Chapter 33

Later that morning, Rachel, Monique, and I received a surprise invitation to go to the Bridges’ home. Granddad, Willie and my father helped Grandpa with some planting. While the other ladies went into town to buy groceries for the week and to plan a special supper for Easter. Jennifer told me to bring my guitar and amp and for Rachel to bring her violin. We packed into Granddad’s car with Rachel driving and I navigated us to the Bridges’ place. When we got there, I was surprised to see Lars’ ‘69 refurbished black Mustang parked in the driveway.

“Cool car,” grinned Rachel.

“It’s Lars’ car,” I replied and Rachel blushed, while Monique and I snickered.

Maggie Bridges let us in and as we walked into the house. Monique held my Strat case (which also held my picks, cables etc.) while I carried my amp. I saw a piano, a microphone stand and several amps set up in the den. I noticed Lars, the Bridges and my girls sitting on the sectional. They were all grinning at me.

“Ready for your audition, Cousin?” grinned Lars.

“Hey, wait a minute! The girls and I haven’t even played together yet!” I complained.

“Don’t worry about Jen and Janie. They’re in already.” he laughed.

“Yeah, worry about yourself,” shot Jen, with a serious expression she shared with Janie, before both my girls broke into giggles and were joined in by Monique as the three girls hugged.

“Just kidding, Cousin,” laughed Lars, as he picked up his bass and went to plug in. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re all in.”

I went to set up my amp and plug-in. “What about Jimmy Davis’s buddy?” I asked mentioning Lars’ drummer buddy, who was insisting on a friend of his to be the guitarist for the proposed band.

“If he’s okay, he can play rhythm, but since you are better than he is and that you are a package deal with the girls, if Jimmy makes too much of a stink, we’ll just find a new drummer.”

“Dude, Jimmy’s been your friend since second grade,” I started.

“Like your old man is fond of saying, ‘family first’, Cousin.”

I smiled at Lars, as he broke into a familiar bass repeated lick once he saw I was holding my Stratocaster and was plugged in. I just grinned at Lars and played the requisite harmonics and Jennifer came in with the prescribed Greg Rollie bluesy piano lick, before Janie started singing.

Then Jen came in with a harmony part on the next part of the refrain. After that, I joined in, though I didn’t have a microphone set up. Still, considering that and that we didn’t have a drummer, we sounded really good.

When we finally got tired of ‘Na na na na na’, we ended to a thunderous applause from the Bridges, Monique, Emily Parker and Rachel, until I saw Janie and Jen standing by Janie’s microphone and the started singing the next song from Evolution that Lovin’ Touchin’ Squeezin’ leads directly into.

City of the Angels

They sang in two part harmony. I saw Lars eyes light up, as I rushed to the girls and added the third vocal part.

City of the Angels

After that I jumped up and down like a little kid, luckily not tripping over my patch cord or my amp. I strummed the first few power chords as Lars hit his bass part. The drums would have made it better, but it didn’t stop Janie from yelling “Yeah!”, as I ripped into Neal’s screaming solo. I was a little rusty, as I hadn’t played it in several months and it was a little sloppy, but what did I care? It was an obscure Journey tune and Janie was really into it.

Janie knew the words and we got most of the way through the first verse, but the problem was that it really got ragged. Between not having a drummer and not practicing it, it fell apart among fits of giggles. We still got applause from our audience, though we probably didn’t deserve it for that one.

“Okay, you guys are simply awesome!” gushed Lars. “I’ve been trying to get Jimmy to consider doing some Journey, Styx and Deep Purple tunes, but he didn’t think we could get a piano player as good as Jen or a singer who could sing high enough like Janie, so we would have to stick with bands like Cream, Bad Company, and BTO. That kind of stuff is all his buddy wants to play.”

“Nothing wrong with those bands, but we should be able to have much more variety with Janie singing and Jen’s piano,” I observed.

“And your playing, Cuz. You kick major butt on that solo.”

“Yeah!” yelled all my girls and everybody in the room seemed to agree in some fashion.

“I made some mistakes,” I complained.

“Not many and I could easily overlook them based upon the fact that you probably haven’t played that solo in more than a month.”

“More like four or five,” I muttered and everybody laughed.

We ran through a number of other tunes. After Lars broke into the opening bass riff for the Eagles’ One of These Nights, Janie kind of fudged her way through the lyrics with some help from me. We played a little bit with Boston’s More Than a Feeling, before letting the girls give us a versions of Styx’s Come Sail Away and Queen’s Love of My Life. Jen asked to sing lead on that one and she alternated singing the lyrics towards Janie, Monique and finally me. That inspired me to set my Boss DS1 pedal to the closest thing I could come up with a Brian May sound and attempted some of the fills and a decent attempt at his solo (but it needed serious work!). Jen broke into a huge smile as she played a piano flourish instead of a harp to finish the song. We then tried to fudge are way through Little Girl to give Rachel a chance to show off a little. Aside from Rachel’s terrific playing, Janie sounded great on the vocal, but the rest of us struggled not to sound too pathetic. Still, we had an appreciative audience.

By the time we finished, everybody was smiling. We had the great makings of a band if we could get Jimmy Davis on board. Nick promised to book us into the back room of the local Little Italy when we were ready. After practice Rachel, Monique and I headed back to the farm, as I had afternoon chores.

