Rusty McHugh, my birthday pending, Bose Radios, Cowboy movies, and the Florabama…prostate cancer…

A couple of things about my deceased brother Rushton. First of all of my four brothers he was always the kindest to me. Jeff my youngest brother doesn’t count…as mother said he was “the baby.” Rushton always chose me to be on his team in football…he could throw and I could catch and we were deadly, “Down and out John and I’ll hit you.” Nothing like it, on a slanted makeshift football field behind a neighbor’s house just off Flint Drive in Columbus, Georgia we were hard to beat. Nothing against my other brothers, he was a kind loving person with an absolutely big heart. People loved Rushton, or Rusty as he became to be called. Mother called him Rushton and so…as usual in deference to the mother I adored, I did too. I thought we were alike, I mean really kindred souls and spirits. What? A so-called hippie and musician and the fourth child with short hair and glasses and always going to “algebra parties.” That’s what my brothers would say about me to the question, ” where is John.” It was okay. Rushton loved me, mother loved him, he was kind, he gave me his 69 Camero, he visited me when I had to live with my father in his Camero when it was new and he had just bought an 8 track tape player and the Beatle’s White Album and Sgt. Peppers Lonley Hearth Club Band and we listened to every bit of both in the car outside the “converted dog kennel” that I lived in with my father and his “hussy” of a wife (my grandmother’s words” that he used to make and paint magnetic signs. He was all I had at that time except Jeff who was about 6 and my mother who came and picked me up once a week to go to LaGrange deemed acceptable by the “courts” of Marietta, Georgia.

Anyway years later and Rushton is a local hero at the Florabama in Gulf Shores, Alabama he develops throat cancer after having performed there for over 18 years and our entire family vacationing there and going to watch him perform there for years. And then I learn this. Two things I did not know: He love John Mayer and the Bose Radio. Well three things, he love watching cowboy movies with no sound. (The treatment of the throat somehow made him hyper sensitive to sound and air vents…so I guess no sound was part of that side effect of his treatments.

A Bose Radio? He was an expert in everything music so when he told me he loved his Bose it meant something to me. I to this day don’t get the John Mayer thing. I mean he is good, but I did not see Rushton going there. You’ll see from the song that his style is a bit different. But that too meant something to me. The guy that gave me the Almand Brothers before they were known, The Beatles, Traffic, taught me how to play guitar, Frank Zappa (yes Bess Frank Zappa again-Rushton exposed me to the Mother’s of Invention when I was in the seventh grade) and incessantly tried to get me to smoke pot. Don’t know really what that was about but every time I’d turn around I’d be with a group of his friends telling me they can’t “believe you two are brothers” and did I want a toke?

So the picture above? Bose headsets I got for my birthday from my wife’s parents last year…the noise reducing things. I am listening currently to Moby Dick. It is grand! I can listen while I cut the grass at the lake or while, as above, as I fish. Here is the Pepster and little baby breeder, a stick and you can see the headphones. Okay a bit wierd if someone happened upon me and saw two weinner dogs, me throwing sticks to a Lab and all the while fishing (I might add catching) and pulling bass.

On another birthday I bought for me for my wife’s gift for me (follow that? try sometime you always get what you want) for my surgery center. I plug my iphone into it put on pandora and viola play about 15 stations during the course of an operating day. Favorite station on Pandora of the girls and nurses that I work with in the Operating Room? No contest? 90’s Pop.

Once again Off Topic but the reflection and shawdows of the headphones today at the lake was too much to ignore. Made me think of my beautiful gone brother Rushton. We all loved Rushton, but man did my mother love him.

Nostalgic? Well my birthday is on the day that the Titanic sunk and the day that Lincoln died. Can you guess?