Category Archive

“Heavenly shades of night are falling,” indeed.

I am shivering, holding onto a cup of hot tea on my back step, spoiled after the summer like conditions that woke up the trees this week.

It is quiet here, a different house without movement or voices, but nice for one evening.

Just before I took this picture, the neighborhood was cast in dramatic shadows, as the sun peeked out from behind clouds that have now disappeared. The sun has gone now, too, and this light is all that remains of the day. The leaves of the Japanese maple opened just a little today, promising more.

More. More spring, more warmth, more quiet, more voices, more love, more “rendezvous beneath the blue,” more you, whoever you are, wherever you are, more.

For a day following rain, listening to Aretha sing love songs somehow suits my sleepiness well, my wet hair, my late night–way too late at night for how tired I am. It’s so hard not to get lost in it, God, it’s wonderful, awful…The first plaintive lines of the album just set the tone for a night of beautiful anguish:

“Where are you tonight?
Are you lonely like I am tonight?
Have we lied to each other about this affair?
If so, don’t make me suffer. Just tell me you still care.

Have you cried tears like I have, at all?
Do you wonder like I have, should I call?
I’ve hurt for a lifetime not knowing my fate.
Is there still any hope, dear, or am I too late?

I wonder, I wonder, where are you tonight?…”

Is there anyone who is spending this Friday night wondering? Is there anyone who never has?

Johnny Mercer’s “Skylark” (Aretha’s is not my favorite version, but the song seems to need to be here) takes flight, hopeful to the romantic dreams that seem to capture us with that “music in the night, wonderful music” that is so vivid a picture of somewhere, out there (but so much better than just saying “somewhere, out there”). I can’t say enough here, maybe later, maybe when I’ve slept. I just love this song.

By the time I make it to “Laughing On the Outside (Crying On the Inside),” I nearly find myself looking for that rainy day again myself.

Indulge in the depths of despair at love lost, as in “Only the Lonely”:

“Each place I go, only the lonely go.
Some little small café
The songs I know, only the lonely know,
Each melody recalls a love that used to be.
…
It well could be that one time
That a hopeless, hopeless little dream comes true…”

And a plea, in metaphoric shabbiness:

“I may get weary.
Women do get weary, wearing the same shabby dress.
But for one who is weary, try a little tenderness…”

But return, listen–lyrics alone don’t do it justice–as I always do, to “This Bitter Earth.” It always leaves me breathless with Aretha’s soaring voice, such torment from the harshness of love, life wasted, unwanted, but ending in the seeking call of hope.

And sleep well, friends. We’re all looking, all chasing that rainbow, or at least a friend.

—————-
Now playing: Aretha Franklin - This Bitter Earth
via FoxyTunes

The last straw is when we run out of milk. No cereal. No healthy teeth and bones. No decaf lattes from that beautiful Expobar sitting in my kitchen.

So, having managed to get my son on the school bus for the fifth time since his hospital stay, I celebrated by heading to the grocery store.

Now, before I continue on down to the corner market, a bit of an aside. I hesitate, although only slightly, in revealing this much here, of all places. I mean, I have to wonder if there is a feeling of shock and dismay—or worse, pity—at the idea that I cannot get my older son to go to school many days because of his mental health issues. He is smart (which is how he still managed to get on the honor roll), funny, and not noticeably impaired when things are in the right balance… Still, I have found it much more difficult to bring myself to talk about him than it is about his brother, whose disability is developmental, intellectual, obvious—and not stigmatized in nearly the same way. Ah, but in not talking about the bipolar stuff, I stigmatize, too.

Stigma is a term that fits well when you consider the Latin/Greek origin: “tattoo indicating slave or criminal status”. I wish I could say that things have changed much in our world today. On the contrary, I find that when my son with developmental disabilities missed nearly thirty days of school a few years ago, it was at the insistence of the school staff that he stay home because they could not do anything with him. For my son with mental health issues, though, numerous absences (despite the school’s patience and help) may quickly become a legal matter, a crime… like so many other things. A psychiatric admission to the hospital is nearly impossible without entrance through the emergency room, and for so many, a call to 911 following an act of violence, self-injury, vandalism. A crime… but in these cases, a desperate plea for help, an acute illness demonstrated in frightening ways. What more can we do?

There is attention to this problem, but also resistance. Many posts ago, I mentioned a neighborhood’s resistance to a group home for adults with a Prader-Willi syndrome, more in the realm of developmental disability. What I learned later is that the owner of the house is a group that also provides homes and services to adults with other disabilities, including mental health issues. If some neighbors were only wary about any sort of developmental group home inhabiting the nearby real estate, they were positively aghast at the thought of recovering substance abusers or mentally ill individuals living next door. Again, the stigma, and in a world where in normal houses live the teenager who parties incessantly, the aunt who has lavish parties for weeks then retreats for even longer, the many among us who hide our afflictions, for fear of being different, of being noticed, of being shunned… And is it any wonder, when we ourselves fear those who are considered different?

If we do leave the denial, if we have to, finding help is not easy. I know this well, after repeated calls to try to restore services lost in a struggle—services not so easy to get in the first place. Calls to overburdened state agencies go unanswered, even as the calls turn to letters and move up the chain of command. It takes calling a representative and a commissioner, and then, for what? Psychiatrists who prescribe and then never return phone calls for day after day; others who are afraid to take on patients who present too great a risk—a liability; others who do not even take insurance. And then again, a few gems among them. But while we are on waiting lists to see the gems, in my frustration, I wonder again if omega 3s and martial arts and better feng shui could really be a cure-all instead of all this nonsense.

I go through this all in my head, and then turn to the things in my car, the less cold breeze in the parking lot that takes me back to summer breezes I remember so fondly. My car has made its way to the Market Basket, and life is good.

I really do enjoy my trips to the Market Basket. For one thing, it is far cheaper than the supermarket that is closest to my home. For another, I enjoy seeing so many different people. On most trips, I hear little English, but today’s trip was noticeably populated by older couples, most of whom did speak English, and most of whom were quite friendly, although I did notice a few strange looks when I turned around the coffee aisle just unable not to sing along with Andy Gibb.

You know, I still cannot get the song out of my head, and also cannot help thinking of another way to do it. I pondered that this evening, too, again imagining something on the back of a piano, but alas, a torch singer I still am not. “I Just Want To Be Your Everything” is a great song for shopping, though, and it really hit me as I found myself wanting to chant “Come On Eileen, too-loo rye-aye,” that supermarket music has certainly changed since I used to drag along with my mom through Vince’s IGA in Yorkshire Plaza, right on the corner of Laclede Station and Watson Road (which is really Route 66).

