Embracing your inner Okie

I plan to retire in Oklahoma...my home state. I wasn't born there but it was where I went from being a boy to a man. It is where I became a husband and father. So as a product of the Ozarks, I have learned to embrace my inner Okie!

Oklahoma is a state that seems to always be available and willing. It has a great beauty if you can learn to appreciate it. Its graveyards are full of veterans, farmers and ranchers...people of the earth. Those who have learned to love a handful of dirt that they can call their own. People there are friendly and willing to assist you in your humble pilgrimage of becoming an "Okie".

I love Oklahoma. Every time I pass through Roosevelt, I stop by the cemetery and visit old friends and family that have passed away. Many who had given me good advice in my youth that naturally I dismissed due to my immature ambitions, but still they cared enough to give it. And today I know they were right. I see names that I know and many that I don't, but they are all a part of my past, part of my history that is linked to them in some distant but real way. On my last visit, I was instantly hit by the wind. As soon as I opened the car door it was like an old friend welcoming me home. There are times when I wonder why I left.

I know my home state will never match the majesty of Colorado or the ruggedness of Utah. I know I may not see colors there as vibrant as those in New England in the Fall, with its red, purple and golden sugar maples, but the Autumn colors of Eastern Oklahoma sure come close. The Sooner State has a quiet, unassuming selfless beauty with its winter wheat and people who still wave at you as you drive down the road. To me, Oklahoma is OK. The clock seems to tick slower there.

I plan to retire in Oklahoma, mostly because I just feel more welcomed there.

Dodge Polara

I'm not depressed about life, but I do know where I am headed. My wife and I can pack up all our stuff into a small storage space and go hit the road in an 18 wheeler if we have to. At least that is one way to keep a roof over our heads and that might help us be content with not being able to make a living driving a truck.

I've spent a pretty good part of my life as a starving singer and musician, the trucking thing is because I grew up in an entire family of truckers. I remember living out of a 1963 Dodge Polara car in Tujunga California and being told by the police that they could arrest me and impound my car and all my music equipment. So I told the cop that I was willing to do that because I hadn't eaten in a week and I knew they would feed me in the L.A. county lock up. But instead he told me to move my car around the old baseball field where no one could see it. Couldn't even get locked up for a free meal or two.

I have feed street people. But today, the street people are different. They used to be loners, outcasts of society that were taking whatever they could get for free. Now it is entire families that are going to these rescue missions because they have no where else to go. One is within the shadow of Ranch Style Beans right here in Fort Worth Texas and many who visit the Salvation Army mission can see where they used to go to work every day.

It used to be that we Conservatives could pass it off as just a bunch of lazy people that were unwilling to work. We can't do that anymore. At my job, we have dozens of people coming in every day, filling out applications, and when they are done we toss them. We have trucks sitting empty with nothing to do and not enough work to allow us to hire anyone. Yet they come. They beg for work, some are willing to work for $4 less an hour than we are paying our drivers now. If we actually put an add in the paper, no doubt we would have hundreds of people trying to go to work for us.

We are in trouble folks. I imagine before this is all over and done with, many of us may be living in tents and we will still be listening to the news tell us that stocks are going up. That trading is brisk on Wall Street. And we will believe it just like when Chamberlain said "Peace in our time" and Hoover said "Prosperity is just around the corner". There was no peace nor was there prosperity. There was depression and WWII.

I used to write songs about what is coming. No one listened to them back in the '80's, '90's or early 2000's. They wanted songs like "Smoke on the Water" or "Walk this Way". Frivolous songs that have nothing to do with reality because after all, isn't music about trying to escape from reality? Well, tell that to Francis Scott Key, the writer of "The Star Spangled Banner".