Ethical Realism

After the alarm went off this morning at 5:15, the first thing I was aware of was an interview taking place on NPR's Morning Edition with the authors of this book. Sure, I was half asleep, but something seemed right about what they were saying, so I'm adding this to my Christmas-break reading schedule. Maybe it will distract me from the fact that my little boy's reading list will include a driver's ed manual!

Here's the NPR link: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6557588



There is nothing more foolish than to think that war can be stopped by war. You don't prevent anything but peace. -- Harry S. Truman

From Publishers Weekly -- Lieven and Hulsman, partisan think-tank researchers from opposing ends of the political spectrum, unite to provide an alternative to current U.S. foreign policy, based on "the core teachings of ethical realism-prudence, patriotism, responsibility, study, humility, and 'a decent respect' to views and interests of other nations." This "new strategic vision" presents a foundation for "a consensual and stable international order" along the lines of old-fashioned American neighborliness. Their arguments are rooted in lessons from the founders of ethical realism, Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan; the Christian intellectual tradition of Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine; and successful international policy implemented by leaders like Harry S. Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. The authors emphasize the need to qualify national interests against universal ethics, and for statesman who "act in ways that will serve the good as far as possible, and to observe certain strict limits as to what they are prepared to do on behalf of their states. "Though they make some sweeping statements that beg critical examination, and their heavy-handed criticism of the Bush Administration's foreign policy-calling the war in Iraq a failure "not just of strategy ...but of the whole American way of looking at the world"-can be alienating, this refreshing, ambitious work proposes some practical and much-needed solutions for America's compromised reputation abroad. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.



245.6

The White Water Band V

Sometime during that winter of 1975-'76, we went to Cleveland, Tennessee, and played a dance at either Jenny's or Tanya's school--they didn't go to the same place. We returned in the spring, to Chattanooga this time, and played a prom--one of my favorite single gigs ever--on a paddle-wheel boat cruising two hours down and two hour back up the Tennessee River. During this second trip Harlan met one of the girls' friends--Tammy. Seems she was vandalizing license plates while the dance was going on, if I remember rightly. Anyway, it was love at first sight, and the two were married within just a few weeks. (I saw them recently on my way back from New Orleans, and they seemed just like they always did. Life seems to have been good to them.)

But as I went through the graduation of the class ahead of mine, the class of '76, I took a look around and realized that I had just one year of high school left, that I was so involved in the band that I really didn't know many of my classmates. So, sometime early in the summer of 1976, a year after our trip to Myrtle Beach, I quit the band and spent my senior year playing football and basketball, running track, writing songs, getting to know my classmates before we went our separate ways and preparing for college.

Although I don't know where Jim is now, the other guys are still playing now 30 years later. Harlan plays in a big band over in Cleveland, Tennessee. Terry and Kirk still play together in Asheville most every weekend--even though Kirk has to drive up from his home in Atlanta to do so! I had my run in Nashville during the '80s and, while I play at church a good bit, I don't play nearly the amount the rest of the White Water Band does.

We were a decent little band, I think, and I've had fun remembering it all (or at least most of it).

The White Water Band IV(d)

I awoke to a misty rain, but it wasn't being damp that pulled me from sleep. It was Harlan's voice--"Mike? Mike. Wake up. We've got trouble." I climbed down from my bunk on top of the bus, figuring that our trouble had to do with the latenight hellraisers Jim had brought to peaceful Ocean Lakes. But that wasn't the case. Our current difficulties had to do with the girl we'd met the night before at the pavilion, the one supposedly looking for her eyeglasses.

She'd spent the night on the bus. The older sister and her boyfriend had left sometime during the night, but morning at their campsite found the father furious (and probably frantic) over his missing daughter. While I was sleeping on the roof, the father came to get her. As the story goes, she rose up out of a pile of speaker covers and made an unfortunate stagger as she went down the steps of the bus, looking very much like she was either drunk or stoned. The guys learned then that she was only 14 years old and that this could lead to serious trouble. The father told us that he was going to call the police and that all would go better for us if we stayed right where we were.

When they left, Harlan called me down from the top of the bus.

And we waited. In order to be clean for going to jail, we went two-by-two through the rain to the showers. Three or four hours passed, and the arresting officers didn't arrive. (Other experiences since then--not mine--suggest that, when called, Myrtle Beach police aren't hesitant about arriving and arresting.) When it was checkout time at Ocean Lakes, we decided to leave. We couldn't afford to stay at the campground another night and figured that the police could catch up with us somewhere else. So, depressed and hungry, we rolled through Ocean Lakes toward the exit.

