The Visitation

The son of a close friend of my wife's family died last week and she and I drove to their hometown to visit with them. They are in their 70s, their son just 53. He has had a difficult life, especially in recent years. He had bi-polar disease, and had been on dialysis for about four years. His father had been with him that afternoon, had left him lying on the couch with some things he might need. Something happened. He called 911. When his Dad returned to the house a short time later with his Mom, the place was filled with emergency vehicles. The door was locked; they couldn't get in. They tried to revive him and took him to the hospital, but he was gone at home.

It was just over three hours to Fairmont, and we got to the funeral home right at five o'clock. Richard and Mary arrived about 15 minutes later. They were happy to see Diane after all these years; they appreciated our taking the time to come. Diane was the only one in her family who could get there.

After saying our "hellos" and renewing old acquaintances Richard motioned for us to accompany them to the parlor. We were with them when they first saw their son in the casket. It was a moment I never want to repeat.

I've lost friends and acquaintenances, relatives, and I've lost my Mom and my Dad. All of those were difficult in their own way, especially my parents. I can't imagine how it feels looking on the lifeless body of your child.

Is Spring Here?

Normally, March is not grilling weather. However, this weekend has been much more like summer than it has been like the last weeks of winter. We’ve had temperatures in the 70s; today’s high was 78 and yesterday was just a few degrees lower. That’s unusual for this part of Virginia in March.

Most years I get a “feeling,” a “sense” that spring has begun. It’s kind of like a tingling inside, a sort of personal vernal equinox that ignores the calendar. That hasn’t happened yet this year, but my feeling isn’t always exactly the start of good weather and warming temperatures.

Anyway, my wife and I have a big job clearing leaves from around the home place this spring. The fall weather didn’t help much. Between obligations and weather, I just wasn’t able to get the year’s leaf production cleaned up. We have a blue-million leaves that take over every fall. The house is surrounded on three sides—the longest two sides, and one of the short sides—by leaf-bearing trees. The people that we bought the house from, the ones that built it, managed to incorporate every conceivable, and most devious leaf-catching devices known to man. Clearing them usually takes some 25-30 hours of manual labor. This year, I was able only to get about eight hours in before the bad weather came to stay for a while.

But we each spent a couple of hours Saturday, and I spent another two-to-three today, and was able to get the deck cleared enough that I could get to the grills. An afternoon rain both stopped the leaf-clearing project and cooled the day down into the mid-60s.

The menu consisted of lemon pepper chicken, asparagus, grilled herbed potato slices, sourdough toast on the grill, and blueberry-lemon cake. Very good. All of it.

So the grilling season is open. Bon appetite!

The Early Meeting

I got a call last week from Sheila, trying to set up a March 7th meeting of a committee I serve on at the local hospital. It was an important meeting, so despite being offended that someone would be inconsiderate enough to schedule it at 6:30 a.m.—that’s right: 6:30 in the morning—I agreed to attend. I should have known this was a bad omen.

The first problem occurred Monday night when my best efforts to get a good night’s sleep to catch up from a short night on Saturday went in the tank. I hit the bed just after 10, and after talking to my son for a few minutes on the phone I turned my attention to sleeping. Try as I might, I couldn’t sleep until sometime around 11:30. Just after 1:30 I awoke: A little intestinal distress. That was resolved in a half-hour, but by then I was awake. I lay there for a while, and realized that I wasn’t going to sleep any time soon, so I got up and headed into the living room, turned on the TV and lay down on the couch. It probably didn’t help that I kept thinking how close 5:30 was getting with every passing minute. Not long after that an alarm on my laptop computer sounded, alerting me to the presence of a virus. I guess viruses don’t pay attention to the time of day. I made my way across the room in the nearly-dark and searched with my fingers for the button to turn the speakers on the computer down, turned the speakers down, went back across the room and lay down again. I finally dozed off after 3:00. Too good to be true. About 20 minutes later, the alarm that I had disabled by turning off the speakers sounded again, shocking me awake from a deep-but-short sleep. In the dark I had used the wrong button. I didn’t make that mistake a second time, but I was awake again. Finally, I did get back to sleep sometime after 4:00, and probably got another hour when my wife shook me awake. It was 5:30.

With only about three hours of sleep behind me, I was surprised that the getting-ready process went as well as it did. I showered, shaved, dressed, got my stuff together and headed out the door 17 minutes before the meeting was to begin. Since the hospital is 10 minutes away, I was in good shape.

Or so I thought. We’d had some snow overnight and it had covered my car windows with a nice layer of ice. Getting ice off windows isn’t a problem, it just takes a little time, and I didn’t have a lot of it. Finally I headed out with 13 minutes left. I was in good shape!

The best route takes me on a 4-lane road for a couple of miles, and then I turn down an access road for Sam’s and some other commercial establishments which connects to the rest of the route I needed to follow. I couldn’t believe my eyes! Right in front of me, at 6:25 a.m.—that’s right: 6:25 in the morning—was a Drivers Education car with a student driver behind the wheel. The access road is two lanes until you get very near the intersection and the student driver was obeying the 25 mph speed limit. Really obeying the speed limit. When we got through the intersection, I was headed to the right lane for my upcoming right turn and the student driver stayed in the left lane. “This is good,” I thought. But, no. He has now decided to get into the right lane and puts his turn signal on. I then made what was a serious mistake: Being a nice guy. I slowed down to allow him to move over in front of me. (I reasoned that I would provide a good example for him and the student in the back seat, and that the instructor would likely praise me for being a considerate driver.) But he doesn’t change lanes, he just keeps getting slower and slower. Finally, he gets into the right lane just before we reached the stoplight at the next intersection, which has just turned red. Well, I’ve already seen enough of this kid’s driving to last me a lifetime, but the recognition that he and I are headed the same direction finally dawned.

