B.J. Thomas’ (Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song was a perfect introduction to life without our parents. B.J.’s chorus of the repeated “While I miss my baby” ached of the loss of my mom. It would be years until I learned about the 5 stages of grieving and nine years before I took ‘Death and Dying’ at Carthage College. And while B.J. Thomas’ ‘Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song’ went #1 on Billboards Pop and Country charts (but only #2 on the WLS charts I would begin collecting in couple of years), it was my first steps in my grieving process.

We spent a week at Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack’s after my parents died (or after  ‘the accident’ as some of my brothers and sisters would refer to their murder/suicide). The process of carrying on was hard but had to be started. The plan was that Aunt Bernice, Mom’s oldest sister (my mom was one of 13 children), and Uncle Ray would stay at our house during the week so we continue to go to school. On the weekends, we would stay with different aunt and uncles families; understandably.

One of my first fears was how to tell people my parents had died without crying. I soon realized I didn’t have to, most of the people I knew were already aware of my situation. I remember my first morning back at school, we were waiting at the door of West Elementary to get in on a cold Monday morning in February 1975.

The sixth graders would wait at the main north door that sat atop a dozen or so concrete steps surrounded with iron hand rails and another set of rails up the center of the stairs. If you were early, you got to be in the coveted alcove right by the door, while the other poor saps would have to wait on the unprotected stone stairs below in the cold. If you had buddy up top, you could probably get invited into the alcove.

A friend of mine saw me and gave me the ‘nod’ – the invite – to the alcove. There a good chance I would have gotten to the nod because my friend, but more likely it was because it was my first day back at school since my parents had died. In kids terms, I had celebrity status – at least for today. Making my way through the lower grade saps and Fifth graders I realized – again – how easy it was to forget my parents had died and I how I could play like any other sixth graders without dead parents.

After my Mom’s funeral, the family went to Aunt Bernice and Uncle Ray’s house for lunch. Us kids were playing tag in the driveway – just like regular kids. And I remember thinking, “what am I doing? I can’t be playing. My parents are dead.” But we did play. And I would go in and out of these ‘reality checks’ and sometimes I would complete stop what I’m doing with this realization. Thankfully over time these ‘reality checks’ happened less and less.

So when I got up to the alcove I found there was a patch of ice that the guys were playing with. ‘Playing with’ consisted of pushing each other on a three foot patch of ice. We all took turns trying to stand on it while everyone else tried to pushed you off – a makeshift version of ‘King of the Mountain’, or ‘Ice’, in this case. Unfortunately it wasn’t long before I successfully removed Bill Erickson from the patch of ice. Unfortunate because when I ‘removed’ him, he ended up falling and hitting his head on the iron hand rail. We all gasped as his head literally rung the railing – it obviously hurt. I reached out to see if he was OK but Bill held his head and he was fighting hard not to cry. He looked at me and said:

“Too bad what happened to your old lady.”

And that phrase has haunted me for thirty nine years. He had disarmed me completely. I didn’t have a response. Bill wasn’t a good friend, I had never been over to his house but we would play at recess and hang out at school together. It must have really hurt, I told myself. Nobody said anything. I realized everyone knew. Everyone knew my parents had died. Everyone left the patch of ice alone after that. It was now tainted – like me. And we all stood in silence together at what Bill said until the class bell called us in.

When I got to class Mr. Krenek started the morning that he had an announcement. I paled with fear thinking his announcement was about me. That he was going to announced I had returned after burying my parents. He would express how sorry he, and the entire class, was for my loss – but – welcome back.

But the announcement wasn’t about me. Another classmate’s family, I don’t remember her name, had been involved with a private plane crash. One of her family members had died and our classmate had broken her arm and lost an eye. She would be coming back to class in a few days. I looked at her empty desk two seats ahead of me and one row to my right.

The morning when she returned to class, I stared like all the other kids in class. It was clear she had been in a accident.  Her eye was patched with scratches peeking out from the gauze that wrapped her head. Her left arm was in a full cast up to her armpit. She made her way to her sit and opened her desk with her free hand to put her sack lunch in.

I tried to imagine going through a plane crash. The terrifying moments before the crash, the chaos, the rescue. The discovery of finding out your brother, sister or mom or dad was dead. I had just lost my parents but physically I was OK. It was so different from what I had gone through last week. My tragedy was basically hidden. She would have to literately wear hers the rest of her life.

Eventually I learned the old proverb – “I cried because I had no shoes, Until I saw a man who had no feet.” And while it may have been obvious I was the ‘man with no feet’, it was just as obvious she was a ‘woman with no feet’. I found our situations fantastic – not in a good way but in a unbelievable way. I would ‘run the numbers’ and re-examine the odds of our tragedies occurring within a week of each others for the rest of my life.

One important realization as I began this new life without my parents, I was not alone in this, others had their own tragedies. She had no way of knowing how intertwined our situations would be in my mind because I never talked to her. She would never know how much I thought of her situation and how much that helped me with mine. I sometimes wondered if she thought about me and my situation. Would she want to have traded places with me – like I wanted to trade places with her? At the time I would have gladly traded places with her; but would that really have been any better? Sometimes I would think about this at recess. I always got the sense our classmates paired us together. We now were both ‘tainted’. But I still never talked to her. Over time I would realize the fantasy of trading places was not worth the time it took to render them. But render them I would – over the next several years but I never forgot the girl from the plane crash.

Mr. Kreneck, was always my favorite teacher. He would be the teacher I measure all my other teachers to. Of course, it helped to have a personal tragedy to make that connection. I would never say I was a  teacher’s pet – but if I were, I would have already on my way before my parents died.  I first met Mr. Krenek when I was in 5th grade in Ms. Hoag’s class. It turned out Ms. Hoag and Mr. Kreneck were friends and they had their classes work on a project together once a year. I don’t know if the other two 5th and 6th grade classes did this but I was happy to be in Ms. Hoag’s 5th grade class and now Mr. Krenek’s class for 6th grade.

A month or so after my parents died I remember Mr. Kreneck pulled me into the storage room just down the hall from our classroom to talk to me. I had always been a ‘A’ student, school was easy for me. But after my parents’ deaths I had apparently checked out. Mr. Kreneck told me I couldn’t give up. My grades had disappeared, I was in a academic freefall.

And then Mr. Kreneck played a ‘card’ only a few people would ever played on me. He said, “Your mother would not want to you give up like this.” And he was right. I remember leaning against the steel shelving units crying. I remember looking out the second story window through the shelving unit to the asphalted playground and feeling how I still didn’t want to disappoint Mom, even though she wasn’t here anymore. I can’t say I turned my grades around but Mr. Kreneck didn’t talk to me about my grades again. My grades were fine until I got to high school but then I could no longer blame bad grades on my parents.

Another thing I remember about Mr. Kreneck was he collected stamps. He collected foreign stamps, specifically but not exclusively, Czech stamps. Which made sense since he was Czechoslovakian. Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack had introduced me to stamp collecting. My cousins John and Jim already collected stamps; more John then Jim. Soon I had my own book and quickly graduated from used stamps to mint stamps. John also collected ‘First Day Covers‘ which were only issued in the post office the stamp was assigned to, then they were released to the rest of the post offices. I couldn’t afford the First Day Covers John got with the fancy envelopes but I could get the new commemorative stamp the day they got released to everyone else.

In April of 1975 the US release the Mariner 10 stamp. This was the first time I was going to be able to buy a stamp the day if came out. It was also a chance to officially accept my teacher’s pet title. So that bright Friday morning, I rode my bike to the post office, purchased 2 Mariner 10 stamps and proudly delivered one of them to Mr. Kreneck – all without being late to his class. It turned out stamp collecting was a great distraction for me.

These days, when we returned to school, Aunt Bernice would be home cooking our meals, doing our dishes and washing our clothes. Uncle Ray would come from work to our house. They would stay with us for the week and then go back to their house on the weekends. It was weird at first – but everything was weird now. Aunt Bernice and Uncle Ray played the role of mom and dad. Aunt Bernice would cook dinner and make lunches – if we didn’t get them at school, which we mostly did. Uncle Ray would watch TV with us and tease us.

I remember Uncle Ray caught Dave or I picking our noses and Uncle Ray would go on and on about how we looked just like a gorilla he saw at the zoo the other day. Uncle Ray would go on and on about how the gorilla had his finger “waaaayyy up there!” and then grunt like a gorilla, “Ooo ooo ooo.”  Dave and I would get embarrassed or laugh at the other depending on who was Uncle Ray’s ‘gorilla’ that evening. It was a different parenting style and it was fun.

I remember when he would come ‘home’ from work he would threaten us with whisker burns – the act of rubbing his four o’clock shadow against our young smooth cheeks. Dave and I would rub his cheeks and feel his rough bristles and feign shock at the torture his whisker burn would give. Eventually our new ritual would distill into us rubbing his cheek and suggesting he needs a shave. And we would all laugh and giggle.

And for years afterwards when I would see Uncle Ray, I would rub his cheek with tops of my fingers and he would smile, point and me and laugh in his own version of Barney Rubble. Even after not seeing him for 15 years when Desi and I brought our kids to visit them in Nevis, MN on the way back from our South Dakota with Lee. At one point in our visit I came up besides Uncle Ray. I rubbed his cheek and his eyes got wide, he pointed at me and smile, “awwwww, heeya, ya ya ya”

Looking back at those months, outside of my talking to Mr. Kreneck, I never talked to an adult about my parents – not that I remember. I find it interesting that nowadays, if kids bully, or get bullied, or surf porn, or watch horror movies – they are sent to talk to a ‘professional’ but not back then. ‘Back then’, I guess, they waited for something to go wrong. Apparently nothing went wrong with any of us.

During the weekends we would be shipped out to different aunts and uncles. We rarely went altogether to one aunt and uncles, five kids was alot to absorb for one family, even for just a weekend. It was these car rides that I would occasionally catch B.J. Thomas’ “Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song”. Once I caught Aunt Judy changing the radio station when it started but most of the aunts and uncles were not paying attention to the songs on the radio. Or maybe they thought BJ’s melancholiness was just what we needed, or at least what I needed. It was nice to hear there were others that were as sad as I was.

And sometimes on these trips back and forth to our home, if I was lucky enough to have the window seat, I would lean my head against the cold window and listen to B.J. Thomas sing how right it was to feel so sad. And if it was dark, I would even let a tear roll down my round cheek. Because that’s what I wanted – “A real hurtin’ song about a love that’s gone wrong, ‘Cause I don’t wanna cry all alone.”

Years later when Uncle Jack and I were alone in the car he told me about those weekends from his perspective. Jack and I didn’t have many trips just to ourselves. Now I wish we had more of them, or at least more them that I remember. This particular trip was to Downers Grove and we were on Route 53. It was when he briefly worked for the Village of Downers Grove.

He told me about how all the aunt and uncles would gather at Aunt Nancy and Uncle Wayne’s basement to figure out what to do with my brothers and sisters and I. Over the course of 2 or 3 months they made their plans. Hope was to go with Aunt Bev and Uncle Dick. Their daughter Tami was around Hope’s age. Lee was to go with Aunt Sandy and Uncle Claude.

Jack said, “We tried to get all three of you boys but everyone thought that would be too much for us.” So Dave and I went to Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack’s. Dawn ended up going to Aunt Betty and Uncle Richards but it was close between them and Aunt Nancy and Uncle Wayne. Aunt Betty and Uncle Richard’s daughter Judy was a year older then Dawn, while Aunt Nancy and Uncle Wayne’s daughter Sue was a little younger then Dawn. As Jack put it, “While we were trying to decide who Dawn should go with, until Betty announced, ‘that’s it – Dawn’s coming with us.’ And no one was going to tell Betty ‘no’. Suffice to say, there are other ‘songs’ that go with Dawn’s life with Aunt Betty and Uncle Richard.

Dawn told me the families we went to on those weekends trips, as we finished the school year, were the families we were eventually ended up. Since it was unclear where she was going she was still switching between Aunt Betty and Uncle Richard’s and Aunt Nancy and Uncle Wayne’s well into May. Since it had been decided that Dave and I would be with Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack, I don’t remember the weekends we visited them – except a trip to Randhurst Mall to visit a their favorite stamp store.

I do remember a few of these transitional weekends. I do remember we spent a weekend at Aunt Delores and Uncle Larry’s. I think it was Lee, Dave and I. Like us, Aunt Delores and Uncle Larry’s family also had five kids – Debbie, Ken, Jeff, Roger and Rick. I remember Uncle Larry showing us how he stripped wooden furniture and Jeff showing us their Homing Pigeons. I think that was the first time I remember having been to a Catholic church.

We must have spent a couple of weekends at Aunt Judy and Uncle Fred’s because there were two specific incidents I remember there. First was Aunt Judy taking us to see Animal House. Because it was rated ‘R’ the kid behind the glass selling tickets asked if Aunt Judy was our mom. It was the first time we had to explain to a stranger that we didn’t have parents anymore. In hindsight, Aunt Judy should have just said ‘yes’ or ‘I’m their legal guardian’ but we all heard the question and we all looked at Aunt Judy for the answer – which was ‘no’. So only those over 17 could have gone in – which was none of us. If it hadn’t been such an awkward moment for all of us, maybe we could figured out a way to get tickets. After all, it would have been my first rated ‘R’ movie.

The other incident was when Dave fell down and hurt his hip. We had been sledding down the snowy slopes that surrounded a pond behind Aunt Judy and Uncle Fred’s house. I had already gone inside when Dave slipped on the ice and fell on his hip. Typical Dave – if anyone would hurt himself it would be him. He was the one who jumped out the second story window onto the driveway to get away from Hope. And he was the one that took ‘the-bike-that-was-too-big-for-him’ and wiped out leaving him unconscious and carried home by some neighbor kids. But this was the first time he hurt himself without Mom and Dad around.

I don’t think Aunt Judy was in the house when Dave got hurt. What I do remember was Lee and I in Aunt Judy and Uncle Fred’s basement as Dave laid in one of the bedrooms upstairs screaming in pain. But not just screaming, it was almost a shriek. And it went on for what seemed like hours. But it wasn’t just a scream of physical pain but one of emotion. “I – Want – My – Mother!” he screamed. I think Dave’s physical pain allowed him to release the emotional pain of his loss. And while Lee and I acutely understood this loss, helping him was beyond us. Dave’s emotional cries echoed our own loss but we were helpless on his physical pain – so we just looked at each other and the basement ceiling. Neither of us did anything to help Dave or comfort him. Dave had taken over our own pains of a anguish vocally. But as he continued his hour (and more) of screaming I wanted him to stop. He had spent my pain and even though my heart still throbbed, I had to learn this new reality. Neither Lee or I reached out to Dave. I told myself it was because I didn’t want to cry myself; and besides, what could I do? Dave was crying about a  real hurtin’ song and that we had been done wrong. But Lee and I let him cry all alone.

At some point our cousin Fred came down and said something like “Man, he’s must really be hurt.” I think Fred came down partially to see how Lee and I were, and partially to see if we could help Dave. But we did nothing; nothing but relate to his loss.

And that was the problem, no one knew what do – except the practical things. Our aunts and uncles were finding us homes. And as we would find out, they went beyond opening their homes. They opened their hearts and their own families to us – some with more success then others.

It is when I look back I can see how high we’ve climbed, or rather how far we’ve dug out, and yes – realized how how high we all had climbed. We had no perspective for where our now individual paths would take us. Those months after the ‘accident’ were filled with uncertainty. We didn’t know what our aunts and uncles were planning for our futures. We were getting through day by day, week by week. And by the time we starting hitting month by month, our lives together as a family were coming to an end. The plans on where we where going to live were being finalized. The plans of an Estate Sale were made and the house and furniture was sold. Our family would no longer live in the Gray House in Des Plains. And in other houses, room was being made in four different homes with four different families for our eventual arrivals.

