8 thoughts on “SONG OF THE WEEK – JUMP IN THE LINE”

1. Bobg – tell us another story! What happened to the Green Onion?

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   • Hi Fran.

     Louis gave me a heads up that you had asked what happened to the Green Onion. Danged if I know. George and Mom broke up about 6 months later but we had the Steinway until ’62.

     Mom was pretty well known in Fort Collins because in those days she was all about guts, glory and love and was also a highly accomplished classical pianist who had a killer version of Clair de Lune under her hands. She used to play it in the bar along with other classical music pieces. When they broke up she was heartbroken and didn’t want to have anything to do with the scene in Fort Collins, so she and her best friend Nancy started going to a bar out near Severance to commiserate. There was a piano there, too.

     Mom rebounded from George into an unrequited pregnancy with Chuck, the owner of that bar, and 4 months later we were on our way to Florence, Oregon to avoid the stigma of an “illegitimate” pregnancy which should have been his but in those days was hers because that’s how women were treated then.

     Nancy went out there ahead of us and set it all up for us ahead of time. Mom owned and operated a Nursery School on Maple Street in Fort Collins, the Wooden Shoe Nursery, and she left it in the hands of her assistant who sent us checks once a month from the proceeds.

     I loved Florence. We lived on a lake for awhile and I rowed and fished there a lot. I also went from a straight-A’s teacher’s pet to a delinquent because my good friend John Stephenson proved to me delinquency was even more fun. I learned to climb fir trees all the way to the top, jump off, and slide down the outer branches on my back. I almost drowned when I fell through the hole in the dock next to the fish-gutting table on the Florence waterfront. Tons of fun, every day.

     I don’t think Mom liked Florence as much as I did. Two weeks after my sister was born we did a straight-through shot from Florence to Fort Collins in a ’56 Chevy at about 90 on the open stretches. Three months later and still in a post-partum depression she met a guy and married him three days later. He was the most evil and abusive bastard I’ve ever known. He broke her absolutely.

     Within three years all the guts and glory were gone and she was a shell of a human being, helped along by electro-shock “therapy” treatments at the Dewitt State Mental Hospital in Sacramento which he committed her to after a bit of her remaining guts and glory rose up and got in his face. When she returned home it was like she wasn’t in there anymore.

     My mother was a remarkable woman. When she started out she was intelligent, strong, independent, fearless. She was kind and loving. She just got hit with too much life too fast. She married her high school sweetheart at 19, and 6 years later he died in a car crash. She remarried, and he died two years later. She just went through too much shit too fast and it broke her. To the end of her days she still played the piano, was kind and loving, and had a quiet wisdom that only such a life experience can produce. In this moment I wonder now if her life was the model I unconsciously emulated in my own pursuit of wisdom. Now there’s a thought…

     Anyway – there’s another story for ya.

     If you want some more gory between-the-lines details about this story, you can find part of them here under the in-copy heading “Samsara” at:

     https://cascadianwanderer.wordpress.com/2019/01/15/a-biography-of-sorts/

     Take care, Fran. It’s always nice when somebody asks me for a story.

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2. Apropos of the quotes from T.S. Eliot and Diane Ackerman, I can share this about an insight into my Grandmother, my father’s mother. For many years I regarded her as a person with a nature counter to my own. I once wrote this about her:

   “My grandmother was created in the image of that class of finer people defined by her time; a fine-boned, high-strung, intelligent and intense woman keen on the ascendancy of her family to success by the means of her own unflagging administration. She was firm and practical. She manifested a strange mixture of love and devotion and artful sophistication and ruthless society in her experience, and imposed it equally upon all within her realm. She was a matriarch of convention and a champion of the better sorts of all kinds of things; education, the fine arts, music, the people one chooses to associate with.
   “She lived a large part of her life in a small farming community in northeastern Colorado among a population numbering less than a thousand souls. I wonder if she regretted at times the lack of better company. Yet she cleaved to her conventions and convictions with unfaltering constancy.
   “I knew she loved me, but her way was as foreign to me as if we had come from different worlds. Something deep within me rebelled against her forms. I could not understand her when she set about instructing me on how to succeed in her universe of conventional society. I was not part of that. I had come to a universe of sky and trees and grass green as fire, where I wheeled and danced and spun dizzily onward in untrammeled joy and celebration.”

   Sadly, this characterization of her prevailed in my mind for many years. Our individual natures seemed to me to be poised against one another, a conflict without resolution, and that perception took precedence in my attentions over the love I knew was there. Yet as time went on other bits and pieces of information about her were acquired and included in memory as well, with the result that here, in the present, love’s presence can be clearly seen in her now, and present in her there in the past as well.

   “Discussions” in my father’s home when he was a boy and young man about history and philosophy and art and literature were common as meals, and the “stealth educating” my Grandmother practiced on her children produced uncommon results, as you know in part.

   My mother and father were born in 1929. On her sixteenth birthday my father gave my mother a copy of “Elbert Hubbard’s Scrapbook.” On her seventeenth birthday he gave her a copy of “The Importance of Living” by Lin Yutang. Upon his death in 1955, my father’s obituary noted his love of life and his devotion to his family, which was well known in the community. My grandmother raised this son, my father, and I acknowledge that fact now with gratitude.

