"Oh Lonesome Me"

I was guessing Buddy Holly.

When I woke up this morning, some lyrics to "Oh Lonesome Me" were pinballing around in my head--I have no idea why. I don't recall any dreams about being lonesome. But something happened, something that retrieved (some of) those old lyrics from my (fading) memory and insisted I think about them every minute or so this morning.

I checked Google downstairs before I headed out to the coffee shop and saw that the performer was not Buddy Holly but a guy I'd totally forgotten: Don Gibson. Here's a YouTube link to Gibson's performance. The pictures of Gibson, by the way, make him look like a cross between Gene Autry and someone doing an ad for Brylcreem. But he definitely has A Look, and that matters in whatever music world you choose to inhabit.

Here's a few things I learned about Gibson (1928-2003; link to his obituary). Born in North Carolina, he is credited for helping create the "Nashville sound" and always claimed to be more of a songwriter than performer. (He's in the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Country Music HOF.) He wrote more than 350 songs--many were hits for others.

The lyrics to the song are ... catchy, as they used to say:

Everybody's goin' out and havin' fun

I'm just a fool for staying home and havin' none

I can't get over how she set me free

Oh, lonesome me

A bad mistake I'm making by just hanging round

I know that I should have some fun and paint the town

A lovesick fool is blind and just can't see

Oh, lonesome me

I'll bet she's not like me, she's out and fancy free

Flirting with the boys with all her charms

But I still love her so and brother don't you know

I'd welcome her right back here in my arms

Well, there must be some way I can lose these lonesome blues

Forget about the past and find somebody new

I've thought of everything from A to Z

Oh, lonesome me

Oh, lonesome me

Well I'll bet she's not like me, she's out and fancy free

Flirting with the boys with all her charms

But I still love her so and brother don't you know

I'd welcome her right back here in my arms

Well, there must be some way I can lose these lonesome blues

Forget about the past and find somebody new

I've thought of everything from A to Z

Oh, lonesome me

Oh, lonesome me

Oh, lonesome me

The song, I see, was later covered by Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, and Johnny Tillotson. It was #51 in the top hits of 1958; oddly, #53 was Ricky Nelson's "Lonesome Town"--seems as if lonesome was an important word in 1958. I also see that a group called the Kentucky Headhunters released it again in 1990, and it soared to #8. Others who have covered it: Bing Crosby, Edyie Gorme, Connie Francis, Stonewall Jackson, Neil Young, Loretta Lynn, Sammy Davis, Jr.--quite an assortment.

I see Gibson originally recorded and released it in December 1957--and guitar legend Chet Atkins was playing, as well. It perched at #1 on the Country charts for eight consecutive weeks--and reached #7 on the general charts.

In December 1957, I was in eighth grade (a grade level I would later teach for decades) and was having "Lonesome Me" feelings pretty much all of the time--as many eighth graders do. Yes, I had a girlfriend, but I was clueless about how to act and behave with her. (Sixty years later I haven't improved all that much!)

I was in my daffiest of years--certain that I would play both professional basketball and baseball (I played neither)--certain that public school years would never end (they did)--certain that if I couldn't be a professional athlete, well cowboy would do (that didn't work out, either). I also thought that my parents just didn't get it (they did).

So ... I remember "Oh Lonesome Me" on the radio, at sockhops. I remember liking it. Thinking it was relevant. Moving.

And I never would have suspected that sixty years after its release, I, age 73, would snap awake early one balmy (!) January morning and hear Don Gibson's voice, hear those guitar riffs, mouth those lyrics. And flash back to the Hiram Local Schools, 1957-58, where everything was possible, where fame and health and immortality were certain.

Ripped

Ripped has more than one meaning, as everyone knows. Ripped off can mean swindled--or angry. Ripped has also lately come to mean that you have well-defined musculature. (I was going to include here a photo of my own abs to show you what ripped means, but my phone camera ... not working so well ... showed something a bit less well defined, I fear.) Oh, and the word can also mean drunk.

But I'm using it today in the Rip Van Winkle sense. As you recall from that story, Rip awoke from a twenty-year daze to discover that the American Revolution had happened, among other things. (He was somewhat relieved to discover his wife was gone--not exactly a PC-sort of story these days!)

Anyway, it took Rip a bit of a while to ... adjust. So much had changed ... He felt out of time. Out of sync. All of that. His gun was rusty; his dog was gone. He had a rather impressive beard ...

And I've been as confused as Rip the past few days.

