Larry Goodell reads "A DANCE AGAIN for Lee Connor and the Danzantes"

A DANCE AGAIN
for Lee Connor and the Danzantes

We danced we did
we danced the did did dance
the dance we did dance in the did
we did the dance indeed we did
the did & done & dead with dance
the dance done in, we did it in
we did it in the dance we did
the did did dance and done we did
the dance again & did the whole thing in
we did it in we did the dance
and did it in we danced it dead
until it twisted
danced and did it back again
we danced it in and did it in
and brot it back to dance again
we brot it in and danced a sin until it sings
we danced it in and out again
and did we dance? did we dance?
did we dance it in again?
until it sings? until it sung?
until the song sang again
we danced a din and danced a sing
song again we did a dance
and danced we did
we did a dance a dance we did
again we did a dance again
again we didn’t dance again
we stopped and didn’t dance the dance
was done we did it dance and all
the ball was over dance & hall
we did a dance once and for all
we did a did and done dance and did
the dance we did again.
And did we dance again
and did we dance again.

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I videoed Larry Goodell reading “And Dance Again” at his and Lenore’s (photographer and painter) home in Placitas, New Mexico, cupped in the Sandia Mountains above Albuquerque. It was the morning after the tribute for Keith Wilson. I was tired, but Larry still had that flaco-man exuberance that he should bottle and sell. I did two videos, the first of a recent poem which I will post at a later date. For that one he put on an exotic yellow Hawaiian shirt. When I asked him to do a performance of “And Dance Again” he changed into the equally exotic red Hawaiian shirt. He had to do the poem a couple of times before he was satisfied with the performance. He was discombobulated at first because he wants to look at his audience when he reads, but the dance poem--with all of its repetition and rhyme--demands full attention to the page.

I asked him to read the dance poem for a number of reasons. I had seen him perform it in the 1980s at the Kimo Theatre in downtown Albuquerque with Lee Connor dancing along gracefully beside him. It was a wonderful collaborative performance, something which took both of them a long time to rehearse, especially considering the entire performance was probably 2 or 3 minutes long at the most. Lee Connor had told Larry that he had to read the poem exactly as rehearsed—the rhythms and beats, the length of the lines, the intonation of the words. Nothing could deviate because the way the dance was choreographed depended precisely on Larry’s reading. If Larry’s reading deviated from the rehearsal even the tiniest bit, then it fractured the dance. But also I asked Larry to let me record the piece because we were staying in the home and studio that Lee Connor and his partner Lorn MacDougal had built for themselves in the 1980s. They were both very well known dancers in Manhattan but had tentatively moved to New Mexico for peace and space. They only lived there a few years. In September 1987 Lee Connor died in that house of AIDS. Poet and painter JB Bryan, who owns the house now, says you can feel Lee Connor’s presence in the house. I agree. And in the downstairs bedroom there’s a broadside of Larry’s poem and a photograph Lee Connor dancing. It’s an image of ecstasy.

The great thing about Larry (I’ve known him since the mid-1960s) is that he’s always been Larry and over all these years he’s evolved into Larry-squared. His poetics is a mixture of wild-eyed 1960s-New Mexico gringo shamanism, improvisational rhyming and punning, political and cultural cynicism and ribald wit. Larry is a cornerstone of what Ron Silliman likes to call “the New Western poetics.” Larry certainly does his own thing and he’s all about “local,” the very present, and he dismisses the academy and writing programs like flu bugs. If he could, he’d invent a vaccination against the disease. He believes in the goodness of the earth, he’s a misanthrope, especially when it comes to the American experience, and as a gardener he’ll sit on his back porch with Lenore and commiserate about the weather and the locusts and the rain or the lack of rain and the rich people moving into his “fervent valley” driving up the goddamn prices of everything from tomatoes to the blessed land. He loves to perform his poetry (that's how he thinks as he writes: as performance) but ironically does not perform that much. Used to be back in the day he’d spend days creating elaborate costumes of wings and masks and dildos and robes. He’s put those aside now for the most part but he’s still a fun and remarkable performer. He and Lenore have become expert gardeners and householders and raisers of chickens. Every year they host a Summer Solstice Party so today they will be celebrating the longest day of the year, welcoming the turning of the year their in the village of Placitas.