I remember Dave getting angry at Aunt Bernice one afternoon after school for not letting him go over to a friends house because she didn’t know who he was. Aunt Bernice really didn’t know any of our friends. On the other side, Dave’s ‘friend’ was not one of Mom’s favorite for him. I always wondered how Aunt Bernice knew Dave’s friend well enough to say ‘no’. With Mom no longer in our lives Mom would need to work though our new families. And they follow her wishes as best as they could – again, some with more success then others.

So after the Estate Sale and after the school year, our new families came, one by one, to move us to our new homes. I do not remember Hope, Lee or Dawn leaving. I only remember Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack, and John and Jim, arriving with a borrowed pickup truck to move our beds and the last of our possessions. I remember standing with them on our drive way as we said goodbye to the Wests, the family that lived in our basement apartment. The tailgate of the truck laid open for Dave, Jim, John and I to climb in for the ride home – our new home.

Little Debbie West jump on the gate and announced, “I want to be a Zilligen!” Little Debbie wanted to join in the adventure our move, or more likely, just the ride in the back of the pickup truck. Mr. West picked her up so we could climb into the back of the pickup. With our elbows hung out the back of the pickup truck,  we waved goodbye to the Wests with our other hands. Dave and I waved goodbye to our house, our neighborhood and goodbye to our old life. All I could think of, as Uncle Jack steered the truck over turned over the curbs of our driveway and pulled down Rose Avenue, were little Debbie West’s words – “I want to be a Zilligen!”

And the the irony, because at that moment, the last thing I wanted to be – was a Zilligen. And from the cab of the pickup truck I swear I heard BJ Thomas start singing ‘Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song.’

To say the morning after my parents died was the worse moment in my life would be glaringly obvious. I had woken up earlier that morning on a hide-a-bed and my Aunt Mary Ann and Uncle Ed arguing. Well, not really arguing, Aunt Mary Ann couldn’t believe what had happened and Uncle Ed was telling her it did – “I saw the blood,” I remember him saying. The kitchen light was on and Dave, Lee and I were on the hide-a-bed in the living room next to me. It was still dark outside.

I woke up later and it seemed like everyone else was already up. That never happens, I was always the first one up in our house. But we weren’t in our house, we were in Aunt Mary Ann and Uncle Ed’s apartment. The TV was on but no one paying attention to it. In fact, no one was talking at all, the TV was just filling in the sound as a strange compensation for last night’s devastation.

There was a knock on the door and Aunt Mary Ann opened it. It was our Aunt Joyce. They hugged and cried. We cried again too. I remember the awful faces we made last night. Those awful faces people make when it twists up in gut-wrenching pain and tears. After a while, Aunt Joyce pulled away. It was always great when Mom would take us to go to Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack’s. John and Jim always had the good toys. Unfortunately that how kids measure families – if they’ve got ‘the good toys’ or not. Mom would take us over there and Dave and I would play with John and Jim while Mom and Aunt Joyce would sit in the kitchen and drank their coffee. Aunt Joyce was always really nice. But not this morning, she had the same awful face we all did.

At some point, we were told to get our things together but we only had our coats. We had only been coming to Jeffery’s birthday party and he was only four. Since even Dawn was nine, we were really just coming over for cake and ice cream – Jeffery was too young to consider any of us would actually play with him. And it was just our family. No other cousins or aunts and uncles, just the Zilligens. The only things we had to get was our coats and hats – and gloves if we remembered them. It was February after all.

Dressed up to the walk to Aunt Joyce’s station wagon we waited in the hall. Aunt Joyce and Aunt Mary Ann hugged again and cried. We stood like zombies looking at the stairs leading the half floor up to the outside door. That is where it happened. The dim light in the hallway paled compared to the light outside, even though it was cloudy. Aunt Mary Ann and Uncle Ed’s apartment was the first one on the basement floor so it was just us and the stairs but it like the long dim hallway of some government building. I remember looking down that hall and thinking, “I don’t want to walk there.” I don’t know if all five us were staring at those stairs like I was but that was where it happened. That was the last place I saw my mom alive

I don’t think Aunt Joyce knew the situation we were literally facing as she shuffled us to the stairs, like a hen with her chicks. I don’t think she knew at the top of those stairs her sister laid the night before. I don’t think she knew when Dave and I came in from playing in the snow just before we were leaving Jeffery’s party, her sister was laying on the floor with Lee holding her head up. And that Dave and I had to step over her to get back into Aunt Mary Ann and Uncle Ed’s apartment. Eventually, Hope and Aunt Mary Ann got Lee to leave Mom and come into the apartment as well. None of us wanted to climb those stairs because of what had happened last night. But Aunt Joyce didn’t know that so she nudged her little chicks up the stairs and out to in the snowy February parking lot.

I remember looking down at the carpeting where my mom had laid but I didn’t see any blood. But she didn’t die actually there, she had died at the hospital Aunt Mary Ann said. I looked at the other side of the landing, my dad’s glasses were no longer there – like they were last night.

I remember telling someone about how my parents died years later and telling them as I walked out that apartment that morning, as bad as that was, it was never going to get any worse. I understood that people in abusive situations have it harder because their situations are unending. But that was years later and as I write this, and relive this, I’ll admit that morning – was pretty fucking bad. Five newly minted orphans walking through where their mother laid dying not even twelve hours earlier.

I mark this as the lowest point in my life. It’s all up from here, right? But it sucked that now I knew the way to ‘here’ – my lowest point. ‘Here’, I would learn, was a room painted with tears and walls that were icy and black. I know there were walls because I found corners to wallow in. I could not tell if there was a floor or I couldn’t stand because my legs were too shaky to support me here. There was no ceiling, just blackness above you. You never flew, you could only fall – flailing for an unreachable edge or slope. I would also learn, now that I had found my way here, it would a place I would visit and dream about in the days, weeks and years to come. And over this time I would create well-worn paths and set up new and different paths to – ‘here’. Gratefully it is true what they say – time heals all wounds but the paths always remain. And while you end up just using the paths less and less – ‘here’ had become my Saudade.

Many years later, with the children my mom would never know, I had finally started reading the Narnia series to them. Lee had recommended the series when I was in college but I never took the time to actually read them. Now I used the excuse to of  ‘reading to the kids’ to read them for myself. As I started the series for the first time with Nate, it was in the first book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, that I came across the following verse:

“I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been – if you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you – you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again.”
C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

I had to stop reading to Nate and hid my silent tears from him. He was probably 7 or 8 at the time. I was barely able to read the words aloud. C.S. Lewis had captured the night my parents died. The only clarification I would add would be – it’s not that nothing would ever happen again, it was that nothing of significance would ever happen again. How could it?

The ride to Aunt Joyce’s house was as quiet at Aunt Mary Ann and Uncle Ed’s apartment. I don’t remember the radio being on or anyone saying anything. The sound of the tires on the road did nothing to distract us. I’ve never asked Aunt Joyce about that trip. What was she thinking that morning? The tears had been shed, our backs hurt from sobbing but the morning had come anyways. And in the midst this quietest I’m sure we all had the same thought – so now what do we do?

We stayed with Aunt Joyce, Uncle Jack and John and Jim for a week. In that week my mom’s wake and funeral were arranged. I’m assuming someone went to our Gray house and got us more clothes to wear. We were there for half a week when I realized we were missing school. I guess your parents dying was an acceptable reason not to be in school.

I don’t remember too much about our day to day activities. I wasn’t involved with the arrangements for the wake and funeral arrangement, I don’t know if any of us were. I don’t remember leaving Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack’s house anytime during that week except for the wake and the funeral. One thing I do remember was discovering their Hi-Fi and their collection of records. Among those records was Johnny Horton’s Greatest Hits. The song I recognized was ‘Sink the Bismarck’. I didn’t know who Johnny Horton was but I like his first name. Mom called me Johnny – well, she used to.

We watched Family Classics on Channel Nine. I watched for the monster movies but they never really played any ‘monster movies’, the closest I could get was ‘War of the World’ or ‘Mysterious Island’. I remember watching the 1960 movie ‘Sink the Bismarck’ about the Allies mission to sink a Nazi battleship called The Bismarck. And one of my favorite parts was the song (that ironically, is not in the movie).

I played Johnny Horton’s Greatest Hits to hear ‘Sink the Bismarck’ but discovered a bunch of other songs to distract me – “North to Alaska”, “Johnny Reb”, “When Its Springtime in Alaska”, “The Battle of New Orleans” and “Johnny Freedom”. Johnny Horton apparently enjoyed ‘Johnny’ as the characters of his songs, and that suited me just fine. Many of his songs were patriotic and uplifting. But the song that captured my melancholy was “All for the Love of a Girl.”

When I started writing these ‘Songs of My Life’ stories, this was the song I was dreading – and looking forward – to the most. It is the song that defines why I value music so much although I would never say “All for the Love of a Girl” defines me as a person, I find it much too sad. I learned that the lyrics of a song are left to the interpretation of the listener and we fill in our own meaning based on our circumstances, beliefs and values. And in that process, I believe, we gain a better understanding of who we are ourselves, how we see specific situations and circumstances. This song led me to that realization. And though it is about a man being in love, I used it to heal my heart during a tragic period in my life.

That Friday night, February 7, 1975, Mom took us to my cousin Jeffery’s birthday which was at Aunt Mary Ann’s and Uncle Ed’s – Jeffery’s grandparents. It had only been us at Jeffery’s party. Jeffery’s mom, my cousin Lynn, was not there (that’s a story unto itself). I think Aunt Mary Ann was hoping to distract Mom from her pending divorce from Dad. When it was time to leave, Dave and I asked Mom if we could go out and play in the snow fort we had seen when we had walked into the building and she let us go. While we were playing we heard what we thought were firecrackers. Dave was a few yards closer to the apartment building, so he went in and I followed him to the door a few moments later.

When I opened the door I saw Mom lying on the ground as Lee held her head. I saw Hope and Aunt Mary Ann yelling for me to get into the apartment as Dave was just ducking passed them into the door. I was really confused on what was happening. I stepped over Mom and looked to my left and saw Dad’s glasses lying on the ground. I was always amazed at how I knew they were Dad’s glasses. As out of place as they were, I knew they were his. I ran down the stairs and back into Aunt Mary and Uncle Ed’s apartment. Dave and Dawn were as confused as I was. Eventually, Lee too came into the apartment and Aunt Mary Ann closed the door.

From here things get a little blurry – the police were called and I remember standing in Jeffery’s room without the lights on. Dawn and Jeffery were in the room with me. Jeffery was saying “the woo-woo’s are coming, the woo-woo’s are coming,” pointing to the red and blue lights that were spinning around his walls and ceilings from the police lights flashing outside. Dawn was crying and telling him “yes, the woo woo’s are coming.” At some point, I was back in the living room and there were 2-4 cops in there talking to each other and Aunt Mary, Uncle Ed, Hope and Lee. At some point I was told Dad was dead, he had shot himself – suicide. For years I always pictured him shooting himself in his blue station wagon which I envisioned was in the apartment’s parking lot. My scene was always more dramatic – the cops were walking to the station wagon with guns drawn and as they approached, a flash of light in the front seat and blood would splatter on the driver’s side window. But Lee told me,  many years later, he shot mom three times but, not being prepared for the recoil, the second shot went into the ceiling before he shot Mom a second time. The fourth shot was to his head. We couldn’t see him laying in the second-floor hallway when we came in from the ground level.

As I heard Hope and/or Lee told the story that night, they (Mom, Hope, Lee and Dawn) were walking with Mom up the stairs to leave the apartment building. Dave and I were already outside playing in the snow. Dad was waiting for Mom on the second floor at the top of the stairs (it was only a two-floor apartment building). Dad said, “Goodbye, Virginia” and shot Mom three times. He apparently threw his glasses down the stairs and stepped away and shot himself in the head.

Aunt Mary went with my Mom to the hospital and left us with Uncle Ed and the cops. We were crying when we heard Dad was dead. The police finished up their reports but there really anything else for them to do. This tragedy was not going beyond our family so the police work would be minimum. But there was still one more scene that had to be played out.

By the time Aunt Mary Ann came back the cops were gone, at least they were no longer in the apartment and their flashing lights outside were turned off. When she opened her door the five of us gathered around her. She had been crying and wore that God-awful face. I remember Hope asking, “Is she…, is she….?” but she couldn’t actually say the words. Despite not actually asking the question, Aunt Mary Ann answered her anyways by shaking her head yes. Mom had died.

I would say at this point the room started spinning. But it wasn’t just a feeling, the room was literally spinning. It was spinning because I was falling to the ground and that was what I was seeing. I think that’s why I have always thought of that moment as a free-fall. A cold icy fall into nothing – I would later understand it as an abyss.

When the new round of tears had subsided, I would find I had I landed in C.S. Lewis’ quietness. The tears had been shed, the reality faced, the pain was large and twisted, a lump in my throat kept my breath away and my back hurt from the heavy sobs. And yes – then – it was very, very quiet.

That was the story I had just lived through that led me to Johnny Horton the following evening. The Johnny Horton song, “All for the Love of a Girl,” had sad lyrics and Johnny Horton’s voice sounded heartbreaking to me. It was a perfect match for my pain. The song starts out:

Well today I’m so weary, today I’m so blue
Sad and broken hearted and it’s all because of you
Life was so sweet dear, life was a song
Now you’ve gone and left me, oh where do I belong

I was certainly sad and broken-hearted. ‘All because of you’ pointed to Dad and what he had done. ‘You’ve gone and left me’ was Mom, but obviously not by her choice. And that left ‘where do I belong’ staring me in the face; that ominous ‘now what?’ The song then goes into the chorus:

And it’s all for the love of a dear little girl
All for the love that sets your heart in a whirl
I’m a man who’d give his life and the joys of this world
All for the love of a girl

I know it is my interpretation is different from the song’s intent. This tragic event was all due to Dad’s love for Mom, as I interpreted Johnny Horton’s lyrics. “I’m a man who’d give his life and the joys of this world. All for the love of a girl” That is how I saw this tragedy – it was the only way I could see this. Weeks and months and years later, when the pain was bubbling over on how selfish my father had been, and the circumstance we found ourselves in, I would find comfort in ‘all for the love of a girl.’

Some people have wondered how I could not hate my father for what he had done. I can honestly say ‘hate’ never really entered my thought process – outside of hating the situation that I, and my brothers and sisters, now found ourselves in, but there was never specific hate for my father. There were so many other things I was going through and would go through, over the months and years ahead.

And Mom would become my angel, my sense of purity. The song plays her as a girl – young and innocent. While the physical and emotional loss of her was the most painful part, over time I realized what I really lost from her was her strength, which I know she had; that and her independence. She was the victim and she would never recover from that state. My twelve-year-old perspective of her was frozen. I would never again see her flaws. I could not get angry with her or see how stupid she was. I could never see if she was petty or arrogant. This just enhanced her purity, but over time it made her less real – and that was the real tragedy – the loss of reality. Mom became this vision of goodness and innocence.

Keep in mind, she was twisted into a twelve-year-old’s mind, who was laying on the floor next to a Hi-Fi, trying to make sense of his last 24 hours. Dad was also wrapped up there as well. The word “Disbelief”‘ spun in wide elliptical orbits. And “It’s Not Real” bounced with an erratic rhythm. And “It’s A Dream” swung in and out of view.  Unfortunately, it was not a dream and was very much real. And “Why?” I still struggle for that answer.

