Once upon a time in the almost mythical place called California
In an almost mythical village called Redwood City
Was an almost mythical music store called Gelb Music.

And it was good.

Gelb Music was the last store owned and operated by the late Sidney Gelb.
Sidney Gelb had occasion to hire one Norm Van Maastricht as his store manager around 1964.
This guy was pure as the driven snow. Noted for his black suit and black tie he was the epitome of that rare species the “happily married family man”. A paragon of Americana was he, clean shaven, a monthly haircut.

And it was good.

And it came to pass that Gelb Music hired a young Kevin Jarvis as an instructor in things guitar. Kevin became a Teacher and his skill with the guitar increased his fame.

And it was good.

Sidney Gelb announced his intention to retire in 1972 and sold the venue to Kevin Jarvis and Henry White, another instructor in the store.

And it was good

Norm, at this time had undergone a major metamorphis. He found himself single and shortly after the change in ownership of the store decided to grow a beard and let his hair grow.
The suit and tie vanished; less fromal garb was worn and he started to wear a black cowboy hat.
With a feather in it.

Was this good? Let us say it was good.

It came to pass that the building was deemed too bland so an itinerant muralist was hired to paint the building and on the north wall he painted a figure of a bearded thief climbing out of a painted window stealing a painted guitar. The figure was wearing a painted Dutch Boy billed cap.

As art it was mediocre but it was eye catching.

And almost from the day the piece was finished the mantra became “The guy on the wall looks just like Norm.” even though it looked nothing like Norm at all. Norm, at this time, wore a Cowboy Hat With a Feather In It and the mural figure still had his featherless Dutch Boy cap. But still the “It looks like Norm” mantra persisted.

It came to pass that Norm left the store. He became “The Norm” and moved on to the adventure of becoming the de facto manager of a roadhouse of some repute, but that is altogether another story we won’t go into here.

But the wall mural remained there for lo, thirty nine years. Still referred to as “looking like Norm”.

It came to pass, in 2011, that Kevin Jarvis, now sole owner of Gelb Music, decided it was time to repaint the building.
And he had an Inspiration! An Epiphany!

A little conference with the involved parties.
A two minute session with a digital camera

And a new mural appeared on the north wall.
A painted figure stealing a guitar and some amplifiers from a painted window.
A painted cowboy hat with a painted feather and a painted beard.
It looks like, no, it is The Norm!

And it was good…

During the Gelb years when Kevin and Henry had the store I used to take my Dobro over to Kitty and Errol’s, the Powers sisters, two pretty Montessori schoolteachers. We’d play music. They both played a little guitar, Kitty was a guitar student of mine. They both sang so we’d have a nice time making music, folk songs mostly. We all enjoyed the exchange and this was a once or two night a week bit of business.
Well, after about a year of friendship the two girls were suddenly chatty about ‘Toni’ and how Toni was coming up for a visit.. “Wait ‘till you meet her. You’ll love her. And then they’d look at each other and would say words to the effect that I “wouldn’t know what to do with that one.”
“Can she sing?” I asked.
“No, she doesn’t sing. You just wait. You’ll meet her.”
Well, it came to pass that there was to be a dinner party and I would get to meet Toni.
I had no idea what to expect and I just hoped that whoever she was that we would be comfortable with each other since Kitty and Errol obviously loved this person.

So I show up and there are people milling around. The girls lived in a rented house and had room for a nice party if you know what I mean. Their friends were an intelligent bunch… no Bubbas…no Valley Girls. Also no Toni.
Great. Got some dame coming up from L.A. and can’t even show up on time for her own party!
I didn’t give it much thought…you know how it is… I wasn’t that concerned.
I was in the kitchen, I hear the conversation tone change. Evidently Toni has arrived. “Perfect,” I thought. “I’ll be able to ooze into the mingle if I wait a minute”.

Well, the kitchen door swings open and there she is. I had no idea what she was supposed to look like but I found that was always a good thing because in that way you’re never disappointed.

She was short…maybe five five, round face…brown hair styled nicely…collar length and full… brown eyes. Cute, rather than pretty…pretty rather than beautiful.
“I’m Toni.” she said.
“I’m Norm.” I said.
She looked and at me with a smirk and said, “I’m a hooker.”
I looked at her for a second. A little at a loss for words.
“You want something to drink? A sandwich, maybe?” I asked. She laughed and just then Kitty and Errol came in and said “You met Toni!” in happy voices.

