Randomness Rules

My usual spot, Susan's on Main Street, was closed, so I ended up at Starbucks for coffee and eavesdropping. Starbucks now occupies the building that used to be Brady's Cafe, a funky old campus institution that lost its lease at the corner of Main and Lincoln across from front campus of Northeast Swingstate University, to the chagrin of a small but loyal following going back to the sixties. Now it's unrecognizable, all modern, characterless, sterile, and full of customers. I'm drinking my "holiday blend" which the smiling clerk said was a dark-roast, but it just tastes like coffee to me, in a paper to-go cup just in case I need to make a break for it and finish it on the road.

I dropped my daughter at her dorm, then did a quick workout in the lowering darkness on top of a wooded knoll off Loop Road, and now I need caffeine before driving back to Americus and my everyday life. After a holiday weekend of extended and sometimes intense conversation with my sister JoJo and nephew Bubba, I will now indulge in the fine art of random dialog writing, a kind of out-sourcing in prose for those times when you think you have nothing to say. It's a game of chance, something like Draw the Weirdo (aka Exquisite Corpse).

The five of us - Gven, JoJo, Bubba, Helga, and I - played a game of Draw the Weirdo Thursday night. We've been playing it at family gatherings ever since the kids were big enough to hold a pencil: everybody draw a head, fold it over and pass to the next person, draw a torso, fold it over and pass, draw the legs and fold, etc., until each drawing has come full-circle with a cartoonish body created by five different hands. The results are invariably funny, sometimes startlingly weird, arresting, random.

The two young men at the table next to me, both dark and heavily bearded, are difficult to transcribe because they are speaking Russian or some other eastern or southern Slavic language as they consult a book and make notes on a legal pad.

Three girls in Roosevelt High School letter jackets talk animatedly at the next table: "I didn't know their birthdays were on the same day..."

Two tall, blond women talk quietly with a young Indian man at the table across from me, and I finally discern a slight accent, German or Czech, maybe Polish or one of the Baltic republics. They have the high forehead and fair skin of the Scandinavian Slavs: "No no...I don't do that kind of thing. I did it, but...so sick. I owe them twenty dollars. Lobby and objective premises. Money and, I can get them for you (laughs). Apple cider should be cold, not hot. When I first came to America..."

Two loud people walk in: "When he was here, we went to a Chinese restaurant, getting married to just somebody's friend? I need to like talk it out with someone, and we initial dinner and comes back out and like what's up, and she's like oh god, it's like it's too bad, and I walked away and my sister saw what's happening and then my dad like walks away and goes like don't talk. It was so random, oh I've never, no cuz I know but this was in Baltimore for a year and a half and I was leaving the next day, he drove an Audi and my friend's cousin, did I tell you this story, I went to my friend's wedding..."

I finished my coffee and left, headed down the interstate, and found a local radio station, which is always unpredictable. On the way up, we had heard Romanian dances played by a Hungarian string quartet, an Irish-American interviewing a high school DJ looking for a good communications school, and a Slovak-American show from Cleveland with a Slovak-speaking DJ spinning what sounded to my untrained ear like polka music.

On the way back, I heard the tail end of a John Lennon tribute compiled by someone in Albuquerque in anticipation of the 25th anniversary of Lennon's death on December 8, 1980, part "Where were you then?" retrospective and part Lennon songs and quotes, mostly from the post-Beatles, Plastic Ono Band years. (For the record, Gven and I were sitting at the kitchen table of our Oberlin apartment eating breakfast and listening to WOBC.)

Coincidentally we had listened to a lot of Beatles songs Wednesday night. Bubba asked about the order in which several albums came out, so we listened to Abbey Road, Sargeant Pepper, and half of the White Album. When it warmed up on Saturday, we all strolled over to Lesser's for ice cream and across the street to Sour Records for another trip down memory lane in the used CD racks. For an infrequent music buyer like me, one never knows what one will find, and I was pleasantly surprised by the selection of records I could recognize.

JoJo bought a live LP that Peter, Paul and Mary recorded in 1964 at the height of the folk revival. JoJo doesn't have a turntable anymore, so she ostensibly got it for us to play when she comes to visit. She doesn't know what became of all her albums, and she had all of PP&M's and probably knew all the words, as well as sharing the political stance of those three bohemians gone mainstream. I also listened to those records over and over, back when JoJo was 17 and I was 13, and they introduced me to Dylan, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and political folk music in general. That part wasn't so random.