See Rock City, Then Tiny Montenegro

The other day I saw a SEE ROCK CITY bumper sticker on a parked car. Hadn't seen one of those in years. Or the side of a barn with those words. But I remember them well, as long ago as 1969. Repetition has that effect.

The Schleswig-Holstein High "Calendar/Handbook" arrived in the mail yesterday, ahead of Lilly's first day of high school, August 23, which is right there on the calendar. The handbook section is lengthy: 25 pages, twice as many as the calendar itself, and chock-a-block with policy and regs. The index includes, among many other subjects, Behavioral Intervention Policy, Bullying, Disabling Products, Excessive Show of Affection, False Fire Alarms, Gangs, Hazing, Loitering, Pranks, Search & Seizure and Sexual Harassment. Sounds like the subjects covered in Room 222.

The list of disabling products, in case you're wondering, includes stink bombs, mace, pepper spray and other noxious substances. Do kids even make stink bombs any more? If so, leave them at home, kids.

I've been too busy to pay much attention to the Olympics, but I did check the medal standings this evening. Not so much the big-damn-deal headline contest between the U.S. and China, or the home-team surge by the British, but for more obscure medal winners. I didn't see Togo on the list this time. Too bad. But I have a soft spot for the places that are taking home exactly one bronze, which so far is quite a few: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Morocco, Hong Kong, Latvia and Argentina.

Maybe no Togo, but Botswana has won a single silver, its first-ever medal: a fellow named Nijel Amos in the 800m footrace. Other countries taking home medals for the first time (according to CBS; NBC can't be bothered with anything but Team America): tiny Montenegro -- Google the term, you get some hits -- and even tinier Grenada.

The Big Oranges of Memory

What, Independence Day again? I should have taken the hint when Canada Day came and went so quickly. In honor of the occasion I was going to find some poutine, but had no luck. Anyway, back again on Sunday.

Naturally recollections of The Andy Griffith Show are being dusted off now, but that isn't the only encounter I had with Griffith's entertainments, not counting Matlock, an item best forgotten. Sophomore year in high school, which would put it in 1976 or '77, our English teacher, the remarkable Bill Swinny, played a record featuring Griffith for the class. (Last I heard, Mr. Swinny is still alive in his early 90s. Most remember him as a drama teacher, but he taught English too.)

What we heard was, "What it Was, Was a Football Game," by a young Andy Griffith. It must have been a favorite of Mr. Swinny's, besides an example of how to create a character and a comic situation only by voice. We all would have known Andy Griffith, of course, but it's unlikely that many of us had heard the record, we who were imbibing the antics of Saturday Night Live's original cast at that moment. I know I'd never heard it. I was mildly amused. I think most of the class was.

When I heard that Griffith had died, I remembered hearing the story -- a surprise, since I don't think I'd heard it since that remote day in English class. I didn't remember much, but I remembered Griffith talking about his "big orange." Odd what sticks with you, but it isn't just me. Google "Andy Griffith big orange" and you get all kinds of relevant hits.

In those days, you needed a record and a turntable. Now a computer and high-speed Internet connection are enough. So I decided to listen to "What it Was, Was a Football Game," again. It made me smile, and laugh a few times. Quite an achievement, since a lot of comedy doesn't age well. I'll have to go find a big orange and drink it in memory of the comedian.

Item From the Past: Austin '88

On May 20, 1988, I flew to Austin for a long weekend. My old friend Tom was graduating from UT. Later, instead of detailing the weekend in diary form, I did a schematic.

I'm not going to transcribe the entire thing, but it shows my arrival on a United flight into Austin -- I'm surprised I didn't fly Southwest -- and then my movements afterward: to Tom's apartment, Kirby Lane for dinner, back to Tom's, and then that night's sleep, which was disturbed by cats. The next morning, we bought groceries, helped Tom clean up, and then went with a number of people to Carmelo's for the "Graduation Banquet," as I called it.

After that, we hung out awhile, eventually attending Tom's graduation. Bill Moyers was the commencement speaker. For dinner that night, we went to a place called Trudy's, a Mexican restaurant ("Saturday Night's All Right for Eating," I called the meal). That night's sleep was "smooth" -- the cats were quiet, I guess. The next day we had breakfast at a place called the Omletry [sic] and spent some time at Pease Park in Austin. I went to the airport after that.

The Joneses together for the occasion (from left): Richard, Lisa, Tom, Zan.

Tom, Nancy and I, during an interlude.

We’ve Wandered Many a Weary Foot

Another new year. It's just now sinking in. But not just any year -- a leap year, an election year, an Olympiad and the 30th anniversary of the release of "The Safety Dance."

