Wetlands summer camp promises pre-teens fun
March 23, 2016
UPDATE: Missing Raceland man found dead
March 23, 2016
It was one of those after-school spring afternoons, its sun-kissed breezes heavy with happy promise that swells a school-boy’s spirit and heart, and the one beating within the kid they called T.L. was working overtime as he furiously pedaled the blue stingray-style bike with the chopper handlebars and the banana seat. Past the Houma airbase and then a turn here and there, and in no time the kid with the slightly-long brown hair, whose real name is Thomas Lyons, made it to the department store called Gibson’s that everyone was talking about, right there on Grand Caillou Road where there now stands a bowling alley.
T.L. was on a double mission that spring day, wanting to see this store but mostly to find a treasure under its roof. “Cherish,” “96 Tears” and the “Ballad of the Green Berets” were among the songs that scratched their way out of the pocket transistor radios that T.L. and all the other cool kids carried with them that year, but T.L. had a far more esoteric prize in mind.
Walking through the record department at Gibson’s, T.L. leafed through the LP records in their rows like each was the page of some sacred text, until he found the one that would be worth the dollars he had sweated for moving lawns and doing other odd jobs.
“The Best of the Animals” had the very best songs that Eric Burden and the group had ever done, songs like “House of the Rising Sun,” “Boom-Boom” and “We’ve Gotta Get Out of This Place,” and after paying for the album T.L. re-mounted the bike, urging it back to his east Houma home, where his dad had just recently purchased a solid-state Magnavox console stereo, with the kind of speakers that made tones rich and pure when the needle made its way across the vinyl. Not even bothering to use the kickstand, T.L. charged into the house and ripped the cellophane wrapper off the album.
“It is shiny and it is new and you pull it out and you open up and no cracks or hisses or scratches,” he recalls of this experience. And the smell, there is the new smell. Yes, the album had the songs he cherished by the Animals, but it also had songs he had never heard before like Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home to Me” and John Lee Hooker’s “I’m Mad Again” and so this album, the closest T.L. had come to the blues in his few years, was a gateway to a lifetime of musical enjoyment.
This album led to other albums, and explorations of other artists, and a lifetime of cultural communion that continues to this day. They were his friends, these albums, their growing mass in the closet where he stored them a musical growth chart, like the pencil marks your mom puts on the wall to show how tall you are getting. T.L. never made a living in music but it has always been in his heart and his head, as he worked hard in land searches for oil and gas and other commercial pursuits. Van Morrison’s “Blowing Your Mind” album, the one with “Brown-Eyed Girl,” Elvis Costello, the “Johnny Otis Show,” all of these classic pressed vinyl treasures, they all lived on a shelf in a special secret place. It didn’t matter if they got played anymore, what with MP3s and I-Tunes and all of that . But they were there, like the originals in a museum that will never sub for the original works of art, somehow. The notes are replaceable, the spirit and the memory of a spring day on a stingray, the first kisses and first beers and all that relates to growing up, they lived on the shelf too.
And then, a couple of weeks ago, when T.L. 6.0, the grown-up version, gave a glance, the albums were gone. It was an act of thievery, and T.L. is doing what he can, and you had better believe that the pawn shops and junk shops and second-hand outlets are all being alerted to this. The Houma cops are going to be working on this too.
Maybe whoever took the albums, which have the value that only a 15-year-old T.L. or someone like him could ever understand, will do something right and smart and somehow get them returned. Maybe they won’t. And maybe this is part of a great cosmic plan that will involve them learning how what goes around comes around when it comes to broken hearts, which is more of a lesson that any jail cell can teach.
Only time will tell. •
