The Spring sun shined down the branches of this old emaciated yet still vital tree. As I sit on my second story balcony, camouflaged from the pedestrians and street cars below, Spring arrived.

Warmth radiates from the branch tips down the trunk feeding roots. It’s been here a longtime. I breath it all in. This breath of renewal suddenly sparks a distant, long forgotten memory.

It has been fifty years since I sat, becoming apart of a tree over months. I know this feeling. Then I sat ten feet above the bustling traffic and sidewalk on Myrtle Avenue in Monrovia, California.

Please don’t believe that I’m comparing Heidelberg to Monrovia. God no. The scene. The emotion; that, solemn feeling, alone, friendless, I hover in the tree. A voyeur relying on the stability of old, established roots. Roots I never had.

I had no power over the situation. My father had lost his lathe machine job because America had lost its war with Vietnam. Huey helicopter parts no longer in demand, we had to sell the one house that he ever owned. A green lawn, pool in the back, a Levittown equivalent in suburban Los Angeles. Glendora. Selling beat being foreclosed and now Monrovia.

My step-brother lived down Altern Street with his third wife. He saw a for rent sign on the parched, weed covered parcel.

As my parents sought protection in bankruptcy court, I found protection sitting on a few 2×4 nailed together like a platform on a sturdy branch above the wall above Myrtle Avenue like the balcony I’m sitting on above Berlinerstraße.

We had moved from the one place where I had made friendships. I was in a neighborhood. Played. Fought. For nearly three years we lived in Glendora – the longest stay in one place in my life (and would be for a few more years to come).

Fifty years. These feelings return as easily as proverbially getting back on a bicycle. It brought back the isolation. The despair that I felt as a boy given away from his mother and saddled up on the caisson that my father so loved (and never quite adjusted after retirement).

Moving base to base, town to town. Like a ghost I am in strangers childhood and grade school photographs. They wonder “what was his name?”

It was a hot summer in 1970. I sat up in that tree. I knew the road stretched far in either direction. I pondered if it ended. I wanted to go in one direction or the other just to find something. Anything. I realize now the road, roads are my friend.

Here I am realizing five decades later how I’ve struggled with each long hour, always feeling that I’m not apart. I am floating above watching, listening to the roar of white noise and the laughter and conversations of friends.

A different language. A different country. A different continent. But, even though I have made it full circle back to where I was born, the emptiness returns. I could blame the coronavirus lockdown but I would fool myself yet again.

It is simply the hand that the dealer dealt. I will breath with the trees somewhere between earth and the clouds until I see the end of this road.

I’m certain that you’ll be disappointed once you get past the title. You see, I’m just writing about happiness and how it comes in small sizes.

Yea size matters but not when it comes to happiness. It is the simple happiness that a 13” television has brought me through the years.

Television was my only friend for a very longtime. A military father, who removed from the military, he couldn’t get the military out of him. We relocated often. Television was always there. My best friend.

Today I celebrate the USA Hockey team beating the USSR on the so called “Miracle on Ice” in Lake Placid 1980 Winter Olympics.

I watched it on a 13” black & white enthralled at the edge of my shitty motel bed where I lived in 1980.

Hell I did the same thing with the 1968 Mexico City Games from my bedroom. These were my first “all-nighters”. John Carlos, Tommie Smith, Bill Toomey, Dick Fosbury and my thirteen inches.

Yea thirteen inch black and white hooked up to an antenna on the roof. I received UHF and VHF, Joe Namath and Speed Racer, the Three Stooges and Gumby. All cultural signals lost to that century (that’s not on ROKU or HULU).

Sure. If you were losing like Iron Mike, Tretiak or Fetisov, you had not one care about the happiness of youth and that 13” television brought. It brought poor kids the world right into their closet sized bedrooms.

My friend, Bobby Kennedy reminded me a week ago that it was 30 years since he and I watched Buster Douglas breakdown the legend of Mike Tyson… before the legal system. Naturally we watched on a 13” black and white television as we leaned against a wall with a leaking gas line on a Tijuana street

It was a life changing at a time on this earth.

It’s not so special to have fifty inches now but it was to have a thirteen inch at all the right moments when our “culture” evolved before our eyes. It felt like these kids rolling around on ice.

Times have changed.

I find jazz exceptionally beautiful driving in the dark wee hours of the morning. In its totality it’s greater than a clarinet driven composition of a miserably grey day of pelting rain.

I wholeheartedly relish desolate dark drives at these hours. These moments are soulful resurrections because at any other time, jazz can be bewildering busy like the day, and accompanied by others, it is taxing like a conversation with a stranger.

