At Your Bacon Call

It wasn’t a night that would stand out in most people’s minds when they looked back on their lives.  It might not have been enough to be a highlight of the week.  There wasn’t a big storm, there wasn’t a major news story, no member of the family had been empowered or imperiled. 

It was a normal weeknight evening when Kathy and I greeted our daughter, Lucy, who’d arrived after dinnertime to take a few things from her high school bedroom to her post-college house.  It was only going to be a few minutes of course, but when talk about the new job and updates on the old gossip stoked the conversational flames, it was quickly nine o’clock.  It’s the time of the evening when I typically begin snacking and the monkey on my back was craving bananas.

I asked my daughter, “Are you feeling peckish?”

Lucy replied in kind, in old movie fashion, “I could eat.”

My son was due to quit his work shift thirty minutes later as Lucy shouted, “Somebody better text Dan.”  Kathy quickly grabbed her cell phone and pounded a staccato beat on her keyboard before pulling another dusty box out of Lucy’s closet. 

It was fifty cents worth of eggs, maybe a buck-and-a-half in bacon.  Biscuits in a tube brought the total to three bucks tops.  If you want to factor in the cheese slices and the margarine, hell let’s make it five bucks.  I probably dropped something that the dog ate and I chose to forget it.

Anyway, what I’m saying is, it was just intended as a late night snack.  Seconds of preparation had gone into the menu plan, so it was surprising to me when the back door flew open with splintering force and my son walked in.  Dan, who never met a curfew he did NOT like, a fellow who often bridged directly from the time clock to the buddy’s apartment, was home for a mid-evening visit.  “Mom texted me there was hot breakfast cooking,” he volunteered, an explanation that was sorely needed at the time. 

I had it on the dining room table five minutes later and five minutes after that, you would’ve needed a C.S.I. team to find evidence of it.  We ate too much and we stayed up too late, but I don’t think any of us regretted it.  I felt a peculiar pride in having produced the humble supper that stuck with me into the next day.  I was at my place of employment, changing out of my loafers into my work shoes…

Shoes… 

Shoes equal love…

My mother always had a special bond with her father because of shoes.  As a small child with a rheumatic heart, five year-old Carolyn Johnston wasn’t allowed out of bed.  Most people would have just shook their head sadly when they heard the sickly child wish for an accessory she couldn’t use, but my grandfather didn’t.  He bought his baby girl a pair of shoes.  He bought them with money he didn’t have for a child that couldn’t use them…yet.  My mother, to this day, has a fantastic set of shoes.  It’s not at the Imelda Marcos level, but it should be respected.  There isn’t a member of my family that hasn’t been shoe shopping with her.  You knew she might buy herself a pair, but you knew for sure she was buying you a pair.  Maybe two.

And where shoes equal love for some, it seemed breakfast was my Valentine’s card.  When I was courting Kathy, I would come by on Saturday mornings after an all-night shift, with two Hardee’s fast-food platters.  That obviously worked.  A few years later, I was married to that girl, though still working midnights.  We were, at the latter point, eating cinnamon rolls in our own house with our first-born, watching “The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh”.  When Dan came along, Kathy had attempted chocolate chip pancakes.  By the time he was three, she had mastered them.  There was more than one sleepover that wound up at our house because of a promised flapjack feast.

They didn’t know at the time that we often substituted breakfast food for the usual dinner fare because many of the morning staples were cheaper than the steaks, chops and chicken we might have preferred.  I could make an omelet that looked like it jumped off of a Denny’s menu.  What I couldn’t do was stretch the grocery budget any further.  They didn’t know it then and they don’t care now.

Now breakfast equals love.

Dan graduated from community college this weekend, opting to have the family gathering at The Bomber, a historic diner in downtown Ypsilanti, for the post-ceremony meal.  There were eight of us, unanimously choosing breakfast for our mid-day sustenance.  My rapidly growing boy showed me his scuffed dress shoes and asked if I thought they had any life left in them.

