Jimmy James

My grandmother was a great lover of music, though her taste had calcified in the mid-sixties. She liked the early Beatles. She liked James Brown. She liked Little Stevie Wonder. But her favorite band was the Vagabonds.

According to family legend, which she was happy to share over jam and croissants, she met Jimmy James when she was seventeen and worked at the department store as a sewing assistant. She helped the tailor fit the suits for the customers. She always smiled when she said Jimmy James was a good tipper.

I wondered if she meant that as a euphemism.

Untethered

Odd remembrances haunt my lazy brain unbidden at odd times. Family legend has me nearly drowning after falling out of a boat when very young. The woman who is now great grandmother and widow that I made out with in my car sixty years ago. A small clothing store that I walked past in West Portland fifty plus years ago. Now there is a freeway where it was. I think it was small, isolated and named Mode O’Day. The traumatized beauty that abruptly rejected me while in college. Did she ever care for me, or was it completely one-sided?

From Guest Contributor Doug Hawley