WISH YOU WERE HERE

This week I am going to make the 2 hour drive heading south from Indy to southern Indiana.
Jojo is going out of town for work and I need to go see moms. I'm still off work on the injured reserved list so I just need to weave my way through all the doctor visits and physical therapy and get down there. I like that my immediate family all live in Indiana, but we are split between the Northerners and the Southerners.
The Southerners start at Loogootee and wind through Jasper and end up all the way down to the far south west corner of Indiana to Evansville.
Us Northerners begin at Bargersville, through Greenwood, jog over to Indy's west side, through Indy's Eastside and wind up in Greenfield.
I was born in Southern Indiana and we spent a fair amount of time down there as kids. Back then we had family in Loogootee, French Lick and Newton Stewart. Little towns separated not by many miles but by a lot of hills and winding roads.

When I hear the Pink Floyd song Wish You Were Here, it always pulls my mind back down that way, especially Newton Stewart.
The song itself has no memory provoking power.
It's that small part at the beginning of the song that starts the time machine.
The song begins with a radio playing in the background as some unnamed guitar player (David Gilmour) is tuning through the stations searching for a song he can play along with on a 12 string.
It's this one weak station he is trying to pull in that you can here the heterodyne whine you used to hear a lot back in the days of analog tuners that reminds me of trips to Loogootee, or French Lick or Newton Stewart.
The sound that dads car radio made trying to pull in stations that were too far away.
But mostly it pulls my rapidly diminishing memory to the old  portable shortwave radio that used to sit in the General store that my grandparents owned in Newton Stewart.
Seems to me like it usually sat next to the post office section of the store right under a huge map of the proposed Patoka Reservoir that now engulfs that tiny nook of Americana.
my minds eye can still  see that radio that was always turned down so low even a young whippersnapper like me could barely hear it, but I remember that heterodyne whine whistling over some weak radio station, I see my uncle Kenneth sitting there by it, it was his radio.
He was a history school teacher at French Lick and still lived with grandma and grandpa and he minded the store quite a bit.
He was one of my favorite people down there.
It was a huge family and the number grandkids at one time may have reached 30 some. So we were pretty much lost in the shuffle and ignored, but not by Uncle Kenneth.
Seems like he had a nickname for all of us and he is the one that gave Rita of An Ordinary Life fame the moniker "Annie Bob".
He always called me "Mark Clark".
I didn't know then who the hell Mark Clark was but I liked it when Uncle Kenneth called me that. "Well, Mark Clark!", is how he always greeted me.

The other thing I remember about Uncle Kenneth was the he was afraid of the dark, I think he always slept with the light on.
I still have an image of him sleeping on the couch with the lamp on and the shortwave radio sitting there on the table next to him turned way down.

Uncle Kenneth was single till he was 57 years old. He finally got married and moved away.
A little over a week later he dropped dead with a heart attack.
Seems like Uncle Kenneth should have feared marriage more than he feared sleeping in the dark.

That all was decades ago.
These days I can't remember what I did last week.
But it's that shortwave radio that I see and I hear and that distant radio station playing and the sound of the heterodyne whine oscillating over the melody of some long ago forgotten hillbilly tune that is still crystal clear in my memory.

I will be playing that Pink Floyd song when I get down that way like I always do because I like that song and that tiny sliver of yesterday it brings me back to.


I like that song so much that I'm tempted to tell my family that I want it played at my funeral, but it seems like that might be in bad taste.
But I do have a dark sense of humor.
It might be humorous to have people standing around looking at my dead carcass laying there in my coffin with while they play "Wish You Were Here".