Writings
The following are essays, stories, and what not that I have written over the years.
The Ring
August
2007, CBA Web Site Welcome Message
Last year our band,
Bound to Ride , had a gig at
the Stevenson, Washington Bluegrass Festival. Instead of flying there, playing
the gig, an coming right back, some of the band members decided to make a road
trip out of it stopping at Valley of the Rogue, Crater Lake, Lassen and other
points North. It was so much fun that we decided to do it again this year even
though we had no gig to do. This time we headed Northeast to check out The
Grand Tetons and Yellowstone. My traveling companions, which included Sunshine
and Lou McClenehan, Pat and Debbie Ickes, Trista McNeill (Big Jon McNeill is not
into road trips and was busy working), and my wife Ivona, are all supportive of
my effort to crush my brother at a competition we agreed to in which we try to
visit the most National Parks in our lifetime. Credit the idea to Rick Jamison
who has the same competition going with his brother. I am keeping track,
although it is not totally up to date...click
here to see how badly I am beating him so far .
Anywho, lots of fun and exciting things happened along
the way. Ivona heard a snake in the bushes...a snake that turned out to have a
rattle, which resulted in Pat killing it with a rock, which resulted in me
taking a picture of said snake, which resulted in you
clicking here to see Pat with the snake . There was also lots of driving,
sightseeing, camping, music playing, food eating, tent setting upping, and all
the other stuff you would assume was on the menu for a road trip. One thing
that did not seem to be on the menu was daily showering. It's not that everyone
didn't want one...in fact every time we arrived at a campground that did not
have showers, everyone vowed that tomorrow would be the day we finally found
that which was so badly needed to eliminate the ripe odors that were beginning
to permeate our every location. This went on for three days. Ice-cold rivers
provided a splish here, a splash there...running water spigots allowed the
washing of a face, maybe even rinsing of the pits. Moral was low...the only
thing keeping us going was the promise of a shower the next day, or the next,
but for sure when we got to Idaho...but man, that was still days away. Things
were looking grim when we could not find a spot to camp in Yellowstone.
Demoralized, our proverbial tails between our legs,we drove out of Yellowstone
looking for anywhere to lay our stinking, smelling heads.
Just when it seemed all was lost, we found a
campground in West Yellowstone, which is actually outside of the official park.
Meandering through the campground was the beautiful and, here is the most
important part, WARM, Madison River. Since the shower gods were against us,
they had made sure that this campground had no showering facilities. Luckily
the gods of river bathing were on our side and had provided us a river whose
waters were not instantly numbing...a river that could cleanse us of our earthly
scents. Reverend Bar Soap and Minister Shampoo baptized our every nook and
cranny as we frolicked in the swift, warm waters. So far, this was the best
part of this trip.
A thought occurred to me: swift water, soap, wedding
rings...not a good combination. I reminded everyone to be be careful they did
not lose the symbols of their love and commitment. Cleaning and playing
continued...birds flew overhead, fish leapt...somewhere off in the distance,
someone grilled seasoned meats. Life was good.
Then a terrible feeling came over me. I
had been clean for a while now and was goofing off like a three year old in a
pit of plastic balls . I looked down at my hand...MY RING WAS GONE! My
expensive PLATINUM ring was GONE! Would the gods of irony cause the man who had
just been reminding everyone to guard their rings to then go lose his just
minutes later? I screamed, "My ring is gone!" Since I had just mentioned it
minutes ago, everyone looked at me like I was joking. Ha-ha, they laughed,
Phil, being his usual self, messing around with us. Then I made eye contact
with Ivona. She saw it in my eyes...I was not joking at all. The others saw
this exchange and realized it was truth. We gave up immediately...there was no
way in the world it was even worth looking for it. Everyone but Ivona. Was she
so naive to think that looking for it was even a worthwhile cause? Was she so
stingy that the idea of buying a replacement was not an option? Was she so
sentimental that only the original could represent the commitment we had made to
each other? Whatever the case may be, she looked down. She did not take a
step, she did not part the water, she did not have a metal detector. She just
looked down, reached into the water, pulled the ring out and held it up. "I
found it!"
We all shook our heads in disbelief. I went
immediately over, put
the ring back on , and got out of the water. If rings are symbols of
commitment and love, then clearly ours was meant to last.
To bring it all back around to Bluegrass Music, two
days later we drove to Idaho to visit Harry Robinson's new property. They had
just finished the shower house and we all lined up to get our first shower in
five days. It was pretty much the best shower any of us had ever had. Then we
played music, fished, and ate food for the next two days before heading home.
It was a great trip.
The Cioppino Feed in Cloverdale
July2007, CBA Web Site Welcome Message
Last March (2007), Kenny and Carol House invited us, (me, Phil, plus my wife Ivona = Philvona), to their annual cioppino feed in Cloverdale. We drive through Cloverdale all the time to get to Mendocino or Upper Lake or other points north, but we've not spent much time there. Apparently it's not a bad place to grow grapes because after driving grapes around in a giant truck for several years, Kenny decided to buy some land and grow his own. I don't know all the gritty details, but he ended up growing Zinfandel grapes and selling them to Rosenblum, and well established winery with a bottling factory in Alameda. I assume something is well established when it is the wine of the month at the Beverages and More (aka BevMo) in Willow Glen, which is where we live in San Jose.
Anywho, on our way to Cloverdale, we stopped in Healdsburg, and fancy little town with shops and restaurants and hard to find freeway entrance ramps. One of the first things we noticed there was the Rosenblum tasting room, which we decided to check out. We knew Kenny's grapes had been used in previous Rosenblum Zinfandels in previous years, and we also knew that this year, due to the success of previous years, Kenny and Carol House were given their own label by the powers that be at Rosenblum. This means that instead of blending their grapes with a bunch of other grapes, this year they made abatch of Z with only House Family Vineyard grapes. This meant that an additional label got placed below the Rosenblum label that said "House Family Vineyards," and then on the back label there was a well-written description of how awesome these grapes were and where they came from, which in this case was exactly where we were going later that day.
The House Family Label, by which I mean that batch of wine, had just come out that day, and they were tasting and selling it right there in that tasting room. We didn't bother to buy any or taste any since we'd be visiting the grower of the grapes that made the wine in a few short hours...surely he would have magnums of it. So after struggling to get back on the freeway out of Healdsburg (seriously Healdsburg, what is up with that? Seems like you are AOL'ing people to stick around longer), we drove to Cloverdale proper, took a residential street up a hill and then took one of curviest, most winding roads straight up a mountain I have ever seen.
By now, based on my previous foreshadowing, you have figured out that the House Family Zinfandel was in fact so hot off the shelf that the House Family themselves did not even have a bottle and we felt completely horrible that we had had a chance to buy and bring them a bottle. Turns out, they had some other wine so it did not matter all that much in the big scheme of things. We tasted the House Family Z a month or two later and it was by the far the best tasting wine I have ever tasted. But as Ron Thomason of the Dry Branch Fire Squad would say, "I told you that to tell you this..." Lou McClannahan, from the bluegrass super-couple, Sunshine and Lou, ate too much cioppino, broke the chair he was sitting on and ended up like this...
http://www.philcornish.com/CBAPicture.html
The moral of story is, since this is the daily message on the front page of the CBA web site, your message better be slightly related to bluegrass. To that end, I threw in the Dry Branch reference, and now bring it all home by saying that after we picked Lou up and finished dinner, we played music all night and it was fun. How'd I do for my first daily message?
