Grave Robbing 101

As the temperatures start to dip up here and the leaves begin their yearly change of clothes, I am reminded of a story.

Forty-five years ago, a buddy of mine asked me to help him rob a grave.

I had been out of the Army for about a year and had nothing else going on in my life, so I said, "Sure. What the heck." Oh, how many unpleasantrys we begin with those words.

Actually, we had been kicking the idea around for a while; sitting in the basement of my parents old, rented Victorian style house in central New Hampshire; the room shrouded in Holmsian-like pipe smoke. Empty beer bottles stood in yeastey disarray on a blackish-brown, thick oak table.

I had gone through Kerouac, Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Jack Vances' "Dying Earth" lay, flaccid, on a leather covered chair, next to Leibers storys of Fafahrd and The Grey Mouser. "Mad" magazines lay scattered about.('Humor in a Jugular Vein') copies of "Help", and paper-backs of Harvey Kurtzmans' work were also were piled in the corners, along with 1940's editions of Life.

Plus, of course, strategically hidden Playboys.

Flamenco guitar music floated from my record player.

Oh yeah. And candles in empty chianti bottles. Lots of candles, usually lit. Even in the glare of a mid-summer day. We pulled the curtains.

So, anyway, Bill says. "I know a graveyard deep in the woods not too far from here". His eyes glittered. "Wouldn't it be cool to dig up an old skeleton and use the skull to put a candle on?" Copies of Poe leered at us from my bookshelves.

Now, the word 'ghoul' never entered my mind. 'Igor', perhaps. And even the possibility that morally we would be treading on the edge of gibbering madness. Nothing like that. Just......what fun to rob a grave!

So, nighttime came, and as I said, it was just about this time of year. Cool. Crisp. And Bill showed up in his red Volkswagen. A real Volkswagen. Not the tin-cup mirages they sell now-a-days. With shovels and picks in the back seat. And flashlights, equiped with red cellophane. "So as not to mess up our night vision." Bill said. He was the brains of the group.

Off we rattled into the early fall twilight, hearts gay, although we were straight. Out onto a backroad. Up into the foothills of the White Mountains we puttered as the darkness of a New England night bled accross the headlights. Oh, this was going to be fun! Thnk of what we can tell our friends, years from now.

The idea that we could be telling our friends from the inside of a jail-cell never crossed our minds.

"Hey, check this out." Bill reached down and turned off the headlights as we sped through the stygian (a word that is used by Leiber) New England darkness. There was a full moon that night. We were riding in a Volkswagen at about 60 miles an hour through twisting, impossible dirt country roads with no lights. And just the white light of the moon shining flat in front of us.

How cool.

Although.......at this point the thought that I might be headed towards my own demise DID cross my mind. A few years in Korea does that to a guy. I suggested, in a somewhat subdued voice, that Bill might want to slow down. "Hell, no" He guffawed at my skittishness and floored it.

We reached the old grave yard, of which there are hundreds in the back-roads of New Hampshire and Vermont, a-sprout with chalk white tomb-stones and surrounded by moss covered stone walls that meander off into acres of new-growth forest. Hundreds, if not thousands lie forgotten and forlorn among the pine and oak Many are just big enough to hold a generation or two of a family that at one time farmed the surrounding land. They wrenched a living from the soil, spotted with gray-green stones dropped in the last glaciers wake. Then, when the west opened up after the Civil War and provided a less demanding land to struggle a living from, they picked up, left the house and all those before and followed the sun. This was one of those grave yards.

It was miles from any occupied dwelling, hidden deep down a road I had never thought existed, and I knew most of the surrounding area pretty well.

We turned off the key, the head-lights were already off miles ago and piled out, trembling with excitement. "Shut up, man. Your making too much noise with the tools." Bill hissed at me. We fumbled toward the gate, the moon watching down and the crickets a greek-chorus in the background. Frankly, it was years ago, and I don't even remember the name of the guy whos' grave we finally approached. It was a guy. I was pretty sure of that. The idea of robbing a womans grave just didn't seem right to us.

Morality amongst grave robbers.

We started digging and I never realized how hard the ground was. We kept digging. And waiting.every now and then. Liistening. Was that a car? No. Dig. Chop. Dig.

That was a car! No. No it wasn't. Dig. Shovel. Pick-axe. Pause. Sweat. Dig some more. The night crawled by.

"Bill." I wiped my forehead and looked at him. We had barely dug down six inches. "This is too much like work."

He looked at me. "Yeah." He paused. "Much too much like work." He suddenly siffened. "Headlights!" He yelped. We grabbed everything and ran towards the car. We clattered it all inside and Bill started the engine. Off into the night we sped.

