My Redacted Life: Chapter Five (Cont._4)

After a couple of months on a new job in a new city my social life began to improve. I actually had a date, fixed up by Tom Hodges. It didn’t amount to much. It was a woman with whom I had attended college. She was divorced and had four children. We had a nice time but nothing came of it except for a lingering wonderment on my part on how a couple could make four children before deciding they couldn’t live together.

I guess I had a lot to learn about the new world to which I had returned.

A more lasting event occurred one evening while I was practicing guitar of a Friday evening. I had purchased an old Gibson sunburst from a sailor aboard the Hunley and had become intimate friends with it. As I tried my hand at fingerpicking a tune, I heard lumbering footsteps ascending the stairway. When they turned toward my apartment, I laid the guitar aside and went to the door.

I opened it and there stood a close friend from my college days, a man named George M. Owen. He clutched a six-pack of cold beer in his arms, so I knew he had come with no evil intent in mind. I welcomed him in with enthusiasm and he handed me the beer, a late housewarming gift. I bade him sit, removed two beers, handed him one, and took the rest to the refrigerator.

My oh my, did we have a lot to catch up on. Nearly five years had passed since I saw him last. We both looked that much older and possessed a great deal of information about the lost years. He was working for a local architect and had taken up the banjo. He told me of a group he had joined called The Rackensack Society. It was a bunch of folk music enthusiasts and entertainers that included amateurs, semi-professionals, and even some prominent names like legendary political cartoonist George Fisher.

The group met the first Monday of the month at the Arkansas Art Center and would welcome me with open arms. Me? Aside from family, no one had welcomed me with open arms in years. Was he sure? Yes. Actually, they did, and I stayed close to the group for years, until a work assignment took me away on meeting nights.

That evening, we finished the beer and began swapping tunes on the Gibson. I broke out a bottle of Gallo Sauterne I had been saving, and, in the words of our old and dear friend, songwriter Gary Toler from Texas:

The time it ran so slow,

Cause we had so much to say.

Singing slow and drinking sweet white wine,

We passed the time away.

Friend George had filled in an empty spot in his life. I was no longer alone in the big city. And time, we both felt assured then, would always be a soft loving breeze across our cheeks.

Back then: Gary Toler and I.

Morning Thoughts: January 7, 2018

I guess there at some things in everyone’s life they wish they had taken advantage of once. One of mine had to do with hitchhiking. No, it wasn’t the time I was picked up by three cowboys in Wyoming and invited to go with them to Montana to work on a ranch.

Nah, it wasn’t that exciting. This happened when I was hitchhiking to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, from Fayetteville, to see a college girlfriend who had invited me up for the weekend. It was during the height of what we now call “The Folk Music Revival.”

Someone had let me out in a little crossroads called Goshen, Arkansas. I think it’s a bigger crossroads now, I don’t know. I lost both the girlfriend and the urge to hitchhike about the same time.

I’m standing there when a thin little man comes across the road to pick up his mail. He looked like he could have easily been the father of Popeye the Sailor Man. We chatted. Somehow the topic turned to music and he said that he was a folk-singer and banjo-player. My ears pricked up at this revelation. He further stated that he had entertained many a college student in his home.

Allow a digression. In those days, there was a wonderful woman, Mary Celestia Parler, who taught a course in folk music back in Fayetteville. As part of the course, each student had to find an original folk singer or artist and file a report on them. Her view was that, “if you throw a quarter anywhere out in those hills, you’ll hit a dozen of them.”

As a result, folk singers and musicians were sort of the Boston Mountain versions of rock stars.

Back to the side of the road. This cat, (oops, flashback) uh, dude, uh, man pointed to his house, wrote his name and pone number down, and invited me to come and hear him play sometime. I can’t for the life of me remember his name. I’ll call him “Mr. Capps.”

Of course, I took him up on the offer. A friend had a car, co we rounded up a couple of more aficionados, stoked up on whatever we could afford, and “set-sail” for Goshen of a Saturday night.

Well, this fellow could play the banjo. Further, he played it “clawhammer” style, or perhaps it’s sophisticated cousin, “frailing” style. Don’t quite remember. What I do remember is that the first thing he played was “Bluebells of Scotland,” a popular but not well-known ditty. But on that ancient banjo in the hands of that sparse little man, it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard. Hear a vocal version here.

Mr. Capps become a good friend and frequent guest at our impromptu “hootenannies.” It wasn’t far to Goshen from Fayetteville. Someone would fetch him and we would play until he got tired, which was usually long after the rest of us got tired. He could always revive us, though, with “Bluebells.”

It all ended not badly, but sadly. Mr. Capps began to imbibe a bit as the gatherings progressed, and, as gateway sins can do, his transgressions escalated. After a few unsolicited and unwanted “touchings” on some of the females of our group, he became uninvited and forgotten, by most anyway.

I saw him later at a little event put on by some group. My girlfriend and her friend were on the program. They sang Woody Guthrie’s “I’ve Been Doing Some Hard Traveling,” which was odd in that neither of them, in their matching sweaters and short plaid skirts, possessed any internal knowledge of hard traveling of any sort, save perhaps a long walk to a particular class from their sorority house.

Backstage, though, Mr. Capps professed to remember me and asked why he didn’t see us anymore. I told him we had been too busy studying. I waited for a lightening bolt. When it didn’t come, I asked him to do Bluebells of Scotland for me, which he did.

I never saw him again.

But how I wish I had borrowed a recorder and made one more trip to the land of Goshen. Who knows? By now I may have been able to warm someone’s heart with that simple little song, from that simple little man, in that simple little place, in those much more simple times.

I think about that sometimes when I see these million-dollar extravaganzas on TV.