How We Saw Tina & Ike - Or, Once Upon a Time in the 70's

 

FLY AWAY SNOW GOOSE BY

JULIET WALDRON &

JOHN WISDOMKEEPER,

a Canadian Historical Brides

Northwest Territory Story

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In the '60's, I was a typical white college kid who hadn't heard much of what has been called Black music, except for the groups like The Temptations, The Crystals, Martha & The Vandellas, Ronettes or the Shirelles, the ones that made it onto rock'n'roll stations. (The only exception to this being Calypso, which I'd danced to during my high school years in the West Indies.) 

When I arrived at college in the States, I got to know new kids, ones that came from big cities, like New York, Philly, Boston, Baltimore, Chicago and D.C. This new cohort arrived with plenty of Rhythm and Blues and Soul mixed with their Folk and Rock L.P.s weighing down their college-bound trunks of indispensable stuff from home.  

Some years later, married, mother of two, I imagined I'd found the BFF I'd never had in my HS. I'd always been an outsider, for different reasons in the different places. I had a poor self image and secretly I'd always wanted to be "in with the in crowd" despite my own insistence upon being the nerd in the corner of the room. This new friend was young, glamorous and had three little kids, more or less the same age as my two. Her husband was a junior hot shot salesman who'd been a popular member of his fraternity. They couldn't have been any more different from us, but as young marrieds at the beginning of our lives, from marriage to parenting--not to mention work--we shared a lot. 

This was the early 70's and we were young, still wanting to play. Fresh out of college as we were, "fun" meant that the women cooked dinner--something simple, like sphagetti and a salad. Then we'd drink jug wine and listen to (and critique!) the latest rock LP because we were a generation who'd grown up listening to "our music" on the radio. We also told one another the usual get-acquainted stories about our origins. From childhood, we shared tales of raising kids and usually ended with how we were going to escape having the same lives as our parents. Our own kids ran around the house or out the yard, deep in pretend or hide and seek.

This extroverted couple took us to places my husband and I would normally never go--like a Rock'n'Rhythm review in a nearby city to see Ike & Tina Turner. My girl friend, with an urban background, told me that she'd read that Ike sometimes beat Tina. In those days, such a story was between us, woman to woman, as we all knew that physical abuse was but one of the hazards of being born female.  

The audience, when we got there, was a riot of color, some black, some white and some brown. I'd not been in such "mixed" company since living in the West Indies. Some were dressed to kill, with spangled mini-dresses, big hair, and high heels; others just wore jeans. My girlfriend had, of course, decided that we should dress for the occasion. She let down her blonde hair and wore open toed heels and a floaty hippy dress--white, gauzy, short, patterned 

with cherubs and long church choir sleeves.

She'd explored my meagre closet and come up with one of my mother's decades-old cast-off cocktail dresses. This was hot pink and rose red with a fitted bodice, boat neck and full swirling skirt.  She also discovered a ridiculous pair of heels from England, with pointed toes and extravagently high heels. We decided that a pair of bright green stockings would really proclaim that though the dress was thrift-shop retro, it wasn't the 1950's anymore, baby!

Our entrance, just as my girlfriend had foreseen, was majestic! We couldn't have felt more far-out.  Naturally, we got some put-down comments, but such was the price of our utter coolness.  ;)

Soon, music blasted into the auditorium, as a girl group warm-up band took the stage, to be followed by Ike and Tina. He watched her like a hawk, his dark eyes full of calculation, as he checked out the size of the crowd. He made certain we all would all notice that she was his, hands on her waist and then on her shoulders, but she appeared to want to get down to business, stepping forward and giving us all a flash of her white teeth. She waved the chord, freeing the mike, while everyone cheered and jumped and whooped. The band's name might have still been "Ike and Tina Turner," but it was plain who we'd all come to see. 

For over an hour, Ike and Tiny rocked us. They sang their oldies, as well as covering newer hits. Here's a few that I remember from that memorable night.

https://youtu.be/sTM17bmV4wg  ~ Honky Tonk Woman

https://youtu.be/FwaxT7zL7kA  ~ Fool in Love

https://youtu.be/bpuf6AmQH4M ~ Nutbush Avenue

https://youtu.be/uj0wPrN_Y_4  ~ River Deep Mountain High

It was over far too soon. We left, drenched with sweat and totally hoarse, as you are after a great concert. 