When we'd passed the main office, Harlan stopped the bus and said he wanted to go back and thank the young woman who'd gotten us in and to ask her to tell the police that we had to check out and weren't running away.

After a few minutes, he came sprinting back to the bus and bounded up the steps.

"Hey, gang, guess what! The cops aren't coming!" The older daughter had apparently convinced her father that we were innocent. As we'd waited to be arrested, he'd packed up his family and headed for home. We were free to go!

But more news followed quickly on the heels of this. The morning's rain--and the forecast of more rain over the next couple of days--apparently caused a problem for the campground. The kids staying there with their parents would be complaining mightily about not having anything to do. So, the girl or somebody else in the office asked if we would stay and play a dance that night and the next. We'd get a free site for those nights and $50 dollars to boot!

"We can eat!" we shouted and drove directly to Kentucky Fried Chicken for a bucket!

That afternoon, we unloaded and set up the equipment, practicing through sound check. The two girls we'd met the night before, the ones who didn't believe we were a band, came and hung out with us. We all became good friends over the next couple of days and nights. They were Jenny and Tanya--I don't remember if I'm spelling their names right--from Cleveland, Tennessee.

I don't think I'd ever played a gig like those we played on our two nights at Ocean Lakes. The kids were so excited, we were allowed to act like rock stars, having one of the crew introduce us individually. Kirk jumped up from behind his drum set and laid down a beat. Harlan came out and, after a brief solo, settled into a thundering bass rhythm. Terry and Jim came from both sides of the stage with their guitars, meeting in the middle--Jim tall and black-haired, Terry short and blond. Then it was my turn, and I came out to the applause of the girls lined up on the floor in front of the stage, pounded my cowbell and sang, "We're an American band. . . ."

Who Would Jesus Bomb?

I saw this title on a bumper sticker, and then I read the following excerpt from Seeking God's Peace in a Nuclear Age: A Call to Disciples of Christ:

At the heart of our new vision and new venture on the course toward peace will be Jesus the Christ. His way of love is infinitely more powerful than the way of war and violence. "Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." Yet humankind still clings to the ancient fallacy which claims that we can use force to rearrange the external political configurations and thus the wrongs of the world will be set right. Instead of tinkering with these surface externals, Jesus the Christ attacks evil in its breeding place--the heart of humanity: the hearts of nations, the hearts of institutions, the hearts of persons. Here is supremely the place where the church must focus its vision. Weapons of war are set to their task by the human hand, but the hand is set to its task by the human heart. Thousands of years of human experience have proved over and over again that the heart of all transformation is the transformation of the heart.

I found the excerpt in A Guide to Prayer for All God's People.

25 November 1958 --

Two score and eight. . . .

The White Water Band IV(c)

We spent the next day going all around Myrtle Beach looking for any club that would let us play, but we came up with nothing. We were naive, to say the least. Places to play in Myrtle Beach are booked months and months in advance. Dejected, we figured that if we ate light we could spend one more night at the campground and then head back to the mountains on Tuesday.

When Harlan and Jim had met with the manager of the lounge where we thought we'd been booked, he'd invited those of us eighteen and over--everybody except me--to a party being held in the lounge that Monday night. So the older guys decided to go. To be honest, I don't remember if I spent the evening day alone or if one or two of the eighteen-year-olds stayed with me. Anyway, Harlan and Jim (and maybe another or two) came out of the party sometime around 9:00 maybe. Jim had drunk too much and gotten sick and was ready to call it a night when Harlan or one of the others who'd been at the party said something about a waitress who was giving him the eye (and more, perhaps). Jim revived on the instant and bounded off the bus, calling back that he'd catch up with us tomorrow before we left for home.

The rest of us returned to our spot at Ocean Lakes and decided to take a walk along the beach. Somewhere between our site and the beach we came upon a couple of girls--Jenny and Tanya--and stopped to talk. Maybe they had a couple of guys with them--I don't remember. We told them that we were a band, but they didn't believe us. So, we walked on. As we stood on the strand of sand and looked north, we saw the lights of the main drag at Myrtle Beach and decided to walk along the beach till we got there. We'd walked a good long time when we realized that the lights didn't seem to be getting any closer, so we turned back to the campground, figuring we'd find something to do there--or not.

