Days Gone Bill - Chapter 1
Yoohhdalaidie, yoohhdalaidie, yooohhdalaidie -- heee-whoooo.
Hi, I'm happy Bill Hanson and ... I am a yodeler. That's right. I yodel ... yodel my ass off, in fact. You're probably thinking strange. That's fine, actually. At least you're thinking ... while I'm yodeling. There isn't anything confusing about any of this. Is there? Maybe I'm the one asleep here. No way, I don't believe any of that. Seriously. It all makes perfect sense to me. You don't have to be a seer to see into the essence of what I am all about, although I acknowledge that wouldn't hurt. I'm not in this for the money, or for the laughs. I'm in this for the long haul. First, though, I think I'll take another long haul on this here ... what is this shit, anyhow?
Hooodalaidee, hoodalaidie, heeee hoooooo.
I concede, it is an unusual existence, given society's overall aversion to anything out of the ordinary. I go on yodeling because, frankly, Martha, I no longer ascribe any validity to any of society's so-called "norms," be they as they are. One Norm's norm is another man's nuance, to coin a phrase, if not overturn the regime of a fatigued but narrow-minded despot. Yodeling, alas, has lost its luster in our fast-paced, race-to-the-barren-video-store society, yet, given my energy, my commitment and the absence in my life of anything better to do, yodeling, I am quite sure, is on the verge of a significant if not historic comeback.
It's true. I yodel, all the time in fact. As a yodeler, I am one of a dying breed. We're dying because people are shooting at us. People who don't appreciate our art-form. Yoohhdalaidie, yoohhdalaidie, yooohhdalaidie -- hee-whoooo.
Unlike virtually everyone I have ever met, I yodel all day long, every day, every hour of my waking existence. Even as I sleep, the yodeling continues, in dream form. I may be in China, or North Carolina, or alongside my wife in what some would call a bed but we what we call instead, the place. It could be the past or in the future. Heck, it might even take place during Leap Year, assuming they even have those anymore. Oftentimes there are weirdly unrelated people in these mystical dream experiences, strangers who are somehow present as I break out in one of my yooohhdalaidie, yoohhdalaidie, yooohhdalaidie -- heee-whoooo moments. Someone from high school. Mafia thugs. Professional football players. Lackeys. One of the original Eagles. A token black guy ... maybe Paul Simon, in his younger years.
In real life, the people who inhabit my world tend to be primarily in the Mr. Rogers mode. They are to ordinary what a rain drop is to a stormy afternoon. A lot of them bear unusual manifestations of facial hair, have generally unusual posture -- people for whom overalls aren't at all uncommon. A general folksiness seems to run consistent throughout my broad-ranging network of acquaintances and loan sharks. Banjo plucking is big in our neck of the woods and sitting around the old coal stove and swapping dumb yarns is probably more important to most of my friends than, say, monitoring The Wall Street Journal or reading The Sporting News. To be a yodeler it is necessary to surround one's self with like-minded folk and this is no easy task in the late twentieth century, given people's overall aversion to anything without at least some sort of futuristic connotation.
It's true. Another daggone millennium is approaching. I know this is exciting. I'm already a happy guy, as my nickname implies, and knowing we're on the verge of slipping into an entirely new century has got me more excited than I've been in days, let alone centuries.
It's like a form of vertigo. It's actually dizzying ... almost scary. That's right. I see ahead, not behind. Still, yodeling is so closely associated with the days of old and not the days ahead that it's important for me and others like me to keep in touch with our roots, so to speak. It's one thing to appreciate a good sauna bath but it's something else again to ask for the five bean salad and end up with Italian cole slaw.
Now, I have nothing against people of Mediterranean background and I do enjoy my cabbage. But I'll be darned if I'm going to give up yodeling, not after I've come this far.
Betty finds it offensive. She would greatly prefer a more mainstream art form. Wives are funny that way. You try to please them and they get hot under the collar. You try to make sweet music and they accuse you of gargling in public. You step up to the challenge of being actually sincere and they mock you, as if you were but one more street performer, in it for the money, not the liberation of the soul. Misunderstanding accompanies the never-fully-comprehended yodeler. It goes with this far-from-mainstream artisan, from vignette to vignette, gig to gig, free-form moment to free-form moment. Yoohhdalaidie, yoohhdalaidie, yooohhdalaidie -- heee-whoooo. Right. That's what YOU hear. But that's not always what the yodeler feels.