Grocery-store music then was characterized by rearranged Beatles melodies, even though most of the ones chosen barely needed it (“Yesterday,” “The Long and Winding Road”), and other pop songs that were rendered nearly unrecognizable by the arrangements… until in a sickening moment in the dairy section you finally understood that it really was a string version of “Havin’ My Baby.” Trips to the store are different now, and maybe a bit more disturbing.

Still, I am fascinated by the selection of tropical produce: chayote, malanga, batata. I like paying $.99/pound for apples instead of $1.49. I love being there with all the boxes moving around the aisles, and the woman in the electric cart asking me if I could reach and grab a can of Folgers off the top shelf, and the man who is telling the butcher not to hand him that hamburg because he’s on a fixed income and that he just doesn’t know about Hillary, and the woman telling her daughter, “Mira, ven aqui,” as the little girl sheepishly puts a box of vanilla wafers back on the shelf.

These grocery adventures are pleasant in themselves, but the soundtrack is part of the experience. Still, although I enjoy the tunes, I’m not really supposed to acknowledge that I actually noticed them. The music has a more insidious purpose that is really unmentionable. I realize this is a fact. The whole brainwashing thing, innocuous enough, it would seem, because it is everywhere. In the midst of it, though, I realized that I was barely noticing at all how happy I was that my kid actually left the house without a fight, and gave me a hug before heading down the street to his school bus stop, on time, and that the day was warm, and the other fifty thousand things that were going on right in front of me in that store because it had a soundtrack that kept me in a certain frame of mind, somewhere in the late 1970s to mid ‘80s, and made me not notice so much else. Well, Muzak’s philosophy is for me to ponder later, or to leave perhaps to the New Yorker, where it has been pondered already (by David Owen, “The Soundtrack to your Life,” 4/10/06).

It does make me think about comfort level, though. How does it feel to go into somewhere with so many people, all ages, nationalities, abilities, all collected there to hunt down the foods that celebrate our differences.. and yet to hear a soundtrack of my young adult life in the Midwest? I wonder.. what if they added a few different songs, something different, from another country, something I have never heard, just thrown in? something else… or perhaps, just no music. Just real people and real food, together. What a concept.

I had nearly forgotten until I was looking for the Gal Costa album that has “Estrada do sol” that I own a pair of cowboy boots. They almost went into the past when I moved a couple of years ago, gone to Goodwill along with oh so many memories, but I had apparently stashed them in the attic instead.

These boots may not be the type you have in your mind; they are ladies’ boots, short, lace-up, black with intricate stitching on the side in red, off-white and pale blue, sort of fancy in a western sort of way, and definitely not the type of thing I had worn before or have worn since. But I wore them then.

Hondo Boots are still being made in El Paso, Texas, as they have been since 1965, according to the company website. In 1992, the salesman at the Wrangler Corral West Ranchwear Store in downtown Cheyenne told me that they were well-made boots, specimens of fine craftsmanship and close attention to detail. He demonstrated this all quite convincingly, so of course I bought them.

The collection from my life in the west sometimes surprises me: the Pendleton bucking horse blanket that I got at Lou Taubert’s nine-floor emporium in Casper, western blouses with overlaid yokes of various designs, horses, stars, enhanced by fringe and sequins, the Black Hills silver (one pair of earrings, anyway), the red cowboy hat, various shirts from Wahmaker. I had nearly forgotten so much of this, even the trailer I lived in with the pink flamingos out front and the wood paneled living room decorated with mirrors and shag carpeting and a faux leather sofa and rocker with the western motif… and that Barracuda in the garage.

One thing I always knew about my dad: he had always wanted to live out west. That call to follow the sun’s path seemed to go back to the time that he was a kid growing up in central Missouri, listening to the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights, and trying to get off the farm. He did leave, drafted, stationed at Fort Carson. Pikes Peak. Garden of the Gods. We traveled that direction, the four of us, heading out in our 1969 Mercury Cougar to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in April, 1970. I remember my aunt and uncle’s front yard: no grass. I remember being afraid to climb a ladder in the Taos Pueblo, where my mom bought some beautiful pottery that I still have, along with the roadrunner pin my dad used to pin on his jacket.

We went to Yellowstone the next year, in our new baby blue International Travelall with the woodlike panels. I remember the ever widening sky until we approached the mountains, and then, the mountains themselves, snow, my ears popping, the elk antler arch in Jackson, Mommy and Daddy eating trout, us waiting forever for the geyser to go off while I froze in the poncho I had gotten the year before in New Mexico. The motel in Kansas on the way home was supposed to have a swimming pool—because what is a vacation anyway without a swimming pool?—but it was empty… victim of a broken pump or something like that, I think. My brother and I cried about it after a whole day in the car. My dad said he was going to kick the desk clerk’s ass, which for some reason made us feel vindicated, and maybe even happy. For years after that trip, we subscribed to the Jackson Hole News, and there was a lot of talk about moving to Wyoming. We started wearing ski jackets for winter coats, although we never learned to ski or ever went back. My dad wore a sheepskin jacket that my mom ordered for him from the Shepler’s catalog, along with the cowboy hat; boots came from Gravois Bootery, which must have been the only store in the St. Louis area that carried Tony Lamas. And finally, one day, I noticed we never talked about moving anymore.

My dad still set the radio on his basement workbench to WIL, and we kept hearing plenty of Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings and Conway Twitty, and of course the older stuff on the record player. We still watched Hee Haw, and Porter Wagoner, and then started going every Saturday, it seemed, to the country, and chased the chickens and shot beer cans off the fence posts with my dad’s 22, and sat around in the evenings listening to the grown-ups discuss what J.R. had done the night before, or the various family ailments or mini-scandals, or what my aunt might have heard on the party line, all while they drank gin and Squirt, and I wondered, as the timed air freshener spritzed hollyberry scent above the cigarette smoke, why we couldn’t just go home, or go somewhere, anywhere. So, years later—now—I do by golly know all the words to most Hank Williams songs. Only, now, I like them.

Colorado, Wyoming, the Wild West always seemed to be my dad’s territory. I was led there by coincidence, but never really stopped imagining him there—following his path, maybe I was, on the back of the Virago in the wind and the sun and the driving rain, chugging through Chugwater, holding on for my life flying by Hell’s Half Acre. It seemed so unlike me, but almost necessary, chasing some dream that was inside of him, some dream I never got to see him live or even really hear him talk about.