“Better talk to Grandma,” I advised.

Yeah, I know, a pair of shoes lasts a lot longer than a plateful of hash browns.  But you can’t make an omelet out of a penny loafer, either.

Singing Merle Back Home

When I moved into my first college apartment at the tender age of eighteen, neither I, nor my roommates owned any sort of sound system.  We had a transistor radio with a broken antenna to pull in Tiger games from the voice of the Midwest (WJR in Detroit) and a cassette player.  Not a boom box, mind you, with real speakers and perhaps a tweeter or something.  A cassette player, with one tiny, tinny speaker.  You had to flip the cassette to hear side two.  Jim was the guy that was as broke as I was, staying home while our other roommates pursued theatre interests and sorority girls.  I don’t know how many times we flipped that solitary cassette, but I would bet I could still sing every song it played.  I bet Jim could, too.

The other two roommates had decamped within a matter of months, both claiming that they just couldn’t live with people who insisted on them paying their fair share of the bills.  What had been an austerity budget before became a sustenance budget, spending only what we had to to stay alive while shouldering our share of the house as well as the shares of the absent renters.  It meant a lot MORE evenings that consisted of baseball radio broadcasts and hundreds of repetitions of the cassette tape.  There were only two artists...side A was Roger Miller, he of “King of the Road” fame (though that song was NOT on the cassette) and side B was Merle Haggard.

Jim was perhaps six months older than me, we’d graduated together from the same high school.  We’d known each other for years, yet both of us admitted years later that we weren’t sure that we would get along.  We wound up being best of friends, bound together by hard times.  You work with a person, you create a friendship.  You starve with a person, you become brothers.  I’m still humbled, all these years later, that I was selected to be the best man at his wedding.  There are ties that are forged by eating Cost-Cutter Macaroni and Cheese with only butter because the milk is gone.  Shit, we were grateful we still had the butter.

With all respect to Roger Miller, who I loved then and love still, our bond was forged by Merle Haggard, the poet of the common man.  His grasp of hard times and his lyrical hopes of better days to come was a thing to hold on to when you felt that the world was aligned against you.  We were two boys who thought they were two men, together but alone, far from the girls we loved and loath to admit defeat and move home to our parent’s houses.  When Merle sang, “Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink”, we did.  When “Misery and Gin” would play, we would both fall silent for two and a half minutes.  I don’t know what he was thinking and I never shared my thoughts.  It sure seemed like Merle knew what we were both thinking. 

By this time, Merle had been consigned (along with Hank Jr, Cash, Jennings, Kristofferson and Nelson) to “Outlaw” Country, meaning that he was too old to be considered marketable in the post-“Urban Cowboy” era.  While they still had a few tricks up their sleeves, separately and together, the Country music we had grown up with was largely vanquished.  The upstart artists called themselves “Young Country”, and while many made the attempt to describe the forefathers’ music as “Classic Country”, the implication was clear…if you ain’t “Young Country” you are “Old Country.”

Merle Haggard was born in a converted boxcar in an oil town not far from Bakersfield.  He lost his father when he was a boy.  He was in and out of jail as a youth, even while “Mama Tried” to raise him better.  He was a guitar-playing inmate in San Quentin when Johnny Cash played a concert there in 1958 and Merle thought he could see a future for himself.  As a boy, he’d hopped on freight trains to go see the country.  He eventually found himself in solitary after getting caught making “spud” (a potato-based intoxicant) talking to the man in the next cell…the soon-to-be-executed “Red-Light Bandit” Caryl Chessman.

Upon his release, Merle dedicated himself to his music.  He could sing, he could yodel like Jimmie Rodgers, and play both the guitar and the fiddle.  By 1970, he was appearing on network television alongside the man who had inspired him on “The Johnny Cash Show”.  Merle was an Okie in spirit but wasn’t from Muskogee, or even Oklahoma.  What the hell, it was a convenient rhyme.  He went on to have a long and storied career, with dozens of gold records and millions of fans.

