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Long ago I composed a song about my childhood life at The Monday Club in my hometown. This was the first verse:

“When we were young and our souls were young, and we didn’t know what we didn’t know. We spent our nights at The Monday Club in each other’s arms, on the soft pine floor.” Corny, and hopefully a smidge of romance.

I have a hazy memory of the inside of the place, which wasn’t very big. Saturday nights, only Saturday nights. I knew a few dances, like get out on the floor dances. The twist, the jerk, could of done the stroll if I studied at math a little more. I think I was quietly wild enough for an okay watusi. But, all these more than 60 years later, I wished I’d gone all in with dancing. I would have learned the mashed potato, even the pony (like Bony Maronie). And this, perhaps my all-time favorite line in this musical life of mine – “Wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate.” The shimmy.

And slow dancing, oh, slow dancing. Didn’t always get a “Yes,” wasn’t always picked, but still, it was the start of a love affair. With slow dancing. I’m hoping I was with one someone or another, “in each other’s arms,” with this one:

Yes. Girl groups, the Monday Club, me and all of us.

When I was a kid I was blessed to find myself immersed in a musical milieu with three distict ‘styles’ of sound — The Beatles/Beach Boys British Invasion/American counterpart groups; Motown – and growing up in a population of one-fourth/one-third black folks and classmates, and working at a record store two years, there was lots and lots of Motown; and Girl Groups. It would have been a wildly limited life without the girl groups, and was wildly enriched with them. If you know, you know. If you don’t, bummer. Double winner — Motown girl groups.

If I wanted to refer back to last week’s pronoun-less and Chinese poetry fascinations, it may sound like this — “Evening walk, open windows, Ronettes spin, each star twinkles.” Which – far out – is me walking alone 6:45pm, early December passing Liz Precourt’s house and out comes flying through a second-floor window ‘Be My Baby.’ — “The night we met I knew I needed you so.”

When I was growing up in Wareham, MA there were these two places for dancing – The Monday Club, right down from me on High Street, and The Upstairs Cellar down on Main. You best believe both were filled with The Rascals, The Four Tops, and The Shangrilas. And if the creek don’t rise, and I’m right here through Friday, tacked on to every post this week will be one of my 10,000 favorite girl group songs.

Honored ones.

Much magic swirling. Late Saturday calm. Lowest electric charge sparkling the church bell air. Dong dong, dong dong, dong dong.

“Wait for it,” Saturday says. “Wait for it.” Too old to date. Breaking hearted. Someone please confiscate these leaf blowers. Planet sighing, every unnecessary decibel. Rakes? Brooms?

What’s with the only Dr. Wu?

This week’s pronoun-less, let-it-all-hang-out, quietly now, fit-and-start posts have been brought to you by Dr. Wu and Francois Cheng’s “Chinese Poetic Writing.”

So rich, this sparcity.

Look at all these books piled on the small blue sidewalk fetched table. Read them all at once? Piles so heavy the planet tilts.

Cosmic pinball machine. Hometown Zen arcade. Swans bobbing on the flowing river. So many childhood transgressions. Oh! They sparkle with life.

Dizzy selflessness, right there, amidst these flowers. There’s no helping this sputtering practice. No cure, this vast aloneness.

Finally. A little quiet at last, even here. Such a spot-lit place – electric blog. Orange freeze from the dairy queen. Always somebody’s birthday.

Practice. The entire conversation – about practice; as practice. Free speech. It’s other than history considered. The Ten Grave Precepts. ‘Not withholding the Dharma assets.’

Express the inexpressible. Bird song out the window. Refridgerator running. There’s a wildness. There’s a wildness to this practice. (Of living.) Switch shoes. Lazybones summer, with – as – chickens in a coop. That one goose. Looking directly.

All these walks a smidge like Thoreau, in the cabin’s open door. Lingering all day. Free speech. Face painted by the sun. Forever music and dancing.

Conversations with a Missouri girl so open. Wild and brakeless.

The room is not prepared.

