February 29th, the strangest of all days, the once in only four years day......
The day that Davy Jones died.

My blog has sat, patiently waiting, since late in 2010, untouched in the incredible busyness of a life that seems to grow more complicated with each passing day, and which finds an older, grayer, somehow infinitely tireder me looking back out of the mirror. I'd been planning for several weeks to write a new entry, to blow off the dust and cobwebs of fifteen more months of life, but I never seemed to quite get around to it.

Until today. When I'd heard that Davy Jones had died. My wife, Alison, had shared the news with me as we sat eating dinner on TV trays, like some couple in 1966, me drained dry from a ridiculous day at work, she soft-spoken and almost ethereal in a mood of quiet reflection. She told me that she had cried sitting in her office when she heard the news this afternoon. And with good reason.

Alison, like me, was a shy, introverted kid who found solace in books and old movies and those wonderful, innocent TV shows of the Sixties that we watched on fuzzy UHF stations like old Channel 45 out of Baltimore, in a distant world circa 1973 when we could be citizens of our own little realms via black and white portable television sets and scratchy old 33 rpm albums. And to Alison, the daughter of deaf parents and the elder sibling to a hearing sister, there was no greater world to slip effortlessly into than that of The Monkees.

When we first began to date, one of the most compelling things she shared with me was how much The Monkees had meant to her as a little girl, and how she had felt some kind of kinship with them at a time in her life when friends and sympathetic allies were a scarce commodity. For the little girl in a strangely lonely world, the madcap antics of the crazy boys who sang and seemed to find fun in every facet of life were like an elixir.

I, too watched The Monkees on many a Saturday morning in the early 1970's, when the show was out of production barely five years but seemed somehow to still be fresh. But the seeds had been planted long before then. My mother still recounts how I sat in my high chair in 1967 while my brother played the 45 of I'm A Believer and how I jumped excitedly up and down, singing along as "I'm a Beaver". In my long musical meanderings that have followed, there's still something deeply ingrained about hearing that song at such an incredibly young age. When I hear it today, just as the electric keyboard solo starts in the middle of the song, I'm inevitably pulled back into that vanished time.

But, interestingly enough, it wasn't until many years later that I really understood the full musical impact of The Monkees. It was The Beatles who became my biggest musical influence as a kid, and I grew up listening to the old Capitol Records albums Meet The Beatles and Something New that my older brother, Wayne, had bought when they were newly released, when I was still a year away from being born. As I got older, I bought Magical Mystery Tour and The White Album, and the long-lost Love Songs compilation. And as I struggled to follow in my brother's footsteps learning to play guitar, it was the music of The Beatles I digested with an insatiable craving.

And so, the legitimacy of The Monkees as a huge, defining musical force didn't really register with me until I was in my 20's. The story was well publicized of how the group, assembled expressly for the TV sitcom that bore their name, were initially intended to capitalize on the success of The Beatles in A Hard Day's Night, and that The Monkees didn't even play their own instruments on their debut and sophomore albums. The deeper truth of the story was that Don Kirshner, secured by NBC as the musical producer for the series, ruled their early recording sessions with an iron hand, until, under the rallying cry of Monkee Michael Nesmith, the group petitioned for creative control and handsomely won it.

The first recording following their liberation was an album that is now rightly viewed as a seminal 1960's musical landmark, Headquarters. The first album on which the group played their own instruments and provided original compositions, this 1967 effort carries the unique distinction of being the album that was knocked out of the #1 Billboard chart position by none other than The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper. But The Monkees continued to hold their own unique niche in popular music, due largely in part to the fact that they maintained a powerful live presence touring the US and Canada beginning in Hawaii in December 1966, four months after The Beatles played their last concert together at Candlestick Park. Their live appearances were routinely an hour in length and incorporated rear-projection imagery. They toured throughout '67 and '68, appearing the last time as a foursome in November, 1968 in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.

Peter Tork announced his departure from the group shortly after the conclusion of the fall, '68 tour. Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, and Micky Dolenz soldiered on, refining their sound to incorporate more elements of country (Nesmith), Broadway rock (Jones), and R&B (Dolenz). After a 1969 summer tour backed by Sam and The Goodtimers, Nesmith departed, and the first half of 1970 saw Dolenz and Jones carrying on as a duo before calling it quits. As the 1970's music scene found the four band members struggling to find their independent identities, it was Davy Jones who remained the charming, ever popular teen idol. A few hit singles here and there, a famous appearance on The Brady Bunch, and then little was heard of Jones (or his compatriots) until MTV resurrected the series on it's 20th anniversary in 1986.

But Alison, and millions of other Monkees' fans, never stopped hoping that the prophetic last line of the theme song from their TV show would come true--"we might be coming to your town". Alison had told me, from the earliest days of our relationship, that she wanted with all her heart to meet The Monkees some day, and to let them know how much they had meant to a shy, isolated girl who always found something to smile about when she watched the crazy boys who sang and goofed and somehow made everything all right. And then, in October of 2008, her dream came (partially) true when we got to see Davy Jones live at the Ram's Head Tavern in Annapolis, right around the corner from where we were married. In that small, intimate setting, Davy put on a powerhouse show, and sang all the old songs, and twisted and danced like he was still that 21 year-old kid from ages ago.

When the show ended, Alison and I found ourselves at the end of a seemingly infinite line, mainly late 40-ish women, standing in a frustratingly narrow hallway that ran through the adjacent restaurant, waiting with as much patience as possible to get Davy's autograph. The tavern management had announced that he was not taking photos and the line was herded onward to where he sat inside a small box office, behind a barred window. We finally got there and Alison shook his hand while I slid the booklet from the CD of Headquarters toward him to autograph. His eyes were incredibly youthful and his smile was dripping with all the charm of the lad we'd grown up watching on the series, but he seemed tired and drained. Thirty seconds later we were out in the crisp air of the October evening and ambling down the darkened walks of Annapolis.

But the final, most perfect fruition of Alison's dream occurred in June of 2011. To my absolute amazement, a notice on the Rhino Records website announced the 45th anniversary tour of The Monkees. True to form, Michael Nesmith would not be joining them (he very rarely participated in reunion concerts or tours), but Davy, Peter, and Micky would be appearing with an astonishing set spanning The Monkees' entire career. The closest tour date to our home turned out to be the Hershey Theatre in Hershey, PA, and Alison, my stepson, Jordan, and I made the trek to what I knew was literally a once in a lifetime opportunity. We sat there in the sold out theatre in the sub-lighting before the show, a huge laser projection of The Monkees' guitar logo above the stage.

There sat Peter Tork's banjo on a stand, and Micky Dolenz's drum kit emblazoned with DRUM across the bass head, just as it had appeared during the Circle Sky sequence in the group's psychedelic movie Head. When they finally came onstage, the crowd went wild. Although Mike Nesmith was not in attendance, his spirit infused the musical efforts of his band mates, and an endless montage of stills and filmclips of the group from their prime spilled across a gigantic screen behind them as they ran through their catalog. Not just the hits were represented, but some of their most definitive album work, including epic tracks from Headquarters, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, & Jones, Ltd., and Head.

Their voices were incredible, and they dazzled the crowd with their versatile musicianship as well. Backed by a top-tier band, Dolenz played drums (including a powerful timpani line in Randy Scouse Git), Jones played acoustic guitar, and Tork demonstrated his prowess on electric guitar, banjo, keyboards, and French horn. Throughout, their banter was hilarious and occasionally touching. At one point, Peter Tork pointed out a girl in the audience, no older than 25, with long blond dreadlocks. "A Monkees' fan with dreadlocks," he mused, thoughtfully. "Sometimes life is so full."

And Davy Jones, as ever before, was the show stopper. He danced like a younger version of himself, and even danced with a younger version of himself. While a film clip of the Daddy's Song number was projected behind him showing Davy of 1968 dancing from the movie Head, the Davy of 2011 was dancing live out front, mirroring the moves of his youthful self with unerring accuracy. But the most incredible moment came when Jones launched into his definitive vocal performance from The Monkees--Daydream Believer.