Lee Byrd (excuse me but too many “Lee’s” in this blog, so I need to differentiate) and I and our good friends Jane and Steve Sprague went to one of Summer Solstice parties in Placitas back in the 70s. Or maybe it was Larry’s birthday party. I can’t remember. What I do remember is when finally the night came, Larry dressed himself up in a wild shaman costume and he stood outside in the darkness and whirred a bullroarer around his head. He had built some kind of maze of stone and he was dancing. Dancing and chanting and invoking the goddess. We were all drunk probably. Or stoned. Or some kind of combination. At least Steve and I. Like always, the stars in Placitas were extravagant and the night was making animal sound and insect sound and wind sound. Surely the goddess had to listen to Larry. I certainly listened. And when we said goodbye Larry kissed me full on the lips. He was the first man ever to kiss me on the lips. He gave the same favor to Steve and Jane and Lee. It was some kind of initiation I guess. It was okay.

So this is sort of a Happy Summer Solstice card for Lenore and Larry.

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The Sandoval Signpost did a nice piece about Larry and Lenore with several of Lenore’s photographs and a photograph of them together in their garden. But a better place to see both of their work is at The Santa Fe Poetry Broadside—for Larry’s poems and for Lenore’s photographs. Don’t miss Lenore’s wonderful portrait of Larry as shadow. Also, you can buy two of Larry’s books--Firecracker Soup at Cinco Puntos Press and Here on Earth from La Alameda Press. Below is a photograph of Larry, replete with rat tails and ears and goggle-eyed glasses and moustache, performing “White Rat Generation” from Firecracker Soup.


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Thinking about Placitas and the poetry of what Ron Silliman calls "the New Western poetics," I realize I need to write something about that too. Hopefully soon. One thing to the next. It's fun for me. Stay tuned.

Tribute to Keith Wilson

Last Sunday the Duende Poetry Series in Placitas, NM, hosted a tribute for the poet Keith Wilson. Keith, now 80 years old, is frail and in poor health, following a series of strokes. He understands what others are saying but is not capable of making simple sentences or even words without enormous struggle. It's a terrible sickness for a poet. And to make matters worse, the day before the event he had to begin using a walker. The hosts were kind enough to ask me to introduce the event. I was honored. Below is my tribute to Keith that I wrote for the occasion. In an aferword following, I'll say more about the event, the Duende Poetry Series and its organizers.


A TRIBUTE TO KEITH WILSON
Duende Poetry Series
Placitas, New Mexico
Sunday, June 15, 2008


Welcome, as Jerome Rothenberg would say, to the Paradise of Poets. Welcome, as Gertrude Stein might say, to the continuous now of poetry. We are here today to honor poet Keith Wilson, and by our presence, the radiant beast of poetry survives. We nourish her by making our poems, we nourish her by reading the poems of others, by hearing aloud the poems of others, by buying books of poems and by sharing these poems and talking about these poems and the poetics that we discover in these poems.

It’s a peculiar idea, thinking of poetry as a creature of biology, an ethereal animal made of words and ideas and rhythms of language and culture. An animal that was birthed in the chants and drumbeats of our collective pre-history and which continues to breathe the air of our contemporary wanderings through, and experiments with, our language. I began learning about this idea when I was school at the University of Arizona in Tucson, 1963 to 1965. Keith and Heloise Wilson were kind enough to invite me into their home and there I discovered a household of poetry. It was a unique place. The idea of poetry and art as community and as a continuous thread of understanding seeped into my mind and heart. In Tucson that community of poetry was centered in the Wilson household. I met Bob Creeley, Gary Snyder, Robert Sward, Barney Childs, Paul Malanga, Drummond Hadley, Diana Hadley, George Bowering and so many others. We talked about poetry, especially about the poetry that rooted itself in Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Charles Olson--the New American Poetry as anthologized by Donald Allen. Keith was a role model. He always had at his side his notebook where he was working on his poems. I listened to Keith’s early work in manuscript and saw him rejoice when Gino Sky and Drew Wagnon, editors of the mimeographed little magazine Wild Dog, decided to publish a poem, his first publication. I remember Keith being enthralled with Jack Spicer’s work. He borrowed books and typed them up, duplicating the format of the book and creating his own librito, doing a mockup of the cover. The practice he told me was to feel the words and to learn how and why Spicer broke his lines the way he did. He typed other poems and books he admired. He was obsessed with his writing, and his obsession was contagious. He was, like for so many of us, a role model of what a poet is. It was a wonderful time, and I learned so much, being in that community which so much created by the presence of Keith and Heloise. In the 70s, when Jerome Rothenberg began to publish his anthologies and theorizing about the life of poetry, I knew immediately what he was talking about. It made perfect sense.

