Associations

 It was all over the news the other day that radio giant Bob Kevoian had died after a long battle with cancer, and right away I noticed the redbud was blooming and the grass had come in thick and green, and how there are days now, more than just one, when the mercury tilts past 75 degrees in the afternoons.

Weird, the associations your brain makes. They are visceral and textural and do not intersect in any sort of geometry known to mathematicians or academics.

And so when I heard the news about Bob Kevioan -- one half of the legendary "Bob & Tom Show" -- I didn't think of seventh-grade boy humor, or Chick andr Christy Lee, or Duke Tumatoe's latest update of "Lord Help Our Colts." No, sirree.

I thought that it's mid-April, and we're just a couple of weeks from May.

I thought it's only a handful of days now until the temple of American motorsports opens its gates again, and a century-plus of ghosts and memories and legend will echo again to the whine of racing engines. Alex Palou, Pato O'Ward and Josef Newgarden 'n' them will be adding to their own legends. They'll be running the infield road course, and, later, on Memorial Day weekend, it'll be "Gentlemen and ladies start your engines" and "Back Home Again In Indiana" and the flyover and 300,000 humans turning the Indianapolis Motor Speedway into a decent-sized city.

It'll be May, and the Indianapolis 500.

And where do Bob Kevoian and Tom Griswold fit into all this?

They'll provide the soundtrack (laugh track?) for the whole ancient spectacle, or at least the parody soundtrack. Who could forget "I'm Just A Mario"? Or "The 500 Song" by Heywood Banks? Or "A Song For Dick" by Tammy Whynot, in which a woman laments drawing Dick Simon (a perennial back-marker as a driver) in the annual 500 betting pool?

I got "Dick"-ed again,

I picked Dick to win ...

Ah, memories.