You desperately try to assemble a rhythm, find some thesis, a compatible spark that may connect to another. Not searching for anything enduring since, all great musical numbers have an end.

You simply wish to share perhaps a sublime moment of comfort and peace with a piece of god’s other art, a human, whose biorhythms sync effortlessly with you.

How that happened one late September Saturday evening at a Santa Monica pub, I will never know but it happened around sharing Mose Allison.

She knew what I was talking about and I felt the rhythm of our beat drive some improv into conversational places I’d only shared with my friend, Jackie White over cold San Miguel’s listening to Freddie Hubbard and Stanley Clarke in that comfortable, cold, dead dark countryside.

I never talk about Mose Allison, I thought, as I walked away to my car with Jeanette’s telephone number tucked in my pocket.

I hadn’t asked. Hell I’ve never asked. She’d felt the groove and offered to set up another gig because her best friend, she was playing sour notes. Our jam session interrupted.

I was seduced by our rhythm all the dark drive home. It was the right accompaniment to jam on another night. Yet, it betrayed memory.

The memory of how that seduction pacing like a ride cymbal in my head can abruptly end. It was once beating and squealing until I drove Jackie White that last night to pull an armed bar robbery.

He hit the road south as day broke and i lost my beat, as I turned course in the other direction.

Less ceremoniously and a decade later, this jazzy number ended abruptly with Jeanette as well.

I really never got to know her because after every subsequent gig, she became more acquainted with my bathroom floor, hugging my porcelain pedestal.

Though I wouldn’t leave them alone, I wasn’t jealous. I sat in the sink, drinking and jammed on about Chick Corea as he spun on my turntable.

But in the end; that, final day as I paid for some shitty Mexican meal on Santa Monica Boulevard for her and my roomie, I stepped into the parking lot to find them tongue wrestling. The musical klutz, my good friend, who was there at the pub, disinterested in Mose Allison and Jeanette diving in for a solo.

Day was breaking. It was the close to the night of the Hollywood Christmas Parade, a friend’s suicide in the day. I recoiled at the crescendo.

The glare; that, dissonance brought by coming light. The harshest of Light, reality. It ripped through that dreamy dark groove that I dig in the lonely, lovely sojourn of my life and all that jazz.

Another Veterans Day comes and goes. As I get older it’s harder to suppress my animus. But I cannot dare or it will eat me alive.

This time of year it rears the ugliness. The dark truth. It’s set off online and in line as I approach the entrance to shop benignly at Market Basket.

Those silver haired, VFW adorned veterans soliciting donations for other veterans. They form a charming, united front this pair, as they flirt with the 60 to 80 year old ladies that come their way.

The ladies eating up the suave advances of those gallant, once young, soldier boys. Those forever young devils. My mind spills into disgust as I imagine if this is sex after sixty-five.

But down deep, I battle my guttural instinct to ask if they knew the soldier boys who raped my teenage mother.

Perhaps they knew them. Occupying the Rhineland a good decade after death’s decay was sanitized from my Strasse.

Those fine young men who casually destroyed a young girl’s life before it had chance to start, leaving her with two baby girls and twenty months later with me. In a home with not enough food to feed us. I would have to go.

Yes. Those wonderful boys in uniform giving of themselves to have a good time away a year, maybe two from their wives and children back in the states, defending “our way of life”.

Imagine how many Vietnamese, Korean and European bastards they left littered about those lands this past century? Abandoned. No money. No husband. No father. They’re left to fend for themselves and their alienated child(ren).

Thank you for your service.

However you say, not all of these servicemen were such cads. They’re mostly kind hearted, well trained and mannered young men representing you like a high school football team playing at some one else’s field.

True, after my teen mother gave me away she found a half-decent serviceman who actually went back home and divorced his wife, abandoning his daughter to return for his foreign bride. How did they feel about his service in that small Pennsylvania town?

yes once again, he wasn’t so half-decent to destroy his little girl’s childhood. Nor was he anywhere near human as he molested his new bride’s daughters, once he relocated them back in the States.

They weren’t his daughters.

He left them without a single word or finances for a year hitch in the ‘Nam. Imagine what this monster did over there to young girls?

But hell. Those were children of that foreign land that he was entitled to by virtue of his armament and status as a freedom fighter for them this time.

They weren’t his daughters. None of them were.

The Veterans who raped our teenage mother are probably dead now. I can’t thank them for their service to the darkest instincts of humanity. For flag and nation. Duty.

No I can’t thank them for my mother and half sister’s brief lives, the other sisters’ drug addiction, their mother’s neglect and mental breakdown.

We just have to live with it until we die. And we are set free. Home of the free because we had to brave their (self) service.