Over the week we stayed with Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack I would continue to listen to Johnny Horton’s Greatest Hits side two. We went to Mom’s wake but only Hope and Lee went to Dad’s. Somewhere within the adult decision hierarchy of my Mom’s family, it was deemed that Dave, Dawn and I were too young to go to Dad’s wake. Mom’s wake was held at Oehler funeral home north of downtown Des Plaines where we lived.

The wake was a surreal affair and what I remember most was Mom not looking right in her coffin. I would learn many years later the process and the role of the mortician. Well, whoever was Mom’s mortician did not do a good job, she didn’t look like Mom. Her cheeks were too puffy and her makeup didn’t look right. This just added to the surreal event and added to my denial of what had happened. Despite Mom not looking right, the wake offered closure. I wished I would have had that with Dad. Years later I would ‘see’ Dad in a crowd of people but after many years of these ‘glimpses’, I realized I was seeing someone that looked like Dad, specifically the picture of Dad from my parent’s bedroom. I always wonder if I had these ‘glimpses’ due to my lack of closure with Dad’s death.

There were a lot of people at my Mom’s wake. I recognized aunts, uncles and cousins and the occasional church members from Messiah Lutheran. I remember a couple of my friends from school coming to Mom’s wake. At some point, we went down to the basement of the funeral home and of course like typical kids, they wanted to know what happened so I told them. It wasn’t a secret. They asked why my dad would do that and my only answer was “because he didn’t want to get a divorce”.

The next morning was Mom’s funeral. It was held at our church Messiah Lutheran in Park Ridge where my parents had been custodians and weekly we attended church and Sunday School. I don’t remember actually going to the church, but I remember it being very crowded when we got there. As the service started, my brothers and sisters were led to the front pews that had been reserved for us. I remember seeing my sixth-grade teacher Mr. Kreneck and my fifth-grade teacher Ms. Hoag singing to the opening hymn as we walked in. A coffin was centered at the front of the church – Mom’s coffin. The service had begun and again the surrealism of our situation cast the front of the church in a washed out, dreamlike state, like poorly developed film. So many times I had wandered in that sanctuary – up by the altar and the pulpit. But today I sat in the front row looking up at Pastor Keays with Mom’s coffin to his right.

Of course, we were crying as he talked about everything Mom and Dad had done around the church. Though honestly, I can’t say I remember him actually talking about Dad. At some point in his sermon he brought up the flowers Mom would plant around the church sidewalks and that we would always remember her by the flowers she planted. It was at this moment our crying turned to weeping and we had to be escorted out of the service.

Many times I would go with Mom to pick up the annuals she would plant at church. While Mom picked out her flats of annuals for that year’s plantings, I would wander into the greenhouses to where the cactuses were until it was time to go. The station wagon or the VW bus would smell like fresh dirt and marigolds if that’s what she was planting. I remember her picking out alyssum, ageratum and pansies too. We would go to church and mom would spend the afternoon planting. And now Pastor Keays was using that memory of mine to memorialize Mom – and that brought a watershed of pain and again renewed my loss.

We ended up in a limousine that followed the hearse to the cemetery. I remember thinking – the first time I get to ride in a limousine wasn’t my prom, wasn’t my wedding or even a trip to the airport – it was to the cemetery to bury Mom. But again, kids like shiny things and I forgot the purpose of our trip. Soon Dave and I began exploring the expanse of the limo’s backseat and discovering this newfound luxury. It was crazy but I didn’t even know where Mom was going to be buried, I had heard Memory Garden but I had no clue to where that was.

The limo took us from Messiah to Memory Gardens, which turned out to be in Arlington Heights. A seven-mile trip with a mile worth of cars following us. Despite the sun, as we stood by the open grave and it was cold – it was still February. Mom’s coffin was brought over from the hearse and laid in front of us. Pastor Keays said more words that make us cry. But the crying got worse when he stopped and the coffin was lowered into the ground. This horrible trip that started with a walk up a short flight of stairs was beginning to end. We cried and we stood looking down at a box that held Mom. At some point, we were pushed back into the limo or one of the aunt or uncle’s cars. And Mom was gone.

We had lunch at Aunt Bernice and Uncle Ray’s house. Their small house was crowded and eventually us kids, at least Dave, Dawn and I, escaped to play in the driveway – despite the cold. Again, in the midst of a game of tag, I was shaken with the realization that we’re playing at our Aunt Bernice and Uncle Ray’s house after we just buried our mother. My father was also dead. It wasn’t right. We should never play again. We should never laugh again. The world should stop. But it didn’t – and neither did we.

We spent the rest of the week at Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack’s house. There was now nothing to do – except figuring out what to with five new orphans. I spent more time laying on the floor next to the Hi-Fi listening to Johnny Horton. It had been a horrible week – in fact, the worst of my life. I had now established a new low point, firmly marked. A place I could feel sorry for myself. Decorated with tears and sporting the latest in morbid realities. I knew the way to ‘here’ and I now had a song to accompany me. It explained everything because it really was – all for the love of a girl.

 

The seventies were crazy times. Like the self-indulgent children of the 50’s, the children of 70’s were just as self-indulgent. But while the 50’s children were reprimanded by strict parents, the 70’s children enjoyed the freedom their parents were denied. The children were free and loose – as expressed in the Hippie movement at the time. While these 50’s children, now adults, expressed their indulgences through material possessions, the children of the 70’s turned and rejected material things – this, apparently, sometimes included their clothes.

Streaking had actually been going on for years – in fact, hundreds of years. Historically, the first streaker could have been one of our Founding Fathers – John Adams. Rumors have it that as a student he streaked across the Harvard campus. It was documented that George William Crump in 1804 streaked cross Washington and Lee University. More recently, Dartmouth College had a long history of streaking across the Green. In fact, it was already a tradition at many college campuses by the mid-sixties.

So by 1974 the trend was spilling off the campus and getting noticed by the media. How could it not? Naked teenagers running through neighborhoods, on to fields during sporting events, through school campuses – what had started out as college dares were turning into a national phenomenon.

Check out this Chicago news story about a streaker that went through a Northwestern classroom:

As the media took notice, Ray Stevens took advantage of this growing fad and scored a hit with his novelty song “The Streak“. Ray Steven’s song tells of his wife’s three hapless run-in’s with a streaker. Ray Steven’s was not a One Hit Wonder though, he had already scored a #1 hit with “Everything Is Beautiful” so he was no stranger to the music industry. Ray knew just what was he was doing when he recorded “The Streak.”

At eleven years old, I had not seen an actual streaker but I was definitely keeping my eyes open as I rode my bike around our new house in Des Plaines, ‘The Gray House’, as we called it. We loved ‘catching’ The Streak on the radio, it was our first time hearing a novelty song on the radio. This was followed in the fall with another novelty song by Cheech and Chong – their first hit single “Earache My Eye“. These were audio gems. When one came on, you would run through the house yelling “It’s on! It’s on!” And whoever was within earshot would listen and laugh at the crazy adventures of The Streaker or the father and son wake-up call.

But unfortunately, my family was not immune to the craziness of the seventies. It had infected our family as well. In a way, I guess, our family’s ‘craziness’ was caused by that same search for freedom the Hippies craved – Mom wanted freedom from Dad in the form of a divorce. The Hippy movement that was turning over that ‘Father Knows Best’ perspective, was also turning over in our family.

And to say I didn’t see it coming would not altogether be accurate, but I wasn’t expecting it either. I guess no kid ever ‘expects’ their parents to get a divorce. On the other side, I think any kid could somewhat ‘justify’ their parents getting a divorce or at least to themselves. Mom and Dad fought – but didn’t all parents? But children live in a self-centered world. A marriage could be falling apart and we will idly sit around and watch the Partridge Family – and I did. If the fighting got too loud I would turn the volume up. For example, I didn’t know Dad had left us for two weeks when we lived in the Red House. I didn’t know things had gotten so bad at home that we had Peanut Butter sandwiches for a week while he was gone. Maybe it was because I actually liked Peanut Butter Sandwiches so I didn’t remember this as a bad thing. And to be fair, while I remember Mom and Dad fighting they weren’t fighting constantly. Maybe they hid their fights or maybe I tuned them out or maybe I just don’t remember. But apparently, their problems were irreconcilable.

One of my strongest memories, and what shook me awake to the situation at hand, was Dad bringing me into the den the summer of ’74 and having a ‘serious conversation’ with me. Now just because your parent tells you they want to have a serious conversation, doesn’t mean its actually something that’s really that serious – like sex or drugs. You never know if it’s actually a serious conversation or something they just think they need to talk to you about. This actually was a serious conversation.

Dad explained that he and Mom were not getting along and he wanted to know who I would want to live with. Holy crap! he was asking me to choose between him and Mom! I didn’t answer – I couldn’t answer. He said he didn’t need to know right then but I suspect he knew the answer because I couldn’t hold back the tears that had welled up in my eyes and fell down my checks. I didn’t want to choose – but if he had forced me to answer I would have chosen Mom. But I didn’t tell him that. It was then that I realized how serious the situation at home had become.

So when I came home from school that October afternoon, Mom said we needed to pack up some clothes and things for the weekend, I was numb to the situation at hand. Dawn, Dave and I went upstairs, and Dave and I went to our room and silently packed clothes, a couple of books and a few toys into a paper bag. Eventually, we heard Lee in his room putting his stuff together as well.

We were already downstairs and packed when Hope came home. When Mom told her, she screamed at Mom that she didn’t understand and she’s didn’t want to leave. “I don’t know why my parents just can’t get along!” – words we all wanted to say but Hope actually said them. Mom ignored her outburst but the truth cut into me, and I suspect the others too.

We piled into the VW bus and silently drove south. Mom had the radio on but the Cubs were finished for the year so there wasn’t a game on. And had we known that Watergate hearings were going to mess up our Saturday morning cartoons, we would have noted they were starting this week too.

As Mom drove I recognized we were going to Park Ridge and when she turned down Potter I figured we were going to Aunt Betty and Uncle Richard’s. Mom didn’t say a word she just drove. Eventually, she turned down their street and pulled into their driveway. Normally when we came we usually parked in the street behind their cars but there didn’t appear to be anyone here so Mom pulled all the way to their garage.

Mom got out of the bus and went to the door. She opened the screen door and dug in her purse. Finally, she found a key and opened the back door. This was weird. It wasn’t unusual for us to go to the back door, but it was unusual for Mom to have a key to their house. This was just making a weird situation weirder. Soon Mom had the door open and motioned us to come in. “Bring your things,” she said.

In we walked into the Aunt Betty and Uncle Richard’s kitchen. “Put your things in the living room for now,” Mom said “until we figure out where everyone is sleeping.” So we went to the living room up and dropped our bags on the floor. There was no one home.

Five blank faces looked at Mom as she explained that Aunt Betty, Uncle Richard, Brian, Keith and Judy were gone for the weekend and they were letting us use their house. We were staying here until Sunday. She explained we were hiding from Dad and we had to follow a few basic rules: we could not go outside, we could not turn on the lights or TV’s and all the curtains had to remain drawn.

That early fall evening the shadows of the houses stretched across the street and darkened Aunt Betty and Uncle Richard’s house. We had been to their house many times but never like this. It felt strange. The house was familiar but we weren’t supposed to be here – not now. The normally warm house felt odd and uncomfortable. Like a shirt whose collar was caught but you couldn’t fix it.

Actually none of this felt right. The silence permeated this normally familiar home. Us kids playing quietly – yea, that was unusual too. The tension was stretched tight between the walls and I didn’t know if it broke if it would pull the walls in on us or blow them apart. So when the living room light clicked on all the oxygen left the room. Mom ran in from the kitchen. “It turned on by itself, ” someone said.

“They have it on a timer, ” Mom said quietly and turned back to her hot dogs in the kitchen that she was making for supper. Mom may not have heard it but I could hear five hearts ease down from their reckless pace. And the oxygen levels returned to normal.

We ate our hot dogs at the Stein’s kitchen table. The formalities of grace abandoned, we focused on finishing our quiet meal as fast we could. With just the crunching of potato chips and polite requests for more Hi-C or chips we finished our meal. Dave and I were exploring Brian, Keith and Judy’s stash of games and toys in their basement. That’s when the phone rang.

“Don’t answer it!” Mom said.

Once again this showed how tense our situation was. None of us kids were going to answer a phone in somebody else’s house. What was more worrisome was Mom’s reaction to this. Everyone froze as the phone continued to ring. Dave and I came up from the basement. Three, four, five, six, seven. I’m sure all of us were wondering how many times the caller was going to let it ring – it eventually stopped.

“OK,” Mom started, “No one answers the phone. Only a few people know we are here and if they want to call us, they will let the phone ring three times, then call back and let it ring two times, and then its OK to pick it up.” Our strange weekend just got turned up a notch.

You have to remember this was 1974, before cordless phones and Caller ID. This was before you could actually buy your own phone – phones could only be rented from AT&T. Touch tone phones were available – for a monthly fee. And the only way to know who was calling was to pickup the phone.

Mom had called someone when we arrived but she had called from the kitchen when we were all in the living room or putting our stuff away. Was it Aunt Betty? Aunt Joyce? Pastor? All likely choices. Dad? Very doubtful.

The rooms were getting dark and the only light we had was the light on the timer in the living room. It seemed the darker it got outside, the closer together we were drawn on the inside. Moths to a flame?

It was only 7:30 and I was already getting tired for reading. Despite my new interest in ghost stories,  I was over half way done with my latest ghost story book, The Thing at the Foot of the Bed by Maria Leach and I hadn’t brought another book. Ever since I couldn’t stay up to finish a scary movie about creatures living in a chimney, I’ve been reading ghost stories instead of my plant books. Or maybe it was when I heard the psycho stories from that kid at Girl Scout camp.

OK, let me explain. A few summers ago, Mom was Hope or Dawn’s Den Mother when they went to Girl Scout Camp – which was just a Day Camp at the Des Plaines River Forest Preserve. Lee, Dave and I also went to Girl Scout Camp and were assigned to a den made up of all the guys who’s moms were Den Mothers. Actually, it was baby sitting.

There was this one kid who kept telling us psycho stories. Stories about psycho’s who would cut off babysitter’s legs or dismembered siblings and spouses. They always started out the same – a warning over the radio of a psycho escaping a prison or mental hospital and eventually dismembering everyone in the house or apartment or car – except the ‘lone survivor’. These stories awakened a morbid curious in me which lead me to my interest in horror movies. Then ago, it could have been my collection of Monster models I had been building since first grade. But this weekend I was scratching that itch with a book full of ghost stories.

By 8:00 someone or all of us must have complained enough that Mom announced we should go to bed. After various rounds of fruitless negotiations, I found myself laying in my cousin Brian or Keith’s bed staring at the ceiling – a strange ceiling filled with strange shadows from the street light outside. This completed the strangest that had pounced on us when we first came home from school and curled uncomfortably around us all evening. I felt like I was being punished and sent to bed early. It wasn’t fair because we hadn’t done anything wrong. Yet I understood we had to hide from Dad. Actually, no – I didn’t understand why we had to hide from Dad. To be honest, I didn’t really understand what was going on; all of this was uncomfortable and all of it was strange.

