As I write this, Lora and I are in Yuma, Arizona, one of the principle snow bird sites. There are reasons for this, some related to climate, some to the economy. Today, the temperature is projected to rise into the high seventies. The climate in Yuma does have some drawbacks, most notably the wind, and the dust carried by the wind, but for the most part it is sunny and pleasant during the winter months. And it is not San Diego. Mind you, I have nothing against San Diego. I grew into adolescence in the surrounding suburbs. My earliest memories are concentrated there, and so I still consider it my point of origin, if not my actual place of birth. Having said that, however, for those of us who live on the fringes of the tourist trade, the RV parks in San Diego are enormously expensive compared to Yuma, and there is nothing like the expanse of BLM land where camping is virtually free. It's the difference between a thousand dollars a month vs. 180 dollars for the six month stretch between October and April. Although it doesn't have the beaches, it does have the Colorado River, and for those whose amusements involve motors, one can cruise the Colorado in an oversized boat, and there are thousands of miles of ATV trails where one can zip along in a Razor. Consequently, the San Diegans descend on Yuma to play on weekends, where it is cheaper, and less constricted, and the snow birds follow suit to escape the arthritic cold of points north.
Lora and I did not set out on this adventure to become part of a community, much less an unrelated extended family. If anything, we set out expressly to escape community. I should say that our attitudes toward this idea of community are rather contradictory. We both, I think, would like very much to belong, but this belonging seems always to elude us. It's puzzling, and I have given it much thought, but have come to no definite conclusions. Neither Lora nor I are individualists, at least not the sort who feel it necessary to cultivate their eccentricities as a form of public display. To all appearances, there is nothing much unusual about us, in dress or behavior. Lora chides me for my conservatism on occasion, though she seems aghast when I dress or act in ways that would draw attention. We both spent too much of our early life alone. My father's itinerant military career meant that I was always the new kid on the block, or in the class, and while there was a surge of popularity surrounding my novelty, it quickly wore off and I found myself once again alone. Lora's father, her step father, was an abusive drunk in the grand Irish Catholic way, which helped insure she spent most of her adolescence alone hiding away to avoid his wrath. No doubt our combined sense of unwanted isolation can be chalked up to adolescent angst, but even after, I spent most of my young adult life in the Air Force, not because I had a military temperament, or because it provided me a coterie of companions, but rather because the uniform itself gave an official stamp of belonging and it concealed those unconscious eccentricities and insecurities that isolated me. I suspect the same was true of Lora. The uniform covered the scars of her abusive childhood, with the added benefit that military life, at least in peace time, demanded a certain arbitrary tidiness.
I mention all this because those RV parks that cater to the snow birds go well out of their way to foster an illusion of community. For the San Diegans, it's irrelevant, of course, because they come here simply to play and go home. If there is community there, it's the rather tenuous community of those who enjoy the same sorts of over-powered toys. For those, like us, the more permanent residents, however, it's a powerful illusion. When we first arrived at Imperial Dam, we parked unwittingly on "music row." We really had to idea. We selected our site because it was flat, easily accessed, close enough to the waste water dump, and yet afforded a modicum of privacy. We had no idea that the sites along that row were ostensibly "reserved" for a coterie of amateur musicians who returned year after year. As we were informed later, we had parked on "Roland's site," though we were forgiven and welcomed when it was discovered that I played the guitar. I put all this in scare quotes, because none of it is official BLM policy, more simply an understanding among those who return to Imperial Dam year after year to winter.
Buster was the unofficial initial ambassador of music row. One learned quite a lot about Buster, quite quickly. He sketches his own back story in the way that a novelist or playwright might describe an important secondary character. As it turns out, he was the only professional musician of the lot on music row, and he has tales of the time he was invited to tour with the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis. He turned it down because he already recognized that he was an alcoholic. Life on the road with Jerry Lee Lewis, and perhaps others of the early rock and roll pantheon, would not contribute to his sobriety, and so he chose his marriage over alcohol and fame. As it turned out, he was married over fifty years, and his sobriety and the longevity of his marriage are his core points of pride. He had given up music along with the alcohol, at least initially, but had rediscovered it when he and his wife had come to Yuma to winter and he fell in with mythical Slim and others of the picking and grinning crowd. The three chord 1/4/5 songs of rock and roll gave way to the three chord 1/4/5 songs of what might be called classic country. He has been coming to Yuma now for 30 years.
