The Voice of God

Three girls were clustered in the hallway of my high school. It was early April of 1958, on an Air Force base in Puerto Rico, between classes. I was walking toward them, in a way that could take me right up to them – or right past them.  I’d decide which depending on what they were talking about. Which turned out to be this:

Peggy: “Hey, Sue I hear you’ll be at the Spring Formal after all.”

Sue (with a nervous shrug): “Yeah, I’m going with Bob Gilliam.” She wasn’t looking right at Peggy.

Peggy (unconvincingly): “Oh, that’s cool. Is your mom gonna drive you?”

Sue: “Yeah – do you and Teddy need a ride?”

By this time, my decision was made – a slight shift of stride took me past them, my ears burning and my gaze fixed on the ever-fascinating rows of lockers, as if I had never noticed them before. Continue reading Friends Music Camp Stories #3: The Voice of God →

First posted, August 2016

One

August, 1956 –The night before the hurricane, I listened to the bugle calls before I went to sleep, as usual.  The calls weren’t played on a real bugle, of course, but from a record, blasting out of big loudspeakers somewhere in the barracks on the other side of the base, where the airmen lived.  They played one call at nine o-clock, another long one, called “Tattoo,” at nine-thirty, and the last one, Taps, at ten.

Unless there were a lot of planes taking off or landing, the bugle calls carried on the still night air over the tall palm trees and all the way to the family housing, where they echoed down our curving streets, which ran along the edge of the base facing the sea.

That sea, the Caribbean, was only two blocks from our house at 131 C Street.  That is, it was two blocks to the edge of the land; from there to the water was another two hundred feet or so, down a cliff.

Continue reading A Dog Days Blow–My Other Hurricane: Betsy vs. the Twenty-Five Dollar House →