I met Danny in Dallas at the Sons of Herman Hall one night over 10 years ago. We went to see the Cornell Hurd Band and just loved them. I don’t remember the circumstances, but there was some possibility that Mark might play with them (which he would have loved because of all the Western Swing they play). We introduced ourselves to Danny and he just was as talkative and friendly as if we had known him for years. We admired the gloves he had created for himself to play the rubboard, they had the spoons attached so he didn’t have to grip the spoons. He had created all sorts of “noisemakers” for his rubboard.

Once we moved to Austin I would see him playing with Cornell or see him out enjoying music all around town. He also would bring breakfast tacos to the station on Thursday mornings. For a short — unbearable — time, I did a morning thing at the stations and would see him then. He always knew me and was always so friendly.

I never ate at the Texicali enough, but it was fabulous food. My sister and I ate there one time when she was in town. We had ordered and realized after a while that it had been a LONG time that we had been waiting for our sandwiches. The waiter came by and was very nice, but he explained that they had had a very large phone order come in and that had delayed the kitchen. We had lots of time, so it wasn’t a problem for us. We saw them boxing up sacks and sacks of food and someone come in and take that away. We eventually got our food. About that time, Danny Roy came into the dining room and in full voice said, “People in this restaurant have been waiting too long to eat today!” and he started handing out money. He came around and flamboyantly put maybe two dollars on every table. It was an incredible display of goodwill. I have never forgotten that. He could have easily instructed the wait staff to deduct something off the ticket (or just ignore it all unless someone complained), but he was generous AND a showman.

Danny was just one of those creative spirits in Austin that you wanted to be in their orbit. You wanted them to be your friend. And Danny WAS your friend. I will never forget Danny Roy Young.

Carole responded to my post about the grocery stores and the advent of new cheaper stores that just stock milk and eggs and the necessities of a grocery. It has just made me reminisce about all the grocery stores I grew up in.

In Amarillo there was Safeway and Furr’s. The Furr’s was at 34th and Bell is an auto parts store now and I’ve been in it so see if it feels at all like the old store. It doesn’t. That was where Mother and I were when we heard that President Kennedy had been killed. I have no memory of that moment, but Mother says a woman came rushing into the store, panicking, and telling people that the President had been shot. The manager said he would find out and he came back in a moment and let people know it was true. I do remember many of the events in the days after, but I don’t remember that moment.

The Safeway was at the corner of 34th and Western. It was closer to the house, but I think we liked the Furr’s better.

When we moved to the country, we still shopped a lot in Amarillo stores, but we would have to plan our grocery trips to rush straight home and get things into the freezer or refrigerator since it was a 20 or 30 minute drive. That would be the last stop. We also began to shop in Canyon at what is really a bygone thing, the hometown grocery store. The nicest one was Cooper’s. It was very small compared to today’s grocery stores, but had everything you needed. Mr. Blewett, the father of my classmate Tammy, worked there and it was always nice to see someone I knew from church working in a business.

Occasionally we would stop, just for milk or something small, at Crow’s or Jack’s groceries in Canyon. They were truly more like the convenience stores of today. No, they were too small to compare, really. I suppose some people may have been able to do all of their shopping there, but they were tiny stores and only had maybe three aisles. They were old-fashioned stores at the time, with wooden floors in Crow’s and a logo that looked like the crow in Hekyl and Jekyl.

In my day (as I find myself saying more and more), the clerks would take your items out of your basket for you and punch the prices into the big cash registers and only THEN would they go down the never-ending conveyor belt to the sacker. I loved the cash registers and loved when a clerk could punch four numbers with one quick punch, not even looking, then smack down on the big square beige button with the heel of her hand to make the numbers “register.” Mom would write out her check while this was going on, waiting for the final amount. Mom always wrote her check for more so she could get some cash back and no one ever needed to see a driver’s license. At Cooper’s, they even had blank checks from the First National Bank so you didn’t even have to have your checkbook with you when you came to the store. But we banked in Amarillo so I never got to see those blank checks in action.

After the checking was done, while the young man that was sacking was still putting everything into big brown paper sacks (with no other option) and putting them on the tall upright cart, the checker would dial, like a telephone, on her big trading stamps device and spool off dozens of big “10″ point trading stamps. In Amarillo, we got green stamps most of the time. S&H Green Stamps. There was also Gunn Brothers. In Canyon they were gold and I can’t remember what they were called. There was a time that it was fun to paste in the stamps into the books and see how many you could fill up. I delighted in tearing the stamps, the 1 point stamps, into individual stamps and pasting them one at a time. That soon got old and I was glad they came in 10s and you could paste down a strip at a time. But I still loved the feel of a thick, solid, book all pasted with individual stamps.

