Category: who said that

Just Resting

 “Catch the Wind” is a song written and recorded by British singer-songwriter Donovan, released as a single in the United Kingdom on March 12, 1965, through Pye Records. It reached No. 4 in the United Kingdom singles chart and No. 23 on the United States Billboard Hot 100. In 1965 I was refusing to accept any role in the slaughter of Americans and Vietnamese people. It was a time of fear, friends, and music. There was a struggle for sanity that followed me throughout my life and on some level, continues today, and it has taken its toll.

Years later, circa 1973, I was sitting in a bus station in St Petersburg, Florida, waiting for a ride that would take me back to Washington, D.C. Bus stations are curious places full of curious people, and I have spent more than my fair share of time in them. I had a long wait for my ride home, and I sat there listening to the public-address system announce departures for places in South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, New York, and all points north, south, east, and west. I watched as people broke into a full gallop to get to one loading area or another, all desperately trying to outrun time in a great hurry to get to the next place in their future or to escape the place they had just been. I was also anxious to be getting on with the getting on of it when this old gentleman in old clothes with an old beard and tired eyes sat down on a bench not far from me. For a long time we both sat in silence and listened to the speakers calling out the departing and arriving of steel and flesh when he looked over at me and said with a bit of a sigh and some bewilderment at the scene unfolding before us, “I’m not going anywhere myself. I’m just resting.”

People tell me that I have an issue with being in the moment. I always seem to be trying to outguess the past or fool the future. It’s a little like New England weather: We are either waiting for it to get better or expecting it to get worse. I used to wish the days away when the cold gray sky and bitter winds brought only early sunsets. But when the trees begin to blossom and the creeks and rivers begin to run free and the maple syrup flows, there is no place else I want to be.

In the last two months, I have literally brought myself to a screeching halt (maybe I should say screeching and screaming). I don’t stop easily. Then I realized that as Donovan sang, I can’t catch the wind, and in so many ways, despite my running, I am still sitting in that St. Petersburg bus station, but now, suddenly, I’m the old man not going anywhere. I’m just resting.

 

Hurt and Hope

Hi, it’s me, the bleeding heart, the angry young man growing old but no less angry, watching dreams disappear along with friends and lovers. It’s me, remembering places and people that seem as fresh in my mind as if they were standing before me today. Some left me only recently, some so many years ago that I have to squint through the fog of time to call them back. I have scars left by lovers and friends but maybe none cut as deep as the scars left by lost hope.

I think I know why we are given only a certain amount of years to walk the earth. It’s because the pain of living would drive us insane if we had to endure more than one short lifetime here. Someone asked me recently when the pain of personal loss, the death of a loved one, would get better, and I answered this way. I said sometimes you will drift on relatively calm waters, your emotions rising and falling with some predictable current, and then whoosh, a tidal wave of pain takes your body and slams it against a seabed of hurt. It knocks the breath out of you and tumbles you around until you don’t know which way to go or how to escape, and you’re sure you’re going to die. In fact, you almost welcome that possibility. But then slowly a small light breaks through the swirling tides and gradually the air returns to your body, and you learn how to float again.

Some people set themselves up for a different kind of hurt, and I am one of them. We are the ones who never learned to color inside the lines, never learned or even tried to fit inside the pigeonhole or the cubicle, and never learned the art of keeping our mouths shut when we see injustice, hunger, war, prejudice, bigotry, and hate in all its ugly forms. We were the radicals and the prisoners of the 1960s. We marched in Selma and sang at Woodstock. And please don’t call us liberals. I surpassed that label many years ago. In fact, I think I was born a radical headed straight for outrage.

We are the young and old who recently felt a movement taking place. We believed that one man had an idea that would ignite a flame of change. But the worst president this country will ever know (at least I hope there will be no one worse), and also the worst human being I have ever watched strut around a stage (if I dare use the term human being) was elected. Since then, as many of you know, I have tried to crawl into my virtual cave and create a monastery out of my small place by the sea. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked because there is a little voice of conscience inside my head that keeps screaming “You can’t let this morally bankrupt clown win and you have to keep fighting with every ounce of strength you can muster, even if it’s only with words on Facebook, in blogs, and face to face with those you meet.”

The idea of community has been suggested, and it is an idea I not only agree with but am very familiar with. It can work not only in the form of organizing but by providing the support we all need to survive the hurt of caring too much, and it will help keep us from losing hope again.

2016: Good-Bye and Good Riddance

 

The trivia question is, Why do we celebrate New Year’s on January 1st each year?

So here we are racing hell-bent for leather into another year. No matter which side of the political fence you are on, for most of us it was a nerve-racking election process. Over a month later it still has me babbling to myself and likely will for a long time to come. The scary thing is the campaign and election process was probably only taking our emotional inclinations up the roller coaster that will slowly reach the summit and teeter very quietly until it plunges us ass over teacups, screaming, to the bottom of some great unknown political and social abyss.

I took the last two weeks off from publishing new blogs. First I ran a story from a couple of years ago that many said they liked, and more said so this year, called “A Radio Christmas to Remember,” and then last week I reprised “Once There Was a Time.” Both are on this website, and both are true and wonderful memories for me, some of the many I can look back on in my life, both good and bad, that remind me life is worth living.