I mention all this because those RV parks that cater to the snow birds go well out of their way to foster an illusion of community. For the San Diegans, it's irrelevant, of course, because they come here simply to play and go home. If there is community there, it's the rather tenuous community of those who enjoy the same sorts of over-powered toys. For those, like us, the more permanent residents, however, it's a powerful illusion. When we first arrived at Imperial Dam, we parked unwittingly on "music row." We really had to idea. We selected our site because it was flat, easily accessed, close enough to the waste water dump, and yet afforded a modicum of privacy. We had no idea that the sites along that row were ostensibly "reserved" for a coterie of amateur musicians who returned year after year. As we were informed later, we had parked on "Roland's site," though we were forgiven and welcomed when it was discovered that I played the guitar. I put all this in scare quotes, because none of it is official BLM policy, more simply an understanding among those who return to Imperial Dam year after year to winter.
Buster was the unofficial initial ambassador of music row. One learned quite a lot about Buster, quite quickly. He sketches his own back story in the way that a novelist or playwright might describe an important secondary character. As it turns out, he was the only professional musician of the lot on music row, and he has tales of the time he was invited to tour with the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis. He turned it down because he already recognized that he was an alcoholic. Life on the road with Jerry Lee Lewis, and perhaps others of the early rock and roll pantheon, would not contribute to his sobriety, and so he chose his marriage over alcohol and fame. As it turned out, he was married over fifty years, and his sobriety and the longevity of his marriage are his core points of pride. He had given up music along with the alcohol, at least initially, but had rediscovered it when he and his wife had come to Yuma to winter and he fell in with mythical Slim and others of the picking and grinning crowd. The three chord 1/4/5 songs of rock and roll gave way to the three chord 1/4/5 songs of what might be called classic country. He has been coming to Yuma now for 30 years.
Buster had a sardonic sense of humor with the men, and a flirtatiousness with women that many might consider inappropriate in our overly sanctimonious times. He was fond of saying that all women were beautiful, though too he was fond of quoting the mythical Slim who would point out in response that some just barely made it. Still, one suspected that Buster did indeed believe that all women were beautiful, and it was clear he enjoyed the company of women, particularly those who were willing to play along with his bravado. He was fond of Lora, and was quite open in his admiration of her behind, and Lora for her part would tell him to quit being a dirty old man and keep his eyes where they belonged. He delighted in the idea that, if he had to be an old man, at least he could be a dirty old man.
He called me over early on, with the imperative to bring that guitar of yours along. I enjoyed playing with him, partly because he did play all of those songs that originated in the fifties and early sixties. In their basics, they weren't difficult to figure out. If it was in they key of C, one knew that it would be composed of the C, F and G chords, with an occasional "minor fall" (as Leonard Cohen might put it) of A minor or E minor (hallelujah). He complained that I couldn't hear the chord changes. It wasn't that I couldn't hear them. I heard them fine, but we skipped around from song to song to song so quickly that I couldn't quite anticipate which variation on a theme we were stumbling through. Then too, while on rare occasions I have played with other people, my guitar playing has been mostly a solitary affair, and because it was a solitary affair, I could take great liberties with a song, if I even bothered to play a recognizable song. What I enjoyed most was a sort of improvisational finger style, taking a melodic or progressive theme and playing around with it. One of Lora's earliest memories of me -- one she alludes to often enough for me to believe it is iconic -- was of me doing just that in Kunsan not long after we'd met. She was returning from somewhere and was laboriously climbing the stairs to the apartment. She had badly sprained an ankle. The awkwardness of the pain and the crutches made the climb difficult, but she didn't call out and I didn't hear her because I was lost in playing the cheap guitar that I had bought at an open market. I remember telling her that playing was a way to let the universe flow through me, which immediately embarrassed me because it sounded so pretentiously new age and because it was true. When a theme took me, and I could just play -- just play -- disappearing into the playing the way smoke disappears into a breeze.
