Day: March 6, 2018

As I was fishing the river earlier this week, It woke some old memories. Solitude, serenity, serendipity. I used to stumble upon things as a child that may seem very strange to others, but which in my lone way were calming and beneficial.

I would skim rocks across this same Chattooga river for hours. I think once I got up to eight bounces…imagine that sense of accomplishment! I kept a secret place behind the house on Eighth street where I piled unusual and different rocks. Unless someone found them, which isn’t likely, they are still there piled in a pyramid like group.

We all have our secret eccentricities. And our secrets. I was thinking of one of my deep, dark secrets at my granddaughters band concert the other night. How I had always wanted to be in the band…but could never learn to read music. I remember trying out for band. I was give a clarinet. For a few weeks I simply memorized the tunes and played along. But the squiggles on the pages never made sense, and I was too ashamed to ask for help. I could have gone on and just memorized the songs, but…I just felt out of place. I didn’t belong.

I have gone on and learned to play and sing, to write and even lead choirs…all the time not knowing how to read a note of music. I’ve memorized thousands of songs, hundreds of musicals, millions of notes. I can harmonize with anyone on any song. But if someone showed me “Mary had a little lamb” written out in notes with nothing to identify it..I wouldn’t know what it was.

I wish I had said something back in the eighth grade…maybe I would have enjoyed being in the band..who knows. My knees were bad, so no football either. I simply ended up as a cheerer.

Math was pretty much the same also. I faked And guessed my way through algebra. I liked Geometry though, thanks to a very understanding teacher, Mr. Alexander, who gave me a B based more on my great writing and the ability to produce a fifty page term paper on angles. I can remember to this day his surprise that anyone could turn out that many pages on something so innane.

I’m just weird that way I guess…my talents lend themselves more towards slideshow entertaining than reality sometimes as I realized tonight after my bath as I shaved left handed, and brushed my teeth right handed with nary a nick nor a tooth missed. Guess things could be worse. I write with both hands too.

Ah well, enough of this rambling. I have important sleep to get too.

One of the things I used to enjoy the most when I was eight or nine years old was hitting rocks with a stick. I especially enjoyed this activity when I went to my Grandparent’s house.

Grandpa and Grandma lived on the end of an old dirt road and of course that road was loaded with…rocks! I couldn’t wait to get there on a summer day back in the late 50’s. I’d go down to the road right next to the barn and find me a stick about the length of a baseball bat and make a pile of rocks about the size of a quarter. It didn’t matter that the stick was skinny because I could hit those rocks. I honed my hand/eye coordination with hours of hitting rocks into Uncle Lark’s corn field for hours at a time.

“There goes another Home Run for Mickey Mantle” I would holler out in my head. I could hear ol’ Dizzy and PeeWee Reece calling it out over the center field fence at 410 feet.

Mantle was my earliest baseball idol, and still to this day is my all time favorite. There’s a signed photo of him from his Triple Crown year of 1956 hanging on the wall down the stairwell from where I’m sitting. I wish I had gotten it signed in person, but I never got to meet Mickey.

I’d pick those rocks up and toss them in the air and whack them. I’d whack them and try to knock flying birds out of the air, although I never hit one.

This morning as I was walking down by the river, I picked up a skinny stick and a rock and when I got close to the river I threw it up in the air and swung….I was exhilirated and excited down inside as I heard a loud “crack” and “Mickey Mantle hit another home run” into the depths of the Chattooga river.

I looked around to make sure nobody had seen me, and I walked on….