ANNOUNCING: On Friday, Sept 27, 10:30 – 11:30 a.m., I’ll be reading and signing books at the Bloomfield Township Senior Center. Major thanks to Creative 360 in Midland and Pages Book Store in Detroit for eager and attentive audiences. In Midland, a first: my reading took place during a tornado warning. We moved to the basement for the evening.    

Thank you, Joy Gaines-Friedler, for the photo below, at Pages.  At right is a link to my most recent blog post: A Suite, a Swim, a Fish– 

It was October 2005. What little I knew about Galveston, Texas, I owed entirely to Glen Campbell. His song of that title, written by Jimmy Webb, was released in February 1969.

I was sixteen. I had a girlfriend. The song played on the AM radio in my red VW bug when we bombed around town or drove down to the drive-in theater in Saginaw.  Good song, crappy radio.

I never bothered to listen carefully to the lyrics. I hummed along indiscriminately and waited for the sad and yearning turn in GC’s voice when he sang, “Galveston, oh Galveston, I am so afraid of dying…,” missing the references to the sea that came earlier in the song: “I still hear your seawinds blowing,” for example, and “I still hear your seawaves crashing,” for example, and “I still see her standing by the water.” MORE