The Song Drew Me There

I can proudly say that I went to Bilbao, Spain, before Bilbao became hip.

When I announced that I was going in 1995, Bilbao was so unhip that my friends said:

       Why do you want to go to Bilbao?  It’s a gritty port city.
       Why do you want to go to Bilbao?  There’s nothing there.
       Why do you want to go to Bilbao?  It’s a faded industrial city.

Only my brother understood.  He said:

       Bilbao!  There is a song about Bilbao!!!

The song is in German, lyrics by Berthold Brecht and music by Kurt Weill.  It was the opening number in “Happy Days”, a musical that was a flop and closed after seven performances in Berlin in 1929.

The Bilbao Song is strong, stark, and unrelentingly nostalgic.  It wistfully describes Bill’s Beer Hall in Bilbao, a place where you could be yourself and you could get anything you wanted.

CLICK HERE to listen to the song in German (3 minutes), with a cello to heighten the wistfulness

When I went to Bilbao, I did not go looking for Bill’s Beer Hall because it is fictional.  I saw that the city was faded and gritty.  Huge cranes for unloading ships dotted the skyline.  I ate in a restaurant.  I left after spending a day there.  I felt satisfied because I had been in the city in the song.

CLICK HERE to listen to the song in English (2 minutes), sung by Andy Williams

When I was in Bilbao, I was unaware that they were building a new museum.  It opened two years after I was there.  The museum is a branch of the Guggenheim, and was designed by superstar architect Frank Gehry.

The Guggenheim is shaped vaguely like a ship and curves along the riverbank.  It is covered in titanium and reflects light that bounces off the river.  One of the main river bridges goes right through the museum.  It is spectacular.

Nowadays no one calls Bilbao faded; it is vibrant.  Bilbao has become hip and is a main tourist destination.

Bilbao once had a song.  The song drew one tourist there.  Bilbao now has a museum.  The museum draws thousands of tourists there.

Architecture has the power to transform.

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com

Obby Dobby Is In Danger

I sent invitations to everybody in my mother’s address book.  The invitations were for an event called "Edith At Eighty", my mother's eightieth birthday pary.

I was delighted that Mr. & Mrs. Kirmser were coming.  They were our neighbors back when I was a teenager, and their son was a friend of mine.  I had spent a lot of time hanging out at the Kirmsers’ house.

On the day of the eightieth birthday party, the guests greeted me as they arrived.  Mr. Kirmser stood in front of me, with a look of concentration in his face, and said, “Hobow obare yobou tobodobay?”

I was at a loss for words, it sounded like Mr. Kirmser had had a stroke.  He repeated, again with great concentration, ““Hobow obare yobou tobodobay?”  I did not know what to say to him.

Then he broke into English, and said, “When my son heard I was coming to this party, he taught me to say that.”

Of course!  Mr. Kirmser had not had a stroke, he was greeting me in Obby Dobby, a language that his son and I were fluent in, back in our teenage years.

Obby Dobby was a secret language, spoken by putting an “ob” in each syllable.  If the syllable starts with consonants, the ob goes after the consonants; if the syllable starts with a vowel, it goes before the vowel.  How are you today? becomes Hobow obare yobou tobodobay?

Pig Latin is another secret language.  As well as Measurray, a language promoted by a New York disk jockey named Murray The K.  In Mesaurray, the phrase How are you today? becomes Heasow easare yeasou teasoday?  This language seems to have died out when Murray The K went off the air.

The value of these secret languages is that you can talk to someone in the presence of a third person who does not know the language and you can say anything you want.  The languages are also intellectual exercises, and fun.

Recently I was at a dinner and someone their made a joke about seeing four teenagers at a table in a restaurant.  All four of the teenagers were texting on their cellphones.  The assumption was that they were texting each other rather than talking to each other.

Then it hit me.  Texting enables you to talk to someone in the presence of a third person, and you can say anything you want.  Texting has its own way of abbreviating syntax and phrases; so, it is an intellectual exercise.  And must be fun because teenagers do it all the time.

