My Consciousness

Hotspot Returns
The sun is about to come up on this Saturday morning.

And, the hotspot has come up again on my phone, so I am doing this from the comfort of my room...

I didn't play last night.
 It was raining pretty hard off and on, something that I caught glimpses of in between nodding off on the couch and waking up at various times.

At one point, I must have gone into the bedroom to maybe lie down for a few hours half expecting to be woken by a text, perhaps from Lilly, telling me that she spoke to the State Police, and I was OK to play in front of her house, once again, or maybe from Jacob, telling me that he would stop by, during his Friday activities; which seem to include riding into New Orleans with Bob, his guardian, who does his Christian radio show on 800 AM, at 4 PM.

Neither occurred, and I wound up getting about 8 hours of sleep before waking up, full of energy, and ready to go, at about the time I would usually be in the middle of playing at the Lilly Pad.

It was still raining, otherwise I might have gone down and tried to play from 1 AM until whenever.

I think having my playing spot taken affected me at a deeper level than I was originally aware of.

It was easy to go with the "everything happens for a reason," and "when one door closes another one opens" B.S. for a while, but, waking up at midnight and wondering where my next dollar was going to come from was something I could feel in my stomach.

It's a familiar feeling from other times I have stayed in -like knowing that a party is in full swing somewhere, and I wasn't invited, type of thing...

Dixie Lily

And, then I started to put a few pieces of the puzzle together...the cosmic puzzle.

I had fallen asleep with the song Dixie Lily, by Elton John on repeat in the next room, faint enough in volume to have been almost subliminal.

That album, 'Caribou" was probably the first album I ever bought, as an 11 year old. And I would guess that I have listened to it at least 400 times, maybe more like a thousand.

It was one of those albums where almost all the songs took turns being my favorite, bumping another one from the same record out of the top spot.

Come for "The Bitch is Back," stay for "Solar Prestige A Gammon," type of thing..

I bought it using "my own" money, because, at the age of 10, I had started working. So, the purchase of it was not subject to the scrutiny of my parents. I was old enough to ride my bike to the record store and spend my own money.

They might have steered me away from the queer looking guy on the front cover, had they been plunking down their own cash.

I had started caddying, the summer after sixth grade, at a Country Club about a mile from our house as the crow flies, setting the same alarm clock that had woken me for school back even an hour further.

This was after having heard about the opportunity through some of the neighborhood kids, with one of them throwing in: "Yeah, but you'll never make it; you have to be strong enough to carry a Kangaroo bag for eighteen holes; you'll never make it through the front nine; you'd better forget it!"

No, I didn't know what a Kangaroo bag was, but  I would learn, along with the lesson that there would always be kids who would say things like: "You'd better forget it," like Jeffrey LaBelle had, probably hoping that I would fail for never trying, and would be relegated to riding my bike around all day, with wheelies and skidding and setting up little ramps to do daredevil stunts being the highlights of my summer vacation, with "bagging" candy bars from Baronne's Pharmacy being my main source of income, in other words, basically living Jeffrey LaBelle's life.
I Learn That People Will Work With You
But, caddying the first time, I found out that club members would lighten a Kangaroo bag for a particularly skinny 11 year old kid like myself, by removing a couple dozen practice balls from one of the compartments, jettisoning a second sand wedge that was only used on a different course which had courser sand, and perhaps detaching the heavy umbrella if there wasn't a cloud in the sky.

Eating healthy is only a matter of

recognizing certain shades of green

The members seemed to appreciate the fact that us kids were working over the summer vacation, and a lot of them, especially the one's who were in the "nobody ever gave me anything; I had to work hard for everything I have" camp, would kind of take us under their wing, and give advice that turned out to be pretty solid, like "If you're smart enough to go to college, do; cause there are plenty of kids too fucked up to even finish high school; let them clean your toilet!" Solid advice.

These were mostly the doctors and lawyers and wealthy businessmen of the world.
My dad might have been able to afford a membership there, but drove about 15 miles to play golf at the Westminster Country Club instead -a more "working class" place.
A membership at Oak Hill Country Club may have come at the expense of our family staying only one week, instead of two, during our annual pilgrimage to Cape Cod each summer, or the quality of schools my sister and I were sent to.