When we got back to Ocean Lakes, we were passing the recreation center when a girl whose name I don't remember stepped out of the shadows and asked us to help her find her eyeglasses. We started looking all around the place, which was difficult because it was dark out and no lights were on inside. We were scattered all around the place, and I remember watching the girl turn and look 'round at all of us and then walk directly to a particular spot and pick up what we were all looking for. And I remember thinking that she did it as if she knew exactly where they were all the time. When I got the opportunity, I called the guys together and told them what I'd seen and that we needed to keep an eye on this girl.

But it was too late. One of the guys, I think, already had a beach-crush on her. (We've all had them, right?) She came back to the bus with us--followed us back to the bus is probably more accurate. Then she left for a little while and came back with her sister and her sister's boyfriend. The crowd and the pot smoke gathering inside the bus made me decide it was time to ascend to my bed up on the roof. Not that I didn't usually join in when the joints started making their rounds. I did. But something about Jim's being who-knew-where and there being strangers on the bus had me feeling uneasy. Needless to say, it took me a good while to fall asleep.

While I was sleeping in those first hours of the night, the sister and her boyfriend left to return to their family campsite. They tried to get the girl we'd met to go with them, but she wouldn't. I later learned that by this time, everybody but one of our entourage was keeping a safe distance from her. I think they knew that the situation wasn't going to end well.

But that pot didn't come to a boil until morning.

Meanwhile, Jim came home in the small hours of the night--came home with fear and trembling. The waitress he'd dashed back in to see turned out to be a heroin addict. She's taken Jim from the hotel part to meet a friend of hers. Then Jim became a third wheel as the two addicts wanted to go high down to the beach. They wanted to find somebody they could strangle and "watch their eyes bug out," and Jim wanted no part of it. To hear him tell it, he more or less dove out of the car as they brought him to our site in Ocean Lakes.

I woke up to the woman screaming at Jim, "Get out! Get out!" I think she was using a name, but it wasn't the right one. I don't remember now if he'd given her a false name or if she just forgot it in her condition. But they were soon gone, their car fish-tailing down an Ocean Lakes street and disappearing around a corner.

And then they were back again. I don't know how much time passed, but things were different. The interior light came on and showed them naked. They were screaming for Jim to come out. They wanted to strangle him. But the blue bus was a still and quiet as death, so they disappeared into the night again.

They didn't come back, but I lay awake on top of the bus for a long time before I fell asleep again.



243.2

The White Water Band IV(b)

We arrived in Myrtle Beach sometime in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. Terry had never seen the ocean before, and when we got our first full view of it--that beautiful dark blue underneath the blue sky--he said, "It looks higher than we are! Why ain't it comin' in on us?"

We knew the name of the hotel where we'd been booked and the name of the guy who'd booked us, and we went directly there, intent on causing a disturbance. With the big blue bus parked out in the parking lot, we all went into the hotel and headed for the club. I can picture us now as we strode across the lobby and headed for the top floor. I have it in my mind that we were too ready to rumble to wait for elevators, and the six or seven of us there hit the stairs running, taking them two at a time. Imagine what we looked like coming out of that stairwell--a handful of mountain boys, unshowered and unshaven and probably in the same clothes we'd worn on stage (and then slept in) the night before in Hickory.

The manager happened to be there, and Harlan and Jim--their southern Appalachian manners and sense deference kicking in at the last second--sat and talked with him civilly. They liked him. While the rest of us wandered aimlessly around the big shiny room, such a contrast to the homley little place we'd played just a few hours before, they found out that it wasn't this fellow who had screwed us but the booking agent. Apparently the agent had attempted to get us a booking and failed, but his failure came after he'd already told us we were in.

So, here we were in Myrtle Beach on a Sunday afternoon. No place to stay. No money to speak of; we lived in a time before debit cards or ATM machines, and none of us had a credit card. I might have had $10 in my pocket. We'd been expecting this hotel to house and feed and pay us, but that wasn't going to happen.

We figured pretty quickly that we couldn't afford even one room in a motel, so somebody came up with the idea of a campground. We headed south along King's Highway. We pulled into the first campground we came to, and the blue bus stalled out about 50 yards short of the main office. Harlan and Jim got out to go see about a space, and somebody else got busy trying to get the bus started again. The guys came back and said that they were told it was a family campground. Rock-and-roll bands weren't welcome. This seemed okay because we were all eaten up with mosquitos and weren't interested in spending a night as food for the bloodsuckers. We got the bus going again and headed on down the highway till we came to Ocean Lakes Family Campground.

