Rocky Mountain Madness…
Euphoria in Denver
"It’s Colorado rocky mountain high, I’ve seen it rainin’ fire in the sky
Friends around the campfire and everybody’s high,
Rocky Mountain high…” Rocky Mountain High, John Denver
It was bound to happen, and what a perfect setting for it. The mile-high city of Denver, the Pinnacle of the Eastern Slope, is the perfect pick for the Democratic convocation of the Blue-State Hopeful, the Apostles of hope and change.
The slick Carnival showed up this week en masse, gasping for oxygen and grasping for a hold on promises as weak and insubstantial as Colorado’s ethereally-thin air. In many ways it was the perfect venue to stage the evolving Floor Show of Illusion. Known for its abundance of blue sky, what better place to make so many “blue sky” promises of hope and change, mere bones of esoterically-abstract concepts gnawed bare and tossed out to keep the crowds deluded.
The Denver Pepsi Center has been the site of this spectacle of delusional madness. Thousands of wild and hopeful-for-change freaks took turns screaming into microphones, pledging the delegate votes or yielding their position to “that great state of Illinois, home of Lincoln and the next president, Barack Obama.” Pomposity radiated from the podium and reverberated from convention hall walls. “Magnetizers of the Present,” the current and has-been glitterati and low-level Party Luminaries, “strutted and fretted their hour upon the stage…uttering tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing….”~~ thousands upon thousands of empty words uttered non-stop.
Those of us who grew up in small towns of the South have seen, in microcosm, how this delusional madness plays out. From itinerant carnivals to traveling politicians, they all showed up sooner or later down at the fair grounds and held their seedy convocation of cheap tricks, rides, and presumptuous panaceas. Having shaken the last few coins from the dirt-poor farmers, they shook the dust of town from their shoes at the city limits sign, and moved on down the road to another town, to another shakedown. When the effects of the elixirs had subsided the locals looked at one another with this question, “Were we that stupid?” The answer would be evident next month when the bills came due! But we had a good time.
Tonight, down at Invesco Field, Charles MacKay’s predictions in his book, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” written in 1841, will find their fulfillment. With strobe lights flashing multi-colors on his big ivories, The Party Panjandrum, The High Priest of Change will stroll to the podium and stoke the contagion of hysterical frenzy among his 77,000 disciples. He will continue to promise the undeliverable, and from his lips will gush effusively dire omens and divinations of the future. His hollow exhortation will echo throughout the world, cresting in a crescendo that will give human folly and delusion new definitions. Yes, The Dems have their man!
“He climbed the cathedral mountains, he saw silver clouds below, he saw everything as far as you can see, and they said that he got crazy once and tried to touch the sun, and he lost a friend but kept the memory…”
All good parties must end, and this one will, too. The fireworks and Rock Stars’ Tents will move to another city, but not before the fund-raising count has risen to nearly $1.5 billion. Euphoria will evaporate as well, its descent more slowly that its ascent. The party hangover begins when Visa and American Express bills arrive next month, and hot dogs no longer cost $7 bucks…good thing, because that’s what a lot of folks will remember about this convention. But we had a good time!
And what about the vicarious voyeurs who watched this madness at a distance? Well, the final shakedown for us will be complete when our bills come due, usually every April 15th …don’t worry, you’ll be for sure on the “Preferred Donor List” then!
Bud
August 28, 2008
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Flying...An Escape into the Parallel Universe
Friends:
Flying…
An Escape into the Parallel Universe
“…a little while, and my longing shall gather dust and foam for another body… a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman will bear me…”
The Prophet, Gibran
The engines roared and the jet turbines screamed, breaking the serendipity of the day.
They ingested the air in a lustful hunger for testosterone sufficient to escape the hold of earth. Slowly at first they moved, then faster, faster, faster over the runway, itself the route to the beginning of life in the Parallel Universe, or to the end of life on the earth. Tension mounted as sufficient rotation was achieved…then an auditable release of nerves as man’s sleek flying machines lifted into the supporting resistance of air…the principle of gravity was broken once again.