That was over 40 years ago now. So much has happened. Keith and Heloise, with their children--Kathy, Kristin, Kevin and Kerrin (aka Turtle)--moved their household and their menagerie of dogs and cats and yes friends to Las Cruces. Keith became an important teacher of poetry at New Mexico State and his presence there attracted other poets. Las Cruces became an outpost of the New American poetics, and Keith’s poetry became a cornerstone of contemporary New Mexico and southwestern poetry. Indeed, the poetry of our nation. We have all benefited in our own ways from the work he has done, the way his life of poems evolved and fed the beast. And during all of that time the Wilson household has continued to be a center of poetry. Many hours I have sat around that dining table on Locust and talked and laughed and argued and hooted about people and ideas and poems and family and about sorrow. The core of those hours and days was always poems. For me I cannot separate Keith and his poems from that kitchen table; I cannot separate Keith and his poems from the community of poetry that he and Heloise have fostered in their lives. I would not be standing here without the presence of Keith and Heloise in my life. This is the Paradise of Poets. The continuous now of poetry survives. Like Keith we write ours poems in the flow of this unending history. We write in the margins of our culture, we are ignored, but that is okay somehow. Our work somehow survives in the language, in the way the culture experiences the world. And we are doing what we love to do.


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The Tribute to Keith was a wonderful event emceed by the poet Larry Goodell. This event followed one held earlier in the year in Las Cruces and hosted by the Sin Fronteras Reading Series. Both were emotionally exhausting, but quite different, probably because the Duende event was held in the nice open air ramada of the Anazazi Winery in Placitas. People mostly came from Albuquerque, Las Cruces, Santa Fe, El Paso and Tucson. Heloise Wilson, Keith’s wife of all these years, read a series of poems that Keith had dedicated to their children (Kristin, Kevin and Kerrin were present, along with three grandchildren). She was followed by a great group of poets and friends and family, all telling stories and reading their favorite Keith Wilson poems—poets Leo Romero, E.A. Tony Mares, David Johnson, Karen McKinnon, Wayne Crawford, Dick Thomas, Gary Brower, Larry Goodell, JB Bryan, son Kevin Wilson and daughter Kristin Wilson, ecologist Peter Warshall and others I may have (forgive me) forgotten. After it was over Keith seemed stunned and in a strange but exhausted ecstasy. Readers and listeners, once done, felt likewise. Friends were crying openly and hugging each other. The community of poets and poetry and art can sometimes be so wonderful. Luckily, Larry and Lenore hosted a huge potluck dinner. Their house was crowded with people and kids. The dogs wagged their tails, the fish swam in the pond, the chickens stayed in their coop, the sun was shining bright, the food was delicious and too much, likewise the wine and the beer. My gosh.

The Duende Poetry Series is old school 1960s stuff organized by survivors of those times—Larry and Lenore Goodell, JB and Cirrelda Bryan, Gary Brower and others who throw in their support from time to time. With a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation, they have hosted a variety of events, including a memorial reading for Bob Creeley (he had lived in Placitas back in the day when he was teaching at UNM), Acoma poet Simon Ortiz reading with his two daughters Rainy and Sara Marie, a performance by the great old time folk fusion Bayou Seco band (aka Jeannie McLearie and Ken Keppler plus all their assorted friends along with a cornucopia of instruments), and others.


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A note about this tribute I wrote for Keith: So much of what I do (especially my poetry and tasks at hand like this tribute) seems to me like luck (good, bad or indifferent) mixed with improvisation. Or vice versa. JB and Larry had asked me a month or so ago to do something to introduce Keith and so I've been thinking about it. I had been thinking about Jerome Rothenberg's anthologies, his sense of the ongoing body of poetry as a living being. I've always loved his work, especially his and George Quasha's anthology, America, A Prophecy, the first and probably only anthology I read from beginning to end like one reads a novel, so I had been looking for my beatup copy of the book to re-read the introduction. (I first met Rothenberg at Keith and Heloise's house after a wonderful reading at NMSU in Las Cruces--his reading of the poem "All the world needs is a 5-cent cigar" was an important event for me, helped me look differently about the way I go about poetry.) Then on the Ron Silliman blog I saw the link to the discussion of Jerry's poem "A Paradise of Poets"--hosted by Al Filreis and featuring poets Randall Couch, Bob Holman and Jessica Lowenthal--at the Poetry Foundation website. Then soon afterward Jerry sent out an email announcing his new blog, so I simply riffed off that stuff. That's how poetry works, I think. At least for me. That's what Rothenberg has been saying all of these years.

