MUSIC

                                                           

I once saw the results of a poll that had been taken, as to which song was the most popular song, ever sung and recorded in America. The result was Judy Garlands signature song “Over the Rainbow.” As a kid growing up in the fifties, I remember my mother singing that song as she went about her daily chores. I went and watched the movie “Judy,” a while back and it took me back down that yellow brick road and back to that song.

Music is so subjective and we all have our favorites and we all have opinions as to what we like and dislike. I think I loved, “Over the Rainbow,” because the lyrics tell us a story of hope for a better world in a better time and what a ‘Beautiful world’ we live in. In fact, Louie Armstrong sang about that very thing. But In a world of have’s and have nots, hope is all some people have left and here is someone singing about it and in words you can readily understand.

As the years have gone by my music tastes have changed too but there is a point when I can no longer buy into what some call music today. I watched the super bowl half time show and as much as the choreography and dancing was good , the music was hard to judge because I understood little of what was sung. It was more noise then anything. I have gone to dances where the music literally drove me out with its loudness. Where the dancing seemed to be more reminiscent of people in trances. Where you no longer touch your partner, or hold them or talk to them, you just try to avoid some catastrophic collision that would leave you both on the floor.

Enough about that. Sometimes when I am troubled, I ask Alexa to play music from my era and it always cheers me up and sometimes tears me up. For so many of the songs bring back a memory, that was at least for me, from a different time and what I would call a better place. They will be singing “Somewhere over the rainbow” a hundred years from now. Much of today’s music will be forgotten. There are impersonators who are very popular, singing songs from the last half of the last century. I have resisted most of the urgings to get with it and try to find the good in todays music. Maybe I’m stubborn and maybe I’m spoiled and maybe I just know good music when I hear it.

When I was in my thirties and forties my wife and I would go to dances a lot. We too had pressures and a lot of worries and stress in our lives and at least for a few hours we needed to go and get away from it all.  It was the music that was the elixir and when the night was over, we rode home, her snuggled under my arm, just as we did a decade before when we were courting. It was a booster shot from the daily grind and it did us wonders.

I am probably in the last decade of my life but I’m at peace with that. It’s been a wonderful life and so much has happened that made me proud and happy. But when it’s all over, somewhere in that list of credits that will play at the end, will be the music that made me so happy and continues to warm my heart and soul. The pictures of all of those memories that develop in my mind when the music returns, could not be any clearer if they were in 5g and high definition. No, as Nat King Cole sang--- they are just “Unforgettable.”

A MEMORY FROM THE PAST

                                                        

Many years ago, and shortly after I was married, my wife asked me to take her to her Grandmas place for a visit. So, we made the long trip from the big city to a little town in south western Minnesota called Bellingham. A hamlet of maybe 500 people. Then out of town we traveled on a dusty country road until we came to a one lane road that led to a little shack, right next to a corn field. The road was muddy and rutted, so not wanting to get the car stuck we parked the car and walked up the road towards the house. The old lady had no idea we were coming and she had no phone to call her, so as my wife put it, “It was going to be a surprise.”  I asked her, “What if she isn’t home?” her answer was, “She’s always home.” She has no other place to go. 

As we got closer to the house the back-screen door opened and out came this diminutive little woman, arms wide open walking towards us dressed like a refugee from Europe in 1930. At the time I couldn’t help but think she reminded me so much of Mother Theresa the way she looked. A white apron wrapped around her tiny body and on her head was this babushka that contained most of her silver hair inside. But it was her face that I couldn’t help staring at. It was as wrinkled as skin could be and deep set in her face were the brightest blue eyes I had ever saw. She sported a toothless smile that went from ear to ear and she kept saying over and over. “Gott im Himmel, Gott im Himmel. Schau wer hier ist.” For those who don’t know German. Loosely translated she was saying “God in heaven. Look who’s here.”