Terry was the smallest of us, and his hair was longish and blond. So, having been made aware of the "family" requirement we migh encounter, we stuffed his shirt to give him breasts and put him back in one of the bunks we'd built on top of our equipment. Our stupid plan was for Harlan to go in claiming to be a member of a family band--think "Partridge Family." Terry was either his sister or his wife and we were all to be related at no greater distance than cousins. We watched throught the windows to watch how Harlan got along and to see if anybody was going to come out and check his story. He stood in the office, talking to this fellow, and by the shaking of heads and the glances toward the bus, negotiations didn't seem to be going well. Then a young woman came out of a back room. We could see her smiling and saying stuff to the fellow behind the desk, and then Harlan was back with a place for us to spend the night. Apparently the woman was the daughter of the owner, and she teased the young man, who had been about to turn us away, into letting us have a space for the night. They assigned us a spot in a back corner of the campground, and we made our way there.

It was late, but we went down to the beach anyway. I remember being chest-deep in the ocean, with nothing but the stars and the campground lights around me. The distance was dark. The water was dark. Some few weeks later, I would lose my breath thinking of this moment spashing with friends in the dark water as I sat by another friend in a dark theater watching the opening scene of a new movie called Jaws.

Fortunately, no sharks attacked, and we spent a decent night in the campground. I slept on top of the bus again and tried to ignore the growling of my stomach.



245

The White Water Band IV(a)

This is the big WWB event, the band's defining moment in my memory. I use the little (a), because I don't know how many posts I'll need to tell the tale. Again, the story is dredged up from beneath the sludge of 30 years of memories, so the details might be wrong now and then. The gist of the tale, however, should remain intact.

Summer, 1975. The White Water Band received an exciting call from a booking agent we'd been working with for a short time. He told us he had a major week-long gig lined up in a hotel lounge in Myrtle Beach. The band was excited about the gig itself, as well as the future benefits it might offer--that is, more high-paying, high-exposure gigs.

As soon as I heard the news, however, my throat tightened and my palms began to sweat. I was 16 years old that summer between my sophomore and junior years, and I didn't see any way that my parents were going to let me go on the road with the band. But a couple of evenings later, Harlan stood in my folks' kitchen at suppertime and convinced them that we had a good situation and that he'd make sure I'd be kept safe and out of trouble. At last Mom and Dad agreed.

Jim and Harlan took off work for a week. Terry and Kirk had just graduated from high school and, if they had jobs, did the same.

Along the way to Myrtle Beach, we were to play a night in a bar out in the country somewhere around Hickory, North Carolina. Maybe it was a Saturday night in Hickory, and we were to travel on to South Carolina to begin our gig sometime early the following week. Whatever. I have two memories of that night. First, I was on stage, singing, and a dancer or two on the floor kept making motions as if they were throwing something at me. I didn't feel anything and thought they were just playing with me, but then I looked down at the floor and saw wadded dollar bills scattered around my feet. Second, complications arose in our Myrtle Beach plan. One of the guys called our booking agent to check on final arrangements for our arrival, and the booking agent said the lounge manager seemed to be backing out of the deal. The agent had him under contract, he said, so he should be able to pressure him into going along with things as they'd been agreed upon. We decided to stay in Hickory that night and call the agent back in the morning to find out how things panned out. The blue bus remained parked in the Hickory joint's parking lot, we all spent the night there. Because we were to be staying in the hotel and making decent money, we left--I did, at least--without much in my pocket or my suitcase, so I climbed up on top of the bus, rolled up my jeans for a pillow and covered myself with my beach towel. I slept fitfully through a dewy night.

Next morning, we got the bad news from the agent. The gig was cancelled. The lounge manager had double-booked his room, and he was brining in the other band. Dejected, we got on I-40 West and started back toward Asheville. After only a few miles, we stopped at a motel restaurant for breakfast. A little food and caffeine--coffee for the older guys, Mountain Dew for me--went a long way to revive our spirits, and we sat at the table and slowly grew indignant at the way that Myrtle Beach shark had treated us. Harlan and Jim realized that they'd taken a week's vacation, and they couldn't get that time back. I seem to remember Jim--tall and thin with black hair and red mustache--saying that we ought to go on to Myrtle Beach, find the hotel and, if the lounge manager wouldn't give us our gig back, "beat his ass." So, with our bellies full and our blood alive with caffeine, we piled back into the blue bus and headed south through Charlotte and on to Myrtle Beach.

