Trash

Walking along smoking a cigarette the fire comes too close to the end and it starts to taste bad. Casually the butt gets flipped to the pavement to rot for the next five years. As the ice melts in the soda it no longer tastes like its fresh so it too can be tossed aside. Soon a car will flatten it out and we won't see it as easily. We live in a trash can. No need to empty the can, or replace the plastic bags, simply fill the streets and the wind will wash it clean. I too was a participant once even though I was taught in the Boy Scouts to carry out more than you brought in. I adhered to that belief for many years until caught in the senseless mindset of that part of society. Someone else will clean up after me. Is this the core belief of those who trash our world? As I aged a bit more I gave up that only me attitude and always find the proper place for my trash. I watch during rush hour as the butt of a smoke comes flying out the window and I think that they are filthy pigs without any cares for our shrinking planet. The leftover bag from a fast food joint lays at the curb waiting for the cleaning crew. Plastic grocery bags fly in the wind only pausing to adorn our trees. What ever happened to the commercial of the noble chief looking out upon the horizon of cement and trash strewn freeways. A tear rolling down his cheek. Have we forgotten the needs of Mother Earth so easily? Are we satisfied that we are simply Green? Remember to carry out more than you brought in. Live with these words in your heart and make this a cleaner world for all of us.

Falcon part 2

I have never seen a new or restored 1962 Falcon but I can imagine that the blue paint was as bright as the summer sky. The imitation wood paneling running along it's length hard to distinguish whether it was really varnished wood or shiny plastic. I was to become the owner of the car through my Mom's second husband. I won't include his name because as it turns out he was not an honest man. In fact I really believe he gave me the car to try and get "back in" with Mom. She had booted him out after he pulled a gun, a Ruger .357 Blackhawk with a 7" barrel, and pointed it at me. I screamed at him to go ahead and pull the trigger. My Mom's problems with him would be over after the cops arrested him. I stood proud and defiant as any 23 year old with nothing to lose would. I never thought for a second that the trigger could be pulled and I would be gone. My only thoughts were with my Mom and how he was trying to control her and her belongings. Backtracking just a bit in the story to explain, he and Mom got married and inside a month he was wanting her to sign over everything she owned to him. Now she didn't own much but had lived for more than twenty years alone and was quite independent. She never signed the documents he wanted and the day he pointed the gun at me we were having a yelling match about this very subject. We were to discover several years later he had tried to do this with several other ladies and would eventually be prosecuted for the deceptions he lived. I never trusted him and was wary of the gifted car later. He tried to take it back but I had already signed and processed the title with the state of Utah. So now I was the owner of a 1962 Ford Falcon station wagon with a gas gauge that didn't work and you kept track of oil mileage along side of the gas mileage. This was the car that would get me from Utah to North Carolina the fall of 1984. I was reading Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" and I was working in a dead end job setting appointments for Jeremy Ranch. Not a fun job just call and give the spill and decide on the date. A monkee could have done this better than I was doing. One morning I realized I needed to hit the road in order to change my life.I literally walked in the front door at work and out the back. I kept walking all the way to the Avenues until I arrived at Mike's place. Throw me a party because I'm leaving SLC as fast as they will give me my paycheck I told him. We partied that night like there was no tomorrow. I'm sure no one believed I would ever really leave. But they had not been reading "On th Road". Two days later the Falcon was packed with everything I owned and I was saying good bye. I hit the road rolling and singing the Willie Nelson's song, "on the Road Again" inside the Falcon, Jack's book "On the Road" by my side on September 20th 1984.

The Falcon

The year was 1984, September just before my birthday. The plan was to party like crazy in Kansas City and gorge myself on BBQ. Well it didn't quite work out that way. The Falcon decided not to cooperate and turned a generator light on just after crossing the Wyoming border from Utah. It was completely black, no stars, bitterly cold and the wind was blowing like a hurricane roaring across the plains. The wind would rock the car as it moved down the highway. Top speed of 62 mph. Blazing fast for this 22 year old car. Any faster and it shuddered so hard I was afraid the imitation wood paneling would fall off onto the highway. I pulled over in a roadside cutout trying to sleep a few hours. It was impossible to relax as the car shook from side to side. I was certain it was going to flip on over into the blackness of the Wyoming night. Bleary eyed I moved on down the highway arriving at the Nebraska border at sunrise. On the plains a sunrise rises very quickly. No mountains or hills to impede the lights rays. The blackness starts changing into purple hues which change into reds and finally the brightness of yellow spills over the horizon enveloping everything in its path. I was seeing the sun rise for the first time over the heart of America. I drove all day across the plains passing the largest pig farm I had ever seen only stopping for gas and food. The generator light shown brightly all day long. I'm sure it is nothing I rationalized to myself. The car wouldn't start if there was a problem. So I drove on enjoying the flat lanscape and the breeze from the floorboard holes. I stopped for gas every 100 miles or so since the Falcon's gas gauge didn't work. I had to add a quart of oil every third stop. I drove on. It was now my birhtday and if I pushed I could still party at Kansas City for a short while befroe closing time. So on I drove crossing the border of Missouri just after dark. The map showed only a few small towns along the way and I estimated about three hours of driving. My last stop was a truck stop for gas and a six pack of Budwieser. It was my birthday you know. Thirty minutes later after crossing the Tokono River, the lights in the Falcon went dim then off and then the engine died. I was stuck on the highway late at night in the middle of no where on my brithday evening. There would be no cake, no BBQ, no new friends to celebrate with, just me, the '62 Falcon and what was left of a six pack of Budwieser.

