A Quick Checkpoint

A lot happened during those 9 months we spent in Escondido back in 1969. (Or maybe I just remember too much.) It's going to be tough to explain it all...

Playing the guitar started out as just something to do. But by the end of that summer it became who I was... And I wasn't just playing in those 2 bands. We knew the owners of a small cafe in La Jolla (I no longer recall the name) and I spent some of my evenings there playing background music... Stuff like Classical Gas, Girl From Ipanema, Michelle, Ticket to Ride - even a bit of Bach (not the hard stuff) :-) It wasn't a paying gig but I didn't care - I would have paid to play...

Aside: Back then I rarely talked to strangers because of the anxiety thing - I still don't. But for some reason I was never really nervous playing in front of an audience. The guitar became my voice and I didn't particularly care if people liked it or not...
Yeah - The more I reflect on my formative years the clearer it becomes that the good times were the ones when my life revolved around music - those are the times I remember clearly - and the times when the chaos around me didn't seem to matter... So in a way it was my salvation...

When I wasn't playing I was drinking - a lot - mostly with my sister Karina. Yes. After a lifetime of being at each others throats we had set our differences aside and actually become drinking buddies...

And speaking of Karina:
She was continuing to shed her inhibitions. That was one of the teachings of a certain "religion" whose name I shall not mention but it sounds like Cyan-Tall-Oh-Gee :-)
She had roughly 5 boyfriends in Escondido. She was modeling - both local newspaper ads and the "artistic" variety (it paid better). She placed second in the Miss Escondido pageant. She was also heavily into hallucinogens. And she was writing (and performing) some of the most amazing music. Here's the opening verse of one her songs from that era:

It was on the morning of the second day
Something came to me ... and then it slipped away
Flowers grow on a hill
The morning air is very still...
Their graves ... will lie forgotten...

It was an anti-war piece and it sent chills down my spine when she sang it... I used to have a copy of one of her studio tapes but I gave it to her daughter many years ago. I need to see if I can track it down and digitize it...

BTW: For the record - I have never touched hallucinogens. My thoughts are quite bizarre enough without them, thank you! ... Plus I saw what it did to Karina. She was never the same after some of those trips...

But back to the story:

Of course - mom was still mom. She still lived in a reality all her own... We were (as usual) overextended financially - missing rent payments, car payments and every other kind of payment you can think of. But we had a good time :-)

I should mention that mom was definitely not OK with the things Karina and I were doing. Despite her flighty and whimsical nature she was quite conservative (and protective) when it came to us kids. She just didn't know what to do about it. She went on frequent rants but we just ignored them... Even her patented "I should have never been born!" routine had stopped having any effect by then :-)

OK - this is (sort of) funny: One Saturday night mom came home from a trip to San Diego and told us she had run off the shoulder of I-5 (almost wrecking the Mustang) because her lane had ended (construction zone) without any warning whatsoever...
So - we went down I-5 again the next morning... The first signs appeared five miles before the spot where the incident had occurred. And as we got closer we encountered every size, shape and manner of warning device - including flashing lights: Construction Ahead - Caution - Lane Ending - Merge Left... I counted about 20 of them... Mom insisted that they had all been put up in the middle of the night because none of them had been there the prior evening :-)
She could be so oblivious... The fact that she was only ever in one accident (minor one in 1962) is so statistically improbable that it is almost incontrovertible evidence of intervention by a higher power :-)

Here's another story from that time period in Escondido:
Mom was ticketed for stopping past the white line at a stop sign. After unsuccessfully trying to talk her way out of it she asked the officer what would happen if she didn't show up for court. He told her "Try it and you'll find out."
Long story short - she got a notice that her license was being suspended for "failure to appear". When she finally went in front of the judge she did a routine on how badly mispositioned the stop lines were (from a visibility standpoint) in downtown Escondido and if people stopped where they were supposed to the city would need a lot more ambulances and tow trucks... She also explained that the officer had instructed her to skip court if she wanted to know what would happen ... so she did :-)
The judge dismissed all the charges... Yeah -that Hungarian charm didn't always work - but it worked often enough :-)

So yeah -there are lots more stories to tell before the move to Tyler, Texas in December. And I'm going to do my best to tell them...