Random memories countdown to Seventy

Friends, my seventieth birthday is just a few days away.  I have been sharing random memories on my facebook storyline last few days but this one with names and all deserves a bigger platform.

   It was late spring of 92 best recollection and Brett Morgen the Oscar winning later to be documentarian had just left town. Going away party was on my back porch by the woodstove cause most of em were smokers while I kept the rest of house chilly and smoke free  to save money. On that porch early Feb 92 was a later tour manager for the Rolling Stones Karen Krattinger, and Morgen who had just done a student piece on Collinsville Titled Blessings of Liberty. In 2015 he did Crossfire Hurricane for the Stones and was Nat Geo producer director for the chimp woman. Re his collinsville doc  Rather he had shot about a hundred hours over the course of 5 weeks and was headed back to LA to edit with Bob Dylan's son, Sam.

    I was Morgen's local consultant. 

     Building on that notoriety, children who two years earlier had been my charges as a substitute teacher, began showing up in my front yard at two am. One such earlier experience they shined the lights , bright lights all through house cause they knew I slept in the front room, horns a blowing. I went out and they said get in the car. John Morgan was driving and Susan Weaver the Football coaches daughter and her friend andrea, the daughter of the county deputy sheriff was in Back Seat. Morgan was on way to UVA as an architecture student.

    Andrea or Susan one said hold on as we went back toward town, half a mile , I thank it was, and took a left hauling out through a pasture. I said My God what have I done.

    We crossed a a cow pasture out through Momma's cousin Didymus old place  lickety split bouncing around on what I found next day to be an actual gullied dirt road, and headed up a ridge and down, under the interstate through c creek underpass and was in Andy Myer's back yard. There were cinderblock steps up to his front door. His mom and dad were up smoking themselves and andy got in the car. Maybe we then took in Rip Shin that night but it was all new territory for me. A month later I still couldn't find a way to Andy's trailer on a normal route.

     That Thanksgiving or the next one my sister was in town and went with us. Musta been eight or nine in the vehicle that night with Weaver cousins from Greenville SC, one of which was Furman Coach Scarpa's sons tennis player in the 14 and unders. Scarpa s wife was one of the real girl friends of Kenny Stabler in the sixties.

    True story one of the more unforgettable and there were many my 30 years in Bama.

     But as Denis Johnson says at the end of Train Dreams after a Grand wrap up sentence you have to read "And that time was gone forever."