Tuesday, October 18, 2011


"Back When" by Tim McGraw



Don't you remember
The fizz in a pepper
Peanuts in a bottle
At ten, two and four
A fried bologna sandwich
With mayo and tomato
Sittin' round the table
Don't happen much anymore
We got too complicated
It's all way over-rated
I like the old and out-dated
Way of life
Back when a hoe was a hoe
Coke was a coke
And crack's what you were doing
When you were cracking jokes
Back when a screw was a screw
The wind was all that blew
And when you said I'm down with that
Well it meant you had the flu
I miss back when
I miss back when
I miss back when


I love my records
Black, shiny vinyl
Clicks and pops
And white noise
Man they sounded fine
I had my favorite stations
The ones that played them all
Country, soul and rock-and-roll
What happened to those times?
I'm readin' Street Slang For Dummies
Cause they put pop in my country
I want more for my money
The way it was back then
Back when a hoe was a hoe
Coke was a coke
And crack's what you were doing
When you were cracking jokes
Back when a screw was a screw
The wind was all that blew
And when you said I'm down with that
Well it meant you had the flu
I miss back when
I miss back when
I miss back when

Give me a flat top for strumming
I want the whole world to be humming
Just keep it coming
The way it was back then
Back when a hoe was a hoe
Coke was a coke
And crack's what you were doing
When you were cracking jokes
Back when a screw was a screw
The wind was all that blew
And when you said I'm down with that
Well it meant you had the flu
I miss back when
I miss back when
I miss back when


It was somewhere near Texico (by Clovis, New Mexico) on the Texas/New Mexico border on our way back from south Texas that my fiery Rebecca startled me. We had had many confrontations on her use of computers and her iTouch to constantly facebook. Her remark confirmed that the both of us had, at least one thing in common. We often listened to country & Western radio stations and Rebecca would say, “There is nothing like listening to this music in the right states.” The ads were for state fairs and farm equipment. The voices of the announcers were down-home. This is what she, “This music is about nostalgia and about romance.” She was right and there was a song (see above) that confirmed it all.




It is still difficult for a 69 year-old-man to remember back when… and in particular back when I was 14 which happens to be my granddaughter Rebecca’s age right now.

With the teachers on this limbo-like-sort-of strike-that-is not-quite Rebecca will not be getting marks at the end of this first school semester. She is in grade 9. I have told her (seeing that both Rosemary and I have been teachers) that the impressions that teachers get of you in that first semester can be pretty permanent and if you are not doing much those impressions can be irrevocably damning.

Rebecca has a new love interest and both Rosemary and I suspected that there has been lots of coasting. I remember that when I was 14 I was getting mediocre grades in school. It was not until I started my grade 9 at St. Ed’s in Texas (a Catholic boarding school) did my grades not only became better but they became extremely good. What was the change? It was an imposed evening study hall in our dorm. We were not given a choice. I had no laptop, no electrical devices to distract me. I either read a book (and that was good) or I studied, and that was good, too. Our TV was monitored and we were allowed measured time periods we could watch TV.

In south Texas I finally told Rebecca that she could only use her mother’s laptop for one hour during the day (and night). At first she protested but she soon adjusted to the restriction and did fine. This was probably because she had not informed me (but I had suspected) that the iTouch (that I had given her!) had a an app for facebook. When I threatened to take her iTouch away that produced terrible confrontations and I was told that I had no authority to do this. So I took away (or better still) hid my iPhone charge which she used to charge her iTouch.

You can understand that by the time we were driving back to Vancouver (near Clovis, New Mexico) there was a palpable resentment in the Malibu.

When I started in that grade 9 in Austin, I soon found out it was difficult for me to fit in. I was not a Latino because I did not look like one and I spoke perfect English. I was not an American Anglo because I spoke perfect Spanish. I was in a middle that I soon accepted as an inevitable personal status.

Rebecca’s mother made some of her wonderful pineapple squares and told her daughter that she might want to take some for her friends at school. She was met by a barrage of angry statements that nobody did this sort of thing and she was not going to do it either. In fact Rebecca keeps much of her unusual life a secret from her friends in her effort to be like everybody else.

My guess is that this is most normal. It was when I was 21 and in the Argentine Navy that I attempted to become an individual in an organization that demanded blanket uniformity. I had a tailor sew a crease on my pants (not allowed but corporals did not bother to notice) and we all had patented methods of bending our plastic (German submariners type) navy caps to make the shape our very own. I wore very good sunglasses most of the year and in the winter I wore expensive Argentine black leather gloves instead of the issued wool. I bought a handsome black leather briefcase in which I stored my reading material like Time Magazine.

It was once while on a train going to my job as a translator that a man in civvies pointed out that I was not wearing my cap and that I was reading a magazine (Time). He told me that this was not in the regulation. He asked me for my particulars (my naval identity number) and by the time I got to the office an arrest order had arrived that cited gross insubordination. The man had been a scary officer in the Argentine armed forces security service.

So Rebecca at age 14 wants to fit in. She has the most beautiful curly, heavy hair I have ever seen. She wakes up at 5 every morning to straighten it and applies her makeup to look as perfect and as much like everybody else in her class. By the end of the week this reduced sleeping makes is so that by the time she visits us on Saturday noon she is more likely to retire in what used to be her mother’s bed to have a siesta.

We have a pact in that I can now tell her how wonderful she looks when her hair is curly and she will not become angry. She has learned to take that as my personal compliment.

Because of the non-teacher’s strike a dance she was going to go (invited by her new love interest) has been cancelled. Her mother had taken her to a vintage clothing store to find her a dress and then she bought her new shoes.

This disappointment has been partially ameliorated in that she is going to wear the dress and shoes this Sunday. Rebecca and I are going to attend a matinee performance of the Vancouver Opera production of West Side Story. She has until Monday afternoon to write me copy (her review) so we can blog it for that evening. I know she will do a very good job yet like all the other fine jobs she has written for me she has kept it a secret from her contemporaries. Few really know about her trips to Argentina, Uruguay and Washington DC. They don’t know that she has gone to Mexico three times, Morelia, Guanajuato and Mérida and to Texas, twice.

Perhaps the hiding of all her experiences began some years ago when she told her friends she had spent an afternoon in Mayor Sam Sullivan’s office with her grandfather and friend Abraham Rogatnick. They called her a lier.

My friends all tell me that all those years of taking her to ballet, modern dance, theatre and baroque concerts (with a smattering of Philip Glass and Turning Point Ensemble concerts) will have left an indelible presence in her brain.

Meanwhile I long for my Rebecca to stop straightening her hair and revealing that wonder that her real curly hair is. I meanwhile enjoy how she is able to navigate with adults in conversation or how she is able to talk about her love of roses to an audience of 500 plus avid rosarians. It is only time before she understands that individuality and not conformity is what separates us from ants and bees.