Mysteries

There are very few headlines that demand that I read them, but anything related to Bigfoot, Amelia Earhart, and the location of Jimmy Hoffa's body always draws me in.

We have another alleged Hoffa burial location. How many times have we done the dig?

It just doesn't get old for me.

The Old Place. Whale Edition

Every Labor Day I think of the heroin story, but I've already told you that.

Instead I'll tell you this tale from the Old Place.

The Old Place was extremely hot in the summer. We lived in an old brick building next to the Petroleum and Nuclear Worker's Union Hall. On summer days the house would be cool until evening, when the bricks would expel the heat they'd been collecting all day. Some nights it would be 90 degrees at midnight, and rising. Kinda awful. However I don't think we ever paid more than $500 bucks a month for this place and I was on disability so this was the perfect spot for us during those years.

About a dozen years ago, on a hot Thursday in late August, we were watching ER. The teaser for the 11 o'clock news came on saying that a whale had washed up on the coast of our town. Our little beach was maybe 200 feet across, so we assumed that they meant the oceanside beach of the same name.

We waited for the news, and, sure enough! We recognized our little beach and the burned-out pier. Crazy! We grabbed our flashlight and walked down to the beach. There we found another couple who had obviously watched the news also. Our lights made out the shape of the whale. Not much to see, but I would come down the next day and see him in daylight.

The morning paper said that we were about to have a heat wave on the weekend. It was pretty warm by the time I left the house. I stepped out and it smelled...a little "whale-y". Poor whale. According to the Fish and Game guy I met, the whale was a juvenile female, had been deceased for quite a while and wasn't in his jurisdiction. The joy of living in an unincorporated area. "So what's going to happen with the whale?" I asked him, "I don't know," he said. Uh-oh.

I ran into a neighbor on the way back home and we talked a bit about the whale, the smell, and the upcoming heat wave.

Two days later I saw the same neighbor and commented that it was smelling a lot less whale-y. He said "You know why, right?" "Me and Bob..." (anything that started with those three words could not be good. Bob kept a pit bull chained to his porch behind our house, he didn't have a lick of sense and he owned guns) "went out in my boat, tied a rope to its tail, and towed it into the bay. Then we shot it full of holes." He seemed surprised that it didn't sink. All he knew was that he didn't want the smelly whale on our beach during a heat wave. I could tell that in some weird way he thought it was his civic responsibility to do something with the whale. He lived next door to me and also owned guns, so I wasn't going to disagree.

One week later, on Thursday, we saw the teaser for the news: "Another whale has washed up in the area." It was clearly the same whale, and I could see the bullet holes this time. It had floated into another county, on the beach fronting a fancy neighborhood, just in time for the heat wave.

I almost had an image to illustrate this post.

That first smelly day on the beach I used the last shot on my camera to take a picture of the whale. When I got my film back, the whale shot wasn't there.

So ends the story of the whale.

Bandaversary

A few weeks ago we had a second anniversary gathering of the Hawaiian band. 

First up, pizza (one pepperoni and one broccoli, feta and pesto). 

Then the Keynote presentations began. I don't recall who decided that we should each create a Keynote presentation, but it was nerdy and hilarious. We drew numbers out of a hat to determine the order of the presentations (someone suggested that it be the beer can hat) and then whoever was presenting was required to wear the beer hat.

Many of the goals we presented were similar: new recordings, more gigs, some were different: outfits, introduction of a bass player.

All in all it's been a satisfying year. We played five gigs at two festivals, two forklift parties and a school fair. We played for a halau, which was a first. Can't wait to do more. 

And get those outfits!

The Ring

Another part of the H5 saga.

H5, as you may recall, was an old friend from the very old days when I was young and lived over an Irish bar. He and his buddies, all programmers or atom smashers of some sort, frequented the bar as did I, since doing so meant I could both be social and not have to clean up my own livingroom. The bar was my *other* livingroom.

The boys were the center of much of my social world. They were much older, had read all of the books that Classicists are supposed to read, and were fairly fluent in Old Norse. I'd just finished studying the Sagas myself, so we had a fair amount in common. Except they retained the stuff and I didn't.

They also had real jobs and I didn't. I was beginning my spectacular waitressing career that kept me just ahead of the rent, then $210. So they'd often buy me dinner in order for me to continue the evening's revel. We'd discovered a terrific French restaurant, Andre's, whose namesake chef loved to make our tummies happy.

One night after going to Andre's, H5 dropped me off and I noticed a certain tension, as if I were on a date I didn't know about. I ignored it, because I didn't want to know that he was sweet on me. It helped that I had a boyfriend (who also provided his grandfather's WWI French army uniform for me to wear to Andre's on Bastille day). They boyfriend was around only a little, and then not around at all. At that point I had no cover.

One day, I got a call from H5. A typical phone call from him would start like this: "This is.............[H]. Happy Einstein's birthday" (or Autumnal Equinox or whatever). We'd be talking for a while and then he'd say something absurd like "The boys and I were talking and we've decided that we'd like to create a religion with you as its figurehead." Awkward, right? Conversations like this happened with greater frequency until the day.

I came home from work, rehearsal and shopping to find that there was a sewage leak in my apartment. Funky brown water stood in my sink and my bathtub. I'd brought home mussels to cook, so I was filling a pan while trying not to look into the sink. The phone rang. It was H5.

The conversation went something like this:

"Hello, this is.............[H]. Happy [insert esoteric holiday]." This was followed by smalltalk on his end. I didn't have time to tell him that I was surrounded by vats of my own waste. It got worse. "I was wondering if you would consider...........marrying me?" There was no prelude to this, no holding hands or kissing or sharing of reading material. I said "Can you hold on for a sec?" I ran to another part of the apartment and screamed into a pile of dirty laundry. When I could put off returning to the phone no longer, I grabbed the phone but didn't know what to say. "Think of the advantages," he said. Unfortunately I couldn't think of the advantages, and my selfish self could only think of how awful it was to be caught off-guard in this sort of circumstance.

He'd done the right thing. In the chivalrous world he'd constructed for himself in his mind he'd found a damsel in distress (me), fallen for her, tried to protect her from her bad boyfriends and poverty and pay for her laundry (I never took him up on the laundry part). The only problem was that he never fully filled me in on his fantasy and I didn't want to know about it.

Today I ran across a ring he'd given me. A friend of his had made it out of coin silver. He hoped that if I ever needed money I would sell it. I don't need the money now, but I think I'll sell it and give the money to the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism). He never quite got on with them, but they believe in a romanticism that's as deep as his.