Peace.
Joy.
Happiness.
memories
8
Dec 22
More from the Re-Listening Project
We return to the Re-Listening Project, where I am forever trying to keep up with what is in my car’s CD player. What’s in my car’s CD player is the entirety of my CD collection. Well, not all at once, that’d be a spectacular device. We’re surely decades away from having the technology to put hundred and hundreds and a few more hundred CDs on one simple machine.
But I can load several at a time in my car, and what I’m currently doing is listening to all of these old circles of plastic, in order. It’s a fun thing to do. And some of it is fun to write about. These aren’t reviews, but fun of memories, and a few good licks.
And this is the first record that, on this go around of the Re-Listening Project, that I’ve listened to twice. It got dismissed as mediocre at the time, but “Friction, Baby” has aged well as Better Than Ezra’s sophomore effort.
I listen to Tom Drummond’s bass line as much as anything.
But, first, Kevin Griffin’s post-alternative lyrics. This is 1996. I was 19 and, true to pop form, there’s a little something in there for most everyone or most any mood.
But that rhythm section, man, that still demands your attention a quarter century later.
I worked with someone during high school and college and the album title became a salutation and a closing because we both liked the record. She was from Vestavia, and, yes, this album is that suburban. I don’t know if I ever asked her what her favorite song on this was.
Do you ever wonder when the last time someone listened to something was? And how, after a long time away from it, if their impression had gone in some different way than your own? Perceptions are funny, inconsistent and perfectly valid that way. Anyway, there’s a nice mandolin on here, too. As I said, a little something for every mood.
Perhaps, in the long reach of life, you wonder why you did a thing, or spent so much time around a person or people. Maybe that’s why she’s unfriended me. (A fate worse than meh!) Maybe that’s why you stopped listening to a record you used to enjoy. That and other albums and other priorities. But it’s nice to go back and see what still works, and what you hear differently. Somewhere in all of that you get to decide what to lean into, and what deserves a cringe.
Anyway, we used this track on my college radio morning show. (Speaking of cringe!) Open mics, talking to the post and signing off for the day.
Top of the world, I guess.
I’m certain that I picked up this next album as a station giveaway. Probably it was the cover art that intrigued me. If anything, I’d heard one song on the thing. Probably something we played at the campus station. I don’t remember this getting a lot of commercial airplay, but as another sophomore album it got a lot of play from me in late 1996 and definitely 1997.
It’s Melissa Ferrick’s “Willing to Wait.” Ferrick is still touring. Still making music, and also teaching the craft, these days at Northeastern University. And while this is Ferrick’s second record, consider this. This is a career that started as a 21-year-old woman, opening for Morrisey. That’s ridiculous, but none too big for the Cracker Jack Kid. It’s honest, simple, complex, ragged, truthful, vulnerable, aggressive, and not at all a radio-friendly record. Which is probably how I came to see it on the giveaway table. But critics, and Ferrick’s fans, liked it. If any of those adjectives appeal to you, there’s something for you here.
This is the “Cracker Jack Kid” song, for the reference above.
I had this idea, listening to this record this time: what would this song, and it’s specific themes, feel like if a male did it?
Oh, and we didn’t cover this, but this album is full of intriguing instrumentation.
And some yodeling, or at least a fun little run of scat.
There was a girl — I was in college, so of course there was a girl — and this isn’t the song that I attached to that breakup, but this record was in heavy rotation at the time, and there’s this lyric here, about remembering the color of a doorknob, it sticks with you.
I lived in a two-floor apartment during the time I was listening to this a lot and also feeling that particular breakup. (I was the wrong religion, basically.) The downstairs was a cinderblock building. But the upstairs was simply two sheets of wood paneling. I could hear when my neighbor signed on to AOL. I could hear when she had mail. And, perhaps worse, when she didn’t.
Only now, thinking of how I sat on my stairs and learned one of the louder songs on this CD, have I thought about what music my neighbor heard for three years on her side of the wall.
Oh, look! A live version of one of the songs!
Someone played the stripped down version of their work is always so interesting.
And, just for perspective, that girl? The cheerleader grew into a woman who became a teacher, pretty perfect for her, I think. Her oldest kid is older, today, than we were back then. The last song on Ferrick’s record is titled “Time Flies.”
No kidding.
It was a bronze-colored doorknob, by the way.
6
Dec 22
Travel day photos
This is a filler post, as we spent most of the day traveling today. We woke up in Savannah, picked up our last little shopping treats, had breakfast, sat in the park and then got an Uber to the airport. It was after 9 p.m. when we got back to the house in Indiana. So, you can imagine.
