City Songs Saturday - A States

Without a logical theme coming to mind for today, I figured I'd stick with the simple. Here's a sampling of city songs from the "A" states of the good ol' USA.

Alabama: Angel From Montgomery - John Prine


Alaska: Anchorage - Michelle Shocked


Arkansas: Little Rock - Hayes Carll


Arizona: By The Time I Get to Phoenix - Glen Campbell


Arizona Bonus: Goin' Back to Tucson - Supersuckers


TMC

City Songs Saturday - Big Ten edition

With all the drama surrounding [snark] The [/snark] Ohio State University, Jim Tressel, Terrelle Pryor, tats, weed, jerseys, and cars, I thought a Big Ten edition of City Songs Saturday might work.

Before anyone unleashes on me, yes I realize these cities aren't the homes of Big Ten universities. I'm just trying to get in the general vicinity of the states.

Detroit Rock City - KISS


Cleveland Rocks - The Presidents of The United States of America


Champaign, Illinois - Old 97s


What's Made Milwaukee Famous - Jerry Lee Lewis


The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines - Joni Mitchell



TMC

Memories One Year Later

One year ago this morning - June 3, 2010 - I was at my parents' house. Their suitcases were packed, and we were about to leave for the airport. I'd booked seats on Southwest to fly them to Jacksonville to visit my sick uncle, my mother's youngest brother.

As we finished a cup of coffee and finished loading the trunk of the car, the phone rang. Too late. The battle was lost. He had died in the early morning hours. Flights and hotels were canceled, and the bags were unloaded. That day sucked.

Its hard to believe a year has passed. I miss conversations and visits with him immensely - even though I know his absence to me pales in comparison to what it means to my aunt and my mother.

One habit I developed the last 2 or 3 years of his life was to call him as I grilled steaks. Every few weeks, it was just a neat opportunity to talk with him from my deck for 20 minutes or as I sipped a beer and waited for medium-well.

A memories have popped back in my head in recent months. I started a draft of this entry months ago when the first one hit, and I continued to add to it with a target publish date of today. Here are a few stories that still make me smile.

• In spring 1984, I needed to land a summer job between college quarters. My uncle said he could arrange a job in the accounts receivable department with his employer. Because I was an accounting major, this would be great practical experience - plus give me the chance to live in Florida for the summer. I quickly accepted and quit looking around Nashville. With about a week to go before the spring quarter ended, he called to say that because he was in sales, the company's nepotism and other control policies prevented me from working in receivables. Instead, he offered me the chance to work in the warehouse loading trucks in non-ventilated trailers. What could I do? So I went from having an air-conditioned desk job to working in trailers that seemed hotter than the seventh level of hell.
  

• July 4, 1984. My aunt's boss was retiring, and she was about to be promoted to his position. She and my uncle scheduled a retirement party/picnic for him and a ton of co-workers at their house. I offered to help - mow the grass, man the grill, refresh ice on the beer, whatever. A day or two later, my uncle admitted he'd had two tickets to the Firecracker 400 NASCAR race in Daytona. He knew he couldn't go because of the gathering, but he didn't tell me about them because he didn't know if I'd want to go alone. It turns out it was no ordinary race as my racing hero Richard Petty won his 200th career race. Instead of my being there, the tickets went unused on his night stand.

• My uncle, a long-time friend of his, a long-time friend of mine, and I went to a local beer joint in Jacksonville the night before the Daytona 500 in 1994. A table of girls had their eye on my uncle's friend and got him to dance. The others were okay from a distance - but we just kept our seats, drank our beer and continued our conversation. A few songs later, another one claimed my uncle and it was down to my buddy and me. As the two of us continued to talk, we kind of just forgot about the two of them. Let 'em have a good time. Whatever. But then suddenly, my uncle grabbed me by the neck and dragged me to the dance floor. He had recruited a midget - I'm telling you a MIDGET - to dance with me. Now I'll never be mistaken for an NBA player, but I'm hardly in the midget category. But he and his friend were doubled over in laughter while I had to figure a way to wrangle myself out of this awkward situation.

• One of the neatest phone calls I ever received was in summer of 2000. I answered and heard the following challenge: "Hey, guess where I went last night." Now how am I supposed to answer that? So I immediately gave up with "I dunno. Where?" He excitedly said "the Billy Graham Crusade!" He talked a lot that night and much more in the years to follow how his faith was strengthened beginning about that time. He eventually started a men's small group Bible study class on his screened-in porch. He told me they had a great core of guys who enjoyed wrestling with scripture and drinking beer as they discussed it.
  

