time

 

time was – when it hardly moved – time that is

 

n    think back to when you were 15 …

 

couldn’t drive a car – didn’t have one…

 

and – way -- too grown up for bikes or scooters…

 

jump forward a few short months

 

now 16 - you’re driving, dreaming and living

 

‘People Just Got To Be Free’

 

1968 seen 20 on the age dial

 

“the ink is black”

 

remember the opening of “Hang on Sloopy?”

 

the drums ….

 

Sloopy lives in a very bad part of town….

 

me in the back seat - 15 years old

 

two girls and me - all three of us

 

too shy to do anything but make jokes 

 

hitching a ride to the city

 

going to the state fair

 

listening to

 

“Hang on Sloopy”

 

just yesterday I say

 

sloopy let your hair down

 

let it hang down on me

 

just who was sloopy?

 

yardbirds just hanging around the yard

 

but it’s too late to say you’re sorry

 

Zombies….

 

The “M and B Club” – was “the place” to go in my day and when you were there you were “there” – though I never knew what M or B meant – I do remember the music, the beer and the girls …

 

‘she’s not there’ you know

 

how about the opening of …

 

“Don’t Worry Baby” …. Shit --- that song takes me back

 

Well it’s been building up inside me for oh - I don’t know how long….

 

I don't know why but I keep thinking

 

something will go wrong

 

Don’t Worry Baby – everything will turn out alright

 

I guess I should of kept my mouth shut…

 

I remember the light on my 8-track stereo was ‘purple’ and Don’t Worry Baby is playing and I’m proud of the 8-track cause I don’t need any cardboard inserted in the top or bottom for it to play…. Gee…. Don’t worry baby

 

Back in the day we had - JFK, John Glenn, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Elvis, Roger Maris, Jim Brown….

 

Who does this generation have ? ==== Obama – weak kneed, skinny black guy who can’t bowl and gags on a beer and a woman who throws back whiskey shots with the men -- or steroid junkies - like Roger Clemons and Barry (Pillsbury Doughboy) Bonds.

 

Groovin…. On a Sunday afternoon….

 

..and we did

 

groovin down a crowded avenue…

 

wouldn’t you love to flip the pages backward and lose the computers, cell phones, fax machines, robotic voice mail, etc. etc.??  wouldn’t you?

 

….go back to the gasoline pump – where the gas was 50 cents a gallon and someone ‘pumped’ it for you and give you a glass for stopping by….

 

You baby … nobody but you…

 

turtles…

 

candy is sweet but it just can’t compete with you … baby…

 

a little ray of sunshine

 a little bit of soul

just a touch of magic

 

What a day for a daydream

 

What a day for a daydreaming boy

 

Now I’m lost in a daydream

 

Yo… just me a dreaming about days gone by and even though time isn’t on my side - it’s time to have a sweet dream…

 

So… the year is 2008 ….  Whatever happen to those years between 1960 and 2008?  All 48 of them? 

 

Where did they go?

 

Hmm… must of went somewhere with Scratch’s Mojo.

 

So…

 

If I find Scratch’s Mojo (for him)

 

Then … I find the 48 years between 1960 and now, yes?

 

This Diamond Ring….

 

Brown Eye Girl…. One of the best openings of any song

 

Hey where did we go days when the rain came

 

Down in the hollow playing a new game

 

Laughing and running

 

Skipping and jumping

 

In the misty morning

 

My brown eye girl

 

Van Morrison talks about a ‘transistor radio’….

 

Give me a “Victory Party” after the football game, a beer, and Sherry showing up – looking for me…

 

Screw 2008 – give me 68 or 69 or 70 or ..….

 

BY PAT BUCHANAN

How would he pull it off? I wondered.

How would Barack explain to his press groupies why he sat silent in a pew for 20 years as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright delivered racist rants against white America for our maligning of Fidel and Gadhafi, and inventing AIDS to infect and kill black people?

How would he justify not walking out as Wright spewed his venom about "the U.S. of K.K.K. America," and howled, "God damn America!"

My hunch was right. Barack would turn the tables.