This New Year's Eve was almost Lilly's first with friends, rather than her family, but the party fell through. Next year, I figure, they'll pull it off. Gathering for the new year is something youth should do.

Last summer, a high school friend of mine published this picture on Facebook, and she's kindly letting me put it here. It dates from December 31, 1981, during a gathering of high school friends a few years after we'd finished high school.

I'm actually in it -- barely. That's the edge of my leg, arm and head on the left. At least, I'm fairly certain that's me. Left to right from there, top: Tom, Catherine, George, Ellen, Lynn, Louis, Elysse, Tom, Debbie; bottom: Stephen, John, Nancy. I'm not sure who took the photo.

I'm glad I have an image of Stephen, the fellow with his tongue out, a pose he struck sometimes. Stephen Humble in full. He was born in December 1961, so had he lived, we would now both be 50.

That occurred to me a while ago, and when I had the thought I happened to be near Google, so I put his name in. There's a psychiatrist in Nashville by that name, and an English cricketer of that name who has a Wiki entry and a Facebook page, and a number of other references that probably don't point to the person pictured above. Deeper in, there are other references to other people, but I have to put in "Stephen Humble MIT" to get a few fleeting references to his name in dusty user group archives and academic papers. Maybe those are faint traces of the person I once knew.

So I thought he should have a better mention somewhere on line. Here, for instance. Stephen Humble was my friend in high school and a memorable character for those of us who knew him ('umble, he said it was pronounced, but not even the teachers said it with a silent h). He was exceptionally bright and insatiably curious about a lot of things, with a special facility for mathematics, the sciences and languages, at one point studying Turkish "for fun." He was the only male flautist in our high school band. He appreciated strange humor and weird incongruities, and had a vigorous laugh for someone with such a skinny frame. In his high school years to proved to be a freethinker and all around odd duck.

So naturally Stephen gravitated to my group of friends. Fit right in, he did. I know he caught a fair amount of flak from, let's say, less enlightened kids, though probably more so in junior high than high school. Too bad for them. They missed out on a lot by not listening to what he had to say.

He's the only one, besides former Sun-Times columnist Zay N. Smith, ever to appreciate my line, which I made up one day after Latin class: "I move that the subjunctive be abolished from the English language." Stephen laughed out loud at that, back when that was an actual activity rather than Internet shorthand. Of course, it's not really a laugh-out-loud joke; but as I said, Stephen was a highly literate oddball.

He went to MIT in the early '80s. I don't really know what he did for a living after that. He was a Unix expert, among other things. I remember once he told me how user-unfriendly Unix was, noting that when you made an entry mistake, the only reply the system would give you was a question mark. I think he spent some time in Europe, doing who knows what, but by the last time I saw him, in 1995, he was back in Cambridge, Mass. At that moment in his life, he had an enormous, Old Testament-prophet head of hair and beard.

He also had a boyfriend. That was a surprise. Not, ultimately, that he preferred men, but that he had a sex life at all. Knowledge of the carnal sort seemed to be one of the few kinds he wasn't interested in, but I suppose our high school assumptions were wrong, as they often were.

I don't know why he killed himself in 2002. How could I know that anyway, even if I'd seen him more often during the last 20 years of his life? Whatever troubled him must have been powerful, to subdue his love of learning. But I won't dwell on his end. All I know is that my life was more interesting for having known him, and so requiescat in pace, Stephen.

Call of Duty: MW3, Grand Theft Auto & Best of All, Death Race

This evening I pulled up Google News and one of the Top Stories headlines was, "Mitt Romney's Dark Side: Presidential Hopeful Tried Cigarettes, Beer." For a moment I thought an Onion article had wormed its way into the standard Google feed. But no, it was from Reuters.

Early this afternoon, as I pulled up to a red light at a major intersection, I noticed a fellow on a unicycle cross the street on the other side of the intersection. Riding casually across, one-wheeling his way to his destination. That's the first time I've ever seen anyone on a unicycle here in the suburbs, unless you count the performers at the circus a few years ago, which was technically in the suburbs.

Come to think of it, I can't remember seeing too many non-circus unicyclists on the streets of Chicago or Nashville or San Antonio, either. But I did see kids on unicycles sometimes in Osaka, and heard that some schools teach it in PE class.

At the grocery store today, I bought a popular soft drink whose commercial tie-in at the moment is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. The clerk, a young man in his 20s, asked me if I'd played it. I said no, not interested. He told me that the soft drink packaging includes (I think) some kind of code that gives players extra ammo (or maybe a kit containing one forty-five caliber automatic; two boxes of ammunition; four days' concentrated emergency rations; one drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills; one miniature combination Russian phrase book and Bible; one hundred dollars in rubles; one hundred dollars in gold; nine packs of chewing gum; one issue of prophylactics; three lipsticks; and three pair of nylon stockings).

