Archives for December 2018

Below is something I wrote in 2013.  This one hits pretty close to home. I remember sitting  with my good friend Mike Chumley and we both agreed that some of the best times in the lives of the two of us….came on New Year’s Eve. Go listen to Sonny Till and the Orioles……and I hope you might remember something from the past.

Happy New Year

                                     Just some thoughts:

There are many songs that reference Christmas, but not many that reference New Year’s Eve.

I remember the first time I heard the song. I was riding in the back seat of my good friend’s (Mike), 1956 Chevy convertible on New Years Eve of 1959. It was a cold winter night, one of those Indiana winter nights when the car heater is going full blast. It was nearing midnight, and the DJ on the radio introduced a song by saying, “Here’s  Sonny Till and the Orioles asking you a question: “What are you doing New Year’s Eve? This song is for all you guys and gals out there tonight.” It was like a Wolfman Jack thing. There was no satellite radio, only AM radio but it was great.

“What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?”
When the bells are ringing and the horns all blow
And the couples we know are fondly kissing
Will I be with you or will I be among the missing?
Maybe it’s much too early in the game
Ooh, but I thought I’d ask you just the same
What are you doing New Year’s?
New Year’s Eve
Wonder whose arms will hold you good and tight
When it’s exactly twelve o’clock that night
Welcoming in the New Year
New Year’s Eve

Maybe I’m crazy to suppose
I’d ever be the one you chose
Out of the thousands invitations you receive
Ooh, but in case I stand one little chance
Here comes the jackpot question in advance
What are you doing New Year’s Eve?
New Year’s Eve

Some of the best times I ever had came on New Year’s Eve. In some ways it does not seem like that long ago, Cohort and I, along with our dates, and it was New Year’s Eve.

I hope you are not among the missing.

What New Year’s Eve memories might you have?

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December 31, 2013
Keep on,
Larry Adamson

Posted December 30, 2018

Just some thoughts:

You don’t get to make up most of your story.
You get to make peace with it.

You don’t get to demand your life, like a given,
You get to accept your life, like a gift

Beginnings and middles, they are only yours to embrace.
to unwrap like a gift.

But you get the endings. You always get the endings.
You get the endings and you get to make them
a gift back to the Giver.

Ann Voskamp

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June 29, 2018
Keep on,
Larry Adamson

Posted December 28, 2018

Just some thoughts:

Now rest assured Hank is not going to be contacted by the National Institute for Marriage or James Dobson’s old group, Focus on the Family, asking he give tips on marriage. It is well documented that Hank’s marriage to Miss Audrey would not be described as martial bliss. I can remember sitting with Kirk McGee (of famous brother combination that used to appear on the Grand Ole Opry-Sam and Kirk McGee from sunny Tennessee) and him telling me stories about things that he and his brother often witnessed between Hank and Audrey. 

Just some thoughts:

I used to use the word hero for sports figures.

After visiting Europe  and walking the beaches at Normandy I am more careful with the use of that word “Heroes.” I don’t use it with people who play games.”

Having said that I have always had favorites. I guess my earliest and still to this day my favorite baseball player was one who played fourteen years in professional baseball. For twelve of those years he played with the Chicago White Sox’s. For various reason I identified with him. He was small, once described as “modest in size and minimal power” and yes a very good player.  He was a “ballplayer’s ballplayer. His manager once said “If you had eight Nellie Fox’s on your team you would be a winner.” In 1997 Fox would be voted into the baseball Hall of Fame.

In 1954 I was twelve years old and played my first organized baseball as a member of Ranes O’Daniel little league team. I played second base and my running mate at shortstop was Dave Everson. In our minds we were the equivalent of the White Sox’s combination of Chico Carrasquel (later Luis Aparicio) and Nellie Fox.

Years later I would overhear a conversation a co-worker of mine was having only to learn that he was a very good friend of Fox’s wife who at that time was a widow. Sadly Fox died from cancer on December 1, 1975. In fact my co-worker friend was from Fox’s home town and had known the family most all his life. Sometime later I would meet Joan Fox as she visited our office. I was introduced to her and she invited me to come to her home sometime and she would share with me much of Nellie’s memobilia and memories.

Not long after that invitation found me in her living room. What I thought would be a short visit turned into hours of her sharing with me the life and times of my boyhood “favorite.”

“Larry do you have Nellie’s autograph” she ask. “No, no I don’t, I would love to have but don’t.”  With that she got up from her chair went into another room and came back with a box. I could tell the box was full of papers. “During the baseball season and the years we were with Chicago we stayed in a hotel in downtown Chicago. What I did was I kept all those canceled checks over those years and I want to give you one.”

Thus today I have framed and hanging on my office wall a picture of Nellie Fox, one of his baseball cards but most of all I that check (canceled) made payable to the Piccadilly Hotel in the amount of $220 dollars and signed—Nelson Fox.

You know sometimes our heroes well sometimes they don’t turn out to be what we really thought they were.They just don’t live up to the what we thought of them  in our youth.

And then…in some cases they and their families they become even more than what we might have imagined and they still remain our favorite.

