So long, Dogpatch!

Cayucos Beachfront

Once upon a time, a person of limited means could live in Dogpatch on the Central Coast of California, near the ocean, not far from where author Dell Franklin used to live, when Dogpatch was still a thing in Cayucos; weeds grew tall, murderous she-devils lived next door, and friends with dogs would come to share drinks and gossip. Photo by Stacey Warde

By Dell Franklin

Around 18 years ago, when Stacey Warde and I were publishing a monthly literary journal, The Rogue Voice, I wrote an article entitled “Long Live Dogpatch!” It was kind of an ode to one of the remaining overgrown weedy lots left in town, and it just so happened I was living next door to it in a garret-sized  one-bedroom apartment, and roosted in the lot just about every day among knee-high weeds in an easy chair with a foot rest while reading newspapers, magazines, books, and editing articles, and occasionally tossing a tennis ball for my black Lab, Marley, to retrieve and return.

Ahhh, those were the days! Tag Morely lived across the lot and the Pirate usually came by to toss biscuits to Marley, and across the street lived Cindy and Cloyce, with whom I often shared beers after he returned from construction work while I tossed the tennis ball into the lot for Marley and Woody, Cloyce’s 120-pound Weimaraner.

Tourists or new Cayucans driving by often slowed down to eye me and the two non-operational cars – a ‘76 Olds Cutlass Salon, and an ‘81 bumperless Chrysler Cordoba with Corinthian leather bucket seats – collecting dust in the lot beside my aged Toyota Tercel wagon before driving on, not realizing that the Cayucos Dogpatch was making a last ditch statement for survival.

Cayucos was a different place not so long ago, when the Tavern was still open and booming, and if I happened to pass out on my way home in the field where the Pier View Suites and shops now sit, and lost my keys in the process, I could at least sleep in one of my heaps and walk down a block or two come morning and find the local locksmith, Ed Frawley, to let me in the apartment, for I didn’t find my keys in a gutter nearby until a week later.

At this time an extremely attractive, terribly sexy but reptilian-eyed woman moved into the apartment in front, and when she couldn’t lure me to bed for future black-mailing (I was with a lady who visited often and helped with the RV) she decided I should be dealt with. 

Since I had three cats beside the dog, she complained about all four and threatened them with physical harm because they supposedly urinated on her BMW. She had a couple of slimy and dangerous-looking characters come by to size me up as I roosted, and I always stood and swung my 35-inch, 35-pound Louisville Slugger baseball bat and they dispersed.

Her strapping son came by, but he was too young to be a threat.

And then, finally, came a giant of a brute, who walked over and stared at me while I roosted, and the she-devil looked on from her back porch.

I asked him how he was doing. He kept staring at me while Marley smiled at him, and then he noticed the bat.

“That yours?” he asked.

“It is.”

“Mind if I look at it?”

“Be my guest!”

He picked up the bat, and took some graceful left-handed swings.

“Man,” he said. “This is a big motherfucker, bigger than I ever used. You hit with this?”

“I choked up a couple inches. Those are my dad’s model bats. He played for Detroit.”

“No shit?”

“He ordered me six, straight from Louisville, and I used them my senior year in high school and in college. Major league grain.”

“You play any pro ball?”

“Nah, I could have, but chose not to.”

“I played four years in the Dodger organization. Played for the Reno Silver Sox in the California League, led the league in home runs.” He swung the bat. “This is a fuckin’ beauty, man, a fucking log.”

“It’s my last one. The others got broken when I let teammates hit with them.”

Meanwhile, the she-devil slammed the back door and disappeared into her apartment. 

“Man, I could use a beer.” the giant said.

“Let me get a couple,” I quickly said.

Seconds later we tipped long necks. His name was Joe. We both had hilarious baseball stories. I found him a lazing chair and brought out two more beers and then the chilled bottle of Stoli while through the side window of the front apartment the she-devil leered, jaw set, pacing. Finally, when we were both drunk and rollicking and laughing so hard we were keeled over – and Joe admitted his ex-wife had called him in Bakersfield to kick my ass and hurt me bad, and that far as he was concerned I was a good old boy and a baseball brother, and that he had married her when she was 17 and drop-dead gorgeous, and she had taken him for everything he had and destroyed his baseball career – the she devil stood before us, lashing out at poor Joe, ordering his “lazy drunken ass” to pull some goddamn weeds in her overgrown front yard!