Monopoly

Monopoly became an obsession for us one summer. We would play for hours that turned into days sprawled out on the burnt orange shag carpet that was so popular back then. Every one's house seem to have the same old burnt orange or pale yellow shag carpet covering once shiny wood floors. The idea that shag carpet was better than wood floors was sold to almost everyone back then. Instead of polishing the floor we would use the special rake and fluff the fibers back to life. Of course this would only delay the inevitable evidence of our existence as we marked our trails across the shag fibers. But for now we lay across the carpet and played like no one has ever played before. Deals were made and loans given to the losing players keeping them in the game. Pages and pages in old spiral notebooks became the ledgers of the loan sharks. No one ever lost a game and hardly anyone ever won. It simply went on for what seemed to us the entire summer. Sleep-overs would become Monopoly into the nights of summer. We played on. The money so worn you would have thought it had been carried in a damp wallet for years. We played on. The game would keep our minds away from the fact that most of our fathers were doing their duty in Vietnam. We played on. We were Army brats and Monopoly tycoons all rolled into one. The Williams house, where several days in a row of Monopoly had taken place, was a small three bedroom frame house, single story with the burnt orange shag carpet with a slightly musky odor. They didn't own the special rake and I'm not sure that carpet ever recovered from five or six young boys sprawled out playing Monopoly. They were the only black family on the block. Skin color was never an issue for us even amidst all the racial strife taking place in the south during the late sixties. The rioting we saw on the news just didn't apply to us. I really can't say if the game ever ended or baseball finally won our hearts back to the street diamond. I just don't know.

The Baseball

Near the end of the sixties, for my gang, baseball was king. We played for the love of the game much like our current heroes Willie Mays, Johnny Bench and Hank Aaron. They played for the love of baseball just like us. We played everyday all summer long unless there was a Monopoly game going on at someones house. More on that later. We even fashioned our own baseball diamond from a weed strewn field across the street from my house. The sweltering heat of central Texas made what took just a few days seem to be a whole month of lost baseball games. But we were on a mission to have our own field. Sweat and dust clinging to our faces as we cleared weeds taller than we were, cut out baselines in the dirt and cleared enough rocks out to make the slide into base a bit less painful. Baseball was our game and now we owned a field, well sort of. The landowner eventually built some homes there and our games moved back to the street right next to Bill's house at the top of the hill. An adobe style house that had a driveway in the front that did a semi circle back to the streets. That was also to become our racetrack. The street was flat here and his house was less susceptible to an errant fly ball finding window glass. But I caution you, don't overrun third base or you will wind up in the cactus. Ouch. In our gang of friends most of us were between 6 and 10 years old. But we didn't mind if the occasional teenager happened along and wanted to play. Right here I would suffer my my most severe concussion of my younger years. On a balmy fall day I would defiantly tell this older teenager he couldn't pitch worth beans. Hey you can't pitch worth beans I yelled at him. Beans were still pretty cheap back then and it was definitely an insult as I recall. A painful mistake as I would soon find out. I returned to my position at first base ten or so feet from where he was pitching and turned around....blam....the baseball struck my right eye knocking me out cold. He threw a regulation MLB baseball square in my eye. A sucker punch to the eye with a baseball. I don't remember his name or much else after except when I came to I was spinning on the ground screaming. The ball had rolled off and down the hill somewhere in the weeds. We searched for it days later but never found it. Over a year later I found a ball in the weeds and the overwhelming feeling that this was the baseball that hit me sent a chills up my spine. I still have that baseball. Forty years I have saved that ball as if it were a home run ball by Hank Aaron. I never think about that day or dwell upon being hit in the eye unless I get the ball out and handle it. But today it sprang up from the abyss of my memories and into consciousness became this story.

The Beginning

There are literally millions of random thoughts I want to get out of the depths of my mind. I can't really remember the beginning, nor can I remember anything close to it. People have told me that they can remember events or people when they were young, but I cannot. Was it the concussion I had while screaming down the steepest hill in town? I had to have been in third grade by that time as I do remember it was on my first bike. I went so fast the bike was shuddering from the speed. I was quivering inside too since I had never gone down a hill like that before. When I hit the pavement I skidded on the hot Texas asphalt for what seemed to be an eternity. I'm sure it was but a few seconds and was all it took to scrape the skin from most of my right side. Bleeding and crying I set off walking the bent up bike back home. It was a long walk as I had to go around several streets and back up a smaller hill. No one was around to help me, no friends, no family and no strangers. Of course we never talked to strangers back then. When I arrived home Mom wasn't there either. I had no one to cry to but myself. So I cried. My beautiful bike, a blue spider bike, was bent at the handlebars and the front wheel wobbled. I worked the entire summer that year mowing grass at $1 to $2 per yard to earn the money for that bike. It had a three speed shifter on the frame. It was so cool. None of my friends had a shifter and I always believed it gave me a great advantage in our racing games. But today I cried and cried. Skin removed from my arm, the blood dried on my face, slumped beside the 3 speed racer I loved.