“Many men would take the death-sentence without a whimper to escape the life-sentence which Fate carries in her hand.” T. E. Lawrence
Blame it on the Greeks, these heavenly looks of man and this urgency to escape. Icarus, exiled and imprisoned on the Isle of Crete, longed for escape. With nerves of steel and wings of feathers and wax, he leapt from the rocky escarpments into the ethereal air of The Parallel Universe. Higher, higher, higher he soared into the sublime sphere of the heavenlies, drunk with freedom’s elixir. Alas, too high, too high he soared, too near the sun…with melted wings he plunged back onto his former world…gravity suspended, but not superseded!
The Parallel Universe, where sense of movement is slowed, where silence is broken only by the terse tentacles of radio waves, the last link in earthly connectivity. It’s where man rides on currents of cushioned air, dancing with sunbeams, playfully dodging nimbo-cumulus marshmallows, the playground of angels gathered in a celestial display of magnificence. Freed temporarily from the edict of Exile issued in Eden…The Curse upon the ground, where thorns and thistles grow and sorrow prevails. Yes, a glimpse of heaven itself.
“Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth…trod the high un-trespassed sanctity of space, put out my hand, and touch the face of God.” John Gillespie Magee, Jr., Aviator
Welcome to The Parallel Universe, the “Twilight Zone,” a brief encounter with eternity, where laws of nature are transcended by quarks and quantum physics, and where the speed of light is exceeded.
I myself was born again into this world on September 14, 1968. My birth certificate hung with the shredded shirttails of hundreds in a tableau of colors from the wall of an Epps Hangar in Atlanta. My “aeronautical mother”, if you will, was of the Cessna family, a sleek, young 150 hottie, who bore me into the heavens on my first solo flight. Into my ears of dust she spoke, “Fly, my son, fly,”
“…and (her) word was in my heart, like a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I grew weary with forbearing and could not refrain…”. Jeremiah 20:9
From hangars, terminals and tarmacs the windsocks blow, and rest, and blow, and rest…the spirit of the heavens again stirs our primordial proclivities, and we can refrain no longer. Such is the life of aviators. For though we know that “dust thou art, and unto dust thou shall return,” yet we have tasted that Parallel Universe, and our spirits are restless until we return. For, like Kubla Khan,
“…for (we) on honey-dew hath fed,
and drunk the milk of Paradise. Coleridge
And in the end, we will all join in the old Gospel chorus,
“Some glad morning when this life is over,
I’ll fly away.
To a home on God’s celestial shore,
I’ll fly away…….”
Bud
August 21, 2008
Flying…
An Escape into the Parallel Universe
“…a little while, and my longing shall gather dust and foam for another body… a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman will bear me…”
The Prophet, Gibran
The engines roared and the jet turbines screamed, breaking the serendipity of the day.
They ingested the air in a lustful hunger for testosterone sufficient to escape the hold of earth. Slowly at first they moved, then faster, faster, faster over the runway, itself the route to the beginning of life in the Parallel Universe, or to the end of life on the earth. Tension mounted as sufficient rotation was achieved…then an auditable release of nerves as man’s sleek flying machines lifted into the supporting resistance of air…the principle of gravity was broken once again.
“Many men would take the death-sentence without a whimper to escape the life-sentence which Fate carries in her hand.” T. E. Lawrence
Blame it on the Greeks, these heavenly looks of man and this urgency to escape. Icarus, exiled and imprisoned on the Isle of Crete, longed for escape. With nerves of steel and wings of feathers and wax, he leapt from the rocky escarpments into the ethereal air of The Parallel Universe. Higher, higher, higher he soared into the sublime sphere of the heavenlies, drunk with freedom’s elixir. Alas, too high, too high he soared, too near the sun…with melted wings he plunged back onto his former world…gravity suspended, but not superseded!
The Parallel Universe, where sense of movement is slowed, where silence is broken only by the terse tentacles of radio waves, the last link in earthly connectivity. It’s where man rides on currents of cushioned air, dancing with sunbeams, playfully dodging nimbo-cumulus marshmallows, the playground of angels gathered in a celestial display of magnificence. Freed temporarily from the edict of Exile issued in Eden…The Curse upon the ground, where thorns and thistles grow and sorrow prevails. Yes, a glimpse of heaven itself.
“Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth…trod the high un-trespassed sanctity of space, put out my hand, and touch the face of God.” John Gillespie Magee, Jr., Aviator
Welcome to The Parallel Universe, the “Twilight Zone,” a brief encounter with eternity, where laws of nature are transcended by quarks and quantum physics, and where the speed of light is exceeded.
