Wednesday, September 28, 2022

In The Early Evening Pain

 


Author's Note: This turned out to be the last time we enjoyed an evening with Gordon. I'm so glad he traveled to Peoria while we were in town.


           What a lucky happenstance, my favorite performer making a stop just minutes from our summer home near Peoria, Illinois. How could I pass it up? I pleaded for it to be a birthday gift and was granted the company of my wife and old-soul daughter to the September 27th Gordon Lightfoot show at the Civic Center.

            We waited through a very capable opening act, something new to us as a Lightfoot audience. Nashville’s Jack Schneider sang a handful of original songs, demonstrated his guitar chops and even strapped on a harmonica a few times. I wondered if perhaps Gordon found him slightly reminiscent of his old friend Bob Dylan. It was quite enjoyable.

            Finally, the frail looking legend himself strolled confidently out on stage, settled quickly in behind the mic and began to strum and sing Sweet Guinevere. After the initial shock at the raspy remnants of his once beautiful voice, our expectations were adjusted for the evening. 

            At age sixty-eight, my knees complained after we walked up to the second balcony. But I don’t have to perform with my knees. Gord’s voice seems to be going into retirement against his will. After all, Paul McCartney is eighty years old, and Tony Bennett released an album at ninety-five.

            But literally “with an achin’ in his heart” – a triple aortic aneurysm nearly took his life in 2002, leaving him to recover from a six-week coma and a tracheotomy that would have sidelined most mortals. That he is alive is amazing, touring twenty years later, astounding. He subsequently suffered a stroke, and most recently a broken arm. The man is no stranger to pain.

            His faithful fans are in love with this troubadour, a songwriter with no equal, and a band that could perform with a cardboard cutout of the Canadian national treasure and still hold a crowd’s interest in tribute to their hero. 

            And then it happened. Just as some random drunk at another show started shouting at the top of his lungs, one dimwit felt the need to yell “GORDON” during every song. Dude, he knows his name, and no matter how many times you yell, “RAINY DAY PEOPLE,” he is not taking requests. The raucous idiot should have been thrown out like the one at the Pabst Theater in 2013. If you’re reading this, you embarrassing asshat, you’re not a fan, stop pretending. Fans don’t do that.

            As the show proceeded, Gord’s voice warmed up a bit. At one point he paused to use a nasal spray, then got a laugh when he offered it to lead guitarist Carter Lancaster. It made a noticeable difference, but by that time we were used to his limits and I was openly crying during If You Could Read My Mind. I looked over at the face of my thirty-year-old daughter, a Speech Language Pathologist sitting in rapt attention to the haunting melody written in 1970. We danced to Inspiration Lady at her wedding. Sadly, that song wasn’t included in the evening’s set list, but perhaps more crying would have just been excessive.

            She commented that Gordon had difficulty clearing saliva from his vocal-chords and lacked the necessary lung power to propel sounds without difficulty. But far from having pockets full of sand, he continued to pull out hit after hit, some shortened a bit to “tighten up the show.” He spoke of the band performing nine shows in twelve days and the desire to sleep in their own beds. Perhaps after the show he jumped a jet plane, and to thunderous applause was eventually on his way – in the early evening pain.


😎


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Sunday, September 18, 2022

Family Feud

 

            There are few houses on Cook Road, but the two at Numbers 23 and 25 are unusually close to each other and oddly situated. Relations between neighbors at these two homes have varied depending on the occupants. The shared boundary tests the better natures of those who dwell on either side.

            A fence might seem to be in order. But a wall of any design along the dovetailed property line would be a mutually detrimental eyesore to both owners, and has thus been avoided.

            Sarah and Jerry’s dog Rusty at Number 23 is a former farmyard mongrel adopted out of sympathy for its plight, and relentless requests by eight-year-old Bekka. Rusty routinely loitered by the back door, awaiting a breach in security by the normally vigilant family. The shaggy little opportunist was an escape artist who seemed to love being chased.

            In remote or less populated areas, sewage is often disposed of by septic systems that must be regularly pumped out. One late April day several years earlier, the septic tank cover was removed for pumping at Number 25 and remained open while the tanker truck went to unload its contents. The back yard was perfumed with the yearly crop of blue perennials that only partially masked the stench emanating from the open system.