Mom and Dad were getting a divorce which meant Dad was not going to be living with us anymore. From what I understood from TV and what kids talked about, that meant sometimes you would go over to Dad’s house or wherever he was living but just for visits. So then I started wondering where Dad would live. The TV show Odd Couple was about divorced husbands and they lived in apartments. Maybe Dad was going to get an apartment. And when we had ‘a visit’, Mom and Dad could just switch places. Mom could go to his apartment and Dad could live in our house for the weekend. Maybe Dad could get a little house like the one we used to rent to people – but maybe a lot nicer. Or even better, maybe we could ask the West’s, the people who live in the basement apartment of our Gray house, to live somewhere else and Dad could live there,  that would be perfect! The more I thought about it, the better I liked it. But when I thought about from Mom’s perspective, and figured she may not be too keen on that idea.

I started running through different scenarios, what if there was something at school, would Dad come? So would getting a divorce mean Mom and Dad would get along better? Would we go to church together? Would Dad come with to the Brumm picnic? Could we go to Dad’s softball games? Did Dad even play softball anymore? Why are we hiding from him? Is Mom teaching him ‘a lesson’? Why is she so mad at him? What did he do? Why doesn’t he just apologize? Why is this happening? I don’t want to be here – I want to go home – to my own bed, my own ceiling and my own shadows. I don’t like any of this. This is scaring me – scaring me way more then my ghost stories. I don’t want them to get a divorce, I want things to be the way they used to be. I want to play with my dinosaurs and watch my cactuses and ants. I want to watch TV with Dave and Lee and have Mom come in and change the channel to the Cubs game when someone got a hit while she was listening to it in the kitchen. I want Dad to come home from work and kiss Mom and yell for us for supper. I want my friends to come to my birthday party and Mom and Dad to drive us all to the theater to watch the latest Godzilla movie. And come home to have cake and ice cream. I want everything to be GOOD and everyone to get along. Why couldn’t they just get along? But the strange shadows on the ceiling were silent, and I realized even my own thoughts were becoming strange to me.

 I heard a click and the light from under the bedroom door was gone. The timer on the light must have clicked off. I heard Mom walking around downstairs and the front door jiggle – she must be checking the locks. Eventually I heard her climb the stairs as she went to bed in Aunt Betty and Uncle Richard’s bedroom. And the strange house just got darker – and stranger. I hated all the questions that kept popping up in my head. I didn’t like being scared. But not like a spooky ‘being scared’ – scared about what was going on. Uncomfortable. Strange. Not fitting. Itchy. Scared. Then finally – sleep. No more questions.

The next morning it was still strange but I always like the mornings better. Dave was already out of bed and Mom and Dawn were also up. I found Dave downstairs in the basement. He had discovered our cousins’ 45 collection and was playing “The Streak.” The interjection of humor was exactly what we needed to help offset this weekend. We joined in when Ray Steven’s yell to his wife, “Don’t look, Ethel!” only to be warned by Mom we needed to be quiet. When the 45 ended and then the best part came – we could just play it again. And once again Dave and I were laughing as Ray Stevens’ warned Ethel over and over again not to look.

Eventually we moved to different 45’s and then started digging through the Stein’s games and pulled out Trouble to play. Typically I could usually beat Dave at most games but not this morning. The Pop-o-Matic was definite popping his way. And while I would usually beat Dave, believe it or not, I wasn’t always the most gracious loser. In turn, this made Dave less then humble when he won – which he eventually did.

While Dave and I got along pretty well, it wasn’t hard to get mad at him. He knew which buttons of mine to push and I, well, I would typically just punched him. Or shoved him, or pushed him. The problem was even though we were only a year apart, I had Dave by 80 pounds or so. And believe me, Dave didn’t weight thirty pounds. So he would typically taunt me from afar – and that was his mistake this morning.

While he was standing over me doing his stupid winning dance, I grabbed his foot and pushed into the couch. At the same time Mom was yelling in her loudest whisper, “I told you two to be quiet!”

Dave hit the arm of the couch and landed on the seat cushions. Dave and I both heard a muffed ‘crunch’.  I had thrown the ‘listened-to’ 45’s on the couch and Dave had fallen on them (yes – with my help). As Dave rolled off the couch to see what had ‘crunched’, there laid the 45’s we had listened to – luckily they were all OK, with one exception – “The Streak”.

“You pushed me!” Dave blamed.

“What is going on down there?” Mom whispered, as loud as she could.

And I had no response. And the brief normalcy Dave and I had evaporated. My first thought was to hid it – which I may have tried at home. But Dave would never had let me get away with it at home or here. I quickly realized how bad my situation was. We, OK – I mean ‘I’ – broke Brian or Keith or Judy’s 45 and I would have to tell Mom.

I walked to the stairs and held up the 45 to Mom, “Dave and I were wrestling and he fell on the 45 and broke one,” I said. I tried to put as much blame on Dave as possible.

“You pushed me!” Dave started.

“Quiet! you two,” Mom cut off. “You are going to have to buy them a new one.” And then she turned back to the kitchen.

Normally I would have happy getting off without any punishment, but I could tell from Mom’s face the broken 45 was not her biggest concern. And that sunk me back to our situation and our imprisonment. What had started out as a somewhat normal or even fun morning had reverted back to this weekend’s somber theme.

Mom didn’t really make breakfast, we just ate cereal to quiet clicking of spoons and bowls and the occasional “pass the milk, please” or “can I have the Fruit Loops, please.” Mom got a couple of phone calls via the ‘secret code’ and made a couple herself. We all played games and read our books or played with our toys to pass the morning. Lunch passed like breakfast and as we got to the longest part of our stay – the afternoon.

The sense of prison was there – not that I had any real sense of what a prison was like. Actually, confinement would be a better word. While it was cloudy the sun was bright and that only heighten the sadness of our confinement. I wondered if our guinea pigs felt like this? But they wouldn’t be hiding from their dads. They wouldn’t understand the complexity of divorce or how a marriage dissolves into games and moves. Or in our case – lack of moves.

At some point in the afternoon the phone rang but only once. At this point we knew the code – three rings, then two rings, or it just rang seven or eight or nine times until it stopped. One ring was strange. It rang again, this time twice. I had been upstairs in Brian and Keith’s bedroom and had come out to look at the ringing phone – which really didn’t make any sense. From the stairs I saw Mom standing in the living room with her arm out to keep anyone from answering the phone. No one was moving toward the phone. We were all too scared. Again, that didn’t make sense, it was just a phone.

The phone began ringing again – one — two — three, and then stopped. The silence followed. I didn’t understand why I was scared. The phone just started ringing again – one — two — three — four — five — six — seven — eight, and then it stopped. Dad’s trying to find us. Apparently he knows there’s a code to answer the phone. Who else has he been calling? Has he come by the Stein’s house? The phone had been quiet for 3 or 4 minutes when it started ringing again – one — two, and then it stopped. More ringing – one — two, now more stopping. Two more rings, more silence, then five or six rings. We were all staring at that stupid phone.

Dad was trying to find us. We knew it was Dad.

But why shouldn’t he find us?

– Because Mom didn’t want him to.

Why?

– Because we were hiding from him.

Why were we hiding from him?

– Because they are getting a divorce.

So?

– So what?

Why are we hiding from him?

And its because I couldn’t answer that question that I was scared. Actually I was scare because I wouldn’t ask the next question. I couldn’t ask the next question.

What would he do if he found us?

That is the question I couldn’t ask and never asked until I wrote it. Dad was Dad. There was no fear with him outside of a spanking, and those had ended years ago. But there was one time we woke up to find the kitchen door window covered with cardboard and Mom wearing a bandage. I asked what happened to her arm and she said she cut it cleaning up the glass. When I asked more questions I was told to leave the subject alone.

Actually, the real question was – what would he do if he found Mom?

I would learn a phrase years later – ‘there’s a thin line between love and hate.’ I think Mom had crossed that line a while ago. And whatever was happening this weekend – I think that Mom thinks it will now put Dad on the other side of that line as well. Divorce papers? Restraining order? I didn’t know what going on at the time and being trapped at Aunt Betty and Uncle Richard’s and watching a phone ring off as Dad tried different codes to try to find us. This was outside of any child’s childhood. So if we were supposed to be hiding, why did I feel so exposed? What if he guessed the code?

Eventually, the phone stopped ringing and with the new silence, we could tell Dad had stopped trying – for now. He tried again later in the afternoon but his guesses were way off. And the only way Mom would have answered is if he guessed the code the first time. Dad’s attempts left the afternoon like yesterday – strange, apprehensive and scary. We again retreated to our books and games. The bright light from the thin clouds deepened my sense of being a prisoner. And while we had now spent twenty-four hours in Aunt Betty and Uncle Richard’s house, we still felt like strangers. Mom received and made a couple more calls.  Dad had given up his attempts. The phone sat in silence with the rest of us that evening.

The evening passed like yesterday did – unwanted and slow. I finished “The Thing at the Foot of the Bed.” And we all played some more games but, frankly, we were getting tired of being cooped-up. We went to bed early again but glad to know this would be our last night. I was amazed how tired I was of being bored and that played out on the strange Ceiling Shadows games again that night. My mind again spun through what Mom and Dad being divorced meant to us kids – actually, what it meant to me.

It was going to be different, and yet it wasn’t. I didn’t usually see Dad before school because he left so early. He usually didn’t get home until supper time and then he, or sometimes Mom, worked at church cleaning stuff, setting this or that up or fixing things. When he was home we mostly watched TV. Lately, I would ‘play’ with my cactuses (actually sit and watch them while they sat in pots on the front porch), or collect ants for my ant farm; or play with some of my new friends. But I really didn’t do much with Dad.

So their divorce wasn’t really going to change what I did too much, I didn’t think. I figured I, actually we, would have to visit him at his apartment like the guys in Odd Couple. I guess that would be like going to Grandma and Grandpa’s – Brumm or Zilligen’s. I think I could deal with that. Maybe this won’t be too bad – and that’s what I kept telling myself as I fell asleep.

I’d like to say we got up the next morning, got in our VW bus and went to church (which was pretty close to Aunt Betty and Uncle Richard’s house), met Dad and everything was fine. Or something more dramatic for you the reader – as Mom backed out of the driveway, we found Dad sleeping in his station wagon outside Aunt Betty and Uncle Richard’s house and there was a car chase through Park Ridge until the police pulled Dad over and we got away. But the reality is I don’t remember what happened. I think we got our stuff together, got into the VW bus and drove home. Lee said he remembers the house being completely dark when we came home so that would have meant we spent all of Sunday and Aunt Betty and Uncle Richard’s. And Dad wasn’t there. And life went on.

To this day I don’t actually know why we were hiding from Dad. As I said earlier, I’ve always assumed he was being served either divorce papers or a restraining order. I don’t remember Dad being around that Fall and Winter. We did have a few visitations – he took us to a movie, ‘The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams‘ but I remember the movie more than the actual visit.

I remember Dad took us to Grandma Brumm which I thought was weird. Weird because because she was Mom’s mom (not really but I didn’t know that at the time) and secondly because we had lunch there. Grandma and Grandpa Brumm had a tiny house. An upstairs I had never been in, and the main floor that was consisted of living room, a tiny room to the east where they used to put their Christmas tree. There was a tiny kitchen to the north of the living room with a table for two and a bed to the west of the kitchen. On our visit with Dad, a table had been set up in the living room and we had lunch. The room was so small you could not get around the table when everyone was sitting down. We rarely ate meals at Grandma’s.

After that lunch, Dad stopped at Aunt Bernice and Uncle Ray’s. We pulled into the driveway, Dad got out to see if they were home but they weren’t. Why we stopped there I don’t know. Again, Aunt Bernice was Mom’s sister so why were we stopping there at all?

Those were the only two visits I remember. I don’t remember any interactions between Mom and Dad during either of those visits.  I think Mom just stayed in the bedroom when Dad picked us up.

Fall turned to Winter and like the temperatures outside, Mom and Dad’s relationship began to freeze. Actually, freezing wouldn’t be the right word because a relationship is based on interactions and those were being minimized. Us kids would go between a somewhat normal week at school and then to the occasional awkward visits with Dad – a reminder that things were changing. A new reality was emerging.

With Christmas, more realities emerged. Wrapping paper was replaced by newspaper – a sign that money was tight. There was no Christmas Eve trip to Grandma Brumm. Santa had replaced Jesus for all of us.  (This is not to imply that Jesus wasn’t part of our Christmas. We always went to church and Sunday School each week and also Advent and Lenten services. This Christmas we no longer had to play the ‘Santa Game’ for Dawn’s sake.)

And while the divorce had been public knowledge for a while, the realities and the mechanics of this new life were now beginning to be felt. Dad’s small role in our day to day lives was getting smaller. The skin on this new life was very thin and very sensitive. And while I could still go to school and play with my friends, I kept the divorce packed away and left at home. But on Dad’s visits, I would have to strip out of my old life and bare this new skin.

We all, I think, felt exposed, Mom and Dad, included. And at those moments I would have liked to run away but only in my old comfortable skin. But this new skin was here to stay until that one got peeled away too – a few weeks later.

Terry Jack’s “Seasons in The Sun” ended up defining my generation’s ‘One Hit Wonder’. Released in December of ’73, it went number one in March of ’74 and remained in the top 40 through Memorial Day weekend that year. So to me it always felt like a summer song. It was also my first Teenage Tragedy song.

What many people don’t realize it that ‘Seasons In The Sun‘ was a cover. It was originally a French single from ’61. It was first covered in English by the Kingston Trio in ’63 – ten years before Terry Jacks, a Canadian,  covered it in ’73. Jacks was drawn to the song when his friend developed leukemia. Initially, he presented the song to the Beach Boys, who Terry Jacks knew, but after some initial work for them, he ended up recording it himself.

‘Seasons In The Sun’ will always remind me of those warm summer afternoons. The winter of 74’s grip was finally broken, as the dandelions fought our grass for sunshine. Once again we could play outside on our big side yard at our Gray House. It was sitting outside with that triumphant Spring Sun energizing everything it could see. This is how I remember first hearing the doom and gloom of ‘Seasons In The Sun’. Typically we had a volleyball court setup in our side yard. The jungle gym and tether ball were behind the house on the other side. Once spring dried enough we would be back on our big expanse of grass and Dad would eventually put the volleyball net back up. It was in the midst of the sunshine and a warming breeze where I first heard Terry Jacks mournful goodbye.

Even at eleven years old, the irony was not lost on me – the warm spring days with its promises of Life conflicted with a song about someone dying.  From the song’s beginning fuzzed up guitar melody, to the catchy chorus, to the angelic background vocals – this was a beautifully sad song. But at eleven years old, thoughts of dying were still fantastic. A concept I related to as well as I could imagine living in the year 2525. I was finishing Fifth grade, my first year at West Elementary. The art of dying was something your pets did, not anybody you know.

Skipper was our family’s first dog, a collie – as in the Lassie kind of dog. From a small child’s perspective he was a large long haired friend with four legs, a bushy tail, a pointy snout and ears that us kids would take turns trying to make them longer then they were. He had been my hairy older brother. One morning many years ago in our Red House, after waking up, I wandered outside only to find Skipper lying at the bottom of the concrete stairs that led to the laundry room. When I told Mom, she explained that Skipper had fallen down the stairs inside the house and broken his leg. Dad had laid him outside.

It was bright hot sunny morning and the sun reflected green off the flies that were gathering around Skipper’s eyes. I remembered the dried tears on my cheeks and the tightness in my throat whenever I looked at skipper. This was because Mom had also told me, that when Dad came home from work, he was going to bring Skipper to the vet to be ‘put down’. I don’t remember where my brothers or sisters were, I only remember my arm aching from swiping the flies away from Skipper’s eyes. I don’t know how long I stayed with Skipper that morning or when Dad came home that evening. There are no memories of tearful goodbyes as Dad carried Skipper to the back of the car. I only remember Skipper was no longer with us. And then after Skipper, there was Buffy; and then there was Jamie. (Full disclosure – we only had Buffy for a couple of years. Buffy’s bladder problem became someone else’s problem.)