I do not recommend trying to live out another person’s dream, even if that other person happens to be your father, and even if he happens to have died too soon and too sorry. Searching for someone that way just makes you realize how little you really can know beyond yourself. Searching for my dad’s way made me feel that his spirit was even farther away.

But maybe we are guided to these paths for reasons within ourselves. Maybe those unmarked trails, those wrong-way turns, those errant paths that we find ourselves straying onto without understanding are set in front of us to challenge us, to teach us how to find our own way. We may not know another’s path, but we can know our own. Maybe when we wander, when we yearn, these paths are the ones that lead us back to ourselves.
—————-
Now playing: Southern Culture On the Skids - Liquored Up and Lacquered Down
via FoxyTunes

Happy New Year!

I came downstairs this morning, flipped on the radio, and I think I heard a Latin version of “America the Beautiful” on vibraphone. They never announced what they played, but I’m sure that’s what it was. It was just too early for that kind of tomfoolery.

But, I must say, it did finally get last night’s anthem out of my head. After leaving the Worcester DCU Center a few minutes after we arrived, one among us hyperventilating and two crying—and that in itself more than a little tragic—my girls asked if they could listen to Kiss 108 on the way home, too. I cringed, “Oh gee, girls, isn’t that what we listened to all day?” but quickly said yes. Yes, anything.

They said they were counting down the top songs of 2007, but I could have sworn we heard exactly the same show on the radio the night before. Yes, we spent a long time in the car on Sunday evening, too, when an ordinary trip to CVS for antibiotics and antipsychotics turned into a two-hour joy ride through the western suburbs. Admittedly, the trip was not exactly a joy, given that the pharmacy technician had made a slight error in the names of my two boys. Rather than just assuming that their last names would be the same and the first names different, she apparently put them through the system with the same first name and different last names. It took them a call to my ex-husband, who called me (why they never called my cell number, which I gave to them at drop-off, I still do not know), three calls to one insurance company, and two to another to straighten it out, all while we kept coming back in half-hour intervals. Thank God for drive-throughs. But then, we heard a lot of Britney.

I must have heard that one really popular song before—no, I know I had, many times—but not repeated in such a short span and not day after day after day. We got home last night from our short-lived revelry (we at least saw fireworks), and after posting something here that I had written earlier, then popping upstairs to watch “Ratatouille” with the girls before bed, I had some unexpected time left to sit and think about 2007. But I wasn’t thinking, or even meditating. The year was about to end, and there I was, in the bathtub humming strange songs.

When I realized what I was doing, it really bothered me, and it also unsettled me just a bit that one thing I had learned on the last night of 2007 was that my older daughter does a fair Britney imitation. (She did nearly shave her head once, too, but that was when she was four, and her brother was responsible for starting with her bangs. I think that my blood-curdling screams when I first saw her hair all over the floor and the scissors in her hands will prevent any similar episodes in her adult life, but may also sentence her to a lifetime of therapy.) The thing is, I wasn’t sure she was getting all the words right, but I was also glad that she was not singing what I thought I was hearing.

I couldn’t go to sleep like that, though, the tune going through my head with no clear idea of what the song was about. I came back downstairs, and spent a good hour or so of my New Year’s Eve googling Britney lyrics. Reading the words aloud made me feel like Steve Allen.

“I’m Mrs. Lifestyles of the rich and famous
(You want a piece of me)
I’m Mrs. Oh my God that Britney’s Shameless
(You want a piece of me)
I’m Mrs. Extra! Extra! this just in
(You want a piece of me)
I’m Mrs. she’s too big now she’s too thin
(You want a piece of me)”

Oh dear. Somehow my effort to influence my kids’ taste in music seems to have failed almost as badly as it has in the food category. My kids used to like things I listened to (and things I cooked, too). I know I reported last summer that my kids’ acceptance of my own favorites seemed to have fallen off in the folk music genre, but I did not realize that their taste had gone so far into Britney territory. Even more disturbing was that after I found the lyrics, I also found the video for the song on YouTube, as well as two remix versions, and I watched them all the way through.

My daughter, the would-be Britney, has just come downstairs after her bath to inform me that she finds my recitation of “You Want a Piece Of Me” insulting, so I think this little writing exercise will have to come to a close. It is bedtime, after all, and tomorrow is a school day. Vacation is over, and hugs are necessary, for all of us.

They really do want a piece of me.

“I’d jump the Mississippi deep and wide…
If you was a waitin’ on the other side…”

I had the George Jones and Melba Montgomery CD playing in the car stereo today as I contemplated the nature of online dating.

First off, I don’t know if the melodrama of country music is the best thing to listen to in moments of loneliness and despair. Second, I was not actually in a moment of loneliness or despair before I pulled out the George Jones. There are real tragedies in the world that beat out momentary melancholy and self-indulgent pity.

I really have nothing to say right now, which for me is itself a statement. I saw a couple of friends, thought, spread out some artwork I am doing on the dining room table, went to a teaching workshop… The weekend was in all ways ordinary, and that in itself was enough to make me a little regretful this weekend. What more could I have done? Was there not one thing I did to make someone else’s life a little lighter? It really bothers me when there is not.

Maybe it was the cool nights and the long shadows that made me feel that way.

Of course, my fleeting sadness could have been much worse. I could have continued on to Hank Williams, maybe a little Leonard Cohen, and the keys to a new John Deere.

Then again, no. My yard hardly needs a weed eater, much less a riding mower. And I have better means of transportation. It’s got to be pretty hard to get a six-pack home on a bicycle, and after the endorphins of a hard ride kick in, there is really no use for it anyway.

All right, one last night of decadence before my kids came home…

It was Saturday. You already read about the early Oyster Band part of my evening. I went on to finish the “Freedom and Rain” album. Just fabulous. I always love it. I love the pissed-off, flip, glad-I-figured-you-out “thank yous” in “Valentine’s Day.” She throws his clothes out on the landing so cheerfully it breaks your heart. So much to love in that album.

But I still couldn’t get “Night Comes In” out of my head. By that time, I had listened to June Tabor’s version a good many times, sort of fixated at first by that “lose my mind and dance forever” thought. Other lyrics drew me in more, though, calmer, more introspective thoughts. I decided that if I did not actually own Richard and Linda Thompson’s “Pour Down Like Silver,” I could at least attempt some plays of their song on Rhapsody. Sound not as good on my laptop, but lying on the dining room floor, it wasn’t half bad. Understatement. Slowed down, no longer mercury, now really silver.