She invited us into her one room house and gave us each a half a glass of warm beer and some bread she had baked. What I have a rough time putting into words, is how happy, how absolute giddy she was to see her granddaughter. I had come there that day only to make my wife happy. I could have listed a hundred things I would have rather been doing that day but I am here to tell you today. Had I done something else that I would have no memory of today, I would have lost a beautiful moment. But here I am 55 years later and that memory of that old lady lives on in my mind as if it was yesterday. I have since met politicians in high office, C.E.O.’s of large companies, celebrated sports figures and famous people from many walks of life. None of them ever stuck in my memory like this poor, almost destitute, old German Immigrant lady who just happened to be my wife’s grandma. And now, I ask myself why?

My only explanation is I was so touched by the love this old lady showed us. She had nothing of value but a decrepit shack on the prairie and lived in squalor, but the love she had for her granddaughter and the happiness it had brought her that day, It was simply love personified. It was so beautiful and so simple that even reduced to the lowest common denominator of a tearful hug on a muddy farm road, it defied words.There is something to be said about human emotions, that bring out happiness that all the money in the world cannot buy.

We never saw her again. A year later she died and we never found out until she was gone and buried. Gone but never forgotten.

A SAD FAREWELL

                                                           

Today as we leave Arizona for the summer, and to our home in the north it is with so many mixed emotions. We are in the troughs of the corona virus and no we are not leaving to hide from it, as it seems to be everywhere. We are going to where we are more comfortable with the medical community and family, if it should come to that. Each fall when we return to Arizona, we learn of people who have are no longer with us. It’s are hope, our prayer that this year, the virus will not be a part of that for those who stay here or for us who leave.

I once read a book by Steven King where a global pandemic was ravaging the world and people were wondering if this was the end of humanity. Now this is nowhere that serious but I caught my mind, drawing parallels between that story and current events. One wonders if the time will come when something far more serious than the Corona Virus will break out. Our country seems to have been complacent when it comes to being ready for things like this.

As a young boy I grew up during a polio epidemic. I had classmates who contracted the disease and I remember one of them dying from it. Others wearing steel braces on their legs and pictures of kids in iron lungs. I wasn’t overly worried about contracting it, because I was a kid and I left my worries at the kitchen door each morning when I went to school. Each day was a new adventure for me. There was no television or media to stoke our fears. What we knew was what our parents told us, or we witnessed with our own eyes. Then they found a vaccine.

Then we have the direct opposite from this country, in other places where the borders are closed and the media is largely absent. I thought the other day what if this virus gets into North Korea or sub Africa. Countries that have little ways to take care of the masses and it sometimes seems, have little empathy to go along with it. Places that struggle to feed their people, let along take care of the medical needs of their citizens. It could be happening as we speak because we will never know about it. What about the homeless people in this nation grouped together in makeshift shelters? As we leave, in the home behind us, lives an elderly couple that needed to be in assisted living a long time ago. He’s 93 and basically bed ridden and she is 89 and has cancer. For all practical purposes they are helpless. They need to sell their home and go into a care facility. We talked with her the other day and she says she can’t do that because she can’t part with her stuff. Their middle age kids don’t seem to care or live too far away to help. Hopefully social services will get involved and force their hand. I can’t imagine the sense of hopelessness that must exist inside that house.

So, for Pat and I, we will return to Minnesota and try to stay as cloistered as we can and minimize the risk as best we know how. I hope the leadership in this country can calm things down. Life will go on and hopefully we will have a nice summer and be able to go back to Arizona in the winter safe and well.

LOOKING FOR PEACE

                                             

I’m a restless soul and I have spent most of my life looking for peace. For the most part I have found it in my life but it’s not my life I now worry about. It’s those of my friends and family that are left to live out their lives in this chaotic world. To those of you with a way to the Internet I ask you to look up the late Paul Harvey’s recitation of, “If I were the Devil” on U tube. He did this in 1965 and you would be amazed at how prophetic this piece was and is today. Was Paul some kind of a clairvoyant? No, I believe he was a very smart man. But what he talks about here. Well the handwriting has been on the wall for a long, long time. Here is most of the text.

If I were the devil

If I were the Price of Darkness, I would want to engulf the whole world in Darkness.

I would have a third of its real estate and four fifths of its population, but I would not be happy until I had seized the ripest apple on the tree. 

So, I should set about however necessary to take over the United States.

I would begin with a campaign of whispers. With the wisdom of a serpent, I would whisper to you as I whispered to Eve, “Do as you please.”