Yes, Barack agreed, Wright's statements were "controversial," and "divisive," and "racially charged," reflecting a "distorted view of America."

But we must understand the man in full and the black experience out of which the Rev. Wright came: 350 years of slavery and segregation.

Barack then listed black grievances and informed us what white America must do to close the racial divide and heal the country.

The "white community," said Barack, must start "acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination — and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past — are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds ... ."

And what deeds must we perform to heal ourselves and our country?
The "white community" must invest more money in black schools and communities, enforce civil rights laws, ensure fairness in the criminal justice system and provide this generation of blacks with "ladders of opportunity" that were "unavailable" to Barack's and the Rev. Wright's generations.

What is wrong with Barack's prognosis and Barack's cure?

Only this. It is the same old con, the same old shakedown that black hustlers have been running since the Kerner Commission blamed the riots in Harlem, Watts, Newark, Detroit and a hundred other cities on, as Nixon put it, "everybody but the rioters themselves."

Was "white racism" really responsible for those black men looting auto dealerships and liquor stories, and burning down their own communities, as Otto Kerner said — that liberal icon until the feds put him away for bribery.

Barack says we need to have a conversation about race in America.
Fair enough. But this time, it has to be a two-way conversation. White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to.
This time, the Silent Majority needs to have its convictions, grievances and demands heard. And among them are these:

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known. Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.

Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the '60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream.

Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks — with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas — to advance black applicants over white applicants.
Churches, foundations, civic groups, schools and individuals all over America have donated time and money to support soup kitchens, adult education, day care, retirement and nursing homes for blacks.
We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?

Barack talks about new "ladders of opportunity" for blacks.
Let him go to Altoona and Johnstown, and ask the white kids in Catholic schools how many were visited lately by Ivy League recruiters handing out scholarships for "deserving" white kids.

Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America? Is it really white America's fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?

Is that the fault of white America or, first and foremost, a failure of the black community itself?

As for racism, its ugliest manifestation is in interracial crime, and especially interracial crimes of violence. Is Barack Obama aware that while white criminals choose black victims 3 percent of the time, black criminals choose white victims 45 percent of the time?
Is Barack aware that black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse?

We have all heard ad nauseam from the Rev. Al about Tawana Brawley, the Duke rape case and Jena. And all turned out to be hoaxes. But about the epidemic of black assaults on whites that are real, we hear nothing.

Sorry, Barack, some of us have heard it all before, about 40 years and 40 trillion tax dollars ago.

Saturday morning – my trip to Little Rock ended earlier than expected when we were released from our training on Thursday afternoon.  Taking advantage of this ‘early release’ program I immediately set a course for Oklahoma, and arrived home around 7 p.m. that evening. 

 

Anticipating my Friday ‘off,’ I relaxed with the Pupster and her sister, (Thursday evening) watching ‘No Country for Old Men,’ a pretty good movie that we (the Pupster and I) had already seen at the theater. It was interesting for Puppy and me to watch it again, and spot some things we’d missed the first time.

 

The next morning I went about catching up on things and was enjoying my ‘Friday off,’ until late that afternoon I discovered that “Buster,” our original schnauzer, (the dog that our business – Bustersbabies - had been named after) … had died in the backyard. 

 

Buster had been sick for a couple of months; the vet had told us that he had ‘hook worms.’  When I questioned him about why Buster had them but neither of the other dogs did he’d told me that older dogs were far more susceptible to disease, especially hook worms.  He (the vet) felt like Buster could recover from this, but what was unsaid, although implied, was that he might not.  We don’t know exactly how old Buster was; at the time we got him – our vet – estimated his age at 3-4 and we had him for seven years, which would make him around 10 or 11.  Since schnauzers have a normal lifespan of 14 years, one could say Buster might have been short-changed in length, although Pupster and me can attest that he wasn’t (short-changed) in quality of life.  He had a terrific life here with us, and as Number 1 Schnauzer of “Bustersbabies,” he produced offspring that will populate this part of the world for many years to come.