In the next week or so I'll have more about Keith and his work. Hopefully, Joe Somoza will allow me to publish his introduction to the first tribute for Keith held in Las Cruces. His was more biographical, especially in discussing how Keith developed a poetics fit to the occasion of his own voice. I also have a couple of nice videos of Larry reading poems. Stay tuned.

Stop Talking

(Note: If you’re not interested in Zen Buddhism and its practice in America, then you might as well skip over this entry. I got the title for this post at the Book Soup Bookstore on Sunset Blvd. I was buying a book for my journey home, and a little stack of elegant cards were right next to the cash register. “Stop Talking,” one said simply and plainly. Yeah, I thought, that’s what I want to say.)

This last weekend Johnny Byrd and I were in Los Angeles for the big Book Expo. Saturday Johnny let me have the morning off. I drove to Santa Monica to sit with Brad Warner and his sangha. I love Brad’s books--Hard Core Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up. They’ve both been important to my own practice, and I look forward to his third which he says should be out by Xmas. Brad in his writing and his dharma talks speaks in an young iconoclastic punked-up American lingo that’s refreshing. He received transmission from Gudo Wafu Nishijima, and like his teacher he’s a Dogen scholar. (A nice portrait of Dogen below. I snatched it from wikipedia, but I couldn't find any information about it.) Brad's writing is wise and he writes a fun read. His sangha meets at 627 Hill Street, a few blocks from the beach, in a small green house that they rent from the church next door. It’s rich with zabutons and zafus and empty of furniture and ready for non-action. I was rushing because I didn’t want to be late. Not to worry. Brad’s Sangha is the most laid back of the laid back. I should have expected that, no? Brad and his folks (mostly musicians, it seemed) talked about music and making music while we waited for the last few members to straggle in barefoot for Saturday morning zazen. The gist of the conversation was music, hip and witty and iconoclastic. As the time passed, the chatter got old and I got antsy. I didn’t know or much care what they were talking about. I had come to sit and to listen to a dharma talk.

My limited experience has showed me that Zen meditation groups are all different one from the other. Zensters are always talking about “American Zen”--what is it? Maybe American Zen is about diversity. Like Pentecostal churches. Whoever starts a Sangha, defines a Sangha. Time and our history will certainly show us who we are, so perhaps documenting our experiences is a good thing. Like Hansel and Gretel, leaving a trail to come home by.

The nicest thing about the Hill Street Group was I was easily the oldest person there. By 15 years at least (I’m 66). I read somewhere that, in analyzing age demographics of Zen in America, the average practitioner is getting old. So many of us are the children of the 50s and 60s, the generation of reading too much Kerouac and Gary Snyder and D.T. Suzuki and Allen Watts and lusting after enlightenment like it was another drug to be gulped down. But not on Hill Street. The Zensters that morning were mostly in their 20s and 30s, four men in their 40s (including Brad), and Grace a nice take-charge woman maybe a little bit older. A very young sangha it seemed. But I had expected the youngish nature of the sangha. Brad, who is is in his early 40s, is an ex-punk rocker and that experience and Japanese horror movies (that’s how he earned his living in Japan) are the metaphors and language through which he writes his books. Hip and cool. Good for a paragraph or so in Malcolm Gladwell’s next book. Total count was 13 or 14 people including me. Four were women, Grace and three others. That was the Sangha’s demographics--young, 30% women, 85% white, mostly hip and middle-class, electronic-punk-&/or-alternative-rock musically inclined. And, except for the women (thank God for women in a zendo), they talked a lot.