When scanners came along, I really missed the big registers and the punch, ching, punch, ching, routine. I always wanted to be a checker, but the scanners killed that enthusiasm. I hated it when prices were taken off of items, too. I LIKED having that purple 34 cents stamped on my soup can. Then you could also notice at home when the prices had changed. Hey! Tuna was 73 cents last week and now it is up to 80! And you could also fish around among the cans and find the ones that still had last week’s price and save a few pennies. On the other hand, with the scanning there are less mistakes and the items and their prices are all spelled out for you on the tape. We used to go home and say, “Now what could I have bought that cost $5 when I didn’t buy any meat?” and we’d have to think and study on it until we realized Mom let us buy a record album or something.

And yes, that was a huge difference back in the day. With those small stores, you’d think that they wouldn’t carry something like records, but they certainly did. You don’t see a selection of CDs in groceries anymore (okay, unless it is the megamart thing), but back then that’s where we got a lot of our albums. I vividly remember the record rack at the Furr’s in Amarillo and Mackie and I asking Mom if we could have “Meet the Beatles!” She let us have it and my life was changed! Later, it was 1975 and I read an article about the “Red Headed Stranger” album in Texas Monthly while I was at the dentist. I had to go to the grocery afterward and saw it there and bought it and took it home. Again, my life was never the same. I remember buying “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” at Cooper’s and quickly getting it purchased and out of Mom’s sight so she wouldn’t notice the song titles that might not meet her approval (now I can’t even remember what song title I was worried about… The Bitch is Back was on Caribou and I certainly kept THAT one out of Mom’s hands).

Just to clarify, I don’t remember going to grocery stores with a wooden basket over my arm or having the meat man offer me a steak. That were modern, just less modern than today. Less crowded than today. Less busy than today. And a lot cheaper than today.

What’s shakin’, bacon?

How’s things in your world?

Hidy!

Howdy!

Howdy do!

Hey!

Hey hey!

Hey there!

Look at chu!

I’m sorry— I’m late, I have nothing to say, and I am sleep deprived, but I thought I should at least say hi today.

***

and sure, now I think of something to write about . . .

Tuesday night, August 19, 9 p.m. central time, on ABC TV there is a Primetime: Medical Mysteries on spasmodic dysphonia, the disorder I have. Watch it! Learn about it! Help people you know that struggle to talk.

Mark likes his Speed Stick deodorant unscented. That unscented if VERY important to him. Today I was at a little gig-let he had with the Jo’s Coffee House Band on South Congress. I told him I was stopping by a store on the way home. He said he needed deodorant. I was going for butter, so I knew any grocery would have that. I stopped at what I call the “Mexican” grocery because Spanish is the predominant language there and they have the biggest abundance of unusual vegetables that I assume go into Mexican foods I don’t know how to make. I wish I did. I like this store because it is very small and never crowded and I can get in and out in a hurry. I didn’t know if they would have the right variety of deodorant or not. They did not. But they had butter and lard (yes, I buy lard), so I got those and went on down the street to Walgreen’s.

Walgreen’s has a wide variety in the deodorant department, I discovered, but no Speed Stick unscented. There is “Fresh” and “Original” and others, but no unscented. So I decide Mark is just going to have to take what I get him this time, but I will find an unscented deodorant, just of another brand. I looked over this HUGE selection and discovered only one brand that had unscented. The others had “scents” or at least names that can’t possibly mean something to someone buying them. I can only imagine the meeting where the marketing team came up with “scents” called Phoenix or Swagger. True names, I swear.

I have high hopes of organizing my genealogy a bit more. I visited cousin Paula last weekend in Comanche and her files and folders are all so neat and she can print off a document at a minutes notice because she has it all together. He has wonderful notebooks full of paperwork in plastic sleeves so it is all readable, protected, and in order! I want that. But my stuff is in piles and boxes and so disorganized. So tonight I decided to start the effort of getting it where it needs to be. But there is so MUCH of it all. I pulled out files from a cabinet in the garage, boxes piled around my office, scrapbooks, notebooks, more boxes, and sacks full from the closet. Genealogy in every nook and cranny. I divided it into some piles in the living room. Piles that quickly lost their meaning as family lines blurred. Then I look into the closet and see the big box of letters, and more piles of photographs. I don’t want to get in and divide THEM tonight, too, do I? No. So I pack it all up, place it all around, and wait until it frustrates me again.I still have such big projects going for the Cunningham reunion that there is no time to organize the rest of it.

One fun thing I did find tonight was a photograph. We have a sweet little photograph framed and up in the drum room of Mark as a toddler playing a little guitar (or maybe it is a plastic ukelele). Whatever it is, it is sweet and showed his musical bent from an early age. But I discovered (again) tonight that we have Mark’s baby book. And there I discovered where this whole thing began:

I don’t know where the sticks are, but he looks quite pleased to be wrapped around that drum.