Apparently the game was released last weekend, and for some this event was a big hairy deal. I know this because Lilly told me about it. The release caused a lot of chatter at her school, especially among the boys she knows. I asked her if she had any interest in playing herself and she said maybe, but among that kind of game she likes to play -- at other people's homes -- Grand Theft Auto. You learn all kinds of things about your kids if you pay attention.

By golly, I think I'm supposed to fret that such a violent game will affect my daughter in evil ways. You know, just like the urges people my age felt to run down pedestrians because of the primitive arcade game Death Race. Ah, the screeching wheels, the screams of your victims. Doesn't that take you back? No? Wiki asserts that "because of its limited production run and the number of units that were destroyed, Death Race is very rare today. Collectors will sometimes pay $2,000 for a working unit in good condition." If it doesn't have one, the Smithsonian needs to get one.

In the late '70s, Mike, a guy I knew in high school, and I would sometimes visit the airport in San Antonio and play games at its arcade room, which was usually empty in the evenings. Death Race was one of the games there, and we played it. It was probably all we could do not to commit vehicular homicide on the way home.

Bastrop State Park

I was unhappy to learn over Labor Day weekend that much of Bastrop State Park has burned to the ground. The park is in Bastrop County, Texas, not far southeast of Austin. It isn't a large park, a little shy of 6,000 acres, but it is distinctive for its loblolly pines -- a patch of piney-green East Texas dropped into Central Texas.

I've been there more recently, but my fondest memories of Bastrop are of two camping trips to the park with high school friends in the spring and summer of 1979. If I pause for a moment, I can picture the campsite, the fire we tended late into the night, the sloping ground nearby blanketed by pine needles and rich in pine cones -- which we spent time throwing at each other. I can hear the voices of my friends, but not quite what we said during our many and varied conversations (we had no electronic entertainment, and were better for it). I can almost smell the pines, but I'd need to visit a stand of loblollies for the memory to return with any olfactory gusto.

Over the weekend, wildfires encouraged by the windy leftover of Hurricane Lee ravaged the drought-dried Bastrop SP and, unfortunately, hundreds of homes in the vicinity. I understand that loblolly pines grow back quickly, but still. It's a damned shame.

The 7Up Deco-Psychedelia Mashup

Hot weekend. But it should be here in the Northern Hemisphere, considering that the calendar says July.

I spent some time roaming the vast aisles of a certain do-it-yourself warehouse retailer one day recently, looking for this and that, but mostly looking at this and that. In the men's room of this particular store, I noticed that both of the urinals and one of the three sit-down toilets had OUT OF ORDER signs taped to them. And where is the one place that broken toilets should be fixed quickly? A do-it-yourself store.

Yesterday's posting, which is also posted on Facebook, got a fair amount of attention on that social media site, mostly from my old friends who are in the picture. But one friend of a friend asked if, indeed, that was a bottle of 7Up on the table. It was a liter bottle, I think, in a style that's probably long gone, though I haven't examined any glass 7Up bottles lately. It just seems likely that a design available 30 years ago wouldn't be available any more.

That bottle called to mind this commercial, made in 1974 and aired for some time afterward. Everyone in the room with me that day in 1981 would have seen it any number of times.

Link for Facebook readers.

Watching it again after so many years, I'm taken with the luminous artistry of the thing, created by the fine blending of '20s and '70s styles, visually and musically. What to call that? Psychedelic deco? I'm sure I didn't appreciate it when it was new, as with so many things.

More on the commercial's director, the late Robert Abel, is here. He went on to be a computer animation pioneer, among other things, and seems to have gotten a Clio for his efforts on the "Bubbles" commercial. I hope so. More on 7Up is here, from Snopes, of all places.

Item From the Past: Anticipation of New Orleans

Career consultants and their ilk say never to post pictures of your drunken self on the Internet, but I'm going to ignore that advice. Besides, after 30 years I'm not sure just how much I'd had to drink on the night of July 12, 1981, at my home in San Antonio in the company of some of my high school friends, two years after finishing school.

Probably not that much, all things considered. I look pretty giddy, though.

We had reason to be giddy. Four of us -- three in the picture, and the fellow taking it -- were planning to visit New Orleans later that week. And so we did, leaving on the 16th. Now that was a time.

Cathedral Park & the Bishop Jones Center

It's been a run of clear, very warm days during declining summer this year, but cool nights. Meaning that Lilly and Ann weren't dressed for it on Saturday evening when we went to Spring Valley Nature Center to look through an amateur astronomer's fine telescope. So there was a fair amount of complaining about being cold while we walked to the viewing area. But it was worth it in the end, at least for me, since we saw the Ring Nebula (M57), which I'd never seen before outside of photos.

