taken on their education and consequently, on their postgraduate ambitions. The stoners were definitely pissed off, of course. A lot of the parents of the stoners and, hey, even a lot of parents of the non-stoners, were pissed off as well. The community at large was none too pleased at the way the school up there on the hill had failed in handling the ‘pandemic.’ The administration was pissed off at the cops for botching the best laid plans of mice and men and bringing the ACLU down on their heads. The cops were pissed off at the ACLU.And both the administration and the cops were pissed off at the still unknown ‘Unaphoner’ who had started the whole the whole domino shipwreck and apparently had gotten away scot free.

So yeah, there was still a very bitter taste left in everyone’s mouth. And a day or two later everyone would find out what all this would lead to.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Once again it was during that same damn early morning homeroom period before classes were to begin, the period that was apparently cursed that year. As I looked out over my homeroom, it was impossible not to notice something was wrong. Only five kids were seated before me. Five seemingly nervous kids.

“So… where is everybody?” I asked.

The kids exchanged nervous glances. Then one of them said, “In the cafeteria.” As if that response answered the question.

I waited a moment, and then said, “OK. I give up. Why?”

One of them said, “Because they’re not coming.”

I let that sink in. “OK. Let’s try that again. Does anyone want to try to tell me why they’re not coming? And, you know, like, feel free to include a few specific details so I can get it?”

It took a long moment. “Because they’re mad. They ain’t going to classes today.”

One of them added, “Go look for yourself.” Jeez. I really didn’t like the sound of that.

“Be right back,” I told them. As soon as I opened the door into the hallway, I immediately became aware of a low, faraway roar of voices. I walked down the hall past the few classroom doors, turned right at the ramp, stopped, and looked down it. It was much louder now. And Christ, I could see thirty kids just milling around in the lobby down there, which was located right between the principal’s office on the left and the cafeteria on the right. Not only were they milling, but what they weren’t doing was making any effort whatsoever to be quiet down there, which seemed pretty daring considering they were basically right in front of the main office.

They were all obviously very agitated. There was anger and belligerence down there. This was not good. As I watched, I saw some of these kids drifting out of sight off into the café, while others from the café were joining the crowd in the lobby. So that was it then. Practically the whole student body was down there, apparently a lot of them crammed into the café.

I returned to my classroom. The bell to go to first period was chiming as I stepped back in, for all the good that was going to do. I mean, it was obvious. There wasn’t gonna be any first period that day. But just what the hell would there be? That was the question.

The principal came on the intercom. “The first period bell just rang. We expect all students to report to their first period classes at this time.” Listen to him, trying to make it sound like it was just a normal day. Even with my door to the hallway only open just a crack, we could hear the roar down below reach a momentary crescendo as an answer! Yeah. Well… expect and be damned, Mister Principal.

Five minutes passed. Nothing, not a thing changed. And then the principal’s voice came back on the intercom. Only this time his voice wasn’t broadcasting from within the relative quietude of the main office. This time his voice was embedded in the over-riding din and angry clamor inside the cafeteria. He was carrying a hot mic, i imagine for the benefit of the entire school, i.e. to keep the cooks and custodians and office personnel and we teachers holed up with our little bastions of mousey goody-two-shoes in the know. It was actually a little difficult to pick out his words because they were being pretty much drowned out by the rowdy crowd noise. “Listen to me! Please! Hear me out. OK? It’s obvious we need to talk. So that’s what I’m here for, OK? Let’s talk. I’m here to listen…”

His plea was met by another crescendo, now up much closer and personal. Only this time, due to the mic, you could so much more easily make out the f-bombs popping like popcorn in that wall of noise. “No, I’m serious here! Let’s…” But he never got to finish what he had started to say.

After an indistinct shuffling noise of the mic being roughly handled, one loud male voice much louder and clearer than anyone else in the cafeteria had suddenly taken over, yammering about how it was too late to talk, and the roar of voices then amplified sharply in a frightening assent. It was like listening to a live-action news report from some banana republic being overthrown! That’s when I bolted out of the room once again and down the hall to the top of the ramp.

I got there just in time to witness our principal forcefully threading his way back through the lobby crowd, and then storming his way into the main office. At least physically he didn’t look any worse for the wear. Within twenty seconds he‘d turned off the power to the intercom, and the mic went dead.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

OK. This is the hard part for me. Bringing this story to a conclusion.  Why? Because it’s easy, remembering all the wild and crazy outlandish things that happened. Those kinds of bizarre things are much more likely to engrave themselves indelibly in the mind. But I’m hard put to remember now how it all specifically came to an end. Because in my mind… it had all just petered out.

I do know the rest of that particular morning seemed long. It seems like for a couple of hours at least the students just continued to hang out, milling around angry and lost in the lobby and cafeteria. Probably not though. I know that I, and a lot of other teachers as well, joined them for a good part of the time, mostly to keep an eye on them. Funny, I can’t recall if lunch was served in the café, but it must have been, right? (I probably would’ve remembered if it hadn’t been.) And obviously the buses had to have run on time to take the kids home, since they would’ve had to pick up the junior high and primary school kids at the other locations. Although I have no memory of that either.

I can however remember one thing. And in telling it, it’s going to feel like I’m going off track and digressing, but have faith— I promise you, this story will dovetail right back into the saga of the of the Bummer Bomb Threat days’ demise.

So it just so happens that S.A.D. #43 was right in the midst of another, parallel, nightmare unfortunately coinciding with the bomb scare pandemic. Contract negotiations between the school board and the teachers’ union had long since broken down, and cosequently we’d been working without a contract for well over a year. It had become a nasty war, one which found us teachers, often with our families in tow, protesting en masse outside school board meetings and sometimes even downtown, waving our crudely made ‘UNFAIR!’ signs. The war (and yes, ‘war’ is an apt word) had been going on for far too long. The teachers and the board members had both employed various strategies of warfare.

(Sometime long after this particular day, the war would find us teachers actually going on strike, despite that fact that it was illegal for us to do so. But that’s a story for another day.)

One of the strategies used by the board ended up setting the bar at an unbelievably all-time low. Our previous superintendent had retired the year before. And when it came to hiring a replacement, we discovered that the selection committee had narrowed the open position down to three candidates. Two of the candidates were showing various strengths befitting a potential superintendent. One however stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb. His name was Smith, and he came with the reputation as a one-year hired gun. One look at his credentials and you’d have to ask, Why is it that this Mr. Smith has a record of serving as superintendent in various districts for a single year only before moving on to the next? You couldn’t help but ask that question, you know?

So anyway, guess whom they’d hired.

Superintndent “Snuffy” Smith

Now it turned out I had a source of special inside knowledge as to what this Mr. Smith was like as a so-called “superintendent.” In a previous single year of employment mind you, he’d served (using the term’ served’ loosely here) as the super at S.A.D. #68, aka Dover-Foxcroft’s school district (D-F being my hometown). That year, when Smith left the #68 school district behind in his rearview mirror, he also left the schools in a shambles. So on recon missions, I was able to learn a lot from teachers I knew there.

However, the knowledge I was able to garner turned out to be superfluous.  One week to the day after Smith had been hired at Mexico, a mysterious parcel in a plain brown wrapper arrived at our school addressed only “To the teachers of S.A.D. #43’s Teachers Union.” There was no return address.

When opened, we found written on a note at the top of what appeared to be a cornucopia of paperwork, “This is a HOW TO GET RID OF SUPERINTENDENT SMITH KIT.” We couldn’t believe our eyes!

This ‘kit’ was comprised of several newspaper clippings detailing unbelievably horrific things this man had been caught doing in SAD #68: (midnight harassing phone calls, blatant sexual harassment of female teachers, stalking, you name it) and lists of how-to suggestions to combat these behaviors, like “Work with the police (we did),” and “When you find out which teacher is getting the majority of late night/early morning harassment calls, have the police put a’ lock’ on that teacher’s phone line. (WE did that, too…)” and “Whenever Smith calls a female staff person into his office, that female staff person must insist on being accompanied by another staff person,” etc.

  • Funny thing: after leaving Mexico High  a year or so later to sign on to S.A.D. #68, specifically at Foxcroft Academy, I was fortunate to be befriended by one Peter Caruso, one of the Academy teachers there who had actually participated in assembling the generous Get-Rid-Of kit sent to us when we needed it most. And I must say, the two of us have since enjoyed a few decades of chuckles and laughs at how cartoonish a villain Smith was, and how happy we both had  been to escort him to the nearest exit of our respective schools.

Anyway, guess what. It uurned out that several of us teachers, most of us teachers actually (me included) had already been receiving such annoying anonymous phone calls for a week! So it had already begun, a week before we’d gotten the info. We hadn’t an inkling that the new ‘superintendent’ could ever be involved. Why would we?

And the very first time a female teacher was called into his office for a conference, and she arrived with an accompanying teacher, he angrily ordered the uninvited one out. And when that teacher said (and as a movie buff I like to think of it as reminiscent of the computer HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey), “I’m sorry… I can’t do that…” he summarily kicked them both out, threatening to put a note detailing their disobedient behavior into their permanent records.

So, yeah, in good ol’ S.A.D. #43, all told, things were already going to hell in a handbasket long before the bomb scare weeks.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So finally, back to the Infamous Day the Kids Took Over the School! (OK, they didn’t really take it over, exactly.)

So of course it’s protocol in all S.A.D.’s that when an emergency occurs at one of their schools, the superintendent must be informed. I know a lot of the teachers (and even the principal) would have preferred not to have him called but, alas, he was summoned. And… he came. I need to say that by then he’d lost the respect of the entire body of teachers and principals and even the students, whatever the piddling amount of respect he’d ever begun with, that is. And you might be doubting the truth of my claim that even the principals were happily in (and rowing) the same boat as we teachers were. But that’s because back in the late ‘70’s, the principals and vice principals were on the same side of the contract bargaining table as the teachers. Our salaries were tied together as one unit during salary negotiations.

Here’s an interesting little tidbit: our principal actually enjoyed entertaining us teachers with a hilarious little Charlie-Chaplin-with-cane routine that specifically made fun of “Snuffy” Smith behind his back.

Oh OK.Want another? When later, as the school year was nearing its end and the school board was getting antsy about not having been given even a glimpse yet of the superintendent’s next-year’s proposed budget, they laid down the law and demanded he present said budget at an open town meeting. So a little later in front of a gathering of the interested tax payer citizens of Mexico, they asked him to hand it over for their perusal. This he promptly did. So the board members hunched themselves down over the pages for a minute or two. And what followed was amazing. One of them looked up abruptly and with a perplexed frown exclaimed, “Wait just a minute here! This is last year’s budget!”

To which Superintendent Smith, feigning surprise, countered with, “Oh my! OK, I get it. You see I was comparing the two budgets together on my desk at home. Why, I must have mistakenly picked up the wrong one! OK, I’ll be sure to bring my proposed budget to the very next meeting.”

But that didn’t fly. They were onto him like flies on horse puckey, just as S.A.D. 68’s board had gotten onto him back in Dover-Foxcroft. So no, they wanted to see the proposal right away. A demand to which he readily agreed. Only problem was, when they tried to get in touch with Mr. Smith the following day, the best they could do was get in touch with his lawyer. He was nowhere around. Believe it or not.

So anyway there the kids were, still angrily milling and muttering all around the cafeteria and lobby under the watchful eye of a number of us teachers. One of the students suddenly called out, “Oh great. Look who’s here!” A lot of us looked. And here came old Charlie Chaplin, aka Superintendent “Snuffy” Smith huffing and puffing toward us on a mission, hobbling up the walk with his signature cane. I figured he’d just hobble right on in, only it turned out the front doors were locked. He peered in through the glass and caught the eye of two of the closest kids.

“You two!” he barked. “Open this door now!” But all they did was sneer at him for a moment, and then just blew him off’. Turned on their heels and let themselves get swallowed back up in the crowd. Oh was he ever pissed! I was so proud of them.

So then he began rapping his cane, really hard, against glass. And to any of the fifty kids he could make out before him, he started yelling, “I want this door opened! Open this door now!” Strangely there were no takers.

My fellow teacher and I suddenly realizing that we were close enough to the glass doors that he could easily spot us, casually slipped our hands in our pockets, turned toward each other (leaving only our cold shoulders facing the doors), and launched into a make-believe ‘conversation’ meant to appear so all-consuming that it was small wonder we were failing to hear his outbursts, so out of sight and out of mind was he. Man, he went mad as a hornet. It’s a wonder his cane didn’t break the glass, while our faux conversation went on unabated.Finally the clatter ended.

We looked over our shoulders and there he went, his back to us now, hobbling off around a corner to circle the gymnasium. It would be a mighty long hobble to limp all the way around that building to come in through the one of the back doors, poor fella. But about fifteen minutes later he did show up in the midst of the cafeteria hubbub, barking orders.

I didn’t know to whom he was speaking at first (as I was purposely looking askance), but I heard him saying, “Well, I’ll tell YOU what! I’m in charge here and I’m going to end this mess right now! Iwant you, you, you, you, and…  you! You five! You’re coming with me! And in the next hour, we’re going to get to the bottom of this and solve the whole damn fiasco right now! Come on. Let’s go!”

I watched the six of them lurching away toward the conference room, The Shanghaied Five looking oh-so-absolutely-mortified! By picking his negotiations panel straight from the hip, all willy-nilly like that? From an entire cafeteria bursting at the seams with Mexico High’s angry little Abbie Hoffmans and Patty Hearsts, he had just managed to form an ad hoc posse of… the Dungeons and Dragons dorks! All personally hand-picked to be the spokespersons for the stoners. Poor kids. Just innocent bystanders. Wrong place, wrong time. Tourists, really.

