Rootless, feckless and sleepless

It is the end of the day. Actually near the end of the day. I wanted to take time to record some words, but I am running into the law of diminishing returns. It is the end of the day and it has been a long one. I drove with Kate to McDonough and back and on to Monticello and back and then to choir. We had a nice time at ElToro Loco out on the deck they have built on the side of the building. We saw David and Betsy Hitson and had a nice conversation. We saw Terry and Bunny Wynne and I had a nice time talking to them. We saw Randy and Tina Greene and had a nice conversation. I hate seeing another kid going to a Baptist College like Berry. We even saw the Flynts and the Jones through the glass behind our table.

I then went to choir to try to hold up the tenor line all by myself. If I can get the note sequence, I can do it. But if I get off the sequence of notes, I will murder it. Fortunately, Sylvia is patient. I had worn my voice almost out by singing with the music on the stereo in my car. I could tell that when I was coming back from Monticello. I was just burning it out with Brewer & Shipley. Only my love of the music kept me going.

PBS on Channel 30 is doing a biography of Dean Martin. He was kind of fun. He had a good voice for someone with kind of a purple delivery. I liked him. He was also funny.

He was from Ohio, Steubenville, to be exact. It is hard to imagine someone with that kind of city style being from a little town in Ohio. I guess there were more of those types back in those days before everyone seemed to move away from the center of the country for NY and LA. I guess that is just the way it seems sometimes.

It reminds me of times when I would listen to the AM radio stations from all over the country on the car radio. I loved that. It seemed like visiting a lot of places which were foreign to me as a young guy. New Orleans, Chicago, Fort Wayne, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Nashville, Des Moines and St. Paul. I heard radio stations from all those places and everywhere in between. I remember listening to the dixieland from New Orleans and basketball from Cincinnati and hockey from Fort Wayne. I remember hearing traffic from Chicago and news from Indianapolis. I remember hearing pop music from Minnesota and country from the Grand Old Opry in Nashville. I also remember how hard it was to feel proud to know that I was from that Nashville area where those goofy comedians like Stringbean and Minnie Pearl (Mrs. Cannon, if you please) came from. I remember listening intently to try to grasp a kinship to the musicians and the singers and cringing at how corny it was.

You see, I came from Indianapolis and Huntsville, Alabama (Rocket City, USA) and Atlanta. Surely that was much more important than that country town in Middle Tennessee. It was only later that I really fell for it and loved the music and the people and "claimed kin." After all, it was the Dixie Dewdrop, Uncle Dave Macon, from Murfeesboro, who had been the first star of the Grand Old Opry. And my grandfather Gary, who I had never met, had loved him. He was a tie between the times of Mule Skinners and Tinkers and Medicine Shows and modern days. And his music and the music of others like him became the tie between the relatives I had never met and the ones I loved to visit when we left the big city to drive to the farm or Hoptown.

Of course, there was that Christmas at the farm when I was 13. I got a stereo and a Nitty Gritty Dirt Band album. I can remember like it was yesterday, sitting under the stairs behind the television in the hall, listening in my pajamas to the American music, the traditional music, played by young long-haired guys from Southern California, like their progenitors from the hills of Tennessee and Kentucky and North Carolina and Virginia. I remember sitting there as my dad and his dad sat with me and listened to the music and creating a generational bond that never diminished.

Things fade naturally like the blue of your jeans. All those relatives, all those places have passed away and changed until I have no physical connection to them. I remember taking Kate to the Western Kentucky State Fair in Hopkinsville. I was trying to recreate times when we visited relatives during the fair. I specifically remember watching harness racing when I was a child and seeing the contests and the dunking tanks and the wild miniature roller coaster. Ending it with fireworks in the warm Summer evening. But so much was changed when Kate and I went to the fair. The horses were replaced by tractor pulls, an enterprise I still don't understand. It may be the lower class American contender to Cricket. Both incomprehensible to the unitiated, or even the partially initiated.

But Kate was on a ride and I sat and watched from a bench. Some guy came up to me and asked me if he knew me. He was trying to create a connection. But I couldn't say I knew him, and my connection to the area was tenuous at best. And I knew it and I couldn't pretend, even by asking the guy if he knew anybody I might be related to. Sure, there was a physical resemblance. After all, we were from the same area, we shared the same gene pool. But there was no real connection, even when I tried.

And now it all seems gone except the memories and the family connections. Does it really matter? I wonder.