I myself was born again into this world on September 14, 1968. My birth certificate hung with the shredded shirttails of hundreds in a tableau of colors from the wall of an Epps Hangar in Atlanta. My “aeronautical mother”, if you will, was of the Cessna family, a sleek, young 150 hottie, who bore me into the heavens on my first solo flight. Into my ears of dust she spoke, “Fly, my son, fly,”
“…and (her) word was in my heart, like a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I grew weary with forbearing and could not refrain…”. Jeremiah 20:9
From hangars, terminals and tarmacs the windsocks blow, and rest, and blow, and rest…the spirit of the heavens again stirs our primordial proclivities, and we can refrain no longer. Such is the life of aviators. For though we know that “dust thou art, and unto dust thou shall return,” yet we have tasted that Parallel Universe, and our spirits are restless until we return. For, like Kubla Khan,
“…for (we) on honey-dew hath fed,
and drunk the milk of Paradise. Coleridge
And in the end, we will all join in the old Gospel chorus,
“Some glad morning when this life is over,
I’ll fly away.
To a home on God’s celestial shore,
I’ll fly away…….”
Bud
August 21, 2008
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Black Holes and Rainbows...A Heavenly Coup de Theatre
Black Holes and Rainbows…
A Heavenly coup de theatre
The barometric pressure hung low all week, and I hung low with it.
This heavenly drama makes for cabin fever and low spirits. The inescapable combination of sorry weather and news, both of which are tough to escape, puts a damper on things. They hound us relentlessly with a disgustingly depressive diet, reminding us:
“…this ain’t no technological breakdown,
Oh no, this is the road to hell.” (L. Cohen)
Even the earthworms in my yard abandoned their grassy haven and migrated mindlessly en masse to the pool, collectively drowning their miseries. I might have tried the same thing, but the thought of hell lifted my spirits. I crawled out just in time to see a rainbow sprouting in the sky. While I can’t swear to it, I believe I saw angels riding the rollercoaster of colors through the skies. “Hop on,” the host sang, as I remembered the tune,
“Give me silver, blue and gold, the colors of the world I’m told,
My rai, ai, ainbow is overdue…”
Bad Company, c 1990
And my rainbow was long overdue!
I’m in good company with Bad Company … they knew what they were writing about, and I’ve had my own share of “bad company.” I call them black holes, those giant sucking vortices in the heavens that are like my mosquito catcher…a device that sucks ‘em up into a canister and makes worm food. I once had such a friend---I said “once”---upon entering a room full of merry folks, instantly the life was sucked out of that room…he didn’t have to say a word, he just showed up. That’s a human black hole.
Rainbows are not like that. Elusive, yes…but their aloofness is their allure. Disappointing, yes, because they are always where you are not, which is about near everywhere except where your one-foot square plot of earth happens to be. They are a reflected glory, not the glory itself. Some people are reflections of celebs, politicos, you know, important folks. They think they’re rainbows, but they are black holes.
Neither can rainbows deliver what they seem to promise, which is that pot of gold at the end. We concocted that story, because we’re always looking for silver and gold, not blues. Rainbows have no end, or beginning, which makes them sorta special. They can be everywhere, and nowhere, all at the same time. Kinda like Somebody else, if you know what I mean. And because we cannot grasp them, hence we cannot corrupt them, which is what we seem to be especially adept at doing. They are ephemeral, and not selective upon whom they shine…they are just a sign of Someone’s everlasting favor. At least, that’s how I like to see them.
An angel rode a rainbow into my office one dreary day. His name was Scott Angel, and he worked for that giant, black-hole-sucking vortex called the IRS. He was there to collect a very large debt I had incurred and was at that time hard-pressed to pay. My intentions were honorable, but my bank account was humbled. That makes no difference to black holes…they siphon whatever you have to feed “the machine.”
I reminded him of his name, and he seemed to want to live up to that high calling. Of course, I did my part, shedding Belushi-sized tears, reminding him of the plight of my poor family, employees and prospects for life. With compassion he rode out on that same rainbow, having given me six months to pay up.
We have two choices: Black holes or Rainbows…we choose daily. As the rainbow faded into the ending of the day, I think I heard encouraging laughter from the heavens, singing, “Look up, and remember.”
Rainbows may never be early, but they are never late! Be one today.