But soon Cloyce joined us with a six-pack, along with Woody, and Dennis the landscaper down the street came by for one with his black Lab mix, and then the she devil’s son, Joe Jr.,  dropped by, and then Stacey came by to check on a story I was writing and decided to have one, and then Miranda – my girl and indispensable proofreader – drove up, paused, and quickly left, not happy.

Ahhh, those were the days when Dogpatch fought valiantly to survive, but sadly, my old neighboring lot recently was leveled and a majestic double-decker went up, and Cloyce and Cindy just moved to central Florida because they can no longer afford to live in Cayucos or the Central Coast, the she-devil and Joe are long gone, and I am up the street hanging on for dear life.

So long, Dogpatch!

Dell Franklin may be the last man standing in the only Dogpatch that remains along the California coastline.

Living in exile

Where on earth a person belongs

I think of those condemned to die. I would, at this point, choose exile over death.
Photo by Stacey Warde

By Stacey Warde

I have lived in exile most of my life, self-imposed, no ruler or tyrant but me.

I put myself in the place that doesn’t feel like home, not unlike standing on the edge of a cliff or sleeping with the enemy. I like testing myself that way apparently.

Musonius Rufus, banished into exile by the Roman Emperor Nero, said one may as well make himself at home wherever he lands. Those who loved you, he says, where you once lived will love you still, no matter where you are now.

I think of those condemned to die. I would, at this point, choose exile over death but leaving, departing, any place can feel so final, the door closing, putting an end to thoughts and ideas about where one belongs.

In exile, you may actually be better off, Musonius says. You may come out on top of the world. Stronger, more resilient, better trained and equipped for the hardships life brings, whether at home or on the road. Exile will turn you into a philosopher, or make you stronger by demanding only what is essential to live. What need is there of luxuries and sweets? The good life is the hard life, the one that challenges you.

At war with myself, the hearth I long for — the warm place of welcome and rest among friends and family — eludes me, always a pilgrim, a wanderer, in exile, seeking a landing and finding none, wanting someone or something along for the journey, a familiar, like the sweet aroma of a good strong cup of coffee or a quick sloppy blowjob.

“You don’t want to be alone,” Faith said to me once, long before she died. She too was searching for home, and did her best in an old folks’ trailer park, where she served the finest dinners with her best friends and silverware properly set, a habit she acquired as a debutante in a grand house of great influence many years ago.

No rest for the wicked, she’d say, poverty stricken and happy in her own way.

I’m in “transition” and have always been, I told her, moving from birth to death, as so many of us do, seldom stagnant, game for the thrills, without the phone, eager to eat ass. She’d laugh. I identify as he/him and prefer to eat women’s asses. Faith loved to laugh and laughed best at bawdy humor.

My home, sort of, is my body, which is its own type of exile. Everything changes, even and especially the lines on my face and skin. No roof repairman or plumber can fix those, the sagging and aging skin, the march toward the end.

WHERE does one actually live? Where does one go to see the movies or to see visions and to meet with old friends? When leaving jobs, family, or the familiar? On the way to the gallows? Or on the way to the desolate island of Gyaros?

Stacey Warde is publisher of The Rogue Voice. This article first appeared on Substack.

On the train

Trump country

The land we are burrowing through is the land of the forgotten. I have never observed such an amazing amount of junk along the edges of towns. Photo by Stacey Warde

By Dell Franklin

We are rolling along, through the high desert, headed for Denver on my second day on the California Zephyr and words cannot describe how soothing it is to sit in the observation coach watching the country flow by – clickety-clack, clickety-clack – a sort of mesmerizing effect unrivaled for whatever ails a human being: restlessness, boredom, a mind-deadening rut bordering on depression….

The world is reawakening before me, like a flower blooming. It is all the same yet different. I am surrounded by people who eschew normal modes of transportation, and savor the train.

The land we are burrowing through is the land of the forgotten. We are in the middle of Nowheresville, approaching Grand Junction, Colorado, and I have never observed such an amazing amount of junk along the edges of towns, piles and piles of steel and ancient rusted debris, wind blasted tractors, various farm equipment and cars, adobe huts in ruins, long faltered prefabs and trailers, mangled furniture of every type, on and on until we are in Grand Junction.

Slowing down, we pass through dilapidated outskirts of broken fencing and small square nondescript homes with old dusty pickups in back, and into the drab horizontal sprawl of Pilot Gas, John Deere yard and building, Steel Supply, Red Roof, Conoco Station, Tractor Supply, Outback, Dairy Queen, Mesa Mall, a bowling alley, Hobby Lobby, Walmart, etc., etc. 

