Posted Tuesday 12 August 2003

Dream

Henrietta Texas, 1959: My room was a garret built atop our house on Omega Street, and from my windows to the east, I saw her walking up the sidewalk.

Slowly, a stranger, about fourteen or fifteen, with dark hair and almond eyes, perhaps two blocks away. Well, I admit it. I had binoculars.

She looked about her as she walked, maybe seemed a little timid. A block before our house, she crossed Omega Street, and vanished from sight up the sidewalk behind the old Baptist Church. I knew every kid in town. I'd never seen her before.

But I was to see her again.

When school started, within a few days I'd learned her name -- Linda J. -- and she was absolutely beautiful.

But a couple of years younger than my esteemed self, so I rarely saw her, and in my clumsiness never professed myself. Then, too, I fell in love with three or four other girls soon after.

But on a band trip to Wichita Falls Swimming Pool, somebody brought a portable radio, and some of us danced in the gazebo. Holding her in my arms, with her breasts soft against me, and the scent of her body so near ... it was very, very difficult. Sweet and painful all at once. Even now, hearing again the Everly Brother's voices blending in harmony, I can feel that longing and lust and sweetness and pain.

I never became involved with Linda Johnson. I was a hot-shot rudimental drummer back then, and was the head of the drum section. My associates were Mr. Noah A. on the bass drum, and ... Miss Linda J. on cymbols.

Noah had it easy. Just hit the bass drum on every beat.

Cymbols are more difficult, because you must stand, counting measure after measure, and sooner or later you get the the one place where you clash the cymbols together with a great flourish.

Linda had a bad habit of counting wrong. Sometimes we had cymbol clashes in the middle of soft passages. Often we passed the correct spot, and when Mr. Raeke glared, we got a kind of belated cymbol crash.

All this reflected upon me, the head of the drum section, so I tried to keep an eye on Linda, and helped her count the measures, whilst playing the rudimental snare part.

Although not particularly good at counting measures, she'd grown even more breathtaking, and on this particular day wore a snug black medium-weight turtleneck sweater which showed off her lovely figure to perfection, each perfect breast the stuff of dreams.

Today she was counting very seriously, and we were drawing near the correct place. As the band headed into the last two measures, Linda raised the left cymbol high, and lowered the right cymbol low. Standing upright, her head and shoulders nodding in time, she counted down the last four beats.

Up came the measure, and the cymbols swung!

"Thunk."

No stunning crash. Just a muffled sound. I looked at Linda's face, but her eyes were blank, staring into space far beyond the ceiling of the room. She had caught her left nipple between the cymbols.