Henrietta, Texas, 1958: Eddy Frank and I were wandering in the halls of the courthouse. The ceilings are perhaps eighteen feet above us, the smell of old varnish and smoke clings to the walls.

There are two bathrooms. One says ‘White’ and one says ‘Colored’. The White bathroom is floored in tiny white hexagonal tiles, with ancient cracks across the floor. I do not know how the Colored bathroom is floored.

We had a reason for being there. A good reason.

However, now at 62 I cannot tell you the good reason we had at age 12, but I assure you that we had a darn good reason to be there, probably.

Perhaps it was the fire escape. This long metal tube was a wonderous slide. There was no ladder of course. Clasping the upper edges in your hands, step by step you ascended. Far taller than the kiddie’s slide at Lulu Johnson Grade School, at the top was a metal cage, just outside a lady’s window. Behind this window one sometimes found adults with angry faces; they yelled at us to get off the slide.

Slide down we did. Then labored again to the top. Standing in the metal cage, high above the courthouse lawn, you could see the death ledge clearly. A sandstone decorative ledge upon the outer face of the brick walls, with a great triangular chunk missing, about six feet away from our cage. The broken part was right above the metal-edge courthouse steps, so far below. Legend had it that a boy, perhaps like ourselves, had tried to walk along that ledge. Naturally, the ledge broke, throwing him to a horrible death on the steps below.

I know of no boy who decided to try it, though it was tempting.

So perhaps our good reason was the slide. Or maybe we were just taking a short cut. Or looking at the doors. Or visiting the White bathroom.

When we saw the key sticking out of a door, we stopped in our tracks.

Eddy Frank looked at me. I looked at Eddy Frank.

“What do you think we should do?” I asked. Eddy Frank, more thoughtful and less impulsive than myself, pondered.

“We could take it,” he said. I nodded quickly. By taking this key, we could make a smoke bomb of gunpowder. We could set it off in the middle of the night. Well, after dark, anyway. Wouldn’t that be a funny joke? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!

We resolved to take the key. Eddy Frank pulled it from the door. We high-tailed it out of there. Our plan was go to the Western Auto store across the street. We would have a copy made. We would return the original key to the doorway where we’d found it.

But no sooner inside Western Auto when Eddy Frank, looking over his shoulder through the big window, said, “Uh-oh.”

A woman and two men had come from the courthouse door, and, standing on the steps, were looking in every direction. Somehow, they were on to us!

Evading the salesman, who was drinking coffee anyway, we slipped out through the back door and into the alley. For the moment safe from prying eyes, we paced. What should we do?

We could be jailed. Fined. Thrown out of school. We could get spankings. We were in a world of trouble. Eddy Frank stopped.

“We’ve got to take it back,” he said. Frantic, I argued.

“No, no!” I shouted. “Just throw it away. Hide it in that pipe!” But Eddy Frank was stubborn. In the end, we marched back into the courthouse. Nobody now seemed to be looking for us.

We found a room with large musty books and a counter. Eddy Frank walked up, placed the key on the counter, and said to the lady who peered down at us.

“We found this key in the alley over there,” he said, “and we’ve brought it back.” She glared cruelly at us.

“Uh huh,” she said. “That’s the ladies room key. Someone was inside, and heard the whole thing.”

“OK, then,” said Eddy Frank.

Then we left, while the leaving was good.

Henrietta, Texas (Special): Preparations for the 72nd annual Clay County Pioneer Reunion starting next week, September 18th, in Henrietta have started.

The rodeo office at the Pioneer Grounds opens at 9 a.m. Box seat ticket holders may pick up their tickets or call the office for delivery at (940) 538-5111. Rodeo will feature bull and bronc riding, calf roping, bulldogging, clowns, a greased pig contest, ladies fancy riding, music and comedy. A dance will follow the festivities.

Riders who plan to participate in the Pioneer Rodeo grand entries or parades need to have up-to-date Coggins test papers on their horses.

Float building has been under way for several weeks at the Pioneer Hall. To register float themes, call Sherri Halsell at the Clay County extension office at (940) 538-5042. After the parades on Saturday and Sunday morning, stick around for the fiddling contest and art show on the courthouse grounds.

The theme for this year’s float parades is “Pick 3, Any 3, in 2003.” The annual reunion gets under way with the cowboy kickoff parade Sept. 18 and continues through Sept. 20.