But we don’t DO drugs, Superintendend Smith…

But like I said. See, that’s really the last specific thing I remember. Or remember clearly. Like I suggested earlier, it’s mostly the really bizarre events that burn themselves permanently into the memory. So how things finally ended, the winding-down details of MHS’s gradual return to normal, or whatever passed for that year’s ‘normal’? It all seems like a fuzzy dream-ending now. I guess I just probably stopped paying attention after all the rigmarole that had been going on for so long. I think that’s when I started putting my focus on updating my resumé, and losing myself in researching any English teaching positions opening up across the state.

One job opening was in my hometown of Dover-Foxcroft.

But I am pretty sure that our infamous little high school drug-dealer was eventually able to wiggle off the hook with the help of the ACLU. And as part of the blow-back from that, I think the other kids who had also been compromised in that drug bust ended up making out fine as well. I believe everything was just dropped in the end. It was the adults who ended up with the proverbial egg on their collective face.

Oh yeah. And come to think of it, I don’t remember our ‘Una-phoner’ ever getting identified either.

I made those call, heh heh…

So… the end of the story? The whole thing just seemed to fizzle, and then just dissolve dissolve away with time. And the school year limped on, following the school calendar to the end.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper“

—from “The Hollow Men” by T. S. Eliot

home

DUDS: BOMB THREATS THAT BOMBED   —PART TWO “The Cold War”

(Third story) (the really interesting one)

PFFFFFT!!

Mexico High School— Mexico, Maine, mid-1970’s

The very first time it happens, you’re caught off guard. You might be knee-deep in a discussion of the Biblical allusions in The Grapes of Wrath or demonstrating the difference between phrases and clauses.Then, suddenly, the intercom crackles to life; you’re being informed that the main office has just received its first bomb threat of the year and all students and staff are being instructed to exit their classrooms in an orderly manner and prepare to board the buses that will be awaiting them.

You glance out your classroom window and yes, here they come, the long, yellow line of school buses snaking up the hill to cocoon your high schoolers in safety at a safe distance. And you think to yourself, Oh well. It happens. It’s a pain in the ass, but it happens. So… let’s get it over with and get back on with our lives.

And that’s what you do. Sure. An hour, maybe two, is lost. The class schedule for the remainder of the day is re-adjusted to compensate for the glitch. Eventually the bell rings in normalcy once again. A different class files into your classroom all a-buzz about the ‘adventure,’ The Grapes of Wrath just a fading memory until tomorrow.

And surprise, surprise—there was no bomb. So it goes.

But when the very next day, amid your demonstration of The Dynamic Elements of Good Character Sketches, gets interrupted by a second bomb threat in a row… you’re a little more than just a little irritated this time. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition” or a bomb scare two days in a row. But damn it, I swear it happened. On the other hand, OK… admit it— you’re also a bit impressed by just how ballsy the little bastard(s) must be, chancing another one right on the heels of yesterday’s. I mean, don’t they realize they’re just asking for it. That the cops’ll track’em down and that’ll be the end of it. Just a matter of time.

OK, after that rare ordeal was over with and everybody was safely ensconced back in their little classroom desks once again, the principal, needing to rip someone a new one, if he only knew whom, came over the intercom with, “This stupidity will stop right here and NOW! Once was bad enough but it’s become a serious crime now, costing the taxpayers unexpected, untold money—compensating the bus drivers, the town having to compensate the police department—money that your parents, your very own families, will have to dish out because of this reckless and senseless act. What some airhead among you thinks is a game. But I can promise you that when the perpetrator or perpetrators are caught (and mark my words they will be caught), we are prepared to press charges to the fullest extent of the law!”

There. He had appealed to their common sense, common logic. So it was over and done with. And thank God for that.

But it wasn’t. There was another one. And believe it or not, another one after that! Quite a slap in the face to the principal.

Something had to be done. But what? OK. A plan emerged. It was kind of a desperate plan, and could even be seen as possibly irresponsible. But it went like this: From this point forward, whenever the office secretary answers the office phone and hears the beginnings of a bomb threat, she will hang up immediately. That plan was put into action. And it worked. Yes, the phone did ring, and of course the voice on the other end began, “There’s a bomb in the…”

Hah! Take that, Mister! Touché!­ And oh, I’m sure the office staff did some gloating and high-fiving after that, especially after the second follow-up call came in and was likewise thwarted. Can you imagine how pissed off the bomb-scare caller must have been? But the school administration’s plan had  worked. Just like Nancy Reagan saying, “Just say NO to drugs.” Simple as that. Case closed. We could get on with… education, believe it or not.

But the flaw in the ointment was… see, Ms. Reagan didn’t know diddly. And this is where my (true story, I swear!!) anecdote here gets really surreal. Because in the afternoon of the day after the two squelched phone calls, out my window I suddenly happened to spy the long ghostly line of yellow school buses doggedly crawling back up over the hill to MHS once again!

And I thought, What the hell are they doing? They can’t be heading here. I mean, we don’t answer the frickin’ phone anymore! But sure enough, twenty minutes later, the evacuation orders were being given once again over the intercom.

What in the world had happened? Well, according to the cops, a bomb threat (for the school, mind you) had been phoned in to the little convenience store down at the bottom of the hill. The store owner had no knowledge of the trusted just-say-NO-and-hang-up strategy, so of course like any good citizen, he’d taken the call, had taken it seriously, and had reported it to the police immediately.

OK then— Bomb Threatener: 5 or 6,  Administration: 0

So you can see what was happening here, right? A duel, of sorts. Like a game of chess. Unfortunately, personal pride had gotten into the mix, each side feeling the need for upping the ante. But… one side had the advantage: that of knowing exactly who its opponent was. But at this point the school’s administration had no clue who it was they were locking horns with. Interesting conflict.

So, it being the school’s turn raise the stakes: “From this point on, until the perpetrator ceases this senseless attack, school will be held in session on Saturdays. Every Saturday until it stops. We very much need to recoup the lost time we’ve been experiencing. And attendance will be taken!”

Hah! Take that! So you see? We were basically a precursor to the later 1985 film, The Breakfast Club!  

How the administration imagined Saturday make-up days…

But just try, for a moment, try to imagine how well this ploy worked out: (a) half the student body simply opted to skip school that first Saturday. (And what a Breakfast Club detention list that would have made, had anybody complied. But they hadn’t.) Plus, with such a very large percentage of your students missing from the mandatory Saturday classes, making up for lost time and progress proved impossible. And it just felt so spooky-weird, looking out over your classroom desk and finding only six kids in a class of twenty, dutifully sitting there and staring back at you. Plus (b) for those who did show up, a bomb threat was called in that Saturday morning anyway. Seriously. And like, who didn’t see that coming?

Score— Bomb Threatener: 50  Administration: 0

Strange days indeed! So the ball was back in our court once again. And us no closer to discovering the identity of our nemesis. And by now, actually the conflict was beginning to lean just a tad toward something that smacked a bit of myth or legend. I mean, who was this guy? Or guys? Or even gals? Some kind of… Unabomber-Caller?

THE UNAPHONER…

Of course after that loss, our principal called an emergency meeting in the library, which was then being referred to as ‘The War Room.’ Instead of just admitting defeat and cancelling school for the rest of the year (my prayer), he really wanted to play hard ball now. So we had to brainstorm. And we brainstormed! Brainstormed our brains out! And would you believe it? We finally came up with something! A plan so devious and dark, it boggled the mind.

Here it is: First we department heads were instructed to delve into the musty old book depository and dig up sets of twenty-five or so old retired texts within our disciplines: i.e., Math, English, Science, etc. That we did. And hah! There were a ton of Warriner’s English Language and Compositions in there collecting dust.

The Students’ #1 Favorite Book…

Secondly, each department’s teachers were instructed to design and produce one ad hoc general lesson plan that would rely on the use of these old books. Then the printed out lesson plans were placed in a temporary file for later use. They were allegedly ones that any teacher could just glance at, quickly get the gist of, and know what to do— pass out the books to kids, and have at it.  

Thirdly, these book sets were then covertly loaded into the back of somebody’s pickup truck and then transported across town to… (you’ll never believe this!)… The Maine State Army National Guard Armory! Yes, I know!

See, somehow, we’d got the Maine Army National Guard Armory’s commanding officers to allow us to use their facility on any week day that we received a bomb threat. The armory was always a secure and locked facility. If by chance our bomb caller decided to try to call in a threat to the armory, they could just be told to buzz-off and go pound sand. The armory would provide just the very safe and secure haven for the students we needed, and… (here’s the kicker) …for the remainder of the entire school day! It would be like they’d be drafted for the day!

So, of course it didn’t take long for the next awaited phone call to come in. And then the plan went off without a hitch. The buses pulled into the school parking lot. The smirking kids boarded the safety buses as per usual. But this time a number of teacher volunteers boarded the buses with them as well, which raised some eyebrows of some of the kids.

I wasn’t one of those volunteers. No, for the very first time in my life I joined the cops as a bomb squad volunteer. But I made sure I was still out there in the parking when the bus doors slammed shut on those kids and the buses started to roll. In the past bomb scares, the kids would just remain seated on the buses— safe, warm, and dry, and usually with the bus door left leisurely open, just waiting until the cops had cleared the building. However, this time they were suddenly on the move. And the surprise of that, and the fact that they didn’t know where the hell TO, was written all over the bug-eyed, precious expressions on the faces pressed up against the windows as they were being hauled off and away.

And what a nice day that was for me! Virtually a holiday. It took a couple hours to comb the building, but that wasn’t hard. Plus, I got to socialize with the police officers, some of whom I already knew. And then, back to my empty classroom for the entire day. Unbelievable. Luxurious. A big change from my usual workday. I remember frivolously imagining that hey, maybe I should change careers from teaching to professional ‘bomb-squadding.’ But all good things must come to an end. “Nothing gold can stay.” —Robert Frost and Ponyboy Curtis

Around 2:20, the yellow bus-caravan finally rolled back into the parking lot. Again, I was standing out there in the lot, eagerly awaiting the reports on how well our anti-bomb-threat plan had worked . And as soon as the bus doors flopped open… Something didn’t  feel right. Something was very wrong.

As they stepped down off the bus, everybody looked… so… disheveled. So… under a strain. Especially the teachers, who appeared weak to the point of just having  to allow gravity to do the job of dropping them back down onto terra firma. Even the kids. Honestly, all the passengers had the look of the survivors of a plane hijacking, where the hijackers had kept their hostages sweating in their passenger seats out on the tarmac for twenty-four hours. Everybody was beat. When my English teacher colleague, Burt, got off I said to him, “Really? It was really that bad?” he just looked at me with an irritable, prickly glower and hissed, “Fuck you!” Comments from other departing staff included “Never again!” and “Just lemme at the bastard who came up with this plan!”

Later that afternoon, it all came out in ‘The War Room.’ By the way, I was curious to see that a couple of officers from law enforcement were sitting in on the debriefing. “Do you have any idea how many rabbit holes there are in that armory for 300-plus kids to hide-out!?” “One or more of our little shits broke the lock to the supply room! Fortunately the firearms weren’t stored there, or I’d hate to think…!” “These kids got on the buses with no idea they were going anywhere, so naturally they didn’t come prepared with anything! And yes, I know you sent us off with a big supply of pencils, but somehow they went missing!” “Lemme tell you something! That supply room had practically a friggin’ library of Field Manuals in there, at least two of which were labled Explosives and Demolitions!” “Jeez, those stupid so-called lesson plans weren’t realistic at all! Not that it really mattered since the kids wouldn’t stay put for more than five minutes!” “Try finding some kid hiding out down there in the motor pool!” “Such a zoo, and it’s pretty likely somebody got pregnant on our watch, from what I hear.” “You know what? Just… please! Don’t ever do something like that to us ever again, OK?”

Score— Bomb Threatener: 300+,   Administration: 0

We, the foot soldiers in this war, were now more than a little discouraged and felt ready to throw in the towel and just hand the school over to the terrorists. But our principal? No. He seemed oddly very pensive and calm while listening to the rants of his underlings, but somehow not discouraged. And as badly as we felt, I’m sure none of us would’ve wanted to trade places with him and be in his shoes. Anyway, he adjourned the meeting fairly pleasantly, thanking the volunteers for their valiant efforts and saying we’d be revisiting the issue soon.

I left feeling guilty about having enjoyed what my volunteer-colleagues might have seen as a siesta in the shade compared to what they’d gone through.  Well… let’s say a little guilty. And a whole lot more lucky, than guilty.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It was odd. Nothing happened over the next few days. And lemme tell ya, nobody saw that coming. It was nice, yeah. However, I know we were all waiting on pins and needles for the next shoe to drop, me even fixed on continually scouting out the road outside my classroom window every chance I got. The waiting was like we were in a Cold War.

But… who knew? Maybe when our nemesis had seen and personally experienced the level of retribution the administration had been willing to go to last time (namely, the Armory fiasco), he or she or they (like ourselves) were seriously a little scarred by how badly things had already gotten out of hand. Maybe the ‘bad guys’ were actually a little gun-shy too, wondering just how far the administration might be willing to go at upping the ante next time.

But Time marched on. Until the other shoe did drop. And when it did, it came in the form of a very strange announcement over the intercom. The school was still in early homeroom period, just waiting on the passing bell for the first class of the day. “We have just recently received a bomb threat.” You could actually hear the school inhale its collective gasp up and down the hallways. Here we go again! And how far will it go THIS time? “The threat indicated that the explosive device is located in the gymnasium. So since the gym wasn’t being used this morning, and is located far at the other end of the school, far from our closest classrooms, the police and firefighters went right to work there and have cleared that area. However, to be on the safe side, now we are going to clear the entire building one classroom at a time.”

