Ukulele

            In a dream I was working on ideas to fix the United States but none of them worked.

            My left knee was still a little tender on Sunday, five days after I’d banged it on my bike, but it didn’t impede me from putting weight on it for the yoga poses that required that I do so. 

            I spent most of the day getting caught up on writing about the many events of the last couple of days and so Sunday was not very eventful.

            That night I watched another episode of Laramie. It was a pretty typical western of the late 50s with nothing really outstanding about it. Two men run the stage stop in Laramie, Wyoming. They have a hired hand that is played by Hoagy Carmichael and the owner of the business also takes care of his little brother, who is about twelve. Every episode, Carmichael sings part of a song and this time he sang some of his own “The Ballad of Sam Older”. The song seems to always be played during a highly emotional moment in the story and since this particular song is about someone shooting his friend in the back it was meant to convey to the boss of the stop that he had abandoned his partner. His partner’s brother had shown up at the stop after having deserted from the army and he wanted help to escape to Canada. The owner did not approve of deserters so he refused to help by giving them a map to a certain trail that would get them safely across Montana and into Alberta. They struck out on their own but it seemed the song helped the guy decide to help them. Carmichael plays the songs on a ukulele. But at the time that these stories are supposed to take place the ukulele was only just being introduced to Hawaii by the Portuguese. The ukulele didn’t hit the west coast of the States until a decade into the 20^th Century so I doubt if Hoagy’s character Jonesy would have had one.