The need to make music is a human one.
By the Fountain Hills Park lake is an outside music area. In a tight circle are eight different music makers, You can hammer tubes, strike bells, bang on cans, waggle ropes that move noisemakers, make sounds to call the cows home.
All the instruments are unattended this morning, so, having the area, all to myself, I pick up a mallet and take a turn at one of them.
This must have been how these instruments were discovered. Some cave man hit a mastodon skull with a rib bone, and, to his delight, the first melody in the world was composed.
Hitting a small piece of metal with a mallet to get noise is easy.
What is hard is to make a combination of noises, in the right order, with the right rhythm, that sound like music.
Musicians have been wrestling with this conundrum since the dawn of time.
I make myself a little melody and have fun.
That is, I’ve heard many learned musicians say, ” the point of music.”
In the front courtyard of a vacant home for sale in Fountain Hills, Arizona, a bird has made her nest in a God’s flowing locks..
She, quietly, doesn’t move as I peek through the house windows into sad, empty rooms where someone used to live.
By the time this house is sold, her eggs will be hatched, her babies will try their wings and fly away to start their own families, build or find their own nests.
God’s, some believe, write our scripts and they write them intentionally with miscues, forgotten lines, improbable entrances and exits, all at the Director’s discretion.
Personally, I would prefer a long boring script instead of a short intense one, but God’s have a manner and method all their own. I’m sure I have been given what I need instead of what I want.
If I could fly, I’d nest in this God’s gentle locks too and take my parenting as serious as this Mom.
Golf, as invented in the Scottish countryside, started with sticks and a ball.
Those old guys hit the little hand made wood ball for a distant hole dug in the ground, added traps and water later to make the game harder. They created a rule book and came up with tournaments and prizes to keep competition interesting and playing the game seem more noble than it is. Hitting a small ball with a stick with a club head, and getting it to go where you want it to, is a devilishly difficult skill.
Frisbee golf has recently become popular with the younger crowd. There is a frisbee golf course around this Fountain Hills Lake and it features eighteen designated holes. There are no traps but the goal is the same – get the frisbee around the course in the fewest amount of strokes, or throws.
These guys are practicing this morning for their Sunday tournament today, and, by empty picnic benches, competitors are stretching, taking their frisbees out of Wal Mart tote bags and wiping them down with a clean rag.These two contestants tell me there are different sized frisbees for the different shots they have to make in a round. They let me try my hand and toss one of their plastic plates at a close by practice hole they are using to warm up before their tournament begins. I give a toss and manage to land the frisbee inside the little upright basket where it is supposed to go.
There is room in this world, I believe, for ” frisbee golf. ”
After a round of ” frisbee golf ” I expect all these ” golfers” will easily be found at their ” nineteenth hole ” just as we go there after our rounds on our local courses.
Drinking predates golf by thousands of years, and explaining why your score was so high is always easier with a cold beer, chips and dip.
Whether it is real golf, or frisbee golf, GOLF is still, since it was made up, a four letter word.
Even if golf tests your temper and ego, it easily beats work, still another four letter word we all LOVE to HATE.
This morning, the Fountain goes off at nine sharp, the same time as all the local businesses open. Ducks cruise past it like little feathered boats as a steady geyser of water is propelled several hundred feet into the air.
I film the eruption from several directions and barely get it all into my camera viewfinder.
I’m not sure I would come to Fountain Hills just to see this fountain, but, being here, it is icing on the Fountain Hills cake.
In the desert, you see lots of things that don’t seem to fit.
Why, in the middle of a desert that sees less than ten inches of rain a year, would there be a lake? Who, in their right mind, would build a fountain that shoots up several hundred feet in the air?
Regardless of the fountain’s history, I’m duly impressed with the ability of the human race to come up with engineering marvels that still can’t out do what Mother Nature routinely does, even without putting her make-up on.
The landscape in this part of Arizona has few trees and even less water.
It has jagged rocky hills that rise from the desert floor like turtle heads coming up out of their shell. The tallest vegetation, for miles, is the saquaro cactus that we first began seeing as our Arizona state highway takes us from higher cooler elevations down to the torrid desert floor.
The saquaro, this morning in Fountain Hills Park, look like banditos and some only have one arm. One has his six shooter pointed at me.
Fountain Hills is a sleepy bedroom community not far from Phoenix, a place to escape the rigorous winters of the East coast and Midwest, a place to leave big urban centers for roadrunners in your front yard and sometimes temperamental rattlers.
This man made lake, with its world famous water feature. makes a good quiet place to stroll as the sun comes up. The fountain used to be the tallest man made geyser in the world till some prince in Dubai wanted to make a new number 1 and made it happen in his back yard..
This morning, the sun rises fast. Palm trees stand like men in lime jackets on an airplane runway waving flashlights at the sun as it docks into its assigned gate.
Mining for memories is Scott’s full time, no pay retirement job.
