Notes in the key of C

Some times certain songs are like time machines that take you back to a specific moment in your life, don’t you think?
“Dream Weaver” by Gary Wright. I was living in the Bay area back then and it was a warm summer day at the Oakland Coliseum. “Day on the Green” it was called and for this particular concert, taking the stage would be Jeff Beck, Peter Frampton, Gary Wright, and Fleetwood Mac. Twelve dollars per ticket and the parking lot began filling up at least a day before the concert. By the time the gates opened, the lot was trashed and people were already being carried off on stretchers. Seventy to seventy five thousand music lovers, drunk, stoned, high on something and even a few sober ones crowded into the coliseum for a full day of good music.
Another “Day on the Green” featured Vixen, Atlanta Rythym Section, Journey, the Steve Miller Band and as if THAT wasn’t enough, the featured band was “the EAGLES”. No cops, no hassles, good weed and great music. Live for the day and party ’till you couldn’t see straight.
“California Girls” , the song by the Beach Boys takes me back to the summer of ‘65, and the brown-eyed girl, from Appletree Lane in Mountain View, California, who was down on vacation with mom, sister and brother. Emotions I had never known before took over me and I was a kid captured by something I didn’t quite understand. Love? Infatuation? Lust? It was probably a combination of all of them. The simple things such as holding hands, walks on the beach at sunset, stolen kisses under the bridge. We were young and innocent and we cherished every moment together. After all, that summer would not last for ever. But I suppose, in a way it really does, suspended in my memory and returning to me in the words of an old song.

Buster came to live with us about six years ago, not long after our grandbaby came into this world. His “mama” was going to have her hands full with the new baby so we adopted this little Shih-Tzu.
With his last birthday, B-boy is about ninety eight dog years old so he’s been showing signs that a senior citizen dog acquires in the twilight years of his life. His vision’s impaired on one side and he can’t quite jump up onto the bed like he used to. So, he whines.
Now, a dog’s whine can mean a multitude of different things depending on the circumstance. If it’s about dark-thirty in the morning, and you’re snatched right out of lala land by his insistent whining, it could either mean, “Put me up on the bed!” or “Let me out before I raise my leg on the corner of the living room couch.” If he sees that we’re getting ready to leave the house, his whining and running in little circles between us setting the alarm and the front door means “Pleeeease take me with you, even though it’s ninety eight degrees out there and you’ll probably come back to find me unconscious if you leave me in the car for even five minutes!” If he’s outside at the back door whining, it must mean “Let me in because five minutes from now, I’ll be asking to go out into the FRONT YARD!”

At his age, his hearing is not as good as it used to be. It’s deteriorated to a point somewhere between perfect hearing to stone cold deaf. I like to call it “selective hearing”. He can’t seem to hear me yelling at him from right next to the couch when I hear him underneath, scratching and tearing at the upholstery. But he can be sound asleep, anywhere in the house and if your keys get picked up, he appears like a bolt of lightning, whining, wagging, spinning, and ready to go. I say, “Check your bowl!” just ONCE, and he makes a mad dash toward the kitchen to see what’s in his food bowl. But just let him wander off across the street and close as the next door neighbor’s yard and his hearing shuts down automatically. Cursing, yelling and threats of bodily harm if he doesn’t come back, fall on deaf ears.
I guess we’ll keep him. But he just has to do SOMETHING about that snoring and wheezing while he sleeps.

The one thing that’s as hard to find as a one-legged chicken in this part of the country is a Filipino farmer. But I found one at the local weekend market on Cherry Street. Her accent was unmistakable and among the vegetable selections being offered for sale wasssss……..the dreaded padia. Okay, the spelling might not be correct but bitter melon is still bitter melon, no matter how you spell it. And I’ll tell you, of the many different vegetables that appeared in cooked dishes on our dinner table, way back when, few others were more hated than the bitter melon. None of us kids liked it and dad could never understand why. It was almost like we were being punished for something and you couldn’t just pick it off your plate because everything else had that nasty bitter taste. “Just eat it!”, was what he’d say to us and we’d have to choke it down somehow. The sight of that bitter melon, green and knarly-looking, brought back the memories.
Of course, there were other foods that we ate that some may consider as being pretty gross but “hey!” cooked the right way, with the right spices………..Ymmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!!!
We used to cook with parts of a pig, for instance that would never be listed on the menu of YOUR local diner. I mean pig’s blood, intestines, ears, nose. Ok! Don’t tell me YOU’VE never had pickled pig’s feet! How about tripe (the cow’s stomach lining)? Or tongue ( the Mexicans call it lengua and make tacos and other dishes with it.
Dad used to slice raw liver and pickle it with vinegar, tomatoes and hot peppers? Ohhhh…yeah! How about raw octopus?
Heard enough? Well, “Miss local Filipina farmer” tells me she enjoys eating that bitter melon raw. Raw!!!!! How sick is that?
Give me my sliced raw fish and my bowl of soy sauce and wasabi and you can have the rest of that stuff. And don’t forget the rice.