Putting down Skipper down was a crack in my perfect world. So when Terry lamented the death of his friend in ‘Seasons In the Sun’ this eleven-year-old understood where he was coming from – after all, I had lost a dog, a brother. I wasn’t living in some idelic TV show world, I was dealing with the realities of life.

I am sure I was not the first kid to fantasize about my death and my funeral. Dreaming that Mom and Dad would finally give me the attention due me, instead of wasting attention on my brothers and sisters. So well portrayed in the ‘A Christmas Story’ scene when Ralphie comes home blind.

My old friends from Devonshire school and my new friends from West would both come to my funeral. And they would fight over who was my best friend and who I played with more. And the cute girl in the back of the class would admit she kinda liked me after all.

And my brothers and sisters would feel terrible on how they treated me and actually admit I was a great kid. Hope would put one of my old plastic dinosaur in my coffin. Lee would add my beat-up Monster magazine that mom had gotten me in. Dave and Dawn would fight over which cactus to put in by me and end up each picking their favorites.

My parents would be crying and blaming themselves. They would said they were too hard on me and that they should have gotten me that bike I wanted, or that dinosaur model, or not make me go to church all the time, or maybe they would not have fought so much. If I could have survived, they would promise never to fight again. That’s how I imagined my final scene in ‘Seasons In The Sun’.

Kids are so self-centered. Wanting to be the ‘best friend’ or trying to get sympathy from family members – but that’s a kid’s world. It was normal to think we weren’t being treated fairly in a family where we competed with each other for attention, love and material things. The fantasy of my death was a way to get attention from my parents and extract sympathy from my siblings.

But I wasn’t always innocent myself; of course not. Kids see the world through self-centering glasses. I remember one Easter we were hunting for Easter Eggs inside in our Red House Easter morning. As with any family, the advantage always goes to the older kids. So Hope and Lee were really cleaning up on finding the eggs that year. And, I’ll have you know, I wasn’t doing too bad myself. Dave, on the other hand, wasn’t doing well at all and started crying.

There tends to be an age growing up when you know what to do but you simply can’t do it as well as the older kids. Dawn wasn’t old enough yet to really care that she wasn’t getting as many eggs. She was happy with the 3 or 4 eggs she had been given. Dave was next to me, crying to anyone that would listen (i.e. Mom and Dad) that Hope, Lee and I were “getting all the eggs!” Dad came over to console him. He knelt down and spoke quietly in his ear.

At the beginning of the hunt, Mom and Dad had announced there was one special egg that was worth a dollar to whoever found it. They didn’t say what it looked like but that we would know it was the special egg when we found it. Dad was telling Dave where the special egg was – upstairs in the kitchen and taped to the underside of the bench where us kids sat at for our meals.

As I was running up the stairs I could already hear Dave crying. His cries turned to shrieks when he got to top and saw me pulling the special egg from its hiding place. Dad appeared next to Dave with a look that said – well, let’s just say I hadn’t learned any of those words yet.

Dave and I fought a lot growing up but we got along much more then we fought. Hope and Lee were two and three years older then I and Dawn were almost three years younger than me. Dave and I were only a year apart – like Hope and Lee – but both being boys, it was bound to come to blows at some point in our playing. When it came to fighting, I remembered what Grandma Zilligen said, “we would just let the boys fight it out in the farmyard.” But then again – Grandma was a nut job. Still – playing and fighting was something I did with all my siblings but mostly with Dave.

<insert cranky grandpa voice> “When I was a kid” </cranky grandpa voice>, it was OK to leave your twelve-year-old home alone to watch your six, eight and nine year old. The eleven-year-old didn’t need to be watched either but was willing to help the twelve-year-old. It was OK to leave the kids in the car when you ran into the store. We also played outside at night. And to be left home alone all evening. I have fond memories of our evenings without Mom and Dad. It was on those rare occasions when all five of us played together for an entire evening without someone getting on someone else’s nerves.

One thing we did together was played games – boardgames, though it was hard to find games you could play with more than four people. I think Mom and Dad indulged us with games – most likely because we could occupy ourselves and when our friends came over. They also make great Christmas presents for the entire family.

We had a lot of games, shelves full. I remember lots of them and more as I looked them up: Don’t Spill the Beans (an old game that’s being updated and still being sold today), Masterpiece (I definitely appreciated this one more after going to the Chicago Art Institute), Pivot Pool (for those us who only had bumper pool), Battleships (great two player game that has become a classic), Battling Tops (an all-time classic and one of my favorites), Stay Alive (almost forgot about this one), Happiness (from the hippies that brought us flower-power), Life (another classic but it took a long time to play), Aggravation (the old game I could never remember how to play), Toss Across (since we couldn’t play Jarts inside), Sorry (your standard game for when your friends came over), Crossfire (I loved the guns but we would eventually lose all the steel balls), Operation (I didn’t know this was actually a game, mainly because the batteries were always dead ), Ten Commandments (our friends would always stare at us when we brought this one out – we couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t play this), Landslide (I still think of this one when someone mentions ‘electoral votes’), Gunfight At OK Corral (like Crossfire but you just had to get the other guys gunfighter while you were shooting steel balls), Mystery Date (I only played this once because Hope made me), Gnip Gnop (stupidly simply game but fun – I called in it ‘ga-nip, ga-nop’ but I’m guessing its just ‘nip-nop’), Rebound (another game with steel balls, what a great invention those steel balls were!), Headache (Evil Sorry with the Pop-O-Matic), Clue (didn’t really like this one at first because there was too much thinking), Barnabas Collins (any game with skeletons was always cool), Trouble (basically just Sorry with the Pop-O-Matic), Hang On Harvey (I swear Mom and Dad would buy us any game, and we would play it), Uncle Wiggily (an older game we would play with our friends), Which Witch (since we didn’t have Mouse Trap, this game had the most things to assembly and after a hour of setting up you didn’t want to play anymore), Don’t Break the Ice (kinda like Operation – you didn’t know it was a game, you just played with it), Stratego (my first strategy game), Chinese Checkers (all us kids played this – because we all could at the same time), Kerplunk (a classic ‘Jenga’ time though I wonder why they didn’t use steel balls in this game, just regular ol’ marbles), Cootie (don’t think I ever played this, just made as many Cooties bugs that we had pieces for), Criss-Cross (Lee always had the timing down – to knock over your…yep, steel ball) and Hands Down (because plastic hands were so much better then real hands).

But typically when Mom and Dad left us alone, at some point in the evening, we would play ‘House’. Kids all over the world played ‘House’ but everyone plays differently. In our version, Hope played mommy and Lee play daddy (though I never really thought he took his role as seriously as Hope did – I suspect he was figuring out it wasn’t cool to play ‘House’. Girls could get away with it for a lot longer). Dave was typical a dog and Dawn was typically a cat. I played the role of a beast of burden – a horse, an elephant, a rhino, a tiger, anything Hope could ride around the living room. As Dave got older he too would play a rideable animal.

We would play in the living room of our Red House. Hope would take turns playing with the dog and cat and taking turns riding her pet rhinoceros. Lee would also take his turns and eventually end up on the couch directing the animals on how to play. Or sometimes he was the guest to visit the ‘house’. This went on until the dog and cat stopped staying in the ‘house’ or the elephant or horse got tired of being ridden and went downstairs to watch TV.

Sometime in the early seventies, Mom and Dad started attending a New Year’s Eve party. This meant not only would we be home by ourselves, we could also stay up until Midnight! This is also when Hope taught us to play ‘Sardines‘. We played lots of group games outside but there was not a lot of games you could play inside in the middle of winter. Sardines was perfect for kids that had to stay inside – at night.

First, you turn all the lights in the house off. Next, the person that is ‘it’ hides somewhere in the darkened house while everyone else closes their eyes and counts. We’d have to watch Dave, he was known not close his eyes sometimes. Then, everyone would hunt for the missing person (I guess you could call them the ‘sardine’). Once you found the sardine, you became one yourself and you had to squeeze into their hiding place with them. The trick was to do this without tipping off the others who are still looking for the sardine. We loved playing this game and while we would try to play whenever we could, it became a tradition to play it on New Year’s Eve.

The last time we played Sardines was New Years Eve 1974/75. We were now in the Gray House and there were more places to hide. We were no longer the same kids when our Sardines tradition had started. Hope was a freshman in high school, Lee would graduate from junior high that spring and Dave, Dawn and I went to West Elementary.

The bigger change was Mom and Dad were no longer living together and in the process of getting divorced. Despite the upheaval, or maybe because of it, Mom went out New Year’s Eve. I don’t know if Mom needed the time away from us or she was just letting us hold on to our Sardine tradition a little longer, but for one last time, we had the house to ourselves on New Year’s Eve.

We no longer played ‘House’ but we did play Sardines. Our last New Years Eve wasn’t the same, it had a different vibe. I don’t know if we had started early or if it was the stress the pending divorce and we lost interest, or more likely, we were just not into Sardines as much we had been. Actually, it was Hope who wanted to stop playing. She had heard that WLS radio did a countdown of the top 89 songs for the year. So sometime after 11:00 the lights came back and we turned on the TV. I was curious about this countdown so I went with Hope and Lee to listen to Hope’s radio, or we tuned the kitchen clock radio to WLS and listened as they counted through the last of the 89 songs for 1974. Midnight came and we celebrated a new year – 1975.

And we celebrated a new number one song. It was Terry Jack’s “Seasons In The Sun”. Listening to the song in the kitchen New Years Eve was so different. On one hand, it reminded me the warm spring days seven or eight months earlier. On the other side, the melancholy fit much better on that cold January night. Terry Jack’s lamenting about death snuggled nicely with our parent’s pending divorce. But none of us could have suspected that five weeks later, the seasons in our own sun were about to end.

Ah, the musical hunt – finding that long lost song from your childhood. While I can’t say Reunion’s “Life Is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me)” made a great philosophical impression upon me, but it was very unique and memorable, for me and many others who heard Joey Levine’s patter through a ‘who’s who’ of the musical industry of the early seventies.

Patter? That’s the term Wikipedia used to describe the song format. When I was a kid and trying to find this song I would say “he kinda talked fast”. Later I would say “rap but not really rap”. Patter, apparently, it the correct term for this type of song – had I know this it might not have taken me nine years to find it. Other ‘patter songs’ you might know are Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, Barenaked Ladies’ “One Week”, INXS’ “Mediate” (which immediately follows “Need You Tonight” and its unlawful in not to be played together in the state of Nevada) and Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

“Life Is a Rock” was released in the beginning of 1974. It was released as a novelty song though I didn’t think it was funny per se. I thought it was cool. This guy sang so fast and not so much sang but talked through a barrage of lyrics. As soon as you heard one word he was on to the fifth word. Whenever we heard it was playing on the radio we run over to listen – mainly to catch more of the lyrics.

The problem was it was a radio song. We never owned it and if we sang the chorus I don’t remember it. And thus began one of my longest searches for a childhood memory.

As I described in my search for “The Birdman of Alcatrash”, much of a music search centers around the iconic Phonolog. But it has its limits. As a kid, teachers would tell you to use a dictionary to spell a word. What always tripped me up was – how are you supposed to find the word if you don’t know how to spell it? Correct me if I’m wrong but I believe the dictionary lists songs alphabetically. Thank God for spell check for terrible spellers like me!

How do you find a song that you don’t know what its called? You talk to the experts and that is usually determined by friends or ego. Next you need to have a base level of information.

This left me incapable of finding “Life is a Rock”. In the nearly 10 years it took me to find this song, whenever I would attempt to describe it it to a ‘music expert’ came out as – “He kind of talks fast but its not rap, he goes “na na na na na nah”, then there’s a chorus, that I don’t remember, but I know in one of the fast parts he says “Doris Day and Jack the Ripper.” The clerk at the record store, or the friend of the friend or the latest ‘music expert’ would just stare me. And when I was done explaining the best I could almost see the literal thought bubble appearing over their head, “you got to be shittin’ me.”

Not to take away any accolades from Todd Hersted, or ‘Harley’ as he wanted to be called, but I would have eventually found “Life Is a Rock” without his help. As I shifted from albums to CD, I began to buy a series from Rhino called “Super Hits of the 70s: Have a Nice Day” and on Volume 13, track 12 my quest would have ended. And I would have been alone downstairs in our first house with the headphones on and Desi sleeping before her weekend morning shift. I would have no one to share the victory of my ended quest – and no story to tell.

As I said, it took me almost ten years to find this song, so this happens far from the eleven year old boy in fifth grade that would hear the song from his parent’s AM car radio or the clock radio in the kitchen of our new house in Des Plaines. When my quest ended, I had just turned twenty one years old, a junior at Carthage College and living a dorm – South Hall.

In one sense, I had become a very different person than the fat shy dinosaur-loving, ghost story-reading, cactus-growing fifth grader that I was. And while these typically drastic years for anyone, most would agree for me these years had been more drastic. And while it may be hard to see the child in the young man I was becoming, the child was alive and well – welded to the core of my frame.

First you need to know who I am or who I have become. I am Waba – a nickname started in Wilmot Junior High. And while it wasn’t surprising the nickname followed me from junior high to high school, it also made the leap to college. By my junior, it was more popular than my real name. It became how I identified my ‘self’.

And like most college juniors, I was too comfortable with myself and suffered from ego and bravado. I also admit my affliction of these ailments was likely worst then most twenty-one year-olds.

College was a great experience for me. I also took some classes there. I’d say I learned about the dangers of liquor, drugs and sex – first hand. OK, not so much of the dangers of sex. I loved the dorm life, a bunch of twenty-somethings living together – what was not to love?

Freshman year we quickly learned about ‘Dorm Storming’ – the aimless wandering through the hallways in any of Carthage’s four dormitories – Tarble, Denhart, Johnson and South. The real purpose was to meet girls, in our case, and to break the boredom of an afternoon or evening. I didn’t really do alot of ‘Dorm Storming’ – mainly because I wasn’t good with girls, but I did well as a wingman.

My Junior year I roomed with Eric Stephen. A six six/six seven Carthage Basketball player from Detroit. He was a Sophomore and we both loved music. One of my strongest memoroes of Eric was while we were waiting for our friends to go to lunch, Eric started dancing around our room to Culture Club with a handkerchief over his head mocking Boy George – he cracked us up. I still smile at that memory.

Earl and I (Eric’s nickname was Earl. Why? Because last year Rusty Stamer said so – and so it was) had the first room on the hallway off the stairs and we were right across from the third floor’s elevator. While it could get noisy on the weekends when everyone was coming home drunk from the bars, it was a great place for groups to gather before they left the floor.

Earl and I had an old bar I stole from our basement setup in front of the window that faced north. We bunk beds that we bought from Kivi (friend who now lived next store) setup on our west wall. My album collection provided the foundation for the stereo on the east wall of our room. Because of where our room was, it was a great social junction and people always stopped in.

Earl and I weren’t the only one with nicknames either. Carthage had a tradition of naming their floors. While fraternity and sorority floors were just named for their particular Greek organizations (Sigs, Dons, Buffs, Kappa Chi, etc), even the independent floors had nicknames. So while the official Carthage College information said Johnson Hall 1A (first Floor, North wing), they were better known by their nicknames. There was Fourth High, The Attic, Mooners, TKD – which stood for Tappa Keg Daily, IPT – which stood for I Phelta Thi (there’s another whole story about changing the name to Johnson Country Club – but very quickly – as incoming freshmen, we were told the floor had a bad reputation and agreed to change the name. That turned out to be a huge mistake perpetuated by current RA – Resident Assistant, who would constantly complain about my music. Well, not the music “but if you could just turn the bass down.” Most of the kids on that floor left the following year). I spent my Sophomore and Junior year on the ‘A B Itch’ floor.