Our private jam sessions were one thing, but he quickly involved me in the Sunday afternoon jams at the gravel pit, a pavilion about a half mile from our campsite. Buster was more or less in charge of the affair, and on Sunday afternoons, at about 1 p.m. he would drag his supply trailer down to the gravel pit and set up the speakers, amps, and mics that helped facilitate the weekly event. They weren't really "jams," at least not in the way that I think of a jam, but more an "open mic." Each person was expected to stand up to the microphone and sing, while those in the background played along. There was supposed to be back porch feel to the gathering, but it wasn't really a group of friends gathering together to play and sing familiar songs. It was more like karaoke, an opportunity to put oneself on public display. There has been much talk surrounding the notion of narcissism of late -- the current white house has more or less assured a national reckoning with our national narcissism -- still, though, the whole exercise struck me as an exercise in narcissism. At one level, of course, it's the five year old's "daddy! daddy! look at me!" -- a child diverting attention to itself in search of affirmation. Buster's playing is accomplished enough to escape this sort of trivialization, but for most of us, if we expected actual judgment, if we expected anything other than affirmation, it would be an exercise in public humiliation. Ostensibly, it's all in good fun. If someone said, "well that truly sucked!" and meant it, a taboo would have been broken. It would be as though daddy had watched his five year old and said, "sugar, what you're doing isn't that special. Anyone your age can do it, and to be honest, most do it better."
The taboo is never broken. We applaud enthusiastically enough, and occasionally offer up a "good job" when a performance seems to transcend the individual performer's skill set. Peace in the gravel pit is preserved. Buster once or twice has said to me, "I'm proud of you," and his paternal tone struck me as both odd and amusing. Although at 64, I am young enough to be his son, and it mattered. For a moment, I was part of the community, though I knew it would be short lived. I'm not sure whether it is something in me that repels, or something in me that rebels -- Lora and I go back and forth on that topic -- but I'm the sort of person who expects actual judgment and usually gets it. Growing up, I was usually the kid singled out by the bullies for exclusion, the reviled other, and so I tend to rebel preemptively before I can be excommunicated. Having said that, however, I run the danger of putting self-pity in the place of self-infatuation, which is really just more of the same. No one who is rapt with self-pity thinks they deserve their fate, and so the spite of others becomes just another way of affirming that one is somehow special, truly special, perhaps in ways that only god can see.
Round we go round we go round. At the core of it all, I think, is an emptiness. The couple that Lora and I have taken to calling the twins are a case in point. They live in Yuma, now, though they wintered at Imperial Dam sometime in the past, and so feel entitled to crash the jam at the gravel pit. They are among the not quite elderly (that is to say, not yet infirm) and they show up at the gravel pit dressed alike in outfits no doubt specifically selected for the occasion because they always feature musical notes. They both play identical baby blue electric guitars, which they play robotically, she especially with a repetitive spasm of a strum. I'm trying not to sound too judgmental, but their whole being seems to cry out for exactly that -- judgment. At one point, just before Christmas, they must have had an anniversary, and they sang a song that went something like "if you want to know what love looks like, look at us." There was no sense of irony, not even the least hint of self-mockery, and the audience clapped appreciatively and a few voices added congratulations. They seemed deeply gratified, but it struck me that they must gaze lovingly into the other's eyes to see what? a reflection of themselves. Someone remarked to Lora that she knew we were a couple because we looked alike, which puzzled and mortified her. I suppose it's difficult for two people to live together for thirty years without mirroring each others pet phrases and gestures, even facial expressions, and I suppose too that it helps to have a common understanding of the world and shared values, a common micro culture, but the matching baby blue guitars points at something different, something utterly superficial and devoid of substance, each a reflection of the other, each affirmed in the rapt admiration they see gazing back from their reflection.