   The development of a consciousness of love does really involve both attachment and detachment, as Eliot observes. And as Diane Ackerman says, “One never steps into the same stream of consciousness twice.” The attachments we form are the roots of the detachments we accomplish, and consciousness grows with every step on the path.

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3. This one woke up some memories. The human brain is a wonder, isn’t it? It holds experience in deep storage and then, with just the slightest encounter with a word or song or image, it produces a complex collage of related, acquired, on-board information. I sometimes wonder, at my age, if these instances of sudden, broad-spectrum recollection are the final occurrence of my history in consciousness. So far as I know, memory still serves, but then that’s not saying much. I can recall what I can recall, but I have no way of knowing what I used to be able to recall and have forgotten – because I’ve forgotten it.

   I do recall “Sonora,” and the memory has dragged up with it quite a chain of memories. In 1957 (when I was 8, turning 9 in December) I had my very own stereo, a huge multi-component tube system involving an amplifier and a receiver (with their housings removed and, as a result, a glowing, fascinating invitation to electrocution), a turntable, and four speakers which were the size of small refrigerators. Really.

   I also had one of the first TV-radio combo units, very spendy, the screen about nine inches square, which I got for my birthday and had for just awhile until one of the adults in my life confiscated it from me, hooked it up to an inverter and put it in a DeSoto.

   It happened this way. Late one night I got caught jumping up and down on my bed with a guitar, playing Elvis Presley at about 150 decibels, the curtains on my bedroom window shuddering in the bass line, long after bedtime. I thought my mom and stepfather were out in the studio in the garage where they had matching Hammond Electric organs – the ones with four or five keyboards and more switches than an ICBM control panel – and would play duets until the early hours of the morning. I miscalculated.

   They didn’t take the component system because it was a hand-me-down and they didn’t want it back, but the TV-radio in its gleaming little white-plastic box was a novelty, and they coveted it. Memory informs me that a couple of nights before I had defiantly sat at the dining table for an hour or so past my bedtime plus a couple of hours after the evening meal rather than eat a miserable pile of canned spinach that someone had decided was good for me.

   I won the battle, spitting a bitter, army-green cud into a napkin when nobody was looking and sneaking it into the wastebasket. When they returned to check on me I gave the impression they had won, but my recalcitrance had earned some bad feelings and my memory says this was also part of the reason the TV-radio was taken. It was a way of getting even. Karma. Balance. Whatever.

   How I came to have the stereo in the first place is another story, but I can’t begin to cover all that here. Later, after many long months of collecting and assembling and being on the debris-receiving end of an existential carnage dump involving death and inheritance, I had about twenty speakers lined up behind about thirty exotic wool blankets hung from plumbing, water, and gas pipes in my own basement studio, where I would listen to “Papa Loves Mambo” and boogie like a Mambo king. The blankets were dyed in dark hues of rust and purple and deep burnt-orange, and had lions and tigers and water buffaloes, and Vishnu and Shiva and Buddha, and other wildlife emblazoned on them. I had a million candles lit down there and no fire extinguisher, too.

   This was 1958, the year I turned ten. I am still surprised at how old I had become at that age. It was an era which involved, among other things, black berets and free verse and coffee houses when Starbucks was just a gleam in some beatnik’s eyes. I hung out there, too. And also in a prairie tavern ten miles outside town at a crossroads where I had free pinball privileges and all the Tom Collins and ginger ale I could drink.

   There was no TV in my basement studio, ever. The one we had, a great 25-inch black and white chunk of RCA console, was upstairs in the living room. That year on December 28th, just a couple of weeks after I turned ten, I watched Johhny U. beat the Giants in the greatest professional football championship game ever played with my mother and the house jazz quartet from a local dive called “The Green Onion.” There was lots of beer and burgers and beans and chips and smoky haze and farting, and it was all pretty great except for the farting. At halftime the drummer picked out some notes on our piano I had written on staff paper, and my first original composition turned out to be unplayable nonsense. I never attempted composition again.

   TV had some great moments in those days. One of the things I remember seeing as it happened was Don Larsen’s no-hitter against the Dodgers in the ’56 World Series. I was rooting for Brooklyn, so I had mixed feelings about it when it was over. I knew I’d just witnessed rare history, but a lot of rare history seemed to be commonplace in my life in those days. In the space of two weeks I had caught not one but two foul balls at Denver Bears baseball games. What are the odds of that? In my life, for awhile back then, rare history was quite commonplace.

   That was also the era when George, the cigar-smoking jazz saxophonist and owner of The Green Onion, bet my mother she couldn’t eat an entire bowl of habanera chili. He put up his bar, she put up her Steinway Concert Grand. She won. But she let him off the hook. I thought it was a bad move. I figured I was ready to have a jazz dive of my own by then. I wished she’d kept it.

