Memory is transitory.  The older I get, the more I realize it.  Tonight, my visions are aflame and I am going to tell you a story.  I must do it now because tomorrow, what I would like to say will be no more than forgotten daydreams, and I little more than a lump of barely vibrating clay.

I recently downloaded a dozen or so Dusty Springfield songs from an internet service.  Many were covers of other great artists.  As I listened to Dusty, I thought about my dimly lit past.  So dimly lit.  “Tin can at my feet, I think I’ll kick it down the street.  – yes, I think it’s going to rain today.”

The poignant words of Carole Bayer Sager, “I’d rather leave when I’m in love,” as sung by a largely unheralded diva.  Gorgeous is the word that comes to mind.  Dusty had beautiful vocal chords.

Matt, the son of my partner r. r. bryan, brought me something from his father.  “Do you know how to write a screenplay?”

“I have so many thoughts that I need to write down,” he told me.

Matt is twenty-five, just back from Afghanistan.  He looked at me, and then at the darkened sky outside the window.  “This weather drives me crazy.  I like to pull the covers up over my head and just sleep.”

“You must really be my son,” I said.  “I don’t think your dad would understand.”

Matt smiled, but did not comment.  Instead, he glanced around the room as if he had expected more than my lame comment.

“I have a few books,” I quickly added.  “Screenwriting is an art and I’m afraid I have no experience to even point you in the right direction.”

Matt went away, hours have passed, Dusty is singing, “You gotta give me some, give me some of your good, good, loving.”

I am remembering a time in my life.  I am regressing, to two days before my twenty-first birthday.

I am a college student, the Vietnam War raging.   People are dying, mothers are crying, hey, and I am into denying – at least for the moment.

It is an all night drive from Monroe.  I awaken at an early-morning coffee shop in New Orleans.  Funny, I was the driver, a half-dozen graduate and undergrad geologists rubbing their eyes and trying to awaken.  We pushed ahead to Port Sulfur, a tiny town on the coast of south Louisiana.  Later, we arrived in Venus – Louisiana, that is.

“Where are you doing the rest of my life?” Dusty sings.  Her dreamy voice is sublime.  No person has ever had such a voice.

Venus is a little Gulf-side town filled with working men waiting to take crew boats out to offshore drilling rigs.  We take our own crew boat, far out into the Gulf’s blue waters and visit Gulf Oil’s Garden Island Bay Field – Gulf’s fourth largest oil field in the world.  “All the oil that will ever come out of this field will only last the world for ten days,” our tour guide tells us.

We spend the night in Venus, in a crew cabin.  Next day, we head for Biloxi, Mississippi along the Redneck Riviera where we have rooms waiting at the research center.  We reach it after dark.  It is my twenty-first birthday and I accompany the graduate students to a strip joint in old downtown Biloxi.

I wish I could tell you that a beautiful young stripper took a shine to me, took me out back and made passionate love to me behind a sand dune facing the Gulf’s breaking waves.  It did not happen that way.  I got quite drunk as I watched a couple of women with dead eyes move sadly on the tiny stage, until their number finally ended.

Next day, Duncan, a fellow student - and ex-SEAL, fresh from Vietnam - and I took a long hike on Dauphine Island, a long shore island in Alabama.  We found an abandoned hotel, and two college girls that were friendly, and curious.  They stayed with us for a couple of hours.  I can neither remember their names, nor their faces, or much else about the short time we spent together.

“I just don’t know what to do with myself,” Dusty sings.

What a set of pipes! I think as my memories begin dissolving like the dying petals of a summer rose.

I recognize Dusty’s backup on some of the vocals as Laura Nyro.  The two magnificent divas both died of cancer but their music lives on.

Memory is transitory, and I am drunk, but tonight, Dusty’s gorgeous vocals returned me to my twenty-first birthday, and memories and emotions I thought that I had long since forgotten.

Eric’s Web