And, finally, a small dusty train station.

I think to myself, this place has to be a cultural wasteland in which I’d be bored to tears. What do they do around here, and in the surrounding mini-bergs? I envision scowling MAGA Boomers—instead of the more sophisticated Wall Gang in Cayucos of educators, entrepreneurs, artists, a lawyer—ensconced in coffee shops, clad in plaid flannel shirts, ball caps, and baggy Levi’s hitched up over proud pot bellies by suspenders.

What are they talking about? Trump. What else is there in this isolated desolation? He came into their lives in 2015 and has been there for them ever since on their TVs, which have to be on Fox News night after night, nonstop—a jolt of joy, excitement and reaffirmation as their charismatic idol sticks it to the woke, kale-munching coastal elites, those promoting queers and commies and minority mooches and immigrant parasites from shit-hole countries, and wanting their fucking guns!

Every night an anticipation of genuine, enthralling reality TV, and not those goddamn Beverly Hills and New York housewife bitches throwing food and expensive wine at each other while their rich, entitled husbands cower in fear of a lucrative divorce payoff.

Vote for Trump? Hell yes! Things were so exciting when HE was in the sham of a White House goosing and infuriating the precious pussy libs on a daily basis, standing up for real men, the cops and the soldiers, the hunters and miners, by God, and never appeasing those academic mollycoddles in their ivory towers!

Oh, I could “feel” it as I stood outside, among other passengers in Grand Junction, savoring a Haagen Daz bar after visiting a small grocery during a half-hour wait. And, truly, I relished what I felt. Why would or should those who live here and work the kind of jobs available, and face the kind of stifling boredom they do, feel any other way, especially when the wife mistakenly turns on MSNBC or, God help them, Trump’s mortal enemy, CNN?

“TURN THAT SHIT OFF, WOMAN!”

Back on the train, rolling out of GJ, I observed a man whom I was sure was Chinese, dashing back and forth across seats from window to window, snapping photo after photo with his phone. Everybody but me—no cell phone—was doing the same, but this smiling man was the swiftest, and I complimented him on his agility and prowess during a lull and asked to view his photos. He laughed and showed me a long reel of beautiful pics, and we began talking.

He’d been a Taiwanese immigrant, now a US citizen. He came to the states in his teens, joined the Army, got into intelligence, earned a college degree, retired after 20 years as a major, and now works in Washington, D.C., in tech. He seemed happier than anybody I’d ever known. His wife, also Taiwanese, smiled and waved. He was intelligent and astute. Itching to inform him of what I “felt” about Grand Junction and the immense flat lands, he listened intently and nodded.

Finally, when I ended my little observation, he said, “Sometimes, my friend, a man can walk down the street and something will come down from the sky and hit him in the head and kill him.” He looked into me, still smiling, as if he was my friend. “Enjoy yourself while you can. Life is good.”

We talked for over an hour, until we hit the Rockies–where the libs populate wholesome ski resorts with gourmet restaurants and health food stores–and my new friend resumed his frantic photo taking.

Dell Franklin writes from his home in Cayucos, Calif., where he makes time for the Wall Gang, some of whom might be considered “coastal elites.” He is the author of “Life on the Mississippi, 1969” and of the forthcoming book, “The Ballplayer’s Son,” due out in September. Dell is the founding publisher of The Rogue Voice.

Cody who?

People pleasing feels so good, until it doesn’t

I was very eager to please, not realizing what harm I might be doing to myself and others.

Photo and story by Stacey Warde

For much of my adult life, I’ve felt like the local pool boy, convenient to have around, but not of much use otherwise. I’ve worked grunt jobs, and also held roles in what others might consider the “professions.”

I’ve had experience as a pool cleaner, ranch hand, commercial blueberry grower, window washer, salesman, and flockster (raising chickens and selling farm-fresh eggs in the local market), as well as in landscape installation and maintenance, mostly laborer occupations. I’ve encountered invading squirrels, rats, bobcats, coyotes, rattle snakes, vicious dogs, and threatening bosses and angry paying customers, and received plenty of scoldings, cuts, and bruises, including a dog bite in the ass resulting in a trip to the doctor; all this in the dirty grunt business of producing food, and servicing people’s homes.

I’ve also worked as a writer, editor, and publisher, and got into spats with local government officials, readers who hated my guts and threatened to burn down the building where I worked, a bishop who fired me for writing an opinion piece about favorable interfaith dialog with pagans, and I took bites all over, resulting in sessions with a therapist.