In the idle hours during the week when we weren’t at class or someone else’s room, Earl or I would stand behind the bar playing solitaire and spinning our records. There was one particular March afternoon where the room was filled with bright light from the sunny day outside. But the cold March temperatures still kept us from opening the windows yet. The hallway was quiet since most people were still in class or studying. We weren’t always partying – though your priorities would change as the weekend got closer. Earl was at class so I was behind the bar playing solitaire. Our door was open and I had an album playing. I probably had the volume higher then it should have been.

I was pretty active in the Student Activity Board (SAB) at Carthage. It was my favorite social connection and a easy way to be involved. By Junior year I had found out the SAB facility advisor, Bill Hoare, had a subscription to Billboard magazine. I never understood why he had a subscription, but at $150 a year it was something I could never afford or justify. So when he was done with the current issue he would give it to me. (Sometimes this consisted of pulling it from his inbox, flipping some pages and handing it to me.) So for my Junior and Senior years, I basically had a free subscription to the music industry’s trade magazine. I read every issue cover to cover and used the ads to decorate my dorm room and my room at home. Needless to say, I was very current with my record collection.

So on a sunny but chilly March afternoon, I found myself with a free afternoon so I treated myself to some tunes, some solitaire and a beer. So from my stance behind our bar, I saw Todd Hersted popped through the stairway door and walked passed my noisy room. I had Big Country’s ‘The Crossing’ on the turntable. Thanks to Bill’s Billboard subscription, I had picked it up after Christmas since it was topping the British Chart. Typical for me, it was too loud for Todd to talk and with something between a salute and a wave, he quickly passed my door and continued down the hallway. And I went back to my beer, solitaire game and Big Country.

As I was trying to figure my next solitaire move, when Todd appeared in my doorway. Todd Hersted was Mike Hackbaugh’s ‘townie friend’. ‘Townies’ were students that didn’t live in the dorm and commuted to school. Us dorm kids looked down on Townies. I’m sure the townie kids looked down on Dorm Kids as a bunch of spoiled brats but Carthage didn’t really have an off-campus living space so most townies were kids that still lived at home.

Todd waited as I jumped around the bar to turn the music down so he could talk.

“Hey,” Todd said, “I’m supposed to meet Mike at 3:00 but he’s not there, is it cool if I hang out here until he back?”

“Yea, yea, that’s cool,” I told him.

Todd was ok. He typically wore a black leather coat over his t-shirt and jeans. He wore his brown hair a little longer and blown back. He looked like an eighties version of Lief Garrett. He thought he was a ladies man, and from his work at the bars that I had seen, he was. His nickname was Harley but no one ever called him that, in fact, I didn’t even know if he had a motorcycle, let alone a Harley.

Some kids had their shit together, Mike Hackbarth was one of those kids. I don’t think grades came easy to him but he worked hard and most of the time it paid off. On the other side, Mike wasn’t shut-in either – he was one of the guys I would see at the bars and hang with. Mike worked hard and played hard.

I don’t know how Todd and Mike met or much about their relationship, but Todd was over alot. Everyone on AB Itch had gotten used to Todd’s presence so I wasn’t surprised when he showed up at my door.

“So what’s going on?” I asked. It was a Guy Rule to ask a useless question after they’ve just explained why they are visiting you.

“Nothing, you?” anther Guy Rule – a stupid question should be followed by something completely useless as well.

“Just chillin’, listening to Big Country.” And though you would be right to think I was a music sob, I really did listen to everything. My problem was that I didn’t really care if other people didn’t care. I just tried to impress people with the latest bands so in six months I could say, ‘yea, they were so six months ago.’

“Yea, they sound really cool.”

“Have you heard of them?” I asked.

“Yea, I think so. They do that ‘Wish’ song?”

“No, their first single is ‘In a Big Country’.” I was starting to smell bullshit but just in case I got up and grab the album cover and handed it to Todd. He took the cover because that’s what people do when you shove things in their face.

“I picked this up during Christmas break. They are from Ireland…” and I pattered on their chart performance and how I had to get this album as soon as it was released in the United States. Todd flipped the cover over a few times and nodded at the appropriate moments.

“Yes, they sound really cool,” he told me.

“Here’s the first single,” and I got up, flipped the album over and dropped the needle on the first track.

“Oh yea, I know this song. They do this song? Wow, this is a great song!”

I beamed in turning on another person on to a new song not realizing yet I was sucking from Todd’s tit of bullshit. This guy was good. Todd air guitared at the right spots and I stood tapping to the drumbeat satisfied at my latest conversion – unaware of the bullshit dripping down the side of my face.

‘In a Big Country’ ended and was followed by ‘Inwards’. “This song’s ok,” I rated.

Todd reached over and turned the volume down so we could talk. I HATE when people turn my music down. My room, my rules. I just saw Todd’s visit getting shorter.

“You got homework? I don’t want to keep you if you’re studying,” he said.

I knew that was bullshit. Todd knew that was bullshit – he saw my beer on the bar and I already told him I was chilling. And after he turned down my music. I think it was time to separate from Todd. I got up and when back behind the bar to my solitaire game.

“No, I’m good, just some reading I’ll do have supper.” I picked up the cards to look at where I was with my game.

“Hey, you got another one?” Todd pointing to my bottle sitting on the bar.

Ah, now I know the real reason Todd stopped in. He wanted a beer. Suddenly I felt the bullshit on the side of my face. And even if I wiped it away, we both knew I spent the last ten minutes not realizing it was there. Son of a bitch, Todd got me. I could have said I didn’t have anymore but that would have been a lie. And that would have meant I couldn’t have another and my current one was almost gone. And I had just bought a case with deposit bottles, I was trapped.

“Sure” and I reached down into the frig and grabbed two Old Milwaukees, prided their caps off and handed one to Todd as he met me at the bar.

“Cheers,” Todd said and raised his bottle. I reluctantly bounced my bottle off of his. He had a big shit-eating grin on his face because he knew he had won. His whole mannerism changed. I think he completely forgot about the fact that Mike could be coming any minute and he had a full bottle of beer. However, I had seen Todd at the bars enough to know he would finish his beer if Mike walked up the stairway right now. This is why Todd had stopped in.

“You’re taking Marketing, right?” he asked.

“Yea, we just turned in our position paper last week. Johnson said we’ve got to select our product or service for a presentation by the end of the month. You have Johnson?”

“Nah, I couldn’t fit marketing in this semester. I’ve got to take English II again to fill a dimension,” Todd said.  Todd seemed to have trouble fitting a lot of courses in.

“Yea, I’ve got my dimensions filled for the most part. Death and Dying for religion next year and Science with Astronomy this semester.”

“Your taking Astronomy?” Todd asked.

I couldn’t tell the way Todd asked if the ‘what a dork’ was implied or if he possibly was impressed. And while I was trying to decide we both noticed that The Crossing had ended.

“‘The Storm’ is one of my favorite songs off this,” I said as I walked around the bar.

“Yea it was good,” Todd returned. We both knew neither of us had been listening and he wasn’t really listening to the album at all. He took a long swig from his beer.

“‘Harvest Home’ was released as a single but it didn’t really do well,” I said as I flipped the album over and started the other side. “I do like how they use the bagpipes, especially in this song. They’re from Ireland.”

“Yea, you mentioned that.”

We listened as Big Country did indeed play their guitars and bagpipes off each other. Todd was actually listening and turned back to me and his beer as I got behind the bar again.

“Why don’t they make songs that sound really cool anymore?” Todd asked.

“You mean like Van Halen?” I pictured Todd as a headbanger though he didn’t really wear bands shirts.

“No, songs that that had a cool sound.”

“Like a cool guitar riff or something?” I asked. If I didn’t know any better, I was going to have my first music conversation with Todd Hersted.

“It doesn’t have to be a guitar, it could just singing.”

“Vocals, or keyboard”

“Yea”

“Like Queen? ‘Under Pressure’ was cool.”

Yes, stuff like that”

“You mean a hook, a gimmick”

“Yea, something cool so you want to hear the song again.” I think Todd was saying he didn’t want to hear Big Country again.

“‘Jump’ has a cool hook with the keyboard. Van Halen has never done keyboards before,” I offered.

“Yea but don’t a lot of bands have keyboards in their songs now?”

“True, especially new wave.”

“‘Jump’ is good and all but I’m talking like in the old days.”

“Like with Zepplin and Hendrix?”

“No, more like Leo Sayer and Blue Suede”

“Leo Sayer,” I repeated. “I remember him, from the seventies.”

“Yea”

“Who’s Blue Suede?” I asked.

“Ooga chuka, ooga chuka, ” Todd started singing.

“Oh, yea duh, I couldn’t remember who actually did that song.”

“Now that was a great song,” Todd pronounced, “better than this stuff.”

Wait a minute, I think he just dissed my Big Country. “Well, there’s more to music then ‘ooga chuka, ooga chuka‘, I don’t think they every had any other songs.”

“Do these guys?” Todd asked nodding to the turntable? Touche Todd, touche…

“Well its only their first album.”

“The seventies had some great fucking tunes. Hey, do you have another one? ” Todd wiggled his empty bottle at me.

Funny how the swearing rises with your buzz. But I also understood what he was saying. There was some great music in the seventies.

“Did you ever hear ‘In the Year 2525?” I asked.

“Yea, that was cool. ‘In the 2525,'” Todd start singing to his bottle “If woman can survive, they may find, in the year 2525.”

“Yea, I remember a friend of mine in grade school turned me on that. Randy Paluka, or something like that. He had the classic seventies basement. Bean bag chairs, the long beads in the doorway. He had the 45. What a great song.”

“I remembering hearing in my dad’s car. He really liked it but he liked that song.”

“My parents mostly listed to country music – or WGN”

“Yea, my dad was a rocker. I remember,” and Todd started singing “Hold your head up, yeah, hold your head, yeah, hold you head, ahhh.“

“Yea, that was great song.”

“Do you know who did that?” Todd asked.

“No,” I couldn’t even fake a guess.

“Argent,” Todd answered, “those guys could rock”

“Like Golden Earring, and radar lov uv‘,” I sang back. I guess the beer was loosening me up too. Todd grabbed his drumsticks and picked up my air guitar and finished, “durge durge da durge.”

“Hey, do you have any old seventies stuff with all those albums under there?” Todd asked pointing to my record crates. “This ‘Little Country’ just isn’t cutting it.” That was the second time he dissed them.

“I’ve got a bunch of 45’s at home but I don’t bring them up. My brother and I used to go in together and buy the #1 song each week, back when I was in Junior High.”

Todd gave me a weird look, “You could some lame songs that way, like ‘Muskrat Love’.”

“Actually, we did buy that.” Todd laughed “We also got England Dan and John Ford Coley.”

“I’d Really Love To See You Tonight”

“Yep, ‘Devil Women’?”

“Cliff Richard”

“Very good, ‘Slow Dancing, Swaying to the Music’?”

Todd looked down at the bar trying to read the linoleum, “Johnny Rivers!”

“Damn, you know your seventies.”

“Black Betty?” Todd asked.

“Ram Jam”

“Fox On The Run?” he challenged.

“Sweet, and their other singles?” I asked back.

“‘Ballroom Blitz’ and ‘Love is Like Oxygen’,” and took a step back to point at me in his ‘gotcha stance’.

“And…?”

“Well, those were their big hits,” he said.

“There’s one more,” I urged.

“A big song?” he questioned.

“I would say it was a top ten hit”

“By ‘Sweet’? no way”

“You’ll kick yourself when I tell you.”

“And I’ll know it?” Todd asked.

“Definitely”

Todd struggled a little longer. Even the linoleum wasn’t helping him. Finally gave up. “Alright, tell me.”

“Little Wily”

“No shit?”

“Their first single. ‘Little willy willy won’t go home, you can’t catch willy cause willy won’t go, little willy willy won’t – go home’,” I sang and Todd joined in.

“Can I have one more? Todd asked.

I was in a good mood and we were having a good time, so I reached back in the frig for another beer for each of us.

“Last one, ” I told him.

“Yea, yea, that’s it”

I settled back behind the bar. “There’s some old seventies songs I can never find.”

“Try me.”

“Well, I’ve got two left. I found the right song but I haven’t found the actual 45 yet.”

“What song?”

“‘Those Were the Days’ really old, maybe even sixties.”

“Yea, I know that one but not who sang it.”

“I’m still looking for ‘The Birdman of Alcatraz’, know it?”

“How does it go?”

“I don’t remember. Its been so long ago but ‘birdman of Alcatraz’ is the chorus”

In his best Jack Nicholas Shining imitation, Todd said, “How the FUCK! am I going to help you, if you don’t know how the Fuck it goes?”

I laughed. “The other one is kinda like the Birdman, I don’ t know how it goes. It has this chorus, but I don’t know how it goes but the guys talks really fast, just a whole bunch of words and stuff. The only ones I remember is ‘Doris Day and Jack the Ripper‘.”

Todd looked at me and said , “I think I know that one.”

“Really? what’s it called?”

“Did it go like this – ‘B.B. Bumble and the Stingers, Mott the Hoople, Ray Charles Singers, Lonnie Mack and twangin’ Eddy, here’s my ring we’re goin’ steady.”

Holy shit.

And Todd kept going, “Take it easy, take me higher, liar liar, house on fire Locomotion, Poco, Passion, Deeper Purple, Satisfaction, Baby baby gotta gotta gimme gimme gettin’ hotter, Sammy’s cookin’, Lesley Gore and Ritchie Valens, end of story'”

“Oh my God!” I yelled “Who is it?”

Todd ignored me and kept going, “‘Mahavishnu, fujiyama, kama-sutra, rama-lama, Richard Perry, Spector, Barry, Archies, Righteous, Nilsson, Harry Shimmy shimmy ko-ko bop and Fats is back and Finger Poppin”

“Stop, stop, ” I begged, “what song is it?” I was almost in tears.

Todd started the chorus and his eyes got larger like he was trying to beam the answer to me, “‘Life is a rock but the radio rolled me, Gotta turn it up louder, so my DJ told me, whoa whoa whoa whoa, Life is a rock but the radio rolled me, At the end of my rainbow lies a golden oldie.’“

“Oh My God!” I said, “‘Life is a Rock’?”

“‘Life is a Rock But the Radio Rolled Me’ by Reunion, Todd said.

“That is incredible. You know all those lyrics?”

And Todd started again and this time I just let him go, “‘FM, AM, hits are clickin’ while the clock is tock-a-tickin’, Friends and Romans, salutations, Brenda and the Tabulations, Carly Simon, I behold her, Rolling Stones and centerfoldin’, Johnny Cash and Johnny Rivers, can’t stop now, I got the shivers, Mungo Jerry, Peter Peter Paul and Paul and Mary Mary, Dr. John the nightly tripper, Doris Day and Jack the Ripper,’“

I pointed to Todd and smiled.

