Rainy Days and Sundays

It's raining, it's Sunday, and the wagon keeps roll, roll, rollin' along. I did not smoke in the last 36 hours since stepping off the wagon for a few smokes Friday night. I was rather surprised that the cravings yesterday were weaker by far than they had been. Maybe it's the Hair Of The Dog thing. Anyway, my intention is not to smoke and so far, not bad.

I've been spending more time at the piano lately. I pulled out the folder that holds a lot of the arrangements from my time touring with the ensemble years ago. I played a few of them and enjoyed remembering that year - 1983. I had either started a journal I never finished, or I started a letter to someone that I never mailed. Either way, I found it - for the first time in all the years I must have glanced in that folder.

I was 18, in college, and living with my grandparents. Pappy had asked me and one of the high school kids from the church to go meet the tour bus that was arriving that afternoon and help them unload their equipment at the church. The whole day seemed electric. It was one of those feelings you get when you have a feeling fate is about to take the road in front of you and rend it into a fork. It's the feeling you have when the air gets very still after a storm and you're pretty sure the storm isn't over. I've always been excitable. But this had some deeper undertones than my usual giddiness. The singers were comin'! The singers were comin'!

I'd never heard of the group. I hadn't ever heard their music. I didn't even know if they were any good. I didn't know anybody who knew them. It was just one of those things. They arrived in a 40-foot customized motor home and ten of them disembarked. They were ordinary to a fault but my mouth had gone dry when we stood inside the church and watched the "bus" pull into the gravel parking lot. "THAT," I said to Michael, "THAT is what a person ought to do with a year of his life." I was gone. They could have come in and suggested that we drink Kool-Aid, pick up snakes and eat live chickens and I'd still have gotten on that bus. We helped them lug in speakers, amplifiers, drums, microphone stands, sound boards, guitars... Right now, my heart is in my throat just thinking about it some 23 years later. I'm excited all over again.

"The Reach Out Singers and Orchestra", they were called - headquartered in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Only 1 of the 10 was actually from the vicinity of Sioux Falls. One was from L.A. (!), Wisconsin, New Jersey, Tennessee, Illinois, etc. They split up and stayed with various families in the churches where they ministered. Grandma and Grandpa were taking in the director of the group. I lived with Grandma and Grandpa. We'd be there together. At Grandma's house. The director and I. Together. Wow. He was the one from L.A.

Over dinner at Grandma's house, they embarrassed me by pointing out that I was doing my share of singing in church. I thought that was likely not the sort of thing one offers up to a DIRECTOR of a group that just arrived in a MOTOR HOME! I had the same feeling you'd get if your mother pointed out to Julia Child just how nicely you can make toast. I quickly changed the subject to their travels. I wanted to hear all about the glamorous, glitzy life that was the itinerant musician. I had a bad case of wanderlust. I was in my second semester of college. The road was forking right there at the dinner table.

After their concert that night, which was moving, I was surprised by the director's announcement that they were soon to lose one of their members and would be auditioning prospective replacements as they traveled. Their talent office would also be recruiting, but if anyone would like to make a demo tape, they'd be happy to stick around and help out. Four or five people - including the pastor's wife - encircled me and convinced me that "It Couldn't Hurt". So I threw up in the men's room and agreed to sing for the singers. This is like having your mother tell Picasso you draw really pretty pictures and then having Picasso look at you and say, "OK, paint something." These folks weren't Elvis, but you couldn't have convinced my Central Nervous System of that. I made the tape.

The next morning, I went to the church where they'd be loading up and found them doing aerobics to a Stormie Omartian cassette tape. I was invited to join in the exercise time. We were bonding. I helped them load up the last of their luggage and equipment. I felt like I was supposed to be on the bus, but didn't have the arrogance to assume as much. They pulled away and headed for Oklahoma. In a few days, the phone rang. It was the talent office. In Sioux Falls. They wanted me and could I be about 150 miles from here in 3 weeks prepared to stay on the bus for the next 9 months? Everything in my head went gray. I knew I should talk to my parents. I was in school - it was March. So many things to consider. But this was the single coolest thing that had happened to me since birth. I could make it happen.

My parents said "yes". If they'd said "no", I would have chalked it up to pure heathenism and gone anyway. I know I would have. My grandparents said, "of course"! My professors said, "You've got to be kidding." I was on full scholarship, so the money wasted meant nothing to me. I would pick up where I left off when the tour was over at the end of the year. I had "tested out" of more credit hours than I would miss the following semester anyway. They told me that if I completed all the work, took all the tests, wrote all the papers and took all the final exams due over the remaining 9 weeks, I could have credit for the current semester's courses. They had never done this for a Freshman before, they noted. And it probably wasn't a good idea if I wanted to preserve my GPA, they said. They didn't say I couldn't do it, though. So I called back the talent director, accepted the job, collected all my assignments and stopped going to classes so I could accelerate through the remaining material on my own. Two days in, by priority mail, came the folder I re-discovered yesterday - with a note and a cassette tape - that I needed to learn the vocal arrangements in the same time frame.

I got the best grades of any semester in 8 years of college that time around. I was a very good student in the other semesters, but it happens that my grades that aborted semester topped them all. I learned the vocal arrangements. I got on that motor home in Americus, Kansas at a little Methodist church, I believe, and ended up in Copenhagen, Denmark where I started the abbreviated journal I found yesterday. It mentions spending 9 hours in the airport in Brussels. I don't remember that. I wrote that we made up a song about getting nothing but bread on the plane. I don't remember that.

I remember, though, that we had an overnight lay-over in Brussels and that I encountered my first bidet in that hotel room. The same director who had stayed with us at Grandma's house 7 months earlier told me it was a "foot bath" for weary tourists. I thought that was a marvelous idea. We were dropping our luggage in our rooms and meeting back in the lobby for a walking tour that night across La Grande Place. We saw the Mannequin Pis and all the grand vistas that Brussels has to offer. We walked past NATO Headquarters. I remember all that. I remember feeling so giddy and tired and exuberant that I blurted out, "I can't WAIT to get back and soak my feet in that FOOT BATH!" A general stunned silence ensued. One of the guys said, "What foot bath?" I explained that we had one in our room that bore a striking resemblance to a toilet. One of the women in the group pulled me aside and whispered the truth about bidets in my ear. I was a lot younger than I thought I was.

I think I may head to church this morning. I don't like the expectations that come with it and the inevitable disappointment that it doesn't live up to memory. No buses will arrive to carry me off to exotic lands with bidets where I'll sing a command performance before the Danish Army (that really happened). But I'll probably go anyway. "That's just what you do," to borrow a phrase from mother.

Sometimes you go with your gut.