Thoughts about the dream

The world I live in is like an insane asylum. I look around and still, as I did when I was a teenager, see what looks to me like lunacy on all sides. I'm in it and I participate voluntarily. I'm essentially retired, in that I only work as a matter of choice, not of economic necessity. Who is the little boy speaking German? German dich means "yourself." Who is yourself?  Me, of course, the child-like me that still exists inside. But what is the dream saying about my life today that I need to hear?

Wake up call

My cell phone rang at 815am while I was fast asleep in the middle of a dream. It was Mary Lou, who got up at 7 and went to the gym asking me if I wanted to go for a bike ride. I was groggy but said yes, as I haven't been getting much exercise this summer.

In the dream, I was a patient in a mental hospital. I seemed to be fine, however; perhaps I had just recovered from an episode of depression and was ready to be discharged. The patients on my ward were leaving as a group for recreational therapy of some kind.  I was the last one out the portal. As I put on tennis shoes, I was having a conversation with the guy in charge of the activity wherein I commented that it seemed my participation was voluntary but I was choosing to go along. We walked outside and I could see the campus was made of brick buildings, old but in very good condition. I remarked that the routines of this place were very similar to ones where I'd worked in the past. Going up some stairs, I encountered a little boy who spoke to me in German. I replied in bad German "Wer ist dich." Then the phone rang.

The dream was fresh in my mind and I Googled the German immediately. It should have been "Wer bist du?" (Who are you?). I wasn't sure what "wer" means until I looked it up but I knew "ist dich" is not grammatical and "bist du" is.

There were problems getting the air pressure up to 60 psi when I tried to pump up the tires, so Mary Lou went back to the gym for an aerobics class. I think I'll eat something and then go for a ride by myself, as I rode my bike around the block and it felt OK. Maybe there's something wrong with the pump.

What more can I want from my friends

than to be in your company?

Me and girls

In case it’s not obvious, I’m basically a self-conscious, highly sensitive, imaginative, anxiety-prone introvert who feels everyone’s pain and fear and wants to know and understand everything. Since I was maybe 4 or 5 years old I loved girls. I was continually falling in love with the cute little girls in Disney movies like Priscilla in Johnny Tremaine, girls in my kindergarten class, pictures in magazines of blondes, brunettes, redheads, any hair color was great, pretty much any age-appropriate feminine object I happened to look at caused a romantic flame to ignite.

My best friend from the neighborhood was a kid named Max Clark. Max lived two houses down on Milledge Terrace as far back as memory goes and he was as girl-crazy as I was. Interestingly, we both had great Moms who loved us unconditionally. I had no idea what to do with my girl fixation and was, of course, shy and anxious about actually talking to real girls. It seemed like they were always one up on me. The few times in my elementary school career girls reciprocated my infatuation seemed like random miracles.

Even during the two unsettling 3rd and 4th grade years of the Yankee Sojourn in Rockville I got an affirming response from a blonde girl named Dale I danced with at some school party. The jerk was the in dance and I had some pretty good moves, having gotten bitten by the pop music bug about the time I started 3rd grade up there. How I got up the nerve to ask her is another question. Maybe she asked me; those Northern girls could be pretty aggressive. I recall going over to new pal Danny Muller’s house across the street on Marianna Drive and listening to his big sister, Shirley’s albums like Blue Hawaii on her record player. They played a lot of great R&B on the radio (like Party Lights, Quarter to Three, and the Locomotion!) laying the groundwork for my subsequent fascination with and appreciation of all things African-American.

After I returned to Athens, I was reunited with Max, who was a really eccentric and funny smart kid of the general type I’ve often had as close friends (as individuals they’re all quite unique). The Clarks were one of the anchors that prevented my world from floating away. Max was the oldest of three boys and a little sister, Ceci (for Cecilia), an afterthought, who appeared well after Jeff and Ken. Louie M. Clark, Sr. was a chain-smoking, tattooed Navy WW2 combat vet (he was on a destroyer that took a hit from a Kamikaze) with a very deep voice who sold cars for a living. Max’s Mom, Ann, was a warm and nurturing homemaker with a lovely southern accent. I spent a lot of time playing with Max and his family, often sitting in his father’s den reading volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia from the shelf cover to cover. I now recognize that wasn’t entirely normal for a fifth grade boy.