I guess I can tell this one story, though, because this person doesn’t even know that I have a blog or that I use this name to the world. It is a “new” cousin I discovered through the internet and that fabulous findagrave site. She is a cousin, not too distantly related, and I found her and got some information from her. She made it apparent that family history doesn’t interest her much, though she was quite nice and gave me the information I asked of her. But now I have become one of her “forward friends.” I am getting several forwards a day from this woman I don’t even know (I don’t even know where she lives!). They are all of the “bless you” kind, the kind that request you to forward this prayer to 10 friends to show that you have time for Jesus and are not a heathen. Or the kind that say “This is so awesome!!” and then it shows a picture of a sunset with the face of God glimmering in the clouds while the midi version of Amazing Grace blares out as you are scrambling to turn off the speakers because you decided to check your email at the Starbucks. Amusingly, she also calls herself “Angle Mom.”  Yes, that is not a typo. She calls herself “Angle Mom.” I truly think she means Angel, but it always Angle. I have not yet asked her to take me off of her forward list because I expect I will need some more information from her and I don’t want to aggravate her just yet. I got a forward today that actually had her name in the subject line and I thought maybe, just maybe, there was something more personal than a forward here. But, no, I opened it up and it has a picture of Jesus walking toward me (and it was animated so he was getting closer) and it said, “I just left Rebecca’s house and I am on my way to yours!”  My first thought was, “Jesus can’t come to my house today, it is too dirty!” Then my second thought was that somebody didn’t understand the concept of Jesus…. how can he be at HER house? He’s been at my house for years!

I’ve seen some good music lately. Well, at least the Derailers last night at Hill’s. Many more of those untellable stories surround the other music I saw, but we definitely won’t go there. I’m just happy that the computer is up and running, the weekend is almost here, and I am home in air conditioned comfort.

I’m still in the afterglow of that fabulous Lyle Lovett show last night. I did want to mention, in case you are in Austin and plan on going to a show at the Long Center, that the parking is as bad as you’ve heard. There were many nightmare stories of the first opera and the first ballet. We went early and had no difficulty at all paying our $7 to park in the big garage (that has been there a long while as part of the Palmer Events Center). But when it came time for all of us to leave the parking garage, things were at a standstill. We were in the lanes of traffic moving outward, but we sat, stockstill, for at least 10 minutes at one point and only crept the rest of the time. Meanwhile, lots of cars were still in their parking spots with their reverse lights lit, hoping someone would shut things down even further by letting them out. Next time we will find another place to park outside of the events center and walk or take a cab the rest of the way.

But a wonderful thing about the new Long Center. The big large symphony patio (it has a name that I’ve forgotten) is lovely. I can imagine a pleasant warm-bordering-on-cool night (yes, I can only imagine) with a symphony going on and the patio and surrounding lawns full of happy people. But as we walked out of the show and stepped onto that large area, the big pillars that surround the Long Center framed and enhanced the view of downtown Austin and it was truly incredible. I stood and had to take it in (to which Mark admonished me to move along, I was acting like old people). But it was breathtaking to see the city skyline from that vantage point which I haven’t seen in a long time, if ever. I guess you see it from there at Auditorium Shores, too, but it seemed to be different. Maybe it is because so many new skyscrapers have sprung up since I was last at Auditorium Shores at night!

Last night I typed a full medical report on this computer (Macbook) without the tools that I use to make it easier on the other computer (PC). It was like watering your field with a bucket instead of hooking up a hose. I had to go back and forth from the recording to the document and stop it “by hand” with the mouse instead of “by foot” with the pedal, but I got a report done and that was the one they needed this morning, so I felt a sense of accomplishment. I will get the PC back today and work on all their other reports as soon as I can. I don’t want to repeat that bucket stuff again for a while.

Last night Mark and I and friend Joey went to see Lyle Lovett. Joey had never seen Lyle before, so it was fun to experience it through his eyes. He was duly impressed and certainly felt like he got his money’s worth with a 2 1/2 hour concert. Mark and I have seen so Lyle so many times we have truly lost count, but we agreed that, overall, it may have been the best concert we have ever seen by Lyle Lovett and His Large Band. I expected this to be the same show (or close) to what we saw last October in San Antonio since he is still working the CD “It’s Not Big, It’s Large,” but we got a completely different show…different songs, new stories, different band configuration, too.