Yes indeed. I’d met Toni

Now I’m basically a country boy. I had never in my life met an honest to god ‘working girl’ that I knew of. She certainly didn’t look anything like what I’d imagined what one would be like. None of the stereotypical descriptors of “hooker” or “prostitute” that one reads about in novels seemed to apply. She had a nice figure and was wearing jeans and a long sleeved blouse.

I was, and still am, big on ‘reading edges’ trying to ken what a persons “aura” might be saying. I didn’t actually see auras (except in special circumstances) and I didn’t see one on her but I could tell she was Going To Be Different.

I like to look at hands. Ideally, on a woman, I like ‘Vargas Hands’, the kind that have long tapering fingers with lonish enameled nails but those are rare. Still, some of their personality is reflected in thier hands. I always look at their hands because to me it speaks volumes of how a woman views herself. It’s part of the whole picture.

“Let me see your hands” was a question I was never afraid to ask . The way they put their hands forth told me things. I would do my “study” and sometimes do a jackleg imitation of a palm reader which allowed me to touch her hands and pick up little hints about their persona. A lot of tactile signaling can happen doing this.
When I asked her to show me her hands I noticed a bit of a hesitation and she presented me with two gently clasped fists that she ever so slowly opened. A person who trusts but only reluctantly…

She had “Urchin’s Hands” which are hard to describe. They aren’t and never could be ‘Vargas Hands’ but long nails wouldn’t enhance the hands that much. But I could see she had a well keptness to them. Honest and sturdy but still maintaining femininity.

I took her two unclenched fists in my upturned palms and was startled by her wrists. She had deep scars on both of them the ones on her left wrist a bit rougher in scar tissue than her right.
I gently stroked them with my thumb.
“Are you O.K. now?”
She cocked her head at me said “Kitty and Errol told me you’d let me know if I was OK or not.”
“Well, you really ought to get into another business if it comes to that, y’know? You need to be good to yourself”

We talked for a little while. She said she wasn’t a street hooker…no, she was a ‘call girl’ and she just had a couple or ‘regular clients’. More like a kept woman was how she put it. She made it very plain that she had no pimp. “No man ain’t taking any money from me.” I listened to her story with absolutely no judgment to it at all except to sniff it lightly to see if it was a true tale. It certainly seemed so.
Oh, well, another trippy person living an interesting life but the scars on her wrists bothered me. These weren’t little white lines… she had done a real hack on herself .

The rest of the night passed uneventfully. She and I mingled with the others and eventually Kitty, Errol and myself played about an hours worth of music. A good time was had by all. Toni and I didn’t say much for the rest of the evening . I’d catch her looking at me sometimes. Sometimes her face would be expressionless other times she would have her smirk. a certain knowing smile.

Finally I went up to he and very quietly said “Y’know what?”
“What?”
You think you’re pretty rowdy. Yeah, you do. You think you’re pretty rowdy but you’re just a rowdy little punk which is to say you ain’t all that rowdy at all.” She thought this was very funny. I started calling her “Rowdy” after that. She loved it.

She was only up for a weekend. The dinner party was on her arriving Thursday. That Friday we went to an Emerald Hills burgerie and played pool. When we got there I found she was only 20 which would be a problem because the Canyon Inn, the burgerie, was a beer and wine joint and she had no ID.
We just wanted to eat and shoot a little social pool so we had Toni drinking Cokes. I got another revelation when we got there. She asked me if the cops in this area write citations for needle marks. Whoops! Needles! This explained why she was wearing long sleeves on warm nights.

That gave me something to chew on as we played some pool. We eventually got turned out because Toni couldn’t produce an I.D. so it was a short night. She was on a plane that Sunday and I figured that would be the last of her.
Just as well. It’s hard for me to understand someone so into a substance that they are willing to inject it into themselves. We ain’t talking medicine, here. Her world was so different than mine I didn’t think we would ever be more than casual aquaintances.

A couple of months later, to my surprise, here comes Toni strutting into the store.
“The Rowdy Little Punk is here!..” she announced, kissing me in the process.
She invited me up to the Powers house that night and of course I went. We had a nice time. Played music, sang a little, Toni just taking it in and enjoying it. Talking during that second weekend visit I found out that she made really good money at what she did but she had nothing to show for it except a lot of clothes. She said that’s where most of her money went…to clothes.

