Daily Blues & Views

 I received an email from an old friend last week.  We'd been sharing memories of a mutual friend who recently died.  While I haven't seen her in over 40 years, I do recall a brief visit when she was passing through the Bay Area in the late 1970s.   I used to date her sister and she dated my best friend.  These were teen-age dates, mostly, but their importance and dare I say significance has surfaced since we've been talking about our lost friend.   It's about the music.  Those dates from the mid 1960s until the early 1970s revolved around the music scene in Los Angeles.  While those years are most notable for the Rock and Folk-Rock groups that emerged, it was the small club scene that we frequented.  The Ash Grove was a small folk music venue on Melrose Blvd. in Hollywood that emerged as the place to go.  Here we saw many of the blues greats in their prime.  The irony, of course, is that many of these performers were well into thei...

 If someone said to me, "You look like you just lost your friend," I'd say you're right.  I wear it on my face.  While I don't like to rate things, especially friends, by comparison, (good, better, best) I did have a very long friendship with my late friend KO who died last Saturday.  60+ years is an accomplishment for loyal friendship.  So, when it ends, there is a hole that goes unfilled.   Like all human relationships, there were ups and downs.  Not living in the same place since 1970 also threw in a few challenges.  Yet we prevailed.  It helps when a friendship this long features both participants having the same birthday.  We exchanged many fine gifts over the years.  I have books and records and a few other things that will keep KO in my life for the duration.  A note on sharing the same birthday with a friend: it's important not to get so caught up in your own birthday that you forget about the one you share it with. ...

 Some say we've raised a generation of "snowflakes." That is, kids who have been overprotected and are not ready for some of the harsh realities they are sure to face as adults.  To be sure, corporal punishment is not the answer, but to  toughen up many young people, some changes will need to happen. My parents were loving people.  Perhaps why I received the "empathy gene."  Of course my personality is only part heredity, but the environment I experienced taught me to consider the feelings of others consistently.  Yet, as a child I received, on rare occasions the sting of a hand or a belt.  My sister and I called it "the strap." It was an old leather belt of my father's and it hung inside on the door of a broom closet.  Of course we weren't hit with the buckle of the belt, but that leather strap stung just enough.  Today, thinking back on those times the strap found my arms or legs, I'm mildly shocked.  It seems incongruous that kind peo...