• He was a huge sports nut. Lifelong Celtics fan - including sitting 2 rows behind the bench at the old Boston Garden as a 40th birthday gift to himself. Season ticket holder of USFL Jacksonville Bulls and NFL Jacksonville Jaguars for many years. Played fantasy baseball before it became the rage. He attended MLB, NFL, NBA, NASCAR, 'wrasslin', and just about everything else in professional sports - except hockey. I'm glad to say I took him to his one and only NHL game - the Tampa Bay Lightning vs. our Nashville Predators - about 5 or 6 years ago. Unfortunately, the Lightning mopped the floor with the Preds that night. But we had a great visit, shared a number of brews at the game and at a few of the lower Broadway honky-tonks after the game, and he crossed the NHL off his list of sports events to see.

TMC

City Songs Saturday - NASCAR edition

Greetings from Concord, North Carolina where I'm spending the weekend enjoying the festivities of Coca-Cola 600 NASCAR weekend with friends a'plenty and Schaefer beer a'many.

The theme for today's City Songs Saturday focuses on various cities having NASCAR tracks. Click here if want to read/listen to other City Song Saturday entries.

Indianapolis - Bottle Rockets

Pocono Joe - Mark Miklos

Oh Atlanta - Little Feat

Dallas - Jimmie Dale Gilmore (performed here by Flatlanders' bud Joe Ely)

Ooh Las Vegas - Gram Parsons (covered here by Jason & The Scorchers)

TMC

City Songs Saturday - Port Cities edition

Despite my settings, this blog template will not display tags. So click here if you want to see my other City Songs Saturday entries.

Galveston Bay - Bruce Springsteen

City of New Orleans - Steve Goodman

Corpus Christi Bay - Robert Earl Keen

Jacksonville Skyline - Whiskeytown

San Diego Serenade - Tom Waits

TMC

A Mother's Day Pup

The first entry I posted to this blog not quite three years ago was about the loss of my dog. Its not as if his passing had just happened. He had been gone a few years - but I tried to convey how much I still missed the ol' hound.

A couple of months ago, I sent the link to a co-worker. She read it, paused and then said something to the effect of "well, that's the most depressing thing I've ever read" to which I replied "that's kinda what I was going for."

With that as background, I've been thinking about how to re-visit the subject but spin it to the positive. So let me give this a shot.

I got my pup on Mother's Day 1992. We were living in Chattanooga, TN at the time, and I went to Nashville for the weekend to visit with my folks, kiss my mother on the cheek and wheeze with red eyes as my dad filled the living room with smoke from his hand-rolled cigs. We'd hit that point of the visit where the three of us kind of just sat there in silence. My mother was likely pondering what to prepare for the next meal, my dad was gently rocking in his recliner and I was cruising through the Sunday Tennessean - including the want-ads.

Growing up, my sister had a dog. Daisy was a dachshund-beagle mix. I played with her, but she was definitely my sister's dog. Throughout junior high and high school, I took care of 'my' dogs by living vicariously through others. I took care of neighbors' dogs all around us as they took various weekend and vacation trips. Sometimes I was paid a little bit - sometimes not. But I didn't really care because I simply enjoyed time with the pooches.

When I finally got a house of my own, one of the first things I wanted was my own dog. As I flipped through the classifieds that Sunday morning, one posting jumped off the page: Labrador-golden retriever mix pups for $25. (I would've clipped the ad and kept it if I could've foreseen blogging back then.) I called the guy, he said the pups were still available, and off my brother and I went to get me a dog.

7 weeks old. 5 pounds. Slept on the front seat of my Toyota Corolla all the way back to Chattanooga.

To provide some context about size, here he is very much interested in my wife's dwarf rabbit.

Sleep was the name of the game in the beginning.

It didn't take long for that 5 pound pup to hit 35 pounds - and then 50 pounds - and then eventually around 80. As he rapidly gained weight, I'm pretty sure it was concentrated in his legs ... and his tongue. He often had the funniest facial expressions.

For a couple of years, I took him to have a Christmas picture made. The cost went towards a pet rescue organization or something like that. Like kids, it was damn near impossible to get him to look at the camera at just the right time. Fortunately, a quick treat was enough in this instance to freeze him for just the right snap. Both years, I took him and our neighbor's golden retriever. As a reward after the photo shoot, I fed them Krystal hamburgers in the parking lot as people drove by laughing.

For the first few nights we had him as a puppy, I tried to follow the advice of books I'd read. Put the puppy in a cardboard box, add some towels and a stuffed animal, and include a clock to simulate the mother's heartbeat. This will help ease any separation-anxiety the puppy may have. Baloney. Despite doing all that, Winston whined worse than my trying to beg out of my annual prostate exam.