To put it in the most polite terms I can think of, the year 2016 really sucked when you weigh the really happy vs the not so happy/really bad. The list of well-known people who died in 2016 is staggering: Glenn Frey, David Bowie, Prince, Alan Thicke, Carrie Fisher, George Michael, Harper Lee, Alan Rickman, Nancy Reagan, Muhammad Ali, Sir George Martin, Leonard Cohen, and the list goes on and on. As always, I have a soundtrack playing in my head, and right now I’m listening to Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died.” I lost two very dear friends, Father Daniel Berrigan, the radical priest, and Larry Miller, radio personality. I also lost my sister, and my brother is now perched on the edge of the final answer.

John Lennon sang of UFOs over New York in his song “Nobody Told Me.” What would you think if I wrote a song, some of the lyrics which follow?  Maybe you would think I found some dynamite shrooms until you realized every word is true (and no, Dylan, you can’t have it. I’ve given you enough lyrics over the years).

There’s an orange man in the white house

And a black man on the street,

The Russians have my phone number

So please be discreet,

My neighbors can’t be trusted

And death lives in the wheat…

But as I said, even though this last year has been a great big double whammy, no fun at all, I can still look back on memories and people and places and be glad about them. They make me want to carry on. I hope no matter how difficult your year was you will find those things that say yeah, it was still worth it and I’m glad I’m here now, but good-bye and good riddance 2016.

In the podcast is the answer to the trivia question and some news and thoughts and rock and roll. I hope you’ll join me on the shores of Rambling Harbor.

A Radio Christmas Remembered

As keeper of the light, I maintain contact with others who dwell in the darkest part of day, the night people. I love night people. They walk on the other side of life, often by choice,

I suppose everyone gets nostalgic around holidays. I certainly do, and I’m not even a big participant in what has become holiday madness instead of holiday joy. I love the ads that tell me how much money I can save by spending twice as much as I would have spent.

New Year’s Day especially has always been a time of reflection, gladness, and regret for me. Even as a young person, I always had that special someone or moment to look back on. As we grow older those moments become greater in importance.

I have not done live radio since 2006, and sometimes I miss it. After all, how can you not miss something you yearned for from boyhood and once had. Then I talk to friends who confirm what I already know. Radio is not the radio of my day but a homogenized, programmed system of corporate brainwashing that keeps personalities under control. I am grateful I worked in radio when it really did mean something when underground FM radio broadcasting was fun and creative.

The story that follows I wrote two years ago, but it happened over 40 years ago. I am republishing it here because it is real, and it matters, and people tell me it is one of their favorite pieces. And it is one of my special memories of Christmas.

December, around the year of ’82, 1982, wind-blown snow, middle of the night (or morning. After all, what is 3 a.m.?). The snow, the kind that sneaks up on you, slowly drifts, quietly getting deeper. It moves across a large, deserted parking lot, transforming this lonely place. This deserted piece of asphalt is being molded into the Montana or Wyoming Prairie, a perfect backdrop as Merle Haggard asks the Big City to turn him loose. Though not that far from the city of Boston, it is easy to feel cut off from the rest of the world, watching this snow fashioning beauty from desolation. I will likely not see another human for at least three more hours. I am the keeper of the light from midnight to 6 a.m. I can still see most of my car, but whether or not I’ll be able to move it when the morning comes is doubtful, even if relief is able to get to me.

As keeper of the light, I maintain contact with others who dwell in the darkest part of day, the night people. I love night people. They walk on the other side of life, often by choice, and my way of reaching them is from a country radio station operating from the basement of a small strip mall in the middle of nowhere but reaching everywhere, an AM signal that sails across flat lands and water, especially at night, and I am the only show in town, the only one playing music on the AM dial in the middle of a lost time zone.

About once a week I get a call from a cross country trucker. As he enters Rhode Island and starts to pick up my signal he calls— “The California Kid is on the line”—and this time wishes me a Happy Holiday and as usual requests a few tunes to help him reach the state of Maine a few hours away. I am his traveling companion.

I also get calls from Alice. Alice drives all over the area maintaining ATM machines, and she calls once or twice a week as she makes her rounds. I never meet Alice as she is a little like the coyotes that patrol the prairie parking lot, preferring to remain elusive. I call her Dallas Alice, from the Little Feat tune “Willin’,” which goes out to her each time she calls.

On this snowy night, Alice calls to wish me a Merry Christmas and says to wait a few minutes then look outside the door.  We end the call, I queue up “Willin’,” and go up the few steps to the door. There waiting for me, already collecting snow, is a small prelit Christmas tree and a card that says, “Merry Christmas from Dallas Alice.” I see her footprints across the snow. She had parked near the entrance so she could easily get back on the main road.

I never met Alice, but she left footprints in my mind, and I never met the California Kid, but we road many a lonely highway together. A woman named Alice, Dallas Alice, and the lonely trucker, the California Kid, on a cold snowy night so many years ago, gave me a lifetime of Christmas smiles.

Rating: 1 out of 5.