"Our good times start and end, without dollar one to spend, but what else baby do we really need?"

Before we knew it, the concert was over. They came out for an encore, and when they left the stage the very last time, Davy, Micky, and Peter walked off arm in arm, swinging their legs side to side with each extended step, in perfect tribute to the "Monkees walk" shown in the opening montage during the credits of their TV show. Then they were gone, and somehow, so was our childhood.

But The Monkees, and Davy, aren't going anywhere. The series is still as fresh to watch in 2012 as it was when first seen on tiny screens a half century ago. And the music, which means more to me now than ever before, is timeless. I firmly believe that the two pivotal albums of the 1960's are Headquarters and The Beatles' Rubber Soul.

Nobody makes music quite like that anymore.

So much of what I hear today strikes me as either cookie cutter production where everything sounds like everything else, or incredibly dismal and ugly. It's next to impossible to find new music today that has the life and zest of The Monkees' classic tracks. The music was gentle, and young, and fun, and to hear it today is to remember a world when you could imagine that the four fellows really did share a grungy apartment together, and drift from adventure to adventure, always joking and smiling, and always singing that amazing music that spoke of a young generation that, in the group's own words, had something to say. It means the world to me that my 18-year old stepson got to see them in concert with Alison and me, on the last tour they will ever take. Music should always strike emotions in the listener, and always infuse something that plays in the heart after the last notes have faded. The music of Davy Jones and The Monkees will never cease to do that.

What else, baby do we really need?

The long walk that wasn't.......

"There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir, we must rise and follow her...."

I can honestly say that those words have haunted me for most of my life, stuck so deep in my consciousness that I inevitably hear them play in my mind each autumn, just as western Maryland starts to bedeck herself in the astonishing tapestry that so uniquely defines the falling of the year. Interestingly, I first read them at the age of six or seven when looking through an old issue of the 1960's children's magazine Jack and Jill. The magazine had belonged to my brother, Wayne, when he was little, and the issue was from October 1965, the year I was born. In the middle of the magazine was a calendar that spilled across two pages. The dates themselves were on the lower half, with interesting, fall-flavored drawings of squirrels hiding acorns and fieldmice climbing up pumpkins, and assorted comments about noteworthy dates printed as if in the hand of some schoolkid. The top page was what got me, though, a colorful drawing of a stylized nighttime vista--an old fashioned, freshly harvested cornfield, with corn shocks (remember those?) stationed pell-mell, a harvest moon beaming in a star-speckled sky. In the foreground, luxuriously reclining on a fallen log, a brown bear sat cooking his supper over an open fire. He was dressed as a hobo, with a tattered, tweedy jacket, pants with patches on the knees, and a crumpled old hat that looked like something Red Skelton might have used sixty years ago for one of his personas. The bear was contentedly holding a stick over a small, crackling fire, patiently roasting a delightfully old-timey hot dog--the stereotypical kind curved almost like a banana, the casing twisted on each end. Beneath the picture was the banner OCTOBER 1965.

As a kid, there was something about that picture that profoundly lodged itself in my brain, and the 'There is something in October...." phrase was the annual caption that came back to me each fall, speaking to some hidden, complicated part of me. The verse is actually from the ancient poem A Vagabond Song, by William Bliss Carman. It ends with the line 'she calls and calls each vagabond by name', which speaks to me with a depth and power comparable to the opening words. A lifetime has passed since I first saw that calendar from my birth year, but each fall I find myself lulled into that wistful, searching mindset, that old familiar restlessness, the unheard clarion call that resonates in its absolute silence to stir me from some weighing slumber, suddenly alert to the bite of cool, fall air and the crisp scrape of fallen leaves....

This year was no exception, and again I felt the old, persistent tug. And, as I have in so many days gone by, I planned to find an outlet for that autumnal wanderlust walking down a very particular path, in very special company. Having been born and bred in Washington County, Maryland, I, like a myriad of others before me, have been a spectator throughout my span of years to an unusual procession which graces Hagerstown at the end of each October--the Mummer's Parade. Sponsored by the Alsatia Club, a local community organization, the 86 year-old parade is such a component of life in Hagerstown, attending it is almost autonomic. Younger generations might be less enamored with it, but to anybody who grew up in Washington County from the 40's through the 90's, the whole event is so drenched in nostalgia that you can't even describe it. As for mummers -- average joe's who dressed in homemade costumes and once formed a sizable contingent of the parade -- they're still there, although in vastly-diminished numbers. For years, the main elements have been the marching bands from every local middle and high school, fire, police, and rescue vehicles with lights flashing, local queens and princesses of clubs and schools being chauffeured in gorgeous antique automobiles, the Ali Ghan Shriners driving like kamikazes on go carts and miniature motorcycles at breakneck speed in intricate routes, and a score of elaborate floats for just about every civic and community organization. The parade assembles at Long Meadow shopping center, then meanders in a staggered loading of units from both Oak Hill Boulevard and Potomac Avenue, converging into the main route of Potomac Street. The march continues straight through downtown Hagerstown and finally concludes beyond the old Bester School in the south end....

In the 70's, there used to be even more bands, many of them from the Baltimore area. I always remember Johnnycake Middle School because of the unusual name, plus a plethora of others, much larger in membership than the Washington County groups. Over the years, the parade has been hosted by a vast array of Grand Marshals, one year even under the leadership of members of the 101st Airborne of Band of Brothers fame. All in all, in addition to the novelty of it being a nighttime parade, probably the most amazing element is that, seemingly, all of Hagerstown's population spills out onto the streets. The attendance fluctuates based on weather, and 'perfect parade weather' is definitely a subjective thing. Some people prefer those odd years when it's 70 degrees and feels more like late spring, but, especially to those of us who first experienced the parade in the 60's and 70's, when falls somehow seemed colder, the ideal clime is 45 degrees, clear, with no wind. Some years it's even been known to spit snow, which is fine in increments, but the worst, of course, is a soaking , raw rain.

The great memories I have of the parade as a kid were from my salad days of the very early 70's. In that quiet, little world where we watched ABC, NBC, and CBS (and maybe channel 5 out of DC) on our Zenith console TV that faded to life with painful slowness, there weren't the 50 billion electronic and digital distractions that cram their way into every facet of our modern existence. Back then, a parade meant something, so much so that you might find yourself sitting at school on the following Monday morning still imagining the marching bands in their precise, unfolding cadence, something special enough to replay and study when your mind was drifting off of something mundane like math or social studies. A guy my dad worked with at Mack Trucks lived in a house on South Potomac Street, right along the parade route, with a front porch that rubbed elbows with the sidewalk. We would usually take shelter on his porch, maybe going in to use the bathroom, and he and his wife would normally provide coffee or hot drinks to fight the ubiquitous chill. I also remember one year (1974, I think) when we watched raptly for hours a scene far more compelling than the parade. Across the street was a hair salon, the owners of which were hosting a parade-side costume party. The hosts and their guests were meandering through the ground level and upstairs rooms, gradually becoming more and more inebriated as the night wore long, eventually providing quite comedic (and unpredictable) entertainment of their own. Finally, the last band passed (by tradition, North Hagerstown High would start the parade one year and South Hagerstown High would end it, then they'd switch the following year) and we would trudge home. Sitting in my parents' kitchen, we would warm ourselves in the cozy room while my mother provided endless trays of buttered toast that we would munch with cup after cup of hot chocolate.....

I would never miss a parade--well, almost never. I distinctly remember one year in the very early 70's when my dad and I decided to stay home and watch The Mary Tyler Moore Show while Wayne and Mom went by themselves. But we were usually all together, and, when Wayne went off to the University of Virginia in '76 and then moved to Baltimore in '81, it became that much more special of an event. He would always try to make it home if he could, and from one of those parades during my teen years, he took an amazing photograph of Dad watching the cavalcade. My father was wearing a dark jacket and a hat that looked like an English roadster cap. Wayne took a picture of him standing in front of a stoop, looking toward the street, and it had a wonderful, Depression-era feel to it. He even entered it in a photo contest a few years later under the simple title Dad.......