The colorful ring in photos isn't what you see through a small telescope. Instead, the lens reveals a wispy smoke ring among the solid background stars.

During the afternoon of the last day of 1977, some four or five friends and I gathered at a house on Patterson Ave. in Alamo Heights, where one of our group lived, to begin celebrating the new year. It might have been the end of December, but the day was pleasant, and so we took a short walk down Patterson to where it meets Torcido Ave. Ellen, the girl who lived on Patterson, told us this was the way to Cathedral Park.

The property is fenced in, so the gate must have been open that day. We repaired to a large patch of land at the foot of a large hill, in view of some buildings up on the hill that were partly obscured by trees. We sat under a copse of trees at the base of the hill, next to a small, rocky stream, and talked about whatever we talked about. I remember that it was warm enough to dip our bare feet in the water (a cold front in the early hours of 1978 brought more seasonably cold weather).

When it's flowing, that stream must be one created by the Edwards Aquifer that feeds Olmos Creek, which, together with the Blue Hole on the campus of the University of the Incarnate Word, form the headwaters of the San Antonio River. I didn't know any of that 32-plus years ago. Or exactly what was up on the hill, though I did look up and wonder about it out loud. Ellen said the park belonged to the Episcopal Church, but I don't remember any mention of the Bishop Jones Center. Turns out, that's what was atop the hill.

On August 18, 2010, I spent time looking around the Bishop Jones Center and its 19-acre grounds, unexpectedly answering the question about the place that I asked years ago, but had long forgotten asking.

The web site of the Episcopal Diocese of West Texas has a paragraph's worth of information about the Bishop Jones Center: "In 1962, the bishop of the diocese and his staff moved... to the spacious new Cathedral Park in Alamo Heights. Already on the property, when it was given by the Kamko Foundation, was the lovely and quaint 'pink house.' Cathedral Park rapidly became a location of worship, rest and refreshment for the people of the diocese and community neighbors. Today, the Bishop Jones Center -- which comprises Cathedral House, Chapel House, and Cathedral Park -- is home to the diocesan bishop and his staff and continues to be a gathering place for the diocese."

During my recent visit, I drove my mother to the center late in the morning and while she did what she had to do as a volunteer for the Episcopal Church, I took a look at the chapel and meeting center, done in a charming Spanish Colonial Revival style inside and out, and set in a lush landscape all around the hill that sports enormous old trees, plantings at short intervals and thick grass. Stone-surfaced trails wind through the grounds and also lead to a columbarium built into the hillside. The columbarium must be fairly new, since I counted only about 20 permanent residents, with space for many more.

Though I took a few pictures, the photo collection of this fellow, who obviously works (or worked) at the Bishop Jones Center, provides a much more complete look at this gorgeous property.

Some stairs lead down the hill in one direction, to Patterson Ave. In another direction, the hill slopes down without the benefit of stairs, or many trees or much grass either. I went down the hill at that point, reaching a small group of trees surrounding a dry, rocky stream bed. I couldn't remember whether this was the spot we visited all those years ago, but I figured it could have been. Then I turned around and looked up the hill -- and that jogged my memory. Whoosh. For an instant three decades and then some vanished. This was the same place, absolutely.

Item From the Past: Band Concert

It seems like I participated in a high school band concert 31 years ago. I have no memory of that particular concert, the Christmas concert of '78, probably because nothing unusual happened -- nothing funny (strange) or funny (ha-ha). But because of my essential pack-rat nature, I have documentary evidence that points to me being there. I would have remembered skipping a concert more than going to one, so I must have been there. And my mother paid $2 to sit through it.

The program actually has four pages. Besides the cover and the Symphonic Band member list, there's a Concert Band member list and a list of the music performed that evening, ordinary items such as "Old St. Nick Rock," a medley called "Noel," "Sleigh Ride," and "Christmas Music for Winds." No early versions of "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer" or anything remarkable (if I remember right, that song didn't exist in 1978).

Looking at the Symphonic Band member list, I'm struck by how little I know about the people on it. I'm currently in contact, more or less, with one person in that band, and occasionally hear from or about a few others. A handful of others are Facebook friends only since this year. I know that at least three people on the list are dead -- one cancer, one suicide, one cause unknown. On the whole, I don't know what the people on the list are up to now; probably some are mathematicians and some are carpenters' wives, but mostly I don't know what they're doing with their lives.

Which is as it should be. Cleaving too closely to high school, more than 30 years later, would be pathetic.

I also took a look at what else might have happened on that particular day, besides a high school band concert no one remembers. Wiki tells us that one Patrick Casey was born on December 19, 1978. And what did the newborn baby Patrick have to look forward to (thus far)? A career in le bad cinema, as a writer and director worthy of commentary by Leonard Pinth-Garnell.