All right, I get it. Tired, lying in the dark early in the morning. I get it. Wow.

It’s a little after 8:00 on a Saturday night, and I’m in my car, see the sign for the Pike. I pass through the normal money grabbers, and hop on, just so I can drive fast without stopping, at least for a few minutes.

June Tabor’s clear voice pours out, “Dancing ‘till my feet don’t touch the ground…” and indeed my feet touch nothing that I can perceive, and my heart leaps. I think water, want to dive into it, swim deeper deeper. I want passion. I want so much this Saturday night. But, in fact, it is already all here.

I have to wonder, this is so unlike Richard Thompson’s version of his own song, so much lighter, airy, in fact. Night does come in, as it inevitably does, but here it’s not silver; it’s mercury.

But now I’m not thinking, driving, faster than maybe I should, around Storrow, nonstop around the Charles, the lights, the night. If Thompson sings this with restraint, the Oyster Band lets it loose, flying.

I know the Thompsons’ album, “Like Some Cool River.” Wish I owned it. A young Thompson emerges spiritual, heartbreaking, I think around the time he and Linda converted to Sufism. Is this why the pensive quality of his version? May well be.

But tonight, I fly back up the Pike, come home, eject the CD from my player and quickly put it on in my kitchen, where my desk is. I have to write about this, can do nothing else. I the song back on repeat, not wanting it to end. Perhaps it is my obsession that keeps me from getting tired of it. No, no, not tired at all. This repetition does not bore me; rather, I find something more each time it repeats, deeper, deeper into the music. The song ends, spins back, and I know the voice is there. The ethereal Tabor soars above the driving rhythm, and I am transported well beyond the capacity of my own words. This, surely, is sublime.

—————-
Now playing: Oysterband - Night Comes In
via FoxyTunes

It may be due to years of the maternal mantra about eating a healthy breakfast, or perhaps because I found it was actually true that my day went better when I ate first. I do not skip breakfast. My morning latte habit hardly helps to get me going in the morning without a bowl of oatmeal, or something—but please, just not cold cereal. Too many Rice Krispies left drowning despite their desperate cartoonish calls to be eaten, I guess… Nonetheless, this morning, seeing a sole banana left lonely on the counter, I got out the box of Kashi and opted for something healthy, if cold, before my bike ride.

Of course, it is Sunday, and peeling the banana could remind me of nothing else on a day like today but the Velvet Underground.

I went for a walk once in downtown Framingham on a Sunday morning a couple of years ago, and realized just how many churches there are for such a small area. It was busy, and as the morning grew later, the foods cooking, garlicky, wonderful things. Not the “Sunday smell of someone frying chicken” that Johnny Cash sings about, but indeed something cooked for comfort, something that I was also not going to eat, something more of some longing that could be what Brazilians term “saudade,” something more familiar now as I have lived here for a while and have found these sidewalk scents a habit. The people gathered on the streets were dressed up for services, mostly, except one crew I saw in the middle of downtown. It took me a while to figure out that they were gathered for services of a different sort, namely, methadone.

The Velvet Underground disk reached about halfway through “Venus in Furs” before I realized I just wasn’t in the mood for this album this morning, much less Deleuze-like contemplations about that particular song. I really did not feel like hearing “Heroin,” or thinking about methadone clinics or wishing more, like Kris Kristofferson, that I was stoned. No such angst this morning. What I wanted was to get on my bike and ride.

It didn’t take long, after waiting for a train to pass, until I hit my stride, breezing down 126 through the familiar Sunday smells that I mentioned earlier. I do enjoy this, like feeling the street and seeing the people out walking, hearing the music of different languages, music out apartment windows, stores, before I find myself in more wooded territory, smaller town feeling, into Ashland, Holliston. This is such a Sunday morning, somewhat sunny, not always, blood pumping into my legs as I hit another hill coming back.

This is strange to me to wake up and do what I want to do without looking out for anyone else. It is my vacation, of sorts, a respite from the days of thinking about who else needs something. I love the ordinary days, love taking care of the people I love, love it when my kids wake me up by jumping on me in bed, especially when they are not looking for anything but hugs. But right now, I love this, too, love the luxury of locking my house and heading out for an hour-long bicycle ride with no need for babysitting or getting back soon, love the luxury of saying yes.

“Hello, you good lookin’ thing you. ..
Now this is the Killer speaking.
Do I like what? I sure do like it, baby….”

–Jerry Lee Lewis, at the beginning of “Chantilly Lace”

I played piano growing up. I did not play it very well, but I took lessons until I was about twelve, and it was one of those things I wanted so badly to be able to do well. I wanted it so badly, in fact, that my parents bought a piano when I was seven. I guess I must have shown some promise at one time, and I really did try. Alas, a great talent I was not to be. My Hanon Variations may have made my fingers faster, but I was not one of those who can do much with them on the piano without hours and hours of practice… which is what the really talented kids often do. I’d never catch up! I kept at it, but after a while, I became a pre-teen, and therefore, bored.

Another factor that discouraged me was Jerry Lee Lewis.

My dad suggested a few times that I could try to play like Jerry Lee. I just could not figure out how to make a piano sound that way. It was not that I wanted to displease my father; I just could not for the life of me do what the Killer was doing. I tried a few times, but it really just hurt my hands, and I was sort of afraid of damaging the piano or something.

I played mostly classical music. Lessons after the nun who taught in third grade (I didn’t last too long with Sister Alice) were at Mrs. Bolsterli’s house. My teacher was Miss Moline. The entire house was devoted to piano lessons, and once a month we had to kill a Saturday afternoon at Club. Club was required at least eight times in the year to play in the recital. After “The Sting” came out, a rule was made that we were only allowed to play non-classical pieces twice during the year at Club. As it was, Scott Joplin was by far the most played composer for a couple of years. Of course, the recital was all classical. Club was interesting… well, no. No, it was not. It was interesting sometimes because there were new people to see (for some reason I think we were all girls) who all took lessons from the three teachers who taught in the house. I knew none of the girls at school, because they went mostly to Bristol Elementary, I think, whereas I went to Edgar Road. Recital was fun, because it was at the Monday club, and they served punch in bowls and fancy refreshments after it.