• After only a night or two, he figured out how to jump high enough to crush the edge of the box to escape.
• So then he was moved to a half-bath - where he proceeded the claw the crap out of the sliver of carpet showing between the bonus room and the bathroom vinyl.
• Then he got booted to the garage on a pile of towels - that he destroyed within a matter of days. Not learning a lesson from this incident, my wife reasoned he might like having one of those fluffy cushions from L.L. Bean, Eddie Bauer, or whatever it was. "Umm, really?" I asked - "How much is it?" Just $50. *sigh* It lasted 90 minutes - long enough for us to put it down, go to dinner and return to a smiling pup sitting amongst shredded poly-fill and fabric.
• From there, he was incarcerated in a chain-link dog run in the backyard for overnight stays. He loved being there during the day so it only made sense he stay there at night too. Or so it seemed. After a few months, the remnants of a Gulf hurricane hit in the form of a bad thunderstorm. Winston went ape in his pen as the rain pounded and thunder boomed. I had barely cracked the gate open when he smacked it against me and made a bee-line for the garage - which is where he stayed pretty much at night for the next 5 to 6 years.
• As a last resort, I built a simple wood box and filled it with cedar shavings to hedge against fleas. Who woulda guessed it? After all that trial and error, this was the fix. Not only did he enjoy it, but the neighbor's Krystal-eating golden, Jazz, enjoyed it too. She ended up spending more nights in our garage than she did at their house for the rest of the time we lived there.

As a labrador, he did a pretty nice job of learning to retrieve. He excelled, however, at keep away. After getting whatever ball I threw for him, he'd go get it. But he enjoyed baiting me into taking it from him vs. quickly bringing it back for another round. The only exception to this was if I disappeared. If I threw the ball and quickly ran inside, hid behind a car, etc., it would drive him crazy trying to find me.

But one day, my attempts to outwit a mutt nearly put me on the disabled list. See the 4x4 post in the picture below? One spring afternoon, I zinged the ball out the garage, and he took off like a shot. To play my trick, I turned to head for the door to the house. Except...I misjudged where I was, turned, and ran full-force-face-first into that post. I remember laying on the floor with his licking my face - however, I don't remember getting to the floor. No blood and no double-vision. Just dog slobber on my face. So all things considered, I was very lucky. Dog 1, TMC Zero that day.

Some of the neighbors called me Maestro after I trained many of their dogs along with mine to sit orderly, shake and await their milk bone. I was like the neighborhood milk bone crack dealer. There are only 3 dogs in this picture, but there were three others who also knew where I kept my stash - and what it cost to get one. A paw shake without teeing off on another dog as they got it.

Once Winston was booted to the pen and garage, he was an outdoor lifer. He had those rare occasions, however, when he'd get a bath and be allowed for a brief time in the house. His ability to understand was uncanny. He used his "inside voice" and always acted as if he belonged there. I'm sure it was a lobbying effort on his part to make his stay full-time.

When our son was born (who turned 16 about 10 days ago. sigh...), I let Winston in briefly to see how he'd handle things. No growling, no barking, no biting and frankly very little sniffing. Instead, he instinctively bonded by laying down and enduring whatever tugs or drooling was to come his way.

He minded his manners inside and understood his life was outdoors. But his favorite time seemed to be those rare times in Tennessee when it snowed. The deeper the snow and colder the temps - the better he liked it.




In 1993, Chattanooga got a snow for the ages - about 2 feet. A day later, the temps plummeted. What started out as a fun time for sledding and such turned into a hmm, well this could get interesting experience. We lost power for 2 days and quickly burned through what little firewood we had left. But while we tried to conserve energy, think how we'd salvage frozen food, and wonder how cold it would be while we slept, Winston ran non-stop from sun-up to sun-down. With a 24" thick white blanket, it was easy to spot his black goat galloping from one yard to another.


He was such a wonderful pet. 13 years. Lots more memories that could be shared here. Maybe I'll blog another handful in the years to come each Mother's Day weekend.

Hopefully, this entry was more uplifting than the one I wrote a few years ago. I know I smiled a lot as I scanned the various photos and thought about so many fun times.

TMC

City Songs Saturday - Plains states

I want to thank each and every one of you who commented on last week's City Songs Saturday blog debut. Yes, all zero of you. Thank so much for the feedback. The message was loud and clear - 100% of no one suggested to move forward with the series, and for that I'm grateful.

How about a CSS theme shout-out this week to the Plains states - places like Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma.

Kansas City Star - Roger Miller



Tulsa Time - Don Williams



Wichita Lineman - Glen Campbell



Idabel Blues - Stoney LaRue



Back Home in Omaha - Todd Thibaud



TMC