Now me, at that early stage of my career, I was a naïve little male English-teacher-Pollyanna.  Yes, I realized that what we’d just heard was a little odd… but hey, I still had faith in the in the wisdom of the police in situations involving our safety. If that is what they were saying needed to be done then OK, that’s what needed to be done. I’m good. My only concern was wow, one classroom at a time? Man, that was going to take a long time.

“So, at this time, all students in room 103 will please report to the gym, accompanied by your teacher. Please leave all coats, textbooks, and backpacks at your desks. Once your classroom has been cleared, you will be returned to your classroom, and then the next classroom will be called down.”

So I was all OK, if that’s what we’re being told to do then hey, let’s do it and get back on with our lives. At least we weren’t being asked to board the school buses on another hell-ride headed for the Armory this time, right? But… I was totally surprised at the reaction of three of my boys to the announcement. They looked totally pissed off. One of them just blurted out, “There ain’t been any bomb scare!”

I answered, “What? How can you say that. I mean, come on—look how many bomb scares we’ve had over the past month! How can you be surprised we’re getting one more?” This kid wasn’t even bothering to look at me, let alone answer me. He was too busy just glaring along with his buddies, all three of whom were all shaking their heads seemingly in disbelief and anger. I couldn’t understand what the hell was going on in their heads, not that it mattered much to me. I just put it down as some kind of extreme conspiracy theory they must have bought into. I was like… Whatever!

Anyway, the time we spent waiting for our room to be called to the gym was really awkward. If it had been an English class, at least I’d have some class work to keep the kids busy with, something to keep their minds somewhat off what was going down. But no. I just declared a ‘study hall,’ without really expecting anybody to study anything, such was the tension in the room.

It was just a really long wait and it was getting on everyone’s nerves, including mine. But finally our classroom was called down.

My room, if I remember correctly, was 206… or maybe 201. Anyway, the ‘2’ in 206 simply meant, of course, that we were located on the second “floor.” Although… there really was no second floor, per se. See, our school was built on a fairly steep slope of land. And what I just referred to as the second floor was actually just a single-story wing of classrooms built up on the higher end of the sloping grounds. And there was no stairway to reach the 200-numbered classrooms, only an ascending, low-pitched, walk-up/ walk-down ramp. The classrooms’ hallway up there was built at a right angle to this ramp, so the hallway forked in the shape of a T. When we got called down to the gym, we made our way down the hall and took a right-angle turn at the top of the ramp. And so… as you’d start to head down the ramp, ahead of you you’d have a view straight down to the lobby with the principal’s office situated off to the left and the cafeteria off to the right. To get to the gymnasium’s entrance, you’d pass straight through that lobby and eventually come to a very small ramp, at the top of which were the gym’s doors. (By the way, the reason I’m giving you this description at this point is not only you can better picture the lay-out now, but more importantly because the lay-out will be an important factor in the exciting, DON’T-MISS-IT! conclusion to this ‘Cold War’ in Part III.)

OK. So… a ‘funny’ thing happened at the end of our little ‘journey.’ Odd– funny, not funny-funny. Lost in my own little air-head thoughts, mostly about how glad I’d be when we’d get this whole rigmarole over and done with, I’d led my class down the ramp and, as the point-man, and was just about to lead us up the…

“OK, that’s it. Stop right there!”

I stopped. And looked up to see who was there. What the hell? I found a uniformed cop standing there in front of me blocking my way. “Who… me?”

“Actually, you can keep going. Just go on right up into the gym.”

“Oh. OK.” I turned to look over my shoulder for my kids. “Let’s go…”

“No. Just you, Mr. Lyford.”

“Excuse me?” I looked around. Amazingly, there were four police officers. At least. That I could see. One of whom was a female. I looked back at my kids. They were being formed into a single line by one of the cops.

“Just you. Now, go on up to the gym, and you can help out.” This just didn’t feel right. Had I missed a memo? Or what?

One of my girls was at the head of the line. The female officer positioned over to the right addressed her. “Let’s go. You’re coming with me.”

“What? Whtta you mean? Where to?”

“Just around the corner. It’ll only take a minute.”

“Well, suppose I don’t want to come with you? What then?”

“Then I doubt you’re going to be very happy with the alternative.”

That was a threat. I was stunned. A cop who had just positioned himself onto the left side of the ramp said pretty much the same thing to the boy who was next in line. Apparently this was a two-officer gauntlet. Male and female. What were they planning to do? A strip search?

“Go ahead now, Mr. Lyford,” I was once again prompted.

Confused, shaking my head, trying to take it all in, I plodded up the ramp as I was told to, pulled open one of the four heavy doors, and stepped inside.

Jesus! There was three-quarters of our student body, sullenly and nearly silent seated up there in the bleachers.

So… nobody but nobody had been returned to their classrooms at all! What the hell was going on?!

I recalled that statement one of my boys back in the classroom had uttered, just after the announcement had been made: “There ain’t been any bomb scare!” 

He’d been right! This was something else entirely.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

OK, so there will be a Part III that will take you the The Hot War and The Final Retaliation. So… STAY TUNED FOR THE FINAL ROUND….

HOME

DUDS: BOMB THREATS THAT BOMBED —PART ONE

As I pointed out at the beginning of my 44th blog post, “Just Say No to Streaking,” a teacher’s professional life is comprised of so much more than just the academic subjects she/he teaches. The other fifty per cent of the teacher’s actual classroom existence is spent frittering away on such Mickey Mouse nuts and bolts as the following: lunch duty, hall duty, lobby duty, bus duty, detention duty, prom duty, bullying duty, graduation duty, bomb scare duty, steaking duty, school dance chaperoning, winter carnival chaperoning, study hall monitoring, being a class advisor, being a student club and activity advisor, being a  coach of what-have-you, being a vandalism detective, not to mention the breaker-upper of the fights and the smoking in the boys’/girls’ room, and a warrior in the war on drugs in general, etc. And see… I strongly feel that the general population needs to be reminded of this fact from time to time.

So no, I didn’t spend my career only wallowing in adverbial clauses, split infinitives, and Romeo and Juliet. The following three anecdotes, arranged in ascending order from least to most complicated ( i.e., least to the most unbelievable and entertaining),  illustrate my experiences with Bomb Scare Duty…

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

(First Story) (the least complicated and least entertaining one)

Of the many, the very last time I worked a “bomb squad” detail (please notice the quotation marks, and accept my assurance that I choose the term with a metaphorical tongue in cheek), I was moving left to right, locker by locker, down the third floor hallway of Foxcroft Academy. This was approximately sometime between 1999 and 2001. There had been a one of those ‘bomb in the building’ phone calls to the main office, which was a little odd because it was the day before the very last day of the school year. I mean, what was the point? The seniors had graduated and vacated the premises days before, and the only thing left on the school calendar were the last few of the Final Exams.

So why was I on the so-called bomb squad? Boredom. I had a choice. I could allow myself to get stuck standing outside there in the hot and humid school parking lot chaperoning a good 300 rowdy juniors, sophomores, and freshmen (and oh they were wild and wound up) OR… I could simply raise my hand and shout “Pick me, pick me!” when the police asked for a couple of volunteers. I’d volunteered.

OK, you GOT me. This is not really me. It’s George Santos.

But don’t get me wrong— no hero, me. Everybody (me, the cops, the teachers, and the kids included) knew there was no bomb. So basically it was just a matter of me getting myself in out of the sun and humidity to enjoy some leisurely peace and quiet. And it was quiet up there on the third floor.

I was working the senior locker area. Most of them had been emptied out. A few had still had a few textbook sand some homework papers left in them, stuff some seniors had been too lazy to turn in; and those, we were just tossing out onto the hallway floor to be sorted through later.  

But anyway, there I am, looking down at two or three textbooks piled at the bottom of some kid’s locker, and when I pick them up and toss them out onto the floor, I spy something else down there. A bomb? No. There are no bombs. What it is… is actually just a little sandwich baggie stuffed fat with green stuff inside. No surprise to me. (Well, surprised that any kid would leave such an expensive little  stash behind.) So I call out, “Got something over here, guys. Not a bomb. Just something… that you might smoke in a bong maybe.”

“Oh yeah…” one of the two officers I’m accompanying says, bending down to retrieve it. On closer inspection, it’s immediately obvious that the Ziploc bag is swollen, as if with some kind of what… gas? The officer unzips it and, pffft! air escapes from it like from a poked balloon. “Jesus!” says the cop, with a wrinkled nose.

“That smell!” exclaims the other.

I smell it too. “What the hell! What kind of pot is that?”

“GAH!” The officer turns and tosses the baggie across the hall, plunk, right into one of the large trash cans on wheels we’ve been using for the paper junk. “Oh, just the very moldy, many-months-old , PB&J  sandwich kind,” he says. “Phew!”

So yes, there you have it. My very last “bomb squad” experience turned out to be… a green, moldy, old nothing burger. So it goes. And I warned you not to expect much.   

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

(Second Story) (a ‘You can’t make this stuff up! kind of story)

So my very first bomb scare experience occurred in Belfast, Maine back in the winter of 1969, the craziest year of my entire professional life. I was a first-year English teacher at the high school and as a first year teacher, I was finding that whole Ohmigod-I’m-a-freakin’-TEACHER-now! experience quite terrifying. I already expressed this in an earlier blog episode titled “Poet…? Peacenik…? Pugilist…? Part Three.” But for those of you who missed out by not reading this great story yet, here is a little excerpt:

The fearful Ichabod Crane in me…

“I was terrified. All my life I’d been suffering from stage fright and, now, suddenly having to face classes of thirty human beings six times a day (too many of whom looked a lot more adult than I did) just sitting there staring at me? Waiting for me to begin doing whatever it was I was getting (omigod!) professionally paid to do? Human beings all suddenly required to address me as none other than “Mister Lyford”? I mean… hell, I was no “Mister Lyford,” not the last time I looked!

“On top of that, they’d given me classes for which there weren’t enough books! They’d forced me to take the Dramatics Coach job when I’d never even been in a play in my LIFE! They’d dumped most of the worst classes on me (a common dirty trick school districts  play on the unsuspecting new hires). And one of my two Speech classes was filled with “students,” not a single one of whom was willing to even stand up and tell me his/her name.”

So anyway, during a faculty meeting shortly after New Year’s Day, 1969, our superintendent (who, by the way, I’d learned on day-one was considered a buffoon by the teachers and department heads alike) brought up the unexpected topic of bomb scares. He shared with us that a number of other area schools were recently having to deal with bomb threats, so it was likely it was only a matter of time before we experienced one as well. Then he proudly let us know that he had hatched just the plan to catch the miscreants whenever it happened to us. I didn’t find out till later that Superintendent King was known for his cockamamie ‘just-the-plan’ plans. You wouldn’t believe it.

EXcellent. I’ve hatched just the plan to catch the miscreants…

The plan was this: “Whenever a bomb threat is phoned in to one of our schools, I’ve instructed all the respective principals go to the intercom microphone and simply say (all calm, cool, and collected, mind you) ‘Cole Alert.’ Now, when you hear ‘Cole Alert,’ you will know that a bomb threat has been received. But the kids? Hah! They won’t have a clue as to what that expression means. How could they? So, while they’re left in the dark— you, with your advantage over them, will be watching your classroom students like a hawk in that two- or three-minutes interim leading up to the actual School Evacuation Order. And in so doing, one of you will be in the position to witness, say, one student possibly winking at one of his buddies, or maybe grinning knowingly or, you know, perhaps elbowing somebody else meaningfully. So you will record their names, and see that I receive them at once! Then later we’ll have the police call them in for questioning, and together they and I will sweat them down into a confession.”

One of my colleagues whispered in my ear, “His favorite show is Hawaii Five-O. He sees himself as a Jack Lord. You know, Detective McGarrett.

Superintendent King

A week went by. And then it happened!

Moments before the bell for the first class of the day was about to ring, I was monitoring my early homeroom period. Suddenly the distraught voice of the principal started barking over the intercom, “COLE ALERT! COLE ALERT! COLE ALERT!” with the same urgency of a World War II B-17 tail gunner yelling, “BANDIT AT THREE O’CLOCK!” Think Major Burns. From M*A*S*H. 

I immediately (but surreptitiously, of course) began surveying my students, watching for, anticipating the telltale wink, the elbow, or the knowing grin. Ready to pounce. But all thirty-plus kids erupted simultaneously, every one of them asking similar versions of the same question to one another. “What the hell is this? A bomb scare?” “And who the hell is Cole?” But there were just so many of them, and it was all happening so fast, I just couldn’t see how I was supposed to be watching all of them at once! And I never caught a single wink, grin, or an elbow! I was a failure.

And then, of course, they all turned on me, their wise all-knowing ‘educator’ at the front of the room. “Is that what this is, Mr. Lyford? A bomb scare?” And loser me, wanting to be the ultimate professional, I quickly pasted on my best poker face and feigned ignorance. “Well, gosh… I have… no idea what this is all about…” at which point the entire classroom busted out in a volley of laughter at the flagrant silliness of my attempted white lie. And before the laughter had time to totally die down, the intercom crackled to life once again and began issuing the evacuation instructions.

Now… that was only the beginning of what was about to turn into the longest, most drawn-out days.