The White Water Band III - Supplemental

I remembered two more songs that were favorites of mine: "Walk Away" and "Funk 49" by the James Gang.


245

The White Water Band III

The semester is wearing me out as it crawls toward a close. . . .

So, the White Water Band had the Coop in which to practice and a bus in which to travel. We also had our line-up: Terry and Jim on guitars, Harlan on bass, Kirk on drums and the kid on percussion and vocals.

And when we were practiced enough, we went out and played. As I said in another post, we played bars. True. But that wasn't all--maybe not even half--of our work. Most folks from around Marshall would better remember us for dances played at the swimming pool and community center. We played some campgrounds. We played once for my the electric company my aunt worked for, one of its big public events. I remember poor old mountain women climbing out of the stands and begging us to stop (or turn down), as if their they were about to bleed to death through their ears. We played outdoor street festivals. One of my mom's "favorite" memories of coming to hear the band play is of a summer afternoon in Hot Springs--when the place was dead, without the lively attraction it has now--when the band was set up on a flatbed trailer on the main street near the railroad tracks. She says she stood there listening to us blast away at the crowd and didn't even hear the train passing less than 100 feet from her. That's loud!

White Water was a cover band. I've been trying to remember some of the songs we played, and I've come up with a few.

• The Doobie Brothers--"Long Train Runnin'" and "China Grove"
• Kiss--"Rock & Roll All Nite" and "Black Diamond"
• Led Zeppelin--"Stairway to Heaven"
• ZZ Top--"La Grange," "Heard It on the X" (I think) and "Tush"
• Lynyrd Skynyrd--"Freebird," "Sweet Home Alabama," "On the Hunt," "Tuesday's Gone" and "Simple Man"
• Ringo Starr--"It Don't Come Easy"
• Foghat--"Slow Ride"
• Mountain--"Mississippi Queen"
• Moody Blues--"Nights in White Satin"
• Procol Harum--"Conquistador"
• Deep Purple--"Smoke on the Water"
• Rolling Stones--"Jumpin' Jack Flash"
• Bachman-Turner Overdrive--"Takin' Care of Business," "Let It Ride" and "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet"
• Santana--"Oye Como Va," "Evil Ways" and "Black Magic Woman"
• Grand Funk Railroad--"I'm Your Captain/Closer to Home" and "We're an American Band"
• Marshall Tucker Band--"Can't You See"
  
• Jethro Tull--"Locomotive Breath"

That's all I can think of at the moment. Some of them we did fairly well--or thought we did. Some of them--"Nights in White Satin," for example--I can't imagine how we did at all!

I should also say that we did two or three original songs. I seem to remember one Harlan wrote and one Terry wrote, but I have no memory of these that I can get hold of. And I started my songwriting career with the band. We did one of the first songs I wrote: "Madison County." I still remember it--some of it at least.

Madison County is the only place for me.
If you gave me the world, there's no place I'd rather be....

I have a couple more posts planned about White Water--our biggest adventure, the defining event in my memory of those years, and my leaving the band.

Favorite Lines I

No, these aren't my favorite pick-up lines! They're a few of my favorite lines from songs that I've heard over the years.

I won't leave you 'til I turn to find you gone.

Cock Robin

I was either standing in your shadow
or blocking your light--
though I kept on trying
I could not get it right.
For you, girl,
there's just not enough love in the world.

Don Henley

We're too young to reason,
and too grown up to dream.

Bryan Ferry

Oh, to grace how great a debtor
daily I'm constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
prone to leave the God I love;
here's my heart, O take and seal it,
seal it for Thy courts above.

"Come Thou Fount"

When you're lovers in a dangerous time,
sometimes you're made to feel as if your love's a crime.
Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight;
gotta kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight.

Bruce Cockburn

When I was a kid, Uncle Remus, he put me to bed,
with a picture of Stonewall Jackson above my head;
then Daddy came in to kiss his little man;
with gin on his breath and a Bible in his hand,
he talked about honor and things I should know,
then he'd stagger a little as he went out the door.

I can still hear the soft southern wind in the live oak trees;
and those Williams boys, they still mean a lot to me,
Hank and Tennessee.
I guess we're all gonna be what we're gonna be.
So what do you do with good ole boys like me?

Bob McDill

More later, as I think of them. . . .


243

The White Water Band II

A long day at the office, a short night on the blog.