She told me that she had been involved with an “outlaw” motorcycle club for a while. She liked the big bikes and the lifestyle. And the drugs available. She had pretty much quit that life but still kept in touch with some of the guys. After all, she had built some friendships with some of them.
She wanted me to write to her so I did. I think I saw her on three, maybe four separate weekends. Never even approached intimacy… no kissing, well, no necking, making out…that kind of thing. But still, a deep, caring, love and affection was growing between us.

I wrote to her for a year or so. She would get depressed and I would somehow cheer her up. And I would keep gently pressing her to get out of the business. She asked me to call her a couple of times and introduced me to her mother over the phone. She lived with her mother and would meet her clients at whatever rendzevous they arranged. Never at home.

One night her mother called me. She was worried because Toni was stoned or something and would I talk to her. I had no idea what I could do that far away. Looking back on it, she should have called the paramedics but maybe it was a financial thing or she was afraid of getting her put in jail, I don’t know. But talk to her I did and she was a mess. Obviously depressed but not actually suicidal that I could tell. But she was loaded on something. Just what I never found out or cared to find out. I talked to her and got her from mumbling to coherence, somehow.
I got a promise from her to call me the next day and once more I told her she had to find something else to do with her life but I felt out of my depth. I mean, why am I even talking to this girl… she likes bikers and uses drugs that require needles.

I’m not exactly sure what it was that did it…she always said it was me…but she got reconnected with her father who ran a catering truck business and who had a small fleet of “roach wagons” as people call them. She got a job driving one of these and found that she loved it and claimed that she had quit The Business and the drugs except for a little pot. Quitting the business was not an overnight thing. She may not have fully quit it, I don’t know. But her letters took an amazingly upbeat tone. She was starting to save money and just all in all felt happy.
This went on for a long time. She never came back to the Bay Area. But I had no idea that I would never see her again.

This went on for a while. She was happy and proud to be out of her olld profession and lifestyle.
One night I was thinking about calling Kitty and Errol and see if they’d heard from her…when the phone rang. It was Kitty. Toni was In Something more than trouble.
It turns out she went on a ‘run’ and a good time was had by all. During the revelry she had gone into someone’s tent and indulged in a needled drug. I have no idea what it was but likely it was heroin.

She passed out. She had overdosed herself because she had tried to throw up and aspirated on her own vomit. This is usually what kills in an overdose. It isn’t the drugs necessarily, that kill them. It’s the incapacitating effect so that your body doesn’t react to things like aspirating your own vomitis. You drown in it. She didn’t die but it caused oxygen starvation… brain damage…and all that was Toni went away forever. She was alive but she was pretty much going to need institutional care for the rest of her life.

A day later I got a letter from her. She had written it and mailed it just before she went on that fateful trip. In it she said she knew I wouldn’t approve but she was going on a run with this bunch of bikers she used to ride with “just this once and never again”. She told me she would be careful and signed it with love as she always did…

I cried. Deep and hard. The adult version of that little kid’s shoulder shaking shuddering, gasping sobs. There have only been two other incidents that moved me that deeply and I have to say it is Not a fun cry to have.

When I went to LA on what I call “The Johnna and Deedee Caper” I decided to try to find out more about her. Kitty gave me a phone number of one of her friends in L A and while I was down there I called the number and stated my business… was there some way I could visit Toni. The guy made me leave a number and I’m sure he made a couple of calls to have me checked out.

He called back and said, “Look. I don’t think you should go see her. She’s really fragile now. In fact the person you knew as Toni Berry isn’t in her any more. She’s changed a lot physically and she would not like to know you saw her like this.” His voice was gently…not hostile or defensive bit full of empathy and sadness.
“Remember her as she was, man. Everyone would be better off…”

And that’s the end of it.

Of course, now, there are lots of ‘what if’s’ but they won’t fit in the slot and you don’t get to play them anyhow…

I’ve only composed two songs in my life. Both instrumental, both played on the Dobro.
One is called “Travis” and the other…

…the other is called “Berry Pickin’ Waltz”

This is Evelyn Nesbit.

A beautiful, young,  turn of the (19th) century lass.

An in demand artist’s model, she gained fame as one of the “Gibson Girls” by modeling for Charles Dana Gibson a noted illustrator of the day.
She had several affairs, most notably with Stanford White architect of Madison Square Garden.