First of all, it was still early morning, around 8:00, far too early for a school building to suddenly flush its entire student body and faculty, ready or not, right out of the building and into a winter wonderland with its air temperature down around zero degrees. But suddenly there we all were, populating the sidewalk like a colony of National Geographic penguins on an ice floe. And secondly, our “super intelligent” superintendent had apparently planned his crafty Here’s-How-We’ll-Thwart-the-Malicious-Bomb-Scarer-Plot not one stinking millimeter further than just coming up with the cool-sounding, 007-ish code name, “COLE ALERT!” And that meant we were all left out there freezing on the sidewalk with nobody having any idea what to do with us!

A half-hour passed, while we watched the police cars and fire trucks pull up and park in the big school parking lot. Some kids hadn’t had time to grab their coats. I ended up lending my coat to one of them. Meanwhile, my toes were so numb it felt like they had disappeared.

Then down the line came our assistant principal with news of the superintendent’s emergency ad hoc Plan B (actually Plan A, if you think about it). Having phoned around town for some/any place to temporarily house our little army, a deal had been struck with the owner of the local movie theater. Suddenly we had a destination. We could go there. They would have room for all of us. A place to sit and warm up. So. We got our marching orders and off we marched. The theater was about three quarters of a mile away.

When we finally arrived en masse at the theater, it turned out the doors of the theater were still locked! Once again we had to assume the portrayal of a penguin colony, while the assistant principal went across the street to a pastry shop to use their telephone. Yeah. 1969. No cell phones back then.

After the proprietor finally showed up, in we went. And guess what. Now it turned out that the thermostat was still set at 55 degrees! And we were told that it would take a very long while to warm the place up. So we sat, watching our exhaled breath forming little mini-clouds before our faces with every breath we took. But hey, at least 55 degrees was like… plus yardage, metaphorically. Better than 5 degrees above zero anyway.

It was also very dark in that dingy theater. And I’m sure that you can understand that the kids were getting more restless and obstreperous by the minute from utter boredom, and who could blame them? Some were racing up and down the aisles, some singing songs, some just whooping it up, and a couple of the kids managed to get into a fight and had to be forcefully separated. Meanwhile, we teachers had formed ourselves in a line blocking the exits, so kids wouldn’t escape.

Man, we were there for such a long time.

But by the way, it just so happened that Belfast Area High School had earlier arranged for a school assembly that very morning. The assembly was to feature classical music performed by a visiting string quartet— two violinists, a violist, and a cellist. So our stable genius of a superintendent came up with the great idea of having that quartet appear and perform on the frigid movie theater stage to entertain us! Because you know, “Musick hath charms to soothe a savage breast.”

Somebody found and dragged four chairs up onto the stage. And then, voila! The musicians were trotted out onto the stage witho no introduction whatsoever. Or perhaps someone did introduce them but it was just too loud and chaotic there, that I simply missed it. I dunno. But watching the absurdity of the members of that doomed quartet sitting out there all swaddled up in overcoats and scarves and boots, diligently sawing their bows back and forth on the strings, their frozen breaths forming little empty cartoon balloons above their heads, and starting with their dainty sonata and hoping in vain to work their way toward the minuet…? Let’s just say… it didn’t go well. A loud boom-box blasting Bob Dylan or The Stones might’ve worked.

Ironically, the ill-timed concerto only exacerbated the savagery in the beasts’ breasts. Hoots and hollers and catcalls and loud boos! The stamping of feet! Everything was getting out of control fast, though we tried to shush them and weed out the worst of our little villains, but the anonymity in the darkness made thjat difficult!

Our musicians had found themselves playing with all the distractions of the band on the deck of the sinking Titanic.

What stopped it all dead in its tracks was the sudden, militaristic arrival of the superintendent and his henchmen! Yes, it seems that whenever and wherever he arrived, our ‘commandant’ always showed up with between four and six of his trench-coated tough guys (school board members no doubt, but definite mafia wannabes). They took the stage. The quintet-ers were summarily dismissed and immediately scampered off and away with their strings and bows and music stands in tow. Someone turned up the house lights way up while Superintendent King dramatically faced down the rabble with His terrible-swift-sword wrath… “WE’LL HAVE IT QUIET!”

And lo, suddenly it was quiet. And verily He saw the silence. And He saw that it was good!

He took the few steps from center stage to downstage, all the better to confront His adversaries with His odd mixture of disgust and pity. And He stood there with his feet shoulder-width apart during nearly a full minute of dramatic silence, just daring anyone to make a peep… and then, finally, He spaketh.

“This morning… somebody with a very sick and demented mind, phoned the high school principal’s office and informed them that forty sticks of dynamite were planted up in one of our classroom ceilings. Yes, that’s right. Can you imagine that, ladies and gentlemen? Can you imagine how diseased and twisted the pea-sized brain of this… this Neanderthal has to be? To do something as insane as that? No, you can’t. Because it goes beyond imagination, doesn’t it.

And we have reason to believe… and I’m sorry to have to inform you of this… that it was one of you… one of your classmates, perhaps the one sitting right next to you at this very moment, who made that that deranged call. As hard as that is to believe. Yes. I know. You see, a psycho did this. A sadly sick psycho made that call… and as a result, the rest is history. You were his victims. You are the ones that this psychopath sent out into the freezing cold and left you out there for more than an hour! This… mental patient…”

[Now of course I obviously can’t remember the exact words that Commandant King spaketh to us, because this was back in 1969, some 55 years ago. But I assure you this is very much approximately the speech he made, marked by the vitriol and political incorrectness that citizens of this decade would be shocked to have heard. But… it was just this vitriolic speech that led to the even more unbelievable… next thing.]

I swear, as I was standing there at the back of the theater listening to his words… (and you’re going to find this practically impossible to believe because… hey, I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t been there) I heard, and a bunch of us teachers heard, a ‘noise,’ a low muttering, an ongoing muttering voice that was basically just a bare buzz under the thunder of the superintendent’s diatribe. Now we, the teachers, had no idea where the voice was coming from so, instinctively, like good soldiers, we all spread out, stealthily moving around the seats in order to home in on whatever the source of it was, because by now you could make out some of the words. And the words I was hearing? I‘d begun to find them more than a little disturbing.

But then suddenly, we no longer had to search for the source. Because a few kids in the middle section all at once just jack-in-the-boxed right up out of their seats and began jockeying themselves frantically, both to the left and right, away from a single, still-seated young man they’d been sitting near to. And what this fellow was saying was essentially this, only in lots more words: “And what, he’s calling ME sick? Hah! HE’S the PSYCHO!”

Of course the boy was quickly apprehended by a trio of phys ed. teachers (no, not by the likes of little ol’ me). The police were called to the lobby where, just before he was transferred into their custody, this young man (an obviously disturbed, solid, heavyweight of a Korean boy) managed for the first time ever to zip the lip of our officious, yammering, Superintendent King (of the Five-O) by delivering an iron-fisted gut-punch to his breadbasket, leaving him entirely at a loss for words as well as the ability to breathe temporarily.

The two immediate outcomes of that little altercation were (a) by the next day, our boy the ‘bomb-scarer’ seems to have been quietly… ‘disappeared,’ never to be seen or heard from again (as far as I know anyway), and (b) as a result, many of the faculty felt compelled to gather that night (as was their wont every night anyway) at Jed’s Tavern, to happily raise their mugs of grog in a toast to… (well, nobody really knew the Korean boy or his name, as it turned out, so…) to the young “Unknown Bombadier” who’d made, for their morning’s amusement, the utimate sacrifice.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~  ~ ~ ~

Now dear reader, if you found this I-swear-on-a-stack-of-Bibles- it’s-all-true remembrance of mine hard to believe (as I did myself while it was all unfolding around me as an innocent and unsuspecting first-year teacher) I can only warn you to fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen, for… DUDS: BOMB THREATS THAT BOMBED —PART TWO (coming soon)

PFFFFFFT!

home

SATURDAY NIGHT IN DOVER-FOXCROFT: REC CENTER, 1961

The Rec Center over at Central Hall runs on Friday and Saturday nights. On Fridays it’s open exclusively to the sixth, seventh, and eighth graders; Saturdays, it belongs to the big dogs of Foxcroft Academy. Guests are allowed in only if one of our students has personally invited them, and secondly if the invitation has first been cleared with a faculty advisor of the Rec Center Committee (of which I am now a member— I’m the freshman class of ’64 rep) and a permission pass signed by our principal, is presented at the door upon entry. Yeah. We run a tight ship.

Now, I’ve never ever been a committee-kind-of-guy, but this Rec Center is one of the most important things in my life. I’d be so damn lost if we didn’t have Rec Center to look forward to on the weekends. But being on the Committee does mean that I have to man the check-in table in the foyer for a half hour one evening every other week. Because if someone without the official and required ‘invited-guest’ pass manages to slip on in past, me without me catching it (and immediately alerting the faculty advisor or chaperons on duty), I’d probably get kicked off the committee. And I don’t want that.

So tonight, here I am, happily walking the frigid little fifth of a mile in the snow storm from my house to Central Hall. And when I push my way in through the front doors, I check in with whoever is seated at the greeting table and then begin to clomp up the old wooden staircase toward the second floor, drawn forward by the tantalizing thrum of the muffled jukebox bass.

Forty per cent of the reason I love coming here every week is the music, pure and simple.  The other sixty can probably be summed up by the title of that 1940’s book (that I’ve never read) titled The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Because that’s me. Lonely heart. Lonely hunter. But a hunter who’s actually pretty pathetic at the hunting, if you wanna know the truth.

At the top of the landing, I stop to stare in at the dance floor, which I can’t really even see yet as it’s cloaked in total darkness. (Ah. It’s a slow one. Jim Reeves. “He’ll Have to Go.”) I’m not too crazy about bumping into anybody in the dark, so I’ll just stand here listening until my eyes have started adjusting to the change in lighting from the brightness downstairs.

Though love is blind, make up your mind

I’ve got to know

Should I hang up, or will you tell him

He’ll have to go?

When I can partially make out some of the shadowy, slowly-swaying couples leaning into one another in hugging embraces (oh yeah, that must be nice), I venture in. Stepping around and in between them, I hang a right and make for the coatroom door which, when I push it open, lets the lone, 60-watt, bare light-bulb-hanging-from-the-ceiling brightness flash-blind the dancers in the dark nearest the door, as well as myself all over again. The music muffles when I close the door.

This room’s the size of a really small office. And, as usual, there’re mountains of jackets and coats piled up here, there, and everywhere, right on the floor even. I unzip my parka, wiggle out of it, and bury it under a pile over in the far corner so I’ll know where to dig r it when it’s time to go. Then, it’s back out through the door. And the new song starting up is “The Bristol Stomp” by The Dovells.

The kids in Bristol are sharp as a pistol

When the do the Bristol Stomp!

Really somethin’ when they join in jumpin’

When they do the Bristol Stomp!

I drop myself down in one of the chairs over on the left side, the boys’ side, of the hall, and wait for my night vision to catch back up with me again. The dance floor is actually a basketball court with a hoop at either end, one fixed just above the coatroom door and the other, down at the far end, hanging just in front of the stage. The seats are lined up on either side, left and right. And it’s kinda funny, the left side by some unwritten law being the boys’ side. The girls all park across from us on the other side of the hall. 

I watch the couples gyrating to the peppy rhythm. “Bristol Stomp” is pretty lively and yeah, some of’em are really going at it. Me though, I’m pretty much a watcher, basically. Not that I wanna be. I don’t like to think about it too much, but each time the music starts up and the couples rise to meet each other out on the floor, our two segregated rows become, by default, the wallflower rows, I guess.

Yeah, we’re the wallflowers, the shy ones. The ones who are not part of a couple. Not really by choice exactly.

Oh sure, I mean physically…all we’d have to do is get ourselves up on our own two legs and just… walk over there. And just ask somebody, if you have the guts. But the thing of it is, some of us have learned that it’s a whole lot longer walk, plodding way back across the floor when somebody just looks right at you and says, “No.” Especially when a fool bunch of her girlfriends all bust a gut giggling like crazy just as you’re turning around and feeling stupid.

And…isn’t it dumb, and totally unfair how it always has to be the guy that asks. The girls can’t really get shot down, can they. Not when they never have tobe the ones asking. Well, unless it was a Sadie Hawkins dance, which we never even have. And then, too, oh yeah, it’s perfectly all right for the girls to just step right out onto the dance floor in two’s or three’s or four’s and start dancing up a storm together to rock’n’roll songs. But you’d never catch a bunch of guys doing that. It’d be pretty much frowned upon, you dig?

So… yeah, at least they have something they can do instead of just sitting over there like a bunch of morons. Like we do.

Anyhow, most of them left sitting over there in their own little Lonely Hunter Hearts row aren’t ones I’d even want to ask to dance with me. Why? Because stupidly I’m a movie-romantic.  See, I go to the movies every week on my allowance. Practically no matter what is playing. So I see all kinds: westerns, comedies, gangster-flicks, horror, sci-fi and, yeah, the love stories. I would never admit this to my buddies, but the love stories? For some reason, they really get to me. Basically, because I can’t help identifying so much with the male leads on the screen in all of those boy-meets girl plots. And then I just can’t help fantasizing all the time that some day, some girl, some Sandra Dee or Natalie Wood, is actually gonna take an interest in me.  And then… you know, we’ll get together. Dating. Somehow.

Problem is… it’s just never that day.

Oh God, you wanna know something embarrasing? My favorite show on TV (well, next to The Twilight Zone that is) is something titled The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. It’s a silly sit-com starring Dwayne Hickman as Dobie and Bob Denver as Dobie’s comical beatnik sidekick, Maynard G. Krebbs.

