MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2000

Summer vacation. At the end of August, the Call reported that the Board of Supervisors had voted to "vacate" several alleys south of Market, including a pair near Howard and First, where an "office project with associated retail uses and underground parking" is soon to appear. With the ink on the vote barely dry, the demolition crew has moved in. Tenny Place and Sloan Alley are now rubble. Heck, most of the block is rubble.

Clean sweep. The latest Real Estate Times carries a Zephyr ad that begins, "Rarely Available Lighthouse Loft." In case you haven’t been paying attention, the Lighthouse for the Blind on Howard — where they used to make the brooms you bought every year — has been converted to "truly urban living with the warmth and heart of home." The unit for sale boasts "an extraordinarily large storage space, a one-car++ parking space, and a common roof deck with 360º views of the city and the bay." In case you were worrying, Rose Resnick’s Lighthouse is alive and well, across Market on Van Ness.

I was born in 1961 in a small town in Indiana called Elwood, located about 40 miles northeast of Indianapolis, off State Hiway 37. I was raised by my father and grandmother in a home about five miles outside town, in Tipton County at the crossroads of Hiway 37 and 128. It was a new house situated on two acres, half-wooded, bordered on the west by Duck Creek and on the south by a somewhat smaller tributary whose name I never did know.

I was a good kid and very rarely got into any kind of trouble. Grandma took me up to the Baptist Church every Sunday for morning and evening services, and every Wednesday night for Bible study, even had me singing in the choir starting at the age of five.

At 14 I discovered music in earnest, and over the next four years taught myself to play guitar, piano, and other instruments, and began writing songs. At 18 I took my guitar and what few other items I could carry and hit the road south, to seek my fortune. For the next 13 years I hacked around the country hitch-hiking and riding freight trains, making my way mostly as a street musician, with occasional paying gigs in both dives and class joints throughout the U.S.

Then one day I was playing on a street corner in San Francisco, when this sharp-dressed black fellow walked up to me and said, "Hey boy, you ain’t got that guitar tuned right. Let me see that a minute." I handed my ’46 New Yorker over to him in somewhat of a daze and watched stupidly as he speed-tuned it and readjusted the floating bridge. Then he handed it back saying, "There you go; you’ll be all right now."

Before I could say thanks or even what the hell, he had disappeared into the crowd. After a moment the significance of what had just passed came home to me, and I tried to undo the changes the tall black stranger had wrought on my guitar, but it was too late.

That is how I got the blues.

Moral: Some are born to the blues; others have the blues thrust upon them.

Big Fat Woman

Arlis R. Tyner