Middle road, tar path, someone hollers, “Yo, Cool Breeze.” Nobody but Japanese Maples and Hydrangeas. People on porches, Saturday coffees, Boston Common traffic. The Red Sox are winning. There’s Sister Ray, some of its endless, unexpected hiccups, former lovers scattered, autumn leaves swirling sidewalks, each pair of running shoes – thin, thin, thin. 

Junior + Senior years of college, ‘69 through ‘74, a collection of cats and rolled reefer, frisbee’d Star of the Sea, frisbee on the 114, two Billy’s and a John, a thing ghost-like quartet completer. Is it the pot, floating stretching, olympic-worthy mid-air catches? Look, look now. All the Bills gone. Jack’s in the shack.

So much alcohol, many meetings, cats, kitties, ten hundred stories. What’s help really, really like? Without pronouns. Without explanations. So, yeah, someone yells out, “Cool Breeze?” Wasn’t there always that one saved chair?

Speaking of no explanations – Any artist ever explained? Any poet? 

Bad news from the Doctor, what to do?

Celebrate Saturday, hunker down, reading glasses.

Still, breeze blows beyond, passing trees, out the window, alone along the bench. Crows the only audience. Dragonflies.

Way things are – no sense. Understanding – dark closet.

Pig part switcheroo. That’ll do. That’ll do.

Some days.

By 10:30 in the morning yesterday I had sat in meditation three times, drank a couple of cups of coffee, and written my three Morning Pages in the recliner. I’d washed my sheets and towels, then washed the Camry in a car wash. I was sitting at my rarely-available but there-it-was favorite table at Starbucks with a dark roast and a side of half and half, looking at a poem from one of those books I tend to dig a lot – “Alone, she stands everywhere, leaving no tracks.” My friend Gina had called earlier, back at the studio, and there was poetry of its own in our conversation.

Then, on Zoom, I heard this read in Kentucky from a different poem late in the afternoon – “There are so many unopened presents from your birthday.”

The “leaving no tracks” has a glow for me. The all those “unopened presents” too. I was conscious at 4am of having woken up again and getting yet another chance. Maybe to leave no tracks. Maybe to open more presents.

Yeah. Some days.

I was stumbling through the late afternoon NE Portland heat, tipping, James Brown’s “Get On the Good Foot” pouring out from the android. My son Spenser and I had had a long talk, one of our talks that swirl in and out of common sense and outrageous loopiness – the new laptop, his pin, his password, why someone who lives in Portland was living with all them in Idaho and her parents would come and visit but it’s all cool, dad, and trying to spell the word “Throne” over and over to me, me repeatedly saying “Ghone” is not a word known anywhere in the solar system, cracking up, nevermind the Northwest or close by the Snake River.

The conversation ended, sweat rolling down my back and arms, with Spenser telling me that after he and Marion and Mabel and Asher (the PDX/Idaho/PDX girl) exited the movie “Minions” he listened to two songs on his phone – “8675309” (Tommy Tutone) and “Electric Avenue” (Eddie Grant). I howled, I’m pretty sure, with joy because I love both those songs so much and told my son so, and I said Eddie Grant was a Rastafarian and Spenser said, “A what?” and I said check the video on YouTube on your new laptop and he said it’s on my phone. Dad.

Then I found my way down and over to the Brazee Street bench that’s become sacred and played Harold Melvin and Lou Rawls and stumbled my way a few more blocks home, all mine this week with the landlords up in the San Juan Islands, and I checked the zillion plants I’m watering for them and got to sit on their porch and read more Pelecanos and then drop back into this below ground coolness, and bang this out.

It’s a blogger thing.

I woke up this morning with the strangest, most interesting feeling. That every moment of my life – each and every one – had and was crowded up just behind right then. Like I was having direct access to all of it. This happened while sitting.

Yesterday I stood in the middle of NE Clackamas, on my way walking to Fred Meyer’s to buy Tums – simply stopped by this spectacular Copper Beech towering over the corner of Clackamas and 17th. To the point where I walked over to the door of the large house whose yard held the tree and waited for people to see me. And when they did I gushed my thrill for life right then out into a Tuesday afternoon, and one of the young guys said the tree was 120 years old.

Which, I don’t know, isn’t feeling that old these days.