Now Obby Dobby is in danger of dying out.  So is Pig Latin.  These languages are endangered in our electronic age.  Who needs a secret language when you can text?   

Now I worry about who’s going to buy all those t-shirts that say “IGPAY ATINLAY AMPIONCHAY.”

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com

Knee Deep In Rice

A dear friend from high school was watching a Johnny Cash tribute on television.  When the show featured the song “Don’t Take Your Guns To Town”, my friend started to laugh.

Laughter was uncalled for.  A show about a beloved icon of American music demands reverence.  The song itself is tragic; a young cowboy, ignoring his mother’s plea, takes his guns to town, where he is shot and he repeats his mother’s plea as he lies dying.

My friend was laughing because the song on the television show took her back 50 years --- back to the time when we were in high school, and I wrote a parody of Johnny Cash’s song.

Our sophomore year English teacher was named Barker Herr, and he had a pernicious case of halitosis.  I could not resist:

      A young cowboy named Barker Herr grew restless on the farm
      A boy filled with wanderlust who really meant no harm
      He changed his clothes and shined his boots
      And combed his dark hair down
      And his mother cried as he walked out

      Don’t take your breath to town, Bark
      Leave your breath at home, Herr
      Don’t take your breath to town.

Parody also served me well in the Army.  In Basic Training, you were expected to vocalize: chanting along with the sergeant as he counted cadence: “I want to go to Vietnam; I want to kill a Viet Cong”.

However, when I finished Basic and started Helicopter Mechanics Training, our platoon had no sergeant.  We had to march ourselves from the barracks to the training area and back again.  And we got to choose out own vocalizing.  The blood-thirsty cadence counts we chanted in Basic Training were dropped. 

We first turned to whistling.  You would be amazed at how nicely you can march to the theme song for “The Addams Family”.  The finger snapping helps keep people in step.

When we weren’t whistling, we were singing.  It was a grand time for parodies.  First came The Monkees, who used to think that love was just in fairy tales.

      I used to think that Army was just in fairy tales,
      Meant for someone else but not for me
      But Army was out to get me
      That’s the way it seemed
      The military haunted all my dreams.
      Then I saw my sergeant, now I’m a believer
      Not a trace of doubt in my mind
      I’m in the Army, I’m a believer
      I couldn’t leave it if I tried.

This song did more than make us snicker as we marched.  It encapsulated our mutual experience.  A few months earlier we had all been civilians, surrounded by happiness.  Now we were soldiers, surrounded by a world over which we had little control.

Next up: “Sealed With A Kiss” by Gary Lewis And The Playboys:

      It’s gonna be a long lonely summer
      Over there in Nam
      Hiding from the Cong
      Working on my helicopter
      Knee deep in rice.

This was harder to march to, but it expressed the angst that we had about being deployed to Viet Nam.

Parodies are nice and easy.  You don’t have to invent a tune.  You know the pattern your new words should fit into.

Parodies are powerful.  You can create a parody that encapsulates a mutual experience or a parody that expresses angst.  And, maybe, you can create a parody that will make someone laugh during a Johnny Cash tribute 50 years after you graduated from high school.

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com

Highline And Lowlife

I read that only three cities in the world have one: Paris, New York, and St. Louis. These three cities have parks created from abandoned elevated railroad lines.

When we were in New York in September, we walked New York’s elevated park, called the Highline. Lots of people were walking the Highline. It was great fun to be above ground at second-story level. We could look into buildings. We could look down at New York’s street life: food trucks, street festivals, temporary roller skating rinks, restaurants, art galleries. We could look outward at vistas full of skyscrapers.

The New York Highline changed about every block. Sometimes you walked down the middle in between plantings on both sides. Sometimes you walked on one side and the plantings on the other side were wide enough to almost look like a field. At one point you came across wooden chaise lounges with people sitting on them enjoying the sun.

The plantings amazed me. They appeared to be drought-resistant native plants chosen because they do not need maintenance. These plants were thriving.

Here are 3 Highline photos: the chaise lounges, peeking into a building, a vista of skyscrapers.