Time passed; friends departed. We moved and moved again. Tina vanished for a time from  pop radio, but then she was back, without the abusive, controlling husband, and better than ever. Many even bigger hits followed. My favorite is the heart-wrenching "What's Love Got to Do With it?" which spoke volumes to so many. 

Then, in the 2000s, I encountered a new Tina, now in a Buddhist incarnation, as were many in our cohort. After years of pain, of suffering, and a lot of growing, the Queen of Rock had found healing and peace.  

https://youtu.be/6XP-f7wPM0A  ~  Sarvesham Svastir Bhavatu Om

 

 A rough translation: May there be well being in all, May there be peace in all, May there be fulfillment in all...Peace, Peace Peace.)

Hail the Traveler! I'll never forget that wild night in a Hartford auditorium. 

~Juliet Waldron

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Take the Taconic

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Driving solo is not something I grew up doing. My teen path did not take me down automobile alley, like so many other American kids. I learned to drive only after I'd become a mom. I was a fairly timid driver for many years, but that wore off quickly after dementia began to hunt my own mother down, necessitating frequent 400+ mile round trips to southern Ohio. I drove the PA Turnpike to I-70, close to Dayton, before turning south and driving through farmland. 

Going through the little burg of Enon, just south of I-70, in need of psychic help before I arrived to face whatever age-related catastrophe awaited, I'd momentarily abandon my goal and  divert to the tiny residential loop of '50's houses that encircle the sacred space of a lone Adena Mound. The place still has some Mojo left, though, and a few moments of contemplating it always gave me strength. 

Those earlier anxious journeys were how I learned to drive alone. As everyone knows, you've got to keep your wits about you on an interstate. Out there are all kinds of people, in vastly different mental conditions, hurtling along at the speed limit or better--mostly way better--and you have to watch your back, as well as pay attention to the road ahead. To paraphrase the old maps and their dragons: "Here there be Potholes & Folks with Anger Issues."

I went to see an old friend in Western Massachusetts recently. We usually drive a route that we've been using since we left the Northampton area. This involves driving east from Harrisburg, up I-81 into coal/fracking country, with heavy truck traffic--no tolls on this road--toiling up mountains and then braking down into the narrow upstate valleys lined with old mining and rail towns, everyone trying to get something going again in those semi-moribund cities and jamming the Eisenhower-era roads to the hilt. A sharp turn south and you hitch yourself to I-84 East, which bangs and bumps it's way into New York State, crossing first the Delaware and then the Hudson at speeds that were, 100 years ago, unimaginable. 

                                                            The early 60's bridge at Newburgh

Instead of enduring the increasing congestion and insanity of I-84 as it roars into Connecticut, this time I took an alternate route north, an old FDR era road, The Taconic Parkway. This is narrow, twisting, and, in places, raggedly patched, parkway was engineered for 45-55 mph, and is crisscrossed by (often) blind side roads. In the late '30's, the Taconic was a wonder, however, allowing people from southern NY/NJ to easily drive north into Northern NY vacation-land, to escape the heat and crowding of a big City. The "Parkway" designation meant there are no trucks, an added benefit. Lots of us oldies remember standing, gripping the back of the front seat, peering over the driver's shoulder while our car and a line of others dragged along on a single lane road through hilly country, behind loaded trucks which didn't have the engineering to allow them to hold their pace when climbing.

                                                                     Figure this out...

 The Taconic was a progressive model of a public work created for the benefit of a rising urban middle class.  The road was originally carefully landscaped, but time and funding have by-passed it, and now  woodlands encroach from every side, making those green alleys a dangerous choice during twilight when the deer are moving, or after dark or in bad weather. Night driving there, I've read, can be fatal, especially when the inebriated or the just-plain-confused enter the Parkway and do unexpected things like driving South on a north bound lane. I can't imagine much worse than popping uphill while taking a fun curve on your motorcycle or in your small European car and being surprised by van headlights accelerating toward you.

Despite all these scary what-if, my Taconic drive was a relief. It felt to slow down, mind the speed limit in light traffic while having time to notice the September blue of the sky and see little flocks of  compact clouds racing west.  After a long hot summer, a Northern High had come to bless my journey. The weather was clear, breezy and cool. Each mile I drove North, I felt better, and this feeling buoyed me through the post-stop-to pee+ lunch-break stupor which my metabolism decrees will follow. 