In Virginia, as in most states, you can turn right on red after stopping. The kid must have thought you had to actually park the car, because even though there wasn’t another car in sight anywhere he sat there almost until the light turned green. He then eased out into the merge lane, ever so slowly, with me hanging back in the main traffic lane, which was my second nice-guy mistake. More precious seconds elapsed as I waited for him to change lanes, which he didn’t do until the merge lane ran out. He then proceeded to go less than the 35 mph limit until my next turn. I fully expected him to continue straight up the avenue, but no, he, too was turning left. Well, you can imagine what happened then: Waited too long at the stop sign, even though there were no cars on the road, pulled out, and went under the speed limit for the rest of the way until my next turn. Blessedly, he went straight; I turned left, and made the meeting with one minute to spare. Fortunately, things got better after that.

I still don’t know why any self-respecting driving instructor is out that early. Maybe it’s so that the students don’t snarl traffic later in the day when normal people are out in large numbers.

Technorati Tags: Traffic, Humor, Youth, Oddities

Music Series

Origins

I can’t remember exactly when I became interested in music, but it happened very early in my life, because my parents always liked and listened to music, and of course I heard the music when they listened to it. Mom had taken piano lessons as a young girl, meaning that she had some exposure to what is commonly, though incorrectly, referred to as “classical” music. Dad said he had a brief encounter with the violin, and I guess that in that short time he must have come in contact with “classical” music, too. But what they listened to was big band swing music—Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey, Glen Miller, Stan Kenton and other bands of the 30s, 40s and 50s—and they listened to The Grand Ol’ Opry on the radio every Saturday night to hear people like Hank Williams, Little Jimmy Dickens, Ernest Tubb, The Sons of the Pioneers, Minnie Pearl, Grandpa Jones and all the others. Yes, that’s right: My parents liked swing and country. An odd combination? Well, yes, it was.

In those early days there wasn’t nearly as much entertainment available in homes as there is today. AM radio was king, hardly anyone had even heard of FM radio, and almost nobody had a TV until well into the 50s. I was eight years old in 1952 when the first experience I remember with television occurred. Someone brought a TV set to my house so that my parents and some friends could watch the Republicans nominate General Dwight Eisenhower for President of the United States. We used “rabbit ears” to pick up a station a long way away to watch the Republican Convention.

The main entertainment medium, other than AM radio, was the phonograph, which, for those too young to remember, played plastic discs called “records.” Mom and Dad had quite a few 78s and 33s (45s weren’t “invented” yet). We listened mostly to swing and country music records, and less “classical.”

One of my Dad’s favorite musicians was Gene Krupa, a drummer who played with the Benny Goodman band. Dad had a few Benny Goodman albums, and he would sometimes play them over and over, and just raved about Gene Krupa, who is credited as the first drummer to play an extended jazz drum solo, which he did on a tune called Sing, Sing, Sing with the Goodman band at Carnegie Hall in 1938. Before Krupa, the drums were just part of the rhythm section, and rarely played more than a few beats by themselves, filling in open spots in the music, but he brought the drums to the forefront. My Dad’s enthusiasm for Krupa inspired me to learn to play the drums.

You could start band in our school system in the sixth grade, but I was able to start during the summer before sixth grade when Larry Everson and I took lessons. After school started, we drummers spent a lot of time standing around with our sticks under our arms while the instructor worked with the wind instruments. I got bored with that, and switched to the trumpet in the seventh grade. But even though I was a trumpet player in the band, I continued playing drums and other percussion instruments some outside of band. I became a pretty good trumpet player in junior high.

In high school I had the opportunity to play in a school band that played swing and jazz—a stage band, a “big band” like Benny Goodman’s, with 16 pieces. Also in high school, a bunch of us band guys, some who had taught ourselves to play, piano, guitar and bass, formed a rock group called “The Lancers” (I think that was the name. That was a long time ago, and the band wasn’t together very long). I was the bass player in that group, but after a few months The Lancers fizzled out and the horn players and I joined another band called “The Jades,” a group of self-taught guys who were pretty good. I played trumpet in that group. Needless to say, adding two trumpets and an alto sax, played by “trained musicians,” really propelled The Jades to bigger and better things. The Jades was a group of white guys that played soul music, and it lasted about a year after the horns joined before three guys left for college and The Jades took a 35-year hiatus. Our claim to fame, aside from widespread local fame, was backing up a black chick group called The Chantels, whose big tune at the time was “Maybe.” They liked us. They said we were “the most soulful white band” they had ever heard. We were pretty pleased by that.

Meanwhile, the school stage band went to the state stage band festival in my junior year and won first place. The judges were two professional jazz musicians, clarinetist Buddy DeFranco and Chubby Jackson, who played a 5-string upright bass, a specially made instrument that was years ahead of its time. It was a real thrill for all of us, but especially for me, because one of the tunes we played was Moonlight In Vermont, with a trumpet solo played by, who else, yours truly! Playing in the stage band and The Jades, along with the school concert band and marching band, convinced me to study music in college.

Obviously, I was hooked on music. I still am.

Technorati Tags: Music, Origins, Youth, Childhood