Glass of buttermilk



Ole buttermilk sky
I'ma keepin' my eye peeled on you
What's the good word tonight?
Are you gonna be mellow tonight?

Ole buttermilk sky
Can't you see my little donkey and me?
We're as happy as a Christmas tree
Headed for the one I love

I'm gonna pop her the question, that question
Do you darling, do you do?
It'll be easy, oh, so easy
If I can only bank on you

Ole buttermilk sky
I'ma tellin' you why, now you know
Keep it in mind tonight
Keep a-brushin' those clouds from sight

Ole buttermilk sky
Don'tcha fail me when I'm needin' you most
Hang a moon above her hitchin' post
Hitch me to the one I love

You can if you try, don't tell me no lie
Will you be mellow and bright tonight
Ole buttermilk sky?

Ole buttermilk sky, don't tell me no lie
You can if you try, ole buttermilk sky

0503, not all that early, and low sounds of traffic from down WBeachDrive. Far off, a truck dropping off a dumpster. When I was a boy there were no such sounds, but we could hear the sound of a city road-grader, long, yellow Caterpillar tractor rounding Massalina Bayou scraping the dirt road smooth for the next couple weeks until rain turned it to mud bogs or dried to washboard roads that could break a car’s springs. In my early day, it was easy for a car to get stuck in the sand anywhere in the Cove. 

Or the fire engine, the city’s huge old American LaFrance fire truck at 4th Street and Magnolia could be heard starting and rumbling off with its engine’s unmistakable deep rumble. And the siren atop City Hall, its wail announcing which city ward the fire was in, two for the Cove.

Why am I doing this, wandering this way? Because in spite of the buttermilk sky that’s trying to hide the crescent moon, I can’t hear the donkey clopping along I remember from the mid-1940s, Hoagy Carmichael’s song, maybe Bing Crosby singing, IDK. And of Carmichael, in the early 1950s dancing snuggled cheek to cheek to the song “The Nearness of You.”


Almost slipped by silently after dark last evening, tug pushing a barge. We could only see the green starboard running lights. And as she rounded the bend to head north, the only way we could tell she was there was by the dark break across the reflection in the Bay of the red light from the tower across beyond BayPoint. Which, also, is sometimes how astronomers detect a black hole, blotting out light of the stars beyond it.


Anyway here comes Tuesday, just in Time.




No, there it is


DThos+