Yesterday, I killed several times, willfully endangered the lives of at least four other living things, all out in plain sight and no one stepped in and tried to stop me. I’ve killed that way before and I’ll do it again and again.
If you can imagine yourself being impaled on a razor sharp hook and while you’re twisting and writhing in sheer agony, then being unceremoniously tossed out into deep water, with no swimming lessons or limbs, or fins with which you might be able to tread water, sinking slowly to the bottom . It becomes a tossup as far as what will probably happen next….eventual drowning or getting gobbled up or ripped to pieces by a hungry, predatory fish. Such is the life of a Canadian nightcrawler. Spend most of it, slithering around in dirt, eating crap and realize that the end of the line for you is actually at the end of fishing line, on a sharp hook.
How about this? You’re cruising around, riding the currents, and after awhile all this swimming is giving you an appetite. You start looking around and keeping an eye out for something good to munch on. Then, all of sudden, there it is up ahead, a big, fat, juicy worm, bobbing around near the bottom. And you think to yourself, “Hmmmmm! Been quite awhile since I had one of those!” So you ease up on it and take a few spins around it because something just doesn’t seem quite right. But, finally your hunger gets the best of your good judgement and you GO FOR IT! CHOMP! And before you can say, “Yummy!” , there’s a hard jerk and excruciating pain in your upper pallet. Fight’s on! You’re trying to swim away but some invisibile force is pulling you in the opposite direction. How quickly you forget how tasty that first bite was. Eyes located on opposite sides of your head don’t help either because you can’t really see what’s causing so much pain as you are being dragged against the current and toward impending doom. If it’s your lucky day, you’ll be too small to take home and you’ll get tossed back into the water. “Whew!! That was close!!” But if you end up in a the live well of a boat or on the end of a stringer, you know what comes next. Filet knife, cornbread jacket and really, really hot oil.
Aaaaaaaaah……fishing. Relaxation and excitement all rolled into one package. It’s been referred to as “a jerk on one end waiting on a jerk from the other end”. Put the bait on the hook, cast it out into the water and wait…..and wait…..and wait. An occasional look at the tip of your pole to see if you’re getting a nibble and perhaps a look over at the guys fishing next to you. They’re doing the same thing….waiting.
Stare out across the water and wait. Find a shady spot and wait. Re-arrange your tackle box and wait. If you’re patient enough (and you have to be) thirty minutes, an hour or more can pass and then “WHAM”, the tip of your fishing pole suddenly dives down toward the water. You jump up, your heart racing and you snatch your pole and jerk back on it to set the hook. All this waiting was finally paying off. It’s a big one for sure. Set the drag, let it have some line and reel in slowly so it won’t get away. The water’s kinda murky so you really can’t see what you’ve caught. It’s probably a HUGE striper or channel catfish. Visions of fresh fillets start dancing in your head. It’s getting closer. Eeeasy nowww. Oh, the stories that will be told over and over again about the big fight and how you finally landed this trophy-sized fish. Fish fry,.. here I come. Invite some friends over. There’ll be plenty to go around. Almost there and you look over to make sure that fillet knife is still in the top of the tackle box. The last few feet seem to take the longest and as you feel it coming to the surface, the anticipation is unbearable.
You pull back on the pole one last time and as your catch breaks the top of the water, your heart sinks….DAMN! A big piece of driftwood riding the current caught your hook. All the air leaks out of your high hopes and everyone else goes back to what they were doing before you caught “the BIG one”. You reel it up, take it off the hook, impale another helpless, writhing worm on that sharp hook, toss your line back out, and….wait.

Pictures alone will tell the tale of the destruction that Hurricane Katrina left behind as it ripped through the Gulf Coast and plowed down the “Big EZ”. As if all that was not enough to deal with, the chaos caused by devastation and flooding far beyond expectations, ignorance to existing laws, that don’t get put “on hold” during a crisis, and obvious stupidity rears it’s ugly head on the six o’clock news. People carrying TV’s , stereos, stolen from closed stores.
Trucks loaded with stolen whatever’s, a guy walking out of a store with a armload of fishing poles, people just helping themselves as if it were freebie day at the local department store. Another person, shown on camera, holds up and brags about the different pairs of shoes he was stealing. Bold stupidity! Not desperation.
What is it that “snaps” in peoples’ minds during times such as these that robs them of common sense and respect for the law?
You ” choose” to live in an area that’s below sea level, refuse to evacuate when you’re asked to do so for your own safety, steal and commit other acts of violence against each other when you are given shelter from the storm and whine that you’re not getting help fast enough? So, you starting pointing fingers…….and you blame GEORGE.