I once even had one of the area’s best female dermatologists, an attractive associate of one leading dermatologist who taught classes for aspiring skin doctors at UCI hundreds of miles away, lift my ball sack, inspect every inch of my body, for signs of skin cancer and when she found something suspicious on my right lower leg, she snipped it out and sent it to the lab. I’d already had a Stage 2 melanoma removed from my back years earlier.

When the lab results came back positive for a second melanoma, she called me at work while I was in the midst of a pressing deadline, of putting the paper to bed, a critical moment in the publishing business where all the pieces must come together and go to press, as we would say. A late fee of $400 (in the early 2000s) would be imposed for every 15 minutes we missed our deadline for which, I’d been taught, there was no excuse.

“You need to come to my office right now,” the doctor said at 2 p.m.

“I can’t come right now!” I said, exasperated, looking at the clock, with a 4 p.m. deadline. “I can’t get out of here until at least 4:30.”

Okay, she said, “I’ll see you then!” And she hung up. Serious business, I thought.

“Four-thirty, fuck!” I said to myself and arranged to have a friend pick me up from the doctor’s office. Then, I went back to work.

When the doctor was done removing the cancer, I caught a glimpse of the specimen on the tray. It looked like a small slab of veal with hair on it. I gasped. She was so deft and careful, I had no idea what she had removed. My wound healed quickly and there was virtually no scar, not like the one left years earlier on my back by a surgeon who seemed nice but had a heavy hand while tugging on my back.

In all, I was very eager to please, not realizing what harm I might be doing to myself and others. I failed to embrace my own true colors while attempting to “help” others find theirs. My dermatologist did more than remove cancer from my leg; she helped me understand how important self-care can be, especially when the threat to life is real.

As one committed to my job and my boss, and failing to account for my own needs, I gave what I could to be a “good” guy, a team player willing to sacrifice everything, and perhaps more than I should have, just to wear the team jersey. But that’s what Americans do, that’s what we were taught to do. We all work hard and perhaps more than we ought, more than what is humanly healthy. In the end, we might hope for some kind of reward, as I have, only to find that some individuals have far more than they should while others have virtually nothing.

Thirty years ago, the bookkeeper where I was then working as a sales associate for an extreme video producer and distributor (featuring such filmmakers as ski buff Warren Miller and ice climber Austin Hearst, grandson of William Randolph Hearst) asked me to step outside after observing my interactions with the boss.

“Are you familiar with codependency?” she asked. Cody who? Melody Beattie had recently published “Codependent No More,” which was then all the rage.

I’d heard the term and, not being a fan of what’s trendy, I dismissed the bookkeeper’s suggestion that I could benefit from some insights into what has turned out to be one of my leading toxic behaviors, so eager to please, even those who could give two shits about me, setting aside what’s best for me in order to make others happy. What a waste of time and energy! I now realize. But, how to break the habit?

I still do it; this is a very hard habit to break. Where did it begin? Probably in light of the ideal that the best life is the sacrificial life, where we endeavor to give ourselves over to the well-being and happiness of others, even to the point where it hurts and is harmful. But, who knew? Who knew that this sort of sacrifice could be so toxic? What greater way to avoid personal responsibility than to assume responsibilities that are not mine?

I wish I’d been less skeptical and paid closer attention to the bookkeeper’s concern. I might have avoided the heartache of giving in to people who pretend friendship and seek little more than to be appeased, praised, or flattered, who haven’t any real personal interest in me beyond what I can do for them, with little to no commitment to mutuality on their part.

This, I’ve learned, is a type of trauma bond, of which I’m quite familiar, having tried to establish relationships with people who were perhaps not as interested in me as I was in them. And, as so often happens when laser focusing on someone else, we hurt more than help one another. My goal now is to avoid these unhealthy bonds as much as possible, and to associate with others who aren’t afraid of intimacy and conversation, and to expend as much good energy upon myself as I try to give to others.

Giving until it hurts felt so right, until it didn’t.

Stacey Warde lives mostly in solitude, which suits him well, yet he still loves a good conversation. This essay appeared originally on Medium.

