Being The Continued Adventures and Misadventures of Bob Hodge,
Author, Mountaineer and Erstwhile Professional Road Racer.
[Editor’s note: Hodgie-san assures me he wrote this on one continuous roll of e-mail.]
Digging deeper still looking for the causes of this disillusionment with most everything even the athletics had lost its luster perhaps that is what happens when you give up the ghost and quit and die a little simply depressed working full time tedious boring mechanical work a cog and running no joy with the knee pains and pointless anyway oh to rediscover the passion first one has to know what is the thing this young man just want to know one thing before I say, bye bye sweet tart, any thing.
So sometimes he walked those Lowell streets at night as the sun was going down, smoking a pipe of tobacco sitting like a little old man on a park bench and what was it I read about an unexamined life, of course, I agree but sometimes you just have to find the joy, the bliss.
He talked his friend into playing hooky from work and picked him up in the Skylark and they headed to Salisbury Beach and on the way they came upon others, two of the female persuasion. The girls were sisters and we stopped at their house a little ways down the street from it so their parents would not see the car and they grab their bikinis and we are off.
I knew a few girls, didn’t understand them, didn’t go dating or to the prom and had no interest in doing so, because I was a serious person 19-years-old sitting in the park an evening smoking my pipe quite distinguished, ahem.
I knew the sisters well. In fact, my hooky playing friend whom I had known my entire life at least from first grade was dating one of them the older one but on the sly so you couldn’t be sure that was the way it was done.
Hot summer day and the beach packed the sun was like a torch and the water put your genitals into shrinkage mode a good thing too, because when the younger sister ran down that beach chasing after the rubber ball you threw her way ooh la la and she chased it down in that itsy bitsy teeny weeny bikini it was a confirmation of everything that was good and beautiful, made life worth living.
She was flirtatious and for some reason that bothered my hooky playing friend but I knew she just could not help herself being a certain time, girls just want to have fun and all that.
We had sandwiches and then fell asleep and when I awoke I went for a walk on the beach and after walking a bit I started to run barefoot in and out of the crashing wave’s water receding back spellbound I made the far reaches unaware of time the sweat poured and before turning back I dove into the cold water and got out and ran back like a demon channeling Herb Eliot and his iconoclastic coach Percy Cerutty running the sand dunes in Australia.
Hooky playing friend, “Where you been the past hour? Tull is playing the Casino tonight and we are going to sneak in.”
“I went for a run and I felt awesome I could have run all day” and with that we were off in the Skylark headed for Hampton picking up eight quarts of beer on the way.
We parked along a fence by a ball field and the younger sister asked if she could wear my grey hoodie that was in the back seat. “Sure, but it has my name stenciled on the back it was my team issue at J&W.”
Jethro Tull was huge then and the Casino was a small venue and when we arrived out back of the place there were already thousands of kids without tickets and some knucklebrains were trying to climb drain pipes to get in. It looked like a riot might break out at any time.
We found a quiet spot nearby in some tall reeds and drank the beer. The endorphins from the run went to my head and the beer to my legs. We went back to the Casino and got as close as we dared and the entire building was moving up and down and even outside the music was deafening.
It was awesome.
The music stopped suddenly and we found out later the plug had been pulled by the authorities who were overwhelmed by the crowd. It was a mini-Woodstock until it wasn’t.
We walked on the beach and then back to the Skylark. The girls slept in the car and we slept on the cold hard ground beside it.
Very early the next morning it was back to Lowell and back to work but happy for the respite.
Still disillusioned but feeling better about it.