Once I brought in a book of music that my older half-brother had given me once (I now remember only one song in it: “Popcorn”), Miss Moline got a concerned look on her face, a look she had certainly had to give before. And indeed, she was prepared to give the necessary, accompanying speech. “No, no, Julie. These songs are not for here.”

So much for the Monkees songbook, then, too. I got away with “Shades of Grey,” but only because she didn’t realize it came from that book. I removed the pages and neatly placed them inside another book. (I heard a rumor that someone I knew around the same time had turned in “Strawberry Fields Forever” for a poetry assignment. Comments: “vivid imagery, a bit repetitive.”)

Miss Moline’s idea of appropriate music included all sorts of great music, to be honest, even if it was not my first choice. One of the firsts was “Laura.” What a beautiful song. I realized that many of the other songs were ones I had heard in movies, too. Before I knew it, she was bringing in all sorts of pop standards from places in time that I had never been before. My parents certainly had been there, though, and it got me off the honky tonk hook for a while if I played “Misty.” (There was even a Clint Eastwood movie my dad liked, “Play ‘Misty’ For Me.”…) I was getting tired of Clementi sonatinas, and my efforts to move to harder things like Chopin were not going well. I happily played pretty much anything Miss Moline put in front of me. I liked much of the music, but sometimes memorized most parts pretty easily. So, when I was bored, instead of reading the music, I read the lyrics. As a result, I know most of the words to many, many songs popular between 1930 and 1975, as long as they were not the sort of music that was not acceptable in Miss Moline’s lesson space. Yet another reason that my lack of vocal talents is a darned shame.

Again I say it, and it’s true. I wish I had been a great pianist, but I wasn’t. What playing and practicing did give me was a lot of appreciation for people who do play well, and a love for the sound of a piano. Now, it took me several years to remember that a piano, while melodic, is in fact a percussion instrument. That went a long way in helping me understand exactly what it was that Jerry Lee was doing with it, and what my dad liked about it. Rhythm. Hmm.. I was not lacking rhythm; I just had not realized… Hmm…

Now, about those lines I used at the beginning here. My brother and I loved to irk my mom at times, and they did the trick pretty well. But despite the suggestive tone, and the ominous nickname of Jerry Lee, it was still allowed in our house. We really did not have a lot of rock in my house when we were little. It was not that it was exactly forbidden; it just seemed that there was a musical line we should not attempt to cross. Seals and Croft at the swimming pool, yes. Dylan, no. But older stuff, rockabilly if you will…. Now that was all right. We could definitely get away with that. So we did. Jerry Lee Lewis was by far the hardest rocking album on the rack.

My mom was not, and is not, a rocker, though. So, for someone who was more word-oriented, I can see the objections to “Chantilly Lace.” Wow. Maybe she was right… Definitely not tame stuff, or a tame performer. Well, looking back, I think my dad would really have been a little concerned if I really could have played a piano like Jerry Lee. Certainly, other things would have to go with a personality like that, things he would probably not have chosen for his daughter. It was going to take some hard drinking and wild nights for me to reach that level, and really, I don’t think he was ready for that. And neither was Mrs. Bolsterli’s Club.

It does kind of make me snicker now, though, to consider it. I was frustrated by the time I quit at my own lack of talents. I had reached a point, I realized, that I just was not going to become significantly better without a lot of really hard work. The thought of turning the instrument into something quite different than the way I had been taught all along is compelling to me now, if not inspirational. What if I had tried that? Who knows what would have come out of it if I had been able to escape the genre boundaries and just found the power in the many ways of approaching a piano. Not a bad lesson for many things.

On that, I bid you all good night.

—————-
Now playing: Jerry Lee Lewis - Chantilly Lace/Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On
via FoxyTunes

If I cannot be Julie London, I would be happy to be Blossom Dearie. Oh hell, I do not really want to be either one of these singers, really. I just enjoy listening to them.

Blossom Dearie was introduced to me by way of a tape that arrived with my brother when he visited me in France. I was twenty-three years old (thought I was older, thinking back, but I thought wrong when I figured out the year).

I was on a junior (except it was my senior) year abroad (except I had also quit school for two years and was returning, so I was way older, I felt, than my compatriots). I had worked hard to get to France, spoke the language almost fluently when I left, and had known a good day’s work for periods of time after my dad died when I was twenty. I put myself through school, and going to France was cheaper than another year at my chosen establishment of higher learning. So, Caen it was, after six weeks in Paris. It sounded okay to me.

Despite my normal level of responsibility, I had just spent a rather reckless summer trying to earn money in various jobs, perfecting my French and Spanish with the local foreign student population, flirting, and generally getting myself into all sorts of enchanting entanglements. My main employment was temp work. For most of the summer, I took over as the secretary for a CEO of a clothing company while his regular secretary was getting married. It was more challenging than typing letters and answering phones. The people on the phone were aggressive, the expectations demanding. The CEO had a bodyguard, something new to me.

It was the summer I happened on to “La Dolce Vita” and decided to climb into a fountain with a girlfriend after coffee one night. It is the summer I accompanied an Austrian traveler, whose brand of German made no sense to me at all at that point, to a bar that I knew would have great blues. It did, and he was happy as a clam. Afterward, we ran down the hills of Forest Park, dangerous though it was reputed to be at night, watching the people leave the Muny, and sitting beside a pond kissing because we had few words that seemed to be getting across the point any better that life was fun. Another night, I went out with a friend, a doctoral student in math from Milan. His apartment was always stifling, and I remember sitting for hours making him tell me about Italy, watching the lights on the street in the apartment that seemed a little cooler when it was dark and the fans were all on. I remember the reproduction statue of David that his roommates had placed in the center of the furniture-free room. He was a nice guy, a friend. I felt free and alive and young. I met a couple of English grad students and tried to write stories collaboratively. The tales we created were awful, I think, but fun.

Later, toward August, I worked in a wine store. The friend who gave me the job had known me from my translating days. I used to go in the gourmet shop during lunch to talk and buy coffee beans, a great pleasure during that time, especially when they put a bakery in the store. The same friend introduced me to an investment banker who had a room full of jazz records, had just moved from New York, and had enough money to take me out to dinner somewhere nice. We chose a very nice place on the Hill, not the sandwich place down the street, but something very special. The fact that his life had been very different from mine became absolutely apparent the day he told me that his grandmother would have never allowed him to eat at McDonalds… and he never had. Really. It is true that I try to avoid the place, but never to have eaten there? Even as a kid? It was a foreign concept, as were the Sotheby’s auctions, the boarding school upbringing and the air-conditioned apartment in a place where the single professors at my university tended to live. I had friends who lived in less swanky quarters just across the street—well, my Italian friend, for example; it was another world.