I don’t know if Tom Hanks or David Moscow is still looking, but I found the Zoltar machine.
No one was as excited about seeing this banner as I was. Most things that interest me don’t seem to appeal to anyone else, which is weird. I’m sure it’s them, and not at all me. Anyway, Repurpose Savannah “is a women+ led 501(c)3 nonprofit establishing a sustainable future through the deconstruction and reuse of historic buildings.”
This is a movie prop poster. It is currently displayed in the window of an appliance story that’s set up to look like a 1960s retail shop. I want the actual poster, and some of the bakelite that was inside.
On the same block, the SCAD theater is also going to be a part of that movie. The parking spaces are also currently filled with period cars. For a time, this part of Savannah is pretending to be Cocoa Beach, Florida.
This is the Cathedral Basilica of St. John the Baptist, home of the Diocese of Savannah, which covers 90 counties.
The bumpy, yet smooth, bricked road that is River Street, the primary tourist trap of Savannah.
Another version of this will become a banner on the blog.
If you go down there, though, you get great views of the vessels moving up and down the river.
I don’t care that there’s a tugboat in the foreground for scale, there’s not really a way to accurately convey the size of this thing, which started its voyage in Japan, made ports of call in Tacoma and Long Beach, then crossed the Panama Canal to visit Savannah. Four years ago, that ship rescued 11 Tunisian fishermen who were victims of a hit and run by another large vessel.
Here’s one more shot of our tree at Forsyth Park. Just on the other side, and trending a bit to the right of the trunk, 14 years ago, almost to the day.
Finally, here’s The Yankee, who planned this trip — which is why it was excellent — hanging out with Santa Claus. (She planned a really nice trip. She should have just made it longer.)
Another picture of her with a slight less authentic, but more lifelike, Santa is going on the Christmas cards this year.
2
Dec 22
Did you figure it out?
I told you yesterday, dear reader, that we were taking a trip. I left it to you to guess where we were. Are. We are there now. Here. We are here now. Where is here?
Here’s a hint.
We were on a run around the fountain, just a little two-mile shakeout. And I found this in the cement. Seemed a good bit of advice. I’m glad someone put it somewhere with a bit of semi-permanence.
This sidewalk could persist for 80 years, which is a nice long time to leave a message. I wonder how long it has been there already.
We stopped in a pub for a snack, and we found some very good shaker glasses.
Might need to get a set of those. (I had the Swedish meat balls. They were tasty.)
Also, we spent part of the afternoon with our old friend, Andre, who has come over for a mini-vacation of his own. But, first, he had to finish up his week, hard-working, persevering sort that he is.
There are other friends, not pictured, here as well. But where are we?
There’s two hints in the images above, and this is your final hint. Tomorrow we’re running what is billed as “The South’s Toughest Bridge Run.” so this is your last chance.
Got it yet?
We’re in Savannah, where we took our first trip, where we got married, where we return to as often as we can. Where, tomorrow, we have that run.
(Omelette for breakfast, calzone for dinner, walked seven miles today before a sunny 10K tomorrow. What could go wrong?)
28
Nov 22
A lament
He was the fastest person I knew as a kid. I guess he had to be. David threw his hands at the ground, ferocious, like the rest of him, but his feet fairly well glided over the grass. We met on the soccer pitch, played together for several years. He was the first person I ever met who learned how to get better at things with relentless practice. I remember more about our friendship than I do his soccer. But I remember this. We were a good team for a while and once we came across a better team that had a superlative striker. Our told him to mark him all night. David gulped, and set out to do it. And for 90 minutes that other dude did nothing against us.
That’s a youth soccer story and so it’s as real as it is meaningless, but that, in some small way, tells the story of David.
He grew up loved, but hard. His mother loved him, but doted on him, but she did that to all of us. His younger brother loved him, too, well, as much as a middle kid could. His two younger sisters worshipped the ground he walked on.
When he was 13, David saved a woman’s life. Got to a car crash and put a tourniquet on a woman before she bled out. Thirteen. I mean, really.
His father was a hard man. He was a Vietnam veteran, a chimney sweep, by trade. A man who knew about scraping out his way, and never afraid of the work. His was a big, strong personality and all that comes with that, for better and worse. David, even as a child, had his own big, strong personality, and some of you know what that might turn into. But his dad had his positive traits. He took his kids to work, took me with him too, and taught us all about spending a day in the sun. We built scaffolding, hauled up bricks, mixed and lifted mortar and tore down scaffolding and it was all probably something you couldn’t do with kids today. David’s dad, though, for a hard man, was generally a fair man. He demanded a lot of that boy, and so the two of them had their struggles, and sometimes I was the tiniest distraction or escape or whatever, and that was good. David was a deep sensitive kid, and it was obvious even among other kids.