Here's what happened to discombobulate me--discombobulate, a word that goes back to about 1916. My dad was 3; my mom was not yet even a gleam in her father's eye ...

For the past more-than-a-few years I have purchased each year what's called the Book Lover's Page-a-Day Calendar. Occasionally, something on a page will encourage me to scan and post it on Facebook for my friends to ignore. (See the top of the page for an example.)

So ... Christmas. Joyce had wrapped the calendar for me; I unwrapped it; on January 1, I began tearing away a page each day.

And Confusion Reigned ...

Something was wrong. Some of the titles-of-the-day seemed a little too familiar. The day of the week was ... off.

So last night (January 9) I looked closely at it, and that huge DUH! sound you heard in the night was from me, realizing that I'd inadvertently bought last year's calendar. Look up above at the image: The 2017 is pretty damn obvious, isn't it? And ... it was JANUARY 9! I didn't exactly catch on quickly, did I?

I cursed Amazon, from whom I'd bought it.

Checked my Amazon order. Learned that I had, indeed, ordered the 2017 calendar. Oops.

So I can't even return it, can't feel indignant, can't feel the comforting surge of umbrage against a vast corporation, can't ...

... blame anyone except myself.

So ... I (humbly) ordered the 2018 one. Should be here in a day or so.

And then I will be able to join Rip Van Winkle in achieving, eventually, some ... comfort.

I Finally Slept, and Then I Dreamed ...

Joan Didion
&
John Gregory Dunne

Last night it took me awhile to convince Morpheus to embrace me, but he finally did, and sometime during that embrace Joyce and I met writers John Gregory Dunne and his wife, Joan Didion.

We were at some kind of event--plein air--and the two of them, middle-aged at the time--were holding forth about something and having a grand old time of it. They teased each other about computers. He said he had two of them; she said she had her mother's computer. [Don't even begin to ask me what that's about!]

As I think of it now, there were very few people there--a somewhat generic urban setting.

Then they began to leave, and I said to Joyce, let's go introduce ourselves! We trotted (!) after them, and they slowed only a bit. I told her I used to review books for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. She said something that indicated she knew that the PD did not publish many reviews nowadays.

I told her I still reviewed a book a week for Kirkus Reviews.

She said, "Oh, I hear they have some very good people."

To which Witty I replied, "Just one that I know of."

They both laughed, and she told me I should review for her publication, Blue Verizon.

I asked if that were a publication for people depressed about their smart phones.

She smiled, and they danced away.

And then they were gone, and Joyce and I were walking across Randolph Avenue in downtown Enid, Oklahoma, where I grew up in the 1940s and 50s. We were not using a crosswalk, just in the middle of the wide busy street. I was attending to my iPhone, looking up Blue Verizon in a search engine.

A truck nearly ran us over. Stopped. The driver gestured impatiently. (But not obscenely: I dream clean!)

And then we were on the sidewalk, and we entered an antiquarian bookshop. I headed for the periodicals, hoping to find a copy of Blue Verizon.

I was looking through the stacks when I woke up with the certainty that I'd misheard Joan Didion: Surely she had said Blue Horizon!

**

I have little idea about where that dream came from. Joyce and I did recently watch that Netflix documentary about Didion (The Center Will Not Hold), and both Joyce and I have read a lot of her work--and I read some of Dunne's novels, too, back in the day. He's been dead since December 30, 2003 (he was 71), and Didion is now 83 years old.

I have had other dreams about meeting famous writers--from Norman Mailer to William F. Buckley Jr.--but nothing as detailed and intimate as this one.

If the events in the dream had actually happened, of course, Joyce would hardly have been a supporting player, the role my Dreaming Self assigned her. (It seems that even in sleep I can be a jerk.) But it's kind of weird, isn't it, apologizing for events in a dream?

But I'll say I'm sorry anyway ...

Flu Flies Back

The flu, annoyed (apparently) with my previous post (about how the flu had flown), swooped back in for a return engagement the past few days, sitting on my shoulder, chirping snidely, taking occasional bites out of my face and ego.

I'm feeling better today (Monday), but I will not say a thing about that Evil Avian (all right, you can delete that Evil part ... J/K) for fear that he/she/it will flap back with more crap for me to endure.

I've been out of the house just once since late last week, and that was yesterday (Sunday) when Joyce and I made a swift and desperate run to the grocery store to replenish our dwindling supplies. She, too, has been struggling with the Evil Avian (and she loves all other birds). That forty-five minutes at the grocery wore me out so thoroughly that I dozed and napped most of the rest of the day.