Among others, he has worked on such deathless films as I Was A Teenage Frankenstein's Roommate; Hey, Stop Stabbing Me!; National Lampoon Presents Dorm Daze; Sledgehammers at Dawn; and his latest, Transylmania, "the story of a group of not-too-bright American college kids on a semester abroad at the only college that would accept them: The Razvan University," notes the free encyclopedia.

It continues: "The film has been universally panned by critics, with overwhelmingly negative reviews. The film currently holds a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, receiving not one positive review. It received an 8 out 100 on website metacritic, which assigns a normalized score to a film based on reviews, which makes it fall into the category of 'Overwhelming dislike.'

"[It] opened extremely poorly, at #21 with only $263,941 from 1,007 theaters, making it the 3rd worst movie opening since 1982 for films which opened in more than 600 theaters, and the worst for films opening in over 1,000 theaters."

SPQR 2.0

Finally got around to watching the first episodes of the second season of the sometimes meretricious, always interesting Rome this weekend. It picked up right where the first season left off, right after the assassination of Caesar. It bothered me a little that the first season had that event in the Senate, rather than the Theater of Pompey, as history tells us. But the actual staging of the deed was spot-on. Rather than having Caesar say "Et tu, Brute?" or "You too you sonofabitch?!?" or some such, that exact sentiment was conveyed by his look at Brutus.

Caesar must have thirsted for immortal glory. One can only wonder what he would have made of the fact that people are still telling the story of his death, etching it in light even, more than 2,000 years later. Of course, he had help. But for the consolidation of his legacy by Augustus, his story would probably be no better known than that of Marius or Sulla.

As with the first season, I'm so taken with the series' verisimilitude that I can overlook its worst aspects, especially its gratuitously prurient nature (but hey, it's HBO). Besides the extraordinary look and feel of the production, I like its more-or-less historic accuracy, which is certainly better than you usually get with dramatized Romans; and the well-drawn fictional characters, especially the two soldiers. I also like the way that the story doesn't bother to explain everything the characters do, either in historic or cultural terms.

Another a good point: the show allows the characters to take their religion seriously, or not. Roman paganism is not treated, even implicitly, as a mere warm-up for Christianity.

It's made me pull my Cary and Scullard A History of Rome, Third Edition, off the shelf again. I open it up and written on the inside front cover is "Dees Stribling, Jan 14, 1981." Bought it for Roman history class that semester, taught tediously by a young classics professor.

Luckily that wasn't my introduction to the subject. My brothers were, sort of, at least with their commentary on the sword & sandal movies we'd see on TV; and then there was Mrs. Quarles, high school Latin teacher, henna-haired and eccentric, who had actually been places and seen things, such as former parts of the Roman Empire. I was also a member of the Texas State Junior Classical League for a few years, and went to TSJCL conventions primarily as a reason to get out of town (the same goal as with National Forensic League meets). One year I went all the way with the Latin Club to Amarillo. Exotic Amarillo. A vigorous dust storm buffeted the bus en route to the Panhandle.

My VU Latin professor, the late Dr. Ned Nabors, also referred to C&S from time to time. "If it isn't in Cary and Scullard, it didn't happen," he said, overstating the case, but he was fond of overstating things. Anyway, it's a worn old hardback, and if I want to know where Rome is fudging or conflating things, I look there. Just me being old-fashioned, since I could look on-line just as easily.

Item From the Past: "Freeze a Yankee"

On August 25, 1978, a girl named Kathy B. broke my thumb. While I was still wearing the splint, I told people that and got weird reactions. "We were dancing," I said. That didn't seem to clarify things, since I still got weird reactions. "Really, that's what we were doing." People didn't believe it, somehow. Pretty soon I gave up explaining it.

But that's just what happened. We were at a party with a sizable number of other kids. I don't know that I was exactly dancing with Kathy, a sometime girlfriend of one of my group, though she didn't attend our high school. I was just dancing in her vicinity. She was wearing some kind of hard-soled shoes. My hand went down, her foot went up, and they made contact. I didn't find out I had a cracked knuckle until the next day, at the emergency room.

But that's not what brings that evening to mind. Someone at the party had a 45 of the song "Freeze a Yankee" and he played it for us at least once, probably a few times, and we were greatly entertained. I never heard it again after that until today, when I found it on YouTube (where else?). Occasionally over the years I'd mention the song, but no one else -- the non-Texans, that is -- had ever heard of it. The group that cut the record was from Dallas, it seems, and whatever success they had with it was mostly in Texas. For reasons that might be obvious once you listen to the song.