 

We buried Buster in our backyard, and we will never forget the little white dog that came into our lives at about the same time we’d came into each other’s lives.

 

 He will be missed.

Ice will be on one of his famous out of town business trips all this week so my participation in blogging may be diminished somewhat.  Meanwhile, yall have a good week and I'll leave you with a partial rambling disertion that has come to light with a new discovery in the former Northwest Territory just last month.

 

ice

 

Almost midnight and still snowing I think to myself, as I peer out the small bay window next to the desk.  It’s late for me to be up, but I wanted to watch the snow and it's gentle fall, and although the fire in the hearth is dying, its warmth feels good to me.  I can faintly hear familiar music coming from the other study, which is adjacent to the one I’m in.  Probably Elvis, which is a favorite of my granddaughter, Lucy, who doubles as my official guardian.  She’s also up, hardly ever going to bed till early morning, and without doubt still ‘blogging,' using Blogstreamer a fourth generation version of Blogstream, the ancient blogging tool I utilized back around the turn of the century. 

 

Watching the snow, and listening to the music, my mind drifts easily back in time, to 1971, over seventy years ago.  It’s June and I’ve been out of Nam, and the Army for less than a year; just bumming around the country has brought me to Corpus, mainly because the nights are warm this time of the year, which is especially nice if you’re sleeping outside most nights as I am.

 

During the course of my bumming around  – money has not been plentiful, thus I’ve had to become accomplished at the many ways to raise money, one of which is selling blood, mine.  There was always some agency offering to buy blood, you just had to find it.  Which is what I was looking for that day when I came across an ad of another sort.  At first glance it was my intention to not answer its summons; as it was worded in a peculiar fashion, and seemed surreal, plus it was offering a substantial sum of money, which notched it up a little on my suspicion meter.  

 

I did, however, answer the ad that day, and even though I was near broke at the time, I’ve always told myself that it wasn’t the money that made me make the call; whatever the reason, the fact was - I needed money, and it was offering some. The ad was seeking people with an exceptional memory to participate in a study being run by some group somewhere.  For some reason, I’d always had the ability to recall huge blocks of my past life, without effort, quoting conversations, verbatim, that I’d had with my parents, other relatives and friends, months in the past, even years.  I remember the look of astonishment that Dr. White, our family Doctor, had given me one morning, when I’d repeated to him word for word - a conversation we’d had five years earlier, when I’d first been brought to him as an 8 year old.  It was at this juncture of my life that I began to keep this unique ability from the adult world, for within a few days, I had the Doc and some of his other Doctor type friends, all over me and my parents, to ‘bring me in for some kind of special check-up.’

 

I never had that ‘special check-up,’ keeping my talent pretty much undercover after that, even while in High School, and later while in the Army.  For a short time after getting out of the Army, I’d tried to use it to my advantage, my financial advantage especially, but could never get anywhere with it.  Seems that nobody was much impressed with it, and since it couldn’t help me, it just remained a curious by-product of myself that was only mildly interesting to anyone.  That is until I saw the ad in the Corpus newspaper.  Oddly enough, right around that time – we’d been hearing street rumors that the government was looking into mind-expanding drugs, there was even hints that they were experimenting with soldiers and LSD. 

 

So, it was under these circumstances that I read the ad and instantly discounted it.  However, the lure of easy money quickly overcame my uneasy feelings, and  misgivings aside, I made the call.  I remember thinking as I dialed the number, about a saying I’d heard sometime before, about not being able to ‘un-ring the bell once it’s been rung,’ which seemed to be an odd thing to be thinking about at the time, although today as I write this, I can see it was just a harbinger of things to come. 

 

 

it was just a short jag

out of my way

thinking I’d stay & see

how she done it

on her side of the world

 

it’ll be nice to see you

but just know

I don’t do long-distance

relationships

 

come on down you said

bring that old caddy

I’ll cook a roast

& we’ll get around for awhile

 

I drove for hours

wondering where you were

lost as I was

without you

 

Seven years ago…

 

gone as quick

as a memory

on a long ago summer night

just a short jag

out of my way

 

love you now and forever

 

ice