This morning, though (with a temperature in the balmy low 30s), I decided I was going to make my customary trek over to Open Door Coffee Co., which I did, wondering all the way if a Certain Bird were hovering near, waiting for a chance to flutter back and take a few more bites of my face.

But, no, not so far ...

I was at the shop from about 7-9:30 (my usual time). I read the Times, read 50 pp of The Portrait of a Lady, a novel I'm re-reading because I so much loved the recent sequel, John Banville's Mrs. Osmond. Portrait is a long novel--and I still have about 100 pages to go, even though I've read, oh, 10,000 or so.

It's the kind of text that forces a reader to go slowly. Sometimes I will turn a page and will see, on the two subsequent pages now revealed to me, that there are no paragraph breaks--no conversation---nothing to make the two-page journey, well, easy--or, in current jargon, "reader friendly."

And so I take a deep breath, tell my eyeballs to be patient, and on I go, advancing limb by limb along James' tangled tree, eventually arriving somewhat nearer the trunk. And (I hope) wiser for having done so.

I turn the page.

No paragraph breaks ... deep breath ...

Actually, I'm glad I'm able to take a deep breath at all this Monday morning. For the past few days any deep breath has been followed immediately by a hacking sound from my chest--and by a proud cackle from that nearby Evil Bird that flu back into my life for a few days--as if I need yet another reminder of human fragility and mortality!

PS--And, yes, I did get a flu shot this year--as I have done every year for the past few decades. First time I've had the flu since I began the injections back in the 1990s.

Has the Flu Flown?

Oh, what a week Joyce and I have had! Last Wednesday or Thursday, Joyce began hacking and coughing and pondering whether the next breath was really worth the effort. I ran errands, tried to comfort her--the same that she does for me when I am down.

And then ... Friday morning ... I awoke with a certainty that she and I were now, well, bedfellows. I called my physician's group, and they worked me in right away. Probably flu, they said. Have a nice day.

I didn't.

Friday was horrible. Ditto Saturday. Sunday sucked. And I have to say that it really helped our mental health to look outside and see some of the coldest, nastiest weather ... Nome outside our Home.

Slowly, we emerged. Last Thursday, as I said, I ran some errands, but after they were over, I did not leave the house again (except for that Friday a.m. trip to the doctor) until Tuesday.

Meanwhile--to add to the joy--all the scheduling for my upcoming immunotherapy got screwed up, and we had to reschedule everything--and this morning (Wed.), bright and early, I headed out to the local medical lab for a blood draw to start the bloodball rolling.

On Tues., Jan. 16, I will go to the Akron Red Cross to have my blood drained (Dracula is on call), the T-cells removed, my blood returned, my T-cells flown to Atlanta, where they will (we hope) acquire super powers; then on Fri., January 19, down to the main campus of Seidman Cancer Center in University Circle, where my now-magic blood will be reinfused.

A week's rest; repeat the whole thing.

A week's rest; repeat the whole thing.

Five weeks in all. And we're just hoping that the weather cooperates (it's been so cooperative so far this New Year) so that planes are not grounded and that roads are open from Hudson to University Circle and that hungry yeti are not surrounding stuck cars.

We're of course hoping the T-cells will kick some cancer butt--at least for a while (there is no cure for me, not yet).

We're hoping that Dracula's teeth are very very sharp so that the blood-letting and -returning will proceed no more eerily than necessary.

In middle school, more than 30 years ago, our son played Dracula in a school production that I directed (no, there was no nepotism!). So ... I'm hoping that's a good omen, having a Dracula in the family?

One Way a Book Can Mean More

Joyce and I are long-time subscribers to the Library of America, buying each month's volume as it comes out--and buying most of their special volumes, as well. We did not join right away, so some of our volumes are not first printings, and when I discover one that is not, I hop online and find a replacement. Usually not too expensive.

This past week, for example, I decided to re-read Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady (1881) because I so much enjoyed John Banville's recent sequel--Mrs. Osmond (2017). But when I removed the relevant James volume* from its slipcover and looked inside, I discovered it was a later printing--not the original from 1985. Sigh.

I got online and looked for a nice copy--and found one for about $30 that offered a special surprise. It bore a book stamp on an inside page:

That's right--Gore Vidal (1925-2012), one of the writers I have most enjoyed reading throughout my life.

I've read almost all of Vidal's books--novels, essays, memoirs, plays. I say "almost" because he wrote so many things that I'm not positive I've read everything. But it's not for lack of trying.

