As long as I don't call them because that's one of things I'm not really good at with this phone. To be honest one of the things I learned how to do, maybe the first thing if I were being honest, is listen to music-not just the kind I've loaded onto the phone via an SD card or whatever they're called, but also via a service I pay for every month, in my case Slacker.
There are a variety of services-I had this one on my Blackberry and I have the version designed for an Android phone because that's what I have now. There are hundreds of stations to choose from and I tend to pick one when I'm toddling off to the gym in the morning and maybe switch to something else while still there. I enjoy various styles of music unlike Carl with whom I worked years ago in Germany who liked "two kinds of music-country and western." And meant it.
A couple of mornings ago, in the middle of a station of artists like Fountains of Wayne, Al Stewart's Year of the Cat surfaced--an anomaly to be sure, I thought. Yesterday, while listening to a channel modeled on bands like the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Al and his cat made an encore appearance.
I very much enjoy Al Stewart and have a not inconsiderable number of his elpees, but I was puzzled at how we were finding one another after a long time gone. I still remember the first time I'd heard, and heard of, Al Stewart. It was about this time of year almost thirty-five years ago, Jack P., an Air Force Technical Sergeant who lived down the hall in the same barracks at Sondrestrom AB, Greenland, had returned from two weeks leave back in the world with a present for each of the AFRTS jeeps, Kim Q, Joey H and yours truly.
We three worked for the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, AFRTS, and listeners disassembled and reassembled the letters making up the abbreviation to form other networks to include the Far Arctic Radio and Television Service (my personal favorite). All three of us showed up on the same day and were the most junior guys on the base for at least five months until, thank gawd!, the Tower of Power, the ATC shack (air traffic controllers) got an influx of new meat and we three jeeps in the FARTS motor pool were now old hands.
I don't remember what Jack brought either Kim or Joey-but what he brought me was 'the record everyone at your station was talking about and playing' (my station was WNEW-FM, today less than a ghost but for years a presence like no other in the world's largest radio market) and the 'the record' was Stewart's Year of the Cat. I smiled remembering how really fine, new and fresh the music on that album sounded the first time I played it in my barracks room and what a good friend Jack was to each of us.
It didn't do him too much good, the warmth of our friendship, I mean, since a few days after he returned he hiked out to the Polar Cap with Stu and Pat from the Cop Shop and something. somehow, somewhere went very wrong and Jack wound up disappearing in one of the myriad of (sometimes) roaring rivers the melting ice cap produced, though the water was nowhere near as warm as the sun that had created it.
The recovery divers who were flown in from Iceland to find his body (and failed) estimated he could have lived no more than thirty seconds with that water temperature. They themselves could barely last ten minutes in their insulated gear as they searched. Everyone on the base lost a good friend when Jack drowned, exactly thirty-five years this past Thursday.
I'm not sure the universe operates like a great clock and I appreciate that some would wish me to believe that such a clock requires a Great Clockmaker. That's as may be but it would help me understand and accept as real the bridge of memories built by a song from back in the day. "I'm not the kind to live in the past. The years run too short and the days too fast. The things you lean on are the things that don't last. Then my line gets cast into these time passages."
-bill kenny
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