To the young I would whisper, “The Bible is a myth.” I would convince them that “Man created God,” instead of the other way around. I would confine that “what is bad is good and what is good is square.”

In the ears of the young married I would whisper that work is debasing, that cocktail parties are good for you. I would caution then not to be “extreme” in religion, in patriotism, in moral conduct.

And the old I would preach to pray—to say after me—Our father, which are in Washington.

Then I’d get organized. I’d educate authors in how to make lurid literature exciting so that anything else would appear dull uninteresting.

I‘d threaten T.V. with dirtier movies and vice versa.

I’d infiltrate unions and urge more loafing, less work. Idle hands usually work for me.

I’d peddle narcotics to whom I could. I’d sell alcohol to ladies and gentlemen of distinction. I’d tranquilize the rest with pills.

If I were the devil, I would encourage schools to refine young intellects, but neglect to discipline emotions; let those run wild.

I’d designate an atheist to front for me before the highest courts and I’d get preachers to say she’s right. 

With flattery and promises of power I would get the courts to vote against God and in favor of pornography.

Then in his own churches I’d substitute psychology for religion and deify science.

If I were Satin, I’d make the symbol of Easter an egg and Christmas a bottle.

If I were the devil, I’d take from those who have and give to those who wanted until I had killed the incentive of the ambitious. Then my police state would force everybody back to work.

I were satin I’d just keep doing what I am doing and let the whole world go to hell as sure as the devil 

WHAT HAPPENED TO US?

                                                

I have often wondered what this world would be like if we went back to the way it was in 1941.Why is 1941 significant? If for no other reason, it was the year I was born. Come back and imagine if you would, one black telephone in each house and you had to tell the operator the number of whom you were calling and she made the connection for you. Most homes were without a television set. Milk trucks coming to your house to deliver milk each morning. No microwave ovens and lots of people still heating their homes with fuel oil or coal, or as my father did, burning wood he cut the fall before. If it snowed you cleared the drive with a shovel and most lawn mowers had only push power to turn the blades. Some people still had a refrigerator that kept food cold by evaporating a block of ice delivered by the local ice man.

There were rural homes that still didn’t have electricity. They pumped their water with a hand pump and they milked the cows by hand. Many still used horses or mules. Tractors were a luxury. Cars were basic; an engine, a transmission you shifted by hand using a clutch and brakes, you practically had to stand on to stop. If you wanted music you sang as there was no radio. You pulled out the choke to get it started and, in the winter, when it was very cold, well you didn’t even try. The heater was a little box with a door you opened that fried your feet.

There were no fitness clubs just surviving kept you fit. No Mc Donald’s or Burger king or Dairy Queen. No drive up for anything. Stores were open 8 to 5 except Friday nights they stayed open late for the farmers. Everything was closed on Sunday. Most people went to church on Sunday and families spent a lot more time together. What else didn’t they have? Drug problems, mass shootings and a lot of less divorces. It wasn’t perfect; there were people who would still rob the bank and alcoholism was a problem, then like it is now but there was a whole lot more respect for the law. You didn’t buy your way out of trouble very often. Could we live like that again? Maybe people over sixty might be able too.

Change is inevitable and just for the comfort factor, a lot of this change was for good. But sometimes we throw the good out with the bad. Lawyers and judges have litigated the rules we lived by to make them worthless. We have such a drug problem we are choosing which ones to make legal because we can’t just keep locking people up. Morals went out the window a long time ago and if it feels good, it has to be good, by today’s standards. We fill the airwaves and the internet with filth and sex and then wonder were all the perverted behavior comes from. We quit caring about each other and now we advocate that the government needs to do that for us. The schools need to make our kids into good people and feed them and make sure they get proper medical care because we are way too busy for that.

Medically, we made some great advances and people that can afford the care are living longer. Those who can’t, can only hope that someday they will be able too. It seems ironic that some people can’t afford, or get their insurance to cover their insulin but others are only complaining about why their insurance won’t cover their Botox treatments. I have lived from one end of this era to the other and I thank the good lord for letting me be born during this time. If nothing else it taught me right from wrong. May God bless America. I can still say that right?