A Monday Night At The Lilly Pad

• The Lidgley Parcel
• The Lidgley Story
• Hurricane, Or Whatever, Barry

I am in on a Friday morning.
It is lightly raining and windy outside. It is hurricane rain, from Tropical cyclone, or depression, Barry.

I guess there won't be any busking tonight.

I need to take a night to organize a bunch of recordings, instead of letting more of them pile up. It takes me a couple hours to busk and record myself, then another couple hours to listen back at home and equalize, etc.

There are all kinds of things I could do to them, not the least of which would be to play along with myself on a parallel track on guitar and then to sing on a second track, and then to remove the noisy street performance recording, altogether, maybe only bringing it up between songs when tourists say things to me.

The Circle of Life

A work of art, sent by Alyne Lidgley, hangs next to one that I made, then sent off to Naperville, Illinois, to the mother of the girl in the drawing...

The songs would make good templates.

I am working on keeping an even tempo, when I'm busking.

Lidgley Parcel

I was informed last night, at about 9:30 PM, that I had gotten a package earlier that day. I must say that the parcels from the Lidgley's take me by surprise when they arrive out of the blue.

I brought it up to Bobby's apartment in building C, where I had been heading, where I opened it.

There was Belgian chocolate, which had melted, and was still in liquid form in the tin foil package, proving that it was probably about 83 degrees in the lobby at Sacred Heart, with a tropical storm bearing down upon us.

Mike Lidgley and myself in Ocala, Florida

There were some chocolate caramel and sea salt "gourmet" bisquits, as well as a bag of ground coffee of the Nescafe "gold" type, as well as a Starbucks gift card, a couple packs of Benson and Hedges cigarettes, a nice pair of shorts, black with a little belt and pockets that zip all the way around, and a 20 dollar bill.

I keep trying to stay current with the Lidgleys, but what seems to happen is, months go by, and by the time I am ready to send an e-mail, I feel like they might think I am doing that in case they forgot about me, to remind them about sending a parcel, type of thing.

But, The Lidgley Story is one that I have been wanting to retell. It took place in 2009, I believe.

The Lidgley Story

It was 2009, and I had moved from Jacksonville, Florida, where I had started to busk after the economy collapsed into what is now seen, in hindsight, to have been a recession.

Busking was illegal in Jacksonville, coming under the umbrella of panhandling, in general, and I had to move around, often playing somewhere in hopes of making 5 or 10 bucks before a store manager came out and told me I couldn't busk in front of the store, or a cop came by and ran me away.

But, several people had told me that I should go to Saint Augustine, where busking is allowed, and is part of the atmosphere that they are trying to create for the tourists.

I was playing on Cuna Street one morning, when, up walked a lady who would turn out to be Alyne Lidgley.

She took a few pictures of me playing.

Since my blog was only a couple years old at that time, and since I wanted to post pictures of myself on it, but didn't have a camera, I would ask whomever took a picture of me if they would e-mail it to me.

A thousand people told me that they would, but they all seemed to have gotten busy with other things and never got around to sending them.

Alyne promised me that she would send me the pictures.

"A thousand people will tell you that they will send you pictures, but I am the one who will do it," said Alyne.

And so, we talked for a while and then she went on her way, promising to send the pictures.

Weeks went by, and then months, and no pictures arrived.

I started to think that either Alyne lost her camera, or lost my e-mail address by the time August arrived. I think it was March when I met her, and I had just about officially given up on expecting them to come.

Then, I was in the Polish American Club, having a beer. This was something rare for me, because I preferred to buy a whole 4 pack for the cost of one beer in any bar in Saint Augustine, but I had made some money and wasn't in the mood for hiding from the cops in order to drink outside.

The cops there had an ambitious agenda to remove as many of the homeless people that infested the city. There were about 2,000 homeless people in a city of 25,000, which attracted them, because of "the panhandling," and all the organizations that fed them.

It was possible to eat three free meals a day, there, once you knew the schedules, and there were those who would spend their days laying down somewhere, waiting until it was time to start heading over to the St.Francis House, or a certain church, or park.

