Of Was and When

The leaves turn color, shiver and fall this month. This next six week stretch offers the least amount of daylight for the year here in the northern hemisphere. The elections and Thanksgiving marked this November. I do appreciate the facade of democracy, and I'm thankful to so many people I know and love.

I found out today I won't be saying, "good to to see you after so many years" to a friend from my childhood. I read his obituary in the local paper this morning. I did not know he lived about 45 minutes away in Tehachapi. I looked for his name in the phone books here locally when I moved back to Bakersfield after having lived in Northern California for thirty years, but never found him or his number.

His father was Frank senior. He was Frank junior, but his mother always called him Dober. The affectionate moniker stuck with his early mates, and I was one. 

Sometimes it seems like just moments ago, Dober and I scurrying to the Y in a much smaller version of Bakersfield crammed inside some parent's car for basketball, gymnastics or handball.  I can still smell the insides of that old building to this day with the odd mixture combining pounds of perspiration with a sprinkle of Right Guard rubbed with dashes of rubber soles and urine. I think the YMCA ritual lasted about two years when gym interest and rides petered out altogether in the early Sixties. Maybe the Beatles killed our Y evenings, but probably the sight of all those screaming girls wanting a piece of the Beatles on television sparked the new peter principle in the both of us.

Around that period I remember my parents giving me my 13th birthday present early. It was a Fender Musicmaster II redesigned from the Mustang model, and an upgrade from the 3/4 scale model Leo Fender introduced and manufactured in the mid 1950s. The gift came with a fashionable small Silvertone amplifier complete with both reverb and tremolo. My mom and dad had caved to my relentless whines of guitar noxiousness, and because Dober's parents had gifted him with a Gibson ES-355 Chuck Berry model  a couple of months earlier. With good luck and parental peer pressure we were both going to be rock stars.

We took lessons together for a year or so, learning the fundamentals, some scales and some songs along the way. The plaster from those little rooms must still echo  "So tired, tired of waiting, so tired of waiting for youuuuu." Sometimes I catch a memory of the many trips to Parlier's Music Store on Baker Street  in the Beetle Dober's dad owned.  Dober was never impressed with audio capability of his dad's Volkswagon Bug.  Over these trips we discovered guitar playing was hard work, and to our amazement we both had crummy vocal skills. We seldom practiced together, though we got together occasionally for sleepovers and wild on-foot midnight meanderings throughout lesser Bakersfield. After a year of joint lessons at Parlier's with two instructors, Jeff and Denny, we went solo citing musical differences.

The next years found us moving to the same schools, but no longer sharing the same classrooms. My extracurricular interests at this juncture began to focus on bank shots from concrete courts or from slate tops covered in felt. Our strokes found different streams and crossed hardly at all. Our parents who had often dined out, and over cocktails shared Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart records together during our fast-friend times of those early Sixties, seemed to lose touch with one another as well.

Sometime in the very early Seventies I saw Frank for the last time. I think it was at the junior college here in town, but it could have been at CSUB or some spot downtown just as likely. I thought he mentioned pursuing a career as a fireman, but from the obituary that thought now seems the stuff of made-up memory-filler from a brief meeting nearly forty years ago.

I read today Frank was a certified public accountant for many years with Deloitte-Touche, the audit and tax consulting giant of financial services. I would have liked to explore the Neil Young refrain "numbers add up to nothing" with an old friend and accountant, and find out what tunes he had been working on over all these years. But, as his chronicle today mentioned some health issues forced a premature retirement and a much too quick departure from this world.

So after all these years, Dober, you remain for me forever young.