Old friends long gone

For some reason I am thinking of my old friend Jim Godsey. The last time I saw him was in his home in California in the summer of 1978 – thirty years ago. Sadly I was still too young, ignorant and full of myself to realize what a treasure this man was. It didn’t occur to me to tell him how much of a positive influence he had been on my life. I have lost track of him and the odds are I will not get to tell him in this life.

Jim was a few decades my senior. In fact, I went to high school with his kids. I used to hang out with his son Mark and daughter Julie. He was an extremely wise man, as well as being something of a wiseguy. A veteran of the Second World War, he was a machinist by trade, and he loved music.

Few people have been privileged to see a collection of music such as Jim possessed. In addition to stacks of LP’s, he had 78’s and a big reel-to-reel tape deck that poured out sounds from Harry the Hipster and Fats Waller. You could hear German drinking songs, swing, jazz, blues, polka, and novelty songs. The first time this old hillbilly heard “St. James Infirmary” it was at Jim’s house. He even had sacred selections such as “In Heaven There is No Beer”.

Jim had put an addition on the back of the old house he had bought out there in the country. He got it roofed and he more or less finished the kitchen but the bathroom had only half a wall and the whole area was open to the rafters. The main part of the addition was a sort of family room where Jim reigned after work from his easy chair, decked out in his white t-shirt neatly tucked into his briefs. If you couldn’t handle seeing fifty-year-old man, possessing a significant beer belly, in his drawers, it was a good idea to avoid Jim’s place.

On the other hand, if you could get past that, a visit with Jim became almost a religious experience. Harry the Hipster might be singing about a pink houseboat and angels or the Marx Brothers might be up on the movie screen. Despite the fact that he would be drinking Bud and talking about women, the man had a purity about him that is difficult to describe. He wasn’t conventionally pious, but he could respect what he didn’t understand. I don’t doubt that he would have been right at home with the One Cosmos coons.

He loved life, which, when you think about it, is awfully close to loving God. He might gripe about people, and he had little patience for stupidity, narrow-mindedness or bigotry, but life itself was an adventure, and a grand one at that.

After Jim went back to California, I finished college and got a job. One of the things I did with my money was to buy records and audio equipment. I had a pretty decent collection of LP’s myself, a Dual turntable, Kenwood receiver and cassette deck. The audiophile part of my life was a tribute to Jim’s mentoring. When I dubbed off cassettes for my friends to enjoy I was sharing the joy and the wisdom of music that I had learned from Jim. Though I lost my equipment and collection to theft and had more important things to spend money on for several years afterward, the first time I burned a CD, I thought of Jim. When I loaded a collection of Fats Waller on my mp3 player, I smiled thinking how he would have thought it was so cool to be able to hold all of his music in the palm of his hand.

As I think back on my life I see the sources of my true education. They are few: my parents, a preacher, a teacher, a sprinkling of saints, and Jim. I am who I am because I knew Jim Godsey. My friend, I may never get to have a beer with you, but some day we might drink some new wine together.