It's Yesterday Once More....

Traces, faded, folded pencil sketch ca. 1974-1975

I was recently taking my usual afternoon ride with little Noah ("our" ritual), singing along with the radio (Noah is indulgent and sometimes even enthusiastic) and beginning to ponder just what I might do to mark the August 27th anniversary of my initial topic post on the blog (Blue Room, Hot Wheels, Purple Prose and the No. 4 Chili Cheeseburger..., although my first comment was published on August 15 in response to Nicki's inaugural post of August 13, Reflections on a Teacher at CHS). As Noah and I cruised the local drag (yes, I still do that), while I was contemplating possible "takes" ... the crystalline voice of Karen Carpenter (dead at 32 of anorexia nervosa) filled the car with the haunting words:

When I was young
I'd listen to the radio
Waitin' for my favorite songs
When they played I'd sing along
It made me smile.

Not only did those particular lyrics, that specific song, make me smile then, they conversely and concomitantly brought tears to my eyes, along with that breathtaking tug on my heart as so many years instantly fell away ... like those pages falling off calendars in old Hollywood movies to indicate the passage of time. So many different years, so many diverse images ... volatile times, kaleidoscopic places, memorable faces, a beloved twindred soul ... impossible to actually count or relate just how many memories (some good, some not so much) crowded my mind in the space of only a few moments....

I prudently had the presence of mind (and the opportunity) to swing into a convenient Sonic Drive-In just ahead, order a cherry limeade (another memory trigger) and then close my eyes and let the rest of the song work its wistful, beautiful, sometimes bittersweet magic.




Karen Carpenter (1950 - 1983) and her brother, Richard

Anyone who has read some of my blog posts, or who otherwise knows me well, apprehends that music has always been important in my life. Some of my most wonderful memories are bound in silken, sensuous chords or silvery, sussurous words, sometimes intricately woven, mellifluous, moving slowly like warm aural honey through the canyons of my mind ... soaring, close harmonies ... psychedelic screams or insensate mumbles symbiotically clashing with primitive percussion and ripped guitar riffs to savage the senses ... cry-in-your-beer but ultimately soothing and cathartic country ballads plaintively detailing love and loss, or the efforts by some Desperado to hide his Lyin' Eyes, or ...Make It Through the Night to another Tequila Sunrise with some Angel of the Morning, or to hang in just a little longer For the Good Times without thinking of What Might Have Been. (It is worth noting here that recent scientific studies have indicated that crying in response to sad songs is indeed therapeutic and should actually be encouraged as a means of feeling better, as many who have spent time drowning their sorrows and feeding the jukebox in some dark, smoky places can attest.)

I've always had a broad appreciation for sometimes startlingly different types of music ... I remember as a small child listening to Big Band music and the songs which were popular in World War II at home with my Daddy, who also introduced me to purported Peruvian/Inca exotica performed by Yma Sumac of the five-octave vocal range; hearing my mother (a wonderful pianist) play from her sheet music and sing; and watching Your Hit Parade every week with either my parents or grandparents, and with my brother Scott. But I must note that it is often our old music ... oldies, if you will ... the music that was being born and growing to maturity at the same time I was beginning to sense the inchoate yet questing nature of my own soul ... which moves me most.

And there was so much coool music those years after the advent of Elvis in the mid-'50s (see The Times of Our Lives: August 16, 1977 ... Elvis ... and Heartbreak Hotel ..., published August 15, 2008) ... Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Frankie Lymon, Little Anthony and the Imperials, the Flamingos, the Marcels, the Five Satins, the Mystics, the Platters, the Crests (an unusually integrated group for that time, consisting of one Italian, two blacks and a Puerto Rican, who nailed the classic 16 Candles), the great Roy Orbison, the super-great Ray Charles and so many others.

Those were such happy times
And not so long ago
How I wondered where they'd gone
But they're back again
Just like a long lost friend
All the songs I loved so well.



