Archives for September 2025

My first car, a standard model Chevy Nova—manual transmission, air conditioning, and AM radio—was never the jazziest car, but it got me to school or helped me escape my parents’ house on weekends. Cruising the streets in endless loops around town on Saturday nights wasn’t total freedom, but it was the next best thing.

AM radio was okay for the fifteen-minute drive to school. Okay wasn’t cool for riding the streets. During the late Seventies, I lived in a small Mississippi town, and my friends and I relied on Memphis radio stations for our music. Top 40 tunes fizzed in the static of AM airwaves. I wanted FM, but new stereos were expensive. With an Audiovox FM converter from Western Auto, I had the next best thing to hear the cleaner sounds of FM’s experimental, frenetic, rebellious, and sometimes just plain weird soundtrack. My dreams and ambitions found voice in rock-n-roll poetry.

Installed under the dash, the converter was simple to operate: turn your AM dial to 1400, push the On button on the right and turn the left knob for your stations. Multi-taskers could dial and drive at the same time.

Signal strength produced occasional fade-outs. When one station’s signal waged combat with another, I eased off the accelerator, giving the intruding signal time to identify itself, hoping I had entered a zone of geographic and atmospheric perfection to grab the signal from the rock station in Chicago. Memphis FM stations played plenty of great music, but because of the distance its signal traveled, this one Chicago station became the Holy Grail of rock stations. My friends and I never caught it every night. We never caught it in one specific area. We searched every street, hoping the night sky was clear for its signal to shoot into the atmosphere and capture our radios. For a fleeting moment Mick Jagger stormed the stage and strutted through the static until Springsteen or Meatloaf regained the mic in Memphis. We longed to hear one song in its entirety. If we lost the signal and circled back, chances were it was gone.

We loved those Memphis stations, but we listened to them every day. Chicago’s signal brought hopes of hearing something different, something out of the ordinary, not just the usual songs. So, we drove the streets, searching for the signal from that Chicago station in the land beyond our reach that we were sure played music no one else in town listened to.

Isn’t that the stuff of rock-n-roll dreams?

Dale Davis retired from teaching and writes from Mississippi.

I quit pretending to sleep and got up about 4 o’clock one morning. Thinking to snack and then to write, I turned on the bright dining room light. Outside, my rooster saw the gleam shining through two newly installed chicken house windows and tried to awaken the sleepyhead hens beside him.

He sent long farewells to the black of night and welcomed the absentee sun, sounding like his voice box was on autopilot, and with each call directly linked to the one before it for the rest of the wearisome night.

I didn’t get a lick of writing done and finally turned out all the lights and played Tetris on my phone. When I finally went to bed, I turned on a noisy sound machine and even donned a headset.

I still sought sleep as the sky grew paler and Ricky Ricardo, my charming and very handsome rooster, was still crowing and I was trying to ignore him and reminded myself what a sweet rooster he is and that he is good for our farm.

But, oh, the insanity of his rhythmic, still-audible crowing. And I wondered if I ought to give him a new name, perhaps something like, Thanksgiving Dinner. But, no, my grown kids love Ricky and probably wouldn’t forgive me.

Note to self: Hang room-darkening window shades in the chicken house for my sake as well as for my sweet little red hens.

Carol Rice can’t get to sleep.

Boomers once gave their kids the sex talk. Now it’s time for them to speak frankly about dying.

Baby boomers who have children may remember with fondness or embarrassment having the “sex talk” with their offspring. They were more embarrassed than you were, but you got through it and life moved on.

Speaking of life, the roles may be reversed now. Well, not the roles actually. More like the final assignments. It might be time for boomers to let their children know exactly what they have in mind for the final disposition. That is, what do you want your kids to with you when you’re gone. So that would be the “death talk” as opposed to the “sex talk.”

It’s time to recognize the next boom for the baby boomers, and that would be the illness, dependency and death boom, and that is NOT in the distant future. It’s a good time to communicate with the offspring/caretakers exactly how you want to go out of this world.

Just like the sex talk, it should be the time for candor as opposed to squirming. Sit the kids/caretakers down, take a big breath and tell them straight up what to do if/when you slide into dementia and how you want to be buried, cremated or rebooted. Do you have a plot for the time when you’ve lost the plot? If you’re going the ecologically sound cremation route, where do you want the ashes flung?

Do you know what a DNR is? It stands for Do Not Resuscitate and if you are near death’s door in a hospital, your near and dears ought to know that is the acronym you prefer. Gen Xers and Millennials have enough aggro in their lives right now, so it would be so kind of boomers to spell out exactly what we want in sickness and in death.

Thinking about the unthinkable kind of sucks. Leaving your offspring or designated caretakers in the dark about what to do when you go dark sucks even more. It’s time to get over it and do what baby boomers have always done – marched to a different drum. Let everyone know that when the “beat doesn’t go on,” here’s the plan. As soldiers going into battle were told, “goodbye and good luck.”

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.