Saturday, February 3, 2018

Three Beautiful Things 02/02/18: Early Morning Demands and Breakfast, Back to the Dead, Tales at Corby's

1. Maggie and Charly -- the Deke tells me it's primarily Maggie -- have developed a habit of wanting to eat really early in the morning, like at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. and then go outside and bark and do their business. For a long time, they were presenting a challenge by wanting to eat at 4 or 5 a.m., but it's as if they've entered a different time zone and they are definitely on a different clock than I am, especially since the Deke left for her vacation in Eugene.

I have, for the time being, surrendered to this corgi demand and tried to make the best of it by seeing if I can achieve a new level on Candy Crush Saga and by listening to the Miles Davis Pandora station   or the Grateful Dead for a while before going back to bed.

So, this morning, when I buzzed down to Sam's at 6 a.m. to join Ed, Buff, Jerry, and Scott for breakfast, I'd been up, back to sleep for a while, and up again. I was hardly into the restaurant when Jerry bellowed at me from our table across the room, "So, Bill, how was the colonoscopy? We got no secrets here!" I laughed and said it went really well and we got our time at Sam's underway Jerry told funny colonoscopy stories, like the time he had a Mama's Cheeseburger from the HumDinger during his preparation period because he forgot he was fasting.

The subjects soon changed. I enjoyed my sausage and eggs and hashbrowns and the other stories that flew around the table.

And, on Saturday, I'm going to cook up some some homemade dog food composed of  stew meat, sweet potatoes, carrots, and green beans in a gravy and see if eating this more substantial food before bed time might help the corgis make it through the night without pestering me to get up so early to eat.

2. Back in the old days when I lived in Eugene, I was a subscriber to XM-Sirius Radio and I snored a lot and slept alone and often I put the radio on the Grateful Dead station and had it on all through the day and night in my room. Sometimes, at night or during a daytime nap, Grateful Dead songs like "Bertha" or "Scarlet Begonias" or a psychedelic, jazzy, surrealistic jam from a live "Dark Star" would sweeten my dreams.

Today, I suddenly realized that I hadn't listened to hours of non-stop Grateful Dead for quite a while, so I asked Alexa to play The Grateful Dead and our Echo Dot started playing a shuffle of all kinds of tunes, a mixture of tracks recorded in studio and others recorded live in concert, and suddenly I was back luxuriating in the unpredictable groove of the Grateful Dead's Americana folk music, rock n' roll, jazz, blues, psychedelia, and sometimes pristine and, other times, wobby vocal harmonies.

The first track that came on was "Uncle John's Band". I never heard the Grateful Dead play at the Oregon Country Fair site in Veneta, OR, and I quit going to the Oregon Country Fair twenty-five years ago, but for some reason hearing this song transports me to an imaginary and endless late August afternoon under blue skies, the air cooled by marine breezes blowing east from the Pacific Ocean, and I'm sitting near the Long Tom Rivear on the site of the Oregon Country Fair listening to an acoustic string band play slow blues and old folk tunes. Every tune is unhurried, the trees lining the river cast long cooling shadows, and I'm deep in bliss.  I never had this experience, but listening to "Uncle John's Band" sometimes makes me think I must have.

3. I snapped myself out of my Grateful Dead spell and leapt into the Sube and met Ed and Jake for a three o'clock lunch at the Hilltop Inn in Kingston. My prime rib and sauteed onions sandwich on a fresh ciabatta roll was light and juicy, perfectly fulfilling my desire to eat something delicious and that wouldn't leave me feeling stuffed.

After lunch, we headed to CdA, picked up Byrdman, and headed to Post Falls where we met up with Lars and Stu at Corby's, a bar owned and operated by Dave "Big Pappy" Corbeil, Kellogg High School Class of '67. Before he had to leave, Corby hung around for a while, knowing we Kellogg guys were coming in, and yakked with our table for a while.

As the late afternoon moved into the early evening, the stories among us Kellogg guys got better and better, funnier and funnier: Lars and Goose canoeing the Lead Creek; Lars and others getting put in jail in Superior, MT and then getting a police escort out of town; Jake, Louie, and Snotsie trying out Snotsie's Budweiser canoe on the Little North Fork when the river was running high and, well, not getting very far and miraculously surviving; Ed, Stu, Steve, and I making an epic trip to Priest Lake with Ed and me riding in a boat in the back Stu's van. There were more. I've heard every one of these stories a million times. I'm never sure when I recount them if I get the details right.  I do know, though, if we all got together again today, I'd laugh and laugh at hearing them again as if I'd never heard them before.

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