Max and I compared lists of our favorite girls from school, rank-ordered, noting much overlap (Max died in 1996 and I won’t embarrass the living by naming names). I would obsess about brief interactions with them at school or on the sidewalk riding my bike home and try to come up with clever and funny things to say next time out.

Then, Fate dealt another blow: Max’s family decided to move from Athens to the tiny hamlet of Ila in Madison County, 25 miles and a world away from Milledge Terrace. Louie was from Sale City, a very small, very obscure town in south Georgia and he had ambitions to be someone. His chances must have seemed a lot better out there in the boonies. Things did work out for him eventually- his used car business didn’t do so well but Louie became a Republican state representative of some influence in later years. I realize a friend moving away is a routine event in modern life but it can nonetheless be a significant loss for a child.

  

Benjy (now Ben) Anderson, who lived a little further down the street and already hung out with Max and me, became my new best friend. Ben was also a very sharp cookie, though not overtly wacko like Max and myself. We also had a shared passion, sports. Ben and I walked over to the UGA baseball field after school and sold concessions to the sparse fans in the bleachers to make a little spending money. Georgia wasn’t exactly a baseball power. We went to basketball games, too, even though Georgia was mediocre or worse in that sport as well. But I had my parents’ season tickets for football which, back in ancient times, got you in to every sport at no additional charge, even if you didn’t hawk boiled peanuts. I was no less obsessed with girls but I think it became more of an internal matter.

Seventh grade was a sea change for all my peers in Athens. It was the Fall of 1964 and for that year only, the entire grade was sent to the aging campus of Child Street School on the other side of town off Prince Avenue, I suppose due to a facility crunch. (The venerable building was burned down by an arsonist just a year or two later.) The kids from Barrow were mixed with mostly unfamiliar faces from all over town. I did know a number of boys who went to the Athens YMCA under the direction of legendary youth leader Cobern Kelley. More significantly, there were a host of new, gorgeous and smartly-dressed young ladies to admire from a distance as well as a changing social order that wreaked further havoc on my already tenuous adjustment.

At Barrow, the children of relatively wealthy business and professional families blended smoothly with kids whose parents were college teachers and others of lesser means. I knew that a few kids’ families were way richer than mine because they had the incredible toys and sporting gear I only touched on the pages of Christmas catalogs. My Dad taught at Georgia in the unprestigious School of Education and both my parents were several years older than the peer average. My folks grew up during the Depression and both, with wisdom I've come to appreciate, valued simplicity and moderation over conspicuous consumption. It didn’t matter to them one little bit that other people in town lived in bigger houses with fancier furniture and wore flashier outfits. The kids with money dressed stylishly in the preppy fashions of the day while my sisters and I wore budget clothing and shoes. I became well aware of the difference by the time I reached seventh grade since my two older sisters as well as my peers talked about these matters on an ongoing basis. As the year wore on, boys whose houses I often visited during elementary school began forming social cliques from which I was unceremoniously excluded. The cliques included most of the highly desirable girls, placing them well out of my already truncated reach.  Aside from the money gap, my quirky intellectualism, general awkwardness, and considerably anxiety about the opposite sex already created barriers to the kind of social success I saw old friends achieving. I held onto some hope of being part of the so-called popular kids for a few more years but for all practical purposes, the die was cast.

In a different time period with a different set of personal experiences, I would have gravitated naturally to another social group, the smart kids. These young men and ladies mostly came from homes similar to mine, with parents who were highly educated but lacked material wealth. Many of these kids were from other parts of the country, the North or the Midwest, and had moved here at various points in time when a parent, typically the father, got a job with the University. The newcomers had strange accents and were unlikely to become part of the in crowd but I would imagine they were accepted more easily by the kids who studied a lot and made straight A’s. I would have to imagine because I had no interest in being a part of the clean-cut, well-behaved, apple polishing set who made their parents and teachers proud. I wanted to be cool. And as Fate would have it, another avenue of achieving coolness was already opening.