Statue in Ray Charles Plaza, Albany Georgia

I remember Carl Lee and Truett Ball (both CHS Class of 1962) and later Jerry Huddleston (Class of '64) when they DJ'd at 1510 KCTX Radio in Childress ... as I recall, their shift was 3:00 p.m. until sign-off (which was dependent on when the sun set ... when so many of us then changed the dials to 1520 KOMA in Oklahoma City) ... and I remember singing along with the girls (or often just by myself) in the car to Patsy Cline, the Shirelles, the Drifters, the Ronettes, Jackie Wilson and Jerry Butler and Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and Peter, Paul and Mary and the Beach Boys ... feeling an absolutely spiritual connection and uplift whenever I heard Ferrante & Teicher's powerful instrumental Theme from Exodus ... sighing softly along with ethereal instrumentals like A Summer Place (Percy Faith and Orchestra), Wonderland by Night (Bert Kaempfert and Orchestra), Moon River (Henry Mancini and Orchestra), Stranger on the Shore (Acker Bilk) and Sleepwalk (Santo and Johnny) ... and groovin' and movin' to Green Onions (Booker T. and the MG's), Midnight in Moscow (Kenny Ball and the Jazzmen), Washington Square (the Village Stompers), Rebel Rouser (Duane Eddy), Wipe Out (the Surfaris), Walk, Don't Run (the Ventures), Misirlou (Dick Dale and the Del Tones) and the truly cooooool Pipeline (done by the Chantays, only one of any number of one-hit wonders).

Every Sha-la-la-la
Every Wo-o-wo-o
Still shines.
Every shing-a-ling-a-ling
That they're startin' to sing's
So fine.

I have such vivid (and verbatim!) memories of so many old songs ... from grade school and Junior High School, from my years at CHS and in college, through all the intervening years and the intermittent tears ... the genuinely warm glow spreading throughout the body, or the quick stab to the heart, when a particularly strong mnemonic suddenly sparks a half-forgotten or half-buried moment or a day in the life. Memory ... the kind that lights the corners of [the] mind ... is a true gift, though not unlike the gift of rain in that whether it is ultimately good or bad depends on how it is used or deployed. When coupled with the honest assessment of your actual feelings and thoughts, proper use of these keys may help determine your future path, and may help clear obstacles you may encounter otherwise.

Bearing in mind the strong, killer karmic injunction not to cause pain to the innocent, I nevertheless think failing and/or refusing to quietly look at and discreetly examine the past is a profligate waste of the gift, perhaps even a thwart to destiny ... and further begs the question(s): If you don't remember who you truly were at some certain significant time(s) of your life ... what you really felt ... if it has been colored or distorted by outside influences ... then how do know who you really are now??? How do you contemplate who you may be(come) in the future???

I remember the love songs that meant (and still mean) so much to me ... I remember all the words and the melodies ... I remember all the ephemera detailed by the Classics IV ... the Faded photographs, covered now with lines and creases/Tickets torn in half, memories in bits and pieces/... souvenirs of days together/... pages from an old love letter ... so many things gone now in ritual cleansing flames or in the natural attrition of almost half a century encompassing moves and spring cleaning ... and still there remain old totems and anonymous traces like a ballpoint pen, an empty cigarette pack, champagne corks, pressed flowers, hotel receipts, matchbooks ... things that when I stumble across them, I smile to think that I kept such innocuous things, which mean absolutely nothing to anyone but me ... but to throw them out would be somehow to throw away or devalue the memory. And that I will never do. I am reminded that if we cannot or will not remember, we cannot know ... we struggle to learn ... we impede our own progress....

When they get to the part
Where he's breaking her heart
It can really make me cry
Just like before
It's yesterday once more.

[Sidebar: I've always loved the 1966 song Elusive Butterfly, by folksinger/songwriter Bob Lind (another one-hit wonder), which as someone once said to me was the closest thing to pure poetry I ever heard set to music. ... "You might wake up some morning ..." and it goes on from there, making as concrete as is humanly possible all those intangible, surreal (yet so very real) moments of stasis in the midst of constant flux that we call love.... Sidebar Addendum: I almost wrecked the car the other day (perhaps a slight exaggeration, but not much) when the female afternoon drive-time DJ on the usually wonderful Platinum 96.7 station here played the gorgeous, evocative Grammy-winning Misty (recorded by Texas-born Johnny Mathis and released in 1959), and then went on to state oh so erroneously that the song was specifically written for the movie Play Misty for Me, starring and directed by Clint Eastwood (his directorial debut), released in 1971 ... a twelve-year gap. Jeez! Do a little research, for god's sake!!! I cringe to think of the people who will now tell other people that the song was written for the movie.... And I hate disinformation, even in such small matters.... Grrrrrr.... But I digress....]



Cairns Birdwing, the largest butterfly in Australia

I think (and have ventured to say on the blog) that memory ... revisiting times and places and things and people who were once (and may still be) important to us ... is vital as we continue to grow and learn in this life. If we cannot "tap into" the person we were at age 16, or 25, or 34, or 43 ... then how in the world do we comprehend not only whether we have changed, but the extent and nature of the change ... whether the change has been good or bad for us and our ultimate spiritual growth ... instructive or stunting in the development of our lives and our souls ... a comfortably-padded and well-accoutred prison or a true liberation allowing us to be all that we can be? I know some people will immediately think "Oh, but you can't live in the past" ... and of course that is true. It is dead and gone ... but not forgotten ... and I am certainly not proposing that anyone try to dwell in that ghost town, to the exclusion of the present and the future. But ... but ... I believe remembrance and true, unclouded examination is as necessary for our eternal, living souls as air and water and food are for our temporary, temporal bodies....