            This was one of the days Rusty got away from Jerry. Not an athletic man, he nevertheless took off like Hermes after the bounding dog. Around the side of the house they ran, leaping the flowering blue boundary without regard for a minor trespass. Relations had been good since Susan and Frank had moved in. In fact, Susan was outside, her face toward the sun until a somewhat surreal event turned her attention.



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Friday, September 16, 2022

A Fistful of Nothing

 

            Imagine that your child has access to only five television channels. That’s enough to grapple with. We won’t discuss the absence of video games, internet or smart phones. This seemingly barren media landscape represents the entertainment of my childhood. Yeah, I’m that old.

            Now you may be able to understand how a portly middle-aged man in a light blue jacket festooned with epaulets, service ribbons and colorful planchets could play the part of Prime Minister to a fictional goose, the self-proclaimed King of the United States, and succeed as the host of a children’s show that featured only puppets and cartoons. He was Frazier Thomas, and the show was the long running Garfield Goose and Friends. It took Sesame Street to break its on-air endurance record of 1955 to 1976.

            WGN Television in Chicago had a habit of cultivating beloved overweight spokesmen. Norbert “Ned” Locke was another, ringmaster of Bozo’s Circus for fifteen years, but that’s another story. It was a great time to be a kid.

            When I came home from grammar school, our black and white television helped me wind down while my mom made dinner and ignored me for a while. I’d sit on the couch and eat pretzel sticks while Garfield Goose had imaginary conversations with his Prime Minister.


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Sunday, September 11, 2022

Days of Our Lives

           They pulled into a choice spot at the drive-in, central but with easy egress for when the movie ended and a mad dash began to empty the lot.

            “Let them wait in line to go home,” said Ray. “What’s the hurry, baby?”

            It was summer, they were twenty and it was the weekend. She couldn’t disagree. There was no hurry. How could she know about time at an age when life stretches ahead like an endless highway, when wasted moments are always replaced by a new supply of moments to be wasted?

            Momma dragged her to the nursing home a week ago to visit great Uncle Otto.

            “Vicky, you never know when it might be the last time. He’s 93, honey. I know he must be awful lonely.”

            “I know, I know, he’s so sweet, it’s just,”

            “Just what?”

            “It smells kinda bad Momma. And it makes me sad.”



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Friday, September 9, 2022

Bad Behavior

            Folks in Brimfield, Massachusetts talk much of the year about little other than their legendary summer flea markets. When a quarter of a million people leave the area, returning the local population to under 4000, the general state of exhaustion and silence is akin to that following the end of Woodstock, only more so.

            And then winter sets in and Emma Walther goes ice fishing. She becomes the subject of frequent conversations as she walks by the local diner. Imagine, a girl.

            Emma works on weekends in nearby Sturbridge Village as an actress in a living history museum. It is generally frowned upon to express frustration with tourists and their occasionally bad behavior, but bumper stickers that state, “We’re not on your vacation” can be seen on the outskirts of town. Eyes secretly roll at the sound of a Chicagoan asking how to get to Wore-Chester. Emma has been told not to make corrections, but finds it difficult to let it go. “Oh, Woostah, here, let me get you a map.”

            “Dad, I’m goin’ fishing!” Emma yells on her way out the back door.

            The garage stores too much stuff to also fit a car, and she struggles around collections of treasures for next summer’s flea, trying not to upset anything breakable. A bucket, makeshift pole and small tackle box are wedged between tables and trinkets, lanterns and pewter milk jugs. Tourists just love milk jugs.

            Emma slides down the icy driveway with her gear, turns toward town and then down Brookfield Road to the Lake Sherman conservation area. The small lake is one of several in the area, stocked with trout and bass in the spring, and fishable during the short, frigid ice fishing season. She passes the police department, the cemetery and her old elementary school.

            “Hey, school,” she says, her frosty breath trailing behind her, and then yells “Hey Stube!” to a friend across the street.

            “McKay!” shouts Doug Stuben. Eliza McKay is the fictional character Emma plays in Sturbridge, churning imaginary butter and sweeping floors in the refurbished “original” home of the town pastor. The hourly rate is decent, but the work is pure drudgery. Sitting on a frozen lake with a line in the water is more to her liking.


To read the rest of this story and more than fifty others, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.


😎


If you like fiction and you're in the mood for over 50 short stories, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.


Or if you'd prefer seventy non-fiction stories inspired by a town in Illinois, please consider buying Park Ridge Memories also on Amazon. Click on the image below.