Category: Memories

For what it’s worth

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments
Looks like the tree’s bringing the heat.

Some like it hot, they say.

Not me, Bubba.

There are moments when the summertime heat feels almost bearable. Say, when there are no pressing matters and a pool sits nearby. There is an iced beverage sweating in a tall glass and a broad umbrella throwing a soupçon of shade. Someone else is picking up the tabs.

But even then. …

When I was a kid on Randolph AFB the San Antonio summers were murderous. Crouch under the Fedders window unit and play board games or haunt the officers’ club pool like a toasty ghost.

Tucson? Don’t get me started. I drove a 1974 Datsun pickup with no air conditioning, and my guest-house rental (also sans a/c) was a long, slow-rolling, late-afternoon drive from The Arizona Daily Star, where I labored in dubious battle with Young Republicans and old fascists.

Mostly I passed my days at the pool there, too. Not at the Star; at the University of Arizona, where the coeds weren’t yelling at me all the time unless they caught me drooling.

Now here I am in The Duck! City, where everything I do makes life hotter and the windows of opportunity are quickly closed and curtained against the sun.

Cycling. Running. Cooking. Especially cooking. Sometimes I feel as though it’s me browning in the skillet.

Not an early riser by nature, I find myself compelled to rush through the morning’s rituals so I can get out and back in while Tōnatiuh is still warming up in the bullpen.

Coffee. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, the Albuquerque Journal. More coffee, with toast this time. The litter box. Not for me, for Miss Mia, who has already been in there a time or two while I was ethering my sputtering carburetor. Then the baño for me.

A bite of breakfast — yogurt with granola, oatmeal with nuts and dried fruit, a mandarine, or some combination of these. No tea, it’s already too hot, and we don’t want to overclock the old CPU. Dole out some water to the parched foliage.

And then — hey, what’s that sound, everybody look, what’s going down? — it’s raining. Not for long, not in any quantity (0.01 inch), and it evaporates from the chip-seal in the cul-de-sac before the echo of the raindrops fades.

But still. Music to the ears. Maybe I’ll have that cup of tea after all.

Hey, cool.

Going Fourth

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
Incoming! No, that’s outgoing. And not very far, either. Them’s the rules.

The cul-de-sac was rockin’ last night.

Grandpa Doug was in charge of the boom-boom. We got a courtesy call from the fire marshals. And the crowd — well, you could actually call it a crowd. Lots of folks, not all of them residents of the cul-de-sac. Young and old, men and women, right and left, brown, black, white. Your basic melting pot.

Old Glory, catching some rays.

We stayed up a little later than is our practice, and I slept a little later than is practical for a Fourth of July with a heat advisory in effect.

So by the time we’d broken fast, handled our morning chores, and just kinda-sorta gotten our poop more or less in a group, the menu of exercise options had shrunk like a spider on a hotplate.

We settled on a short road ride, which inexplicably saw me roll off without a water bottle. Duh. So we had to circle back after a couple miles to collect that, after which I decided we might as well keep on heading south since that was where the wind was coming from.

For old times’ sake we noodled on over to have a look at Herself the Elder’s first residence here in The Duck! City, now a private home rather than an assisted-living residence.

Then we got a little random, hopping onto and off of a couple bike paths linking various suburban streets, before agreeing that it was just about as hot as we cared to have it and rolling back to the rancheroo for some light refreshment.

By noon the temperature was 93° if you believe our little weather widget, and 88° if you don’t. And the weather wizards say we ain’t seen nothing yet.

When the high temp matches my average heart rate on a road ride I sometimes think about getting back in the pool, churning out the laps in the cool, chlorinated fluids, where the distracted drivers and earbudded pedestrians mostly aren’t.

But I don’t know that I want to be the 69-year-old dude in the banana hammock trying to relive his glory years (Mitchell High School swim team, 1969 South Central League champs). Aren’t the bib shorts and Lycra jersey bad enough?

Retracing my steps

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
This is what a juniper dusted with snow looks like at 5:14 in the ayem.

I meant to post this pic the other day and completely spaced it whilst mumbling on and on about podcasting and whatnot.

We woke on Wednesday to a measurable amount of precip’, not enough to resolve the megadrought, but just enough to keep me off a bicycle. Instead I went for a short run once the temps rose a bit.

I have no idea what made these tracks in the backyard. Fox? Coyote? La Llorona of Hobbiton?

Ten years ago I would come to The Duck! City from Bibleburg in February to get away from winter.

I’d check into the Hampton at Carlisle and I-40 and ride the bike all the doo-dah day, and in shorts and short sleeves, too.