The White Water Band membership settled to Harlan, Jim, Terry, Kirk and me. We practiced in a chicken coop. Harlan's family had at some point in the past--when I was a good bit younger, I think--raised chickens. On their property were two large cinderblock facilities where the chickens had been kept, but by the time the band came along, the chicken-raising was over. We cleaned the chicken poop and dust and cobwebs out of one of these structures, turned on the power and set up our equipment. It was a neat place (neat as in cool, not as in tidy), sitting on the edge of a creek that separated it from the highway. A wooden walkway, something like a covered bridge led from the side of the road to "The Coop."

The widows were, as you might expect from a chicken house, covered with chicken wire, and the sound got out into community pretty well. In the summer, Mom used to be embarrassed when we practiced on Wednesday nights and our covers of Kiss or the Doobie Brothers could be heard at whichever Walnut church was holding prayer meeting. I wonder how much people actually talked and how much she imagined. In the winter, we covered the windows with plastic and turned on heaters of some sort, miraculously managing never to burn the place to the ground.

The band's other "space" was our bus. We bought an old school bus and painted it blue. It was something to behold!


243

The White Water Band I

A couple of recent occasions have brought me in touch with my distant past--high school! Having graduated from Madison High School (Marshall, North Carolina) in 1977, I've been away from those halls for almost 30 years. To redirect, it isn't high school that popped up recently but the rock and roll band I was part of in those years. I ran into Terry, one of the guitar players, when I attended my wife's stepfather's funeral a few weeks ago; the guitar player and the stepfather were cousins but of different generations. Then I decided to stop and see Harlan a couple of Sundays ago Cleveland, Tennessee, when I was driving back from New Orleans. Jim was the other guitar player, and Kirk was the drummer. Our crew also included Jobie and Karen and, at various times, Ben and Steve. Others came in and out of the band--and the crew--and should be remembered here, but like I said, it's been 30 years and more.

Jim was maybe eight years older than I, Harlan maybe five older, Terry and Kirk two older. So, when I was 16, for example, all the other guys were old enough to be in the bars where we played. I wasn't. How did my poor caring fretting parents ever let their baby run off into the night with a rock-and-roll band, knowing he would be up way past his bedtime in some Holiday Inn Lounge or redneck dive in those years long before cell phones or even calling cards? The answer: Harlan. He grew up down the road from me, and my parents--Mom, at least--had known his family since she was small. Harlan was trusted, and even though his behavior wasn't always what my parents counted on, for the most part he was a good influence and good at protecting me. As were all the other guys, even though my parents didn't know them as well . . . or at all at first.

Actually, at first, none of these guys were in the band anyway. The White Water Band began in the spring of 1973, when I was in the 8th grade at Walnut School. I believe I played a set of bongos; Dennis played guitar; John played bass; and Kenneth played drums. I might not be remembering this right, but it seems to me that in the last month or so of school we were allowed, for the last few minutes of the day, to go to an empty room up on the second floor and play songs like "House of the Rising Sun" and probably a thing or two by Creedence Clearwater Revival. I don't remember if the guys knew how to tune their guitars, and if they did, I wonder if they knew to tune them to each other. I'm sure we were great! We were Strawberry Funk!

My most vivid memory of this group isn't about playing at all but faking it--like on American Bandstand. We had a record player in our practice room, and I brought a 45 from home (a "phonograph"--use fingers for quotation marks and say in the voice of Dr. Evil--not a handgun). The recording artist was Billy Preston, and the song was "Will It Go 'Round in Circles." We'd put it on and lean out the windows, lip-syncing, thinking that the students going below wouldn't be familiar with the song and might think it was us.

School let out, and Kenneth moved away. Dennis got his older sister's boyfriend, Harlan, who had taught him to play guitar, to help us out a bit, and over the next few months changes took place rapidly. (Again, this is all based on memories now some 34 years old.) Maybe Terry came out to play with us, and Kirk moved to southern Appalachia from Illinois and joined the band. Dennis lost interest (maybe). Harlan switched to bass, and we pushed John out--"just business," as I would later learn to say in Nashville, but I always regretted things like that. I don't know where Jim came from. My educated guess is that he was working at an Asheville music store where we bought equipment and came to us that way. All the while, I was playing blue sparkle bongos and a set of black congas that I'd bought. I saw myself in the same role as that second drummer the Doobie Brothers used.