At 8pm on February 9, 1964, I and 73 million other Americans sat in front of our TV sets and watched the first US nationally broadcast musical performance by the Beatles. Their signature songs had been on the radio for weeks and I was a big pop music fan long before that. But to see the incredible positive energy the Fab Four generated from the stage and the unbelievable impact on their audience, especially on the girls who unleashed wild screams above the amplified drums and guitars, was life changing. If these four working class English guys could do that, why couldn’t I?

I already owned and knew how to play an electric guitar, bought with money earned from throwing newspapers into people's yards from my bicycle, and had developed some decent chops, thanks to introductory lessons from my old friend, Chip Condon, who by now was an accomplished musician. I had brought the instrument to school for Field Day at the end of the sixth grade and impressed my friends with my skills. Unbeknownst to me or anyone else, the Beatles were the point men of a countercultural revolution about to break out and very nearly turn Western Civilization upside down. As I tuned in raptly to the cutting edge of the tightly rocking bands of the British invasion, soon to be followed by rebellious American garage bands emulating the Rolling Stones and then a psychedelic explosion of creative music, I was 11 years old and I was being drawn to the means of the end I was seeking- brilliant social success, creative fun, lots of money and, best of all, being the object of desire of those gorgeous, crazy girls who moments earlier were tantalizingly normal and untouchable.

Keith Strickland remembers David Brown

David is the first person I met when my family moved back to Athens in the summer of 1968. We moved to a house on Saint James Drive. David and his family lived on the same street. One afternoon I was walking in the neighborhood when a sassy gang of kids in a convertible dressed for the beach and holding a big beach ball stops, and the driver, David who I didn't know yet asked, "Which way to California?" Later that summer David stopped by my house one afternoon when I was sitting on the front porch blasting Hendrix from my parents big mahogany console stereo. He and I connected through music and everything counter culture. I remember thinking, this guy is the coolest. Just as we were getting to know each other David mysteriously left town. He drove to California... San Francisco in fact.

He was cool like that.

Happy trails my friend, until we meet again.

(Posted on my Facebook page this date)

Me and David Brown (a brief memoir)

David Brown and I were born in Athens, Georgia a few days apart in July 1952. His parents and my Mom were early members of St. James Methodist Church (my Dad worshipped every Saturday and Sunday at the Church of Golf), bringing us together at Sunday School (along with the legendary/infamous jokester, Chip Condon) as preschoolers. Besides being extremely bright and full of goodwill, David had fiery red hair, a strangely distinctive voice and a cheerfully sarcastic, nonconformist sense of humor, rendering him unforgettable from the get go. Throw Chip into the mix and you’ve got real trouble.

When we were all in the second grade at David C. Barrow Elementary School, David and I were pulled from class to undergo a battery of intellectual and educational tests. This would have been in the Winter or Spring of 1960, well before the widespread implementation of Gifted Education is US public schools. On the basis of the results, both of us were slated to skip the third grade and become fourth graders in September 1961.  That is in fact what happened to David. I, however, was spared the dubious distinction when my Dad (who himself had skipped two grades back in the 1920s due to his mathematical brilliance) took a leave of absence from his assistant professorship at the University of Georgia and accepted a position as director of educational testing for the Montgomery County, Maryland school district. Our family moved to Rockville, MD, in the summer where I began third grade at Aspen Hills Elementary.

In retrospect, I believe neither David nor I were well served, as David now, instead of being one of the youngest third graders at Barrow, was in all likelihood THE youngest fourth grader in Clarke County. On the whole, despite a few redeeming features such as my first Jewish best friend, Howie Pomerantz and my third grade teacher, Mrs. Phillips who once called me “a walking encyclopedia,” I hated Rockville, where people made merciless fun of my southern accent (“Say, bicycle again, haha!”) and I was bullied by a big kid at my bus stop for mouthing off (a recurring problem of my youth) and kicked out of Cub Scouts for taking off my shirt on an outing to Great Falls (I mean, really? In Georgia we took off our shirts and shoes when it got hot!). To top it off, I had an extremely mean battle-ax teacher, the evil, red-headed, overstuffed Mrs. Benjamin, for 4th grade at the newly opened elementary school right down the street from our house. Mrs. Benjamin moved me into a desk at the back of the class for talking too much. Turned out, I was very nearsighted, leaving me entirely unable to decipher anything on the blackboard. After already being subjected to Mrs. Allen in second grade at Barrow, undergoing the ordeal of Rockville threw my academic career pretty much off the rails.