Besides, I was getting closer to be with my friend, closer to the end of the journey, toward a warm welcome and a flood of cheerful reunion talk. It was a  pilgrimage, too, in a way, back to a once beloved landscape where my children were born and where 20 year-old young married adventures were had, there on the purple skirts of the Berkshires. 

The Taconic ends abruptly, linking me via plentiful signage to I-90. Not many miles east, I was on the Mass Pike, heading toward Boston.  After the long stretches of the morning, I soon found myself hopping off into what used to be a scattering of woodlots and farmland. Sadly, this has become, in the last two decades, strip malls, warehouses, gas stations and housing clusters.  There was stop-and-go traffic on the roads we once used to bicycle. At last, entering a network of roads, now paved, once improved gravel, I wound over steep short hills and into narrow creek-side valleys, houses now everywhere across those once-upon-a-time cornfields, hunting cabins and forests of maple, oak, and pine. 

The house is 50 years older now and the bright golden logs are muted. There is still woodland between my friend and her neighbors. When she and her husband built their log cabin--mostly just the two of them, with pauses for her to nurse their new baby--there were farms and forests and a dirt road. Like some once wooded parts of Pennsylvania, however , this area is pockmarked with houses, and  developments are popping up connected by actual paved roads upon any acreage that is left. 

 

Steps down to the garden, covered with sweet-smelling lemon thyme. Everything you see done by hand.

My friend is there still, getting older like all of us. She is a little younger than me, but she's had a physically hard life. For years she was a cook for years in a busy sea-food restaurant, working long hours in heat amid the constant roar of industrial fans. Now she's deaf, and medical conditions hamper her movements and threaten her balance. The last time I visited, three years ago pre-Covid, I would also take time to visit my friend Kathy in Connecticut. Losing her earlier this year demonstrated to me that while I can still  manage to travel to see friends, I had better do so. 

I met her in the late '60's, when I was twenty-one and already had a "spring off." My husband and I were present at her wedding, when she was 19 and her husband, like mine, was twenty-one. He was my husband's best friend from High School and I remember well the sight of the new couple's knees shaking as they stood in front of the preacher.  Now we are all moving toward 80 at a rapid pace. 

"When I'm 64" is far behind us, although we remember singing along with that one, imagining that we would live brave new lives and never grow old. One thing hasn't changed about my friend--she still has a magnificent head of hair that falls all the way to the back of her knees--even though it's not easy for her now arthritic fingers to braid it. She is wiser than ever, though, and a bright soul and a sense of humor still shine through her eyes. 

My friend and I have a lot to catch up on, and so we talk a blue streak. She has, like the rejoicing family in the Bible, "killed the fatted calf" for me and I am honored by her kindness and generosity. We will feast on mushrooms and good steak one night and the next day go out in the middle of the afternoon for lobsters straight from Maine, the first I've had since visiting here three years ago. We hit the intriguing used book stores in nearby college town Northampton. On on the way there, I admire all the dispensaries Massachusetts residents may enjoy, anchoring many of those new strip malls. We buy fresh off the trees local apples, a crunchy Macoun/Honeycrisp hybrid and drink local cider. We took a drive upriver to visit Historic Deerfield Village on the National Register of historic places, where my friend gamely climbed steep staircases to see where the humble servants and boarders slept, in rooms with no heat.   

 

When we said "good-bye" at the end of our time together, we both hoped this wouldn't be the last time visit, sharing stories and memories, though, we both know all too well by now that change is the only constant. 

~~Juliet Waldron

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Red & White, at war in the world, and in her blood 

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Clawed and Friends, a feline soap opera

 

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 I know I’m getting older, as I’ve definitely run out of energy this summer. The present excuse is that it’s too darn hot and humid. The garden I planted is now flush with veggies, raining tomatoes and continuously sprouting a tasty green called “Perpetual Spinach,” #1 on my list recommendations for the home gardener.  No, filled with gloom as I am, I think I’ll just talk about the “kids”—not actual children anymore, as ours have long ago flown the nest and have children of their own—but the three cats that we now live with. 

My days are a long feline saga. There’s an old saying to the effect that “If you want to write novels, get a couple of cats,” and IMHO it’s true.  No longer do I have teenagers, but I have these cats, and the trials and tribulations of our multi-cat household never ends.