But my greatest enjoyment of the Mummer's Parade is linked to 1983, when Wayne and I unwittingly created a tradition which has now permanently redefined this annual event. I remember I had taken the ACT college entrance exams and he had driven up from Baltimore. We had sat around playing guitar for a few hours, then headed off to the parade that evening. I remember it was damp and foggy, and I wore some long, heavy trenchcoat. And most of all, I remember that we walked. We walked from my parents' house in the north end of Hagerstown and headed to the parade route, then ambled along the venue rather than staying in one spot. And thus, our yearly vagabond journey was given birth....

But this year, we didn't get to go. In what is deserved of the Most Wretched Timing award of 2010, I came down with the worst case of strep throat I've ever had in my life on Friday, and wound up flat on my back through most of Monday. For the first year in more than I can remember, my brother and I didn't walk the old, familiar path in the Hagerstown afterlight. And I severely missed it. It's become so much more than just watching the parade--it's the one evening of each year that my brother and I shake off the cobwebs of advancing years and turn into those kids from 1973 who heaped raked leaves into a bulging pile and careened into it off the back porch in endless succession....

We leave our parents' house about a half hour before the parade starts, and walk briskly through the old neighborhood where it seemed like thousands of us kids trick-or-treated a lifetime ago. We cut down a street and into a newer housing development that used to be a cornfield in our childhood, the first of two cornfields, both bordered by dense, brooding woods. We always take a moment to notice the tall stand of trees which are the original ones that formed the dividing line between the two cornfields, patently obvious as they tower above their other, shorter sylvan cousins planted in the years since the new houses were put up. When we finally complete the two-mile jaunt to the edge of the parade route, we drop into our standard operating procedure: we walk along adjacent streets, down alleys and narrow lanes, paralleling the parade but only occasionally darting out into the throng on Potomac Street.....

Having an architect for a brother is fascinating, because we spend much of the time we're walking looking at all the obscure structural details that adorn so many of the huge, ornate old homes in the exclusive North Hagerstown enclave known as the Terrace. Our favorite is a preposterous Victorian with a high, narrow cupola, in which there's usually a flickering candle. It speaks to us as the perfect embodiment of those great old houses from the books we revered as kids like The Mad Scientists' Club or The Marvelous Inventions of Alvin Fernald. When we finally do make it onto Potomac Street, we push our way through the crowds and look in amazement at the lumbering mansions that line the first several blocks. It's the one night of the year that you can stroll along at a leisurely pace in the relative obscurity of 25,000 other people, and note all the gimcracks and curlicues that seem to somehow evaporate in the light of day when you're in a clump of traffic, blowing down Potomac en route to Sharpsburg or the Outlet Malls, or somewhere else seemingly more important......

And the one special, uniquely Washington County-esque element we can never do without occurs when we amble up to a concession tent in front of one of the big, beautiful churches somewhere along Potomac and order the signature food of old Hagerstown--a steamer. Steamers are completely impossible to explain to someone not from here. They are made from ground beef served on a hamburger bun, but they are absolutely, inargubly not sloppy joes. They are much less sloppy and much more judiciously seasoned. Every mom in the county, every church, club, civic group, and other social entity, has its own recipe. I don't know if they still do, but the county schools used to serve them about once a week all year long. They're all similar enough to be steamers and yet different enough to maintain a distinctive flair, jealously guarded concoctions that are the food of choice for high school football games, summer carnivals, and the Mummer's Parade. And they exist only in Washington County--go further east in the state looking for one and people will think you're asking for steamed shrimp. Cross the Mason-Dixon line and South-Central Pennsylvanians will look at you like you have three heads. The best ones are served wrapped in wax paper, their amazing aroma drifting heavenward in the chilly October night...

So that's the long walk.....my brother and I trudging through a sea of humanity, the parade more a backdrop now to our autumnal journey, the memories of countless Saturday evenings strung back into the 60's overlapping, juxtaposed against the foreground act of two brothers, not quite so young as they once were, clipping at a brisk gait through the old, familiar thoroughfares, looking with amazement at incredible old houses we've seen five hundred times as if we'd never glimpsed them before, then up a secret path behind North Hagerstown High School where we used to sled down the huge hill on winter evenings decades ago, into the quiet enclave of our old neighborhood, to our parents' house for a quick coffee before we disappear to our own homes...

And this year, I missed it. I had waited 52 weeks for our yearly pilgrimage, but the evening came and went, and the next time my brother and I sojourn out to canvas the town, it'll be that much more removed from the past. But the wonderment will still be there. And I will find myself thinking again of that simple drawing of a forlorn bear from October 1965, when I was so very young, and so many walks were yet to be taken. And my brother and I will be pulled out into the chilly air of early evening, the distant sound of muffled drums and muted brass instruments, the sense of a surging throng just a few miles away, behind the eaves and gables of the beautiful, old dwellings. And we'll jog along in the night like we always do, following the siren song of irresistible October. How do I know? Because she calls and calls each vagabond by name.....

Home is the sailor, home from the sea........

It's funny how life unfolds--sometimes in overdrive, pedal pushed to the floor mats, then in a breath, the pause button is punched and the picture freezes, a few pixels missing here and there....

I opened a new blog entry tonight for the first time since July of 2009. I knew it had been ages since I last rambled on for the benefit of the brave (and misguided) few who choose to grace this page, but I was absolutely astonished that fifteen months had elapsed since I had made an entry. The themes that dominated the posts of 2009 were primarily musical, an exciting array of coffee-house gigs with my guitarist accomplice Bobby, reiterating the Beatles' catalog and throwing in the occasional Irish singer/songwriter piece or original. Those were heady times, to be sure, as I ventured back into public performance for the first time in years. Bobby and I continued to write, record, and perform, and it looked as if music was going to be the main focus for the rest of 2009.....

I don't know what happened to derail that, really......Bobby and I continued to play together at church, and still managed to slip the odd coffee house appearance in here and there. But the year grew old and the days grew short, and soon it was 2010 and snow was dropping for what seemed like months. The very cold and white winter slid into the scorching, bone-dry Sahara of summer, and I found myself changing jobs and summarily losing all sense of artistic focus. Bobby and I played out a few more times, sporadically at best, and weeks went by without me even touching the guitar......

And now it's the end of October, and the breezes that blow down from South Mountain to dislodge the vermilion leaves are stirring my artistic sensibility as well. But, as of late, I've actually found myself returning to my first love--writing. I had started writing short stories when I was about 8....pathetic tales of pirates and the like, and, by the time I was 14, I had lapsed into underdeveloped science fiction, heavily emulating the style of Ray Bradbury. Then I picked up a guitar and pretty much walked away from writing for the next 30 years.....

2003 was the strangest year of my life, and the fall found me starting to write a full length novel--a long, full length novel--that stayed stubbornly unfinished for about three years. With the gentle, inspiring prodding of my wife, Alison, I picked it back up in '07, brought it to a conclusion, and finally rewrote the ending just a few short months ago. Then, through an amazing set of circumstances only God could have engineered, I suddenly found myself in communication with an editor at a publishing company in Tennessee, and now my manuscript is in mid-editing, judicious trimming to bring it to a readable length, with imminent publication likely by the end of the year.........

And so, the pause button is released again. Thirty years after I sat in my parents' basement and pounded away on an ancient Smith-Corona elite typewriter, scratching an eraser across the onion paper and brushing the failings of my mis-keyings away, I now find myself back at the same PC from whence I started this blog on a freezing January night almost two years ago. Then, my creative project was an album of praise music, still unfinished on my dust-shrouded digital recorder. I'll probably pull it out again in the not-too-distant future and try to remember how I wanted to finish the skeletal frameworks of the songs which sit, patient and idling, waiting for the day my brain inevitably swings back to that artistic discipline.....