On the train: A road trip

Veterans who bonded through military service

The San Luis Obispo Amtrak Train Station at dawn. Photo by Stacey Warde

By Dell Franklin

I was at my starting point — the waiting room at the San Luis Obispo Amtrak Train Station at ten in the morning — sitting beside my lone bag and small thriftstore blanket rolled up and tied together, when I spotted two elderly gents walking into the station together, dragging two large suitcases apiece. Paunchy, graying, clad in blue jeans and heavy coats, unrecognizable in this part of the world, their ball caps and T-shirts told me they were proud Vietnam vets.

Later, we all boarded an Amtrak bus to take us to the train station in San Jose. A miserable ride. But once at the SJ station we were the only three left to take a train to Sacramento, where I was going to stay for two days and resume the rail to Denver and visit family.

We nodded to each other. I was in knee-high shorts, sneakers, a hooded sweatshirt, my usual beach garb. While they both seemed bald, I had a thatch of wild, two years growth of hair and a full reasonably trimmed beard.

We were brothers from the same generation, sons of fathers and uncles who served in WWII.

I asked the taller of the two if the train to Sacramento was going to be on time, and he said in a clipped mid-Western twang, “My guess is, it is. We were held up six hours going from Denver to LA when a rock slide covered the tracks.”“How was that?”

He winked. “Not the end of the world.”

As I stood beside him and his friend as the train rolled up, we had already established that I was going to Sacramento to play tennis and visit an old best friend I hadn’t seen in 16 years, and they were staying with family in Sac.

When I clambered onto the commuter train and sat down on one side, they saw me and automatically sat together on the opposite side facing me. The shorter man, gray, stocky, but somehow with a jaunty bounce, was from Mississippi. Tom. The bigger man was Mike. They had served together in ‘Nam in 1968 and ‘69.

“The worst of times,” I said. “Tet.”

They nodded. Mike did the talking. There was a twinkle in his eye, a wry slyness. He was from Kansas, 60 miles south of Kansas City, and owned a farm. He and Tom had met in ‘Nam and become such close friends that they met yearly and took train trips together, often visiting family throughout the country — a ritual. They had an easy camaraderie about them, unlike brothers or serious companions. Of course, they were curious whether a specimen like myself from their generation had served, and when I told them I’d been in the Army three years, everything opened up, because there was immediate trust. A bond. We were brothers from the same generation, sons of fathers and uncles who served in WWII.

Tom had just acquired his retirement home out in the country in Northern Mississippi after working his whole life in Memphis. He had a deep, slow Southern drawl. When I told him I once had a firecracker of a past girlfriend from Taylorsville, Mississippi, he pepped up, and suddenly I became Debbie Nelson of 1986: “Day-uhl, y’all such an asshole,” I drawled in my best imitation. “y’all jes’ keep pissin’ me off, no end.”

Tom laughed so hard he almost fell out of his seat. From then on it was like we were fellow soldiers at the Enlisted Men’s club, sitting at a table drinking Budweiser. There are no stories like Army stories. I told them I had joined late in 1963 and spent my tour in Europe, before the war started and the nationwide round-up of those who didn’t have the money or pull to get out of it began. 

Mike nodded. He shrugged. “You had to do what you had to do as well as you could and hoped to get out of it.”

“Seemed like it was part of the job, the duty of being an American citizen.” I said. “You expected to serve.”

They both nodded. Mike said, “That’s why I don’t like being thanked for my service.”

“Me neither.”

“But I’m proud of what I did.”

I said, “I think there’s a certain pride in doing the dirty job for your country, and the military is the dirtiest job there is.”

“It is,” Mike agreed. He gazed at me. “Sometimes, I think they ought to bring back the draft. So many of these kids seem too involved with themselves. They don’t have that feeling of giving back. Maybe they could get into the Peace Corps. Anything. Picking up trash along the highway.” He shrugged. “I don’t ever propose war, but the military did me some good. It gives you a different perspective on life. An appreciation.”

It was three hours to Sacramento and Mike and I talked and talked while Tom listened and gazed out the window at the East Bay. Mike raised emus for twenty years. The second tallest bird. A delicacy. Now he rented out his land to small farmers. The small farmer was disappearing into the jaws of the corporations. He was divorced and had six kids. He appeared farmer strong. There was a peacefulness about him, a reassurance that our country was still in a good place. 

We discussed what it was like having friends while in the military as compared to civilian life. As Tom dozed, I asked Mike if he felt the friends, or best friend you made in the military, was the best friend you’d ever make, and he nodded, strong conviction in his eyes, and said, “Absolutely. Tom and I are best friends. We are family.”