Sweet little fox worked as a model and a showgirl and in that capacity met and married Harry Thaw.
Harry was very rich, very jealous and just a tad nuts.  He shot ol’ Stanny  in June of ’06  and the tabloids of the day had a feast.

It has since been the topic of several books and a couple of movies.

 
I had a page that had been taken from a dilapidated album that had a pen and ink head sketch of Evelyn Nesbit that is a superb example of the genre.

  Looking about to cry, she has a defiant chin thrust out and an amazing pout. 

Amazing what a person can do with just a pen and black ink!

 
Well, I tried several times to run that over to color and haven’t got it right yet. 
This one came out pretty good…
Gave it to a good friend, a lawyer.  I expected to see it in his office and was put out when I didn’t see it so I got on him about it a little.  I thought he had put her in a closet or his garage or something.
He has it at home, hanging on a wall.

It’s nice to know when they make it to a good home…

Our bar did not attract a violent crowd but on a few occasions his gentle, wise, manner would get set aside and this brief but effective Grizzly Bear would pop out and, with little fanfare, settle the situation of the moment.
 
The rest of the time he was amazingly congenial, never seeming to tire of greeting customers with “Good evening, Welcome to Barney Steel’s.  The cover tonight is ___ and the band tonight is ____”
Endlessly…!     Always with a smile.
 
But he was much more than that.  I’m sure I share the same kind of memory as others in his deep listening and gentle responses as I/we vented our latest mental or moral trouble. Always the guy to encourage someone’s efforts.  A man of infinite wisdom and wit, wit that was never at someone else’s expense.
 
Most nights he was working I stood next to him a lot of the time to check the customers as they came in and occasionally give him a break so he could go on a “parking lot check” with someone.  I’d go on a ‘parking lot check’ with him from time to time too, where rumor has it certain herbs may have been smoked.  I can’t remember…
And we talked.  We talked for hours about “Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax…of Cabbages and Kings” as Lewis Carroll would say.  
 
I never saw him drunk.  Ever.  Maybe two beers a night if that.  A man who led by example.  He had a drive of about thirty miles at the end of the night and he would not risk a DUI… 
We had a lot in common, he and I, but at the same time we were very unalike, myself being everything they attribute to an Aries.  His Steady Mellow and my Intensity harmonized pretty well.
 
He was a pretty good pool player.  He never rattled….
 
After the bar shut its doors we drifted away to do other things as people will and we saw less of each other.  Distance and busy lives… we all know how it is.  And a visit from time to time, more of an incidental crossing of paths, were not be the same as the bonding we had at that bar.  A bonding we both missed.
 
But when someone Takes Flight suddenly like this I regret the opportunities missed to communicate, to have had at least one more dinner… one more e.mail…that kind of thing… too many things unsaid…
 
The Dan I knew never seemed troubled or worried but he must have been so at times because he was human with the same pains and pressures of life all of us face…some of the pains he had to go through  took their toll.  But you never knew because he hid it and made it About You.  You got his full attention.  Didn’t matter what it was that had you in a flutter and flurry, he would talk you down in his own inimitable way.  

Jan aptly put it this way  “He always knew the right words and his talent for getting you to realize the answer to your own question was uncanny.”
 
He would answer any question and even when his answer was “I don’t know.” you felt better anyway…
 
When I grow up I want to be just like him.

I believe I made at least four paintings of her.  Some came out well… some did not.

I actually sold two that were based on her.  She is the only real person, as in ‘person I actually knew’  that was the subject in any of the paintings I have actually sold to date.

This is one of my most commented on paintings when people see a photo of it.  It is her head superimposed on a model from an ad I saw in a Cosmo magazine.  She did not actually pose for this painting…I’ve never seen her unclothed.  But it’s a good capture, I think… 

                                                     It’s beautiful, to tell the truth…

                           Even if I do say so myself…

I think she may have it now…
 I really don’t know…

I forgot to ask…

Every painting has a story but some have more story than others…

James Cameron’s TheTitanic came out in 1997 and was, as we all know, a huge hit.
I saw it and I thought the visuals were pretty impressive.  The epic special effects chronicled the historical disaster as best it could, being wrapped as it was, around  a fairly standard Hollywood rich girl/poor boy romantic potboiler.