Bud
August 14, 2008
A Heavenly coup de theatre
The barometric pressure hung low all week, and I hung low with it.
This heavenly drama makes for cabin fever and low spirits. The inescapable combination of sorry weather and news, both of which are tough to escape, puts a damper on things. They hound us relentlessly with a disgustingly depressive diet, reminding us:
“…this ain’t no technological breakdown,
Oh no, this is the road to hell.” (L. Cohen)
Even the earthworms in my yard abandoned their grassy haven and migrated mindlessly en masse to the pool, collectively drowning their miseries. I might have tried the same thing, but the thought of hell lifted my spirits. I crawled out just in time to see a rainbow sprouting in the sky. While I can’t swear to it, I believe I saw angels riding the rollercoaster of colors through the skies. “Hop on,” the host sang, as I remembered the tune,
“Give me silver, blue and gold, the colors of the world I’m told,
My rai, ai, ainbow is overdue…”
Bad Company, c 1990
And my rainbow was long overdue!
I’m in good company with Bad Company … they knew what they were writing about, and I’ve had my own share of “bad company.” I call them black holes, those giant sucking vortices in the heavens that are like my mosquito catcher…a device that sucks ‘em up into a canister and makes worm food. I once had such a friend---I said “once”---upon entering a room full of merry folks, instantly the life was sucked out of that room…he didn’t have to say a word, he just showed up. That’s a human black hole.
Rainbows are not like that. Elusive, yes…but their aloofness is their allure. Disappointing, yes, because they are always where you are not, which is about near everywhere except where your one-foot square plot of earth happens to be. They are a reflected glory, not the glory itself. Some people are reflections of celebs, politicos, you know, important folks. They think they’re rainbows, but they are black holes.
Neither can rainbows deliver what they seem to promise, which is that pot of gold at the end. We concocted that story, because we’re always looking for silver and gold, not blues. Rainbows have no end, or beginning, which makes them sorta special. They can be everywhere, and nowhere, all at the same time. Kinda like Somebody else, if you know what I mean. And because we cannot grasp them, hence we cannot corrupt them, which is what we seem to be especially adept at doing. They are ephemeral, and not selective upon whom they shine…they are just a sign of Someone’s everlasting favor. At least, that’s how I like to see them.
An angel rode a rainbow into my office one dreary day. His name was Scott Angel, and he worked for that giant, black-hole-sucking vortex called the IRS. He was there to collect a very large debt I had incurred and was at that time hard-pressed to pay. My intentions were honorable, but my bank account was humbled. That makes no difference to black holes…they siphon whatever you have to feed “the machine.”
I reminded him of his name, and he seemed to want to live up to that high calling. Of course, I did my part, shedding Belushi-sized tears, reminding him of the plight of my poor family, employees and prospects for life. With compassion he rode out on that same rainbow, having given me six months to pay up.
We have two choices: Black holes or Rainbows…we choose daily. As the rainbow faded into the ending of the day, I think I heard encouraging laughter from the heavens, singing, “Look up, and remember.”
Rainbows may never be early, but they are never late! Be one today.
Bud
August 14, 2008
Thursday, August 7, 2008
The House of Cards....A Faustian Allegory
The House of Cards….
A Faustian Allegory
“And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth forth her untimely figs…”
Revelations 6:13
It had been a day of low karma already, and walking into The Taco Shack nailed the coffin shut.
Dark, musty and smelling of stale beer and cayenne, The Taco Shack represents the stark dichotomy between 5-Star resorts and $2-Beer joints. It is a perfect place to avoid important people and blend into a low side of life.
Inside this dark cavern, the walls teemed with reflecting snippets of life from HiDef TVs. Phantasmagoric scenes of life in plasma flashed incessantly in alternating incongruity. With little imagination one could be living in multiple worlds simultaneously. Sports, news, weather and the World Series of Poker out-screamed one another in an epic battle for attention. My eyes fixated on the poker tables, where serious card games were in progress in Las Vegas, the sleaze capital of the west.
The opulent décor of the casino contrasted sharply with that of The Taco Shack, setting an illusionary scene of someone else’s world open only to the lucky or privileged few. But it was a temporary world. After all, it was a House of Cards… make no mistake about that!
It all took me back to the days of BC ~ “Before Credit.” We no longer live in these now ~ we live in the AD world ~ “After Debt,” and we are learning how short the distance is between the two.