Currently, we have three cats domiciled with us.  I would never presume to call myself an “owner” of "pets" as the cats I’ve met generally end up calling most of the shots.  These three are the first I’ve kept in—the bird/small mammal neighborhood body count is too high to be acceptable to me any longer. Plus, eventually, with outdoor cats, predators--animal or human--disappears our beloved furry family member.  Therefore, our kitties, Kimi, Tony (Anthony) and Willy (Yum) all share the same space. Tony (aka “Ant-knee”) is a young tough from Long Island. I could blame the daily uproar on his theoretically removed testosterone-producing parts, but that would be the easy way out for this Cat Mother.

Kimi is now an elder cat. Long-haired, she requires daily brushing and combing. Nevertheless, she still gets constipated as a result of her own personal grooming regime and needs frequent doses of Laxatone©. She arrived here starving, with open wounds and a PTSD which never subsided. Since then she has mostly lived, by preference, wherever other cats/people are not.  She has just had a bout of pneumonia and I’m pushing several pills a day into her. Fortunately, she and I have a relationship of affection based upon my respecting her intricate web of boundaries, so these pills—so far—are no problem.

Tony arrived as a cute kitten, but looks can be deceiving. 

Tony has proved to have not only a high intelligence but a boundless appetite for domination—first of this household, perhaps later, the world! Like the “Little Girl with the Little Curl” in the Christopher Robin poems, “when she’s good she’s very, very good, but when she is bad—she is horrid!” Describes our inventive Tony to a T. 

Willy is also 'Clawed,' because he has a major bad habit of scratching furniture, to the point where we have mostly given up arguing about it. We reason we'll all be dead soon enough and will no longer care. This flaw is worth putting up with, because he is a giant cuddle-bug who kisses and hugs his people. 

With others of his kind,  Willy-yum is a go-along, get-along kind of guy—until he draws the line and bites which is his method for drawing the line with Tony. Willy and Tony are friends for face-licking, as well as tussle and chase games, even though Willy is older and somewhat lame. No, the problem is not between the boys, or with their newly formed posse, but between the boys and Kimi.

Willy, sensitive soul that he is, understood right away that Kimi did not want to be friends with anyone. He did not take this personally.  He and Kimi politely left one another alone, about the best that we can all hope for.

 Tony, however, takes Kimi's crippling fear as a personal affront, one that he rediscovers anew every day. Kimi, as he sees it, should play and wrestle with him like Willy-yum does. In his world view, this is the natural order of things, perfectly obvious to his bright yet inflexible mind. When he bounces up to her, she hisses and retreats under a chair, this, 100% of the time. That, he presumes, is an invitation to get under the chair with her. When (unsurprisingly) she screams and scratches, and all hell breaks loose. 

So since she's been ill, she is recuperating behind closed doors. I move her between rooms in the heat, transferring cat boxes, food, water and beds each time, with Tony trying to either trip me or jump Kimi all the way. His nose knows that his Cruel Cat Mom has been feeding the Stupid One "better" food. And yes, I am. Sick cats get appetite tempters like baby food and kitty cans. 

If I try to share kitty cans out, however, Tony gobbles his and everybody else's too, so all special food has to be dished out behind closed doors.  In an attempt to be "fair," I've dirtied many, many kitty dishes. I feel like a Mom dealing with a nearly toxic sibling rivalry.

I soon gave up the sharing of canned chow. This summer's supply chain lapses are making purchasing the "right" flavor/texture kitty food chancy. Things will get easier when Kimi recovers and we can just return to my occasional running interference when the familiar routine of his bullying and her fear gets out of hand. Like people, these two kitties have difficulties with changing their visceral reaction to one another, reactions which  lead to "antisocial" behaviour from both parties.  

The official Chinese line on pets is that they are "useless bourgeois luxuries."* They may not be "useless" in terms of the emotional support and comfort we two-legs receive from our fur friends, but they are luxuries our 1st World living conditions allow us to enjoy. Spaying, neutering, maintenance and vet care (because "where there's stock, there's trouble"**) are fixed costs.

Moreover, you need time to devote to their proper care as well as a generous share of patience and understanding for their non-human needs and ways. They may have once been thought of as "dumb animals," but we know better today. Between you and these complex, sensitive critters a relationship will grow. Just as relationships between two-legged beings require time, thought and uncomfortable doses of learning about yourself, so too can our dealings with our mammalian kin test and enlighten us.  

~~Juliet Waldron

*The Economist, July 2021

**"All Creatures Great and Small", James Herriot 

 

                                    So sweet, now that he's asleep...

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