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My mom tells me that June 29, 1951 was the happiest
day of her life. I don’t remember it. I’m sure it wasn’t my favorite although
it was my first. The Bay Area of California was a nice place to be a kid.
Lots of sun and ice cream. Summers we went to Santa Cruz and heard Pat
Boone on the radio and got plenty of sand in our little butt cracks. Moving
to Kentucky in 1959 was emigrating to a foreign land with too many rules:
you had to be a Christian, no shirts off in the summer, say “Yes Mam” and
“No Mam” to the stern, drawling teachers with kleenexes stuck up their
sleeves. At Unitarian Church we learned to fight the good fight and play
ping pong and table hockey. In 1965 fate scooped me up again and dropped
me down river to the land of the redder neck where I learned that white
and rich was best and I didn’t quite make the cut. I stayed there long
enough to carve out a little niche to be torn away from again. This time
a 180 to an expensive arts prep school in Michigan you’ve probably heard
of where I learned I was eighth best at what I’d used to be first best
at. By the time I graduated, something was happnin here and there and everywhere
and I quickly started smoking lots of it. I got a reasonable facsimile
of hip and poured out my soul to the soundhole and my knee at Midwestern
Coffee Houses til getting back to the land was hipper. Since then I’ve
moved there and back, quit looking for work, and refined the manly art
of getting by.Two years ago I started chuckling. That’s all folks.
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