Others, I found, did not share my cavalier impression of the film.  Some got quite wrapped up in it.  ‘Immersed’ might be a better word.  Some people got so enthralled with the movie one would think they had gone down with the doomed ship.

One of these people happened to be a young woman I’ve known for a good part of my life.  She was one of the Titanic survivors in a manner of speaking.   For some, surviving the movie itself and not becoming a sobbing basket case afterward was it’s own form of surviving the sinking .   

There were a lot of things you could buy centered around that movie and she had more than a few of these…  She was definitely into it.

I was painting quite a bit around that time so it was only natural that I would try to paint her.  She was a pretty lady but she was very hard for me to capture with my brush and paint.  I work from photographs rather than sittings and portraiture is hard for me.  It is doubly hard to do if I know the person being painted well.

I had a certain photograph of her she’d let me copy.  It was of her, taken in one of those touristy photography setup shops where they shoot you wearing costumes, cowboys, turn of the century stuff… you’ve seen them. 

She had donned a Scarlett O’Hara/Southern Belle outfit…. hoop skirt, parasol, hat and gloves…  Her face in the shot fascinated me.   It was almost angelic, a sweet serene expression with a vixenish hint of a smile…  But I just couldn’t catch what I saw using watercolor.  I tried using that face as a model several times with no success.  I had turned out enough failures trying to paint her that she may well have thought I’d never succeed making a painting of her.  I was beginning to think the same thing.

               …meanwhile, back on The Titanic…

There is a scene in the movie where Kate Winslet’s character is laying pleasantly naked on a couch and De Caprio’s character is doing a charcoal sketch of her.   This scene and the resulting sketch got a lot of attention in the movie.  It also gave me an idea.

I didn’t have Photoshop but using my scanner and some voodoo, I got that photo of her face maneuvered onto the movie sketch.  I then ‘cheated’ and used an opaque projector so I could trace the result  to help me block it out on a piece of 20 x 30 illustration board.

I worked on that for about a week but I bobbled the “blue jewel”, a central thread of the picture and the movie both…  I had no idea how to make blue jewels.  I’d never tried to make any color jewel, let alone a blue one.   I reluctantly set the work aside.  I even thought of throwing it away but the face was intriguing even unfinished.  All  I’d had done on it were the eyes and the lips and a vague outline.    You can ruin a watercolor by overworking it so I stopped work on it but kept it around.  I figured I might at least save the face as a painting on its own merit.

  On a whim I used a Polaroid camera and snapped a shot of the unfinished painting.  I scanned that and e.mailed it to my friend  to show her what I had done.

                      Well, that got her attention and she begged me to try to finish it.

Watercolor is touchy folks, particularly if you’re trying to do repair work on it.  You can’t just daub over it like you can with acrylics and oils.  You run a very real risk of losing your paper to agressive wetting as you try to draw off some colors and otherwise try to fix things.  I started with the Blue Jewel because if I couldn’t get a sense of that then the rest would not work.  Some fixes work.  Some do not.

How did it come out? 

Honestly, it has problems because of my lack of training, but my friend was thrilled.
She was pleased so if she was pleased I was pleased…

I somehow had managed to rescue the blue jewel and in so doing salvaged the painting.    I don’t think I could do that photo of her face any better justice than what I have here.  My friend has a bit more endowment going for her than Kate Winslet had but that just requires extra attention.  One does what one must do…

             I’ve known her a long time, now that I think of it…  

                 which has nothing to do with the painting. 

                            Or the story…

                 the painting is signed, as they all are…

Paper Dolls by Vann…

     Somewhere lives a computer programmer who should be drawn and quartered.

     He/she would be the person who came up with the idea that the already frustrating task of making a phone call to a company and having to go through endless selections, menus and button pressing is lightened by creating something called “voice recognition.”

     In case you don’t use a phone much or are otherwise secluded from the real world ‘voice recognition’ is a computerized answering program that is put in place by companies that have a horror of actually hiring someone to talk to their customers. 

     In the past this was done by requiring you to press an infinite number of telephone keys as instructed by an electronic voice.  A voice that is the sister of the briskly efficient but cold voiced operator with the odd, screeing, four note Bosun Pipe whistle that tells you that ‘you have reached a number that is disconnected or no longer in service.’ 

     This button pushing was never intended to be a convenience.  This was a sadistic maze that resembles the old, old, joke about the house of ill repute that effectively channels the customer through a series of doors only to exit to a “You’ve been screwed” sign, never seeing a girl during the whole process.  The process is intended to make you do anything but talk to a live person.