But for now, I'm back to a more distant creative origin. Words flow non-stop in my brain awake or asleep. Every now and then, I can string them together in a coherent enough fashion to make something of at least mild interest to others. With my novel soon to see the light of day, I hope my sphere of influence is ever widening. Part of me still feels like I did at eight, composing tales for my own amusement. I've hopefully stepped into a completely new season. Either way, it feels great to be home.......

A storm amid the hills........

Just a few weeks ago, I stood at the sliding glass door in my dining room and gazed out into the gloom of evening as incredibly bright bursts of color exploded above the tree tops and brought brief, intense illumination to the landscape as far as the eye could see. It was the closing night of the Smithsburg carnival, and, as is the yearly tradition, a quite impressive fireworks display was heralding the end of the week-long festivities. I looked out over the housetops below the hill where my street meanders and found my gaze repeatedly falling on the view immediately opposite. There was nothing all that spectacular about the scene itself, just a dense treeline along a winding road that leads from the edge of town down into the entrance to my development. But, as I had done on other occasions, I determinedly shifted my gaze back to those trees, caught with surprise as each pyrotechnic burst cast a momentary flash of near-daylight over that distant slope. Each percussive slam of the exploding shells rattled the glass in my kitchen window and echoed in a slow-dying slapback from one ridge to the next, rolling like an almost infinite thunder between the towering hills which surround our tiny western Maryland town. Some distant dog, terrified by the cacophony, barked a frantic, forlorn chorus of agitated yelps that somehow merged in a melancholy tapestry with the thunderous claps and short-lived blossoms of intense light. As the finale unfolded ten minutes later, the last booms rebounded through the farmland and the closing burst of light lit the smokey shrouds which drifted lazily on the warm night air. Then it was over, and the nearby dog gradually regained his composure, and Alison and I turned the lights back on, snapped suddenly into the commonplace sight of the living room as it always looked, and the same old town beyond the same old neighborhood out the same old window.....

None of this would be all that incredible in most towns in America, just an age-old expression of festivity in the incredible realm of a summer night, some noise and smoke and fun, and nothing deeper or more profound than a replay of a tradition we occasionally slip on like an old shoe, comfortable and familiar. But my town, like so many of the others tucked away amid the hills of Washington County, Maryland, holds the special distinction of being the site of a Civil War battle, certainly not on the scale of what unfolded just a few miles down the road in Sharpsburg, but, to those who fought here and to those who stood by and watched in a horror of fascination as it unfolded around them, every bit as terrifyingly real and agonizingly unforgettable. Much of the Civil War history of Washington County is entangled in the complex series of events which occurred in the aftermath of the conflict at Gettysburg, as the Army of Northern Virginia made its desperate retreat to the Potomac, fragmenting so as to not move as a single target for the Union Army, a 17-mile long wagon train of the wounded and dying in tow, and with the logistical nightmare of transferring a gigantic military machine back to the safety of Virginia. For both sides, it was cavalry units which played a huge role in the maneuvers of early July, 1863, as the pursuer and the pursued sojourned across the mountains from Pennsylvania back into Maryland. And so it was on a rainy Sunday, July 5th that none other than Brigadier General George A. Custer led his brigade of Michigan cavalry regiments down Water Street and into the midst of a celebratory throng which gratefully poured into the streets to welcome the Union troopers. The townspeople set up tables and served the horse soldiers a stunning array of food and drink, while a cluster of young people sang Yankee Doodle and Hail, Columbia. A family living on South Main Street invited Custer to join them in their home for Sunday dinner, and the general aura throughout the town was one of jubilation.

Custer's divisional commanding officer, General Judson Kilpatrick, arrived with the other brigades, and defensive positions were established with artillery deployments guarding the mountain passes near Raven Rock, immediately opposite the town. As the afternoon wore on, the festival atmosphere gradually evaporated as a threat began to emerge on the mountain -- the Confederate cavalry units of Major General J.E.B. Stuart. Stuart had incurred the disfavor of Robert E. Lee by initiating a largely fruitless ride around the Union army which had caused his absence as the battle of Gettysburg unfolded, depriving Lee of badly-needed intelligence gathering and a shielding device for the infantry against the reconnaissance of the Union troops. Determined to clear the way for the retreating Army of Northern Virginia and resolute in his efforts to restore the confidence of his commanding officer, Stuart moved down from Raven Rock toward Smithsburg. When it became obvious that there was a large Union presence in the town, his artillery unlimbered and began to shell the distant houses. What traces of the party-like atmosphere of the morning remained were completely decimated as the shells began to rain down on streets. A shot dropped into the pottery of Joseph Kimler on Water Street, and another struck the end wall of Leonard Vogel's house across the street. The Confederate cavalry dismounted and engaged the Union troops at the base of the mountain in a short, hot firefight as artillery on both sides pounded away in the late afternoon hours. As Stuart shifted his troops down from the mountain, Kilpatrick became convinced that his position was untenable, and he hastily ordered a complete withdrawal from the town, with his units retreating to Boonsboro. By early evening, Stuart's forces moved directly into the town, and Smithsburg earned the distinction of being occupied by the forces of two different armies in the same day. By 9:00 that evening, Stuart led his men down the Smithsburg-Leitersburg road, and the citizens of Smithsburg caught one last glimpse of the gray invaders moving over the rolling hills, with wreckage in their wake, and a turbulent vision that would forever remain in the collective memory of the small town I call home.....

Sometimes on Sunday mornings, when I'm walking from my car to my church at the corner of Water Street and Main Street, I picture them all there, Custer and Stuart and Kilpatrick, and the hundreds of troopers and horses that rolled up and down the hills and the muddy streets. I try to imagine the unbridled panic that must have swept through the sleepy farm village on that long-vanished Sunday, when explosions rocked the buildings and lead tore through the hot air. Some of the buildings are virtually unchanged since that short battle, old weathered brick and gray stone foundations, with only the occasional power line or satellite dish here or there to destroy the image of what Custer might have looked up and saw. In Veteran's Park, at the base of the hill where the town library sits, a historical marker describes the action and the principal players in that bloody dance one ancient July. But it's the small details that I find the most affecting. The cannonball that struck the Vogel house is still there, embedded in the brick and mortared over by Leonard Vogel 146 years ago. Just down the street is the Bell House, which served as a field hospital, and it's strange to picture men lying in the small bedrooms, suffering and distraught, hundreds of miles from their own homes. The house Custer dined in is still there, just a few doors down from the railroad tracks, nondescript and practically hidden in the long string of others which sit anonymously along the hilly street. It's easy to picture the young boy general, all of 23 years old, basking in the adoration of the young ladies and the grateful old men, and tiny children caught up in the splendor of something they were too many years away from even being able to comprehend. I think of Custer, extravagant and brimming with confidence, absolutely convinced that he would be an endlessly victorious commander, completely unaware that thirteen years later, as the United States celebrated its centennial, he would recklessly lead his men into a deathtrap called the Little Bighorn, and fall at the hands of the Lakota under Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, facing an enemy he completely underestimated, he and his men vanquished in a Montana battlefield far removed from the little town of Smithsburg. In a glass display case in his basement, my brother has a small leather pouch that was reclaimed from the Little Bighorn battlefield, the possession of some now nameless Sioux warrior, a strange modern-day connection for me, knowing that it came from the field where Custer died, the same man who once jubilantly paraded down the street I drive on every day.