The Gov. Briscoe mentioned in the song is none other than Texas Gov. Dolph Briscoe, who was in office from 1973 to 1979. I'm not sure what he might have said that inspired the lyric -- some bravado about keeping Texas oil for Texans, maybe, though I'm pretty sure the governor of Texas wouldn't have had much power to impede interstate commerce. But it may be the only song anywhere that mentions Briscoe, who is still alive and who also happens to be one of the largest landowners in the country.

Nashi & Sonic Drive-Ins

Pilcher Park in Joliet and its totem poles were unexpected good finds. We’d gone down that way to investigate the possibilities of apple picking. Or to be more exact, apple- and Asian pear-apple picking at a u-pick-em orchard near Lockport, Illinois. It’s almost a straight shot south of us on I-355, which was extended through the Lockport and Joliet area only a few years ago.

I expected a bigger operation, but when we got there we found a house with apple trees spreading out behind it. I asked one of the proprietors about the place, and she told me it was a hobby that got out of hand, producing a lot of apples and Asian pear-apples. The latter are cultivated like apples, she said, and in the case of her orchard will be ready to pick in about three weeks.

Asian pear-apples are worth the wait. They look like apples, sort of, but have the sweet interior of pears, only better than most pears. In Japan, they’re called nashi, a more exotic name than pear-apple, certainly, and what we call them around this house. Yuriko considers them a high-cost fruit, and they are, especially in Japan, but even somewhat at Costco.

So we went on our way, and ended up spending our apple and pear-apple budget at a Sonic Drive-In in Lockport. When Lilly saw it, she lobbied hard to go there, since apparently she has fond memories of one we visited in Tampa in 2005. She claimed to remember it better than Disney World on that trip, which was probably an exaggeration. But it didn’t take too much urging on her part.

For about $15, you can get three Sonic burgers (one with cheese), three shakes (two peach, one vanilla), a small order of fries, and a kid’s meal featuring chicken strips, fries and a small bottle of chocolate milk, brought to your car by a carhop on skates. She comes after you insert your debit or credit card in the slot at the order sign, so it isn’t quite like how Richie, Potsy and Ralph would have ordered (I forget to look for a cash option; you probably have to push a special button for that).

Sonic does go out of its way to make hamburgers more like those of old, though of course it’s by formula. Still, I’m reminded of Sill’s Snack Shack in San Antonio, a non-drive-in hamburgerie we used to patronize in the late ’60s and early ’70s, until McDonald’s cleaned its clock. So Sonic has that going for it.

We had Sonic Drive-Ins in the San Antonio of my youth. There was the time, during high school exams in the spring of 1977, when about ten of us jammed into a car driven by the only one of us who could legally drive, and descended on the Sonic on Broadway in Alamo Heights. Such youthful car-packing might be unlawful in Texas now, and even then it was the stuff of potentially lurid headlines: HEIGHTS TEENS SPUTTER AND FRY IN FIERY WRECK. But we arrived safely, and spilled out onto pavement and on top of the hood and trunk to eat our lunch, surprising the waitress.

It Was Thirty Years Ago Today (But I Don't Really Remember It)

Thirty years ago today I attended my high school graduation ceremony. I can't remember much about it. The event was sedate compared with that of the Class of '78 one year earlier, mainly because the administration threatened to withhold troublemakers' diplomas, and posted teachers close by to enforce the edict. We considered this an overreaction on the part of the administration. Viewed from a more mature perspective 30 years later, I still consider it an overreaction.

As they sat on the stage waiting for their diplomas, some spirited members of the Class of '78 tossed confetti and unfurled a banner large enough to be read by the whole audience. What it said, I forget, but it wasn't obscene -- I would have remembered that. Something celebratory no doubt, if not exactly standard school spirit. There may have been some noisemakers, too. I'm fairly sure no people were harmed nor property destroyed. On the scale of riotous behavior, the display ranked pretty low.

Apparently the administrators thought the event should be dignified, not celebratory. As a result, the graduation of the Class of '79 has largely evaporated from my memory. Then again, I hung out with friends later that day, and we must have been in a fairly good mood. But I don't remember anything about that, either, and not because it was a drunken revel. The most memorable events, it seems, aren't tied to any formal rites of passage.

Item From the Past: Lunch at Cappy's

May 30, 1979

The day before my high school graduation ceremony, I went to lunch at a place called Cappy's on Broadway in Alamo Heights. Cappy's must have been an early entrant in the world of casual dining located in a retrofitted structure from earlier in the 20th century, established as it was in 1977. None of that would have meant anything to me 30 years ago. It was just an interesting place to have lunch with friends.

Apparently the place has seen success down the years -- I was mildly astonished to learn that it's still around. Hope it doesn't become a victim of the recession.