Cards were shuffled, dealt, and flashed. Chips were cast onto the table, bets from people putting their money where their mouths were. The looks, the eyes, the stares, the hats, the sunglasses ~~ mere costumes to disguise every sense of emotion or to reveal clues as to what the cards held. And so it went throughout my dinner. The winners, the losers changed often, revealing the vicissitudes of chance in the House of Cards.
All the intrigue took me away from the horror of my meal. It consisted mainly of a mystery meat wrapped in some mushy maize that mimicked something Mexican. I was afraid to ask the ingredients. You see, I’ve been to street markets in Mexico where “carne” hung, stripped of all outward evidence of its origin. But always there was a conspicuous absence of local dogs and cats. However, here the patrons appeared healthy enough, so I continued to eat.
Interviews were held with the poker players, and the best summary of the night’s card game came from LeRoy from Arkansas. He put it this way: “It’s all a House of Cards, and the higher you build, the more risky it becomes…collapse is inherent and instant, without warning. It’s always a short distance from the penthouse to the outhouse.”
The real estate market flashed onto the plasma of my HiDef mindscreen, and in an epiphany I saw it has always been a House of Cards. We built too high on too much sand, and the rains and the winds came. The wreckage was disastrous ~~ suddenly and without warning.
Welcome to the Brave New World of the House of Cards, and the Faustian Bargain ~ a deal with the devil.
Remember, “…never count your money while you’re sitting at the table….”
The Gambler, Kenny Rogers
We counted too soon….hollow now ring the bells of our boast!
As I left The Taco Shack, the Zeitgeist of today’s culture, I couldn’t help but remember how Nero fiddled as Rome burned, and burned, and burned. Into the night I walked humming the children’s simple rhyme,
“London Bridge is falling down, falling down…my fair lady.”
Bud
August 7, 2008
A Faustian Allegory
“And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth forth her untimely figs…”
Revelations 6:13
It had been a day of low karma already, and walking into The Taco Shack nailed the coffin shut.
Dark, musty and smelling of stale beer and cayenne, The Taco Shack represents the stark dichotomy between 5-Star resorts and $2-Beer joints. It is a perfect place to avoid important people and blend into a low side of life.
Inside this dark cavern, the walls teemed with reflecting snippets of life from HiDef TVs. Phantasmagoric scenes of life in plasma flashed incessantly in alternating incongruity. With little imagination one could be living in multiple worlds simultaneously. Sports, news, weather and the World Series of Poker out-screamed one another in an epic battle for attention. My eyes fixated on the poker tables, where serious card games were in progress in Las Vegas, the sleaze capital of the west.
The opulent décor of the casino contrasted sharply with that of The Taco Shack, setting an illusionary scene of someone else’s world open only to the lucky or privileged few. But it was a temporary world. After all, it was a House of Cards… make no mistake about that!
It all took me back to the days of BC ~ “Before Credit.” We no longer live in these now ~ we live in the AD world ~ “After Debt,” and we are learning how short the distance is between the two.
Cards were shuffled, dealt, and flashed. Chips were cast onto the table, bets from people putting their money where their mouths were. The looks, the eyes, the stares, the hats, the sunglasses ~~ mere costumes to disguise every sense of emotion or to reveal clues as to what the cards held. And so it went throughout my dinner. The winners, the losers changed often, revealing the vicissitudes of chance in the House of Cards.
All the intrigue took me away from the horror of my meal. It consisted mainly of a mystery meat wrapped in some mushy maize that mimicked something Mexican. I was afraid to ask the ingredients. You see, I’ve been to street markets in Mexico where “carne” hung, stripped of all outward evidence of its origin. But always there was a conspicuous absence of local dogs and cats. However, here the patrons appeared healthy enough, so I continued to eat.
Interviews were held with the poker players, and the best summary of the night’s card game came from LeRoy from Arkansas. He put it this way: “It’s all a House of Cards, and the higher you build, the more risky it becomes…collapse is inherent and instant, without warning. It’s always a short distance from the penthouse to the outhouse.”
The real estate market flashed onto the plasma of my HiDef mindscreen, and in an epiphany I saw it has always been a House of Cards. We built too high on too much sand, and the rains and the winds came. The wreckage was disastrous ~~ suddenly and without warning.