That night, we had a simple chicken casserole for dinner. There were just eleven of us (The six of us who lived here and Monique and my three Philly grandparents and Rachel. Tonight’s sleeping arrangements were tricky until the farmhouse renovation was completed in November, things would be tight when we had a lot of company. I was surprised that Monique was allowed to sleep in my bed with me.

“We trust you and Monique, Tommy. You both know that you aren’t ready to go too far and have shown good judgment so far,” whispered Mom.

While, we would not go ‘too far’ tonight, we certainly did a lot of kissing.

When I awoke to my friendly neighborhood rooster, I was in a pretty good mood. Monique seemed to be too as we bounced out of bed, got dressed and exited the room. We soon saw Willie getting his coat on, as the three of us battled a somewhat, but not too, chilly Easter morning.

We let Willie get the eggs, while we washed up and then sidled up to our favorite cows. About halfway through, Rachel came down to help, so I relinquished my stool and let her finish with Amber. For ‘slacking’, I was forced to carry both big milking jugs in to Grandpa, who was smiling at the girls giggling, while I was showing off to them.

Steve and Lars joined us for breakfast and Granddad took a moment to cover some ideas for helping Lars get the car restoration business underway. I, of course, threatened that I had better get my gold ‘77 Pontiac Firebird Esprit, when I turned sixteen, or I would pull my investment. That was worth a chuckle from my grandfathers, Dad and Uncle Steve, but a punch in the arm from Lars. “Ouch!”

As it was with every festival service at my church, Easter was special. The adults insisted that we get an early start because like Christmas, Easter services are always packed, It was a good thing that we did, because fairly soon after we took up our two and a half rows of pews, the church started filling up, mostly with people I rarely saw in church or didn’t know at all. Still, it was fun seeing people all dressed up and enjoying themselves.

Easter hymns are fun to sing because you can just belt out the optimistic words. You couldn’t help but feel uplifted as we were told the story of Jesus’s resurrection. It is the good news in which the church was built on and the service was inspirational.

I took a moment to talk to Pastor Bill as I left, thanking him for his thoughtful words in his sermon about how Easter Sunday is our reward for our faith in God’s promise.

“Tommy, it’s a simple message but one many of us forget. Christ gave his life for us, but we were truly redeemed when he came back to us. God’s message to us is one of hope, not guilt.”

After the service, I saw my friends and they seemed pretty happy. “A whole week off from school,” grinned Johnny Martin.

Axel smiled. “Yep. I hope to be seeing a lot of Angie.”

Karl was perhaps the happiest. “I’m going to the movies with Dana Tuesday afternoon,”

I smiled to myself. I remember just a few weeks ago when the best thing I had to look forward to on Sundays was playing Atari at Karl’s place. Now, everything had changed (but in a good way). Still, at least one tradition would be the same as usual. Every Easter Sunday, Karl and Axel would come over for the annual Johansson/Matthews Family Easter Egg Hunt. Then Dad would drive the kids back to their folks’ house for their family celebrations. Karl and Axel packed into the Coronet wagon and we headed back to the farm.

When we got home, I was surprised to see the Bridges family with Janie, Emily and Mr. Parker. They had gone to the Catholic Church and stopped by for the event! I also saw that Uncle Steve and Lars had brought the three Harrington ladies and Johnny Martin. Of course my other cousins (my Uncle Bo and Aunt June’s kids), Mike, Bridget, and James were there. With me, Willie, Monique and Rachel, the kid count had gone from a normal seven, to sixteen!

For the adults, it was both a case of good news and bad news. It meant that several dozen more eggs than usual had to be bought from the store to be hard-boiled, colored and hidden. The good news was that Gran and Aggie had helped my mom, Grandma and Aunt June with the eggs. Granddad even persuaded the menfolk to help out this year (not just with the hiding of the eggs). They had cooked and colored the eggs while we were at the Bridges house yesterday.

Of course, the first eggs found this morning were by Willie in the hen house (While Monique and I were milking the cows). It kind of freaked him out to discover that our hens were laying magical multi-colored eggs instead of the brown eggs they normally laid. As always, it came down to James and Bridget who won. James found a whopping twenty-six eggs, while Bridget managed twenty-five. Willie also got twenty-five, but complained when the judges said that the four he discovered this morning in the hen house did not count towards his total (since it was before the contest officially started).

I was shocked how competitive Rachel was. She had actually found thirty-two. But Monique, Janie, Jen and I managed to distract her, and stole ten of her eggs to give to James (since he was only nine years old and she was almost seventeen). She was miffed at first, but soon was hugging James and congratulating him on his huge bonus find of ten eggs on the back porch. I gave her a big hug and a ‘thank you’ for her sacrifice. I guess that her city life never led to adventures like she was having now and she had been caught up in the event. Emily and Maggie found a few each, but were more interested in visiting the horses. They were disappointed that Thunder had not yet returned from ‘visiting other farms’, but still enjoyed combing and petting on the gelding and the four mares. By two-thirty, all the eggs and candy had been given out and then the Bridges, Karl, Axel and Johnny (along with my dad who was giving the boys a ride) left.