Westminster Country Club

This was one of the un-sung hero aspects of my father, and I am still just coming to appreciate him in his entirety, at this point in my life.  Besides, he probably enjoyed the company of the Westminster guys more.

At some point during the long drive to Cape Cod, dad would try to get us to be grateful for being able to take a two week vacation each summer, and would point out that some kids weren't so fortunate and would be stuck in a hot -not even house, apartment- all summer.

I was able to envision flies buzzing around paper plates of macaroni and cheese, and kids bickering constantly, hating one another because they were poor, and taking their poverty-stricken-ness out on each other, as I rode in the back seat of our 1969 Bonneville.

But, despite getting the picture, I still had trouble feeling the appropriate gratitude. I was just too much of a fatalist, and had lived no other life to compare the one I was living to; something I couldn't articulate from the back seat, but would, I guess, 50 years later, as I sit here.

By alternating between left and right shoulders, I found that I could indeed make it through 18 holes toting a Kangaroo bag (there really should have sounded -from out of nowhere- the cello notes from the movie Jaws, when I was told whom I was going to be caddying for and was told: "(cue the music) and there's his bag, right there."

In fact, as the weeks went by I no longer had to switch shoulders. I was becoming stronger than Jeffrey LaBelle.

I would have made, probably 5 dollars (the 4 dollar "caddy fee" plus a dollar tip) for an 18 hole round that took about 2 and a half hours.

After that successful outing, the question hung in the air: "Should I come back tomorrow?"

Wouldn't it ruin a summer vacation and defeat the purpose of it, to be getting up at 5 AM and working? Shouldn't I be luxuriating in bed until the sun was high in the sky?

But then I thought: What am I going to do, sleep late every morning and then just fritter away the days, riding my bike and running around in the woods, and "playing" with other kids? Like Jeffrey "You'd better just forget about it" LaBelle?

It was probably the thought of the others in the neighborhood riding their bikes around all day because they were bored and had barely any money to spend, outside of some allowance of maybe 5 bucks a week for mowing the lawn and taking out the trash that made me decide to become a regular at the caddie shack.

And, I soon had a reputation of being "an excellent caddie."

Part of this was because, unlike my stouter contemporaries, who might have found carrying a Kangaroo bag to be child's play, and could in fact caddie "double" (you guessed it; one Kangaroo bag on each shoulder -alternating them would be pointless) I was light, and could run faster than them.

If my golfer's ball came off the tee askance, and started to drift towards the woods on the right; even if I had posted up on the left of the fairway, I could sprint to the other side, closing the gap to where the ball would go by the time it arrived. So, I would be right there when it entered the woods and started to careen off tree trunks, rocks, etc. like a pinball, in a good position to observe where it came to rest.

After I gave the sign that I had found the ball and it was still in bounds, was probably when my guy, back on the tee started to think: "Yeah, he's an excellent caddie," and I would be getting the 5 dollars instead of 4.

I was intending to take this secret to my grave, but I guess I never counted on ever having a blog:
If my guy's ball had wound up in an unplayable lie (and it was going to cost him a stroke after he had to take a "free" drop in the fairway) it wouldn't be in an unplayable lie by the time he got to it. I was an excellent caddie, after all.


I never breathed a word of this to any other caddies, my best friend, my parents or my priest.

Now, you know...

I had my sights set on things that were not entirely out the reach of a kid who could take home 4 or 5 dollars a day.

This was 1974, and by the end of the summer I had purchased the Elton John album.

The next summer, a 43 dollar "Bullworker" isometric exerciser came my way.

By the summer of '76, I had been promoted (excellent caddie that I was) to a job working for the PGA professional, Jim O' Leary, cleaning the clubs that came in off the course and storing them, then cleaning the carts, putting them on charge in the garage if they were electric, but cleaning them even if they were gasoline, and then cleaning more things.
It paid $1.25/hr. (the minimum wage then was $1.90 but I was only12 years old, and I loved it).
By the end of that summer, a Schwinn "Le Tour" 10-speed bike was all mine, for I believe around $189, tax included, which blew away Jeffrey LaBelle's ride.

The last hurrah of that vacation was a 120 mile* bike ride to my grandmother's house in Vermont, which I made with my best friend, David Veautour (a Facebook friend, today).