   1958-59 was also the era when I had the old tube stereo – the ’57 curtain-shiverer – stacked up at the head end of my bed. I mounted a couple of the old hand-held bakelite headphones onto some bent hanger wire, wired an earphone switch into the system, and every night fell asleep listening to rock and roll from all over the world. Radio KIMN in Denver and XELO the Tijuana border blaster, among others. Anybody remember Pogo Pogue, Wolfman Jack, or Cousin Billie? I loved them all…

   That was also the era when, as usual, I fell asleep to rock and roll blaring in my homemade earphones and woke up on the day the music died, February 3, 1959. All day long I followed the incoming reports of the plane crash which took the lives of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and J. P. Richardson, the Big Bopper.

   By then I had about two hundred LP’s –the old 78 RPM’s – and a decent collection of 33’s, but the 45’s were catching up. My brother called me “Robert the Mad Professor” because I also had glass-blowing equipment hooked up to the gas line down there, and a chemistry set capable of making gunpowder – sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate – the last ingredient also capable of turning the palms of both hands a deep umber-black and which took most of a summer of hard farm work to wear off. A few years later John Howard Griffin would use it to darken his skin as he researched his classic book “Black Like Me.”

   Anyway… I remember boogie-bopping my brains out in my crazy little basement den to a funky 78 version of this song – the line “dance Sonora, dance” woke up the memory. Attached to it was a memory of what had to be an also very funky 30’s or 40’s version of “I wish I could Shimmy like My Sister Kate.” Along with a bunch of other old great tunes which were great to dance to…

   Now, after all these years, I’m thinking that one of the great secrets to a happy life is to find someone who can dance like you do, especially to the sexy stuff, and then hold on to them forever. It worked for me, anyway. Finally. But we won’t go into that here, either.

   My memories have more connections than long-chain polymers. Thanks for this one, Louis.

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   • Wow, when your memories wake up, they are ready for a full day’s work, aren’t they? I can’t add much to your memories, but you have inspired a couple of thoughts on my part.

     First is Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series. I was a Yankees fan that year. The Dodgers had won the Series the previous year, and I thought it was the Yankees’ turn. I was also a Mickey Mantle fan and happy that he had just won the Triple Crown. I remember that Mantle hit a home run in that game, and he made an amazing catch in center field to save what should have been a base hit. Those feats were all Larsen needed to go with his great pitching. However, I also recall that the game was on a Monday and I had to be in school away from any television set. Some of us did listen on the radio at lunch and recess. I am wondering how you were able to watch the game on TV.

     Another radio station I would listen to at night was KOMA in Oklahoma City. They had a DJ on at night named J. Michael Wilson, who was really entertaining with an imaginary sidekick named “Randy Rodent.” Randy was actually, Wilson, of course, with his voice sped up like the Chipmunks. He would have conversations with Randy between records, and that took some planning because he obviously had to record Randy’s part before he began the dialog. Later, J. Michael Wilson worked for a Denver rock and roll station for awhile.

     And yes, I do remember Pogo Poge and Wolfman Jack and Cousin Billie, as well a others like Jay Mack, Hal Moore, etc. Radio was more interesting back in the old days.

     Thanks for sharing the memories.

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     • KOMA! Yes! Another great radio station.

       I watched Don Larsen’s game in Westminster, Colorado during a visit to my grandparents, who had moved there after my father’s death in 1955. I lived in Fort Collins then, and would take the bus down to see them several times a year. Those visits were always for about a week at a time and school went happily by the wayside.

       My Grandmother was a teacher and artist and during those visits she tried to make up for me missing school. Among other things she taught me some Russian phrases, and Japanese ink brush technique, and I remember we watched Edward R. Murrow interview Fidel Castro in 1959 together, with a discussion afterward. “Discussions” were common during those visits, and in retrospect I think I got some serious stealth-educating when I was there.

       In ’56 they had just relocated from our hometown and lived in their temporary residence, an apartment. They had a neighbor who had a TV – not a common thing in those days – and he invited me to watch the game. It really was a time when “rare history” was commonplace for me, and serendipity was my best friend.

       Also – memory informs me, with a bit of a lag but catching up nevertheless, that sugar also somehow worked into the gunpowder formula, and it was not potassium nitrate which turned the palms of my hands and John Howard Griffin black, it was silver nitrate. Each nitrate produced its own consequences. They were held as one memory, filed under “Things with Consequences.” I am thinking about sorting this file out, it seems to have everything in it.

       Further cross-checking sometime between midnight and 3:00 am last night produced the information that there was more than one chemical filed under that category. I was informed immediately, of course, and awakened without pity, as usual. I suppose just in case I might be considering repeating some of those old experiments.

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       • “There are three conditions which often look alike
         Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
         Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
         From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
         Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
         ……
         This is the use of memory:
         For liberation – not less of love but expanding
         Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
         From the future as well as the past.”

         T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” III, “The Four Quartets”

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         • Indeed. Love, not indifference, is always found in the present – if we look for it.

           “We tend to think of memories as monuments we once forged and may find intact beneath the weedy growth of years. But, in a real sense, memories are tied to and describe the present. Formed in an idiosyncratic way when they happened, they’re also true to the moment of recall, including how you feel, all you’ve experienced, and new values, passions, and vulnerability. One never steps into the same stream of consciousness twice.”
           Diane Ackerman