Like the last time, he once again drew from the entire catalog of Lyle Lovett albums and played songs from the early ones that we hadn’t heard in a while. I don’t know that I have ever heard him play “Record Lady” at a show. He did “The Front Porch Song” again. He did it in October, but before that it had been 10 years since we’d heard him sing that live. Beautiful!! His band is absolutely the best in the business. It didn’t seem to me they featured the piano with Jim Cox as much as they have in the past (maybe when Matt Rollins played). Russ Kunkel, the drum giant who played on all the James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, and Jackson Browne hits you’ve ever heard, was the drummer again and he (and his drums) were incredible. I pay more attention to that than I used to, being married to a drummer, but last night we had prime seats to really see what he was doing, too. Sam Bush was there to play mandolin and he hasn’t played shows I’ve seen in a long time. Gene Elders on fiddle (he plays with George Strait) and Mitch Watkins on guitar (I met him once playing for Jerry Jeff Walker) were wonderful. John Hagan on cello and Victor Krauss on stand-up bass. Victor Krauss has an album called “II” with Lyle singing a song and they performed it with just bass and drums and guitar. That was a new/unfamiliar song to me. Ray Herndon also played guitar and I’m sure I’ve seen him in the past, but from our vantage point he looked so much like Matthew McConaughey that I couldn’t stop watching him! Funny. The steel player (named Buck) and the acoustic guitar player were fabulous, but I don’t know their names. I will have to learn. Is this sounding like a large band? It certainly was. there was also a 9-person choir, “IOP-Instruments of Praise,” singing on the gospel tunes and the quartet that adds SO much to Lyle’s shows. No brass instruments this time, though, so that was another difference since October. Only the song “Penguins” (my least favorite of the night) features horns prominently and they were duplicated with amazing accuracy on cello and violin.

Watching the show I kept thinking of all of the places that I have seen Lyle Lovett. From the first time in 1988 (20 years??) at Tommy’s Heads Up Saloon in Deep Ellum Dallas to Caravan of Dreams and Bass Hall in Fort Worth (and I feel like there was another venue there, too, but I don’t know what it could have been, but I remember Robert Earl Keen opening the show). The Arcadia Theater in Dallas that burned last year and broke my heart. The Backyard in 1999 or 2000— the absolute WORST venue I’ve ever seen Lyle in because people just talked and caroused instead of listening. And the Majestic Theater in San Antonio that was absolutely the BEST venue to see Lyle Lovett in, so we’ve seen him there twice. But the new Long Center in beautiful South Austin may not have the opulence of the San Antonio Majestic, but it is 70 miles closer and has equal acoustics. The sound was fabulous and the crowd was attentive. Last year I had a man singing along with every song behind me (until I threatened physical violence), but this crowd knew how to appreciate the music.

The show seemed extra loose and spontaneous, which may all be part of the smoke and mirrors that creates a perfect show. I am quite aware when Lyle Lovett said, “Sam, why don’t you play one?” that they were all perfectly rehearsed and that is part of the show. But one thing that certainly seemed off-the-cuff and spontaneous was when Lyle was talking and suddenly the lights behind him were bright and then shut back off (as if the lighting director made a mistake). Lyle turned and looked behind him and said, “Oh, for a minute I thought we were being pulled over.” We wondered if that was something that may have happened in a rehearsal and they put it into the show? The lights were so absolutely perfect that I really can’t imagine there being a “mistake” in the show lighting.

Lyle Lovett praised the Long Center and appreciated the Austin audience and showed lots of love to the city. And he also sang the praises of Warren Hood and Marshall Hood and the Belleville Outfit. That was nice. He played with them at the Austin Music Awards in March, though I know he’s known Marshall and Warren a long long time.

I still have the memories of wonderful shows that Lyle did when I first discovered him… when I heard songs in concert before I heard them on a record. And I have great memories of the fabulous Francine Reed singing the duets with him and performing “Wild Women Never Get the Blues.” Those moments can never be topped, but, beyond that, this show just seemed to have it all. A+ with no room for improvement.

Family reunions are so interesting. As I’ve said before, this is a completely far-flung reunion of people that all have a common ancestor, but don’t know one another hardly at all. Some there seemed to be there only to interact with their close relatives and didn’t came much about the rest of us. My handful of close relatives always makes me seek out more folks to visit with. My branch of our family tree only had 6 there. There were several branches with no one, so I guess we at least have something.

The reason for my trip was the reunion, of course, but I think I enjoyed my visits with cousins from another side of the family even more. Perhaps because they were in air conditioned houses while sipping Coke and petting a kitty. Or just because I know these family members more closely and can ask more sincere questions than “Where are you from? What do you do?”

More coming up, but this day is already stacking up to be full. And this week! I came home, thinking I would certainly slow the pace down this week if I could, but since I have Lyle Lovett added to the mix for tomorrow night, I think I will be out and going every single day. If you are living vicariously through me, I suggest you take some Tylenol Arthritis formula. We’re aching!