The history of New York’s elevated railroad park is inspiring. It was a grass roots effort, first to prevent demolition, then to get the park funded. The history of St. Louis’ elevated railroad park is also inspiring. It was a grass roots effort, promoted by bicyclists.

Last weekend, the dogs and I walked St. Louis’ version of the Highline. It is called the Branch Street Trestle, and the differences with New York’s Highline were profound.

No one else was on the Trestle. It is a paved surface that is uniform block after block. There are no plantings.

The Trestle sits in an area called the Near North Riverfront, which is isolated from the city by an Interstate highway. The area does not have art galleries, street fairs, food trucks, or skating rinks.

The Near North Riverfront is used for storage: road salt, oil drums, strange wrapped things that look like giant sea scallops. Hardly anyone lives there, and very few people work there because you don’t need many workers to maintain storage facilities. However, these few residents and workers must like to drink because you pass a number of seedy bars to get to the Trestle. Actually, “seedy” is too kind a description of these bars.

Here are 3 Branch Street Trestle photos: Petey and Sierra roaming free, giant scallops, a vista of rusty chemical storage tanks.

One reason there were no people on the Trestle is that few people in St. Louis know about it, in spite of the fact that the Trestle leads right to a bridge where you can walk across the Mississippi River and wind up in Illinois. I plan to do some publicity, and when warm weather comes next year, I will lead a walking tour in the Near North Riverfront.

The walking tour will feature the elevated park and the seedy bars, so the name of the tour will be “Highline and Lowlife”.

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com

The United States Army Trusted Me

Two events told me that the United States Army trusted me when I was a typist for the 109th Aviation Division at Fort Lewis, Washington.

The first event that told me I was trusted: the Army gave me a Secret security clearance.  This was the level right below Top Secret.  I was thrilled to get the clearance, not because it meant I could type secret documents, but because it meant I could read secret documents stored in the 109th Aviation Division’s vault.

The thrill dissipated quickly.  I was shown the Secret Document Vault: it was just a filing cabinet with a lock on it.  When I typed my first secret document, the information in it did not seem very sensitive.  The enemy could probably find out just as much information by going to the nearest gas station and buying a roadmap.

I never got a Top Secret clearance.  Maybe Top Secret documents held sensitive information that could do us harm if it fell into enemy hands.  Or maybe there was nothing sensitive to say about an aviation division that spent most of its time trying to keep 120 helicopter mechanics busy while there were only 5 helicopters for them to maintain on all of Fort Lewis.

The second event that told me I was trusted: the Army gave me a key to the barracks bulletin board.  I needed the key to put the KP roster on the bulletin board.  Everyone on the 109^th Aviation Division was an avid reader of the KP roster, checking it to see when they would have to pull kitchen duty.

However, I had my suspicions that people did not read anything else on the bulletin board.  I got a chance to confirm my suspicions.

Fort Lewis is a large fort.  I was being transferred to a unit on North Fort Lewis, far away from the 109^th Aviation Division. 

Before my transfer, I sat down at an Army typewriter and created this notice:

IT HAS COME TO THE ATTENTION OF THE COMMANDING OFFICER THAT PERSONNEL ARE RAISING CHINCHILLAS IN THEIR FOOT LOCKERS.  THIS PRACTICE IS TO STOP IMMEDIATELY.  ANYONE CAUGHT TAKING EXTRA LETTUCE RATIONS FROM THE MESS HALL WILL BE SEVERELY REPRIMANDED.

I posted the notice on the bulletin board and asked a friend to let me know how long it remained there. 

I turned in the bulletin board key, put my duffel bag on my shoulder, said good-bye, and got on the bus to North Fort Lewis.  My friend said that the chinchilla notice stayed on the bulletin board for five weeks before somebody took it down. 

My suspicions were confirmed.

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com

It All Started With Dishwashing Powder

I looked forward to breaking some gender barriers when I signed up for a special class offered by my junior high school “Boys Home Ec”.  Us guys were going to learn all the secrets of home economics: how to sew, how to iron, how to cook.

Sewing was kind of cool because you got to run a sewing machine. I made a barbeque apron. I even got the machine to spell out “What’s Cooking?” on the front. I thought it was wonderful and worthy of commercial production.