Grace seemed happiest to see me, the old fart with the goofy hat walking through the front door. Maybe it was because I am older, but I think really it was because she is just a very nice person. Zen does that to you somehow. It's not a promise or anything. It just happens. I guess other disciplines can make the same statement. Grace was in charge of the altar--a small wooden table with a tiny Buddha, a bowl with sand for the incense sticks and a beautiful lush pale-purplish orchid. The service was bare-bone too. After the stragglers had all wandered in and the musicspeak evaporated, Brad gave a short introduction of sitting for me and another man who had never sat with them before--a bow to your zafu, a bow to the sangha and then meditation. A 30 minute sit staring at the wall, a 10-minute kinhin (walking meditation) and a 30 minute sit. No sutra sheets, no Heart Sutra in English or Japanese, no Three Treasures, no chanting at all. Brad simply bowed to the altar, lit the incense and rang the smallish and frugal bell--bong, bong, bong.

The meditation was great. My small piece of the wall was off-white plaster and decorated with a window. At least a corner of a window. White enamel. A white curtain that fluttered in the little bit of ocean breeze. Outside green shiny leaves of some kind of lush California bush. Nice smells. Car sounds. Every once in a while some chatter from down on the big street. I very much appreciated sitting in that room with those people. It was good and strong. And then I got lost in the sitting. Sweet. I liked the 30 minute sits. At our small El Paso sangha and at the Las Cruces Zen Center the meditation period is somewhere between 20 and 25 minutes. When I’m in charge I worry that longer periods will be too much. People won’t want to come back. But of course very few ever do anyway. I shouldn’t worry. Zen is like that. If you don’t want to sit and be silent, you shouldn’t be coming anyway.

When we were done, Brad, Grace and another man who was wearing a black t-shirt with the ironic statement “Tu Eres un Pendejo /You are a good friend” (not a good t-shirt to wear in El Paso), went off to get us tea and crackers. While we waited, the chatter started up again. Punk music. Electronic music. Alternative music. Hip and cool spiced with a bit of cynicism. Very attached to their non-attachment. Too much. I was startled. Then a bit disgruntled. I enjoy so much the quiet time after sitting. I stretch and look around and feel the room and try to remember what the hell I’m doing sitting on a zafu in the first place. But it seemed that a few of the young men in the the Hill Street Sangha came for the talk and the sitting was a preparation for the talking. I read a book once--SIT DOWN AND SHUT-UP! Who wrote that book? Oh, yeah, Brad did.

Brad, tell them to sit down and shut up.

The tea and cookies were served with little or no ceremony. No bowing, no formalities--take a cracker and hold your cup out for the hot tea. And after a few sips Brad started to talk. He welcomed me and the other newcomer. The conversation wandered to this and that before settling on the question of what Brad was to do about teaching elsewhere. One guy in the corner stretched out on the floor. More tea was poured. Seems another punk guru Noah Levine, the author of Dharma Punx, had asked Brad to speak at his zendo on a regular base. Seems he gets tons of people. Brad not so many. Like today, only 13, counting the migrating old fart. We all commiserated that people won’t go out of their way to be Buddhists. The priest needs to be on the doorstep: otherwise, The Eight-fold Noble Path and all the enlightenment candy can wait. Being a loudmouth myself, I tossed in a couple of pennies about my growing up. Brad talks about this question on his own blog in a post called Spiritual Schwag. To be honest, I didn’t care what Brad was deciding. I only get to L.A. once or twice a year. So it's his business. I live in El Paso. I listened for a while but my work was calling. I said thank you, bowed and slipped out the front door. The ocean coolness felt so good on my skin, and the greenery is so beautiful. I missed El Paso, the few people I sit with.

So, was my trip to the Hill Street Sangha worth it? Very much so. The sitting was great. It’s hard to sit anywhere for an hour on a business trip. And I got to think about my own practice. I can do without the robes and Japanese names (mine is Hen shin) and much of the ritual. I like the silence, the sitting and being silent with others. It's very special. And I very much missed the chanting that we do in our small sangha (the Heart Sutra, the Three Refuges, the Four Great Vows). The repetition of those words is a meditation. Yes, many times I am asleep to their meaning, but other times, unexpectedly, they can reverberate deep inside me. Maybe I’m a Zen prude, but I don’t think I’m a Zen prude. Maybe being raised up in Memphis on Little Richard and James Brown made me different from these guys being raised up on punk rock in California or Cleveland. I don’t know. But I do take seriously the silence of a zendo. It’s certainly more important than taking off your shoes and socks and bowing back and forth like a bird on a wire.

