Life About Returning To

 

Driving home from having dropped my daughter off at school I got yapping with a friend who also, recently repatriated back from China.  He’s down in the Philadelphia area.  We gasped incredulous at Trump’s latest foibles, talked about deals, talked about kids and I took the car up and off the west side of the Mid-Hudson Bridge, following 44/55 North I took the first exit off, Haviland which heads all the way down back under the bridge to a spot I’d never seen before, named the Johnson-Iorio Memorial Park, named after two soldiers who died in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968 respectively.  There I sat at considered the river and talked to my pal. 

I drove a while down Oakes Road and up along Mile Hill Road. I was conscious of a phone battery that was only four-percent charged, before this call started.  But before I could say anything he mentioned that he had to go and we agreed to talk again, before too long.  Some dirge-like Gloria Coates which had sounded odd, somber out biking on the rail trail yesterday was not what I was looking for just now, riding through the countryside along Red Top Road, heading back towards the intersection with 299, I switched it over to the radio, WFMU.  A DJ whose name I didn’t catch was playing some old seventies country boogie-woogie and I didn’t recognize it.  But it caught my ears and fit the scene and later on by the time I drove down my driveway I was informed that this had been Mac Davis.

 

“Uncle Booger Red and Byrdie Nelle” was followed by “Texas in My Rearview Mirror” and I grew more intrigued as he navigated the fine balance between good story telling, bitterness, authenticity and a fine balance between rock and country.  Come to find he’d written songs for Frank Sinatra, Nancy Sinatra, Elvis, and like Carrol King was clearly a fine singer of his own music as well.  And like Buddy Holly he hailed from Lubbock Texas which he’d left behind as soon as he could and then sang the rest of his life about returning to. 

Later in the day when my wife went back to pick up our daughter I was quick to call my pop.  Good man that he is he responded “sure” when I asked him if he’d like to come and help me move a bookcase up from the second garage to the house.  He as over in about ten minutes.  We got one and then another of these beasts up to the study quickly enough.  Grateful, I bid him adieu and dusted the old Beijing dust off the shelves and inserted them into the cases.  My wife and I had moved the first one up yesterday and she didn’t think it worked in the room.  It was too big.  The wrong color.  Now there were three of them in the house.  I took off for a bike ride, before she returned.

Monday, 10/05/20