Someone, not me, had a Polaroid instant camera, and a number of pictures must have been taken, since I ended up in possession of two images. Physical images tucked away somewhere; it's what people did before the Internet.

This is the better of the two, and it looks like it was made before the food arrived. Most of us were raising ice tea glasses. It was South Texas in summer, after all.

No point in detailing who's in the picture very closely, but I will say, left to right: Mrs. F, Debbie, Tom, Donna, Catherine, Kirk, me, Margie, Mr. F. Catherine's aunt took the picture. She and Mr. F have passed on. I've lost track of Debbie and Donna. Margie, I met only that day. She was a friend of someone else, and I never saw her again.

Gatsby and I

I had the good fortune of having a few good English teachers in high school, but I had a couple of bad ones as well, or at least indifferent ones. Probably most people can say the same. I think of this on the rare occasions when I pick up a book that's likely to be taught in school, such as The Great Gatsby. In the case of that book, I'm glad no one taught it to me in any school, especially my least favorite high school English teacher, who ruined a number of works for me either permanently or for a good many years -- such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I only appreciated well into adulthood.

I'm glad no one taught Gatsby to me at any school because it's too good. Better that I've discovered it myself over the decades, peeling back a little more each time. I can't remember when I read it first. Probably sometime in college, but not as an assignment. I've read it once every few years since whenever that was, whenever I realize it's been a few years since the last time. Sunday was such a day, and if I didn't have work or other things to do, I'd have finished it again by now.

So many good lines. This is one of my favorites, the first shadowy image of Gatsby: "... I saw I was not alone -- fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars."

I've heard that it hasn't been adapted well to the screen, but even if the movies based on it had turned out better, I still wouldn't want to see them, because the book is too good. Certain books are just that way. Besides, I already have all the characters in mind. They already look like old acquaintances of mine, even down to some of the minor characters, such as Klipspringer, Gatsby's permanent guest; he looks like a lanky, careless fellow who lived across the hall from me in college one year and failed, or was incomplete, in all of his courses one semester.

Otherwise Gatsby turns up in some odd places. In 1988 or '89, when I lived in Chicago the first time, four or five friends and I went to a party at a house near Wrigleyville large enough to have at least two floors and a number of rooms. We'd been invited by a friend of one of my friends who didn't actually live there, and had spontaneously decided to go. It was a fairly busy party and we stayed a while. Later it occurred to us that none of us had met the host, or anyone who lived at the house, and we took to calling the event "the Gatsby party." Even today, if I brought it up to one of those old friends, whom I rarely see now, they'd probably remember calling it that.

Band!

Been a cold run of days lately, drizzly, windy, gray imitations of November. But birds are atwitter and the lawns are greener than only last week. Something is going on out there.

We went to Lilly's band concert recently, and I'm happy to report that the program featured real music for the most part, rather than songs invented to buttress the self-esteem movement. Participating were a fifth-grade band (Lilly's) and a sixth-grade one, each featuring flutes, clarinets, trumpets, trombones and percussion, and made up of kids from six different elementary schools. Lilly's been a trombonist since the beginning of the school year.

The school district's high school jazz band also played. Considering age and experience, each group accorded itself well. Going in you know it isn't going to be Benny Goodman at Carnegie Hall, and that shouldn't bother you.

Among other things, Lilly got to play "Ain't Gonna Rain No More," "The Victors," a version of universally recognized University of Michigan fight song , and as if that wasn't enough UM, "Let's Go Band," which seems to be an elementary-band adaptation of "Let's Go Blue."

I never knew it by that name. Back when I was in high school band, we called it "Michigan," though the association with that college was vague to us, so far removed from it. The tune wasn't anything we formally played, either. But during lulls in football games, it would rise spontaneously from certain sections of the band. One time, during a brief blackout at an away game, it really got going, which steamed our normally unflappable band director.

Another tune we noodled at times was "Swingtown," but rarely more than a few seconds. The baritones didn't actually play that. Instead, we moved our instruments in L-shaped motions to the rhythm.

At Lilly's concert, most interesting piece by the high school jazz band was a KC & the Sunshine Band medley. Well done, all things considered, and it made me want to hear a professional jazz version of it. The originals had a fair amount of brass, so the transition wasn't that strange.

RIP, Noelle His

I didn't know Noelle His, but I knew who she was. As a member of the Alamo Heights High School Class of 1978, she was a year ahead of me. On June 1, 1978, she was very likely with her class at their graduation ceremonies in an auditorium at Trinity University -- an event marked by silly string, confetti, and other very visible items of youthful celebration, all of which I saw as a member of the audience. Early in the morning of June 25, 1978, Noelle and a young man named Kevin (I think), who was recently a freshman at (I think) Texas A&M, died in a car accident.

