No. 641 – Green Grass and High Tides

Performer: Outlaws

Songwriter: Hughie Thomasson

Original Release: Outlaws

Year: 1975

Definitive Version: None

When I came home to live with Dad and Laura in 2004 to take the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of getting paid to watching baseball games, I was given two important pieces of real estate in the family manse.

The first, of course, was the guest bedroom. It was just the right size for me at the time. It had only enough room for a queen-size bed, tiny bedside tables on either side and a secretary desk in the window alcove … and a plant. It had built-in cabinets and a closet for my clothes. But the real benefit was a wall of built-in bookshelves—perfect for the essential library that I had assembled before and in Cleveland.

The secretary was nice but impractical for my purposes. I needed to be on the Internet all the time, and the bedroom didn’t have a phone jack. So I also took over the second desk that was in Dad’s home office—the second piece of crucial real estate.

The office was great. It was a small room off the formal living room that had separate entrances to both the living room and the hall that led to the kitchen or the garage depending on whether you walked straight to the kitchen or to the right for the garage.

In the center of the office was Dad’s executive desk, which had been my grandfather’s desk at his home in Columbus, and behind that next to the exterior wall was a hutch with about 48 long, thin drawers that were great for holding knickknacks. I think it had been my great-grandfather’s.

As you faced Dad’s desk from the kitchen doorway, to the right in the back was a table that held the family computer. It was situated in an alcove, so you could look over the monitor out to the front porch or to the left if you leaned back in the chair out the front window into the yard.

And if you looked around the corner from the doorway, that’s where my desk was. It was your basic DIY desk with a hutch, and I filled it up with as much computer stuff and paperwork as I could. Dad had a cable modem, which would have been great to use, except there wasn’t room for a third splitter for my trusty clamshell iMac. So I set up a phone-line splitter, like I had in Cleveland, and snaked the phone cable under the rug and around Dad’s desk to my computer.

That became my command center for what would turn out to be most of the next year and a half. Between the guest bedroom and office, I probably spent 85 percent of my time at home in those two rooms, with the kitchen and bathroom making up 13 percent of the rest—at least until the family disappeared for the summer.

And with that, we’ll wrap this up and continue another time—tomorrow, actually (the first time appropriate songs lined up thusly).