i was a pre-teen when i first heard the man singing and playing. Twelve. i was twelve, deep into the giddiness of testosterone driven faux coolness, or in other words, being different from all about me, or at least i thought so. In that pubescent innocence, i wallowed in the new thing called Rock ‘n Roll.

Oh, there were wonderful things that took me away, made me a hero, made me a lover (without a real good handle on what that meant), let me suffer in my forlorn abjectness of rejection i assumed from beautiful young girls. It was Rock ‘n Roll. Ray Peterson sang a bubblegum version of “Corrina, Corrina.” Marty Robbins sang “A White Sport Coat.” Carl Perkins sang “Blue Suede Shoes.” Sonny James sang “Young Love.” The Coasters sang “Searchin'” and “Young Blood” long before “Poison Ivy” and “Charlie Brown,” but after “Idol with the Golden Head,” which remains one of my all time favorites.

And a long time before earbuds and cassette players and iPods and Smart Phones and iTunes,  i would sing those songs with gusto while mowing the two acres of yard across the street, thinking no one could hear me above the roar of the two-cycle power mower.

Then, i (actually i think it was for all three of us: Martha, Joe, and me, but i was oldest and i claimed it as mine) bought or more likely was given a “portable” 45 RPM record player, and i would take my hard-earned weekly mowing money from the Cowan’s and the Frame’s and head to College Street between East Main and East Gay to Simm’s Magnavox store with the forty-fives in wooden cases and buy as many as i could afford, take them home, play them on that self-same portable record player.

Considering my pre-occupation with Rock ‘n Roll, or as much pre-occupation as a pre-teen pubescent boy in a little town flat smack in the middle of Tennessee could have while he was dreaming of becoming a football, basketball, and baseball star,  i am sure i must have heard Chuck Berry’s earliest recorded singles (We called them singles, which in retrospect seems a bit odd since singles had a “B” side). But they didn’t seem to stick with me, or rather they were blown away from my consideration by one song.

1957.  “School Days.” i was mowing and singing in the summer. i wished my world to be Chuck Berry’s “School Days.” Mowing became a solid repetition of singing the song over and over and over…

The man was a genius. He touched an unexplored corner of our souls. He mixed country, rock, and rhythm and blues. He crossed lines. Unfortunately, one story has it one of those lines was a state line while escorting a minor young woman across some of those state lines and those twenty months in prison changed him those who knew him say.

Later, i admired him for his bravado. i am not wise enough to know what really happened back in that Mann Act period, but them white men and that white judge sending him off to prison makes me a little bit suspicious about what really happened. It annoys me the truth, justice, has been fogged by pretentious morals and prejudice.

But the man kept playing, and i loved every song.

He came from music. St. Louis. According to Wikipedia his influences were Nat King Cole, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Louis Jordan, Jimmie Rodgers, and Bill Monroe. Now that’s a background.

Oh yes, i sang “Sweet Little Sixteen” behind that roaring two-cycle. But “School Days” was my anthem.

It never happened, of course. It was on its way during my junior high years, two of the best years of my life while i kept singing “Up in the morning, and off to school; the teacher is teaching the ‘Golden Rule.'” But my folks thought i should have the advantage of the military school up the hill called Castle Heights. They were right. A military prep school doesn’t quite mix with Chuck Berry’s “School Days.”

But i won’t forget the feeling of jubilation while thinking of the glory of my (never happening) “School Days” when:

As soon as three o’clock rolls around
And you lay your burden down
Throw down your books and outta your seat
You go down the hallway and into the street
Up to the corner and ’round the bend
Right to the juke joint you go in

And i won’t forget Chuck Berry.

Long live Rock ‘n Roll.

i didn’t really miss it yesterday.

i just had too much going on to pay my proper respects, so i delayed it until today, which i thought was appropriate because it was St. Patrick’s Day.

i think he would like that.

Yesterday, Ray Boggs (what a lovely Irish name) would have been ninety-nine years old.