I then told him the best friend I ever had was also in the Army, John DeSimone, a gangster from Chicago. “We visited each other over the years,” I said. I was starting to get choked up. “When he died, guess who his wife called first, before his own brothers?”

“You.”

I nodded.

“He had your back.”

“All the way down the line. And I had his back.”

“That’s what it’s all about,” Mike said, that proud glint in his eye.

The trip went fast. When, after he  asked me what I did these days, I told Mike I was a writer and had a book –“Life On The Mississippi, 1969” – on Amazon, and explained what it was all about, he dialed it up on his phone, grinned, and said, after hitting a few keys, “I just ordered it.”

Dell Franklin served proudly in the U.S. Army, and writes from his home on the Central Coast of California.

Music in the Schools

I pleaded with my parents to please let me learn how to play the piano. My mother was aghast; she hated piano lessons as a little girl.

By Stacey Warde

Part I

My dad traded his used lawnmower for my first piano. I was in sixth grade.

We lived in the condos, Tustin Village, a tight mix of family units separated only by paper-thin walls through which, as children, we could listen to our neighbors’ pillow talk.

We had no need for a lawnmower.

All that grew in front of our condo, along the concrete slab for a walkway to our front door, was ugly green ivy, a great place for rodents to thrive. The few lawns that could be mowed were kept by the homeowners association in the finely manicured commons, “the putting greens,” we called them — located between two community swimming pools — where at night some of the Village kids would gather to smoke marijuana and pair up for sex for the first time.

Sometimes, we’d spend the day indoors, unsupervised, listening to early versions of Santana or Neil Young on a hi-fi stereo system that belonged to a friend’s parents.

In addition to hanging out in the putting greens and the swimming pools, we gravitated to the playground with its half-court basketball space, swings and tether ball court.

When we got bored with these activities, we’d gather in the greens to play, throw rocks and clods at the beehives hanging from a smattering of olive trees around the commons. Once, a beehive came crashing down on Lane as he rode his bicycle beneath the hive when a rock dislodged it from its place in the tree. He tore off on his bicycle toward home, screaming, covered with bees. His parents rushed him to the hospital. No one that I knew at the time had a love for playing a musical instrument.

The only public music on site occurred occasionally when someone in the Village hosted a cocktail party in the clubhouse, where kids weren’t allowed to loiter.

Prior to moving to the condos, we lived in a small rental house with a tiny lawn that needed frequent quick mowing. Since moving to the Village, however, the mower sat unused in a shed in the square concrete slab of our condo “backyard,” no larger than a prison cell with high fencing, a place that felt mostly like a developer’s afterthought, an accident or a trap, no place where kids or parents would want to spend their time, unless they were hiding, in deep depression, seeking outdoor isolation, or cooking on the barbecue.

The only person in the condos who played a musical instrument in that festering pool of latchkey children, mostly pre-teens, looking for things to do, was an older, stout, and not very popular girl whose father worked for an electronic typewriter business. He, of course, was proud to inform us that his daughter could play the accordion quite well and would love to give us a concert. Kids in the neighborhood turned down the offer several times until finally we gave in and sat for a session in which the stout girl played her accordion with verve and acumen, while her proud, beaming father accompanied her on his own accordion. I don’t exactly remember the music, only the pleasure her face showed while she played. We let her play for us only that one time.

Not long after the home mini-concert, a few of us decided to pick up guitars, it didn’t matter what kind, plastic, wood, whatever, we were gonna play. Forget the accordion! We burned ourselves out the first day and our band aspirations died just as suddenly.

As a sixth-grader, I was discovering that girls had superpowers as we hung out on bored afternoons, listening to records, watching TV, feeling the itch of pubic hairs starting to grow, and sometimes curious hands rummaging through our pants. I needed and wanted more focus, something creative, something to fill in the hours when I wasn’t at the ballpark, or throwing oranges at cars from inside the surrounding orange groves, or lounging on a Saturday afternoon at a friend’s house while his sister tried to wrestle me off the couch.

Dad traded his mower for a beautiful clunky old upright piano that barely fit into our tiny three-bedroom condo. It took up nearly half the dining area downstairs but it fit snugly where it stood against the paper-thin wall. He traded it with my beloved great-aunt Doris, an avid gardener with a big beautiful home garden in Laguna Beach where she and her sister, my grandmother, grew up. She needed the lawnmower more than we did, and she would put it to good use. I loved visiting her home and her garden, which always felt like welcome spaces to me, mostly on account of her warmth and easy Southern California demeanor and the lovely roses in her garden.