I went out with the investor just a few times before I left for France, but I did enjoy his company. I liked his politeness, his passion for the things he loved, and his habit of making dates around Preston Sturges movies and splendid dinners he made himself. I was challenged by his intelligence and yes, his record collection. He had a fabulous turntable and receiver, and had inherited most of the LPs, as I recall, from some sort of a mentor who had needed to move from a much larger place. The records were in perfect condition for the most part, with many rare ones, he told me. I hardly had the background to know them all at that point, but I did recognize a lot, and I did appreciate it. My would-be boyfriend loved going through them, but troubled me by his seeming indifference to the pop I loved. He redeemed himself one day when I discovered on his shelves an Elvis Costello album. “My Aim Is True.” Good start. New York was his favorite place, where he heard live music, and was always on the search for a great new vocalist. It was during that time that I first heard Michele Hendricks. I saw her live years later. And then, there was Blossom Dearie. I heard her not in his apartment, but on the tape that arrived with my brother at December break.

The tape had been delivered, I learned, by the dashing young man in a topcoat, along with a jar of jelly and Christmas greetings to my mother. It came with a note, saying once again that he missed me (ah! joy!…), describing the many pleasures I should be seeking in France (I could not afford many of them), and something about the life he had been leading while I was away. A mix tape! From my sophisticated almost-was-a-boyfriend. It was a lonely existence at the time in France. I had been sick. I missed Paris. Now, I was in heaven. This was the good stuff! No one could have brought me more happiness than I found in that cold Normandy dorm room one December afternoon, when I first played Betty Carter’s “Tight.” I was transported from the world of students (all younger that I, besides) to something that I couldn’t quite have. It was great.

Blossom Dearie’s “I’m Shadowing You” was on the tape. I love Johnny Mercer’s words:

“In Venice
I’ll be a menace
In your Italian hotel
In Paris
I shall embarrass
You on La Rue de la Chappelle.”

It was a great choice. Coincidentally, my brother and I had splurged on train tickets to Venice. We arrived a few days early to a very cheap room in Paris, ready to walk and go to flea markets and museums, and then to set out on the journey from the Gare de Lyon. In Venice, we shivered our way around the frigid, foggy canals, and made the mistake of forgetting the name of our penzione. The city wound around, indecipherably, it seemed, a maze. I wished I had a warmer coat against the bone-chilling cold. We finally decided to eat. We were exhausted, perplexed, and I tried some version of Italian (more Spanish, actually) to explain our predicament. As it turned out, the wife of the owner was from Malaga. Words worked! Before we knew it, our table was covered with a map while the entire restaurant proposed possibilities for how to get us back to our cozy warm beds that night. Finally, the owner’s wife just put on her coat and said she’d help us find it. And she did. My brother hugged her. No menace in the hotel for that night, please.

So, I found the tape again, and listened, wondering if the guy would still be around when I got back. (He wasn’t, if you want to know. I sent him a birthday card shortly after I returned, and he called to say he had started dating a theater director closer to his own age). Oh well. So much for a future there. But I did think about it for a while.

“Both of us will be
So independent we
Will live on the run.
Picketing for every cause
Fighting all unjust laws
Happy we will be
Just you, the Secret Service and me.”

Social activism now? Hmm. Surprising choice for an investment banker. But maybe not for me. And a few more by Blossom Dearie in the meanwhile, the perfect songstress for the newly smitten.

This music may have made me wish for more back then, but she is refreshing to me now. I find myself unable to get “If I Were a Bell” out of my head after I hear her belt it out about as much as it can be belted out with that voice…. Somehow the innocent exuberance is so effective for that song. Wonder what she would have been like cast as Miss Sarah Brown.

The sauntering “Surrey With the Fringe On the Top” makes me relax into a slow ride in the country, when other times I may prefer the hurry. Talk about being in the here and now… Wishful thinking again, what a sweet, slowed-down version of “Tea For Two”! Yes, I can just picture it.

I have the album “Once Upon a Summertime” playing in the background as I write this. It is indeed a beautiful summer day without a trace of melancholy at the moment, and I am off now to enjoy it.

But first another great line from “We’re Together”: “Without you, life’s the flavor of flat… champagne.” Without whom?” Gee, I don’t even know. Well, maybe some regrets, some wishing. Not very zen… probably makes me unhappy. Ah… but what’s life without it? I can only keep practicing. “Doop-Doo-De-Doop…” Wow, I’m certainly familiar with pianissimo, but not “Perry Como” as a musical directive. On that note, I leave you. Have a peaceful day.

—————-
Now playing: Blossom Dearie - Doop-Doo-De-Doop (A Doodlin’ Song)
via FoxyTunes

I am going out on a limb today to discuss a topic that is a little embarrassing to me. Yes, this is the day I admit to my obsession. No, interest. Mere interest.

Last night I… I… listened to Chris Montez. Again.

Now, normally this is the sort of thing that I keep private, enjoying those hidden moments up in my attic, but the CD was sitting down on my kitchen shelf next to my Bose Wave Radio (same one Paul Harvey always talked about back when I only had AM radio, in the Barracuda, by the way). No CDs there, either. But now, cruising around in my minivan, I feel hip singing along with Chris.

For one thing, I am not a great singer. I think I could have great style and flair if I could only hit the notes, but no, no: woe to the would-be jazz artist me. If I could sing, perhaps my taste would not dissolve into these schmaltzy renditions of the great American songbook…

I hate this, hate the way I love it as the CD starts, with applause: “And now for the star of our show, Mr. Chris Mon tez!!!…” The vibes, and there he is indeed, “Because of you, there’s a song in my heart…” I hate how much I enjoy this.

My kids used to like this stuff. I bought it—ordered it from Amazon, no less—right around the time I realized that something was amiss in my marriage. You’ve got to wonder. I went back home to St. Louis for a week with a couple of the kids to see my mom, and had a rental car that was upgraded because something was wrong with the first one. The kids loved the CD, and I was cruising the streets I used to know playing “Sunny.” My older son loved it. He was innocent then. Now he groans, “Chris Montez sings like a girl!” No denying that.