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November 7, 2013
Keep on,
Larry Adamson

Posted December 27, 2018

Just some thoughts:

“Their friendship was frozen in time.”

I heard that expression over coffee this morning. Said by someone not sitting at my table. I wrote it down.

I thought…sadly that happens to a lot of things…things often get “Frozen in time.”

They never continue. They never move from where they once were.

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October 25, 2018
Keep on,
Larry Adamson’

Posted December 26, 2018

Just some thoughts:

Her prayer book was a blue notepad. The kind one could purchase at say a Walmart, Ben Franklin type store. Remember the Woolworth’s, Ben Franklin type stores? In Sullivan, Indiana it was called The Index.

She writes “them down.” Them are her prayers. But she also writes them in pencil. Says that way they are a lot easier to change (erase)  and one doesn’t want to go markin’ thru what they once said they wanted to tell/ ask God about. She had been a good student in school but circumstance had caused her to cut short her learning earlier than most. She started workin’ at about age fourteen cleaning houses.

Each night she would take time to think about certain folks and then write their names down in her book.  But there was certain folks she might be a bit hesitant to write down their names. You know if you writes certain names then their names are gonna keep comin’ back to you and you just can’t get them from your mind.

She even said she had a name or two that she often wondered how or why she ever put them in her book.

“Bertina Bessemer of all people. Everybody know Bertina and me don’t take to each other ever since she call me a nigga fool for marrying Clyde umpteen years ago.”
Aibleen–The Help

Her good friend Minny says if you want someone to pray for you you certainly would want to be on her list. Minny says her friend got some kind of power prayer and she gets better results than most other folks she knows.

Kind made me think, I think I have known some folks who I wish or hoped my name might be on their prayers list. I’ve had the feeling a time or two that some folks have a little more special hook-up regarding their prayers than some others. You ever had that feeling?

Aibleen’s good friend Minny  says:

“We all are on a party line to God, but you (Aibleen) you setting right in his ear.”

You know there are some folks whose list I would just as soon my name might not appear upon.

Aibleen’s is one I might hope that it would appear.

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May 10, 2018
Keep on,
Larry Adamson

Posted December 25, 2018

Just some thoughts:

I once heard a person say, “Son, if you look back over your shoulder you’ll plow a crooked row.”

I understood what he meant.

But you know as one ages sometimes  on occasion it’s awfully hard not to take a sneak peak, a quick glance back over one’s shoulder.

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April 30, 2018
Keep on,
Larry Adamson

 Just some thoughts:

“You ask me to give up the hand of the girl I love”
“But my friend that will never be…you better move on.”

Early this morning as I pulled out of my drive I slipped in an old Arthur Alexander cd. A personal cd I had made. Often at one of the big record sales (albums for ten cents an album)  I go to here in Nashville I will buy up a bunch of albums of a particular artist I like. Then I will make up my own “greatest hits” of that artist. Songs of theirs that maybe were not big hits but favorites of mine. This was the case with this cd I slipped in my car player this morning. By the way I double if anyone reading this even knows who Alexander was. Sadly his later years were spent not on the stage but driving a Baltimore city bus.

The first song that came up caused me to smile. Just the night before my wife and I had dinner and then to a show with another couple. He had shared with me a story that so aptly fit ole Arthur’s singing to me this morning.

My friend and I could talk for hours on many subjects and matters. And often we are telling stories many from our past. As we waited on the women to leave the restaurant and make our way across the street to the theater for the music show he told me this story.

He and his wife were high school sweethearts. He once ask me if I had dated anyone else  much beside my wife as he told me he and his wife had not. I told him well that was not the case in my life. Anyway.

He said one day at school he was standing talking to this girl. The one who would later become his wife. Later that day another guy said to him, “Hey that girl you were standing by earlier today, she’s cute, I’d like to take her out.”  My friend said I told him” She’s my sister and she would not go out with you.”

Evidently that took care of the matter as they have been married fifty plus years. I don’t know if my friend knew of or had heard Arthur singing but in essences he picked up on the line:

“You better move.”

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November 20, 2017
Keep on,
Larry Adamson

Just some thoughts:

Many folks will recognize the name Harper Lee for her novel To Kill a Mockingbird. And rightly so.

I also remember her for something else she once wrote:

“You can choose your friends but you sho’ can’t choose your family, an’ they’re still kin to you no matter whether you acknowledge ’em or not, and it makes you look right silly when you don’t.”

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January 10, 2009
Keep on,
Larry Adamson

Posted December 22, 2018

Just some thoughts:

“I remain fully cognizant that my body is a timepiece that can kill me tomorrow or let me live a hundred years. It is this hard, inexorable passage of time that, I believe, is the one great surprise in every human life.”

“Take the word “final,” roll it around on your tongue, gum it well, cut your tongue on its edges, taste its metallic finish, spit it to the ground in scorn and distaste. It will still mean the same thing.”

My Losing Season–Pat Conroy

In the lines of a Ray Price song…

“Time is a monster that lives in our clocks, it shows no remorse.”

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November 17, 2018
Keep on,
Larry Adamson

Posted December 22, 2018