The weekly plot is almost always a variation on the same theme: Dobie has his heart set on Thalia Menninger, played by the gorgeous Tuesday Weld (one of the biggest reasons it’s a favorite show of mine) but she’s totally out of his league, see? Sound familiar? Yeah. The Heart of the Lonely Hunter? Story of my life.

P.S. you can add Tuesday Weld to my Sandra Dee and Natalie Wood list.

OK. Enough watching. I’ll come back upstairs here real soon, but as always, first I’ll just zip back down stairs to scout out which, if any, of my Maynard-G.-Krebbs pals have shown up.

The Rec Center is an entirely different planet downstairs. It’s well-lighted, and looks sort of like a little teen-age gambling casino. The card games always consist of poker, cribbage, and black jack. You can also sign out a chess or checkers set, and so usually there’s always one of those brainy games ongoing too, surrounded by its usual small handful of kibitzers looking on. Me, I mostly can be found playing cribbage or chess. But then too there’s the noisiest thing going down here: the ping-pong table.  Ping pong is fun.

So sure, I enjoy it down here and all, but I have to say it: my lonely-hunter heart remains up there in the romantic darkness of the second floor, with all Dover-Foxcroft’s Dees, Woods, and Welds practically living out there on the dance floor.

Part of my problem is that three-quarters of the kids who show up here on Saturday nights are the upper classmen. Well, mostly sophomores and some juniors. The popular seniors (and some juniors) what with having their driver’s licenses and their own set of wheel, have obviously discovered better things to do. Like ‘parking.’ Parking out on lover’s lane. Or parking in the public beach parking lot.

OK, ten minutes have gone by down here. I start to take a deep breath, planning to head back up there with my new New Year’s resolution to honestly ask some girl to dance, when the head advisor appears and pulls me aside. “Glad you’re here tonight, Tommy. Eddie hasn’t shown up. So, I’m afraid I’ve gotta ask you to pull a double shift at the check-in table.”

“What? A whole hour?”

“Yeah. Afraid so. 8:30 to 9:30.”

“But, jeez. That’s a lot.” Man, why does this always happen to me? I mean, I just knew, damnit, that between 8:30 and 9:30? With my luck, that’d be the exact same time that the girl of my dreams, whoever she might be, will show up, alone without a date, and would be looking over the dance floor… someone, anyone…”

“Yeah. But… what can I say? It is what it is. So, can you do this for me?”

“Well… sure. I guess.” Me thinking, Oh sure! But… don’t you see? I was planning to make my move!

“Thanks, Tommy. You’re a good man.”

And then he’s gone. With me glaring at his back thinking, Well why don’t YOU do it then! I look at my watch. Oh well, I’ve still got forty minutes or so left before having to man the table. And plus, after that, I’ll still have 9:30 to 10:00 at least. Anyway, I head for the stairs.

As I start jogging up, I’m hit by a very eerie silence up there. Which is odd. Because even if it’s them just deciding what next song to play, where’s the usual loud buzz of conversation? So I’m feeling that old movie line: It’s quiet. TOO quiet. And then too, jeez, what the hey? The lights are all on. Somebody’s turned the lights on! Is the Center what, closing early? Man, I hope not.

I sort of blunder in. Whoa! All the seats are empty! And what else!? I see everybody’s crowded around in a big semi-circle, facing the stage with their backs to me. But… there’s no one on the stage. I can see that! So… what’re they all looking at? Curious, I squeeze myself into the crush and worm my way in to the front. OK. So there’s some guy, some man, standing at the center of the semi-circle. And he’s got a guitar, and he’s talking. But I can’t hear him that well yet. So I have no idea what he’s talking about. But uh… he looks… and sounds… very familiar! But who in the…?

And then it hits me!

Ohmigod! That’s my French teacher there! Mr. Bennett! Reason I didn’t recognize him at first is I’ve never seen him before without a sports jacket and tie. And then again, too, I’ve always only ever seen him in the classroom, never anywhere else, so… well, he’s… out of context here. Especially holding a guitar. And look at him! He’s wearing a very cool ‘dickie,’ like a turtle neck, under his shirt… and he looks… I don’t know, just so surprisingly casual. And cool. And so what’s he doing here then? I mean, he’s not an advisor, or anything.

The Meddibempsters of Bowdoin College, 1960s. Mr. Clay Bennett, 4th row (right). Strangely, James Howard, front row (alone), was also my high school English teacher at the same time…

Mr. Bennett is a super-great teacher. I’ve fallen head over heels in love with French this year. English will always be my favorite class, but French is a close second. And it’s all on him. When he speaks French, he sounds so authentic. And he makes it fun when we practice those… nasal sounds. Like the on at the end of garçon: -ongh… gar  ’çongh!You almost have to wrinkle your nose to say it right. Fun, like I said.

And he regales us some with a few of the memories of his sojourn in Paris. And his recollections leave all of our heads dancing with sugarplums of, say, a bicycle parked on the grassy banks of the Seine, and a romantic afternoon consisting of a baguette, fromage Français, a bottle of wine, and… a friend. Heady stuff. And like I said, I love the class, even though oddly I’m barely passing it, thanks to all the strenuous French literature translation assignments, and the verb tenses. But all in all, I am in awe of this teacher, and I really can’t say that about hardly any of the teachers on the faculty.

And now (surprise) here he is suddenly playing the guitar in his hands, his soft beautiful chords floating around us, and now his voice beginning to sing… surprisingly… “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” And no, not like The Tokens sing it. The way he sings it, because he’s making it his own. And it is really working. My God, I love it. His voice is gorgeous.

I remember now hearing that he was a member of Bowdoin College’s highly regarded acapella chorus, The Meddibempsters, and his vocal training is so obvious. I mean, wow. He’s good. You can feel that everybody in this crowd, like me, is totally knocked out by his performance, and we all want an encore at the end of the song but, no, it looks like that one is all we’re gonna get. However, this little one-song concert is something I’ll long remember, I’m sure. And I’ve just made me a conscious decision: I’m gonna go back and spend a lot more time practicing on my guitar.

And man, I’m just thanking my lucky stars this thing didn’t go down when I’d be stuck downstairs, sitting at the check-in table. So happy I lucked out. But speaking of my check-in duty, it’s pretty close to that time. And since nobody seems to be in any hurry to start the Top Forty music back up again (everybody, content to just be standing around in a daze marveling that one of theirs teachers could be so talented), I guess I’ll have to accept the fact that I’m not gonna get to ask somebody for a dance, at least for right now. But there’ll still be that half hour left between 9:30 and 10:00 though. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky then.

Yeah. Right.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So here I am, sitting alone at the table, loose-leaf notebook open in front of me in which I have to log everyone’s comings and goings. And it hasn’t exactly been busy. One set of parents popping in to pick up their daughter. That’s pretty much it, because it’s late. I nod at the guys continuously go back and forth, going up and coming down the stairs. And try rather meekly to engage the giggly girls who are doing the same in clever conversation as they flit by. The restrooms are down at the far end of the hall; that explains the majority of the traffic. Other than that, I’m spending my time contemplating what I’ll probably do after the place closes down. Play basketball upstairs with my brother and his buddies? Join a couple of my own pals and sneak into the movie theater to see who’s there? Oh well. I’ll figure it out.

(yawn) This job is so boring.

Until it isn’t.

The front doorsuddenly gets yanked open, letting in a rogue blast of frigid, wintery wind and a swirl of snowflakes! And right behind that gust, in stumbles four young men, not boys! Their faces rosy. And just bursting with energy. Talking loudly and animatedly about… I dunno, something. Fortunately the door manages to slam itself shut. These guys look like they’re freezing, like they’ve been walking outdoors rather than riding in a vehicle. And they’re too busy yakking to have noticed little me yet.

Even though they’re in their civvies, they’re all sporting their tell-tale Air Force parkas. So. They’re flyboys. Flyboys from Charleston Air Force Base, eight miles southeast from here, up on Charleston Hill. The flyboys? They aren’t too popular with the homeboys around here, as you might imagine. Not enough girls to go around… is the word on the street. But that doesn’t have much to do with me.

So far, they’re so wrapped up in babbling to each other, I don’t even exist. Whatever the topic of their animated excitement, it seems to have something to do with something outside. I decide to introduce myself. “Hi, guys!” They don’t hear me obviously. It’s like I really don’t exist. Before I get a chance to clear my throat and repeat my friendly hello, I hear one of them say, “OK. Let’s go!” And as if somebody fired a starting pistol, all four are swarming up the stairs!

“WHOA there!”  I yell (to no avail). I panic and find myself jack-knifing to my feet and bellowing, HEY! YOU GUYS!! I SAID, STOP!!”Miraculously, they hear that one. And freeze, up by about the seventh step. Then all four crank their heads around and let their eyes fall on me. Down here. In the foyer. I don’t say anything. They don’t say anything. A moment passes. They all look at one another. Then down they come. All four. To crowd around my dinky little table and lean their faces in at me with rapt interest. Like I’m a bug or something. One of them leans his face in too close, eye-to-eye, our foreheads nearly touching. His face is a blank. A big, blank poker face. “Well…?”

I find I have to swallow before I can choke out a response. “I’m sorry.” Jeez, I can barely hear myself. “But… see? This is a high school thing. Foxcroft Academy has…”

“A high school thing? So what’re you doing here, shrimp boat? You can’t be what, even in third grade yet? Right?”

I have to swallow twice this time. And I feel a drip of cool sweat sliding down between my shoulder blades. “No… uhmmm, ninth grade. “

“Oh, come off it! That can’t be right. I’m afraid I’m gonna have to ask you show me some ID.”

OK, I don’t like the way this is going. At all. After all. I’m a little chicken-shit, aren’t I.  And I’m already wishing I’d just let them pass on by. With, you know,  me just ‘accidentally’ looking the other way. But now I have to say… something.

“You gotta be a student at the Academy, to come in.”

“My God. You really talk fast, don’tcha. I can barely understand you.”

“Or Be. Invited,” I manage to add.

“Oh, that! Sure. I know that! That’s OK. Because… I am invited, see? By… Jim. You know Jim, don’t you. Of course you do. Everybody knows good old Jim. Am I right?”

I haven’t been this frightened since that time on my paper route when I got cornered by a growling German shepherd for a half hour. I keep thinking, Where IS everybody? Anybody? Why hasn’t somebody just strolled by…?

“Well, see… you gotta have a signed pass.” I mutter. “Signed by the principal.”

Here, he shakes his head patiently, but with a big wolfish smile. “Ah! So you’re… the hall monitor. Oh my!” And then he does something I really don’t like.

He puts his hands on my shirt. I figure, Here we go. He’s gonna beat the crap outta me, but no. Instead, it’s like he’s just intimately… straightening my collar, and then dusting off my shoulders, like maybe there was something on them, like, you know, dandruff or something, but still all the while smiling at me, like I’m some little kid and he’s my dad, getting me spiffed up to get ready for school. It’s something that bullies like to do.

“You know what I’m thinking,” he says. I don’t say anything. I just wait for him to tell me. “I think… you and me? I think we’ve become friends. Don’t you? Don’t you feel that?”

I’m just looking down at the toes of my shoes.

“So what I’m thinking is, you’ve thought this whole thing all over, right? And because we’ve become such good friends now, you’re going to invite me to go… right on right up those stairs with our other three friends here and…  then… hey, it’s all good, right? Am I right?”

I nod.

“Can you just say it? That you’re inviting me?”

I nod.

“Then… please… say it.”

I am so ashamed. “I… invite you.” 

“Aw gee, thank you so very…”

Suddenly, the front door gets practically kicked open, letting in another rogue gust of frigid, wintery wind and a swirl of snowflakes! And right behind that gust, in stumbles …a cop. Wait, no, not just a cop. THE cop: Bill Fair!

(OK. I admit it. This image of Robocop is a stretch, but (if you’d ever MET Officer Fair) it’s not that much of a S T R E T C H…)

When you think Officer Fair, think Alpha Wolf. Officer Fair is big. Officer Fair is solid.  Officer Fair’s face and neck are a lunar landscape of pock marks and scars. Officer Fair has… a reputation. Officer Fair can be frightening just to look at. I’m frightened just looking at him right now, and yet I’m so glad he’s arrived. It’s like the wind just blew the door in and (surprise) The Abominable Snowman is suddenly standing right in front of you… and studying you!

And Officer Fair has left the door wide open.

What I’m suddenly seeing is these four guys shrinking smaller and smaller. It’s unbelievable. They’ve become one big, cowering, little gang. If they had tails, you wouldn’t be able to winch them out from between their legs with a chain.

“Bill?” says the guy I just invited to go on upstairs. It rocks me that he’s on a first-name basis with Officer Fair. His voice noticeably shaky, he adds, “We didn’t mean nuthin’, I swear to God!”

“Honest-to-God’s-TRUTH, Bill,” whines another. “We just come in here to… find out what time it is! Is all.”

Officer Fair is a man of few words. Right at the moment, Officer Fair is a man of no words.  Officer Fair is known as a man of action rather than words.

“We were just leaving, Bill. Really. I’m serious.” All four of them are edging around him now, trying to inch themselves toward the open door. Officer Fair isn’t budging out of their way much, meaning they’re really going to have to squeeze themselves past him to get out, which turns out to be about as easy as being born.

“So… hey. Whattaya say, Bill. Please. We’ll just be on our way. Alright? OK?” If looks could kill, four coffins would be getting ordered from Lary’s Funeral Home right about now.