But there are two reminders I find most poignant, made somehow more so by their odd juxtaposing against the commonplace banalities of everyday life. One is something I see each time I take the recycling to the big dumpster behind the fire hall on North Main street. As I turn back the small alley to where the bin is located, I catch a glimpse of the tiny corner of the graveyard behind the Lutheran church. There, almost against the fence, is a small, slate-gray tombstone, rubbed smooth by a century and a half of western Maryland winters, and I sometimes see a small Confederate flag stuck in the ground beside it. There most likely was never a name on the stone, but I find it heartbreaking to think that it denotes the final resting place of some forgotten horse soldier, from either Virginia or North Carolina, based on the states of origin of the troops who fought here. A few feet away lies another stone, equally small and unadorned, which has been identified as the marker of a Union fatality, and there is something painful and awe-inspiring in the realization that these two forgotten veterans once looked out across the smoke-shrouded hills and saw each other's battle lines, and now they lie in the quiet corner of a churchyard together, far beneath the green grass, just a few feet from where laughing children climb unaware on playground equipment in the Maryland summer sun. I sometimes look at the little stones and wonder if each of the men who lie beneath them had a wife and children somewhere, maybe back in some little town not that unlike Smithsburg. I wonder what the men looked like, and what they did for a living....I wonder what dreams each shared with his wife as he held her in their distant home, and I sometimes ask myself whether or not either wife ever really knew what happened to her beloved, or where he was laid to rest.

Probably the little lasting memory of the battle that touches me the most is one I rub elbows with when I drive home at night after a quick trip to the grocery store, and find myself moving down that twisting road along the ridge directly opposite my house, the one I watched lit by fireworks. My window glass had rattled and the dog had barked, and the booms had echoed forever off the ancient hills, and I couldn't help but think that those brief moments had been the slightest taste of what Smithsburg must have sounded like on the old, almost forgotten day of battle. But my fascination still lies with that little ridge, not for anything incredibly significant, but due to the fact that a company of Union soldiers had been assigned to that particular piece of ground. And, driving down that ridge, I almost always find myself thinking about them. They were in one of Custer's units, Michigan Wolverines, men who had drawn the duty primarily because they were outfitted with repeating rifles. The logic was that their armament gave them a tremendous advantage in guarding a critical road out of the town, and they were deployed to secret themselves in the tree line along the ridge, not in the combat, but standing on the side, vigilant, ready, watchful as the drama unfolded. What these men learned with horror was that, as the battle fizzled out and Kilpatrick made a mad dash to Boonsboro --to, in his own mind, save his command--they were left behind. This special detachment with their special rifles, completely overlooked in the evacuation, suddenly confronted with the reality that all of their comrades were gone from the field, and the only troop movement on the streets of the town was by ragged men in gray and butternut.

When they finally realized what had happened, they were able to safely withdraw, but I think sometimes of how awful it must have been to be left on that hill. Most of them were probably just kids, 18 or 19 in many cases. Child soldiers in a brigade with a 23-year-old commanding general, in a sad, tragic war that stubbornly refused to end, abandoned on a tree-lined country road winding out of a small farm town surrounded by towering hills. Today, no discernable trace remains of the Michigan boys who ensconced themselves in their lonely vantage point, save for the fact that the tightly-clustered unit of townhouses at the base of the hill sits on a cul-de-sac with the bittersweet cognomen of Sentry Ridge.

I always find it humbling to think about, the sacrifice of young men who desperately fought each other in a town where some families had members on each side of the war, where loyalties and allegiances were complicated and sometimes painfully blurred. I grew up in this county which has the ghoulish distinction of being the site of the bloodiest day in American history, September 17th, 1862, the Battle of Antietam, but even I never knew about the battle of Smithsburg until I was 41 years old. Most of the people who live here, especially the younger ones, are equally oblivious.....they see the Food Lion and the convenience stores, the bank and the churches and the old brick houses, but they remain unaware of those few brief hours when something desperate and awful unfolded in these common, unremarkable streets that crisscross what we call daily life.....

I guess that's where the story ends.......nothing profound, no great pronouncement of anything. I just like to think about what happened here, because it bears repeating, not because it was so vast in scope, but because it was a human experience, a dreadful one our modern lives are far removed from. But it did happen, and it was one small component in the complicated path that lead us to America, 2009. It may not carry enough merit to be discussed at length, or even to hold the attention of the casual observer for more than a few seconds, but I choose to honor the memory of those boys from so long ago, not with anything grandiose or elaborate, but with a simple and humble acknowledgement. It's not my goal to analyze, to judge, or even to understand.......just to try always, at least in some simple way, to remember........

The old-fashioned summer of 2009

One hundred and forty-six years ago tonight, Union General John Buford bivouacked with his troops at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Earlier in the day, his men had happened upon the lead elements of Confederate General A.P. Hill's corps as it advanced from nearby Cashtown, down the dusty roads and through the hills which would soon be filled with the turbulence of a cataclysmic confrontation between the two opposing armies. The bloodiest battle in American history would be played out under the auspices of the seminary and farmhouses, churches and barns, old ridges and endless rows of gently-swaying wheat and corn. Like iron filings being drawn helplessly to a magnet, they would come, the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia, two enormous masses of men who would decide the fate of the country in the blazing sun of the first three days of July, 1863. After a bloody grudge match which dragged through two sweltering days, the apocalyptic climax unfolded in the early afternoon of Friday, July 3rd, as James Longstreet directed George Pickett to initiate a direct assault across the open fields against the fortified defenses of the Union center, Robert E. Lee's last futile gamble to procure victory north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Nearly obliterated in the desperate charge, the Confederates fell back, tragically wounded but still with an iron resolve. As the Fourth of July unfolded, Ulysses S. Grant was securing Vicksburg, Mississippi and dealing a second crushing blow to the Confederacy as the United States celebrated the anniversary of its independence. Two more years of blood were to come, but the events of that summer were eternally etched in the character and legend of America, and the drama which played out on those fields became another component in the unfolding, the evolution of the American Experiment.

I thought about Buford tonight as I watched the last vestiges of daylight drop behind the hills. As I contemplated the onslaught of July, I felt like he must have as he ruminated on the coming Confederates who would arrive in the morning. Summer is only a little over a week old, but the days are already getting shorter, and I'll awake tomorrow morning to July. Summer is hard for me to even fathom anymore.....even seeing my step kids out of school doesn't really register. There's something about the crushing monotony of adult working life that manages to strip all the wonder, all the magic out of that brief, balmy expanse between Father's Day and Labor Day. What was once the incredible allure of the arrival of warm weather is now nothing more than the reality of a sweaty commute to the office, walking across a parking lot you could fry an egg on and longing for those late September days when the clouds drift like long-dead dreams across a young autumn sky. But it is summer, and, at 44, I sit here trying to redefine what that means to me. One month bleeds insidiously into the next, so it might as well be February. I took a week's vacation in the middle of June and sat through a frustrating expanse of soaking wet days as punishing thunderstorms ripped the sky apart and a daily deluge of rain rendered doing anything outside an impossibility. Now, back at work, the weather is temperate, generally clear and warm, and so far, relatively devoid of the suffocating humidity that too often defines a western Maryland summer.

I don't know for sure, but I think my family and I were in Walt Disney World 35 years ago today. It was 1974, our second visit there, and we were staying on property for the first time, at the Fort Wilderness Campground, in the 17-foot trailer that my mother observed seemed to somehow shrink about two feet every day we were in it. To the best of my recollection, 35 years ago today I went through Pirates of the Caribbean for the first time, decades before Jack Sparrow and the 2006 refurb of the ride which infuriatingly removed my favorite scene, a finale depicting a treasure room where a group of drunken pirates blearily fired their pistols and celebrated their plundering. Now the scene is gutted, all the pirates gone, and the only original figure still there is a parrot perched beside the newly-installed Jack Sparrow, an astonishingly well-animated figure who reclines in a chair with truly uncanny movement. But the buccaneers of my youth are gone. Midway through his spiel, the Sparrow figure proposes a toast to 'my many shipmates lost at sea', and I can't help but think he's referring to those figures I first fell in love with three and a half decades ago today. I feel like Robert Louis Stevenson, who, in his poignant preface to Treasure Island, offers the wish, 'May I and all my pirates share the grave where these and their creations lie!' A whole generation of kids whose parents weren't even born when my family and I first cruised through Pirates 35 years ago today can love it, and be amazed by it, just as I first was, but they'll never know or care about what used to be there, and about what was forever altered to conform to the changing sensibilities of an ever-more fickle world.