Feeling is at the essence of this essay and it is also the name of a song most yodelers wouldn't attempt in their wildest dreams -- dreams that for me would be mere commonplace occurrences. To yodel you must feel. To feel you must yodel. There is, as you may begin to sense, a perfect symmetry to my art. Art, of course, is everywhere you look. Great art, on the other hand, is more illusive, less infuse.
In America, the truly great yodelers tend to live in places like Little Cloud, Oklahoma or Massive Meadows, Montana. They are men named Artis and women named Belle. In many cases, their closets are filled with blue jeans and stirrups. They don't have fancy tape decks, they might still use eight-track players. Some of them remember the 78-rpm record and nearly all of them endorse the foreign policy initiatives of the late Senator Margaret Chase Smith. I know of what I speak. In addition to my other pursuits, I am the chairman of the Yodelers of America Society, based in suburban Detroit.
Yodelers first came to our part of the country in the 1920's and 30's. They were part of a greater migration of artists, vagabonds, semi-pro hockey players and factory workers. They were lured to the Great Lakes states at a time when economic opportunities in other parts of the country were perceived as being unaligned to any industrial momentum that could be discerned by existing methods of measurement, given the limitations of the times and the general absence of anything resembling an odometer.
Detroit flourished; Latin America embraced salsa. If for no other reason than the cleansing of the American heartland, the emptying out of upstate New York and the establishment of a Better Business Bureau in Butte Falls, the emergence of Detroit and its surrounding areas spoke of a higher calling, a re-entrenchment of spirituality in the gut of the monster, a Western Hemispheric upsurge in ticket sales that would not be repeated again for decades.
Of course, no one knew then that someone like Donald Trump would come along later in the century, to rewrite the record books, so to speak. Not in 1924 ... not on Larned ... never in anyones wildest dreams, let alone their more sedate ones. Then again, I have been to the casino and I can assure you, I did not spend a cent. I did yodel, though, and some of the families there found it nearly charming. Sure, Detroit's lost its luster. But, we're not through. Yodeling lives in on in some hearts, if only mine, and I have to believe there continue to be opportunities out there for those who are willing to step up and pay the price, put their money where their musical tastes are and pay the darned piper and just get him the hell out of here.
Betty, as you may have guessed, is my partner in this life and, both of us profess to hope, in lifetimes yet to come. She realizes that for every step forward we take, there can also be a step-and-a-half backwards, not to mention considerable side slippage. Knowing this makes it easier to deal with. It becomes the all purpose phrase, the mantra by which we proceed, the ism in our schism. Words, symbols and images take a large beating in our life together. We are sincere yet gnarled in detail.
On top of that, Betty's also a whiz with numbers, which saves us countless thousands every year in super market expenses alone, which doesn't say anthing about country club bills, which we wouldn't know about, anyhow. Betty and I have learned to live with each other's idiosyncrasies. For example, when I tell her I need to grow a beard, she just says, "Fine, grow a beard. As long as you don't mind not sleeping with me, grow anything you'd like." I appreciate Betty's candor and she appreciates the fact I invariably decide to somehow shave everyday, factoring in my aversion to solitude, as in, being happy.
Yes, you could call me crazy. That would probably be just about right. Better crazy than lazy, I say, scrounging an afternoon coffee. No one officially has designated me certifiably demented, but that doesn't mean I'm not. I mean, how many people do you know who yodel ... let alone yodel for a living? How about a show of hands? OK then. I counted 12 of you. Was there anyone else? All right, let's suppose, then, that 12 of you actually know professional yodelers and the other 6.7 billion of you, including Al Taubman, defer on this one. Let's take the 12 of you, then, and ask you to ... sit over on this side of the room. The rest of you, stay where you are. Please, just sit there.
OK, you 12 now, I'd like you to arrange your chairs in alphabetical order, according to age. Go left to right, starting with the letter I. If you're a Pisces or if you don't know your astrological sign, just keep to the right and we'll get to you later. If you listen to Rush Limbaugh you might want to sign-up for the voluntary brain scan. Donors are waiting. The important thing is, try to align yourself as quickly as possible with some cause or at least with the person to your left. All right, everyone seems to be in place. The gentleman with the green suit ... could you tone it down with the whirling dervish act? It's upsetting to the other participants and it sets a precedent we're not sure we want to have to deal with on the flipside of this program. Thanks. Thanks a lot.