Lora has told me to avoid politics, and religion, but I'm not quite sure how to do that. All things ultimately are political, or religious, or both. The twins are about as white bread as one can get, and on one occasion they sang Merle Haggard's "I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee," and I remember thinking at the time that "good golly miss molly, they're still fighting the culture wars of the late 60s/early 70s." I absolutely loath that song. At the time, it was associated with Buck Owens and Hee Haw, the heartland's answer to the more urbane Laugh In and the Smother's Brothers. Looking back on it today, it was the first anthem for the disaffected rural voters who have helped create our current and contemptible political climate. Even in its day it was a revanchist vision of America that never existed except as a nostalgic fantasy, and I've thought of rewriting the lyrics to reflect current realities. They may not "smoke marijuana in Muskogee," but plenty of rural folk seem fond of huffing meth, and they may not "take their trips on LSD," but opioids seem to be the Greyhound bus to disability and the lassitude of the welfare state. The twins, however, are far from being "Okies," at least not in the originating, depression era sense of the epithet, and seem to be the pure product of small city suburbia, the sort who giggle over the naughtiness of a glass of Chablis, not the dust bowl refugees described by Steinbeck, the original hardscrabble disposables.
Lora worries that I'm becoming cynical in my advancing age, and perhaps I am. To give Merle Haggard his due, there was perhaps more than a bit of irony in the song, at least when he wrote it. The song has been covered by the likes of Arlo Guthrie and Phil Ochs, and with Arlo in particular, it would be hard not to hear a note of sarcasm. Still, we live in a country that suffers from chronic irony deficiency and it's become a sort of literal version of what America was like, before the hippies spoiled it, not to mention the democrats and people of color, and so a vision of what America should be like again. It's difficult to picture the male half of the twins singing "Irma Jackson," Merle's song about interracial love, and given the current imbroglio over immigration and black lives matter, I'm pretty sure that all this love of country is about a far from being "color blind" as ever. Among the snow birds, there aren't any blacks, at least none that I've seen. The twins are overtly religious in a sort of white bread protestant way, and they insist that the last song be "I saw the light." I'm guessing (unfairly perhaps) that their illumination is blinding and bright white, and they would view interracial love as "a sin," not only against their image of god, then against the unspoken, "I'm OK, you're OK" covenant of narcissism. It's difficult for us white folk to see our own affirming reflections in a black face, and no doubt vice versa, and so this snow birding is, for all that I can see, a segregated activity.
Ok, so I am growing cynical in my advancing age. When we pulled the camper out of Mountain Home, we were leaving behind a settled community and what Lora would call the "bullshit." It's a word that carries a lot of freight with us, but boxed up with the other freight is the unremitting pressure to "fit," to conform within the covenant of narcissism. As I said at the outset of this post, Lora and I have never quite "fit," and we have both spent a considerable amount of time thinking about and discussing our lack of "fit." Lora can't help but feel that there's something wrong with us, something hidden from us, but obvious enough to others, like being nose blind to our own stink. We spend a lot of time affirming one another within our own covenant, assuring each other that we've showered sufficiently, but ironically enough, by pulling out of Mountain Home, we were saying in effect, "oh to hell with it" and running away from everything except each other -- running away as a more or less permanent lifestyle. We hadn't counted on the winter, however, and the need to hunker down in place, and there seems to be no place to go for the winter where one isn't immediately surrounded by flocks of snow birds, who bring with them the expectation that we will be birds of a feather.