I pleaded with my parents to please let me learn how to play the piano. My mother was aghast; she hated piano lessons as a little girl.

Mrs. Boger, a classical pianist, had come to our school, the brand new Heideman Elementary School. She came to play music as part of a trio, and I was mesmerized. We sang songs in school with one of the teachers who enjoyed singing but we had never seen a live performance by real pros. I felt drawn to the mix of sound from stringed instruments harmonizing with Mrs. Boger’s piano playing.

The mini-concert was my first real awakening to live music. I don’t know whose idea it was to bring music into the school but I’m glad that it happened; it’s been a lifelong journey and enjoyment in the more than 50 years since. Music, as I understood it until Mrs. Boger came along, had mostly been sing-alongs at school or took place in the background, usually while listening to my Uncle Ron’s vinyl selection of soul, which I still love. But music wasn’t something I’d ever experienced up close, not in a personal or intimate way, not where you could actually see and hear the musicians playing, working together to create harmony.

My great-grandmother, Marie Harding Thurston, apparently could be quite dramatic; she loved the theater and she loved to sing. From “Laguna Beach of Early Days,” by J.S. Thurston, published by History Press.

No one in my family, as far as I knew, had ever played a musical instrument. Only much later did I learn that my grandma played the piano when she sat down one evening and started playing from some old sheet music we had in the house. Her mother, a pioneer educator, Marie Harding Thurston, apparently could be quite dramatic; she loved the theater and she loved to sing, sometimes embarrassing mom and her siblings in a Laguna Beach church because she sang louder than everyone else.

None of that came down to me until dad traded his lawnmower.

I marveled at this music in the flesh, Mrs. Boger and her trio, sound produced by perfectly imperfect humans keeping time and blending themselves in a mix of harmony that I found more compelling than lumbering through a bunch of reading cards, or trying to avoid falling asleep at my desk during “self-directed” exercises such as reading and math. I hated penmanship too, especially when the teacher would try in vain to force my left-handed writing style to look more like a right-hander’s by twisting my hand back instead of letting it curl awkwardly around my pen as felt natural to me.

I couldn’t take my eyes off Mrs. Boger’s hands, though, left and right, as they moved effortlessly across the keyboard, producing the most amazing, articulate sound, in a language or vocabulary that felt both familiar and foreign, in time and in sync with these other musicians. When the performance was over I ran up to the piano. How long does it take to learn how to play like that? What was she reading? Sheet music? What’s that? I couldn’t make sense of any of it. She asked me if I would like to learn how to play the piano.

Yes! I told her. She reached into her purse and gave me her business card. “Give this to your parents,” she said. “Tell them you want to take piano lessons.”

Stacey Warde writes and practices the piano daily from his home in Mendocino County. This article first appeared on Medium.

On being a Jew

In an increasingly anti-Semitic world

Dell Franklin may not be the ideal Jew but he aligns himself with those who have once again become targets of escalating anti-Semitism in the US and abroad. Illustration from his Rogue Voice classic, “The shortest bar mitzvah in the history of the Jewish religion.”

by Dell Franklin

On being a Jew, I’d say I’ve been pretty lax these past 60 or so years, as I haven’t been in a synagogue in all that time, except to deliver eulogies at my parents’ funerals. I get lost when discussing religion and was raised never to bring it up in any conversation in fear of insulting somebody. When somebody tries to proselytize me to any religion, I quickly inform them I’m hopeless and at best an agnostic, or nonbeliever.

Still, I was raised by Jewish parents who both grew up in the Midwest amid virulent and, in my dad’s case, vicious anti-Semitism. And, as a kid, I went to synagogue, usually by force, resentful because it was unbearably boring and took me away from baseball, football and whatever else was on the agenda in blue-collar, roughneck Compton, California, where I grew up.

Jewish boxing champ Barney Ross emerged as one of boxing’s great fighters in Chicago in the 1930s.

My father grew up in Chicago in the 1920s and ‘30s, the only Jew in an anti-Semitic German/Polish neighborhood. From childhood on, he and his sisters were called kikes, sheenies, Jew boys and Jew bitches, and yes, were spat upon. Dad engaged in fights nearly every day. He was built for it, and by 13 trained in a boxing gym that produced the great Jewish champion Barney Ross. By 16, dad was an amateur champion under an Irish name because he didn’t want his parents knowing what he was doing.