....which got me thinking about just how much has changed since that summer of '74. The Internet, Youtube, Facebook, My Space, Twitter, cell phones, Ipods, texting, and the rest of the digital inundation that floods our lives would have seemed like something from Star Trek in that vanished summer. It's permeated the fabric of society now, and the entire weave of the family, and not having those things would strike a younger generation as a heinous deprivation, but we came home from that Walt Disney World vacation in '74 to a world that would seem as removed to today's kids as John Buford at the Seminary is to me tonight. In '74, my parents still had a party line, which we shared with about four other families on our street. Placing a call meant first delicately, quietly picking up the phone and checking to see if someone else's conversation was occurring, and, if so, to then gingerly hang up, coming back five minutes later, and ten minutes after that, if necessary. Crazy and anachronistic today, but we didn't question it. It was what it was, and patience came with the territory. It was the only game in town. We turned on our Zenith TV and sat for what seemed an eternity while the picture tube glowed slowly to life, like the aurora borealis tentatively drifting across a night sky. Our reception was limited to about five or six channels, in a day when there was only ABC, CBS, NBC, a smattering of shows on PBS, plus a couple of oddball channels we could occasionally pick up from Washington D.C. and Baltimore. If there were too many 'ghost images', Dad would turn the knob on a black box that sat atop the TV cabinet called a 'Tenna-rotor'. Outside the window, on the metal tower which clung to the side of the house, the antenna would squeakily rotate, and the picture would improve-hopefully. I remember turning on WBFF channel 45 from Baltimore in the afternoons to watch Captain Chesapeake, a locally-produced kid's show with a host who wore a jaunty skipper's cap and welcomed us all aboard with a hearty 'Ahoy, crewmembers!' His sidekick, Moandy the Sea Monster, was always at his elbow, with a stiff, paper mache-looking head and a shiny costume. He looked like a refugee from one of the Japanese action shows like Ultraman or Johnny Socko and His Flying Robot which formed most of the staple programming for the good Captain, who sat with his reptilian sidekick on a bare-bones set with a blue screen rear-projection of scenes which looked more like the Potomac River than the Chesapeake Bay. All the while, a giddy, zippy organ piece played in the background, a cheesy but instantly recognizable undercurrent as powerful as the choppy, lapping water we saw on the fuzzy background. It didn't even matter that about every eight seconds the camera angle on the background footage changed. It was enough that we were spending the afternoon with the Captain, until that time he wished us bon voyage with 'So long, crewmembers!' Goetz's Caramel Cremes was always the sponsor, and the Captain's endorsement of this filling-disgorging confection was as much a constant as the odd water views which formed a backdrop for this strangely compelling afternoon pastime.

The evenings were a continuous loop of mid to late Sixties reruns: Gomer Pyle, Hogan's Heroes, Gilligan's Island, I Dream of Jeannie, The Munsters, The Addams Family. My favorites were the oddball stuff like Wild, Wild West, The Avengers, and of course, Star Trek, which captured all of our imaginations in an era when something like a hand-held personal communication device seemed a hundred years away. And, when the evening had wound down, the real treat came at about 11:07 as we tuned in my brother's portable radio to the local CBS channel, broadcasting from the tiny, forlorn station just down the street from our house, situated across an empty field we always called 'the playground' because of the ancient sliding boards and merry-go-round the radio station had installed for the neighborhood kids to play on. We locked onto the station and listened with anticipation to a creaking door, followed by spooky music and the intonations of E.G. Marshall welcoming us into the CBS Radio Mystery Theatre. Every night was another macabre story, and it made it somehow even more mysterious knowing that the distant signal from New York was coming through that tiny local station, beaming out through the looming transmission tower we could see from the windows of my parents' den, a few wan, red lights blinking endlessly through each night as a warning to planes flying toward the nearby airport. That the station sat on a desolate stretch of road, beside a deserted manor house, across from a cemetery and a couple of dilapidated barns, combined to make something that was the very embodiment of 'suspense', and, when the hinges creaked and the music played at the end of the episode, only then did we realize it was midnight, and we would go to sleep with the windows open and listen to the distant roar of traffic on Interstate 81, miles away.

Summer was all about food, and we had some definite classics. John Denver once observed that the only things money can't buy are true love and home-grown tomatoes, and you would believe it, too, if you could have sampled some of the crimson beauties harvested from our neighbors' sprawling garden. Then there was corn, amazing, delectable Silver Queen, bought out of the back of Mr. Stockslager's decrepit pickup truck. When we saw the relic of a vehicle pull up at his daughter's house across the street, we knew the best of the summer eating was here, but we also knew that summer was winding down, because he usually came in the first week of August, so it was not only sweet corn, but bittersweet, too. And then there were those unique dishes my mom made--her amazing, breaded 'Maryland Fried Chicken'; corn fritters that tasted like she had deep-fried summer itself; sweet rice pudding she always served warm; her signature potato salad which she must have made truckloads of during my childhood ("Take more", she would say - "there's thousands!"). And to wash it down there was the tea she brewed from the spearmint which grew at the end of the yard. The guy next door had planted it in the late Fifties to use it in mixed drinks, and, when the plug grass he had installed in his yard had crept under the fence, it had decided to bring the mint along for company. My mom had a grove of it down there, and she would sometimes let me help pick the fragrant leaves. My dad's specialty beverage was lemonade he squeezed in the old metal juicer, with a judicious blending of sugar that he measured like a chemist, resulting in a taste I've never experienced in these subsequent years. And, if we really felt exotic, we'd build a small fire in the makeshift stack of bricks on a rock in the backyard and roast a wannabe-Polynesian concoction of skewered Spam chunks which had been basted in brown sugar and crushed pineapple.

When the lightning bugs started to come out, we'd take sticks that had fallen from the huge willow tree which draped like an umbrella in the back yard and stuck the ends of them into the fire until a small flame leapt from the tip. Then we'd blow it out and run through the darkened yard, waving it through the blackness and making figure eights with the glowing red embers, an improvised sparkler. Those same sticks would end up harpooning marshmallows, and we would scald our tongues trying to carefully eat the blackened goo we always ended up with. Sometimes we'd round out the evening just sitting on the patio in the dark, with the only illumination being the pale shaft of light from a flicker bulb my brother had inserted in a cast-iron lantern he had suspended from the patio ceiling. We sat for hours in that mesmerizing light, and I experienced a virtual time warp this past Saturday as I sat with my mom and dad on that same patio, and looked up at that same flicker bulb, and talked with them about the glory of faded summers when we were younger and the world was younger, and life moved at a very different pace down a very different road. The lightning bugs still drifted through the old trees at the end of the yard, just like they did in that summer 35 years ago when we came back from Disney and engaged in the simple pleasures that defined my youth -- late night rides in our '62 Rambler convertible with the top down, looking through my brother's telescope at the moon, lying on blankets on the hill in the back yard and relaxing in the cool of the night.


A few weeks ago, on Flag Day, my wife, kids, and I were driving on the Beltway enroute to Fredericksburg, Virginia to visit some friends of ours, and I found my mind racing back to summers gone by. I realized that 30 years ago that day, I had spent my last day in the eighth grade, at the old middle school we joked was held together with bubble gum, in an auditorium that looked exactly like the the one from A Charlie Brown Christmas where Linus walked out to deliver the Christmas story from the book of Luke. My homeroom that year actually met on the stage, and I could sit there during roll call and look up at the rolled, painted backdrop that said Scrooge and Marley, and recall the days I first saw the play when my brother was at the school and I was just a little kid, a lifetime ago. But now it was Flag Day 1979, the last day of middle school, when we had assembled in the auditorium to watch a crazy old Disney movie with Ed Asner called Gus, about a Hungarian soccer player who trained a mule to play the game. Before the film started, in honor of Flag Day, they asked us to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. I recall sitting beside a girl named Blythe, and, when I rose from the wooden folding seat, it clattered to the floor, somehow a fitting commentary. We were the last eighth grade class to ever graduate from that school, and our underclassmen moved into a new building with a tiny gymnasium, and suddenly our old alma mater was gone.