All my kids make fun of me for it now. And rightly so. It is so hard to explain to them a song like “Girl Talk.” For one thing, it has to be one of the most sexist songs I have heard. It’s right up there with “Wives and Lovers”. To my knowledge, Chris Montez never covered that Burt Bachrach/Hal David hit. Jack Jones did just fine with it. (You remember Jack Jones, don’t you? “Love Boat”? Ugh.) Sure I’ll take the curlers out before you go to work, hon.. Please! And yet, the whole thing with Chris Montez singing about how women go on and on with “inconsequential things that men don’t really care about” seems … I’m searching for the right adjective, and I can’t find anything that amply describes the feeling I get with Montez’s feminine voice singing about the problems of women and their ways. Wow. I just discovered that Bobby Troup wrote that song. What a guy. He also wrote “Route 66” and was the doctor on “Emergency!” The nurse was Julie London, his wife–no, ex-wife, I’m told–and a torch singer I would aspire to be, if I could sing.

I like the idea of sitting on the back of a piano singing “Cry Me a River.” Doesn’t everyone?

But getting back to “Girl Talk,” I just looked up the lyrics: “She’s just a dame; they’re all the same.” Now this is where I draw the line.________ I must stop. I must find good music. Why am I drawn to this kind of thing? No, no! I have to put away the Claudine Longet. Vic Damone’s version of “MacArthur Park”? Sergio Mendes, “Pretty World”. Oh, save me!

I have to break myself of the habit. Never mind that I can sing along with Chris Montez with no difficulty. The question is, do I really want to?

I think I need voice lessons. I really, really wish that I could sing well enough to sing along with Sarah Vaughn when she *intentionally* sings off key and gets it right back where it’s supposed to be. You couldn’t take it away from her… and I can’t even get it!

“Time after time
You help me know that I’m*
So lucky
To be loved by you.”

*[note the rhyme, please]

Oh. I think I just killed all hopes of ever getting a date on this site. I promise not to play this stuff unless you like it, too. I can stop. Really.

—————-
Now playing: Chris Montez - Time After Time
via FoxyTunes

“Did you see it?” my younger daughter pointed out the car window. “It’s there, there!”

The daily heron lumbered over the Farm Pond, toward the hospital, in search of better fishing, perhaps, or just part of the routine. Who knows?

I love herons. It amazes me that such a large, steady bird can just fly right over the neighborhood and downtown, largely unnoticed as people go on about their business. Seeing them, although not rare, is always an event for our family, perhaps just because I have made it one. I have always liked to watch them, pinning some hope for luck on them as if they were storks… although I don’t really need a stork’s brand of luck anywhere near my house. I love the way herons fold their necks into their bodies as they fly, but leave legs hanging, making their tallness graceful, but not graceful enough to lose charm. When they have found a nice, shallow river, they stand, silently, forever, it would seem, for the essential fish to swallow whole. They wait for what sustains them, and take it in a breathless and elegant moment.

The heron spotting for today happened in spite of rain that had started hitting the windshield lightly. Another rainy day, after all. In some ways, the rain seems a relief. We were all already wet, riding home from a swim, hungry, and a little cold, to be honest. The car doors open, and girls spilled out, running into the house. An hour remained before boys would return from camp. The girls ran a bath to warm up, dried off, put on pajamas (yes, pajamas) and took peanut butter sandwiches to the basement. They started drawing.

I made tea and watched them for a while. They were quiet, more likely exhausted after a very late bedtime last night. I was tired, too, working in morning, yes, the swim, too. I could have slept later this morning.

So, now I can sneak upstairs for a few minutes before the late afternoon. I crave my attic. Like the balcony, it is accessible only from my bedroom, my own private spaces. My records are there. Let’s see.. what for today? Glen Campbell, Todd Rundgren, Charlie Rich. Charlie Rich? No, maybe not a good choice for mid-afternoon. I opt for the Lovin’ Spoonful. Hums. Yes, “Rain on the Roof” seems pretty obvious. But what I want, two songs actually, are on a greatest hits album. Where is it? Yes. I have to hear “You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice” (I love the way it adds the layers) and then, one that always makes my heart beat faster, “Darling Be Home Soon.” Never mind what the song does to me, I am just still impressed with the “dawdled”/”toddled” rhyme.

So, I put on the album, and gather myself. A big, round, fuzzy white rug covers most of the floor, and it is there that I sit, looking through the quarter-circle windows that really do open. I look down at the rain puddling up in the neighbors’ yards, and I look through the steam of my tea at the gas station down the street, the umbrellas bobbing along the sidewalk. I love this quiet moment. In a few minutes, it will be busy again, for a while. And then, later, in a few hours, it will be wonderful in ways that nights are wonderful, wonderful wishes, wonderful, graceful, lumbering words.

—————-
Now playing: Lovin’ Spoonful, The - Darling Be Home Soon
via FoxyTunes

I just put dinner on, and have decided to cheat at the risotto tonight, using the pressure cooker and cheaper arborio rice instead of stirring, stirring, stirring the canaroli. I taste the difference, largely because my hair and clothing don’t bask in the aroma for the time it takes to make it, but I’m not sure the kids care as long as there is plenty. Ah, but to give them taste.

Speaking of taste, during an otherwise lovely ride from Hopkinton yesterday morning, my 11-year-old son begged for me to roll up the windows when I was blasting the Fairport Convention on the van stereo. He said it was embarrassing. Sniff. I thought that the album I had chosen rocked, and had wide appeal to all age groups. Then, he noted that “Matty Groves” was “inappropriate.” Well, hard to argue that, as the lyrics started with Lord Arnold’s wife’s proposition and became increasingly violent. He truly was shocked at the idea of Lord Arnold’s abrupt return to find Matty in bed with his wife, and the murderous ending. Yeah, it is a little brutal, I admit. The part that really gets me is Simon Nicol’s gruff “GET UP” after he asks Matty, “How do you like my feather bed? How do you like my sheets? How do you like my own fair wife, who lies in your arms asleep?” It gets me every time. Still, my snobbery would have me prefer to let my kids learn about murder and adultery this way than to figure out in some giggling OMG moment that “Candy Shop” is a song about fellatio.

Right now I am listening to a CD by Lori Carson, an artist I had discovered at a friend’s house on a late night, with snow falling, turning to ice. I heard the song, “Something’s Got Me” and ordered the album soon after. When I heard the whole album, it was “Snow Come Down” that always reminded me of that night. Situations change, though, and the feelings I had lying on the floor listening to music that night turned into a friendship instead, and a nice one, at that. This evening, though, as the wind picks up and rain thinks of falling, the entire album casts its melancholy mood. Why do I subject myself to this?