“‘Gotta go Sir, gotta swelter, Leon Russell, Gimme Shelter, Miracles in smokey places, slide guitars and Fender basses, Mushroom omelet, Bonnie Bramlett, Wilson Pickett, stop and kick it. Life is a rock but the radio rolled me, Gotta turn it up louder, so my DJ told me, whoa whoa whoa whoa, Life is a rock but the radio rolled me, At the end of my rainbow lies a golden oldie. Arthur Janov’s primal screamin’, Hawkins, Jay and Dale and Ronnie, Kukla, Fran and Norma Okla, Denver, John and Osmond, Donny, JJ Cale and ZZ Top and LL Bean and De De Dinah, David Bowie, Steely Dan and sing me prouder, CC Rider, Edgar Winter, Joanie Sommers, Osmond Brothers, Johnny Thunders, Eric Clapton, pedal wah-wah, Stephen Foster, do-dah do-dah, Good Vibrations, Help Me Rhonda, Surfer Girl and Little Honda, Tighter, tighter, honey, honey, sugar, sugar, yummy, yummy, CBS and Warner Brothers, RCA and all the others. Life is a rock but the radio rolled me, Gotta turn it up louder, so my DJ told me, whoa whoa whoa whoa, Life is a rock but the radio rolled me, At the end of my rainbow lies a golden oldie.”

Holy shit. This guy just did this entire song I’ve been looking for over nine years. Later it would hit me the sheer talent involved in memorizing the whole thing let alone doing the whole patter.

“How did you do that?” I asked. It was a stupid question but all I could think to ask.

Todd explained, “When I was a kid I thought it was a cool song and worked on it until I had the whole thing memorized.”

Suddenly Mike was at my door. “Hey Todd, you ready?”

“Yea sure, ” he called back. Mike had already disappeared back to his room. “I’ve got the 45, I’ll bring it for you.” He downed his beer as fast as the bottle would allow and put it on the bar.

“That was awesome, thanks” was all I could manage.

“Thanks for the beer, later” and pointed at me as he made his exit.

Todd did bring me the 45 a few days later but even though I played it a dozen times it didn’t compare to the memory of his performance that buzzy March afternoon.

Later in life, I would find some people, myself included, would find a trick or two they would perfect and deliver to an audience. I figured Todd had a number of tricks that would use to impress the girls. And when you had a new audience it was amazing but repeated performances only dulled the shine.

I never saw Todd do Reunion’s “Life is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled)” again. But thereafter, whenever I heard that song I would picture Todd singing to his bottle in my college dorm room and when the chorus came a fat nine year boy would join him with a big old round smile on his face.

In retrospect, its hard to think that the Carpenters were ever cool. And even growing up in the early Seventies I would never say they were ‘cool’. But everyone knew the Carpenters in the Seventies.

In Devonshire, my elementary school until Fourth Grade, we did not have a music room. Instead, our music teacher would roll his electric piano into our classroom and we had our music class. I don’t remember his name but I remember him being a slightly bulbous man with glasses.

He taught us musical notes and he had this wonderful device that that held 5 pieces of chalk and he could quickly draw 5 lines across the blackboard. With this he taught us ‘F-A-C-E’ and ‘Every Good Boy Does Fine’ to identify the notes on the spaces and lines.

What I remember most about music class was him teaching us Simon and Garfunkel’s “Feelin’ Groovy” and The Carpenters’ “Sing”. I didn’t know these were ‘regular songs’ so when I heard them on the radio I was surprised. “Feelin’ Groovy” holds such great imagery like “Hello lamp post, what cha knowing? I’ve come to watch your flowers growing.”

I thought ‘Sing’ was another song like “Do-Re-Mi” – I thought it was a song someone had made up to teach children about music. I thought all grade schools taught their children these songs and in the mid seventies, they probably did. ‘Sing’ didn’t have the purely educational elements of “Do-Re-Mi” but it sounded like a ‘little kids’ song – like “The Candy Man” from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.

It turns out “Sing” was a children’s song written originally by Joe Raposo from Sesame Street. The Carpenters heard the song for the first time while guests on a  Robert Young with the Young television in 1973. They released it on their Now & Then album and it became their seventh gold single.

Toward the end 1973 the Carpenters released their first Greatest Hits which included “Sing”, “We’ve Only Just Begun”, “Top of the World”, “Ticket to Ride”, “Superstar”, “Rainy Days and Mondays”, “(They Long to Be) Close to You” and others. Had this collection been released when I was an adult, I would have hated it. Richard Carpenter, the controlling arm of the brother/sister team, did some rearrangements of their hits and added new transitions and bridge between the songs. My view on this is that you do not mess with the original mix – espectially when it released on a greatest hits collection.

I learned about this album from Hope who was borrowed it from the neighbors down the street. This was my first album of ‘our music’ and understanding there could a bunch of songs on something bigger then a 45 record. While I had listened to my parents albums occasionally on our Hi-Fi they weren’t really current albums (OK – maybe they were but they were country – so they really didn’t count).

On a brightly lit morning, I found our record player sitting in our front porch – amongst my cactuses. Little by little my cactuses were taking over the front porch. To understand where my collection came from, you have to go back to when Dad left us.

Actually, I didn’t know Dad had left us, that I found that out years later. What I do remember was a time when we ate a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. But when Dad returned, typical of many parents, he smoothed things over with a bribe, a small gift. I was bribed with a Venus Fly Trap bulb.

Apparently he was gone for a week or so to my grandparents in Florida – his parents. When he returned he passed out gifts to each of us, and for me, everything was pretty much forgotten. Kids tend to like shiny things and the Venus Fly Trap bulb I received was dazzling.

As my parents had taught me when you wanted to learn about something, you looked it up in the encyclopedias – that’s why they had bought them in 1968 for just over $300 (I’m sure with low monthly payments). We had the World Book set from 1968. Pulling down the U-V Volume, I flipped to Venus Fly Trap and after I finished the short article it said “also see Carnivorous  Plants”. I went back to the desk that held our encyclopedias and pulled out Volume C. Another short article later is said “also see Bladderworts, Cobra Lilies, Pitcher Plants, Sundews and Venus Fly Traps.” I was soon surrounded by five books of varying thicknesses. After a number of trips to the library, my new interest had officially turned into an obsession.

And because my parents encouraged our ‘scientific studies’ the following Christmas I was awarded an Insectivorous Garden which included a Venus Fly Trap and a Northern Pitcher Plant. Unfortunately these were not included in the box and they had to be sent away for. They took forever to arrive – no matter how long I waited in the bay window (this was probably because they could not be shipped in the winter but the kid in the bay window didn’t hear that part of it).

I don’t know where the offer came from or if they had too many unhappy kids or just good marketing, the Insectivorous Garden company sent another offer for 5 cactuses. I don’t know if it was my constant begging, whining or if Mom just felt bad that my carnivorous plants taking so long to arrive, she got me the cactuses, which arrived before the carnivorous plants! Not having a container to plant them in, Mom gave me a round short glass bowl to plant new spiny friends in.

I remember laying in the bay window with them as they soaked up the sun and heat of that early spring days of 1973. Later that evening we had gone to a Lenten service at our church. Arriving at home I rushed to the bay window to check on my succulent friends. While the terrarium was there all but one of the cactuses were gone!

“Mom, Dad! my cactuses are gone!” I yelled.

With a burst of laughter Mom said, “It looks like Jamie has them.”

Our new miniature poodle Jamie had also been curious about my spiny friends. In the process of investigating the terrarium, she clearly got too close because the result was four cactus rollers in his ears. He looked like a cave woman setting her hair. He was apparently sulking in the kitchen when we came home. I don’t think the family’s laughter help his mood any. It felt like a scene from The Brady Bunch. And once Mom and Hope had freed the cactus from his ears, I quickly replanted them in their terrarium.

After we had moved to our new house I learned that Pesche’s Garden Center was only a bike ride away. Before we moved I would have to beg Mom to take me to Klemn’s, which was near the other house, to look for carnivorous plants and cacti. Now I could go to Pesche’s whenever I could scrap together 50¢ or a buck, pedal out down Lee Street (who knew Lee had his very own street!), past the very first McDonalds on to River Road and into their parking lot. By the time we went to Florida to visit my grandparents I had almost ten cactuses.

From a cactus perspective, our vacation in Florida was a huge success. Apart from going to  Disney World, catching lizards and swimming in the ocean, we had to visit my grandparents friends. Of course visiting old people was never fun – being traipsed about on show for older people to poke and shake and fawn over. And after the initial introductions, there was never anything to do at old people’s houses.

But after our first visit, I soon realized after my mom or dad, or grandma or grandpa mentioned I had a cactus garden, out to the garden we’d go and snip-snip or chop-chop and I had a new cactus for my garden. I got opuntias, cereus and a C. peruvianus. While everyone was very nice, I think I was only of one of us kids that were excited when grandma and grandpa said we were going to visit a friend of theirs.

One visit I remember standing with my parents and grandparents (my brothers and sisters had gone off to explore the new house) waiting for one of them to mention my cactus collection. When they did, the old man gave the Pavlovian response – “well, let me give you some!” and off he went to his shed. Dad and I followed him as he opened the door and returned with pruning shears and gloves. Off to the Opuntias we went.  After a little wrestling he produced a new pad for my collection.

“You OK?” my dad asked and we both saw a number of spines sticking out of his gloved hand.

“Oh sure, I’m used to it,” he said and pulled off his other glove and began pulling out the spines. After a couple of seconds I realized he was pulling the spines out with a hand that had no fingers.

I nearly dropped my Opuntia. Dad leaned into me with warning. Luckily I was old enough not to yell, “Holy Crap! you have no fingers!” Of course now I couldn’t look away from Mr. No Fingers. And of course, I had to tell Dave, who told Dawn and the others. And for the rest of our visit we looked for glimpses of his mangled hand. I think I remember eventually telling us he lost his fingers in a rail-yard accident.

Regardless I have received another addition to my cactus collection. When we had returned home from our Florida Trip and my garden swelled to close to twenty plants. I convinced Mom they needed to be kept on the front porch since that had a southern exposure and that’s what cacti needed. And was cooler in the winter, a requirement for cacti.

So it was among my cactuses on a late Saturday morning I found the portable record player setup and the Carpenter’s ‘Singles’ album available to play. As I mentioned before, Hope had borrowed the album from our neighbors a couple of doors down, the Boscos (interesting family – who knew you could use a snow shovel to clean your house!).

In the early 70’s there were many a science fairs that tested the theory you were supposed to talk to your plants or play music for them. I remember my 6th grade teacher, Mr. Krenick, tell the class about his experiment with plants. One plant everyone talked to and the other they would ignore. By the end of the year the ‘talked to’ plant was doing very well but the ‘ignored’ plant wasn’t doing well at all. While they expected the ‘talk to’ plant to do well, they hadn’t anticipated the ‘ignored’ to do so much worse. After voicing his observations to the class one student confessed, while he was leaving at the end of the school year, that every day he would greet the ‘talked to’ plant nicely and wish it a good morning. But the ‘ignored’ plant he told it to shrivel up and die.

With the record player being so conveniently setup for my cactus, I played them the Carpenter’s Singles album. Most of the songs I didn’t know. Karen Carpenter sang “We’ve Only Just Begun” to my spiny friends and they glowed in late morning sunlight. I think my Powder Puff actually swayed a little.

Karen and Richard moved on to “Top of the World”. And my friends and I just smiled at each other. This was really good music. Karen lowered the happiness level with “Ticket to Ride”. I think my Aloes pickup up on it and drooped a bit. It was when she went into “Superstar” that I began to really listen. She was singing about a singer on the radio. The chorus built up dramatically and I was wondering if I was even listening to the same song. When Karen moved on to “Rainy Days and Mondays” I was still thinking about “Superstar”. What a great song. I’m sure my cacti and succulents enjoyed it as much as I did.

I flipped the album over and played side two. I found “Sing” and it reminded me our my old music teacher at Devonshire. And while many of the songs were sad I was still feeling pretty groovy when lunch time came.

Eventually I would learn that The Carpenters were not cool. And like most bands over time, many people began to feel the same way and the Carpenters stopped being Superstars themselves. Dave never figured out they weren’t cool and collected their album into the 80’s. And I secretly enjoyed them too.

It wasn’t until Chris Farley and David Spade played off how ‘uncool’ Carpenter’s “Superstar” was in this comedic scene in Tommy Boy that I felt comfortable playing this song in public.

My friend Ralf and I recreated the scene in our road trip to his parents in Cleveland in 2010. I never do a road trip without planning a disc or two, and as I’ve been accustomed to do, I would drop in some movie dialogs or standup comics sound bytes inbetween the songs. The original Road Trip to Cleveland disc had the Farley and Spade dialog but I did not not follow it up with The Carpenter’s “Superstar” song and Ralf immediately chastised me for not including it. So when we returned home, I ‘corrected’ the disc for Ralf.

And while the Carpenters will probably never be considered cool for two guys on a road trip, or a young boy and his spiny friends, “Superstar” wasn’t such a sad affair. And now, when I’m looking for a song from my yesteryears, I don’t mind coming back this way again.

Long ago and oh so far away
I fell in love with you before the second show
Your guitar, it sounds so sweet and clear
But you’re not really here
It’s just the radio

Don’t you remember you told me you loved me baby
You said you’d be coming back this way again baby
Baby, baby, baby, baby, oh, baby, I love you I really do

Loneliness is a such a sad affair
And I can hardly wait to be with you again

What to say to make you come again
Come back to me again
And play your sad guitar

Don’t you remember you told me you loved me baby
You said you’d be coming back this way again baby
Baby, baby, baby, baby, oh, baby, I love you I really do

Don’t you remember you told me you loved me baby
You said you’d be coming back this way again baby
Baby, baby, baby, baby, oh, baby, I love you I really do

Who knew the future arrived in 1973? Possibly some fat kid from Des Plaines, Illinois. At ten years old I was experiencing a lot of changes. For the first time in my life, we were moving. We were moving from my beloved home in Des Plaines, IL to an older home three miles away in Des Plaines, Illinois. I was leaving the only friends and school I had ever known.

Before I was to leave the Fourth Grade at Devonshire Elementary, I had a report due. Specifically for this morning, we were to turn in our first paragraph and I still had not decided on a topic. I wasn’t too worried yet since I still had at least two hours before I had to turn it in.  There was plenty of time to write it on the bus, but I still had not decided what to write my current event on.

“Why don’t you do it on the 17 Year Locust?” my mom suggested. Hmm – bugs. I knew all about mammals, reptiles, a little about birds and fish. I was also the family expert on dinosaurs and monsters. And I was catching up to my mom on plants but I was specializing in cacti and carnivorous plants. Only Lee had entered the insect world with his butterfly collection. Maybe it was now my turn.

Luckily Mom had seen an article on these locusts in the paper. Grabbing between the scissor blades as Mom cut the article out for me, I made the bus and ignored my friends on our trip to school as I wrote out my opening paragraph for my paper.

It turned out the 17 Year Locust were not locusts at all but cicadas. They lived underground feeding off of tree roots, crawled to the surface, changed from a nymph to an adult just to mate and die in a few weeks. These particular cicadas lived underground for 17 years – this was going to be awesome!

After reading the article, I was a little confused. It said there would be millions of these cicadas and we should be ‘prepared’. But I hadn’t seen any outside. During recess, I checked the playground and the field didn’t see any. I checked bushes as we waited for the bus to take us home but nothing.

As Dave, Dawn and I ran in from the bus that afternoon, Mom called me into the kitchen. Unexpected gifts are always the best. And any gift outside of Christmas or your birthday was even better.  As I entered the kitchen Mom presented me with a glass jar of dirt.

“I was talking to Mrs. Johnson from church and she was talking about all the locusts that were coming out…”

“They’re cicadas, mom,” I interrupted.

Being used to my interruptions she continued without missing a beat, “and she said she kept digging up the grubs…”

“They’re called ‘nymphs'”, I said, interrupting again.

This interruption caused Mom’s eyebrows to lower in the middle of her face and her speech to slow, but she continued, “so she put one in the jar for me.”