Welcome to the Brave New World of the House of Cards, and the Faustian Bargain ~ a deal with the devil.
Remember, “…never count your money while you’re sitting at the table….”
The Gambler, Kenny Rogers
We counted too soon….hollow now ring the bells of our boast!
As I left The Taco Shack, the Zeitgeist of today’s culture, I couldn’t help but remember how Nero fiddled as Rome burned, and burned, and burned. Into the night I walked humming the children’s simple rhyme,
“London Bridge is falling down, falling down…my fair lady.”
Bud
August 7, 2008
Monday, August 4, 2008
Nocturnal Magic....The Saturday Night Dance
Nocturnal Magic…
The Saturday Night Dance
At 7:05 the phone rang. “Who?” he wondered. He heard her excited voice, a portend, as she answered, “Yes, yes—right now? We’re on the way.” He shuttered, “Uh oh, I don’t like the sound of this.”
“Honey, get away from that computer, put on comfortable shoes---we’re going dancing with Dee and Tom.” You know the initial response of a man already settled in on emails, right? But with the intrusion also came the solution of, “What’re we having for dinner, Hon?,” that proverbial conundrum that nightly confounds couples. As usual, he obeyed…it was easier that way.
Small-town Saturday dances often occur in places like Holiday Inn ballrooms that are depressingly dull by day. But nighttime transforms the mundane into the magical, aided by good music and munchies. Tonight was no exception.
The place was rocking when they arrived. The Island Rockers band was beating out vintage Bob Seger,
“…still like that old-time rock ’n roll, that kind of music just soothes your soul,
I reminiscence about the days of old, with that old-time rock ‘n roll...”
and it moves your whole body as well, he thought, as the gyrating dance floor crowd confirmed…the Kahuna Dance Club was alive and well!
Huh, The Kahuna “Who?” What kind of name is this for a dance club, he wondered. But, hey, who cares, he concluded, his bones beginning to move as the music pulsated through his body, and strange but wonderful feelings came over him.
She grabbed his arm and they wasted no time joining the aerobics as one Oldie segued into Chubby’s:
“…Let’s twist again like we did last summer, let’s twist again like we did last year.
Do you remember when…”
The unrelenting beat of percussion, the high-pitched scream of the lead guitar, the wail of the tenor sax merged with the voices belting out more familiar lyrics, like Credence,
“…Don’t go around tonight, well, it’s bound to take your life,
There’s a bad moon on the rise.”
You’ve heard it, the slur, “white men can’t dance,” but South Georgia Saturday night dances prove it’s a lie. Not size, shape, or age—nothing-- matters when music moves your soul. He knew that from the days of his own band in high school and college, and he had never outgrown his love of music. Old memories revived, and he remembered John, his best friend.
Life dished out to John the dreaded curse of the “white man’s overbite,” a rodent-like condition brought on by large protruding front teeth that totally obliterated his bottom lip. Girls fled at the prospect of kissing John, but he was a killer dancer and girls were attracted to him like a magnet. This “overbite” was accentuated with he danced. His brilliantly big, pearly whites reflected the strobe lights like a mirror… some of the dancers here were apparently John’s overbite relatives. Orthodontics later restored both his flaw and his bottom lip. He was discovered by Hollywood and last seen “Dancing with the Stars.”
The collective mood of the crowd softened as the music slowed, and couples danced, entwined in embraces. The carcass of BBQ’d pig lay lifeless on a table against the wall, its ribs picked clean, and only a few brownies remained uneaten. He and she remembered the advice of years ago, “dance with who brought you,” and they closed the evening with the song,
“Memories, like the corners of my mind,
Misty water-colored memories,
of the way we were...”
evoking flashbacks of an old Redford/Streisand movie.
Evenings, like songs, have endings—this one, too soon. Hand in hand they strolled into the cool night air, the magic of music having reignited old flames. In a contented silence they retreated into their memories as the car sped through the darkness. Receding low on the horizon, a silver sliver of moon sliced slowly into the blackness of the night in its circuit toward tomorrow.
Their home stood quietly alone among the shadows, illuminated by one small lamp as they entered. Smiling, they agreed that it had been a memorable night of music, magic and memories—a night to remember and not to be wasted…and it was not.
