I suppose like most people, there are times when I wish I was somebody else. Maybe more often than with most people ‘cuz with me I can add in the depths-of-depression times…”God, I wish I was anybody else!” But those are not the times I’m talking about here; here I mean those times when I wish I was somebody in particular,  almost always performers, performers like Jimmy Buffett doing “Adventures in Latitudes” or the Saturday-Night-Fever era John Travolta or singer Don Henley, not so much with earlier band Shiloh but more with The Eagles, maybe doing “Life in the Fast Lane”, even Michael Jackson doing Thriller or, better, doing a moonwalk for the first time on the Motown 25 Year Anniversary show in 1983 . There are many others from time to time; I want these time-wasting wants pretty often. In fact, I probably think about being Jimmy almost every time we’re listening to the Margaritaville station on Sirius, which, around here in Red Bay, given nothing better to do, is almost daily. Like right now, not that that’s today’s point.

Today’s point? There are fewer times, today was one, when I wish I simply knew somebody else. Today, for the second time, I found myself wishing I had known Elvis Presley – you know, not like a fan, but as his friend, just hanging out.

The first time I remember thinking this about EP (as I’m told real fans call him) was last year, when Irene and I visited his later-years home, Graceland, in Memphis, Tennessee. In Graceland, to our surprise, we found a comfortable home; a little over-the-top, sure, but nowhere near as tacky as we expected. It was easy to imagine him in the place, listening to music with his pals, maybe working on a Cadillac out in the parking lot if he wasn’t too wasted. Sort of a sad place that witnessed the end of the life of a legend, but comfortable anyway. And today we visited his birthplace, , a beautifully preserved two-room house in Tupelo, Mississippi – tiny, maybe even less room than we have in our motor home, if you can imagine that. But our motor home is elaborate in comparison;  in Tupelo, we found the simplest possible home but comfortable enough,  probably near-identical to the fifteen or twenty others that, in the time, were said to have populated the street. It’s interesting, the perspectives you can get from seeing somebody’s earlier and later homes like this.  The commonality? They’re both comfortable places, and listening to the history of the guy indicates that, at heart, that’s what he loved…just being comfortable, being around his people, a bought-and-paid-for family later on sure enough, a no more dysfunctional than most (excluding his twin’s birth death, his mother’s lasting depression, his father’s time in prison for check kiting) born-into-it family early on, his family around him in both cases.

Today’s tour guide knew him – Sybil’s a pleasingly plump, good-looking gray-haired woman with enough Southern accent to sound like she’s play-acting, and she’s a Presley, too, she told us that, but said “that’s no big deal, there were hundreds of Presleys around,” some cousins or closer, some not, but as far as Elvis, yes, she had known him growing up and until his death; he was only six years older than she, she was “the bratty little kid” that always annoyed him whenever she could, “To get attention, I guess…”…this last said a little wistfully, sorta wishing the knowing had been on another level, not sure what.  And she described him as it seems everyone else who knew him always has; he was a polite, kind young man, generous to a fault, a little shy growing up, putting himself out, ego-wise, only on stage and in every other case being just one of the guys albeit with a little more money than most. Growing up on that street, living in his friends’ houses as much as his own, eating whatever people had to offer wherever he landed that night, just like his friends did when they landed at his place, going to church on Sunday and sometimes singing in the choir, going swimming with his friends even though he wasn’t supposed to…it all sounded pretty good, actually. He was living like every other kid around him at that time, in that place,  just living his life and enjoying it, too.

So….nothing different about Elvis, really the most common of people, good-looking but a lot of the people around Tupelo are good-looking, look at Sybil, but amazingly, through the lining up of circumstances that now would seem miraculous, becoming more than a star, in fact living a dream, and in living it, creating a dream that millions – including me – lived with him. Yes, he changed the face of American Music…but that isn’t why he captured everyone’s heart at the time. He captured us, I think, because he was one of us, just a little luckier in some ways…and even when his luck ran out, when he died the weird, inappropriate death he did, having fallen off his Graceland john, a dozen-drug cocktail pushing through his blood stream, his sweatpants around his knees, his still-beautiful face laying across a pool of his own vomit – even then he died still one of us.

I don’t know how it sounds to you but trust me, I’m no rabid Elvis fan, just chasing his memory around another sleepy Southern town. These are the only two Elvis places I’ve ever been….Memphis and Tupelo. But I loved his music, always have, still do, just like many even too young to know the man. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO10pkOLERQ)

And I sorta get, from the little I’ve seen,  how he found out he had that music there, inside himself. And I bet, given half a chance to get to know him, given some indescribible set of circumstances where I might have been able to act normal around him instead of like a star-struck dummy, yeah, once I relaxed and he relaxed and we just were talking, you know like normal folk, I bet I would have liked him pretty much.