There was no car. There was no grave robbed. There was just a couple of nerdy-jerks who thought they would be cool. All they ended up doing was raising a few blisters and almost wetting their pants.

To this day, I realize that Igor was a better man then me. Hump and all.

"Hump? What hump?"

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Will Obama Eat Our Children?

I'm a liberal, pro-life Roman Catholic male in my mid 60's

OK.

So I used all those words in one sentence. That pretty much sums up a part of who I am. But it doesn't say it all.

I grew up (and I swore I would never start a sentence with those words!) in a country that taught respect to those in positions of authority. The cop on the corner, the pastor, the teacher, your parents and grandparents. The old guy named Koskoff down the street who escaped from Czarist Russia in the early part of the 20th Century and set up a cobbler shop where I grew up in Wilmington, Vt. You would show respect to these people and others older then you. Because you knew if you didn't, word would get back to your parents before you got home. And you would hear about it.

And you respected your president.

In my case, a little grey-faced man named Truman who reminded me of my Grandfather on my fathers side, and a bald-headed guy named Eisenhower who always reminded me of Ukelele Ike, the fellow who was the voice of Jimeny Cricket in Disney's "Pinocheo". They never appeared in our classroom on television, of course. We were not set up for that sort of thing in the early and mid-fiftys.

But regardless of who they looked like, I still respected them.

After John Kennedy died on a gurney in a Dallas hospital in 1963, my focus on the president got a little fuzzy. It was the 60's, after all.

He was my commander-in-cheif when I was serving in Korea and when the Russians put up the wall in Berlin, he extended my stay in 'The Land of the Morning Calm' for a few months. My military service was extended even further a year or so later when we came a hairs breadth from nuclear annihilation over a few missles in Cuba.

But I still respected him.

I respected Johnson, yes, even Nixon, Ford, Carter, Regan, Bush, Clinton and Bush.

Don't get me wrong. I didn't always agree with them or their policies. I didn't always agree with the way they ran their personal lives, for that matter. Nixon made me scream at the tv. So did the rest of them, from time to time.

But they were the Presidents of the United States, for corn sakes!

And I know they appeared in thousands of classrooms accross the country in those years. Many times. I don't believe any child was damaged, or hurt, or had their lives ruined because of that.

Let's show a little respect.

Do you think our president is going to eat our children? Or that he will psychicaly scar them for life? He is the president. He is going to talk for a few minutes, take some questions and be on his way. Just as presidents have always done.

We send our children to school evey day. And every day they are exposed to the thoughts and ideas of everybody they come in contact with. From the bus driver down to the principal. Some of the stuff they learn in the locker-room can be pretty rough also, as you probably remember.

Frankly, most kids will be secretly texting or passing notes or trying to remember if the algebra teacher was giving a test that day.

And don't feed me all this jiggery-pokery about the health bill, or socialism or communism or taxes or the economy. Or whatever your personal agenda is. A thousand years from now, none of this stuff will matter. It's all smoke and mirrors anyway.

Let's just all take a deep breath and get on with lives.

We might start by trying to make peace in our own houses with the people we love and sometimes respect. The rest will take care of itself.

Who Is Django?

A lot of you probably know (which is why you probably wound up here) that Django Reinhardt was a Belgium (some say French) gypsy who lived during the early and middle part of the 20th century. He was an exceptional guitar player. But early in life he suffered terrible burns to his left hand and was unable to use his third and fourth fingers. As a guitarist, I know I would not be able to produce any type of chord or even play single strings without some difficulty, if at all. I probably would have given up and taken up harmonica or jews harp. (Both of which I have tried with little success).

But not Django.

Django developed a way of playing that used triads or three notes, plus incredibly lightning fast single string plucking (with a pick, some say, almost a half inch thick). He almost, you should pardon the expression, single handedly developed a whole new style of playing jazz that revolutionized the genre and literally put Europe on the map that had previously only contained New Orleans, Chicago, New York, St. Louis and Kansas City. With a few stops in between, of course, like Memphis, Detroit and Boston. He sought out a new way of looking at something and then went ahead and produced it.

This is how this blog, I hope, will turn out.

I love the joy that listening and playing Django's gypsy jazz gives me. I love all the romantic things in life that sometimes we take for granted, like music, art, poetry, history, television and movies and I would like to talk about them . But, like Django, I suspect some folks will see my take on thing differently and will let me know about it.

Please do.

If it turns out that we end up in the mud, as Shel Silverstein put it in Johnny Cash's wonderful interpretation of 'A Boy Named Sue'; "A kickin' and a gougein', (metaphorically, of course) well, so be it. As long as we can remain friends.

So that is why this is called Django's Djoint. And I hope to be hearing from you real soon.