Hit the Mexican restaurants, or fetch a sack of tasty treats from the Wholeazon Amafoods across the interstate from the motel. Binge-watch HBO in the room come evening.

I had no idea that in a year we’d be living down here. Zee-ro. If you’da told me I’da laughed in your face.

“Herself is going to get a job at Sandia National Labs that pays more money in one year than I’ve made in my entire life? We’re moving to Albuquerque? Ho, ho. Pull the other leg so I’ll be even when I go out to run in the snow. Albuquerque. Hee, and also haw.”

Well, she did, and we did, and here I am, running in February on the New Mexican snow.

Symphony for Voices in the Head

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 34 Comments
And a-one, and a-two. …

Maybe it’s time for a stroll down Musical Memory Lane.

What/who were you listening to while growing up, or at least older?

My folks were into the big bands, so we had Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman and the like blaring out of the stereo whenever they were in the mood (ho ho ho).

I liked that just fine, and still do. But we all chart our own musical courses, and mine led into some very different waters.

The Beatles hit “The Ed Sullivan Show” in February 1964, and while my sister was wowed, I snorted and thought, “These guys will never be as big as Elvis.”  This was the first installment in our “I Will Never Be Smart” series, which continues 59 years later.

I eventually got into the Fab Four, like everyone else, but early on I leaned toward the Animals, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, The Byrds, the Beach Boys, Simon and Garfunkel, The Sir Douglas Quintet and just about any act coming out of Motown — the Temptations, the Four Tops, the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.

This goes to show the power of TV and AM radio in the mid-Sixties. Randolph AFB, Texas, was not exactly a multicultural paradise. To be blunt, it was light on Brits, Blacks, and surfers. But Ed Sullivan, Dick Clark, and AM radio helped us find them anyway.

If AM was the gateway drug, FM was the hard stuff. When we got transferred to Bibleburg in 1967 I discovered KKFM, and later KILO; the family console stereo had an FM receiver built in, and so did my mother’s 1962 Mercedes-Benz 220S.

So shit got loud, is what. Led Zeppelin. Black Sabbath. Iron Butterfly. Steppenwolf.

But along about the same time I was stumbling across Bob Dylan and Arlo Guthrie, David Bowie and Jimi Hendrix, Sly & the Family Stone and Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd and Moody Blues, Cream, Traffic and Mountain. Then it was The Allman Brothers and Elton John, Leon Russell and Santana. The Stones were still hanging in there, but the Beatles were off the back.

There was a long stretch of country-hippie during my second tour in college — Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Flying Burrito Brothers, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Charlie Daniels Band, Jimmy Buffett, Jerry Jeff Walker, etc. — which made about as much sense as soul and surf, as I was a middle-class white boy from the ’burbs.

John Prine, Emmylou Harris and Bonnie Raitt made the cut too, for obvious reasons. And the shapeshifting outfit George Carlin once called “Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Merrill, Lynch, Fenner, Pierce, Sacco & Vanzetti” was always warbling in the patchouli background wherever dope was smoked.

Tom Waits stumbled into my playlist somehow, after the Eagles covered his “Ol’ 55.” Los Lobos, too, possibly because I was running around with a crew of San Luis Valley vatos. Where Parliament-Funkadelic came from I have no idea, but suddenly they were there and they stayed and wasn’t nothin’ we could do but put a glide in our stride and a dip in our hip and head on up to the Mothership.

Rockers like ZZ Top and Bob Seger proved invaluable for road trips, which I undertook regularly, being indifferent to long-term employment.

I tiptoed into jazz via the back door — fusion combos like Crusaders and Return to Forever, and smooth-jazz dudes like Grover Washington Jr., Stanley Turrentine, and George Benson — and kept one ear tuned to classical because I had played piano and flute as a sprout.

This was a breeze, thanks to NPR. In Corvallis I could pick up three different NPR affiliates, each with its own specialty — jazz, classical, and whatever. Samey same in Bibleburg, with its excellent stations KRCC and KCME, and Denver with KUVO and KVOD.

I was late to punk, which may explain the Green Day discs in my collection. The Cars, Stray Cats, and Brian Setzer Orchestra are in there too, as are Stevie Ray Vaughan, James McMurtry, Planxty, Elvis Costello, Miles Davis, Steve Earle, The Pogues, Warren Zevon, Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Frank Zappa, Lyle Lovett, The Bueva Vista Social Club, Dire Straits, and Half Man Half Biscuit.

Good God awmighty. Each of the voices in my head likes a different kind of music! No wonder they’re arguing all the damn’ time.