But we needed a singer. One night when we were in our practice space--which I'll describe next time--waiting for some guy to come and audition, the band was trying to learn a new song. I don't have any idea what the song was, but I remember that for some reason I was singing it for the practice session and tapping away on my congas. My imagination tells me the guys started looking at each other and raising their eyebrows. "Why don't you sing?" Maybe that question was thrown at me when we finished learning the song. The other guy came and auditioned, but I seem to remember just standing behind my drums while he was trying out and thinking, "Wow, I'm the singer!"

So for the most part, that's where the next many years of my life began.

. . . to be continued.


245

Lights On . . . Nobody Home

Thanks to giving my mind over to teaching responsibilites this week--Hinduism's Bhagavadgita and Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury--I'm mining other minds for the time being.

In preparing for my Wednesday Night Live! class at Cherokee, I ran across these quotes from theologian Joseph Sittler's Gravity and Grace (1986):

St. Augustine, at the beginning of his Confessions, makes a great and beautiful statement: 'Thou has made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.' Back of that statement lies a proposition which says that the human is created for transcendence … that we are by nature created to envision more than we can accomplish, to long for that which is beyond our possibilities.

We are formed for God. . . . Faith is a longing. Humankind is created to grasp more than we can grab, to probe for more than we can ever handle or manage.

. . . This restlessness may make us want to throw in the towel — or to pull up our socks. You can either be creatively restless, as before the unknowable, or you can simply collapse into futility. One of the goals of the Christian message is to join together the people of the way, the way of an eternally given restlessness, and to win from that restlessness the participation in God, which is all that our mortality can deliver.

'Tis the Season

Just when I was about to fall on my knees and thank God that these political ads are over tomorrow, an ad for Corker and one for Ford sandwiched two commercials with a Christmas theme!

So, America, get out and vote--and while you're at it, steal a little time from the office and go shopping at Target!

Leaving New Orleans

The night passed even more miserably than I'd expected. I went to bed at around 11:00 and, I think, went to sleep fairly quickly. But by 1:00 the noise outside on Bienville Street--a main passageway to and from Bourbon--woke me up. I didn't feel too ill toward the revelers. As far as they were concerned, they were just passing with friends through the French Quarter of New Orleans; that they were yelling and laughing and playing bad music loudly below my hotel window didn't register with them. Why would it?

Then there was the almost proverbial Hollywood motel scene, in which I lay trying to get back to sleep while the couple next door made love. It wasn't the banging headboard and screaming of the movies but a fairly steady bumping and two stuttering voices.

All right, I thought, this ain't working for a ten-hour drive home tomorrow.

The main problem is that I'm a "white noise" sleeper, and I had no white noise. The air conditioner isn't that kind that will run constantly, but like one at home, cuts on and off as needed. Even when I turned the thermostat down to 64 degrees, it wouldn't stay on long enough for me to get to sleep. (And, of course, I was a bit chilly at that temperature.) But finally, at about 2:30, I had an idea. I googled "white noise" and "sleep." The first couple of pages of results were commercial sites selling white noise machines, but at last I found a site that offered to play some white noise for me for free. It played a sound something like a way-too-steady rain for a period of an hour and fifteen minutes. So over the next three or four hours, between the air conditioner and the web site, I slept in 75-minute bursts. It wasn't a good night's rest, but it was something.

Enough for now. I'll shave, shower and pack. Call for the car and hit the road. I expect I'll make it home tonight around 10:00.

New Orleans III

Here's a picture of the red beans and rice and Abita Beer to which I treated myself late on Saturday afternoon. Earlier in the day I'd had some shrimp and cheese grits for lunch, but I stopped for this afternoon "snack," figuring that I couldn't leave the city without partaking of this traditional favorite.


New Orleans--the French Quarter--is both a feast for and an assault on the senses:

Sight--lights, people, historical places, street performers, the poor

Sound--music (all kinds from every doorway), the tops of voices, car horns and sound systems, motorcycles, carriages and the clopping hooves of mules

touch--bumping into people thronging Bourbon Street, tired feet meeting sidewalk and street, everything handled and contaminated by far too many people

smell--food, soured garbage, perfume

taste--nothing bad yet

New Orleans Images (from a Saturday afternoon walk):