On the evening of Saturday the 24th, I went to a back yard party at the Olmos Park house of another Kevin -- not the fellow who died -- a Kevin who was also a member of the Class of '78, and who until recently had been first chair baritone horn player in band, and thus my section leader. We didn't socialize all that much, actually, and it was the only time I ever recall being at his house.

At this distance, I remember very little about what went on, but it was a sedate event, the kind of party that mostly involves sitting around someone's back yard and talking about nothing in particular. The novelty of that yard was the device, hanging from a post or tree, that zapped mosquitoes: a glowing, electrified no-pest strip, new to the market at the time. I was probably home by midnight that night.

I don't know the details of the accident, but I know that it was in the wee hours of Sunday; at a railroad crossing on the North Side of San Antonio that I knew well, and had crossed many times myself, both as a passenger and a driver; and that it wasn't far from where I had been earlier in the evening.

On Monday, Jamison mentioned the accident. That summer, I took Government as a summer school class in the mornings, and the teacher was a man named Ted Jamison. Dr. Ted Jamison. What a PhD was doing teaching a summer high school class, I do not know, but he did. He was, in fact, one of the best teachers I ever had, for all of about five weeks in '78, but that could well be another posting someday.

Jamison, about as old then as I am now, was visibly moved by the news. "So young," was one of the things he said. I appreciate that sentiment a lot more now than at the time, of course, and doubly so as the father of daughters.

RIP, David Samuel Bommer

An old friend of mine died recently, one of those childhood friends you don't see or hear much about after you're grown. I believe I first met him in the fifth grade, but I might be wrong; and I believe the last time I saw him was in Dallas, by chance, nearly 25 years ago, but I might be wrong about that too. Things are a little fuzzy at this distance.

There was a time in late elementary school when I went over to his house fairly often, where we spent a lot of time playing pool. Perhaps my fondest memories of David, however, were in junior high, when he and I and another fellow, Steven Lozano, made movies -- silent movies -- with an 8mm camera that David had access to. This was 1974 and '75, long before video cameras became ordinary household equipment, so that camera was a novelty. At least, David was the only person I knew who had one.

Our movies were mostly juvenile spoofs. We did a couple of science fiction stories, such as the one in which "Tedees of Titan" (David, in a bald wig) came to Earth to kidnap an earthling (me), a genius at "physics and poker." Special effects included a model spaceship -- it might have been an upside-down model Enterprise -- traveling by crude stop-motion photography against the backdrop of the pool-table velvet, with the cue ball as a planet.

My own favorite was The Assassin, in which as Hans Lan, a Swiss spy, I wore an overcoat and a red hat with a feather in it. The entire plot of the movie was Steven, the assassin, trying to kill Hans Lan, and failing each time, though inadvertently killing a number of innocent bystanders, each played by David in a variety of clothing. For one scene, we set the camera on a tripod and filmed me reading a newspaper while sitting in a patio chair. Steven, with a huge rubber knife in hand, sneaked up behind me. At the last second, I threw the paper behind me and into Steven's face, and then walked away. He fumbled with the paper for a few seconds, not noticing that David (wearing that bald wig again) had come over and sat down. Then the assassin got him instead of Hans Lan.

In high school, David and I were both in band, but we weren't the friends we had been. He studied music at SMU and as an adult, I understand, he was a professional organist. In band, he'd played baritone sax, and I had no idea he was learning organ at the time too. His obit in the San Antonio Express-News is here. RIP, David.

Meanwhile, Back at the Bunkhouse

Wasted a little time today looking at who’s reading BTST Vol. 2, and I was glad to see someone from Taiwan had spend a fair amount of time reading my entries on Banff and Jasper. He or she had apparently done a search of blogs for those two terms, and was directed to me. Maybe it was a matter of trip planning, so there’s a Taiwanese tourist out in Jasper right now buying a pastry at the Bear Claw bakery on the strength of my recommendation. Hope so.

Meanwhile, back at the bunkhouse, I make phone calls, do interviews, write articles, read other people’s articles, send and receive e-mail. A 21st-century-type desk job, including a lot of spam, of course, like everyone else who has a computer. I’m sorry to see that spam subject lines are now often snippets of real news stories, instead of dada strings of words. Most days I prefer dada to news. Can’t wait to dump my current e-mail address and see how long it takes for the barnacles of spam to attach themselves to the new one.

“Meanwhile, back at the bunkhouse,” was a catchphrase among my friends in high school in the spring of 1976. For some reason, it made us laugh. I can’t remotely remember why after 30 years. Haven’t thought about it in years, and then today I did, like you might find a shell or rock or some other souvenir that you only vaguely remember collecting. Still, you know it’s yours, and it reminds you of another time and place.