Places I'm Going

Looks like Bedford Falls in summer, don't it. We're flying off tomorrow morning because my youngest vunderkin has been accepted to college here, so we are going to look and see if they want to give her scholarship. It's also trade tuition for where I still work. So it could be free except for room and board. It's 50 miles from Woodstock. Wonder if they still have the streetcar rails running down the main street. I was telling her that the other young things from back there will be in their Easter dresses with their white gloves and Easter bonnets. Probably not. Sos, I'm afraid it will be Wednesday before you hear from me.

I strongly recommend this site: Great and interesting stuff

http://www.lettersofnote.com/

or this for fun

http://literarystamps.blogspot.com/

or this for just good weirdness

http://ajourneyroundmyskull.blogspot.com/2009/05/poets-ranked-by-beard-weight.html


Here's a picture of the folks I met last Saturday

Not a great photo. Its a Meetup Group of Bluegrass musicians that meet every week end to play. The banjo and I are in love. Its like Boy Scouts for little banjos. We're gonna have fun.

Haiku & Poem by Judy Liggett- the friend that called and read them to me on the phone

In spring,
 how can one be sad

After feasting on cherry blossoms

     and mockingbird song?

Bird Song

Every evening

Driving  home from work

I roll across a high ridge

Where suddenly the sky

Expands to panoramic.

In the bitterly cold winter evenings,

The sun glowed like a furnace on the horizon.

Every evening the sky was a canvas

Of radiating sumi and pink calligraphic clouds

In art's freest expression of spirit.

Now in the spring

Driving home from work

I  open my eyes suddenly

To expanses of blue and the sun

Shines like a gold medallion

High up over the horizon.

This evening

A raven flew over my car:

A flat, black silhouette

Of spread wing feathers

Painted across panoramic blue.

While walking,

I saw its twin:

A white seagull

Arched under a faint, translucent moon.

 Haiku and Poem by Judy Liggett

Weird places to have slept or not have slept

I decided at twenty I would hitch-hike over to Paris Illinois from Bloomington Indiana to see my father who I had only seen once (at my high school graduation) since I was twelve. My mother had put a restraining order on him because she feared he would try to kill her. (Which he might of- but that's another story. I wrote a book about all of that "It Knows You By No Other Name" available at Amazon) Anyhow, I got as far as Terra Haute Indiana and the sun was going down, so I went to a Salvation Army Flop House for the night. It was late when I checked in and they lead me back to a large room filled with bunk beds and a lot of men snoring. I was given a bunk and told I couldn't sleep in my shoes. (I was afraid someone would steal them in the night- I had heard stories) In the morning there was a long line to the one bathroom and you had 15 minutes to pee and wash up and then a long line at breakfast. I skipped the breakfast part, I had money to buy my own. One night is probably enough for a lifetime. I'd rather sleep out beside a highway. You understand why the homeless don't want to go to a shelter.

There's a story by Flannery O'Conner where a crazy girl goes to the line of guys waiting to get into the flophouse in the evening and calls out Papa and they all break ranks to come to her. I'm glad I missed the line going in.

Weird places to spend the night

We just watched a old remake of The Member of The Wedding (Carson McCullers novel and play and two movies) I thought I was getting the one with Julie Harris, but it was the remake, which wasn't bad. The end of this version Frankie runs away and ends up back at the bar/restaurant. It made me think of one night in Bloomington Indiana when I was 15 maybe? The little group of us guys that worked at the A & W Drive-In would do this little number where each of us would tell our parents that we were staying over at one of the other guy's house and then we'd all go down south of town at a place called Shit Creek and camp out and drink and smoke dope. I can't recall exactly what happened, but myself and Steve Shertzer found ourselves downtown with none of the other two or three and we both had told our parents lies and we both had no alcohol and no dope and it was too late to try to go home. I lived 10 miles north of town and he lived 5 miles south of town. I remember we were trying to get a college student to buy us some Vodka, but we had no luck. And somehow we ended up in the alley behind the city jail and the guys up in the cells were talking to to us. We had money and we getting tired so we checked into a sleazy hotel and shared a room and a bed. I wonder now what the desk clerk thought. There were no questions asked. I was 6'5 or 6'6 by then and everyone thought I was older. We slept with our clothes on, because we were so weirded out by the circumstance.

Weird Places I Lived -Part 2

I walked into New Orleans in '73 with backpack and a little money. I found a large place (by poor standards) over on Rampart Street that had one large room and a little kitchen and a bath down the hall. I luckily found a job the first day at the first place I walked into - a high end printing shop on Carondelet- I thought I wanted to be a printer. The bad part was the little place on Rampart smelled of urine and cigars and you could see the courtyard below through the little kitchen floor and the landlady didn't allow guests up to the rooms (I was on the second floor) I scrubbed the walls and the floors, but the smell just wouldn't go away. Also I was a horny 21 year old. So I moved to Decatur St. to a one little room deal. It looked a little like this. I lived on the bottom floor next to the main building. (Behind that white street door there) The room was lousy, but the landlord gave me rent credit for fixing it up, it had two windows and you had to go outside and into the main building to take a shower in the morning. The landlord liked me and bought me curtains and liked to get get up so he could hear me sing in the shower in the morning and he always made sure that I had my own roll of toilet paper (just in case there wasn't any in the bathroom). - I've always depended on the kindness of strangers- An older gay guy had the bigger apartment next to me and we were friendly. Upstairs was an middle-aged alcoholic printer and next to him a divorced drunk cop down from Ohio. The two guys upstairs adopted me and we drank together some times. The printer would start with whiskey & milk about 5 PM every day. I got tired of it after a while and wanted some green, so I moved out of the Quarter to way up on Dante Street in the river bend area up past Tulane. The ceiling of the room collapsed shortly after I moved out as I described earlier.

Weird Places I Have Lived

When I came to Los Angeles, I was following my wife who had come here to take a job as a mother's helper to a rich Sikh woman who had just had a baby. She had brought our daughter with her from where we lived in Tucson. She had rejoined the Sikh religion while we were there. We were have trouble finding a place to live that we could afford and were offered a room in a house that was a Sikh single womens' ashram. I smoked tobacco and ate meat, but not on the premises. Had an interview with this dude

over why he thought it was necessary to give every one new names (like my daughter). He was the guru and not very bright - he had been a professional wrestler in India before immigrating to LA. He told me that United States people didn't know who they were and America was a great melting pot. All the women were given kaur as a second name and all the men were given singh. I was known to the community as Dan-singh.
I learned about yoga, which I do now regularly.
Anyhow, the Sikhs do not believe in cutting one's hair, so at night it looked like this around the house

which I didn't mind in the least bit, being the hair idiot I am. The house broke up because one woman went to India and another moved back up north to her boyfriend and my wife and I found a gig being apartment managers.

Tom Rush

Remember

A friend just called to read me her poem. Wish I had it to post it here. We're all busted in our own way.