A hotel near the airport, Burbank, Fall 1991: Yesterday I attended a conference. I don’t remember exactly why. I’d been setting up my first 800-number voicemail company, and noticing that quite a few MLM (Multi-Level Marketing) people signed up, I’d decided to try offering a MLM resellers program. I’d flown down from San Francisco yesterday to visit this little conference, to learn more about how MLM worked.

Although I don’t now recall much about the conference, I sharply remember the morning after. On my way to breakfast, I learned that Miles Davis had died. The newspaper didn’t say why; later reports said pneumonia and a stroke. At the time, I assumed drugs.

Miles had called me one night.

Years before in 1969, at 3 am in Beverly Hills, all was quiet in the lobby of the Bevery Rodeo Hyatt House, where I was the night auditor. Miles’ wife — whom I was sure was the woman pictured on the cover of his ‘Porgy and Bess’ album — was staying in the hotel, and the night bellman was complaining that she kept calling him, wanting this, wanting that, fussing, acting oddly, he said.

When the switchboard rang, I answered and it was Miles.

Gravelly-voiced, he asked my name. He knew the hotel well. He frequently stayed there. I’d not seen him, but our highly-crispy morning bellman Roger, had reported in detail their many arguments. Roger, a young and zippy white kid with a full head of steam and vast assurance, was certain that white basketball players were clearly superior. Miles, never known for tact or modesty, was certain that black basketball players were superior.

I’m glad I wasn’t there and was never asked, for I knew nothing about basketball. Disappinted though that I’d not met Miles, for I’d been a fan ever since my friend Lefevre gave me that Porgy and Bess album as a birthday present during high school years. I’d played it over and over in the basement of our home.

In this basement, I’d painted three walls pale blue and one wall burnt orange, and with an intricate speaker-cabinet planned from Mechanics Illustrated and with materials salvaged from my award-winning and bogus science fair exhibit, the sound was magnificent in this basement, with Miles’ pinched tone sounding now and again in little short phrases.

Jerry described that sound as playing through fishnets, but that wasn’t it. I’ve heard that once Miles was asked why he liked the trumpet; he said that it sounded like the human voice. But that wasn’t what it sounded like, either. What it sounded like, was Miles.

So. Beverly Hills at 3 am, and the switchboard rings, and Miles’ gravel-voice asks my name. My name was then Richard, and I told him.

“Richard,” he said. “My wife’s there.” I agreed; she was. In room such-a-number. He thought a while.

“She’s upset,” he said. I agreed; she was. About something. Or about nothing. Who knows? We didn’t know. “She’s upset,” he said. “See if you can’t calm her down, OK?”

How the hell was I supposed to do that? Or, expressed differently, what would be the best approach for a 24-year-old white boy with acne, completely inept with women, an employee of the hotel, to deal with a lushiously beautiful black woman possibly strung-out and cranky on drugs in one of our rooms, to calm her down as a favor to the most famous horn player in the world, calling in from New York?

“Gee, Mr. Davis,” I stuttered, “I don’t know what to do.” He brushed my objection aside.

“Just talk to her,” he said. “Calm her down, OK? Just try, OK?”

OK, I said. I did call her, and asked if everything was OK. She told me off, and then, apparently, everybody was happy.

And now, years later, standing shocked and blocking the line to the breakfast buffet in this Burbank hotel, I read that Miles is dead. He’s gone. I don’t know the guy, but it hurt.

Why did it hit me so?

Recently, Johnny Cash died. It seemed like a part of my life had gone. Adrienne had rushed into my Mount Shasta office to tell me; she’d heard it on the radio. The next day, we were talking about trains, and she asked me what was the Johnny Cash song about the train. “Folson Prison Blues,” I told her, and started to sing the first verse. She burst into tears.

“Don’t!” she said. “Don’t, please.”

Why does it hit us so?

I think it’s this. Most of us have heard a trumpet. But we’d never heard that trumpet. Most of us have heard a freight train. But maybe we’d never fully heard the lonliness in that late-night whistle. In songs, the singer brings us something, and it becomes a part of our lives.

Miles gave us a trumpet, and a sound. Johnny Cash gave us freight trains.