Yes, i married his daughter. He seemed to be pleased, but i wasn’t really sure about what he thought about me. After all, i was a sailor boy. His daughter was…no, is a beautiful, sophisticated young woman. And i was from the South.

But soon, Ray and i had our own thing, not just in-laws, but best friends. We did projects together, we played golf together. We watched movies and sports together. We argued about the best route to get where we were going. And yes, to be perfectly honest, we drank a lot together.

Ray loved to play golf with my friends and me, especially when it was at Miramar, Admiral Baker, or North Island. This was not because of the golf, mind you. This was because he would go early and have SOS (okay, who besides military folks, especially Navy folks, knows what SOS is?) for two dollars.

Watching Ray and my father work together was something magical. Ray was the consummate engineer. Everything was planned out, drawn on engineering plans, all preparations complete, including tools, supplies, safety checks, etc., etc. My father shot from the hip, starting a project with an idea in mind, adjusting when in mid-stream he realized his original idea needed to be modified to work better, finding a tool he didn’t have was needed and either stopping to go get the tool or, more likely, figuring out a way to get it done without the tool. The two of them re-tiled the kitchen floor in our first house. Ray would present his plan, and Jimmy Jewell would point out something in the plan wouldn’t work. They would argue…hmmm, discuss the problem, go out to the garage refrigerator and get a beer, stand there and talk for a half-hour, seldom about the work, and go back in and resume the tile job. Within an hour, they were back in the garage.

The tile job was perfect.

i loved the way Ray loved his daughters, his son, and his family. i loved the way they loved him.

i have hundreds of stories about Ray. i love them all. All of them display how much he enjoyed life.

Yet the thing i always remember about the French-Irish, Boston-born, Wyoming-raised, self-made man, was his humming. Yes, humming. You see, a number of times Maureen and i would go out for the evening, we would take Sarah when she was between one and two over to Taft Street in Lemon Grove to the house of which Ray designed, engineered, oversaw the building of, and then did most of the interior work on himself.

i still remember him sitting with Sarah on his shoulder, her cheek next to his. Ray would hum in that gravely voice, low and rhythmic. i could almost hear the vibration, tremolo i think is the word. Sarah would go to sleep and Ray would rock gently in his chair, continuing to hum.

i miss him, but i always have the memory of Ray and Sarah.

Somehow, it’s appropriate Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s album was titled “Déjà Vu.”

There is one track on the album that keeps playing over and over again in my mind. “Our House” just made me want to spend my life in our house. The album came out in 1970. i was plying my way between Sasebo, Japan; Pusan, Korea; and Qui Nhon, Nha Trang, and Cam Rahn Bay, Vietnam on a USNS ship (first the USNS Geiger and then the USNS Upshur) carrying Korean troops back and forth between RVN and ROK.

“Our House” gave me visions of the way things ought to be: “Our house is a very, very, very fine house with two cats in the yard, / Life used to be so hard, / Now everything is easy ’cause of you and our— / La, la, la.”

I imagined “our house” to be shared with a number of women with whom i had shared special times…no, whom i loved. Then, i met someone and it all seemed to fall into place…for a while. Maybe the problem was we only had one cat in our yard until the very end, nor a fireplace until it was too late.

So then, i led a good life of a single Navy officer. i was a rambling man, saw a whole bunch of the world, met a lot of women, worked hard, played hard, and didn’t have any cats, or dogs for that matter. i still longed for “Our house is a very, very, very fine house with two cats in the yard.”

Then with stories enough to make you think it was fate, i met Maureen and we married. It has been good.

This afternoon, we went through the drudgery, the uncertainty, the pain-in-the-ass of meeting with our tax accountant. It turned out well in spite of our concerns as it always does.

We got home, and i, having been crunching paperwork in distress since all of yesterday and since O-dark thirty this morning, took a nap. i had to clean up the paperwork and set it up for next year’s ordeal, and i set down to find Bill Cook’s post of Howlin’ Wolf. Took me back a long, long way.

