Grand Forks North Dakota

I wish I could say that I took the picture above but I didn’t. It was sent to me from my good friend Ignatius O’Hara a few days back. Truth is I’ve never seen the Aurora Borealis anywhere near Tacoma. Once, years ago when I was seven and living in Grand Forks, North Dakota, I remember my dad gathering me up out of bed and carrying me outside to look at it. It looked like green dancing smoke.

Out in the snow of our front yard, wrapped up in my blanket and my dad’s arms, I kept thinking that I was missing something. That there was something I wasn’t seeing. At seven most of the world is still a wide-open mystery, so green smoke dancing in the sky didn’t impress me much I guess. I think at the time I was more interested in my dad’s reaction to the whole thing. The fact that he dragged me out of bed, carried me down the stairs and out into the night. I kept looking at the sky, at the shifting smoke and thought it looked as if the Milky Way was being blown by the wind. I know for a fact I never saw a red color like the one above. That would’ve impressed me.

Across the street from the duplex where we lived, was a vacant lot where the snowplows and trucks left mountains of cleared snow. Being that Grand Forks is as flat as a table it became a gathering place for all the kids in the neighborhood. We’d kick footholds into the side of the hill and drag whatever we were using for a sled up to the top. My family had a four-person toboggan we bought at the Salvation Army thrift store but it was made out of wood and far too heavy for a seven year old to haul up to the top of our block’s Mount Everest. The Piggly Wiggly at the end of our street would sell these sheets of plastic with a rope on one end. For right around your weekly allowance, you could wrap them up into a tube and carry them all the way to the top under your arm. Some kids had the hard molded plastic seats with brake handles on either side; others had those circular metal disks. The really poor kids just used cardboard boxes, or waited at the bottom to ask if they could take a turn on yours. The major problem with the thin plastic sheets was you could feel every bump on the way down. By the end of the day your ass was so bruised and sore you could hardly sit down. The other problem is they didn’t last much more than one solid day of sledding. The first thing to go would be the rope. By the end of the day you’d be hanging on to whatever piece of plastic that would cover your butt.

The sleds would quickly carve runs into the hill. Like a miniature ski resort, you would have both bunny slopes for the little kids gently winding their way to the bottom and black-run-slopes-of-death for those of us trying to impress the twelve-year-olds. We would take our little plastic sheets over the dangerous cliffs of snow in the hope that in our bravery they might say we were crazy and by that gain their respect.

That night, from the vantage point of my father’s arms I could see that some of the older kids were still on the hill. Our street had one lone streetlight down at the end of the block by the cornfield and in its dim yellow light the boys looked like laughing shadow puppets. We stood there, heads up towards the sky, watching our breath in the night. Me wrapped up in my blankets with my bear under my arm and he, shivering in his pajamas and rubber boots, explaining to a seven-year-old the wonders of the universe.

Liberty Guitars

Right above these words is a picture of my new guitar. The first brand new guitar I’ve had it quite some time so I’m pretty excited, as you can probably guess. It’s called a Dobro guitar made by a company in New Smyrna Beach, Florida called Liberty Guitars. (http://www.libertyguitars.com/) I called and spoke to the owner, Bill Blue, who said that they’re all hand built and they can set them up any way I’d like, so just let him know…

Course, he also told me about catching a cold at some hippy wedding at Jimmy Buffets place in North Carolina the weekend before. I guess his long time road manager’s son was getting married and Jimmy offered up his place for the weekend. Bill and this manager fellow go way back I guess and he’s known the boy near his whole life so he went. Wound up way deep in the woods in a little clearing, getting soaked in the rain, and decided to spend the rest of the day in his wet duds instead of driving all the way back to the motel. At any rate, Bill was no stranger to talking on the phone I quickly discovered, but he had a nice easy style that I seemed to agree with and after talking to Sweetie about the whole thing, called him back and ordered the guitar above.

How did I get Sweetie to agree to this you might ask? Easier than you might think really… A few months ago in a pre-menstrual cleaning frenzy she knocked over one of my guitars and in a freak accident broke the neck off of the body. It was a guitar that I didn’t play all that much anyway but Sweetie thought it should get replaced and who was I to argue. So when I found this guitar she just couldn’t say no.

Bill said it would take three weeks to build the thing and he preferred sending it Priority Mail through the USPS. I said that sounded good to me so I grabbed a good book and tried not to think about it all that much. Three weeks later he emailed me and said the guitar was in the mail and I should get it in a few days. That was on a Wednesday. I’m thinking that if all goes well I’ll be getting it on Saturday. The days crawl by and on Saturday I find myself sitting by the window, drinking coffee and waiting for Gerry, our post lady to arrive. We get no mail.

Monday I’m back at work but decide to rush home for lunch cause that’s when the mail gets delivered usually, but once again I get let down. No guitar. Well by my calculations that’s four days and I should have gotten my guitar by now, but I decide to wait one more day before calling Bill. Tuesday I call Sweetie at home but she says that Gerry still hasn’t seen it. I call Bill and he says the mail is really slow due to the whole Anthrax thing and to give it another day or two.

Finally, one whole week later I see Gerry trying to haul this big old box out of the back of her truck. She’s got a bad back to I ran out to give her a hand and sure enough it’s my new guitar!

If any of you who read this are in the market for a nice, inexpensive, Dobro guitar, give Bill Blue a call. It plays like a dream and I couldn’t be happier... Itellyouwhat.