“Well, hel-‐lo-‐o-‐o,” crooned the voice on the line from the past.
Roger sounded like he had when we used to talk on the phone in the 1960s. His voice, and I suppose mine for him, transported us to his green and white ’56 Chevy that stopped at Oscar’s for a burger and fries
when we had the money. We would insure the needed funds by putting just enough gas in the tank to get us through the weekend.
The radio gave us the Beatles when they were fresh, even revolutionary, with their mop-‐top hair and suits with odd collars, singing, as teen singers always do, about love, imagined, real or lost. Their music annoyed our parents, raised on Big Bands, Sinatra and Dinah Shore, sustaining a human tradition of irritating one’s elders.
“She Loves You” still puts me instantly in the Chevy, cruising, singing along,
windows open, life so free.
“So how’s Wisconsin,” I asked in reply, confirming that I recognized the voice. And we were launched into catching up seasoned with memories.
Roger described his by-‐pass, the value of stents, and his knee replacement. I countered with reports about radio-‐active seeds in my prostate and torn retinas in each eye. We compared the frequency of periodic skin cancers, relics of days when the Chevy got us to La Jolla Shores for body-‐surfing. No thought about sunscreen then; SPF was a random group of letters, not an advertising feature.
His new knee had roots in the ‘60s, too, a game of touch football on a Sunday when he should have been in church.
“God’s response to my playing hookey,” he laughed.
“Didn’t that cause you to flunk your physical for the Air Force?” I asked.
“No. That was my wrist.” Another game.
But not on a Sunday.
Roger was raised by a single mom, I was the son of a minister who never earned much a year. Our fun had to be free or at least low cost. The beach, listening to music on the radio, cruising, making fries last; they were the vehicles for bonding back then.
One year, I added a girl friend to the mix. Roger took the addition gracefully, and we became a threesome, all in the front seat. Remember seats like that?
Then came his girl friend. We found ways to earn money so that we could add movies to the mix of entertainment, preferably double features, a long-‐forgotten
value. We accepted contributions from the girls for gas and weren’t above having them pay their own way into the show. We weren’t earning that much.
We married those girls. Still married.
Roger and I liked the Beatles more than the girls did. Odd. When you hear tapes of their concerts, it’s the screams of girls that form the base over which “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” rises like a jet from a dusty landing strip.
Neither of us got Beatles haircuts—his mom and my dad would never have allowed that—and we had neither the money nor the fashion motivation to get suits with funny collars.
Maybe it was the Beatles’ shaking up of the status quo, the annoyance of the older folks, albeit in the tamest of ways, that stirred Roger and me. Wannabe rebels without the courage, perhaps?
Roger’s life has surprised him. “Never thought I’d have done most of what has happened,” he said.
I agreed. “The unaimed arrow never misses, said Kimo on a T-‐ shirt,” I said.
He laughed again. I remember that. We laughed a lot.
We talked for two hours. Like clockwork, the cell phone connection between upper Wisconsin and Kapolei cut out after 50 minutes—twice. After the second time, we still took 20 minutes to close. Several times, there was one more thing to
recall.
He told me about driving the old neighborhoods on his last visit to San Diego. I told him I still do once in a while. We pondered what has happened to a few of the people who seemed so important to us in those days.
He asked to be remembered to my mom.
It would be fun to talk more often, we agreed.
I won’t have trouble recognizing the voice when that happens.