We had both saved up for our bikes, with that trip in mind, without ever thinking of asking our parents if they would allow us 13 year olds to hop on our brand new 10-speeds at 4 AM one August morning and leave the state on them. As week after week went by with both of us talking about getting these bikes and riding all the way to my grandmother's in West Rutland, Vermont.
I think they figured the idea would run out of steam or we would be careless with our money. But, I think our parents decided that if we could actually (both; so the odds of our failing were 4X) save for a couple months and get the bikes they would let us go.

The Great Bike ride. 12 hours sounds about right. David and I had reached the halfway point, the Connecticut River (visible as "Rt. 91" above, which shadows it) at 11:30 AM, six hours after we had embarked (adjusted for a half hour breakfast) At that rate, we should have reached my grandmother's house in another six hours, in time for supper. But, doing the thing that the hare did vs. the tortoise, we felt like we were way ahead of schedule and started stopping to check out covered bridges, throw rocks in streams, etc and arrived at around 7:30 PM, an hour before sundown in those parts, and right around when my grandparents were ready to start worrying..

Plus, we had made shorter round trips of about 70 miles each after we got our bikes, to practice up. How practically we were thinking.
And I think the argument that I was about to enter high school, and could use a "coming of age" type experience might have been persuasion enough.

*Well, the Schwinn analog odometer on my bike read 124.1 miles, while David's had clocked 127.4, I believe it was. So much for analog odometers for bikes...   
 
But the Caribou album was a big part of the soundtrack of those times of being an 11 year old, entering the work force. I am just now starting to see just how big an influence it had on my formative self.

It was of a time when I was able to apply every cent I made towards stuff I wanted.
Like now.

And, of a time when I had gone, unbidden, out to work, and had found a source of pride and independence in it.
Like now.

And, of a time when I learned that some things are just between God and self; like, maybe you can pray for someone and they will get well, but if you were to tell them: "I'm praying for you," you would squander the blessing and divert it into your ego.

And of a time when, for some reason, things pertaining to New Orleans started to resonate with me.

Our sixth grade "Social Studies" book was broken into about 24 chapters, each one about a major U.S. city. Spanning from Atlanta to Washington D.C., we learned about the geography and the climate and the people and the industry, etc.

Mine almost opened itself to a spot just past the middle pages, where "New Orleans" was the title of the chapter. I kept returning to that section and flipping through it. The photos, I just stared at, trying to make sense of. There were people dressed in weird colors, bright whites mixed with golds and they were black, but not really black, more reddish, and they were holding these steaming bowls full of tiny lobsters and they were smiling these huge smiles as if very proud of the little lobsters.

Even though, I didn't know the word because I was 11, I was like; "What the fuck?" I still remember. I wondered if they would bite. I could guess that the tiny lobsters would.

When it came time for us students to each pick one of the cities to present an oral report upon to the rest of the class, I chose New Orleans. Shipping was a big industry, as it was a harbor city on the Mississippi River, and it was famous for its cuisine and jazz music, if I remember right...

Even on the Paul Simon album, "There Goes Rhymin' Simon" that I had gotten as part of "the top 15 albums in Boston," that I won in a contest held by WBZ FM in that city, what stuck out the most were the two songs The Dixie Hummingbirds, sang on, like: "Love's Me Like A Rock." I was just bemused by them..   

 So, "Dixie Lily" played in the next room as I slept, trying to ditch the problem at the Lilly Pad and escape to Slumberland, and I woke up feeling pretty depressed, because I had been run off my playing spot; and I suddenly felt unemployed. At best, I saw myself having to start on the ground floor and jostle my way into the Royal Street busking society, where maybe Tanya Huang would throw me a crumb and tell me I could have St. Louis and Royal before and after her. That would be a "He needs to be amplified" spot. Finding another quiet place near a bar full of wealthy tourists at 2 in the morning, not so easy.

Then I started to listen to the song more closely.

One of the songs that I had written in 1988 had a part in it that seemed to write itself. I just followed the melody where it seemed to naturally want to go. After I finished it, I remember even thinking I had heard it somewhere before.
It was from Dixie Lily.
With my song, the melody had seemed to already be in my head.

I initially determined that I had unwittingly quoted "When The Saints Go Marching In," -the part when they sing "...want to be in that number..." when the bass note descends a certain scale; my song had the same bass notes already in place, and I just sang what seemed to fit. I thought this was apropos, because my song was about a "holy" guy whom I know.