That’s David, in the Yankees cap. This was at one of my birthday parties. He found a knife, cleaned it up, made me a sheath by hand. It was the cheapest, best, most thoughtful gift.
When David spent the weekend with me we’d go to the mall or the movies or do some other suburban sort of thing. When I spent the weekend with David, we’d spend the day wondering around downtown.
We moved in different directions, as people do. Different high schools, but stayed in touch. I went off to college and his family moved out of town. Not far, but just far enough. The last time we spent together we went camping, which was David’s natural environment. If there wasn’t a target to shoot at, or a fire to build or a tent raise, he’d find one. It was Christmas time. We had two or three tents and David, his younger brother and I went out in the too-cold and, being older, we tasked his brother with keeping the fire burning all night. Not too long after I woke up the next morning we heard him from over the next hill, “Hey guys! The pond’s froze over!”
No kidding, kid. Where’s my fire? But that was OK. We probably called him some names, but then we laughed about it. David and his brother figured it out, as brothers, the lucky ones, do.
Some time after that, David joined the Army. Became a paratrooper and made sergeant. He went to Iraq and worked on dismantling IEDs, or some such.
When he took off the fatigues he signed on as a security contractor. That’s when we found one another again, online. He was working in Afghanistan at the time. We had some pleasant chats. He was a soulful kid and a thoughtful man. And that sort of work just seemed perfect for him.
He’d met someone, got married, and was splitting time between assignments in troubled nations and at home in the States and at his other home in the Philippines. He loved it there. There was a lot of untouched countryside where he was, and he spent several chats telling me all about it. It felt a little like he had finally been able to tap into this calmness that was always in him that he didn’t know how to call upon.
A few years ago, not too long after his first kid was born, his father died. Then his mother-in-law died, pretty soon after. Last night I found a picture of David and his father, and his father his holding one of David’s kids and he’s looking down with this sense of peace and relief that I never saw in the man. He and his dad figured it out, too, and that was a blessing.
I saw that picture last night because I thought to look him up to see the latest, only to find out that my old friend, David, died at the very end of last year. His wife had died a few months before. They are survived by two little kids and some grieving siblings and probably a lot of friends. David was the sort that made them last, even if they got frayed or distanced around the globe.
He saved a woman’s life when he was 13 years old. He knew how to take in the moment, work hard at it, and make it happen, and I think he used that sort of force in some way or another most all of his life.
The Christmas before last I learned of a very distant great-great-aunt who had died, when I saw her marker at the cemetery. Had I learned of it at the time it would have been of the “Oh, that’s too bad. Her poor husband, her kids and grandkids … ” sort of reaction. Distant, as I say. I was sad because there was no one left on that side of the family that thought to tell me.
Last year, I learned that the woman who taught me how to be a mascot died of cancer in 2019.
This spring, I learned my college roommate died in early 2020. He was a success at everything, except maybe for picking a roommate. I think I frustrated him endlessly, but for two years he was a big brother to me, and I admired most everything about him. We hadn’t been close in ages, but I loved that guy.
This summer, I read that a former student of mine died last fall. It seemed she never seemed to perfectly fit in at a school where perfectly fitting in was criminally important. She had a spark and a vitality, though, that never let that be a problem. She moved to New York and lived one of her dreams, but it was all too short. She was 34.
Finding out things well after the fact brings up its own peculiar sort of helplessness.
Two bike rides this weekend. Twenty-five under-caloried miles on Saturday. I just looked at the scenery on Zwift. There’s neon signs on the stores in the middle of the desert. And the “neon” moves. And when the “neon” is off on most of the signs you can see the other neon “tubes.” They could do a lot more with this setup, but they do an awful lot with this setup. I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to notice things like that, but I want to now.
Saturday’s favorite sign was this pig. He waves at you as you go by.
I did a humble little 20-mile ride yesterday. Just wasn’t feeling any of it, but I’ll get back to it this week. I did notice, though, the stars dotting the nightscape, the snow-covered mountains and how the mountains held the clouds around them, as mountains often do.
I closed my eyes for the last five miles. I wanted to see how close I could get to the goal, just from counting the pedal strokes, without watching the graphics.
I made it to within one-tenth of a mile. Which, over five miles, means I should be fairly proud of my counting skills, or fairly disturbed by the amount of time I’ve spent on that particular gear in Zwift, to know the math as I do.
Tomorrow, there will be no neon, no mountains, no pedal strokes. Tomorrow I have to try a run.
