On A Lovely Day in September

For the past few weeks, I’ve been posting YouTube videos of obscure and forgotten hits from previous decades on my personal Facebook page.  This week’s selection, Lovely Day by Bill Withers, deserves some explanation.  It’s the twelfth anniversary of 9/11, which started out as a lovely day in Little Rock, where I lived in 2001.  It’s rare for the weather in New York and Little Rock to be exactly the same, but it was a cloudless day there as well.  The stiffling, sticky heat of summer was gone.  It made the air feel lighter.  People want to get out on a day like that, but instead I sat in front of the TV, just like most Americans did.  Such an ugly thing wasn't supposed to happen on such a lovely day.  

At lunchtime, I needed to be around other people, so I walked a couple of blocks to the River Market, which was a small food court in a restored old building.  I took my lunch outside to one of the tables under a big pavillion where a farmers market is held on Saturdays.  On a sunny day like this, all the tourists and office workers out there would sound like a flock of birds chattering.  But there were only a few tables occupied by small groups of people with stunned expressions, speaking quietly.  I wondered if my face looked like that and I thought, "This is all wrong.  It should be cold and cloudy on a day like this.  The weather should match everyone's mood."

I worked in the Stephens Building.  At 40+ stories, it’s the second-tallest building in Arkansas.  It was evacuated and I had an unpaid day off.  That night was cool enough to have the windows open in my loft apartment at a busy intersection downtown, where the Main Street Bridge crosses the Arkansas River.  The quiet that night on the normally busy street was surreal.  A car passed once every fifteen or twenty minutes.  Remember, this was before Facebook and Twitter.  If you wanted to know what was going on, you had to watch TV.  CNN and all the major networks had live coverage.  We were all joined together by the common experience of watching and worrying.  

Fast forward to the Concert for New York City.  It was a fund-raising event for New York and a much-needed pep rally for everyone, featuring performances by musicians and speeches by New York’s finest and bravest.  The nation was united in a way I haven’t seen before and certainly not since.  The anger and sadness were palpable.  Some of the performances touched my soul.

They showed a video that I’ve thought of countless times since then.  It showed New Yorkers going about their day.  Some of them were smiling.  It showed the diversity and character of the city.  Watching it that night, I was lifted up by it.  I realized New York was going to be OK.  The country would be OK, too.  I thought the choice of Lovely Day was perfect for it.  I was in junior high in the late 70s when it was a hit.  At the time, I thought it was just OK, with no strong opinion of it.  Thanks to that video, I love the song.  

I invite you to stop what you’re doing and watch this.  Turn off all the TV, the stereo, and ignore all the noises from your smart phone.  Yes!  You can do this for the five minutes and 28 seconds it takes to watch this video.  Pay attention to it.  Let yourself be uplifted by it.  

UPDATE:  The video I wanted to share is now blocked, which is a sad thing because it could have uplifted so many.  I could view it a few days ago when I wrote this post and embedded the video, so the decision to block it was made in the past few days.  Here's another video of Lovely Day so you can at least hear it.  Maybe they will make the other vedeo available again in the future.

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My Youth (Circa 1986) Is Calling Me

It’s a quiet Saturday night and I want to get out.  The problem is all my friends are my age, which means too old to call up and say, “Let’s go out and find some excitement.”

Not only that, but I don’t think I have the energy to spend more than an hour anywhere tonight.  I don’t want to go out, but I don’t want to stay in.  So I just sit here feeling old.  I’ve been listening to music from the 80s on YouTube.  My youth is taunting me from the far side of a canyon 20+ years wide.  That little smartass.  I want him to shut up.  

Sometimes his bragging and boasting are pretty broad in scope.  Other times, he’s very specific about his exact location, mocking me with memories of it.  Tonight he’s shouting at me from 1986—a time when I felt especially bold and ready for a new adventure every day.  By early July, I’d been out of college a couple of months and in Tampa only a month.  That young version of me had no real plan, no idea what his next move would be.  But a fresh sheepskin and a wallet full of shiny credit cards keep that from bothering him.  These are his talismans, his shields from worry proof that he was a full-fledged adult.  He didn’t have these things only a few months earlier.  This was the time he dreamed of for four years.  Now he would savor it and take his place in the post-collegiate world..

Never mind that he doesn’t have much money and the humidity in Tampa is almost a hundred percent.  He’ll go out because it’s Saturday night and he’ll have so much fun it won’t matter that his clothes cling to him like they're afraid he'll go off and forget them at the nightclub or wherever else his whim might lead him.

If it’s July, 1986 he still loves the latest hit by Journey called Girl Can’t Help It.  It won’t end up being one of their biggest hits, but it will end up being his favorite song by them.  Maybe it was the steady, strong drum beat, like his steady, strong young heartbeat.  