    This cruelty was not enough.  No.  Now they have invented an Iron Maiden they call “voice recognition” which is a computer program that, according to the lying thieves that sell it, can understand the spoken word in Amerenglish. 

     They have created two voices to inhabit this thing.  The male voice’s lines have been read by a guy who must be named “Bob”.  He has that irritating high pressure announcer-salesman’s voice like the one that freverently urges you to “use your credit card” on all the TV infomercials.  Him you just want to murder and would if you could.  No court in the land would convict you

    The other voice of course, is female.  It is this voice we shall discuss.  It really doesn’t matter since they both use the same lines.
    The female voice sounds so bright and happy you suspect she has a scrip writing doctor who is an amphetamine specialist.  I, for one, cannot visualize a human face to this female voice.  What I see are the brown haired pretty women rendered by commercial artists for appliance ads.  She’s a lot friendlier sounding than the telephone company’s woman who icily tells you you dialed the wrong number but don’t let that fool you.  The end result is still the same with a demonic difference.

     Before, when you had to deal with the button pushing, your coworkers knew what was happening because they could hear you muttering darkly to yourself while you hammered the suggested button code.

     But with the new ‘voice recognition’ things are a little different.
    Now you have Sally Sunshine telling you to “Say what your problem is.” and gives you several examples you could use except none are remotely similar to what it is you’re calling about.

     So you gather your thoughts and part of you wonders whether to talk in a normal tone or perhaps talk a little more loudly…you don’t know if it has its hearing aid turned up.  And while you’re getting ready to speak she gets impatient.  She’s sunny and cheerful about it but still she says “I didn’t quite get that.” or some such so you know right then you’re dealing with a pushy, hearing impaired robot that is possibly suffering from dementia.  As a matter of fact, “I didn’t quite get that.” is its favorite thing to say. 

    Even if you didn’t say anything.
      Great.

     But you soldier on…

    On simple things like “Yes” or “No” she performs brilliantly.  But god help you if she needs a number.  That will result in a back and forth comedy of errors which she may or may not ever get right.

     Argh! 

     In frustration you hang up.

     Big mistake!

     You realize, too late, that you now have to go through the whole process all over again to transact your business but duty calls and you go back to the firing line.  Then some people are like me and we another problem. 
     Not all of us have the elocution of a Shakespearian actor.  Some of us have diction of startling clarity but truth be told, most of us do not have this clarity and some of us even have small impediments, lisps, etc.  This is my lot in life…
     So you have to deal with getting her to understand simple commands and responses to her questions and all she hears are Mondegreens…
        From time to time you realize that you’re not talking to a real person but to a machine…wait, it’s not even a machine.  It’s a chip.  A mini computer and you can’t help feeling like the idiot you appear to be…your co-workers are snickering under their breaths because you are trying to reason vocally with a gadget and the gadget doesn’t care in spite of its happy-puppy tone. The gadget won’t let us pass unless we tickle its electronic sensors with the right sound waves to trigger the circuit.

            You have no choice.

         Sally Sunshine, at any time, might pause for a commercial and ecstatically ask you if you went to their website at www/itainthereeither.com. to try to resolve your problem.  In fact she does this often as if you’re actuallly going to stop, now that you have invested all this time, and go to a website.  To “enter” that website they will require you to sign in by sacrificing your e.mail address so they can spam you endlessly.  And fifteen or twenty mouse clicks later they’re telling you they can’t solve your problem at the website. 

You know what it does then…

Sure you do.

The website advises you to call their Kustomer Kiss customer service number which will be identical to the number you called to get where you are now…

         If you thought you could have fixed it at a website you would have gladly gone there to avoid this insanity. 
            You curse the cyber-woman most foully and she doesn’t flinch.  She asks you to repeat yourself because “I didn’t quite get that.”
           
    There is, however, a solution.

        If you keep punching ‘0’ often enough and desparately enough  it will wait until you are about to smash the receiver on the edge of your desk and rip the speaker from your speakerphone.

It will then, grudgingly, put you on hold and sullenly punish you by playing the latest CD they found in the three for a dollar crate at a garage sale, usually badly played classical music containing too many violins..

            After twenty minutes of this it passes you to a human….        