We moved back to Athens, thank God, for my fifth grade year only for me to wind up with Mrs. Allen under a new name, Mrs. Simpson. Three teachers who apparently hated me in my first six years of school was a little much to digest, no doubt contributing, among other things, to my subsequent deep questioning of whether society knew what it was doing. By the time I was in 10th grade, I had concluded firmly it did not.

My next clear memories of David are from junior and senior year, when we both landed in the best and most fun class I ever took, German with the delightfully hilarious Travis J. Stewart. TJ, as we later came to know him, had a lot of personal problems I won’t get into here. But he was a wonderful teacher and with the increasingly zany Megan Timberlake and hottie Karen Cosgrove in German class, a good time was had by all every time out. Not only that, as a bonus I actually learned German, too!

David and I rekindled our friendship in TJ's class, as we both had very kind and caring, highly respectable, do-what-you’re-supposed-to-do-and-don’t-cause-trouble, middle class parents and both of us were in the process of becoming countercultural subversives. One day I brought in a bizarre, stream of consciousness narrative I’d written on notebook paper and shared it with David, who’s reaction was “Why can’t reality be like this?” Another time, David fired off a great German-English pun, “Es ist hell, damit!” which translates as “It is bright therewith.” David dreamed of running off the San Francisco to escape from the numbing conformity of respectable middle-class existence and become a real hippie. I had the career goal of becoming a rock star, as I couldn’t imagine any other form of work I could stand to do. I thought I could achieve this by forming a band with my high school friends, Keith Strickland and Ricky Wilson, and bringing in a kid from Louisville, GA with a psychedelic hot pink Fender Telecaster and the perfect name, Pete Love.

David, however, went all in on his dream- one summer night in 1969, he got in one of his parents’ cars, started driving west, and in a semi-paranoid state, fully expecting to see flashing lights, get pulled over and be arrested at any moment, David didn’t stop until he made it to the Haight-Ashbury. Like, wow! He really did it!  The next time I saw David several years later when he returned to Athens, he had transformed into a self-confident, enlightened man of experience. From the time he got in that car and started driving, as far as I know, David never looked back. 

Escape from the flood

(written Wednesday August 17, 2016)

Back in Athens, tired as usual. I drove over from Baton Rouge on Monday, having postponed plans for a day due to the 500 year flooding of the nearby rivers. The Amite reached 45 feet, 16 feet over flood stage and a new record, inundating Denham Springs, Livingston, Walker and causing I-12 to be closed. Numerous motorist were stranded for long hours on islands of dry roadway. East Baton Rouge Parish experienced major flooding and AT&T customers lost power. Fortunately, our house is on high ground and we use Cox for phone and internet and T-Mobile cellular. However, getting out of town proved iffy. I needed an extra day to clean up my mess in the studio and pack, so it was good I left on Monday. Both I-10 and I-12 were still closed going east and only one road out of Baton Rouge was passable, Highway 30 down Nicholson Drive to St. Gabriel and Geismar. I took it and, despite water on both sides and one place where half the two-lane was submerged, I was able to get on I-10 at Gonzales and proceed to Athens via New Orleans.

I didn't get enough sleep on Monday and got up early to look around. I estimate 90-95% of the personal property in my parents' house was sold in the estate sale. I met with Susan Henderson at 3pm and learned the sale grossed over $5000. The heirs will clear over $3000 of that. I had dinner at Clocked with Dave Stammer, who is in town, and went straight home after that, turning out the lights by 10pm EST. I slept pretty well and got up at 8am local time.

The problem(s) with politicians

1. What they stand for and what they do are two different things that often have little or no connection.

2. They are beholden to very rich and powerful people who are motivated to become even richer and more powerful.

An exception, I believe, is President Obama, pragmatic centrist idealist, actually wants to make a difference and accomplish the things he stands for. He knows what he's up against.

Dr. Meg

What words can we find to convey the laughter and tears, the anguish, the rage and the joy that fill our hearts or to do justice to a life as great and deep as life itself? Being unable to attend Meg’s memorial celebration due to the necessity of travel, yet with you in spirit, I'm humbled to merit mention in the beautiful statement that gives voice to our thoughts and feelings. Love to all of you.