I enjoy all of it. The laid back dharma, the formal dharma. It’s a good exercise. But if you want to talk, fine. Go outside and talk. Just let me sit down. I promise you--I’ll shut up.

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My friend JB Bryan’s poem “PRACTICE” is appropriate here. His publishing company, La Alameda Press, did a wonderful broadside of the poem which hangs over my desk, thanks to my wife and Luis Villegas, the fine arts handyman who is our friend.

PRACTICE

a body such as this body
tosses back its antlers &
spins them like a propeller

skull finally work
iris, planet, sun
I won’t spend a dime

Great Faith
Great Doubt
Great Effort

O the universe has a wit
easily tasted in green leaves
boiled with water

what’s the bloodstream?
but a river of huge loves &
thunderous flowers of combustion!

be sure to practice everyday

Bo Diddley done had a farm

Johnny Byrd and I were in Los Angeles over the weekend for the Book Expo of America (aka BEA). I’ll write about that craziness later. Per usual, we didn’t try to get a hotel room until late, but I pricelined.com a decent rate at the West Hollywood Hyatt Hotel. It’s smackdab in the middle of Sunset Strip. Aka Sodom and Gomorrah, as Johnny said. It’s a decent place, the noise factor is not bad and the price wss right. Besides, they put us on the 11th floor with a window overlooking Sunset and downtown L.A.--a very good place to think about America.

Down the street is Mel’s Drive-In Restaurant, a retro-50s place where every morning Johnny and I ate our breakfast. Mel’s has good food and a wonderful jukebox. Every morning I got swamped with memories of the music of my Memphis growing up. I even wrote the prose poem (not to worry, it’s still in draft) that I’m pasting below. Friday morning, our first morning for the BEA, the jukebox played Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man,” along with some James Brown and Gene Chandler’s “The Duke of Earl.” Four mornings I listened to that kind of music while I sopped my toast and potatoes in the gooey yellows of my over-easy eggs. Listening to those old songs made me start remembering how that music changed my growing up. So by Monday morning I was ready for the news--Bo Diddley had bought his ticket to the other side.



I saw Bo Diddley perform twice in Memphis, once at the legendary Clear Pool Inn and later, in 1957 or 58, at the Armory on Central Avenue. Both times I was with my friend Jimmy Walker. We had our ritual, just like Bo Diddley. We started off slow and listened and drank whatever booze we had at hand and by 11pm when the band was really getting hot, Bo Diddley banging away at his bizarre square guitar and singing about Bo Diddley having a farm or being a man, we would be pretty well soused and dancing and sweaty. We climbed on the stage and danced with him and his band. Others followed us up. Even a few girls, which was strange for back then. The band was cool with it, they wanted the crowds to go nuts. And we did. We danced until Bo Diddley sent us home with the peculiar anthem of our adolescence:

Oh, when the saints…
Oh, when the saints…

Oh, when the saints go marching in
Oh, when the saints go marching in
Lord, how I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in

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Baby, want you drive my car?
Baby, I’m gonna be a star…

Monday morning, June 2 2008, and I was at Mel’s Diner on the Sunset Strip for breakfast. Two eggs over easy, toast and potatoes, coffee, 1950s retro. The jukebox played Earth Angel, Earth Angel, will you be mine? It was a summertime backyard Friday night party. A box with a big stack of 45 rpm records was dangling at the end of a long extension cord. A pretty girl in a white shirt and pink shorts sat next to it, guarding the music from her parents. I was dancing with Julie somebody. We were 14 years old together. I had at least two JAX beers in my belly. Jimmy and I had stashed some more in the front yard bushes. Julie was pressing up against my body, her thighs leaning into mine. Surely she knew. The parents were watching. They didn’t like the music, and they didn’t like us kids dancing like this. They worried that we had broken the code. We were going places they didn’t want us to go. The huge Memphis trees were black holes in that darkness. The lightning bugs, the lightning bugs—the chemicals had not eradicated them yet. And the stars and surely some kind of moon. I was sweating and happy. We were all white kids but Bo Diddley and Little Richard and James Brown were preaching the gospel. Why would I want to go to Korea? Why would I want to go to Vietnam? Now it was the Beatles on the jukebox. That’s another story. My coffee was done, the bill was $6.45 and my plane was leaving for El Paso at 2pm.

My darling dear, I will love you until the end of time.

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--in memory of Bo Diddley who died yesterday