One of the things that amuses me about him is that we shared a fascination with (obsession over?) Billy the Kid. Vidal wrote a TV script, "The Death of Billy the Kid," which aired on The Philco Television Playhouse on NBC, July 24, 1955. The Kid was Paul Newman, who would reprise his role as the Kid in a film I've long loved, The Left Handed Gun (1958), a film directed by Arthur Penn, who would go on to fame when he did Bonnie and Clyde (1967). The film was based (loosely) on Vidal's play, and he does get a modest screen credit in the film. I showed it in my middle-school classes a few times. (Link to film trailer.)

Later, in 1989, Vidal would return to the Kid, writing a TV movie, Billy the Kid, which starred Val Kilmer and appeared on TNT. It isn't all that good, but--hey!--it's about the Kid! That's good enough for me! (Full film is now on YouTube.)

I own a few other books with some secondary as well as primary interest. One of the most interesting is David S. Reynolds' biography Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. In the copy I have now, Reynolds has inscribed the book to poet Mary Oliver (from the Cleveland area), and the book features Oliver's marginalia and marks.

Well, Reynolds came to the Hudson Library on October 13, 2011, to talk about his new book about Harriet Beecher Stowe. Afterward, he graciously signed some books for us--and when I told him about the copy I had of Whitman, he was (says my journal) "delighted." So ... I now have his signature on his book about Whitman, a book he'd given to Mary Oliver, who'd read and marked in it, then, apparently sold it!

Books like these--Vidal's copy of James, Mary Oliver's copy of Reynolds--have a special significance. They almost glow on the shelf, inviting me, each time I pass by, to return to them. And so--today--I have.


*The Lib of America has published more than a dozen different collections of James’ work.

A Quiet Christmas Day

We had our "Christmas" on Christmas Eve. Our son, Steve, and his family (wife, Melissa; sons Logan (12) and Carson (8)) came up a little after 5 pm for supper and ripping open of gifts. Joyce roasted a lovely tenderloin roll, and we also had some Dyer-Family traditional fare: a Christmas tree-bread, some steamed pudding (from my Grandmother Osborn's recipe--a concoction so sweet that your teeth form cavities as you merely look at it).

We also sang--as my family always did--"Joy to the World" just before we ate, and later in the meal we all recited "A Visit from St. Nicholas" ("The Night before Christmas"), a fairly recent tradition. We took turns with lines and stanzas.

I had memorized that poem back in elementary school for a school holiday event, and, years later, decided I wanted it back in my head. Didn't take too long. I've discovered that re-learning things you once memorized is a pretty quick enterprise.

After the meal, we headed into the living room and the gas fireplace (!!), opening and laughing and loving the whole thing. Far more fun to give than to receive these latter years.

Steve, et al. soon zoomed away (miles to go before they slept) a bit later, and Joyce and I got at least a start on the clean-up (it still continues!).

On Christmas morning, Joyce and I slept till 7 (late for us). We got dressed and had our own little gift exchange. We had agreed to give each other only a single thing, a book, so she gave me the next novel in Jennifer Egan's oeuvre (A Visit from the Goon Squad, 2011--a Pulitzer Prize-winner, signed! I'm on a journey through all of Egan's work), and I gave her Paul Auster's recent novel 4 3 2 1, which Joyce had loved (1st printing, signed). Nerd Fun!

We also had co-purchased a new Cuisinart blender (our old one was making death rattles).

Then we drove over to Starbucks, read the newspapers, read from our books. Then an exciting trip to the gas station.

Home, I promptly headed up for a nap that consumed some two hours! Joyce worked in her study.

A late, nap-delayed lunch. I did a little work in my study, then felt yet another nap coming on. Yielded to it. When I woke, I went to the back bedroom adjoining Joyce's study and found her also in the arms of Morpheus. I lay down beside her, and we talked for an hour while Morpheus lingered a bit to see if we still required his services; we didn't. A wonderful hour.

We had a light supper (leftovers!), then drove to the Kent Cinema to see Downsizing, which was a real surprise (in a good way): The trailers we'd seen had all suggested it was going to be a frivolous comedy with major roles for Kirsten Wiig and Jason Sudeikis. Nope. They turned out to be minor characters, and the brew of the story was quite different from the froth we had expected. More in "Sunday Sundries" here in a few days.

Back from the movie, we streamed a little Broadchurch, then noticed Morpheus had joined us in bed. Lights out ...