I think we're ready for today's lecture. Our topic this morning is filaments. Rather, are filaments. There are filaments in our life, whether we yodel for a living or live or a yodeling. Filaments of love. Filaments of testimony. Filaments of small bagel matter where our wisdom teeth once were. Small, barely observable traces of occasional filament, infinitesimal particulate of physical mass, all of which serve as metaphors for each experience, memory, brain surge and neo-elliptical moment imaginable to Homo sapien incarnate.
If a man were to say to you, "Yooohhdalaidie, yoohhdalaidie, yooohhdalaidie -- hee-whoooo," what would you do? Would you find your handgun, knowing most of you own at least one, and shoot the man in the head for acting like an idiot? Would you call 911 and ask that a gurney or some sort of new age mechanical contrivance be sent to your condo? Would you embroider? Would you conduct a reality check upon the personal estate of your next-door neighbor?
If you answered "Yes" to any of those questions, you're not alone. More than 95 percent of all Americans, when asked if they preferred Mexican or Chinese food, said "Neither." Another two thirds of all adolescents, when asked their favorite after-school pastime, said, "None." Couple that with the fact nine out of ten new fathers own at least seven pairs of Dockers and you have a troubling brew of sociological disintegration on your hands, buried under an already fractured societal breakdown in which even the ones some still call "leaders" are at the forefront of the treachery, the deceit, the unfathomable falling apart of everything Nancy Reagan warned us about, especially Willie Horton.
Imagine a world without Willie Hortons. A scapegoat-free America, in which every man and woman could walk tall and proud, even yodeling if they wanted. It is a brave vision and an appropriate one, given the tendency of institutions today to emasculate rather than originate, to tear apart when building up is needed, to bolster bigotry when cultural synthesis cries out for realization.
When I think of the demagogues in our land, when I ponder the implausibility of a Bob Dole, I have to reach for my old red bandanna and my harmonica and I have to remember the lyrics of the great Bob Dylan who sang about not working on Magi's farm no more and meant it. I hearken back to the example of then-young Amy Carter, during her father's presidency, who, when asked by a reporter from a small town radio station whether she favored sending American troops to Macedonia said, "That's nuts."
American history is replete with stories of truculent glory. Our forebears built one hell of a lot of freeways and ours is now to traverse those great roadways, to take our ambitions to the rest stop of our choice and to yodel freely at each passing semi and tractor trailer. The real meaning of America is being less mean than those who came before, far funnier than our fathers ever dreamed of and committed to bringing grace to our planet, to the extent grace plays in a world gone mad over Burt and Lonnie, who both claim to not have had sex with you and your-ohoohladddie toooo but who, in reality, fail to have a clue as to what most of the rest of us already know, which is, fidelity is where it's at, yodeling is cool, without an edge of promiscuity and even suburban yodelers get even, one at a time.
I once asked Betty to describe for all of our readers her favorite moment in American history. I figured she'd say something like, "October 1968, when the Tigers won the World Series," but she surprised me.
"I'll never forget the first time I heard you yodel, Bill," she said, rather drawing me out of my lethargy. "You truly touched me heart and you really jarred the wax from my ears. I couldn't even hear jets flying over our house before you first did that medley of French Alps standards. Now I can hear even the smallest mosquito flying around my head at night, even in the winter. Your yodeling opened up broad new vistas of audio pleasure for me, even if you didn't know it."
I didn't. But I do now. That's why I attached the word "happy" to my God-given name, Bill Hanson. I'm happy because Betty's happy. I'm happy because there are people out there who care, not about Rush Limbaugh but about humanity, its quirks, its unpredictability, its honesty and potential. Yodeling is all about believing in people, not belittlement, that's for sure. It's about opening up your heart, and your lungs, and letting it all hang out.
If you're a real human being, you'll yodel, sooner or later. My motto is, the sooner the better.
Yodda-lay, yodda-lay, yodda-lay, HEEE WHOOOOOO!
