Three Indian Summer

Daily Musings

I was sitting here listening to Mozart’s ‘Requiem’ and playing with my blog, when a song sprang into my head. It was an old Bob Dylan song, one of his early ones and it came from nowhere.

Dylan sang:

While riding on a train going west

I fell asleep for to take my rest

I dreamed a dream that made me sad

Concerning myself, and the first few friends I had.

It is strange/funny how things from your past will all of a sudden spring back into your mind, as if they had lain in hiding, just waiting to come back on you and make you hold on to them one last time.

I read somewhere that old women and young men have the most friends. I think old women are the more fortunate. They are old enough to realize that it will all end some day. Young men feel invulnerable, invincible and eternal. No, in truth, they are just too stupid to realize what they have.

Because we moved so much, my cast of memories includes several groups of friends, but it was the small group that I went to school with between 1960 and 1963 that stick in my mind.

There was Steve Stevens, the half Apache kid who craved the status of normal in school, and was always on the outside. No matter what he did or how hard he worked at it, the others would always bring up the subject of his race and use it to humiliate him. They could do it because he wanted them; but they didn’t want or need him.

His other dream was to go into the Army and learn demolitions. That boy loved to blow things up. We would make black powder bombs out of old fire extinguisher casings and row out on to lake St. Clare and set them off under water. There was always fresh fish in my house during those summers.

Illegal??

You betcha. We never got caught, but we heard things and for that reason alone we quit.

The reason we heard things was because our friend Sonny Crow had been taken under the wing of the High Sheriff of the county we lived in, and gave Sonny a part time job at the jail. Sonny let us know when we were in danger and we were smart enough to know when to quit.

Sonny was half Crow Indian and wanted to make his living as a taxidermist and live in Colorado guiding groups of white men into the wilderness. He would joke about how many he could leave in there and their bodies would never be found.

There was Dick Wigginton. He was the son of the local barfly who was always available for the local men on any Saturday night. I spent a great deal of those three summers I knew him helping him monitor his mom and trying to keep him out of trouble. He was always so angry about everything. It was just assumed that Dick would end up in jail by the time he was twenty-five. His motto was ‘Live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse.

Then there was me, a short round kid whose eyes didn’t look in the same direction. I was stuck with a Cherokee name and had to bear the usual snide remarks from the English kids who seemed to need the advantage of not being something else. ‘Google eyed Indian kid’ was the way the Principle of the school referred to me. I was in the orchestra with the principles son who would constantly mock my Texas drawl and crack jokes about which way I was looking.

And Dylan sang:

As easy as it was to tell black from white

It was all that easy to tell wrong from right

We’d be together and the thought never hit

That any of us ever would argue or would split


Steve Stevens died in Vietnam while dismantling land mines

Sonny Crow joined the force as a deputy and eventually became the High Sheriff of the county.

Dick Wigginton earned a PhD. In criminal science and is employed by a Midwestern state as a planner.

And me???

I sit here playing with my blog, with a thousand stories running through my head.