Then i went out front to move the trash cans to the side yard after pickup. There in the front yard were Oscar and Luna, “two cats in the yard.”

Oscar and Luna are not really our cats. They belong to Luis and Regina Gonzalez and their two daughters. But they have become our “two cats in the yard.” In this photo, they are surveying their realm from the top of the berm in our front yard. i disturbed them, but not much. Oscar and Luna spend a lot of time in our courtyard. They like to get up on the outdoor furniture to look in the window and watch in amazement at the luxuriating of our indoor cats. Sometimes they hiss.

This is Dakota. Dakota was the cat Sarah rescued when she was a sophomore at San Diego State. Because of the college area where Sarah lived, Dakota became an indoor cat. She is the best suited cat for an indoor cat i’ve ever known. Sarah left for Austin. She planned to take Dakota with her so she got Maureen another cat to have when she left. Maureen wanted to name him “BW” or some other innocuous name, so Sarah came up with “Bruce Willis.” Perfect. Not to be denied, Maureen calls him “Brucie.”

Bruce has not yet decided if he likes being an indoor cat, but he’s getting used to it. He leaps up on the sill and hisses back at Oscar and Luca when they peer in the window. None of them really have determined what is going on and why two are in and two or out. It doesn’t seem to bother them very much.

As i walked back in contemplating a long night of beating the system and setting up tax recording for the next year, which will never be quite as good as i envisioned, i remembered the boys on the couch on the porch in the album cover photo.

“Hmm,” i thought, “i got two cats in the yard and two in the house. Is that doubling down?” And i remembered the lyrics…okay, okay, i remembered most of the lyrics but had to look them up to be sure:

I’ll light the fire, you place the flowers in the vase that you bought today.
Staring at the fire for hours and hours while I listen to you
Play your love songs all night long for me, only for me.Come to me now and rest your head for just five minutes, everything is good.
Such a cozy room,
The windows are illuminated by the evening sunshine through them,
Fiery gems for you, only for you.Our house is a very, very, very fine house with two cats in the yard,
Life used to be so hard,
Now everything is easy ’cause of you and our—La, la, la

It is now near bedtime. Maureen just came in and gave me a kiss before she headed for the bedroom. We ate supper as usual on dinner trays in family room. Tonight,  unlike the colder evenings of several weeks ago, we ate without my lighting a fire, but she did place some flowers in the vase. She always has flowers to place in the vase.  i will follow her soon and hold her before we both go to sleep.

And if you didn’t know, the guy with the bass behind Howlin’ Wolf was another one of the great blues men, Willie Dixon. And just in case you forgot how he played the bass since he was one of the great blues men singing, here he is.

Wow, just wow.

Bill Cook, a Lebanon neighbor and car restorer magnifico, shared a video on Facebook. These were my thoughts as Maureen and i watched and listened:

Thank you, Bill Cook.

Before there was sparkle and glitter, explosions, smoke, backup dancers galore, mosh pits, earbuds, sound systems that can blow you out of the venue, and fans trying to take over the show, there was this thing called the blues, and the musicians played their harp and bass and harmonica like they were singing to their women, and it was deep, suggestive, and enchantingly beautiful at the same time, and everyone closed their eyes and listened to the blues men and women singing their hearts out to the one they loved, and the blues folks and the listeners swayed in time, and thumped their feet against the floor and then rocked back and forth and quietly mumbled in time “ahh,” and “yeah,” and they believed; they all believed in the blues, perhaps because they had contracted the blues and understood; and one of the greatest of all the bluesmen was Howlin’ Wolf.

It was good to see you again, Mr. Wolf, and listen to the blues the way blues was meant to be, and sway back and forth and, even at my age, believe in the blues, perhaps even more so than before. It is gone now, at least the way it was born. But i remember. Oh yes, i remember.

Thank  you, Bill Cook.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09j6vMdKi3E