I never thought I’d see anything that used to be number 1 in the world.
Most life I document isn’t on anybodies list.
At closing, Portillo’s, in Fountain Hills, is almost empty.
The eatery specializes in Chicago food, hot dogs, polish sausage and Italian Beef.
The restaurant is gleaming and has checkered tablecloths, old style movie posters and employees dressed in sporty uniforms. It is a place that Vinnie and the boys would come to eat after taking care of their numbers rackets, breaking some arms,blowing up a competitor’s vehicle with him inside it.
There are more employees in the place than customers this time of night, and, as we finish our late dinner, the help is sweeping floors, closing out registers, getting ready to hang the ” Closed ” sign in the front window and go home to late night movies and Chinese take out.
In the parking lot, the bass player, Tom, has backed his car into a close to our table parking space, in plain view, so he can keep an eye on his expensive irreplaceable stand up bass. I watched him slip the big instrument into its custom made case, at the gig, and roll it out to his car like he was pulling a suitcase in an airport terminal. He carefully laid the bass down in the back seat of his small SUV and covered it with a cheap looking Mexican blanket.
Instruments, like your best set of golf clubs, your best operating scalpels, your best culinary knives, or running shoes, have to be kept close.
This world is not without thieves.
Escaping Chicago in the winter months, Greg and Judy stay in Fountain Hills, Arizona and perform every Saturday night at a close to their house Fountain Hills eatery. They are joined tonight by a friend from Seattle, Tom Wakeling, who plays bass with Lee Konitz and likes to jam with Greg and Judy when he has the opportunity.
The restaurant is full and Chadd, a student of Greg’s, and my teacher, drove us over from Albuquerque to enjoy Greg, Judy and Tom’s performance. It is one thing to talk about jazz, but the best learning comes by listening to players who know how the music is supposed to be done.
The trio plays standards out of the Great American Songbook, takes requests, and play tight, yet loose, in this small unpretentious Italian restaurant.
The accumulated professional years,of these three, nears a hundred. How do you put a value on an art that vanishes in the air after it is played? They never play the same song the same way.
Even better, than the music tonight ,is going out for an after closing bite to eat with the gang after instruments have been packed away and the restaurant/bar shuts down for the night.
Jazz musicians, musical God’s that they are, still eat the same kind of food the rest of us do.
The things of man start with an idea.
Either you are hungry, uncomfortable, scared, envious, or in love. Sometimes you are just bored and want to change because you can.
Chip and Lori want to live simple and live free as far from civilization as they can get.
” It’s an experiment, ” Chip says, and, thankfully, his wife is going along with it. Moving in a different direction than your spouse is like trying to row a boat with oars going in opposite directions.
Sitting around a campfire at night, under more stars than we can see, their new experiment oddly feels like home, even if the wind whips up and the cold sneaks in under my bedroll and makes me wake up in the middle of the night.
Our roots are where we sink them..
Nowhere is a place too.
Nowhere is often a remote, uninteresting, nondescript place, a place having no prospect of progress or success, obscure, miles from anything or anyone.
Nowhere is often a place no one else wants to be, a place that offers no comfort, no wealth, no value.
Nowhere, however, can also be a place to gain privacy, a place to begin new, a place to build what you now see that you didn’t see before.
Pioneers struck out to find value in the nowhere reaches of the old west. Astronauts went into the nowhere of space looking for new worlds. Explorers in the sixteenth century ventured into nowhere to find profit.
Chip, wife Lori, son Bowen, and Scott are striking out today for our Nowhere, Arizona.
There won’t be a town here, but, by the time we are done, this trip, there will be the start of a storage shed for Chip and Lori’s stuff. Their homestead is still further down time’s road.
When you come to Nowhere, you don’t want to come with Nothing and you want to leave Something behind.
This is how it must have felt to the pioneers on wagon trains headed west after the American Civil War, a shared tragedy, like slavery, that some Americans still haven’t worked their way through.
The odd thing about nowhere is that someone was often there before you arrived.
Where country begins is ” when you start to see cows. ”
We are not in prime cow country in this high desert Arizona.There is much better grazing in Texas, and, even better, in Uruguay.The grass on this little piece of our planet is sparse and competes with prickly cactus, junipers, washes, arroyos, ditches,dirt roads and scattered rocks. This land we are driving through, to reach Chip’s little piece of paradise, is open range and these cows have the first right of way over both automobiles and humans.
These two critters give me the evil eye when I stop to take their portrait but they grow tired of me quickly and peacefully amble off away from my interruption.
When you get out of the city you see more clearly the things you are getting away from and the things you left behind that you miss.
When I start trying to make friends with cows, who don’t even have watches to give me the time of day, I figure I have already been out here too long.
I love the country but won’t cry to go back to my city.
Living a simple life, it seems to me, is not as simple as it sounds when you say it.
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