He'd be deciding what to put on with his stereo turned up loud (to hell with the neighbors upstairs) playing his favorite Top 40 station, called Q Zoo.  Ironically, he's sliding into a pair of button fly Levi's 501s with a 28 inch waist and a madras shirt with the sleeves rolled up.  He surveys himself in a mirror and is quite please, thanks to his newfound habit of working out at a gym.  His confidence has seen a huge uptick.  This while We Don't Have to Take Our Clothes Off is on.  It seems this song is always on when he's getting dressed to go out or in the car headed out to prowl.

This song, World Destruction, might fill the dance floor.  He loves it and is pretty sure it isn't being played back in Arkansas.

He sees the movie Ruthless People and likes it as much as this Luther Vandross song from the soundtrack.

Maybe 1986 stands out so much because my body enderwent a bit of a makeover.  I found out i actually liked lifting weights and, even more surprising, it was working.  I heard this song, The Other Side of Life, alot at the gym.  It reminded me of what I was doing in Tampa.

By October, he's made several friends, almost all of them transplants from other states, just like himself.  There's a big street party in Ybor City at Halloween.  It's warm and people wear costumes leaving little to the imagination.  He spots several other young people, all with perfect bodies, dressed up (or maybe I should say down) as Baby New Year.  Twenty-two year old me has on old army pants, a green T-shirt, combat boots and a black bandana.  Rambo.  Word Up comes on and he climbs up on a 4-foot wall to watch the crowd dance in the intersection.  He sheds his inhibitions, along with his T-shirt, and carefully dances on the wall.  He feels free, alive, and fearless. 

Festivals, Fayetteville, and Roots

The Fayetteville Roots Festival is August 23-26.

It brings in live music, food, vendors, and is a celebration of Ozark Mountain culture.  And no, Ozark Mountain culture isn’t an oxymoron.  One of the great things about Fayetteville is that it embraces the future without abandoning its past.

For the majority of people now living in Northwest Arkansas, the roots don’t run deep yet.  For the most part, that’s a good thing.  It means this area has a healthy economy and people want to retire here or move here because it’s a great place to live.  All you have to do is travel east of Little Rock to see what the other side of that coin looks like.

For some of us, “Fayettevile roots” has a literal meaning.  I was born in the Missouri Ozarks and my parents came back here when I was a few months old.  Some of my early childhood was spent in the River Valley before my family returned here.  I grew up, for the most part, less than a mile from the U of A campus.  It was the 70s and early 80s, when Fayetteville was a notorious party town.  It did not escape my attention, but that's for another post.

My mother was born here.  My parents were married in a church just down the street from where she attended grade school.  They met in the 50s when they both worked on the square.  She worked at a dime store—one of the first handful owned by Sam Walton.  Right after they got married, they lived in some apartments on Meadow Street that, just like their marriage, have withstood the test of time.

My grandfather was a football star at Fayetteville High School in the 1930s.  The school won the state championship all three years he played for FHS.  His name is engraved on the sidewalk at Harmon Field with other winning team members throughout the years.  The “football jock” gene somehow didn’t get passed down to me.

But, my grandmother’s knack for telling a story did.

When I was a kid, she told me countless stories of what the area was like in the early 20^th century.  My favorite is about the Saturday her family rode in from Farmington after a rain.  Most people came to town to do their trading on Saturday.  It was the 1920s, before the square was paved.  Their wagon got stuck in the mud.  It’s pretty hard to imagine now.  It was hard to imagine back in the 70s when she told me that story.

These stories about my family and this area made one thing cliear: the two are intertwined, as impossible to separate from each other as vines of stubborn kudzu.

For me, going to the farmer’s market on the square to buy fresh, locally-grown produce feels like it’s in my DNA.  I’m a consumer.  Two generatons of my family were the producers and sold it to general stores downtown.  I can find a high point in town, look across the hills, and know they haven’t changed at all since since members of my family first saw them in the mid-1800s—no matter how much the buildings on them have.

The university has definitely helped make this town what it is today.  Enrollment jumped in the 60s and 70s when the Baby Boomers reached college age.  They helped make Dickson Street “funky” and cool.  After that, the city’s reputation was sealed.  Artsy, eclectic, creative, progressive, laid-back, fun, quirky Fayetteville was the perfect place for an artistically-inclined kid like me to grow up.  It had plenty of opportunities and was an accepting place for me to return to after losing part of my vision.  It’s always been fertile ground for the mind of the writer I was destined to become.

I love hearing newcomers say things like, “I didn’t know this was such a great place!” 

I just smile and say, “Yes, it is.”

But, it has been a great place for a long time.  Even my great-grandparents knew that.

 

The Newcomers Field Guide to Hill Folk, a humorous look at Northwest Arkansas, is now available in print AND ebook.  You don't have to be a newcomer to like it.  You might even recognize people you know.

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