There was one group that arrived on Sunday and set up a couple long tables, which they loaded up with very good food, out of which snow crab legs were usually featured.

I think the idea was to give the homeless people a taste of the kind of food they would be able to afford if they were ever to get cleaned up and get a job. It's the same with the clothing banks that will give out dress slacks with button up shirts and ties and dinner jackets. Make the homeless person feel like a million bucks and soon life will imitate art, and they will acquire the job and the apartment to go with the nice clothes and the snow crab legs.

Me and Alyne Lidgley, circa 2010

The snow crab people had also a lot of dishes that had been prepared by certain people, who were good cooks and used quality ingredients. It was the type of food that Whole Foods sells out of their glass case; stuff like carrot, raisin and ginger salad (which would be something like $11.99 per pound at that place.).

One of the ladies who brought the food, worked for the Social Security Administration, as did her husband. She always encouraged me to sign up for disability benefits, and seemed not to understand why I hadn't.

"What am I going to tell them, that I hear dogs barking in my head?" I asked her.
"Yes, that would be perfect," she had told me. She was a lot like Lilly, whose house I play in front of. She had the same New York accent as Lilly and seemed to champion the downtrodden in the same way.

The police were known to sneak up on homeless people in order to catch them drinking and give them a 100 dollar ticket.

The judges were known to sentence people to the maximum of six months in jail which is allowable by the statute. The idea is that the homeless person who got the ticket would have something like 90 days to either pay the fine or, more likely, just get the hell out of there before the court date arrived.

So, I had gone into the bar, so I could sit in the air conditioning and drink beer without having to look over my shoulder.

Soon, I had attracted the attention of a guy who introduced himself to me as "Art."

Art was a sailor, who was killing time in the bar while his boat was having some work done on it at the marina.

He was kind of a small guy who had the wild hair, the sun weathered skin and the shirt with the fish on it, of a sailor.

Art told me that he was from Key Pine Bluff, in the Florida Keys, and told me that I had an identical twin there.

This guy looked just like me, talked just like me, and was into the same sort of metaphysical stuff and was a musician, etc.

Art wanted to get a picture of me, because it was going to blow this guy's mind when he showed it to him. Plus, the key was small enough that everyone there knew the guy he was talking about, and would all enjoy seeing a picture of me.

We went outside, I guess so he could get photos with landmarks like The Bridge of Lions, in the background. It was about 3:30 PM.

"Is there any way you could send me copies of the pictures?" I asked.

I told him that people often took pictures of me when I was busking and I always asked them to send me copies, and that, so far, none of them had.

"No problem," said Art.

The next morning, I went to the library and logged in to my e-mail account, and the first thing I saw was a letter with the subject: "Photos!"
That was fast...

I opened the attachment, and discovered that it was the pictures that Alyne Lidgely had taken almost 4 months prior. To this day, I haven't gotten anything from Art of Key Pine Bluff, Florida.

When Alyne had sent the pictures, it was something like 11:35 PM in London.
Given the 8 hour time difference, it was possible that she had clicked her mouse to send them right as Art was clicking his camera to take the pictures that he would never send. The two events were within minutes of each other, regardless...

And, so, I had the pictures from Alyne, who wanted me to give her a mailing address because she wanted to send me a parcel -the first of many.

They do seem to arrive only after I have stopped thinking about them, like yesterday's.

My last haircut, August, 2006

A couple of times, they arrived when I had no money, no cigarettes, no coffee
and no clean clothes to put on.

One of them came on the day Michael Jackson died (July 9th, 2010, was it?).

The first one had enclosed a poem that Alyne had written about our meeting, called "Ships."  


So, the homeless people flocked to Saint Augustine, and soon had memorized the feeding schedules. There was one church that only "fed" on the first Tuesday of every month, but it was a fancy barbecued rib dinner with potato salad and vegetables.

The reason I haven't done much in the studio, though, is because it takes me getting out to the Lilly Pad and having people throw money in my basket in order to perform my best.