Clarence White

            On Friday morning I memorized the first verse of "Mozart avec nous” by Boris Vian and the first two verses of “Exercise en forme de Z” by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            It was very windy during song practice and it kept changing directions so that sometimes it was blowing directly in my living room, causing me to close the window a little more; then it would gust in a different direction and it would get hot in the room and require that I open the window more.

            I talked on the phone with my daughter with my daughter in Montreal. We reminisced about events that occurred while I was bringing up Astrid and it was a pleasant trip down memory lane. 

            I photographed some old school documents with the intention of turning them into .pdf files. 

            I had kettle chips with salsa and yogourt for lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride to Spadina and Bloor, then south to Queen and then home. 

It was another dingy day. I met Benji on the stairs and he told me that our neighbour Shankar has to stay home from his security guard job because of covid 19. 

            I converted some documents photos to pdf files on Cloud Convert but after ten I was prohibited from continuing. Apparently there is a ten a day limit unless one pays. I only have four more and there's no hurry so I can wait. 

            I read some more of Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. I thought it was going to turn darkly Gothic in the second half but it just seems to get comical in a Gothic setting. Catherine gets invited to stay with the Tilneys at the abbey but all of the Gothic novels she has read have overworked her imagination about abbeys. She keeps looking for some horrible secret that she might uncover and even suspects her host of having either murdered his late wife or of pretending that she died so as to keep her prisoner in some concealed former monk’s cell. She now wants to sneak away at some moment she is alone to investigate Mrs Tilney’s bedroom. 

            I had a potato, two chicken drumsticks and gravy while watching Andy Griffith. 

            In this story a Mr Maxwell comes to Mayberry to record local talent for a folk record. Andy points out some musicians and brings in a group that he plays with. Andy Griffith and The Country Boys play “Flop Eared Mule”, "Going Up Cripple Creek" and "The Crawdad Song." The recording sounds pretty good and when questioned about it Maxwell tells some of the non-participants that he expects to make a quarter for every record sold. Floyd, Barney, Ellie and some others invest some money in the project. When Andy hears of this he thinks that Maxwell is a con artist. His suspicions are confirmed when Maxwell leaves town. Andy lets the people know they’ve been had but while they are all riled up Maxwell returns. he said he's just sold the record to a company in Richmond, Virginia and hands them their first $5000 royalty cheque. Andy has to eat crow. 

            One of the guitarists in The Country Boys was played by Clarence White from Lewiston, Maine, who in 1968 replaced Gram Parsons in the Byrds and was in the band for five years. He was killed by a drunk driver shortly after the Byrds dissolved. He was previously with the Kentucky Colonels. His father’s original name was LeBlanc and he was an Acadian from New Brunswick, Canada. Two other musicians in The Country Boys were his brothers Eric and Roland.