But then, in a couple of blinks, they’re gone. Just like that. They succeeded in squeezing their way past The Man, and he’s followed them out. The door slams shut. It’s over. Crisis averted. (Well, for me, but probably not for them.)

God bless the U.S. cavalry.

Jesus, breathe, Tommy!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

OK, so now that I’ve half-gotten my wits back about me, and I feel my heart rate slowly and steadily ticking itself back down to near normal… and even though I haven’t entirely stopped shaking yet, everything is becoming crystal clear now. Yup.

So, in retrospect it’s now so obvious that Officer Fair had been tailing these fellas before they’d shown up here. That they’d been on the run, running scared from him for whatever reason or other. And so they’d desperately crashed in here to get themselves lost in a very big building with a large crowd of people in it. Which explains why they so needed to get themselves the hell upstairs and out of sight as quickly as possible: to mingle in with the crowd or, even better, find some little cubby hole to disappear in.

“How’s it going? Did I miss anything?” asks my replacement.

I give him the look. “Well, it is now.”

He frowns. “Uhmmm… OK?”

So I suppose I oughtta tell him the whole frigging story. And I do. About how a squad of four soldiers barged in here and roughed me up but good! And about how, since no one was around here to help me out, I’d decided to string’em along as long as I possible could— you know, acting scared and all, but really? Just keeping them down here, on the bottom floor, with me. You know, so nobody else, upstairs, would get hurt, right?  And about how it actually worked. About how I was able to hold out just long enough for the cops to show up and kick the door in, rough them up, handcuff’em, and drag their sorry butts off to jail. And yeah. Now I suppose I’ll probably hafta go in and ID’em and all, in a police line-up or something. Plus, you know, then they’ll probably want me to testify against them in court.

Now boy, let me tell you, wasn’t he some impressed!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

You know what? To heck with hanging around here for the last dance, especially since I probably would never actually get around to asking anybody to dance anyway. Shoot, I’m rounding up Richie and Dale. I’m gonna talk’em into sneaking into the movie theater with me to see if there are any interesting girls, that need to be walked home. And then maybe we’ll hit Rocket Lanes. Mostly pretty much so I’ll have enough time to wow them with my practically unbelievable story along the way. Yeah.

home

THE STRANGE CASE OF CENTRAL HALL AND THE X-RAY SPECS…

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Every little town in America had its ‘hot spots,’ where the kids growing up there were concerned. For me, born and raised in the 50’s and 60’s in little Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, USA (population back then around 5000), my personal hotspots list includes the following: The Piscataquis River and its old Indian Cave; the kids’after-school hang-outs, Lanpher’s Drug Store and Peter’s Pharmacy; Center Theatre; The Bowling Alley, Rocket Lanes; Sebec Lake Roller Rink; the Milo Drive-in; the Sugar Shack; and the Rec Center at Central Hall. In fact, Central Hall itself.

Ah yes, Central Hall, now newly renovated and recently dubbed “The Commons.” Today the building’s two-storied floors are what, brand new? Immaculate? Stunning? Polished? Air-conditioned? Up to Code? A jewel in the town’s crown? Yes. All of the above, and then some. A dream come true. And everyone, including me, is delighted about it. However…

There is a little child still living inside of me. A child who remembers everything. A child who can, at will, rewind all the natural brain’s virtual reality “films” going back all the way to the 50’s and 60’s. All the way back to kindergarten (1954-55). But this “little child” (not the man I am today) prefers the old Central Hall. The venerable, shabby old building where the town’s four schools held their bi-monthly school assemblies during school day afternoons.

For the schools had no gymnasium back then, no place large enough to hold all the students. So our entire Pleasant Street School student body (tiny bodies) were lined up in twos and, shepherded by our teachers, we all snaked our way down over the tenth-of-a-mile of sidewalks to file into the upstairs “auditorium” section to be seated, right along with all the kids arriving from the other schools.

I remember those assemblies: we had one on hypnosis, one delivered by a man who had just returned from a recent sojourn up in the Arctic, a guy with an amazing photographic memory, and another man who brought wild birds with him, including an eagle and a huge owl that seemed to be able to rotate its head around a full 360o. I loved them all, and especially the getting out of school part.

The town’s churches put on their musicals at Central Hall, the schools presented their plays there; the annual town meetings packed the place to the rafters, as did the inter-school basketball games; and of course The Kiwanis Club put on their now-in-retrospect embarrassing “Minstrel Shows” there. We K-12 kids all had to perform in those minstrel shows so, yeah, I was in a number of them. Here are photos from two of  those, one with me as a little hobo and another of me as an elf.

I’m that little hobo on the far right, the cutest one…
And now I’m te cute little elf on the far left…

Yes, those minstrel shows were something else! But the most unforgettable show I ever watched there happened one evening in August, 1957, making me eleven years old at the time. As a fund raiser, the Methodist Church’s Three-M Club (think Mister, Mrs., and Miss) sponsored a famous hypnotist at Central Hall.

Since the above excerpt from The Piscataquis Observer is at least partially unreadable, here is the actual text…

PROFESSOR BARRON FEATURED HYPNOTIST AT COMING SHOW

When the show “Hypnotic Marvels” opens in Dover-Foxcroft on Tuesday Night, Aug. 21 [1957] at Central Hall, the star will be Professor K. Barron, an American who has traveled throughout the world making a study and application of therapeutic hypnosis in Egypt, Italy, and India.

His studies of Indian fakirs, Arabian mystics, and Holy Men have made him one of the world’s foremost hypnotists. He demonstrates pain control and post-hypnotic suggestion where a strong suggestion is placed in the subject’s mind, and after the subject is awakened the suggestion persists.

All proceeds from tickets will be donated to Three M [Club] to a local charity.

And as a publicity stunt the day before, the hypnotist drove his Cadillac convertible (top down) all the way up and down Main Street, blindfolded! And… (and this was the kicker for our conservative little God-fearing hamlet back then) he was accompanied by (GASP!) a blonde bombshell in a bathing suit sitting high up on the back-seat back-rest, just a-waving like some Miss America at the wolf-whistling, cat-calling throngs crowding the sidewalks on both sides of the street. It seems now, looking back, like something right out of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, something the King and The Duke might have pulled off.

The night of the actual show, the Hall went standing-room-only with the balcony packed to overflowing. My cousin and I had to worm and squirm our way up into that balcony, where we ended up watching the whole thing scrunched down on our knees, with our little torsos pressed up against, and half hanging over, the balustrade, and our gawking little faces hanging down almost directly over the stage. Best damn seats in town!

Surprisingly we got to witness a dozen high school seniors take the stage as volunteers. (I mean, wouldn’t you think school kids would need to get signed parental permission slips before participating in something as sketchy and adult as being used as guinea pigs for the pleasure and entertainment of the masses? Well, in the twenty-first century, yes, of course they would.  But back in 1957, nah, not at all. (So… welcome to the 50’s, ladies and gents.)

After weeding out the few volunteers who obviously couldn’t succumb to Professor Barron’s hypnotic ministrations, though they tried, he seated the kids (in their collective trance) in a horizontal line of chairs situated across the back of the stage. From there during the show, he would sometimes direct two or three individuals to stand and come forward for whatever particular demonstration he had in mind, leaving the rest of them just sitting and waiting there slack-jawed and with no affect whatsoever (and that just seemed so weird, seeing them all shut-down like that). But at other times he’d marshal the entire little zombie posse forward to participate.

As was the case for his first demonstration, in which he temporarily turned these seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds into “kindergartners” being treated to an afternoon at the “local movie theater” to watch a collection of “Disney cartoons”. And as those “five- and six-year-olds,” they were soon gigglng and tee-heeing delightedly at the hilarious “situations” on the “movie screen.” And keep in mind, this random group consisted of a variety of types, from an obvious wallflower to a couple of cheerleaders and one big and menacing-on-the-gridiron football hero, who was now up there tee-heeing on that stage like some little girl.

But suddenly, in the middle of one of the “Mickey Mouse adventures,” Professor Barron’s face took on a horrified expression! “Oh no!” he exclaimed. “Did you see that!? Mickey was just crossing the street when this big truck struck him!”

The mood-shift that this information sparked was immediate and palpable! All the “children” began crying. Even the entire audience was shocked at this turn of events. Shocked because it was so totally unexpected, but especially shocked because of the honest-to-God-real tears visibly glistening now down the cheeks of those horrified faces under the stage lights. I mean yes, even the big and burly hometown-hero, Gippy Thomas, was bawling. Actual tears. And honestly? I was shocked that Professor Barron would do that to them. We all were. Because in our minds, they were now innocent little kindergartners, weren’t they.

But then, almost immediately thereafter, we witnessed a boomerang mood-shift that set them all suddenly “rejoicing” as they were happily reassured, “Oh look! Mickey’s all right! He didn’t get hurt one bit! The truck actually missed him! Why, he was just playing a silly old joke on us all along! Isn’t that funny?!”  (Cheers and happy laughter!) And so, the show continued on.

Next we got to watch our “little children” on a “nature-walk field trip.” And all was well, all of them out in the “forest” picking “wild flowers” and happily collecting colorful, fallen “autumn leaves.” I mean, man, those guys and gals were scurrying all about that stage— grinning, bending over, and plucking up all their little found-treasures when…  suddenly… (here we go again…)

­“Oh my goodness!What’s that?! What is that rumbling noise up overhead?”

The “children”? They had no idea what it was, did they. So… all cautious and solemn, and one by one, they lifted their innocent faces to the “sky.” And gawked.

“Oh my, boys and girls! It’s one of those great big black airplanes! Don’t you just love airplanes?” And they all grinned, of course, but you couldn’t help but wonder if actually they… you know, weren’t entirely sure that they did like those big, black airplanes… “Whoa! And just look! Aren’t those… two big doors opening up on the belly of the plane up there? Yes! That’s what they are!” You could see, as well as feel, the rising level of their concern sweeping right across all of their faces. “And WHOA! Would you look at that! Something…  Something just fell right out of those two big open doors and, whatever it is, it’s falling right down toward us! Golly gee, I wonder what it is, what that might be…” By the fearful looks on their innocent little faces, I’m surprised that some of them didn’t suffer… you know, a little kid’s “accident.”

But then, just as quickly as he’d pulled that Mickey Mouse plot-twist earlier, he executed another old unexpected plot switcheroo: “Oh my goodness, boys and girls! Why that’s… money! Those are… dollar bills fluttering down all around us! Quick, kiddos! Better grab as many as you can!” And then didn’t the audience just roar to see those big high school kids running all around, leaping like deer, leaping up in the air, desperately plucking down the invisible “dollar bills,” and greedily stuffing away all that precious “long green” deep down into their “pockets!” It was quite a spectacle.

There were so many demonstrations that evening. For instance, after being given an in-trance, post-hypnotic suggestion, one boy tried to walk across the stage only to find his right foot seemingly “super-glued” to the floor. And no matter how hard he tried, the floor adamantly refused to release its claim on the foot. Now we, the audience, had been privy to the post-hypnotic suggestion when it was being applied: “The harder you try to pull your foot from the floor, the weaker and weaker your leg will become.” It got such a laugh when the kid finally threw in the towel, glared at Professor Barron, and yelled, “YOU did this! Come fix it!”

Another post-hypnotic-suggestion example was when a very popular girl, a cheer leader, was told, “After you wake up, whenever you hear the words, ‘Good night,’ you must look at me and say, ‘Shut up!’ And thereafter, each and every other time you hear those words again you will, once again, tell me to shut up, only with a growing and increasing anger each time. But, you will have no idea why on earth you were compelled to say that to me, or what it was you were so angry about.”

After those instructions, he woke her up and simply went on with the show as if nothing had happened. Of course then, after a while, he turned to us, the audience, and said something like, “Well ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been a marvelous audience. But all good things must come to an end. I’m afraid it’s time for us to say good night, and…”

(Shut up!)

Dead silence on the stage. The Professor looked confused. “I’m sorry. Did one of you just… say something…?” Everyone, including our girl remained perfectly quiet. It had been such a mousey little request, it had apparently slipped right under everybody’s radar. “OK, never mind. Apparently I’m just… hearing things. But anyway, be that as it may, it is in fact time to bid you all good night, SO…”

“Shut up!”

Our girl gasped! Her hands flew to her mouth. And now Professor Barron was looking at her directly, sizing her up. “I beg your pardon?”

“Ohmigod!”  she said, while shaking her head no, no NO! “Never in a million years would I ever say something… something like… so…”

“So what? Do you mean so something exactly like what you just said to me?” He was doing a great job at feigning peevishness. And also, all of her peers were now staring quite a bit awkwardly at her.

“Listen,” she pleaded with a shaky little voice, “oh, please believe me! I swear on a stack of Bibles I never…”

“So what is your problem? Is it just that you really hate the show? Or just me personally?”

“No! I mean no, no, no, of course not! Nothing like that! And, I’m so sorry!”

“So… do you like my show?”

“Oh yes. Yes! Very much!”

“Ok. So what is it then? That you like my show so much…” (great sarcasm here) “that you were angered when I said it’s time to stop, that it’s time to say good night and…”

“Shut UP!”

This time all of her surrounding classmates turned at once and focused their darkly shocked, jaw-dropped confusion on her.

“Now… oh wow! OK. That was just plain a tad rude, wouldn’t you say? I mean, just who do you think is running this show? You? I guess perhaps you’re thinking you should get to be the only one who gets to decide when to say, and when not to say, good night, eh? Is that…”

“SHUT…………. UP!”

