Miles of Nile

My girlfriend of over four decades and I are heading to Hamden near the end of next month to see Willie Nile of whom I am inordinately fond, thanks to a heads-up from Lee H, a colleague, and friend from a much earlier life. 

And then as if to underscore the Great Clock theory of the universe that I strive manfully to ignore, the following showed up in my timeline feed. Back then I called it:

Watch the Ripples that Unfold Unto Me

Had a pleasant surprise the other evening in my email inbox, a postcard from my past. I had a kind note from Johannes D in Regensburg to chat, briefly, about a Graham Parker project he's working on and to share with me his memories of listening to me on the radio, in another life, on the multiple occasions Graham was kind enough to stop by the station and visit. 

The 'station' was American Force Radio, headquartered in Frankfurt am Main in the old days of the two Germanys; in this case in West Germany, known as the Federal Republic of Germany, to distinguish it from the People's Republic of Germany. 

Those were Cold War days, not that I had a walk-on part in any of that as a skeeter-winged Airman in the US Air Force who played records, wrote and produced public service announcements and interviewed rock and rollers for GI listeners and their families numbering into the hundreds of thousands. And don't get me started on the millions in the 'shadow audience' (citizens of the nations in which US forces were stationed).

I had the time of my life. Though to be honest, I had also enjoyed AFRTS Sondrestrom, Greenland even when it went to seventy-five below zero on Christmas Eve 1975 and stayed there for three weeks in the twenty-four-hour darkness. Sure, it was miserable, but we were all miserable. 

Being an Airman, even a jeep (junior enlisted personnel), in a primarily Army organization, like AF, was, a day at the beach by comparison and you never had to worry about the sands of time getting in your lunch. Except, of course, they did.

Rock and Roll kids grow old, even if they don't grow up. The number of nights in the week where you can hang with the trolls and the gnomes after the gigs start to shrink as Neverland recedes in the rearview mirror. 

I smiled reading Johannes' note for all that it brought back to me and for all that has escaped forever, never to return, because had I realized then he was listening as intently as he was, I might have tried harder to be better at what I did than I proved to be. Maybe I've worked out more, or harder because "...you can't be too strong. You decide what's wrong. Can't be too hard, too tough, too rough, too right, too wrong." 

-bill kenny