He called me over early on, with the imperative to bring that guitar of yours along. I enjoyed playing with him, partly because he did play all of those songs that originated in the fifties and early sixties. In their basics, they weren't difficult to figure out. If it was in they key of C, one knew that it would be composed of the C, F and G chords, with an occasional "minor fall" (as Leonard Cohen might put it) of A minor or E minor (hallelujah). He complained that I couldn't hear the chord changes. It wasn't that I couldn't hear them. I heard them fine, but we skipped around from song to song to song so quickly that I couldn't quite anticipate which variation on a theme we were stumbling through. Then too, while on rare occasions I have played with other people, my guitar playing has been mostly a solitary affair, and because it was a solitary affair, I could take great liberties with a song, if I even bothered to play a recognizable song. What I enjoyed most was a sort of improvisational finger style, taking a melodic or progressive theme and playing around with it. One of Lora's earliest memories of me -- one she alludes to often enough for me to believe it is iconic -- was of me doing just that in Kunsan not long after we'd met. She was returning from somewhere and was laboriously climbing the stairs to the apartment. She had badly sprained an ankle. The awkwardness of the pain and the crutches made the climb difficult, but she didn't call out and I didn't hear her because I was lost in playing the cheap guitar that I had bought at an open market. I remember telling her that playing was a way to let the universe flow through me, which immediately embarrassed me because it sounded so pretentiously new age and because it was true. When a theme took me, and I could just play -- just play -- disappearing into the playing the way smoke disappears into a breeze.
Our private jam sessions were one thing, but he quickly involved me in the Sunday afternoon jams at the gravel pit, a pavilion about a half mile from our campsite. Buster was more or less in charge of the affair, and on Sunday afternoons, at about 1 p.m. he would drag his supply trailer down to the gravel pit and set up the speakers, amps, and mics that helped facilitate the weekly event. They weren't really "jams," at least not in the way that I think of a jam, but more an "open mic." Each person was expected to stand up to the microphone and sing, while those in the background played along. There was supposed to be back porch feel to the gathering, but it wasn't really a group of friends gathering together to play and sing familiar songs. It was more like karaoke, an opportunity to put oneself on public display. There has been much talk surrounding the notion of narcissism of late -- the current white house has more or less assured a national reckoning with our national narcissism -- still, though, the whole exercise struck me as an exercise in narcissism. At one level, of course, it's the five year old's "daddy! daddy! look at me!" -- a child diverting attention to itself in search of affirmation. Buster's playing is accomplished enough to escape this sort of trivialization, but for most of us, if we expected actual judgment, if we expected anything other than affirmation, it would be an exercise in public humiliation. Ostensibly, it's all in good fun. If someone said, "well that truly sucked!" and meant it, a taboo would have been broken. It would be as though daddy had watched his five year old and said, "sugar, what you're doing isn't that special. Anyone your age can do it, and to be honest, most do it better."
The taboo is never broken. We applaud enthusiastically enough, and occasionally offer up a "good job" when a performance seems to transcend the individual performer's skill set. Peace in the gravel pit is preserved. Buster once or twice has said to me, "I'm proud of you," and his paternal tone struck me as both odd and amusing. Although at 64, I am young enough to be his son, and it mattered. For a moment, I was part of the community, though I knew it would be short lived. I'm not sure whether it is something in me that repels, or something in me that rebels -- Lora and I go back and forth on that topic -- but I'm the sort of person who expects actual judgment and usually gets it. Growing up, I was usually the kid singled out by the bullies for exclusion, the reviled other, and so I tend to rebel preemptively before I can be excommunicated. Having said that, however, I run the danger of putting self-pity in the place of self-infatuation, which is really just more of the same. No one who is rapt with self-pity thinks they deserve their fate, and so the spite of others becomes just another way of affirming that one is somehow special, truly special, perhaps in ways that only god can see.
Round we go round we go round. At the core of it all, I think, is an emptiness. The couple that Lora and I have taken to calling the twins are a case in point. They live in Yuma, now, though they wintered at Imperial Dam sometime in the past, and so feel entitled to crash the jam at the gravel pit. They are among the not quite elderly (that is to say, not yet infirm) and they show up at the gravel pit dressed alike in outfits no doubt specifically selected for the occasion because they always feature musical notes. They both play identical baby blue electric guitars, which they play robotically, she especially with a repetitive spasm of a strum. I'm trying not to sound too judgmental, but their whole being seems to cry out for exactly that -- judgment. At one point, just before Christmas, they must have had an anniversary, and they sang a song that went something like "if you want to know what love looks like, look at us." There was no sense of irony, not even the least hint of self-mockery, and the audience clapped appreciatively and a few voices added congratulations. They seemed deeply gratified, but it struck me that they must gaze lovingly into the other's eyes to see what? a reflection of themselves. Someone remarked to Lora that she knew we were a couple because we looked alike, which puzzled and mortified her. I suppose it's difficult for two people to live together for thirty years without mirroring each others pet phrases and gestures, even facial expressions, and I suppose too that it helps to have a common understanding of the world and shared values, a common micro culture, but the matching baby blue guitars points at something different, something utterly superficial and devoid of substance, each a reflection of the other, each affirmed in the rapt admiration they see gazing back from their reflection.
