The Ocmulgee River flows through a place I know well. 
The first time I entered Macon, Georgia’s city limits was in a high school bus. I went to state in the 440, a track event in which I washed out, a loser. 
The second time I went to play Mount De Sales in a tight game of football. Scored a 70-yard touchdown. 
The third time I interviewed an attorney for a disappointing book project. 
The fourth time I went with my family to get legal counsel for my terminally ill Dad, a path that led to disillusionment. 
The fifth time I visited the graves of Greg Allman, Duane Allman, and Berry Oakley prior to spending time with Chuck Leavell of the Rolling Stones, once with the Allman Brothers. 
Well, that’s stepping in high cotton as Dad would say. It’s my brightest memory of Macon. The Allman Brothers remind me of Macon, Georgia, though they were born in Nashville and honed their sound in Florida, “Yankee South.” 
In the early 1980s I saw the Allman Brothers at the Township Theater. I watched Greg stand at his Hammond B-3 organ. I must have dreamed that I saw “Cher” on the drum kit. Cher and Greg had long been divorced, but divorce doesn’t kill you. Two-wheeled conveyances do. 
The Devil has a name and it’s Motorcycle. The very reason I don’t ride is because of Duane and Berry. Do you know that story? 
The afternoon of January 14, I drove through the big iron gates of a place of eternal sleep that overlooks the Ocmulgee River – Rose Hill Cemetery. 
Looking out the passenger window I saw a large plastic mushroom, red with white spots lying in the grass. The Allman Brothers’ logo features a red-and-white spotted mushroom, you know. 
I found the Allmans’ resting place. I walked uphill to where a fellow was laying bricks. The plot was being expanded.
“Why are you laying bricks?” I asked. 
“Greg had a lot of children, and he wants them to be buried here,” he said. 
How much of that is true I just don’t know. 
People have left all manner of guitar picks, mushrooms, coins, and rocks on Greg’s fence. A railroad track runs within view of this resting place of Allman Brothers band members. 
I stood staring at Greg’s grave while “Multicolored Lady” played in my head. Chuck’s piano stayed with me as I held onto the dead man’s wrought iron. Once again Macon made me blue. 
Several of my teammates from that football game are dead. The coaches are dead. Dad is dead. The Macon attorney is dead. The Allman brothers are dead.
Now and then I look in James Dickey’s “book of the dead,” my high school annual. On page 35 there it is, proof of one shining Macon moment. We beat Mount de Sales 13 to zero.
Fifty years later I’m still running and remembering Blue Macon.
I will go back. We all need a place that makes us better understand things we’d rather forget. For me it is that music-recording city by the Ocmulgee, that place where brown water runs by a blue town on its voyage to a green sea.