But now, it's all gone. We used to climb that radio antenna on my parents' house on Saturday mornings when my mom was making breakfast, and the smell of pancakes and bacon would waft out of a vent high on the side of the house, and it seemed somehow even more aromatic in the open air, twenty feet above the driveway, looking down on a world and a summer where the simplest things were the greatest adventures. I'd like the rest of 2009's summer to be like those old ones...basic, uncluttered, a celebration of being together as a family. A world where technology didn't matter, and money wasn't a prerequisite for fun. I can't step into that world of 1974, but I can still sit with my elderly parents and bask in the glow of the flicker bulb, a 'poor man's Disney World'. In the throes of vegetarianism, I would probably not partake in Mom's chicken, but sometimes that taste drifts through my head like the lightning bugs bobbing around the back yard. Life is too much, and adulthood is more complicated than I ever thought possible. Just like John Buford, I'm sitting here watching something bigger than I am pressing its way into my path with urgency and resolve. There's too much to figure out, so maybe I won't worry about it. You can't live in the past, but you can sure drop by to visit, and I'd like to find a way to spend at least some of summer 2009 like we did when things were a lot easier to get a handle on. Old fashioned? I wouldn't have it any other way.......

Baseball, Dad, and what I learned in the seventh inning.....

Well, here I am, true to the form I've unwittingly established as this blog has evolved with painful slowness over the last several months. It's the last evening of April, and I find myself hurriedly pulling some thoughts together, hopefully with a modicum of purpose that makes them even slightly worth reading. It was a rather unremarkable April, a passage of four weeks that were each basically like the one before. But the one bright spot which differentiated this month from its predecessors was the annual event which still stirs my heart no matter how blase' and jaded I've allowed my demeanor to become--the start of baseball season. It's a love of baseball in general, but the Baltimore Orioles in particular. I liken it to my being a Christian first and foremost, but a member of the Brethren in Christ as my specific descriptor. With baseball, it can't help but ultimately be the Orioles. Having been born and bred in Maryland, there was simply too much history and legacy generated from the complex entity we fans lovingly refer to as 'the Birds' to sit by oblivious to it all.

As a native of Hagerstown, the Orioles drama was always unfolding 70-odd miles away, so it carried a heady mixture of being the 'home team' and yet being isolated in the rarified realm of the sprawling harbor city we visited only occasionally in my childhood. When my brother relocated to Baltimore in the fall of 1980, the dynamic changed, and the Birds suddenly felt more like the boys next door. I remember sitting in the nosebleeds at the old Memorial Stadium on 33rd Street with my brother and Dad on a muggy July evening in 1984, drinking it all in, my first live immersion into the Orioles kingdom. There was a new relevance being able to watch the action unfold before me, and I remember being overwhelmed by how enormous it all was, not just the ballpark, but the game itself. The mechanics of the play, as these incredibly skilled athletes wove an intricate tapestry beneath the glaring lights, struck me as being epic in every possible way. That was the moment when something so fundamentally right about the game ensconced itself in the fabric of who I am, and I felt like I was witnessing life from some wonderful and privileged vantage point for the very first time. I remember feeling the amazing contradiction of being profoundly, intimately connected to 25,000 other people, and yet keenly aware of being a tiny element juxtaposed against a gigantic monolith, like a child standing by the ocean. It may not have been the defining moment of my life, but something forever changed in my perspective as I watched the Orioles work their magic in the Baltimore summer night.

But it's the hazier memories of my childhood that are the sweet ones, as I, a clumsy, Coke-bottle eyeglassed, overweight, uncoordinated loner who was always picked last for teams in gym class sat beside my dad on sweltering summer evenings and watched as the action unfolded on our fuzzy old Zenith TV, the picture tube glowing, lightning bugs flitting by the window. In the panorama of that faded past, the truly amazing year was probably 1973. That was a magical summer for the eight-year-old me; our family made its first trip to Walt Disney World, and the Orioles slugged their way through the season with what was arguably their most classic line-up. The mere mention of the names from that '73 roster conjures up the awe I felt as I watched them flow together like a supremely well-oiled machine -- Boog Powell, Brooks Robinson, Doug DeCinces -- and Jim Palmer flinging powerhouse pitches with the grace of a classical dancer and the aim of a sniper, all of it with a sharp-edged undercurrent of determination and purpose. I remember feeling a tremendous kinship with Mark Belanger due to nothing more than the dumb connection of us sharing the same first name. But I recall thinking to myself that it felt somehow empowering when I would put on my Orioles cap and pick up my plastic bat for a family game of pseudo-baseball, and count myself every bit a Bird. On those fleeting occasions when I would actually make a decent hit, it felt good to know that I was, at least in my own mind, in the company of the guy I watched on TV with 7 on his uniform who plied his trade 70 miles away as the crow flies, and a million miles away in reality.

The 1970's wore on, and I found myself gradually distracted with a seemingly endless string of interests vying for my attention: Star Wars, Walt Disney World, the Beatles, playing guitar, model railroading, home movies, creative writing, and perhaps the most derailing of all -- girls! Before I knew it, the Orioles had slid far down on the ladder of significance, and I wasn't reminded of the old glories again until the fall of 1983, now out of high school and struggling to find where I should go in life. I remember sitting at the house of a girl I had been dating, in the company of her rather unpleasant father, with her off doing homework or something, as we watched the Orioles battle the Phillies in the World Series. So much looked the same as when I had watched ten years before, but changes had crept in, too. Jim Palmer was still there, his form and command as flawless as ever, racking up a win in game 3 in a battle of wits with Steve Carlton. But there were new names and a new team dynamic, a slew of personalities who were carving out their own Orioles legacy a decade after the boys of '73 -- Al Bumbry, Rick Dempsey, Eddie Murray, Ken Singleton, and, most notably, Cal Ripken, Jr., who would go on to define the very essence of the integrity which had always represented baseball at its finest. The Birds pounded away through the five games, losing the first, then claiming victory in the remaining four, resulting in their most recent World Series victory to date.

Something eroded, or at least tarnished, as the years went by. Cal proved himself the inarguable Iron Man, but then retired, and the Orioles, and all of baseball itself, were less for his loss. My modern-day hero was now B.J. Surhoff, a disciplined ace who had proved himself throughout many solid seasons and whom I felt an empathy for by the nature of his being seven months my senior, the guy trying to still prove his validity as forty closed in. But then, Surhoff, too was gone, voted by the fans one of the top 50 Orioles of all time, and then suddenly playing his final game in October of '05. In the wake of Ripken and Surhoff, the Orioles drifted through a frustrating quagmire of lackluster seasons and managers who just didn't seem to understand their own players' strengths and weaknesses. The theatrical but effectual leadership during Earl Weaver's tenure as skipper was a distant memory, and for every powerhouse player now coming to the forefront, there seemed to be a counterweight erasing his contribution. Eric Bedard and B.J. Ryan were, respectively, awe-inspiring as a starter and a closer, but Daniel Cabrera and Sidney Ponson threw away games with frustrating frequency and racked up humiliating ERA's. Melvin Mora, Jerry Hairston, David Newhan, Corey Patterson, and various other talents brought solid fielding into alignment with consistent batwork. But Miguel Tejada and Raphael Palmeiro cast a grim shadow over the club in the midst of the MLB-wide pandemic of performance-enhancing drug use.