Ironing was, however, the opposite of cool. It was tedious, dangerous, and difficult to do well.

Knowing how to iron came in handy when my mother had to spend a year in Ohio taking care of my brother’s family after my brother and his wife were involved in an automobile accident. I ironed my father’s laundry for him. I was doing OK with the ironing until I tried ironing my father’s nylon stretch socks. The Boys Home Ec class never taught us how to get the melted rubber off an iron.

Cooking was the coolest part of the class.

The first thing we cooked was broiled apple sauce sandwiches. We took a slice of white bread, spread apple sauce on it, sprinkled brown sugar on top, and put it under the broiler until the brown sugar got bubbly. I thought the result was yummy.

At home that evening, I offered to make apple sauce sandwiches for my mother and father. Unfortunately, they were too full from dinner to try one. In fact, they were so full for the next couple of days that I finally stopped offering.

The real highlight of Boys’ Home Ec was learning to make pizza pie from scratch.

You mixed flour with some stuff, added live yeast, and put a dishtowel over the bowl. Under the dishtowel, the yeast did some magic and the dough puffed up. Next came the physical part: you got to punch the dough down. It was soft and fragrant as you formed it into a compact ball.

Things got more physical. You needed to activate the gluten in the dough. In the restaurants in town, they worked the dough by spinning it and tossing it up in the air. This was beyond the dexterity of a typical eighth grader, so our teacher had us play catch. We tossed the dough back and forth. Definitely cool.

Yet, there was danger in cooking. The class was divided into kitchens: four boys in the blue kitchen, four boys in the yellow kitchen, etc. One day we made biscuits. The boys in the blue kitchen announced that their biscuits tasted terrible. One day we made cookies. The boys in the yellow kitchen announced that their cookies tasted terrible.

The teacher figured out what had happened, and tracked it down to a boy in the red kitchen. He had sabotaged the other kitchens by putting dishwashing powder in their flour canisters. His name was Harry.

Last year, I helped our high school reunion committee track down our classmates for our 50^th Reunion. I found Harry’s current address. It was “In Care of the North Carolina Department of Corrections.”

A life of crime…and it all started with dishwashing powder.

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com

The Sunshine Walked Beside Her

I had a couple of hours left in Minneapolis before catching a plane back to St. Louis. This was enough time to visit a friend, Barb Ivey, who had been admitted to the VA Hospital, which was conveniently located on my route to the airport.

Barb Ivey’s son worked for a while at Wells Fargo when I worked there. He introduced me to his mother,

She had once been married to a man who worked in a most exotic location: the television transmission station on top of the Empire State Building, making him the highest person in New York City. But divorce came, and she had the strength to raise her children by herself, and she wound up in Minneapolis.

She became my friend.  I was drawn to her because her smile and the twinkle in her eyes made it clear that she savored life.  Plus, it was fun to know someone from a different generation.  We tried out ethnic restaurants.  We went shopping.

Once, I had a visitor from The Bronx.  When Barb met him, she asked him what part of The Bronx he lived in. He said, “Not too far from the neighborhood that Jonathan Kozol writes about in his new book”.  Barb amazed the fellow by reaching in her purse and pulling out a copy of Jonathan Kozol’s book.  It was just like watching a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat.

The vast VA parking lot was jam-packed.  I magically found the one empty parking space left.  I took the space and walked into the lobby. “What room is Barb Ivey in?” The receptionist looked a little shaken by my request, checked her computer screen, and said “She was discharged yesterday.”

I went on to the airport, boarded my plane, and later received an email from Barb’s son telling me what had happened on the day before I went to the VA hospital.

Barb Ivey had made a decision to go off life support. Her family gathered around her hospital bed.  The email said that when she was taken off life support, it was a peaceful transition.

When I finished reading the email, a song came on the radio: Tecumseh Valley. One line in the song grabbed my attention: “The sunshine walked beside her”.

I wondered if this song was sent to me by Barb Ivey the magician, reassuring me that all was well after she had discharged herself from the hospital --- after she had discharged herself right off the planet.

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com