When My Family Turned Into a Criminal Gang: Charleyne’s 70th Birthday
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| Charleyne Fitzgerald and her son Clayton Whaley |
In this blog I’ve often written posts about my fascinating ex-wife
Charleyne (see Recent Posts below). We
were married in 1971, had one son, Clayton Robert Whaley, and, sadly, divorced in
1976 when I finally faced the fact that I was gay. We’ve always been great friends, and that is
true to this day when she is married to her high school sweetheart, John Fitzgerald,
with whom she reconnected at a reunion some five or six years ago. Clayton is now married to Maria, and they
live in a suburb of Seattle.
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| Clayton and Maria vacationing in Australia |
Charleyne turned 70 on August 7th of this year (a
Sunday) and Clayton and Maria decided to have a birthday party in her honor, so
Charleyne and John flew there from Indianapolis, their home, and David and I
made a couple of horrific connecting flights from our home in Columbus to be
there for the whole weekend.
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| Charleyne and her husband John at her party |
The days that followed were a delight, and though the actual
birthday was on Sunday, the party was held on Saturday at Clayton and Maria’s
home. At that party, of course, the “Big
Birthday Song” was sung, and that tune has had quite a history (see Related Posts
below). The song was written decades ago
with a lyric I jotted down while waiting for a plane in an airport, and it’s
designed to be sung whenever someone hits a birthday ending in a zero. Clayton, a talented composer, wrote the
original music, but I deemed it too complicated for an untrained audience to
sing, so I simplified his melody, and that’s the version that has now been sung
a great deal (and is available for sale online; http://douglaswhaley.bandcamp.com/track/big-birthday.) Clayton,
understandably, has always longed for a musical version of the song that is
closer to his original melody, and so, he informed David and me prior to our
visit, he would be sending us an updated rendition of the song that he expected
us to perform with him at his mother’s party.
He also told us that when we arrived (the day before the event) he
would rehearse with us. We looked at the
new version of the song he provided, gulped, and agreed. Happily, we can both read music and we trusted
Clayton to guide us through the new song.
The rehearsal was interesting. We finally understood what Clayton was
planning, and we went over it a couple of times. He has inherited some of my genes all right. When David and I were dragging at our
entrances and tempo early on, he put us right immediately by saying, “No, no—it’s
6/8 time! Pay attention to that.” Properly chastised, we did as told and things immediately improved. The original
lyrics are pretty brutal (“Every year more people here are younger, friend,
than you!”), and Clayton had massaged them into a more anodyne message.
There is a video of our performance, but the videographer
failed to catch the beginning, so Clayton recorded that and I spliced the whole
thing together. Here is that video of
the song as we sang it to Charleyne and the guests:
Since the actual birthday was on Sunday we celebrated it by
an evening on the town, going into Seattle, having a drink at an upscale bar, and then a memorable meal at Maximilien, a restaurant overlooking Puget Sound, where
much merriment was exchanged, and a number of alcoholic beverages consumed with
efficiency.
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| The view from the Maximilien |
The trouble started when we returned to the downtown parking
lot to retrieve the two cars that brought the six of us (Charleyne and John,
Maria and Clayton, David and me) into the city.
It was closed, Sunday being the problem. Did the proprietors warn us that vehicles had
to be retrieved by 8 pm on the Sabbath?
No. Was it after 8 pm? Yes; it was around 9:30. Was there an explanation on signs or the parking
ticket as to how to deal with this problem?
No. Did we panic?
Well, sort of. There
was no obvious way into the underground parking lot at all, but then Clayton remembered
the entrance on the other side of the block which we had used to enter the
building on arrival, and, suggesting that the older folks follow, he and
Maria took off at a trot to see if they could get in there. The four elders followed at a walking
(fast walking albeit) pace. When we arrived on the opposite side, Maria was standing waving to us from the entrance cars use to drive down a ramp into the lot.
She and Clayton had seen a car doing this just as they arrived, so they followed it, and when a barrier went up to allow
the car to pass, they had stood beneath it so it wouldn’t come back down. Clayton was there now, holding that
position. We all went down to him,
and he announced that Maria would stay here to keep this barrier up while the
rest of us would go get the cars.
Everyone except me followed Clayton, but I stayed with Maria, thinking
it was a bad idea for a beautiful woman to be standing there alone almost on the
street. She said she’d be all right
without me, but—what the hell—I stubbornly stayed.
There was an additional problem. Cars could come back up this ramp, but there
was a second barrier with a wooden barrier in the lower exit lane, and it was in
the down position. When Clayton, driving
one car with David as his passenger (John following in the other with Charleyne) came to this barrier there was no obvious way to make the goddamn thing rise.
Hmm.
But then David, channeling his hitherto hidden criminal
side, jumped from the passenger seat and physically raised the barrier, holding
it steady, like Hodor. Delighted, Clayton
gunned his engine and both his and John’s cars shot through. David and I climbed in with Clayton as he
passed, and Maria joined John and Char in the second car. Homeward we raced, laughing like lottery
winners.
As we drove, Clayton turned to David and me, and innocently
held high his parking ticket. “We got out without paying this,” he mused. “Are we criminals?”
Lawyer that I am, I promptly informed him that the next day
John, Charleyne, David, and I would promptly exit the jurisdiction, but he and
Maria should get a good lawyer if and when the police came knocking. That produced a nervous chuckle, but happily the
Washington authorities so far have made nothing of our great parking lot caper,
so the “Seattle Suburban Gang” is still at large and free to laugh at parking
barriers once again.
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Related Posts:
“A Guide to the Best of My Blog”; http://douglaswhaley.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-guide-to-best-of-my-blog.html
"Far Too High
in Las Vegas," September 1, 2010; http://douglaswhaley.blogspot.com/2010/09/far-too-high-in-las-vegas.html
"Charleyne and
the Giant Cookie," September 16, 2010;
"Bowling With
Charleyne," February 13, 2011;
"The Cheesecake Incident in Williamsburg, Virginia," January
6, 2012;
“Marijuana and Me,”
July 11, 2010; http://douglaswhaley.blogspot.com/2010/07/marijuana-and-me.html
“The Evil Big Birthday Song” November
5, 2010;http://douglaswhaley.blogspot.com/2010/11/evil-big-birthday-song.html
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