But, last night, it hit me, like the sadness in my stomach that, while there is an over-lapping of ideas in music in general*, it was more like the "plowing through the water, with her whistles blowing" part of Dixie Lily that I had been "hearing" when I sang those notes, and they had been close enough to "Saints" for me to posit that I had done that subconsciously because of the "saintliness"** of the guy I was writing about.

**incidentally, my lyric, over that very chord change was equally spiritual, at least in tone: "His lust hath defil-ed the place where he lay" about my buddy, there.

*who's to say that Elton John, in preparation for composing Dixie Lily didn't brainstorm or crash course on New Orleans music, and wind up kind of quoting (subconsciously) that part of "saints" but only Elton-ized it a bit, when he wrote that part of "Lily?"
  
But Dixie Lily, has been "in my head" since sixth grade...
The year of the tiny lobsters.

I think I may have been aspiring to re-write the Caribou album my whole musical life (while thinking I was trying to re-write Anthem of the Sun, by The Grateful Dead).

More

Listening in that vein, and with this new knowledge, I discovered yet another section of the same song (the little rhythmic variation right before he sings: "see her lanterns") which I'm sure is what led to my having made this one recording when I was 22, where I was trying to do this thing with the bass, and it sounded bad (I think I was accenting the wrong notes of pairs of them) It sounded bad enough to make me think that I was totally out of step with the universe, so bad that I began to associate with it at times when I was feeling like an awkward dork -that's what one sounds like-
I was accenting the wrong notes, but I was trying to do a chromatic bass run like in Dixie Lily...
It sounded like music that camels would dance to, or ostriches. And that stuck in my head (excuse the pun) in a negative way; for times of extreme self loathing; the "I hate myself" rhythm.
 
 

But then, the pondering began about the other little coincidence of my having actually moved to the tiny lobster place, and become embroiled in a friendship with none other than a Lilly who, like the showboat in the song, is a grand old lady (though she actually looks quite young).
Her daughter's are definitely "ladies like those on the big boats."
I'm not sure if I'm analogous to the fisherman in the little boat, but...
When I first drew this connection it was the line about "fancy breeding," which made me think of Lilly, even though I had been thinking of her off and on in regards to the situation.

And when Lily met me, I was living under the wharf where the Natchez docks. That is the boat shown in the video above when he sings the "fancy breeding" line that made me put two and two together.


So, I lay there with a video of Lilly and the girls in my head...walking up Royal Street, coming up the river, the lanterns that line the hotel on Dumaine Street where they always turn, flickering in the gentle breeze....
Until I finally had to get up and change the song; it had been on repeat for pretty long...

But it does make me wonder if I had some kind of date with destiny and things like Lilly's and steamboats are just little clues that I'm getting "warmer." It seems like, with everything that has befallen me in life, my solution to it took me closer to New Orleans.
From my first decision, back in 1993, to "just get the hell out of here (Massachusetts)" when I packed all my worldly possessions in a station wagon and drove 21 hours to be with, my friends from Massachusetts, ironically, I had moved myself considerably closer to New Orleans, and the ball was rolling. The Dixie Lily was reeling me in.

Then throw in an economic crash, which forces me to take up busking.
Then have me move to St. Augustine, because "that's where you need to go" if you are in north Florida.
And then have me find out that St. Augustine is where you have to go to hear people tell you: "You need to go to New Orleans," and well, I was at Stage 2, let's call it....


Lyrics by Bernie Taupin, for those who didn't want to watch the steamboat video...

Show boat coming up the river
See her lanterns flicker in the gentle breeze
I can hear the crickets singing in the evening
Oh, Dixie Lily, moving past the cypress trees

My little boat, she rocks easy
I've been catching catfish in the creek all day
Oh, and I've never ladies like those on the big boats.
must be fancy breeding lets you live that way

Dixie Lily chugging like a grand old lady...
Paddles hitting home in the noonday sun
Plowing through the water with your whistles blowing
down from Louisiana on a Vicksburg run


Papa say's that I'm a dreamer
say's them squitos done bit me one too many times
Oh, but I never get lonesome living on the river
watching ol' Lily leave the world behind

Dixie Lily chugging like a grand old lady...
Paddles hitting home in the noonday sun
Plowing through the water with your whistles blowing
down from Louisiana on a Vicksburg run