• workers in black & white on the Iberville Street sidewalk at the back door of a restaurant
• "Come in, sir, come in! Let me show you what I have in here, sir!" A glance through the doorway into the darkness reveals long legs in high heels walking on the top of a bar
• carriage driver plugs one nostril with a finger and blows snot toward the sidewalk as he carries a couple on a romantic ride along Bourbon Street
• a band of young vagabonds--"urchins" might be a better word
• the Mississippi River
• a bad recorder player somewhere outside in the dark
• a group of Charles Brockden Brown scholars, wine glasses in hand, on the balcony of the Rex Room, a private, for-hire dining room
• a group of revelers on a balcony at the corner of Bourbon and Conti, tossing necklaces of beads in an attempt to "ring" fire hydrants or pedestrians on the street below
• the full moon over Bourbon Street
• the full moon's broken reflection in gable windows above Bourbon and Conti
• a plate of chicken with crayfish and rice, white wine . . . key lime pie and coffee
• the faces of friends and colleagues I gather with every two years

It was a good conference and a good visit in the city.

Now I'm full and a little tipsy and ready to go to bed, where I'll hopefully get sleep in this noisy New Orleans night and rest for tomorrow's ten-hour drive.

I'm ready to be home.

New Orleans II

The Napoleon House -- a restaurant (or the building, at least) supposedly on this site since the 1790s. A group went here for lunch today. The food was more reasonably priced than they expected and not as good as they'd hoped.

I'm tired and fuzzy-minded after a long day. Two conference sessions took place this morning. After walking around for a while in the noon hour, I ate lunch at a little place called Mena's House (I think). I had a fried shrimp Po' Boy Sandwich and a couple of beers. I chaired the session after lunch. Then there was the society business meeting, the keynote address and a bar and buffet. For an hour or so a friend and I walked around the Bourbon Street area. There's still a lot of beautiful sin around here.

I, however, remain chaste.

New Orleans

Tonight I'm in New Orleans at the Chateau LeMoyne. Those of us who study the work of Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810)--we call ourselves the Charles Brockden Brown Society!--get together for a conference every two years. I've been to three of the five conferences so far: Las Vegas in 2000, New York City in 2004 and this one in New Orleans. The first one took place in Brown's native Philadelphia in 1998 and the third one in Groningen, The Netherlands, in 2002.

I picked up a car at the ETSU Motor Pool yesterday (11/1) at around 1:00 or so and left Johnson City at around 3:00. I drove and I drove to Chattanooga, where I stopped to eat supper at a place called Glen Gene's Deli. The I drove and drove and drove to Meridian, Mississippi, where I stopped and slept at a Motel 6. I got to bed around 12:00 (11:00 Central).

I woke up at 5:00 Central and started working to finish the paper I was to deliver today. At around 10:00 I finished it up, showered and went to a computer store to print it out. The older fellow running the place, to whom I'd spoken a couple of times to get directions, asked if he'd seen Johnson City on his telephone when I called. He said that his wife was pushing hard to retire in Elizabethton. That's what he said. I figure if she wants it, he'll end up there before he knows it. After printing the paper at the computer store and eating an early lunch at a place called McAlister's Deli, I headed for New Orleans.

I don't know what I expected to see here--remains of Katrina, I mean. The last few miles along I-10, before getting into the suburbs and such, I saw lots of clean-up taking place in the Interstate median and along the sides. I wasn't sure if it was Katrina-related or not. But when I started coming into the city, I saw a lot of buildings--even a Wal-Mart--still boarded up and deserted. As I-10 passed through New Orleans suburbia, I saw lots of new roofing on the houses; then again, I saw lots of houses missing shingles and some missing roofs. I saw entire rows of apartment buildings roofless and abandoned. And these aren't even in the areas supposed to be hardest hit. Many areas still appear to be either abandoned or only partially inhabited.

By 2:30 I was loading my stuff into Chateau LeMoyne, and by 3:00 I was in the conference's second session. My paper was third in the third session, so I'm finished with that part and can now relax, enjoying the conference and enjoying New Orleans. "Images of Islam in the Literary Magazine" was my topic, and it seemed to go fairly well.

After the session and a little beer and cheese reception, I came up to the room, talked to the folks at home, watched CSI and then went to eat at Louisiana Bistro, just down the street from the hotel. Even on Central Time, this was much later than I usually eat, so I kept it on the lighter side--or so I told myself. I had this great little salad of mixed greens, a little apple and onion bits, some candied walnuts and a great sort of raspberry vinaigrette dressing. Some good crunchy bread. A dish of grits and pork (grillades?). Two beers--Arbita Amber (?). Some incredibly rich ice cream, well decorated with chocolate and strawberries, and a cup of coffee. The "lighter side" went out the window after the salad!

And now, to sleep in the Big Easy!

After