Somewhere in the middle of the decade, it was somehow a respite to start turning my attention to the Hagerstown Suns. After all, they had once upon a time been in the Orioles farm organization, drifting then to the Toronto Bluejays, finally jumping over to the National League, from the Giants to the Mets to the Nationals. There was something wonderfully refreshing sitting in the old stadium where Willie Mays had made his professional debut, watching the very different world of Single A ball, where mega-salaries and global recognition were blissfully absent. Going to Suns games became somehow healing, and invigorating. I sat huddled beside my girlfriend in the air of a cold April afternoon and shared a wonderful time with her, and came away feeling like new breath had come into me. Although I can't give the game all the credit, I did propose to her the next day. She accepted, and now, as my wife, she still patiently sits with me through games, even if they lurch into extra innings, and it still feels like that first game we ever went to together. But probably my greatest live game moment was one I experienced with my dad. It's the absolute cliche of cliches to paint baseball as the defining connection of fathers and sons, the glory and honor of bygone times wrapped in a bittersweet envelope of Americana that would make Ray Kinsella blush. But that's exactly what I experienced along the first base line in the bleachers at Hagerstown's Municipal Stadium one night in July of 2004. I think the Suns lost that night, but it didn't even matter. I sat in my father's company and basked in the afterglow of something from decades before my birth, and I saw this veteran of World War II who had headed to the Philippines wondering if he would ever come home again acknowledge something as he sat with his son and watched the long balls driven deep into right field, just beneath the advertisements for all the old local businesses I had known all my life.

It was nothing earth-shattering, but we stood for the national anthem, and my dad, in his late-seventies and with an amazing array of life experiences defining who he is, placed his hand over his heart and looked down at that field with moist eyes. The sun was dipping behind the skyline of Hagerstown, those roof lines and church steeples I've been looking at for forty-four years, and lights were starting to come on along the streets as the last magenta hues of daylight slid away. Then they threw out the opening pitch, and the innings unfolded with me thinking incessantly about the simple, beautiful image of my dad acknowledging his country, and the game, and special moments with his son in the sanctity of an old stadium in a small city in western Maryland. When we stood for the seventh inning stretch, everybody sang along as 'Take Me Out To the Ball Game' crackled over the PA. I looked over at Dad and smiled, and I knew that I had just been party to one of the most blissfully pure moments of my entire life, when we didn't say anything but the game around us said everything, and we understood it all completely, and unquestionably.

I went to a Suns game for the last time in '05 and sat beside my stepson, feeling what I hoped was at least an inkling of what swept through Dad's heart just a year before. The Suns, the underdogs, the true home team in my true home town, are probably my best shot at a live baseball connection these days. And I haven't made it back to Camden Yards in five years....marriage and kids and all the odds and ends of life clamoring for attention have made things shift back to where they were thirty-five years ago. Now I watch the Orioles on TV again, like on those July nights when I was eight. These days, it's Brian Roberts who captivates my interest, this incredibly versatile and determined young man who plays every game like the future of the world hangs in the balance. They started this season like gangbusters, winning the first three series with a humble might that echoed days gone by. Then it all seemed to unravel, and the season has begun to look more like some of those bleak expanses in the last ten years. But it doesn't really matter to those of us who are orange-blooded. Even if .500 ball remains elusive, it's enough that they'll always be the Birds, our Birds, from a Baltimore that in my heart will always be the Baltimore of 1973, when you walked into the Inner Harbor and were overpowered with the amazing aroma of the old McCormick Spice factory, a permeating odor that is as vanished as the summer evenings when Brooks and Boog and Jim wowed the world from 33rd Street, and awkward boys could watch fuzzy innings at their father's side, and all was right with the world as long as the ball just kept flying......

Ides of March

I love it when an old adage is played out in the reality of unfolding life. It didn't happen as March ended this evening. At the end of February I wrote about March coming in like a lion as snow started to fall. In actuality, it wasn't much of a storm, just one of those teasing dustings that appear every now and then as if to lull the casual observer into believing that one of the old western Maryland winters of chilly days gone by is rubbing its elbows with us again. The flakes fell and the brown grass was crusted with a reasonably full cover which had melted away by the time I got home from church around noon that Sunday. A pretty modest showing, but technically enough to be classified as inclement weather, so the month should have rounded out this evening like a lamb. But the wind has been rattling the windows across the back end of the house like the endless breeze at Nag's Head pounding a beach house, and the first minutes of April will enter in the cold air. Tomorrow is supposed to see the temperature climb into the mid sixties, which would certainly be a welcome change from the biting breeze of this evening.

A month ago I lamented my lack of self-discipline to compose an entry each week, as I had initially hoped when launching this literary ship in the first week of January. Now, here I am again struggling to put something coherent together just for the sake of rounding out the month with one entry under my belt. Writing couldn't help but fall by the wayside in the onslaught of alternate creative exploits which seemed to blossom in profusion in the last four weeks. March was the music month, to be sure. My friend, Bobby, and I exported our odd brand of troubadouring to our favorite local haunt, Port City Java, as well as to a small Pennsylvania enclave. Due to our propensity for playing and singing a probably disproportionate amount of Beatles music, we've officially been referred to at gigs as 'those crazy Beatles guys'. But somewhere between Rocky Raccoon and Polythene Pam we've managed to slip in the occasional Waterboys, Damien Rice, James Taylor, and even a few originals. It's been a great time of not only getting our feet wet in the playing-live realm again, but also a time to meet some fascinating fellow musicians. We've sat in the presence of a jazz pianist who could have made Vince Guaraldi run for cover and a blues-rock guitarist with some absolutely killer chops. And we've been inspired by all that influence to branch out and try some new things ourselves, the culmination of which will occur this Thursday as we convene at Port City to perform a set comprised of three songs which will be played on acoustic guitar and piano. Two are compositions by Snow Patrol, but the third, in honor of the open mic emcee, Tommy, will be none other than A Day in the Life, the climactic closing track from the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper.

Bobby and I started dusting off our songwriting skills lately and have even started to collaborate on a couple of decidedly Beatlesque numbers. The still-evolving plan is to start recording an album of all originals, which will hopefully get under way within the next week or so. The last full album I recorded was one I was working on six years ago this week, Dust of Jericho. It was a disjointed collection of some of the strongest writing I ever came up with juxtaposed against some absolute crap that should have never made it past demo form. But there were nuggets of value here and there, and I'll always remember those strange recording sessions I conducted in my brother's basement in the wilds of West Virginia during the tail end of the winter of 2003, the last year that we had one of those classic winters, with a certifiable blizzard and a seemingly endless array of smaller storms thereafter. I listen to those old tracks now and marvel at how raw and primitive they were, recorded on a digital four track with a ten-dollar microphone. There are only two recordings from the entire set that I think have aged really well, and there's something unarguably compelling about them. I can listen to those simple takes and remember what it was to be alone in my brother's basement on a chilly Saturday afternoon, pouring out everything I had into that cheap microphone. Amy Grant once commented about how an album is like a snapshot of exactly what is going on in your life at a given moment. It's like a commentary about what you're thinking, and fearing, and hoping for. Bobby and I will start recording soon, and it will be a new set of music, and a new collection of recordings, and I'll listen to it when I'm fifty and remember the me that ambled around western Maryland in April of 2009, and the immediacy will pour of the old recordings like a perfumed love letter pulled out of envelope pushed all the way at the back of a drawer somewhere.

My earliest blog entries were truly infinite ramblings. Now, there's a self-imposed brevity that's born more out of the realities of a forthcoming early-morning commute than out of any fundamental change in my observations. I'm listening to Paul McCartney's alter ego 'The Fireman' as I write this, and this fascinating music will become one of the soundtracks of the spring of my forty-fourth year. There will be writing and recording in the days ahead that will be the next in the long progression from the first time I picked up a guitar in 1973 to whatever lies ahead. Somewhere in the midst of everything new, I may even pull out some odds and ends, including a song or two I wrote when I was about fourteen, that have never been refined to where I truly celebrate them. Yet something in that rough-hewn proto-music is the essence of who I am, and who I will be the next time the recorder is on and the guitar is resonating, and the gift God planted in me is pouring out like April rain. The sounds may never be earth-shattering, or innovative, or even worthy of a second listen. But they'll always be my narrative, and the story will unfold with each note, like my life itself. It would be impossible to imagine anything more, and a grievous error to embrace anything less.