Wow. While our hypnotist went on feigning  superior displeasure, you could see her classmates were obviously unnerved to the Nth degree! This inexplicable rising anger in her was now beginning to feel suddenly tinged with a frightening little extra bit of… something else. A little hint of  I’m-warning-you danger?…an Incredible Hulk-ish and you won’t like me when I’m angry? They (who knew her well) (or at least who thought they had known her well) had just glimpsed something dark in their heretofore bubbly, ray-of-sunshine Pollyanna. A Don’t-tread-on-ME mojo they were finding more than just a tiny bit unsettling.

But no one was ever more shocked at it than she herself!

(See, this is what I mean. Isn’t the human brain just a marvelously mysterious organ??? I can’t get over it.)

I will say this, at least. Each and every time he played some hypnotic dirty trick on his subjects, he was always considerate enough to bring his subjects out of their trances by instilling in them a post-hypnotic promise of calmness and peacefulness, instructing them that they would awake happy, well-rested, optimistic, and energized.

Thank God for that, eh?

Now I think it’s obvious that we both realize, you and I, that this was an evening program I witnessed a little over seventy-one years ago. And I was, of course, only an eleven year old at the time, to boot. So, I can only hope that my long-term memory has withstood enough of the ravages of time to be at least to the point where I’ve maintained a fair amount of accuracy here in my reporting.

But for this last, and final, anecdote, (and there were so many more) I have no worries whatsoever. Because I’m confident that this particular scenario was just so bizarre, so unique, and so unusually delicious, that the memory of it was burned indelibly into my cerebrum. So much so that I’d readily wager that anyone else who witnessed this last little stunt at Central Hall, and is still alive today, would tell the exact, same story in very much the same way I am about to. It was that unforgettable.

So, you know how when you go to a local Fourth of July fireworks extravaganza, they always nickel and dime you to death throughout the better part of a half hour with a single shot of this here, and another single shot of something else there? And sure, those are impressive and all. Some sizzle and crackle, some whistle, some blossom like gargantuan peonies against the sky before blowing away in the wind, and some gift you with that satisfying, window-rattling ka-BOOM!!! you’re always waiting for. Yes, each is pretty damn great in itself. But then, at the end of it all, comes what everybody’s been waiting on: the Grand Finale! All of them mixed in together and going off like popcorn for the last ten steady minutes or so.

Well, I’ve gotta say, that’s pretty much the way old Professor Barron ran his virtual wild west show of hypnosis. Turned out he’d saved us the best for last. At the very beginning he had teased the teen-agers with the hint that, if they behaved well enough throughout the show, he just might share with them something at the show’s end that would be so entirely and truly “magical,” something that hardly anybody else on the planet could even imagine. The only stipulation he made was that somebody in their group would have to remember on their own to ask him about it at the show’s end. If they forgot, well… then too bad, it would be their loss. And he warned them that it wouldn’t be all that easy to remember to ask, what with all the variety of experiences awaiting them throughout the evening. (Me though, for instance, still parked as I was on my by-now sore knees up there in the crowded balcony? I’d forgotten all about that a minute after he’d offered the challenge.)

So when the evening did finally find itself on the cusp of saying that final good night, one girl did remember to ask. And so there they were at the end, all seated in that horizontal line of old Central Hall chairs upstage center, waiting like trained seals for him to spill the beans, whatever the beans turned out to be.

And him? He paced back and forth, frowning as if trying to think of the best way to approach the subject. “OK,” he finally said. “I have, within the breast pocket of this jacket I wear, an object. An object I dare say unlike any object any of you has ever seen, imagined, or will ever see again. Ostensibly, the object appears to be only an ordinary pair of glasses, but… an ordinary pair of glasses it is decidedly not, as you will soon see for yourselves.

“Because yes, I am going to allow each of you the opportunity of gazing through these magic lenses for yourselves. But I must warn you that what you will witness as you gaze through the ancient crystals will undoubtedly be somewhat disturbing, although look through them you must. For if you do not, you will never believe what your colleagues here will tell you that they themselves have seen. You will suspect them liars, you will see them as delusional, and yet… you will always be left wondering how such good and reliable acquaintances could, or even would, fabricate such a story with which they will inveigle you. Yes, you will always be left wondering. So…”

And here he slowly slipped his right hand into the jacket’s breast pocket and produced… absolutely nothing! Oh but he appeared to be holding up something– something pinched between his thumb and fingers. And his volunteer subjects? They made no indication that they were seeing nothing as he passed closely before them, even holding out his hand that they might examine “the pair of glasses” up close and personal. No, quite the opposite, they were leaning right in, studying the phantom object, and mulling it over with great interest. Of course we, the audience, understood what was going on right from the first. This was one of those The Emperor wore no clothes things. Only…in real life! These kids were seeing something, even if no one else was. It was an amazing spectacle to watch!

(There. Again, you see? The human brain! Go figure.)

“For these ancient ‘spectacles’ allow our eyes to penetrate through right through solid objects. Well, namely fabrics of all kinds.”

Now, as we watched, we could see the entire row of faces suddenly go all-knitted-brows as they took that in, and began pondering… what exactly it was they had just heard…

“Wait a minute,” interrupted the football hero. “You talking about those… those X-Ray Specs things they advertise in the back of comic books? ‘Cause I can tell you right now: they don’t work! Believe me. I ordered me a pair of those once, and they don’t do nuthin’.”

“No, son,” Professor Barron responded condescendingly, “Let me assure you that in no way is that… toy what I’m talking about at all.”

“’Cause they’re a rip-off is all I’m sayin’. No, they really are,” he warned the others, looking left and right up and down the row of students lest they too might end up wasting their money as well. “I mean, jeez, you couldn’t see nuthin’. I’m serious.”

Someone else, a male of course, piped up, “Are you sayin’ what I think you’re sayin’?”

“Could be. So, what is it you think I’m saying?”

“That these glasses let you, what, look right through people’s clothes and all?”

“Well, I’m going to let you answer that one yourself, young man. Right after you’ve had an opportunity to gaze through them.”

“No way,” said the kid, obviously intrigued.

“Ohmigod!” cried a female voice.

“GROSS!” said another.

“Alright, everyone. Time to stand up and stretch your limbs. At this time, I want you all to form a line. We’ll do this taking turns. Going one at a time.”

“Ohmigod!” repeated the female voice.

As they arose and left their chairs behind, it became apparent that the group was demographically split: the girls were hesitant, and feeling very ambivalent, to say the least, about what apparently was about to go down; but the only word to characterize the boys on the other hand was… eager. So much so that, just as the required line had nearly gotten formed, our football hero came bulldozing his way to the front, saying, “I’m going first!” The audience tittered at that. And then, there he was, numero uno, pleased as punch with himself at being firmly ensconced at the head of the line as was his right! Because might makes right.

“Young man,” Professor Barron admonished, “that was nothing but rude and selfish of you. You should be ashamed. I’m afraid I must insist that you go back and line up at the rear of the line.”

“What? No! I mean… come ON! I just…”

“Son. I must insist. And if you refuse to do as I ask, these glasses will return immediately to my jacket pocket. And just think how popular you’ll be then. It’s your choice…”

“Aw JEEZ!” But then our spoiled little bad-boy, hands shoved down in pockets, begrudgingly shambled back to last place in line while the audience happily roared.

(And by the way, dear reader, I’m not making this up. I swear on a stack of Bibles that this is exactly what happened on that stage that night.)

The guy who was now at the head of the line looked to Professor Barron for some direction, who then went on to explain, “All of you in this line will be facing the audience. I alone will hold the glasses. I will place them before your eyes for five seconds, while you behold these people. Then you will return to your seat, allowing the next person to step forward to have his or her turn. Are we all clear on this?”

The subjects all nodded and muttered their combined Yes in unison.

“Very well, then.” Professor Barron studied the boy, and then held the “glasses” up just above the bridge of the boy’s nose. Me, I couldn’t look away. I was sorely wishing I were that kid, who blinked a couple of times, leaned into the ‘glasses’ a bit more as if adjusting for focus, and… “Oh. My. God!” he gasped. His eyes went sweeping like a search light from left to right over the audience. “I mean… are you shittin’ me!?” Such enthusiasm sent a nervous-horse-like ripple down through the line of those behind him. The “glasses” were snatched away.

“Boys and girls. You must… you need… to watch your language. I want you on your best, most formal, behavior. Remember that! Now, you? Back to your seat.”

The boy turned on his heel and began shuffling back to his chair, rather wildly shaking his head.

“NEXT!”

Next, it was a girl who stepped forward. She looked imploringly at the Professor. “Do I really hafta do this?”

“I really think you should,” he replied.

“But… But… Do you realize… my parents are out there?!”

(A lot of laughter from the audience)

“Well, if you know where they’re seated, you could just look elsewhere. But come on now, you’re holding up the line.”

Awkwardly she sort of tried to press her eyes into the “lenses,” then uttered a shaky “No, NO!” and batted the “invisible glasses” away from her face the way you’d brush away an angry horne! But something… something very noticeable was happening to her cheeks. They were flushing a bright, hot, rosy hue! And almost immediately, her entire face and neck were both red, like somebody had just flipped an ‘on’ switch inside her! Shame was written all over her face. And it had happened in mere seconds. I’d never seen anything like it! “I feel like I’m gonna be sick…” she said, hugging herself and shaking her head as well, as she retreated back to her seat.

“Next!”

An eager boy stepped up to the plate. With the glasses in position, he made it a point to gawk right straight down onto the front row of spectators. And such a noisy bustle of people crossing their legs and hugging themselves you could barely imagine. “Oh WOW!” He looked the crowd over. “Oh yeah! Oh YEAH! WOW!”

“Next!”

And so it went. One after the other. And I swear every single girl blushed as crazily as the first one had! As did one boy, by the way. And when our football hero arrived, he couldn’t have been happier with the whole experience. You’d have thought it was Christmas morning. (Or that he had just scored a winning touchdown!)

Up there in the balcony, I was still wishing so hard that I could’ve been one of them on that stage. But, alas, they’d never picked anyone as young as me…

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So anyway, in my book? That night goes down as probably one of the top-ten memories of all time that I’ve got DVR’d into that hard drive I call my brain. It was really one of those extra-special “moments” in time, like the remembered “moments” I’ve been sort of dwelling on in my preceding blog entries. This one only lasted a little over an hour, but as a result of witnessing that evening, my life was honestly changed.

FroEver since that night, I’ve been seriously preoccupied with pondering how this blob of gray matter in my skull actually works. And long since then, I’ve had to come to grips with, and simply accept, the fact that I’ll never, ever know. It’s kind of like that song written and performed by folksinger and agnostic, Iris Dement: “Let the Mystery Be.”

Consequently, over a long lifetime, so far I have made it a point to attend no less than a couple dozen hypnotist presentations, some boring, some intriguing, but none ever as intriguing as the showman, Professor Barron, allowed us to experience in 1957 at Dover-Foxcroft’s Central Hall. And back even in the mid-70’s (as I’ve related in an earlier blog post titled “If You Could Read My Mind, Love”… just go to the following url):

( https://tomlyford.com/2023/12/14/if-you-could-read-my-mind-love/ ) 

I also once enjoyed a year-long friendship with a retired clinical hypnotherapist form New York, who worked in hospitals and in the justice system. Loved talking to that guy. And I get it: as long as I live, I’m never going to get over marveling about the wrinkled little organ upstairs that acts sort of as my Hitchikers’s Guide to the Universe…

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

In retrospect, I found what went on in this little recap almost a little more cruel than funny at times. I suppose this is because I’m can now examine it now from an adult, twenty-first-century morality lens. But in 1957 everyone, including little eleven year old me, found it hilarious. It’s all relative.

Anyway… I guess that makes me guilty of having been born in, and having lived through, the middle of the mid-nineteenth century. It’s all relative. Isn’t everything?

So sue me. It’s like what Bob Dylan once told me through my stereo system’s speakers:

The times, they have a-changed…

Home

THEY CAME FROM THE SKY!!

The Monsters Were Due on Pleasant Street

Another Lurid, But True, Tom Lyford Story!!

NOTE: BEFORE SCROLLING DOWN TO THE OPENING TEXT, PLEASE LISTEN TO THIS 10-SECOND SOUND BYTE, AND THEN PROCEED...

It finally dawned on me that I’d been listening to a noise, whatever it was, for quite some time. For too long. I opened my eyes. I was in bed.

I looked at the clock. 5:30-something. 5:30-something was not the agreed upon plan! Sleeping in till at least 9:30 was the plan. But just what was that God-awful noise? It sounded like, and I’m serious here, a frickin’ whale breathing through its blowhole. I’d been on a whale watch a few years back and, man, that’s pretty much what they sounded like, to me at least. It was certainly loud enough.

But come on, a whale? So what was it?

I turned half way over and checked on Phyllis. Yeah, still soundly sleeping. Probably wouldn’t be for long though, not with a whale on the roof. I rolled myself quietly out of bed, hauled on a pair of shorts, and tip-toed quietly downstairs.

Then I stepped out onto the porch to a near blinding blue summer sky, what I could see of it anyway. What with the freakin’ whale up there blocking the view. And (holy Moby, Batman!) he was BIG… and blowing loud!

OK, so the day before, Phyllis and I had spent most of the entire day up at the air strip exhausting ourselves standing way too long on our feet and packing away the old hotdogs, burgers, and fries during the big all-day, all-weekend balloon festival. And sure, those balloons looked really big when seen on a wide, flat, empty airfield with nothing but little cub airplanes beside them, but when you step out on your porch and discover one practically rubbing itself up against your roof (you, totally unsuspecting because you’d just woken up from the big sleep and forgotten all about yesterday), then those mothers look cartoonishly huge.