Later, his familiar snoring replaced the rhythms of the music, but in her mind the magic of the moment remained. As her evening closed, she slipped slowly into the dark horizon of her own circuit toward tomorrow, the words of an old tune singing her softly into a peaceful sleep,
“…we had it all, just like Bogey and Bacall,
Starring in our old late, late show, sailing away to Key Largo…”.
Here’s looking at you, kid.
Bud
August 4, 2008
The Saturday Night Dance
At 7:05 the phone rang. “Who?” he wondered. He heard her excited voice, a portend, as she answered, “Yes, yes—right now? We’re on the way.” He shuttered, “Uh oh, I don’t like the sound of this.”
“Honey, get away from that computer, put on comfortable shoes---we’re going dancing with Dee and Tom.” You know the initial response of a man already settled in on emails, right? But with the intrusion also came the solution of, “What’re we having for dinner, Hon?,” that proverbial conundrum that nightly confounds couples. As usual, he obeyed…it was easier that way.
Small-town Saturday dances often occur in places like Holiday Inn ballrooms that are depressingly dull by day. But nighttime transforms the mundane into the magical, aided by good music and munchies. Tonight was no exception.
The place was rocking when they arrived. The Island Rockers band was beating out vintage Bob Seger,
“…still like that old-time rock ’n roll, that kind of music just soothes your soul,
I reminiscence about the days of old, with that old-time rock ‘n roll...”
and it moves your whole body as well, he thought, as the gyrating dance floor crowd confirmed…the Kahuna Dance Club was alive and well!
Huh, The Kahuna “Who?” What kind of name is this for a dance club, he wondered. But, hey, who cares, he concluded, his bones beginning to move as the music pulsated through his body, and strange but wonderful feelings came over him.
She grabbed his arm and they wasted no time joining the aerobics as one Oldie segued into Chubby’s:
“…Let’s twist again like we did last summer, let’s twist again like we did last year.
Do you remember when…”
The unrelenting beat of percussion, the high-pitched scream of the lead guitar, the wail of the tenor sax merged with the voices belting out more familiar lyrics, like Credence,
“…Don’t go around tonight, well, it’s bound to take your life,
There’s a bad moon on the rise.”
You’ve heard it, the slur, “white men can’t dance,” but South Georgia Saturday night dances prove it’s a lie. Not size, shape, or age—nothing-- matters when music moves your soul. He knew that from the days of his own band in high school and college, and he had never outgrown his love of music. Old memories revived, and he remembered John, his best friend.
Life dished out to John the dreaded curse of the “white man’s overbite,” a rodent-like condition brought on by large protruding front teeth that totally obliterated his bottom lip. Girls fled at the prospect of kissing John, but he was a killer dancer and girls were attracted to him like a magnet. This “overbite” was accentuated with he danced. His brilliantly big, pearly whites reflected the strobe lights like a mirror… some of the dancers here were apparently John’s overbite relatives. Orthodontics later restored both his flaw and his bottom lip. He was discovered by Hollywood and last seen “Dancing with the Stars.”
The collective mood of the crowd softened as the music slowed, and couples danced, entwined in embraces. The carcass of BBQ’d pig lay lifeless on a table against the wall, its ribs picked clean, and only a few brownies remained uneaten. He and she remembered the advice of years ago, “dance with who brought you,” and they closed the evening with the song,
“Memories, like the corners of my mind,
Misty water-colored memories,
of the way we were...”
evoking flashbacks of an old Redford/Streisand movie.
Evenings, like songs, have endings—this one, too soon. Hand in hand they strolled into the cool night air, the magic of music having reignited old flames. In a contented silence they retreated into their memories as the car sped through the darkness. Receding low on the horizon, a silver sliver of moon sliced slowly into the blackness of the night in its circuit toward tomorrow.
Their home stood quietly alone among the shadows, illuminated by one small lamp as they entered. Smiling, they agreed that it had been a memorable night of music, magic and memories—a night to remember and not to be wasted…and it was not.
Later, his familiar snoring replaced the rhythms of the music, but in her mind the magic of the moment remained. As her evening closed, she slipped slowly into the dark horizon of her own circuit toward tomorrow, the words of an old tune singing her softly into a peaceful sleep,
“…we had it all, just like Bogey and Bacall,
Starring in our old late, late show, sailing away to Key Largo…”.
Here’s looking at you, kid.
Bud
August 4, 2008
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