You see, as in most Jewish families, plans were made for dad to become a lawyer, doctor, dentist, or businessman. What they didn’t expect was a psychotic athletic competitor who received a football scholarship to the University of Illinois, and ended up playing for the Detroit Tigers in baseball’s major leagues.

At the beginning of his 17-year professional baseball career, dad dealt with anti-Semitism quietly, until it went too far, and then he pulverized a Nazi teammate who belonged to an American Bund, and who repeatedly needled dad with the usual anti-Semitic insults. Dad carved out his eye with his fists and the man never played ball again. He vowed no Jew hater would ever forget the beatings he administered them. 

Young Dell Franklin with his father.
Young Dell Franklin with his father, who pummeled a Nazi sympathizer teammate.

Dad despised the foolish stereotype that Jews were elitist intellectuals and money mongers who wouldn’t fight. “Your old man’s a fighting Jew,” he’d tell me, flashing his most murderous, soul shaking glare, then wink, and grin.

Growing up with a father like this, and an extremely educated bookworm mother, a nurse and an Eleanor Roosevelt bleeding-heart liberal who applied a scholar’s dedication to Jewish history, I was bombarded with the history of the Jews, and especially the Holocaust. I was reminded constantly of a culture that produced people like Einstein and Oppenheimer as well as media and entertainment giants and business titans. This was already part of my identity and forced me to expect much of myself, or at least more than what most people supposedly expected of themselves, because I was a Jew. 

In my mother’s and dad’s families, their sisters and brothers insisted on marrying fellow Jews. Thus, I was attracted to lush Irish girls and voluptuous Italians. I was a full-on jock, and not one Jew lived in our neighborhood. I was an unmotivated student who had no interest in medicine, the law, or business.

I was not called a kike or sheeny or Jew Boy, but, rather affectionately, “Herman.”

At that time, being so young and obsessed with myself and sports, I failed to realize that when something tragic or disastrous faced the Jews, it became resoundingly obvious to me we were not necessarily a religion, or a race, or a nationality, but an historically tortured tribe, which was why, possibly, three months after my Army discharge, I was at the Israel Embassy in Los Angeles trying to volunteer as a soldier for what turned out to be the Six-Day War in the Middle East in 1967.

Of course they informed me I had to become an Israeli citizen and calmed me down by explaining they felt the war would be over soon in their favor, which it was.

But my inclination to end up at the embassy ready to fight for a religion I had not observed since I’d left home reminds me of how I feel today, when the ugly cruelty and ignorance of anti-Semitism in the world, and in the United States especially, is again rearing its ugly and evil head.

After 55 years of utter stagnation, I am riled. Not about being suddenly fervent about my Jewishness, but of being a member of a people I respect and admire and yes, love, despite myself. Once a Jew, always a Jew. Like my father, I can’t read from the Torah during high holiday services, but when I observe those gentle Jewish people who were shot down in that Pittsburgh synagogue a couple years ago by an anti-Semitic monster, I am a Jew.

And watching and listening to these survivors of that slaughter, and how forgiving and spiritual they are, brought back the civility and kindness, the warmth of the Jewish people I grew up with, and how if you are in trouble they rally around you and form a womb of comfort and safety that only a people who have been through what they have can.

I recall, as a cab driver back in the late 1980s in San Luis Obispo, Calif., picking up at the airport a bearded man nearing around 75 who had a regal bearing and penetrating gaze. He was visiting a daughter. He sat in the front seat and talked to me in an accent, and when I asked him where he was from because I was a writer and very curious, he said, Israel.

His name was David Kopenhaus and he was originally German but had fought with the British in WWII, and then against the British in 1948 as a member of the Irgun terrorist organization in Israel, and again in the 1967 and 1973 wars against the Arabs. He also explained he was not necessarily religious, and seldom went to temple. “I am more of a Nationalistic Jew,” he said, looking directly at me with intermittently piercing and kindly eyes.

But I knew what he meant. He had seen it all. And I guess he saw into me, too, because, when I dropped him off, he said, “I enjoyed talking to you — landsman.”

“How did you know I was Jewish?” I asked, because I hadn’t mentioned it.

“As an Israeli, we make it our business to know these things.”

Then he winked, and we shook hands.

Remembering a person like this, and my mother and father, and what is currently going on in this country with the rise of anti-Semitism, I admit to being a proud Jew, ready to rally and rumble, if necessary. △


Dell Franklin is the founding publisher of The Rogue Voice and author of “Life on the Mississippi 1969,” available at Amazon.