There were two of them up there floating above and around our property which felt a little ironic, considering Phyl and I had both totally agreed that we’d seen enough hot-air balloons yesterday to last the whole weekend. However… apparently the balloons hadn’t seen enough of us. They had hunted us down.

I noticed they were barely moving at all however (no breeze) other than settling downward and then lifting back aloft whenever the pilots fired their hot blasts of flame from the propane burners up into the balloons’ envelopes. And that was pretty much the only thing that was keeping them from thumping right down on our roof. Those deep blasts, of course, explained the unsettling, whale-lung-breathing rasps that had awakened me!

Hmmm. Felt to me like an unexpected ‘adventure’ might be in the offing. I mean, it was just so weird, finding a couple of those big-as-clouds floaters grazing down at tree level right on the street where you live.

I weighed the pros and cons of getting Phyllis out of bed, which sometimes could be like poking a hungry bear with a stick. I know we’d agreed to sleep in, but neither of us could have imagined they’d be coming over to Pleasant Street for an up-close-and-personal play-date. The thing was, I just didn’t want to end up having some kind of unimaginable Bill and Ted’s Great Adventure, only to then get told, “What? Why didn’t you wake me? Oh sure, keep all the fun for yourself, why don’tcha!”

So there I was once again, stuck between a rock and a hard place in Cliché Land, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea not knowing whether to fish or cut bait. But I decided I’d do it.

As I reluctantly headed back up the stairs, I was working at putting together just the right diplomatic words that could serve me as my metaphoric anti-bear spray. So… with my right hand on her shoulder which I squeezed lightly, I watched her eyes slit open and lock onto my desperate, shit-eating grin, and let the whispered words just tumble out: “Hey look, Phyl, I know you wanted to sleep in this morning and yes, you can do that if you want, you can go right back to sleep, that’s up to you, and then I’ll get right back out of here and leave you alone, but I thought you should at least know that something’s going on, the balloons have come here, unexpectedly, and yeah, they’re right over the roof right this very moment, you can hear them, and honestly, they’re practically landing on the roof right now actually, and, well, they’re just amazing, so I just thought, you know, maybe I should just… at least let you know, you know (?) just in case you might wanna get up and see them because it’s so unusual and all, and, whoa, did you just hear that (?)(‘cause yeah, that was one of them!) so anyway I just wanted you to know that, me(?), I’m going back out there to watch’em some more right now , so… but you go right back to sleep, if that’s what you want, and me, I’ll… I’ll just head out now, so, you know, you’ll know that’s where I am should you do decide to… OK, yeah…”

It’s always so hard to concentrate when she’s just been awakened and remains lying there, silently contemplating you with those jaundiced, komodo-dragon eyes like that, so I simply ended with, “OK, sleep tight then. I’m outta here. But don’t worry: I’ll take pictures. You just go on back to sleep now, OK? …See ya…”

And so I tip-toed the light fantastic back down over the stairs and popped out the door. Wow. Were those babies ever huge up there, or what?! And close? So close I could easily hear the balloonists’ chatter from one balloon to the other.

And meanwhile too, off in different directions in the sky, near and far, I could make out a couple more balloons of varying colors and designs playing peek-a-boo overhead and between the trees. But in the meantime there was just no way I could pry my eyes off the two close-ups that the slight breeze had wafted over my house and then (fortunately for me) just stranded them there!

They weren’t moving much, just a little, but they obviously weren’t going anywhere soon.

Our home in 2013, Pleasant Street, Dover-Foxcroft, Maine
Phyllis in white bathrobe in the above photo

I find it difficult to explain just how exciting all this was feeling for me. I mean, I was over the moon! It all just felt so crazily freakin’ WIZARD OF OZ-ish! I couldn’t believe it was actually happening! Fun to the max! And after watching them for five minutes or so, I did observe the passenger basket of one balloon actually drag itself slowly across the peak of my roof. It was creepily reminiscent of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, with spooky shades of its character, the Dust Witch.

The other one drifted right into the upper branches of one of our maples. But each time unwanted contact, or the threat of unwanted contact, became an issue for either of them, the propane ‘flame throwers’ would roar on again, lifting the balloon out of harm’s way. And that’s pretty much all these balloons seemed capable of doing right at the moment: rising up, sinking down, and rising up in place again. It didn’t feel like they’d be going anywhere horizontally, at least anytime soon.

I heard one of the guys in the closest balloon shout down, “This is Oz, right?”

So… FYI, our house was situated on a big acre-and-a-half lot at the corner of Pleasant and Grove Streets. And at first I was recording all the goings-on while standing right in the middle of Grove Street, looking east, and facing our old gray house and the balloons above it. Actually though, the balloons were hovering over the expansive, well-trimmed lawn in back of the house. And as I zeroed my camera in on the pilot of the nearest one, I caught him pointing downward at our lawn as if contemplating a possible touch-down. And I was thinking, Yes! DO it. Please!

Suddenly I heard a familiar female voice cry out, “Tom! Damnit!” And that was when I caught a fleeting glimpse of Phyllis. She was up and standing ghost-like in her white bathrobe, hiding in the shadows on this, the west side, of our long wrap-around porch.

I yelled, “Phyllis!” but then one of the balloonist called down, “Good morning!” in my direction. And by the time I yelled back at him, “Good morning! Watch out for our house! How ya doin’?” Phyllis had vanished.

I stopped recording temporarily and headed around the house to the lawn out back, where it appeared a touch-down could possibly be imminent.

Turning the corner, all I could think to myself was, Holy crap, they’re so damn BIG! The nearest one was dwarfing my big barn! Nothing like this could ever have been expected and… I’ve got say it was exhilarating. Thrilling even. And when I heard one of them call down, “Got room? Can we land here?” all I could do was blurt out, “Oh yes! Oh yes!” So: it was happening! They were granting my wish. But what was I getting myself into?

Oh, and there she was again. Phyllis. On the east side of the porch now, hiding behind one of the pillars, going for incognito, but watching. Poor thing. Talk about being “stuck between a rock and a hard place,”  her desperately wanting to be a part of the scene but not being properly “attired.” And knowing that if she were, right then, to fly upstairs, throw some clothes on, and battle with a comb at her hair… then, by the time she’d get herself back down there, the whole damn shooting match could very well be over and done with, and she’d have missed it all. So yeah, poor thing. One of those drawbacks of womanhood that makes me glad that, phew(!) I’m not a woman.

But what a wonderful thing this all was, this balloon festival, for a town our size. But especially what a wonderful thing it was to be happening right in our own back yard! Such a happy, crazy morning!

And omigod! One had already landed! And there it was, towering above a handful of people way out on the back lawn, actually on my neighbor’s property, but our lawns were adjacent, with nothing to mark a boundary. But hey, this one? This balloon? Hovering right above my back door, practically? Un-freakin’-believable! Wow. What a sight! What a Sunday this was turning out to be!

Somebody called for some help, and I went jogging over to the basket hanging in the air just above the lawn. “I’m your guy!“I cried. And then, “Who would’ve thought! We thought we were gonna miss the balloon festival today! Welcome to earth! And we just wanna thank you for choosing our property to land on!” What a treat!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

For the next two to three hours, it was like our whole neighborhood had somehow gotten sucked in through some wormhole and had popped out on the other side in an alternate universe of Rod Serling’s old Twilight Zone. A glitch in the matrix, some might say. For years, Phyllis and I had been living this very predictable, mundane life. You know– every day like every other day. Eating, working, watching television, reading books, doing the laundry and dishes, yadda yadda yadda. Very few surprises. And then…? Bang! Our boring back yard just morphed into an unannounced, flash-mob block party! And everyone came!

Pleasant Street

See meanwhile, a dozen or more balloons were drifting all over everywhere, a couple nearly straying off into a neighboring town. And what that meant was that each balloon had attracted its own little posse of cars and pick-ups which were dogging it along the way as best they could. The town had been affected with balloon mania, you see. It was like a combination of an humongous Easter egg hunt and scavenger hunt. On wheels. The day before, Phyl and I had been out there in our car chasing the balloons. It was all the rage.

So now, with two of those big bruisers planted in our back yard, standing so tall you could see them towering over the roof top, they’d become a calling card for the neighbors, neighbors who began trickling in onto our lawn in ones and twos at first. And these neighbors all had their cell phones of course. And what do you do with cell phones? You take pictures, don’t you. And what do you do with the pictures? Oh, you know what you do: you immediately post them right to Facebook.

So word was spreading fast about “the place.’The place where not one, but two hot air balloons were now tethered. “Where’s this place?”somebody frantically posted on Facebook. “Where’s this official landing site everyone’s talking about? I’ve been driving all over and I can’t find it!”

But so many did find it. Thus, the impromptu block party, a party with no music, no food. But so much better than music and food, they had their own balloons at ‘the place.‘ Two of’em! So come one, come all! And so… we heard the sounds of cars rolling in and parking along the roadside, the slamming of car doors, and the excited voices of kids from age five to sixty-five clmbing up the steep grassy banking from the road.

And meanwhile, our back yard population… ballooned.

It was amazing. I welcomed it. Everyone was having a festive time of it. It was shaping up to be a morning to remember.

It was fun, invigorating, talking to a pilot about his ballooning world. Where he’d traveled, how long he’d been pursuing the hobby, etc. Meanwhile, I kept glancing over my shoulder every now and then and there’d be Phyllis, my little, white-bath-robed wallflower, obviously really enjoying the fun but, alas, from afar.

But then, this pilot did something that totally surprised me. He went back to his balloon, leaned in over the side of the basket, rummaged around inside it, and pulled out… a bottle of champagne. (Well, actually it was non-alcoholic “champagne”).

And then he began telling me all about The Balloon Pilots’ Tradition, which goes like this:

Whenever an airborne balloon pilot yells down and asks permission to land on somebody’s property, and that permission is gracefully granted, it is incumbent upon said pilot to present the landowner with a bottle of champagne.  

Huh! I’d never heard of such a thing. Of course, you could probably publish a set of encyclopedias about the things I’ve never heard of. Having been a one-horse-town redneck all my life.

By the way, on the Monday after the festival for instance, word got around about an incident that occurred at a farm three miles out of town. A balloon touched down there after the pilot received landing permission from the owner. The pilot and crew climbed out for a friendly meet and greet. But then, wow, the aeronauts actually pulled a tiny card table and four small collapsible chairs from their basket. Next, out came a little red and white checkered table cloth. Then came the champagne bottle, along with the half dozen, plastic, stemware champagne glasses! And they celebrated. What fun!

But OK, getting back to my pilot, he soon made me understand that he was not about to just unceremoniously hand over the champagne to me. No. The presentation of the balloonist’s gift to the landowner required just a tad more pomp and circumstance than that. I realized he was talking about a formal presentation. A speech. And, as it turned out, not just any old impromptu speech either. He had a piece of paper in his pocket with the speech all typed out on it!

I said, “Hold your horses for a minute there, sir. I think we need to get the other land owner out here to help accept this gift.”

“Well sure. Of course. So, where is this other land owner?”

“That’s her,” I said, pointing toward the porch. “The one in the white bathrobe, acting shy. The last thing in the world she wants is to get caught outside dressed like that. But as you can see, at the same time she’s fascinated by what’s going on, and I know she’s wishing she were out here.”

Fuzzy little snapshot of Phyllis hiding on porch with cell phone camera…

“Well then. So, what’s this other land owner’s name?”

“Phyllis. Phyllis Lyford.”

“All right. Good.” Then he cleared his throat importantly, took a deep breath, and bellowed, “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! EVERYBODY! QUIET DOWN FOR JUST A MOMENT! PLEASE!  I HAVE AN IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT TO MAKE!”

And amazingly the crowd mostly did quiet down, and practically everyone turned to face the Man with the Message…

“At this time, ladies and gentlemen, I would ask Phyllis Lyford to please step down from the porch and join us here in the center of the lawn.”

Man, I wished right then and wish right now that I’d had my camera ready to go so I could’ve captured the look on Phyllis’ surprised face. Consternation? Chagrin? Chagrin mixed with shock? She was like, WHAT!?

And this was just so Phyllis: “No. Thank you. But no, I’m good. Really.”

But then, with a little encouragement from the pilot, the crowd took up the chant: “Phyllis! Phyllis!”and “Oh, come on down, Phyllis!” etc. It was a silly, grand, and marvelous moment. I found it hard to believe that Phyl, instead of fleeing straight back into the safety and comfort of the house, actually succumbed to the peer pressure… and down she came over the porch steps wearing her Badge of Shame and Impropriety: that white bathrobe that had never seen the light of day! I mean, right out there in front of God, the mob, me, and everybody! And though she was obviously embarrassed, she bravely swallowed her pride and, side-by-side with me, listened to the incredible presentation that began, “And now, to express our gratitude not for only the generosity and hospitality shown to us by this charitable couple who…”

I loved it. Phyllis loved it. And from that day forth, her little white bathrobe became officially known among family and friends as “Phyllis’s Famous White Bathrobe.”So if you know Phyllis, or get to befriend her in the future, feel free to ask her all about it (heh heh).

I am so grateful that someone did have a camera ready this time, and was able to capture and share this photo with me, so that I now may share it with posterity.

And so? That day in May? A Sunday in 2013?

A wonderful time! An unforgettable morning! And forever one of the fondest of all the other million ‘moments’ that lie coded and catalogued somewhere in that little rat’s nest of brain cells I call My Memories.

It was just… all so Emerald City and The Yellow Brick Road. You know?

Home