Lora has told me to avoid politics, and religion, but I'm not quite sure how to do that. All things ultimately are political, or religious, or both. The twins are about as white bread as one can get, and on one occasion they sang Merle Haggard's "I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee," and I remember thinking at the time that "good golly miss molly, they're still fighting the culture wars of the late 60s/early 70s." I absolutely loath that song. At the time, it was associated with Buck Owens and Hee Haw, the heartland's answer to the more urbane Laugh In and the Smother's Brothers. Looking back on it today, it was the first anthem for the disaffected rural voters who have helped create our current and contemptible political climate. Even in its day it was a revanchist vision of America that never existed except as a nostalgic fantasy, and I've thought of rewriting the lyrics to reflect current realities. They may not "smoke marijuana in Muskogee," but plenty of rural folk seem fond of huffing meth, and they may not "take their trips on LSD," but opioids seem to be the Greyhound bus to disability and the lassitude of the welfare state. The twins, however, are far from being "Okies," at least not in the originating, depression era sense of the epithet, and seem to be the pure product of small city suburbia, the sort who giggle over the naughtiness of a glass of Chablis, not the dust bowl refugees described by Steinbeck, the original hardscrabble disposables.
Lora worries that I'm becoming cynical in my advancing age, and perhaps I am. To give Merle Haggard his due, there was perhaps more than a bit of irony in the song, at least when he wrote it. The song has been covered by the likes of Arlo Guthrie and Phil Ochs, and with Arlo in particular, it would be hard not to hear a note of sarcasm. Still, we live in a country that suffers from chronic irony deficiency and it's become a sort of literal version of what America was like, before the hippies spoiled it, not to mention the democrats and people of color, and so a vision of what America should be like again. It's difficult to picture the male half of the twins singing "Irma Jackson," Merle's song about interracial love, and given the current imbroglio over immigration and black lives matter, I'm pretty sure that all this love of country is about a far from being "color blind" as ever. Among the snow birds, there aren't any blacks, at least none that I've seen. The twins are overtly religious in a sort of white bread protestant way, and they insist that the last song be "I saw the light." I'm guessing (unfairly perhaps) that their illumination is blinding and bright white, and they would view interracial love as "a sin," not only against their image of god, then against the unspoken, "I'm OK, you're OK" covenant of narcissism. It's difficult for us white folk to see our own affirming reflections in a black face, and no doubt vice versa, and so this snow birding is, for all that I can see, a segregated activity.
Ok, so I am growing cynical in my advancing age. When we pulled the camper out of Mountain Home, we were leaving behind a settled community and what Lora would call the "bullshit." It's a word that carries a lot of freight with us, but boxed up with the other freight is the unremitting pressure to "fit," to conform within the covenant of narcissism. As I said at the outset of this post, Lora and I have never quite "fit," and we have both spent a considerable amount of time thinking about and discussing our lack of "fit." Lora can't help but feel that there's something wrong with us, something hidden from us, but obvious enough to others, like being nose blind to our own stink. We spend a lot of time affirming one another within our own covenant, assuring each other that we've showered sufficiently, but ironically enough, by pulling out of Mountain Home, we were saying in effect, "oh to hell with it" and running away from everything except each other -- running away as a more or less permanent lifestyle. We hadn't counted on the winter, however, and the need to hunker down in place, and there seems to be no place to go for the winter where one isn't immediately surrounded by flocks of snow birds, who bring with them the expectation that we will be birds of a feather.
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