Lookin' back on how it was
In years gone by
And the good times that I had
Makes today seem rather sad
So much has changed.

One of the greatest things (in my mind, at least) about the blog is that in addition to contemporary topics and catch-ups and reunions ... here in this small space in the vast ethereal universe ... it is ... it can be ... it has been ... yesterday, once more. The blog provides an impetus, if not an imperative, for us to return to a place and time, now vanished except in memory (I am reminded of Margaret Mitchell's halcyon fever-dream of the Old South), to revisit things that happened to us then and in the years thereafter, and to analyze them ... both the beautiful and the painful ... in the light of the knowledge we have gained in our life journeys since then. It provides a place for us to reach out to each other, when a saving hand might be welcome, or necessary, or easy to to proffer.

I had an e-mail exchange with Clemi Higley Blackburn shortly before her shockingly swift and untimely death this past February. Despite an estrangement between us, I had e-mailed her to verify some information for my December 31, 2007 post Bobcat Treasure: Jade ... Candles ... and Auld Lang Syne..., and Clemi graciously answered my e-mail and those questions she could. Always looking (with Nicki) for "new voices" on the blog, I wrote again to Clemi, asking if she might be interested in doing a topic post for us, and she e'ed back that she didn't have a clue what she'd write about even if she was interested in undertaking such a project. And so I answered: "Oh, just whatever might be of general interest, or some happy memories you have from school, or something like that." And I felt a literal, physical pain when she wrote back: "I don't have any happy memories from high school, so wouldn't be able to write anything that would be of interest to your readers."

I was absolutely stunned. No happy memories from high school??? Zip, zilch, nada? I had some pretty ugly, painful memories of my own from those days ... as did many of us. But to say you had absolutely no happy memories? That you had not managed to separate and salvage the good from the bad??? Clemi and I were not good friends in school, but we did take dance lessons together for some years, and we worked on The Corral together my Junior and her Senior year, and I was frequently at her house visiting with her mother Carol during my last year of high school (and after) ... and I know that there were happy memories that she might have found there, if she had chosen to access them ... had made the effort to look ... if someone might have reached her ... if she had been able to consign the bad memories to the black hole where terrible memories should go. But as it was, less than two months before she died, Clemi said and remembered she had no happy memories of high school after 45 or so years. And that made me cry ... then and soon thereafter, when I heard of her death.

It was songs of love
That I would sing to then
And I'd memorize each word
Those old melodies
Still sound so good to me
As they melt the years away.



Spider lily and butterfly

The blog gifts us with visions and memories of yesterday, once more. It is a place to come together to share our lives and our thoughts and our acquired wisdom and compassion ... to reach out to each other in these years when love and friendship may be more important than ever. The blog gives each of us the opportunity to reconstitute the complex, layered individual essence of our past, present and future ... it helps us perfect the essential "blending" of the florals and woods and ambergris and spices acquired as we've walked through this life ... to meld the strong but fleeting "top notes" (aromas which are apparent immediately upon application of a perfume but dissipate soon thereafter) with the "middle notes" (the "heart" or "core" scent which begins to emerge as the top notes fade), and the more subtle but deep and rich "base notes" (formulated to emerge as the middle notes begin to fade, but also to pair with and sustain the middle notes to engender the lingering signature of the essence) ... our quintessence, if you will.

All my best memories
Come back clearly to me
Some can even make me cry
Just like before
It's yesterday once more.

I have been privileged to be Nicki's partner on the blog during this past year and I thank her so much for her invitation, for her trust in me and for her support. I have enjoyed sharing my thoughts with you, have been delighted by your comments, and I look forward to the future with anticipation. And, even if some of us don't always agree, I believe we may continue with an adult respect for diverse opinions. I am humbled and so stoked by some of the wonderful thoughts and insights many of you have shared, whether or not it was for publication on the blog. I remain hopeful that more of you will find your own "voices" here, either in topic posts or comments. And I am fortunate and truly blessed to have been able to "reconnect" after so many long years....

And as ever, I so hope that we each are able to take something from here ... to cherish the good things, and consign the "bad things" to the darkness, to build and plan for days to come ... that we may continue for a long time to share our past and present lives, our commonalities of history and circumstance, and our dreams for the future.

Thank you for all ... for everything ... for oh so much ... you have given me ... and for the eternal, immortal connection....

)O(