                                                    …in Bangladesh…

A little after 4:30… Time to go home.
I go to the elevator and, as is always prudent that time of day, step back a bit. Folks going down often mistake my stop on the second floor for the ground floor and sometimes rush out and nearly trampling me.

Sure enough, there came an Arrowhead water guy barreling out of the elevator. Slender black guy, about forty I’d say. We have a chuckle over this bit of business as we get situated on the elevator. He has a full dolly-truck full of empty five gallon jugs and one in his free hand partially full. He’s been schlepping these things all day.

We chat amiably on the way down, end of the workday stuff and when the doors open I get off first and start down the (rather long) hallway to the side door.

I hear him behind me. I have about a thirty foot start on him but I remember he has his hands full so I hold the door open and wait for him to come out.

“Nobody’s ever done that for me.” he says.
I think he’s kidding and just shrug at him. “Where’s your car? I’m gonna give you a case.”
I said, “Naah… for that? Naah, never mind.” I never buy it. I just never developed a taste for bottled water.

“NoSir! No one has ever done that for me! You get in your car and drive it here and I’ll throw a case in your back seat.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“You did a good deed for me so I’m gonna do one for you!”

“No, nev’ mind. My car’s way in the back.”

“Well then, what suite are you in? I’ll drop a case off.”

“Well,” seeing he wasn’t going to let it go, “How about a six pack?”
“A six pack!?”
He goes to his truck and takes a case off his front seat that had one bottle removed from it.

I could see to deny him would have hurt his feelings so I took it. He was very solicitous (seeing my walking stick) asking me if I felt I could carry it.

I thanked him and gained an almost full case of bottled water, something I would never dream of spending money on, to enjoy…

…just for being civil…

…a true story stranger than fiction…

I’m sure you/ve heard of “dowsing” or “water witching” a method of finding water in rural areas using brass rods or forked sticks. The “dowser” holds his locator of choice and follows what seems to be an unnatural directional pull of their locator. People close to the land believe in such things and the educated scientist types scoff saying it is all hokum.
What I am about to relate to you is absolutely true. An impossibility. But it happened nonetheless…

It was in 1957, when I was a junior in high school, when my dad came home with a tale about a ‘Water Witch’ or Dowser. His boss at work had told him about this old man named Kon Muttrick who lived in a town called New Era who went beyond the Forked Stick method of seeking water that most so-called ‘Water Witches” used.
I told my high school buddy Harley about this guy and we found it difficult to believe that such an event could happen as described. We decided to make a Day of it and go up and see this guy….tell him we were making a science project and report on the Dowsing Phenomenon.

So, off we went. Drove to New Era, Michigan, where the guy lived and inquired (as we were told to ) at a certain small store for directions to Kon Muttrick’s farm.

We pulled into the barnyard and, sure enough, here was this old man, probably in his sixties…bib overalls…gray hair…had that look of The Land that a lifetime of hard farming brings onto a man. He looked a lot like Walter Brennan’s character “Amos McCoy” featured on an old TV program The Real McCoys.

We told him our fabrication and asked him for a demonstration of his abilities.

“Well, y’know…I know where all th’ water is on my proppity is…won’t be a real test.” he said.

“Yes, sir, we know, but our teacher says that dowsing can’t be done and we hear you have a most unusual way to do it.”

What I relate to you now is quite impossible. But I saw it with my own eyes, in broad daylight…

He gave Harley a pocketknife and told him to cut a Sassafras sapling that was about 12 feet high, about 1.5” thick at the base.. Sassafras saplings grow like weeds in western MI and tend to grow really straight. After cutting this treeling very close to the ground he was instructed to trim all the branches off it except for “the brush” at the top. It was at this point about ten feet long I’d say.

The old man then waved in the general direction that he said an underground stream ran and took the trimmed sapling in his hands. He held it vertically with the ‘brush’ touching the ground. Without any motion from his hands, the cut, sky-pointing. tip started gently whipping back and forth. but in an odd, one sided, back and forth.
When he went in the direction he’d said the water was, the whipping action started to resemble a fishing pole with a fish on it, i.e. it was starting to flex one sidedly in the direction of where he’d said the water lay…. move in the opposite direction and the bending would lessen. As he moved toward where the one sided flexing indicated it became a real chore for him to hold the sapling as it bucked.

“Now, watch this, boys” he said and he moved in the direction of the alleged underground stream and the sapling bent over into a ‘U’ until it audibly snapped above his hands!!!