When Merle died last week, after a long period of being ignored by the Country music establishment, my first thought wasn’t about his family or his legacy.  My first thought was about Jim.  About where we were then and where we are now.  Neither of us finished college and neither of us stayed with the girls we had pined for all those years ago.  Yet today, each of us can claim to have come through the fire, at times with only one voice on a cassette tape telling us that it was possible.  It was a voice that had been there, from a man who wouldn’t deny his past and wasn’t giving up on the future.

When I was a kid, my Mama used to cry every time she heard “If We Make It Through December”, because that was when the U.A.W. lay-offs happened.  But Mom and Dad always made it, just like Merle did.  I was fortunate enough to grow up with both of my parents alive.  Dad would always look skyward when I played the Nelson-Haggard duet, “Reasons to Quit”. 

Like all of us, we want to go out on top.  Merle’s career ended with an album co-written and performed alongside Willie Nelson, followed by a tour with the “Red Headed Stranger.”  The album went to number one on the Country charts the week it was released. The halls they played were jammed. Pneumonia was the ultimate winner, ending the tour early and sending Haggard home for his coda.  He predicted that he would pass on his 79^th birthday and was correct.

With only Loretta and Dolly and Willie alive, the rafters of Country music sag with Merle’s passing.  Yet when only the music remains, the sound of a cassette player in a shitty college apartment is a symphony to the people that lived it.

A Jog On A Cold Winter's Day

I was out on the back deck with Flash, the geriatric mutt, enjoying the first day of 2016, a crisp snowless day.  Our property backing up to a park as it does, the woods extend far beyond the fence.  The silence was broken by the sound of a boy yelling, “Help!”  I listened for a moment, to see if it was repeated.  It was, and then again a few seconds later. 

I realized that if the boy had fallen in the water, he might be at risk of hypothermia, so there wasn’t time to call the police.  There wasn’t time to holler into the house to tell them what I was doing.  I had to go now. 

I hopped the fence without much trouble, getting over the slightly lower gate without crotching myself.  The brambles pulled at my jacket and one scratched my face, but I got through them, only to step in thick mud and fall, staining my Christmas corduroys.  Finally gaining my feet, I ran up the slick trail in Rockport penny loafers, slipping and sliding onto the metal bridge, which was, if anything, icier than the trail.

Listening for additional cries, I followed the trail beside the creek.  The water didn’t look too deep, but I figured it was entirely possible to have gotten injured and hung up in the water…like if you were running in Rockports.

It was at about this time I started wondering if this was a popular new gambit for hold-ups…somebody starts yelling for help and the first sap to answer gets mugged.  I’ll admit to mulling that over, but I also didn’t stop running.  And Good Lord, I am no athlete.

I finally came to the clearing where the cries were coming from.  There was a boy, probably twelve, on the path in front of me.  “Who’s yelling for help?” I panted.  The boy started backing away from me.  This didn’t pass the smell test either.  Did this boy push another boy into the water? 

Just then I saw a boy laying in the leaves beside the creek.  He was sheepishly getting up and brushing himself off.  It was a hoax.  A goofy, kinda-messed-up, but still totally twelve year-old thing to do.  I couldn’t even lecture them because the adrenalin dump had gone.  Exhausted, I started walking home, wondering if they would have gone for help if I’d fallen on my face in front of them from a heart attack.

We hear again and again that we must remain vigilant in the post 9/11 world, and I won’t argue with that at all.  We owe it to our fellow man to watch his back.  But sometimes, as with what happened to me on New Year’s Day, people are going to say or do some outrageous things in a misguided plea for attention.  These things may make us angry, but we still need to check them out.  If they turn out to be hoaxes, at least no one is hurt.  At the same time, we can’t stop respecting the legitimacy of any cry for help. 

A quick change out of my soiled cords and a dot of iodine on my scratch, I got away with a sore quadricep and a spilled beer.  I have to tell you, I know a lot of people who enjoy going out for a job but I just don’t care for it.

It makes me think too much.