Nashville, September 2003: At age 71, singer Johnny Cash died today at Baptist Hospital. The medical report will say complications from diabetes resulting in respiratory failure. Friends will say he died from mourning the loss of his wife, June Carter, who passed away in May.

I hear that train a-rolling, it’s a-rolling round the bend
I ain’t seen the sunshine since I don’t know when
I’m stuck in Folsom Prison and time keeps dragging on
And I hear that whistle blowing … down to San Antone.

When I was just a baby my mamma told me: Son,
always be a good boy; don’t ever play with guns.
But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.
When I hear that train a-pulling, I hang my head and cry.

I bet there’s rich folks riding, in their fancy shining cars;
They’re probably drinking coffee and smoking big cigars.
But I know I had it coming, I know I can’t be free;
But I keep on keep a-moving, well that’s what tortures me.

If they’d free me from this prison, if that railroad train was mine;
You bet I’d move it on a little further down the line.
Far from Folsom Prison, that’s where I long to stay
And I’d let that lonesome whistle … blow my blues away.

I think of Johnny Cash, lots of nights. A funny thing about our new home in Mount Shasta — a railroad runs through it. Amtrak comes whistling through, the deep two-toned sound echoing from the hills, and eternal long freight trains clattering in the night.

Does it wake you?

No, it’s soothing.

I’ve missed this sound, and hearing it again feels like home. When I was a child, the Katy line ran south of town. Katy means ‘MKT’, or Missouri Kansas Texas railroad. When the wind blew from the south, the soft clatter of the boxcars floated into my bedroom, and sometimes the far-off whistle.

Does anything capture lonely and vast space like that sound? And did anybody capture the lonely and vast spirit like Johnny Cash?

I think not.

Near Hurnville, Texas, Summer 1971: After Dr. Strickland died, Mama purchased the farm from her parents’ estate, and we moved there. On the third day, Paul and I struggled to carry things into the house from a pickup out front.

“Jesus!” I said, gasping at the weight. The hired man chuckled.

“Better call on someone closer,” he said.

In a foul mood, I trudged into the house.

Later that afternoon, we helped Mama hang some pictures. My sorry mood persisted. But let’s picture the entryway.

After the covered front porch, inside the front door, the small hallway is paneled in dark-varnished wood. Coming in, to the left of the doorway upon the wall once hung the first telephone, a large black box with a cone sticking out, and a cup-shaped receiver hanging on a hook beside the black box.

You lifted the receiver and held it to your ear. You spoke into the cone sticking out of the front of the box. And to ring the operator, so as to be connected to your party, you turned the crank on the left side, which rang a bell far away.

To the left, a doorway led into the parlor, seldom used, with a glass-front bookcase, a tightly-packed little sofa with wooden trim, a very fancy wooden table with a round top and a little carved lip around the top, and an upright piano, possibly never tuned in its lifetime.

To the right, a doorway led into the … what would I call it? It was the room where grandfather’s lean-back chair sat. Here he read the paper, and in the late day, taking a rest, if awakened from his snoring, he’d deny it. “Asleep?” he said. “I wasn’t asleep. I was only resting my eyes.”

Before you and to the right, an elaborate carved wooden piece which has a seat below and great hooks above for hanging coats.

Before you and to the left, a stairway led to a landing, and from there to the second floor. The wooden panelling was only waist-high, and above was a yellowed wallpaper on which were isolated scenes of a lovely cottage beside the road, and a carriage pulled by prancing horses. My grandmother had a motto hanging here, telling about living in a house by the side of the road and being a friend to man. This seemed very wonderful to me as a child.

But now, age 26, I was far too smart, far too wise, far too knowledgeable. In fact, I just about knew everything. Which is why I was so stupid.

I held up a picture to the wall upon the stairway. It showed a wolf standing upon a wintry hill, coat ruffled by the cold wind, gazing down upon a snug cabin in the hollow below, its windows glowing with warmth. My mother said she wanted it more to the left, then more to the right, then back to the left, then more to the right.

Tired and irritable, I set the picture down, and pulled a pencil from my shirt pocket.

“Let me see if I’ve got this right,” I said. I crudely drew a big rectangle with the pencil upon the wallpaper. “You want it right about there?” My mother’s face fell; tears hovered.

I had ruined the wallpaper. There was no replacing it. A little part of the past had crumbled away.