We, of course, were dumbfounded.

Oh, to have had a video camera in those days.

Old Kon claimed he could tell which sparkplug was mis-firing on a car by touching them with his left hand. If he were to touch them with his right hand he’d get shocked like anyone else.

He claimed it was a Gift from God and would not charge you if you wanted him to ‘witch’ your land for water. He did require that you, as an act of faith, have a drilling rig hired and ready on the site. His hardest find he said was a place so barren that the only live wood (a necessity) he could find was a small live bit of brush less than a foot long. It worked, however.

Curiously bigoted for one claiming a ‘gift from God’ he “wouldn’t work it fer niggers or injuns…”

Strange, strange man…

I was never much of one for riding horses…

Oh, of course I’d had my young cowboy fantasies and the daydream of being the only kid in school to ride his horse to classes but as time went on the closest I got to that was when my folks would take us to a riding stable.

Some folks would argue that riding stable horses are not very good examples of good rides but that’s pretty much what you were stuck with if you were not in true horse country.

When you ride a horse with no instruction you find that it is not nearly as comfortable as it seems in the movies.  They manage to get your up and downness while seated way out of synch and your butt takes a beating.

As I got older I noticed that horseback riding was favored more by women than it was by men.  Generally, if a man rode a horse there was a paycheck connected to it.  He was working.  Women, on the other hand, like to ride them ‘for pleasure’ and I’ll not delve into exactly what that might mean but suffice to say, most non working horses are owned by women than by men.  I don’t have any real statistics for this but it seems to be the case from my own observation.

Other things I have observed is that like all mammals, the horse has distinct ways of showing displeasure with humans including:

Ignoring rider’s urgings and commands

Biting

Kicking

Bucking or otherwise unhorsing its passenger.

I also made the observation that these animals weigh half a ton or more.

Every time I envision  riding a horse my weird imagination plays a scenario of the one horse who has figured that he will not conform.  Hay and a barn are not worth the loss of freedom and the chore of being made to do whatever the pompous, fragile, weak humans want it to do.

One day I was standing near a horse and marveling at it’s beauty.  It is truly a lovely animal and you could appreciate the name the Sioux gave it “Shunka Wakan” the ‘mystery dog’.  Domesticated or wild, they are a beautiful creature and it’s young rank as among the cutest and most entertaining animal babies to watch.

This particular horse saw me looking at him and he said, “Hey mister!”

“You can talk? I asked, “How is it you can talk?”

“I was an understudy for Mr. Ed.  How else do you think?”

“That’s amazing!” said I.
“Yeah, well, that’s all water out of the trough now.  But lissen… I have a message for you.”

“For me?  What is it?”
He took a few mouthfuls of grass while he got his phrasing in order.

“Well, first, the information isn’t free.  I’ll have an apple or carrot from you to tell it to you.”

So it was a trudge to my car to get the bribe, an apple which he lipped, chewed and swallowed before he continued.  He was so eager and quick at this he caused me to count my fingers.

“You’re on our hit list.”

“Hit list?  Horses have a hit list?  What kind of hit list could horses possibly have?”

“The word is out on you.  We have our own form of e.mail and internet and you’re on the top ten list of potential riders we deem incompetent and an embarrassment.”

“I never heard of such a thing.”

“Of course not” he said, “You don’t have log-in rights or the password but I’m here to tell you that you’re on the list”

“But what does it mean? I asked.

“It means that sooner or later you’re going to try to ride one of us horses that are in the network.”

“You mean not all of the horses are on the network?

“Not yet,” he said, “Not all of them are up to speed.  Those you don’t need to worry about.  If you’re a gambling man you can probably ride one of them and get away with it.”

“What happens if I try to ride one of you that’s on the network?

He took another mouthful of grass.

Whoever you try to ride will do the full load on you.  You will be bitten, thrown and stomped.”

“What?  For just trying to ride one of you?  Why me?

“Well, firstly, it’s strictly business so don’t get your quirt in a knot about it.  This isn’t about you.  But we are going to put a stop to all this horse riding foolishness once and for all starting with you and anyone else on the list…”

So there you have it.  That’s why I won’t ride a horse.  I might pick one that has access to the list and I’d be a fool to risk the consequences.

You may feel this narrative lacks credibility and you may be right.

That’s your prerogative…