My eyes widened and I grabbed the jar and shook it over my mom’s protests. Out of the jumping dirt popped the coolest bug I’d ever seen. It was a copper brown and you could tell it was built for digging. Its front two legs were like Popeye-legs that could just tear through the dirt. It moved slowing trying to right itself.

I spent an hour just staring at the nymph that eventually righted itself but it didn’t seem to want to do anything more. When Dad arrived home Mom reminded us we were going to go to the new house. I showed Dad the nymph Mrs. Johnson had given Mom to give to me and he picked up the jar. Shaking the jar the nymph moved to tell my dad he was still alive.

“Are they any cicadas at the new house?” I asked.

“Ton’s,”  Dad said. “They’re all over the place – and they are loud.”

Oh — My — God!

In those days we could sit in the back of a station wagon – seatbelts be damned. Dave, Dawn and I sat in the ‘way back’ with our arms dangling over the gate. As we drove into the new neighborhood, you could hear them – even over the car noise. I could tell Lee was just fascinated as much as I was. At a stoplight, their chorus was incredibly loud. Occasionally I would see something fly from tree to tree, or a bush or the ground but we were too far really see anything.

How many were there? I wondered. As we pulled down Rose Avenue where our new house was and Dad drove slower, it was like we were in a cave of sound and their chirping was echoing off invisible walls. I continued to look at the trees and bushes and while I would see the occasional flight of something I still could not tell what they looked like – but they were here, they were most certainly everywhere.

Dad pulled into the driveway and Dave, Dawn and I jumped out the back. They were here and they were loud. I walked over to the white picketed fence and something flew past me. It was big and it startled me. I saw it land on the other side of the fence. I walked over letting my hand bounce off the individual pickets looking for other cicadas but they didn’t swarm like flies or mosquitoes.

As I walked to a tree, I saw one. It sat on the fence and it was about the coolest thing I had ever seen. Its black body was accented with red eyes, their translucent wings were framed in orange. I reached for it grabbing it around the middle. The article said they didn’t bite but it was so big. As soon as I picked it up and tried to fly but it wasn’t going anywhere.

Picking it up, I stared into its red eyes. This was something from another planet, or so it seemed. Its legs flailed as it tried to escape my grip. When that didn’t work it ‘buzzed’ – or that is the only word I can think of to describe the sound it started making. But it wasn’t a buzz from its wings (I had those clamped against its body), I was a buzz that caused its whole body to vibrate. I was weird and fascinating.

I cupped my hands around afraid I was hurting it. If it was going to bite it was going to do it now; but it didn’t. I opened my hands when the buzzing stopped and it settled down. It sat on my hand looking at me – or so I thought. I was thinking I was bonding with this alien entity. This creature from 17 years ago freshly mottled encountering its first human. Instead, its wings lifted and flew to the other yard. The wings carrying the oversized body. It flew level at first then angled up and then I lost sight of it. My first encounter with the 17 cicada was surreal.

I continued to a tree that bordered our new yard and our new neighbors. Immediately I saw four or five nymph shells stuck to the tree. I pulled the shell off breaking its dying(?) grip.

“I found a shell!” I yelled back to everyone who was waiting for Dad to open the backdoor.

Lee was coming over to look as well as Dave. Hope and Dawn were already going inside with Mom and Dad. They didn’t seem as interested in this whole cicada discovery. I proudly held the shell out to Lee who looked at it briefly and then walked to the tree to pull off his own shell. Above us, the cicadas droned on and on like a rolling wave of sound cheering summer in.

“Don’t you guys what to check out the new house?” Dad yelled.

Dave looked at the shells on left on the tree and ran to the open door. Lee took his nymph shell and and started hunt for his own cicada. I yelled to Dad that I would be there soon and plucked another shell off the tree. I told Lee I caught one. Well, not really, more like just picking it up off the picket fence.

I held the shell on my finger and imagined the night before as it dug its way out of the ground for the first time in seventeen years. It looked like it had eyes, but did it? I could picture it slowly crawl through the grass to the trunk of the tree as it began its arduously journey over the rough bark until they were ready to molt their old skin for their new winged life, although it was a much briefer life.

Seventeen years. I wasn’t even as old as this shell. (ok, forget the fact that the nymph would have molted a number of time to get this size but at ten years old I wasn’t thinking like that.) This nymph was hatched in 1956. Wow. The next time these cicadas would come, I would 27 years old, in the year 1990. The year rolled around in my head – 1990, The Nineties. I didn’t sound as cool as The Seventies. Even the Eighties sounds ok. The Nineties.

I did some quick math – I would graduate high school in 1981. Where would I go to High School here? West Main? I think I heard that’s where Hope and Lee were going. Nineteen Ninety – would my parents still be in this house? Where would I be still live here? I would be done with school, so would I be a botanist? Would I finally move to the desert so I could be with my cacti? Or maybe I would live in North Carolina where Venus Flytraps are.

And I could drive a car. What kind of cars would they have then? What kind would I have? Flying cars would be so cool. How would they fly? Would I be married? So I would have a girlfriend? Sex? Kids? When would that happen? Would that happen?

So in 1990, would we have a colony on the moon? Would there even be a future? Would the world still be around? Will the Russians blown us by then? Will I have to fight in a war?

Honestly, I didn’t worry about the future back then, I wasn’t the worrying type. I think like most kids, I was more concerned with ‘here and now’. THE FUTURE was Star Trek. I remember watching the original series with Dad in the basement and thinking how cool space travel would be. Star Trek made THE FUTURE very clean and very fantastic. I didn’t really dream about THE FUTURE, my dreams were more about dinosaurs and giant monsters like Godzilla. And as I got more into plants, about finding carnivorous plants in the wild or cactus in the desert.

I loved numbers and I lately I had been obsessing over Roman Numerals. I would fill pages counting in Roman Numerals, which I would hid from my siblings and friends in case they teased me about it – because it was weird.

So – the cicadas would come back in MCMXC and I would be XXVII. After they would come again in MMVII and then I would be XLIV. Forty Four – I didn’t even think my parents were that old. In MM, I would be XXXVII. This was all very interesting…

The Future – was very interesting.

I remember a song I picked up on last summer and in it, we saw the future of music, in a song called ‘Popcorn‘ by Hot Butter. Besides being a tasty snack, it turned out to a fun instrumental pop song. It had this strange new sound and it was just fun. With a ‘do do do do dadu do’ we knew what song it was (or the optional clucking with your tongue – if one was so talented). The unique sound was from a new invention called a moog synthesizer.

While we had no idea how much synthesizers would change music as we got to the 80’s, we recognized it was an instrument based on computers. Popcorn was actually written by Gershon Kingsley in 1969 on his album “Music to Moog By” highlighting the potential and capabilities of the moog synthesizer.

This version was by Stan Getz who programmed the synthesizer and was the main force behind Hot Butter. Hot Butter released their version in the summer of 1972 and it was an international hit. How he programmed the moog synthesizer we didn’t know but from how we were dancing and skipping to it the end of last summer, we sure had fun with it.

The funny thing about the future is you don’t know when it arrives. A month after we were dancing around to Popcorn, Dad brought home a microwave oven. With six pairs of eyes reflected on the microwave’s door, a hot dog cooked in less then two minutes. While Mom sighed in the kitchen about a $250 machine to cook hot dogs while boiling water worked just as well. Or the trash compactor Dad bought after we moved into the new house that would pound your trash into a two foot cube to save space in the land fills (forget the fact that only Lee and Dad could carry a garbage can fill of these ‘cubes’ to the street). Or a year later when Mom saved enough trading stamps and paid an additional $50 for our first calculator. It did everything – added, subtracted, multiplied AND divided. The future was AMAZING!

Looking back now at the ten year old me and seeing the future in a time perspective, I see the future is only one thing – the unknown. The parts we find amazing could be mere glimpses of things much more transcendent.  Some parts could be dead-ends or a fad that in retrospect appear ridiculous. Others may become common-placed, ordinary and mundane until reflected upon with more insight. And some, I would learn, could be downright terrifying. The true gift of the future is in the reveal and its discovery. The current me now understands that can happen with anything. It can happen wherever you are. And it can happen with who ever you are with at that time. Which means the future is now.

“John!” Dad yelled, “are you going to check out yours and Dave’s room? We can’t stay too long.”

“Coming,” I yelled back and started to the backdoor where Dad was standing. The drone and hum of the cicada continued everywhere. I carefully held the two nymph shells in my hand and lifted them to show my dad. He smiled, patted my back and guided me into the door. I climbed the five or six wooden steps that entered a crooked porch that led to the kitchen. Before could open the kitchen door and step into our future home, Dawn swung the door and skipped out. She was clucking the Popcorn song.

I don’t know if it was because I was leaving Devonshire but my fourth grade teacher let me eat one of my final lunches in the classroom. This was so a couple friends and I could play with the cicadas I had brought from the Gray House in the classroom. I was literally bring back paper garbage bags filled with cicadas back to the old house in the hopes of colonizing our old neighborhood.

We eventually moved to the ‘Gray House’, as we ended up referring to it as. We made a number of trips between the two houses. Hope never did get used to them. When Dad awarded her the privilege of pulling out the ‘For Sale’ sign in the frontyard the day we moved, she screamed as all the nymphs poured out of the hole left in the ground from the pole. Lee and I ran over to investigate. The nymphs disbursed as they crawled to a nearby tree. Lee walked the sign to our new garage. And I looked up to our new bedroom window to see Dave grinning and waving like an idiot. Surely this couldn’t be my future; but I waved back anyways.

I almost didn’t include this song on my list of ‘Songs of My Life’ – not because I didn’t think it belonged on the list, but because NO ONE will ever have heard of this song – except for Lee, who, again, found it originally. As far as music quests, this one was definitely my hardest. And my quest did not end until the internet came along; and even then, it wasn’t as simple as just a ‘googling’ it.

Once again Lee turned me on to another song. Although this time I don’t remember him actually listening to it. I remember going through the 45’s we had laying on the basement floor one day (today I would have been horrified to have vinyl just laying on a tiled floor and not carefully put in their correct album sleeves. We never noticed how bad these 45’s sounded. We were just amazed there was any sound at all). I remember recognized the title, “The Birdman of Alcatraz” so I put the 45 on our record player, hoping it was the song I remembered Lee had played – and it was.

Once again my search suffered from mis-heard lyrics – or rather – having the wrong title.  However, I don’t feel bad messing up the title after 40 years. I could hardly be blamed for thinking the song was “Birdman of Alcatraz” and not “Birdman of Alkatrash”.

This quest began at the Deerfield Record Shop in 1976, after Dave and I had moved in with Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack. The owner was a nice older man named Lenny who seemed to put up pretty well with four young boys in sixth and seventh grade.

The Deerfield Record Shop was not just a little store, it was a tiny store dating back to the 50’s. It had only 20 feet of aisle to walk down, covering record bins and a single glass case of 8-Tracks; and the beginnings of a cassette collection. The record bins began when you entered the store against the wall and leave only the two aisles for customers to avoid being blocked in. Lucky for us (but I’m sure unlucky for Lenny) it was never busy when we were dropped off.

In one of our first visits, he explained he used to have the listening booths in the back of the tiny store but he had to close them because he would catch the kids making out in them. Four young heads peered down the aisle to the back room of past transgressions.

After each of our bedrooms received stereos from Grandma, Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack supplied gift certificates for the Deerfield Record store. Four boys could almost fill the store as we looked for ways to redeem what was remaining on our gift certificates. Lenny had this giant book that you could look up any song in the world – it was called the Phonolog. He kept it to the side of the counter and would explain it didn’t have EVERY song, it did have every song that was currently available.

In the beginning, there were three songs I would be looking for. I imagine when I asked Lenny about them it went something like this:

“I’m looking for a song”

“What’s the name of it?” Lenny asked.

“I don’t know”

“OK, can you sing some of it?”

“No!” it was all I could do to ask him that I was looking for a song in the first place.

“OK,” peering at me from behind the counter and made his way to the Phonelog. “Do you know any of the lyrics?”

“Actually, I know the name of one song – ‘Those Were the Days my friend’,” I proudly announced. I knew he would soon be digging in a box behind the counter and pulling out the requested 45 and asking me about the next song.

“OK, well let’s see what we find” and Lenny would flip through the Phonolog running his finger down the page and adjust is glasses as he zeroed in on his target.

“There it is, now who sang it?”

“I don’t know”

Lenny peered over his glasses at me, “There are over a dozen versions of this song.” His finger ran down the possibilities. “Ah-ha,” he exclaimed, “I bet it was Engelbert Humperdinck.”

“No!” I said a bit too quickly. Engelbert Humperdinck – I was sure he was just making that up. “It was a girl singing.”

Lenny went back to his tome. “Was it Mary Hopkins? or Maria Schell? Maybe Sandie Shaw”

“I don’t know,” I said hanging my head.

“OK, what else are you looking for?”

“Well, there’s one song that the singer sings really fast and then he sings regularly.”

Lenny just stared at me as his glasses clung to the tip of his nose. “Do you know the name or any parts of the lyrics?”

“No, I mean yes, well, I only remember one line – ‘Doris Day and Jack the Ripper'”

Again ‘The Stare’. “Sorry, I’ll need more than ‘Doris Day and Jack the Ripper.’ Is the ‘regular part’ the chorus?”

“Yea, it kinda went like a-huh, ah huh, bump ah huh” I was getting desperate enough I was even humming a melody that sounded more like Crash Test Dummies’ ‘Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm’ song. Had I only known then…

“Sorry kid, try thinking of some more lyrics and we’ll try again. You said you had three songs?”

“Yea, this one I know the title, ‘Birdman of Alcatraz'”

Lenny peered back to the tome of tunes and flipping pages and chasing his fingers. “Here we go he announced, ‘Birdman of Alcatraz’ by Elmer Bernstein. It’s from the Birdman of Alcatraz movie. Is it an instrumental?”

“Yea,” I said, “It’s got guitars and drums, just like a regular song.”

“No no, kid, this is an instrumental, there’s no singing in it. It has violins and cellos. Elmer Bernstein is a famous conductor.”

Elmer Bernstein didn’t do ‘Birdman of Alcatraz,’ and that book doesn’t have all the current songs in. And Lenny didn’t know that much about music. And I was getting very frustrated. “No, that’s not it then,” I said.

“That’s your third strike, sorry kid.”

My brother and cousins were already waiting at the counter with their records and Deerfield Record Store Gift Certificates in hand. I think I grabbed The Beach Boys’ ’15 Big Ones’ and checked out with the others.

It was a lesson for me that things are not as simple as they seem. ‘Those Were The Days’ was covered by over 30 artists around the world. A single phrase from a song isn’t enough to find a song – unless you have Google or a Vanilla Ice wanna-be from the eighties. And even if you know the title of the song you could be wrong.

I talked to Lee about the ‘Birdman of Alcatraz’. He knew it was from the band Strawberry Alarm Clock and the flipside of their first hit ‘Incense and Peppermint‘. What he didn’t know, and what Goggle corrected, is that it is actually ‘The Birdman of Alkatrash‘. Those crazy Alarm Clock boys!

I was thrilled to finally find this song. Yes, it’s quirky. In fact, you could say it borders on being a novelty song – with its ‘quacking’ throughout the song. Ironically, this was the original A side but the radio stations responded to ‘Incense and Peppermint’, the original B side, they reissued the single flipping the songs. So ‘The Birdman of Alkatrash’ all but disappeared behind ‘Incense and Peppermint’ – except for two men who have fond childhood memories of this strange sixties song.