Good question. I do have an answer, too.

I have to.

I love the escape of it–or rather, into it. God, I can feel it right now, the raw exposure as she sings. I get the same spine tingling from Beth Gibbons. I remember hearing her for the first time outside Portishead, on a CD from a French music magazine I used to get, “Les inrockuptibles”. I immediately bought the album after hearing one cut, and never looked back. I found it at Archambault in Montreal on one of my weekend excursions from the isolated life I led in northern Vermont… The November “stick season” with its chill grey and smoke from the woodstoves sank into my memories as I heard her remarkable voice sing, “Autumn leaves/beauty’s got a hold on me.” By that time in Vermont, the leaves were long gone, the feeling faded, but “Sand River” is still my favorite song there, one that immediately makes me wish I were in bed, and not alone.

Well, the risotto is ready. It smells marvelous, and I’ll grate the parmigiano reggiano. Mmmmm…. Wow. I forgot about the Todd Rundgren cover on this album. “And you gazed up at me, and the answer was plain to see…” Like that, too.

—————-
Now playing: Lori Carson - Something’s Got Me
via FoxyTunes

Coinciding with Rob Sheffield’s Love Is a Mix Tape, I recently found in my attic a wooden box of cassette tapes. Unlike Sheffield’s, though, mine chronicled an earlier era: early Elvis Costello (at least one whole tape) and Squeeze/the DBs, Bob Marley. We considered this cutting edge at the time. This was even pre-U2. My graduation present was a boombox. When I went away to Mizzou, my brother, a senior in high school at the time, keeper of the stereo and record collection, made two cassettes for me to enjoy in the dorms. He titled one, “Music of Your Life”; the other read “Music of My Life.”

Looking back over years since he made this tape, I remember our basement. My dad, who was a carpenter by trade, finished a playroom, a sewing room for my mom, and a family room—complete with fireplace—in the early 1970s. Our house was a small ranch. Because it was on a hill, it felt like two stories in back, with the basement opening up to the backyard. The room with the back door was the family room. Then there was a hall, a tiny sewing room that my mom never used because it was claustrophobic and lit with fluorescent lights that buzzed. The playroom was at the foot of the stairs that came down from the kitchen.

The playroom had large toy boxes decorated with decals we had picked out to distinguish them. For some reason, I chose frogs and flowers. My brother’s had various American-themed stuff, maybe planes, too. The playroom also had swings, and a train table, complete with train and fake trees. It was fun. Barbie shared her camper with the “Pogo people,” as we called them, that came free with Proctor & Gamble products, and with Big Jim. Barbie may have been infatuated with Ken, or intimidated by G.I. Joe, but we didn’t own those. Big Jim was no match for Barbie. For one thing, she was taller. She also had big boobs and better clothes. I managed to break Big Jim’s bicep by flexing it too many times, and had to spend my own allowance to buy my brother a new doll. Alas, the new Jim never shared the camper with Barbie.

The family room was where all the really good stuff happened. Because it was the only room in the house with a fireplace, it was where Santa had to come in. To make things easy for the overburdened elf, we just put up a second tree down there, for Santa’s presents only. When we got the color TV/stereo/speaker piece upstairs, the old black and white moved to the basement, along with the old record player, and most of the LPs. (The old green radio that had to warm up, that played WIL 1430 in the kitchen when we were getting ready for grade school, also ended up in the basement, but in the unfinished part where my dad had his workbench. We could hear it just fine anywhere in the basement.) The family room was carpeted in the same olive-green shag carpeting that graced the living room floors upstairs. The gun cabinet was there, next to a lumpy fold-out couch. When we built fires, I can remember being excited to hear popcorn hitting the pot lid upstairs. A few minutes later, my mom would carry down the big pyrex yellow mixing bowl, and sometimes we were allowed to have Vess cream soda then. The soda was bright pink and bubbly and I still have never found another brand I like better.

I grew up with a lot of country music. For a long time I didn’t like it because it replayed the wars my parents had on Saturdays. This was the day of the week that two radio shows aired: the Metropolitan Opera, which my mom has always loved; the other the Grand Ole Opry, which my dad had listened to since he was a boy. Sometime after the second or third feature movie on Channel 11, Dad switched on the green radio. My mom by that time already had started listening to Puccini and the witticisms of the opera quizzes upstairs while she worked crossword puzzles and read mysteries in the living room. For at least a couple of hours, both programs overlapped, and my parents used to turn up their own radios to ever increasing volumes to drown out the other. It was quite a cacophony, but Grand Ole always won because it went on into the night.

We didn’t always listen to it all night, though. Hee Haw and the Porter Wagoner Show were on Saturday night, as well. Before my dad started drinking heavily, we used to watch these shows as a family on the color TV upstairs after dinner. As years passed, though, my dad was asleep by the time The Love Boat came on.

So, I did not question why my brother had included the various Hank Williams songs, Jerry Lee Lewis’s menacing rendition of “Chantilly Lace,” Claude King’s “Wolverton Mountain,” or “Tennessee Bird Walk” (my brother won the album from WIL when he was five). I did notice one song of our youth that I had forgotten.

The first song my brother selected was David Rose’s “The Stripper.”

We just always knew that my dad had bought it for my mom before they were married. It was right next to the Jerry Lee Lewis and Hank Williams records in the basement. My grade school friends and I used the fireplace as a stage. We also used to turn off all the lights and put a flashlight on a turntable with mirrors around the room so the light would bounce off. (I’m not sure how we did this while playing the record, but I remember that detail distinctly.) For more mood, we put the cellophane red wrappers from bunches of bananas over the flashlight. This was what my slumber parties were like. I even convinced my mom to buy me a boa once from Eunice Farmer’s, the fabric store we went to at least once a month.

In the cedar closet off the playroom, my mom had a wardrobe of beautiful clothing from the 1950s and 60s. It was an era when ladies wore hats and gloves, girdles and wildly colored slips. Well, at least, my mom did. My mom also flew an airplane and bought a 1961 Galaxy convertible on a whim, so I cannot say her tastes were representative. Still, from the things that she allowed us to have for dress-up, we found plenty to take off, and even got a pretty good idea about how to do a bump and grind. For some reason, no one ever seemed offended by our shows, even though we giggled a lot. Then we chased my brother around the house with Jean Nate or Tinkerbell, or Avon’s Moonwind, collected in bottles shaped like deer or cats or mermaids. No wonder Big Jim left the camper. Oh well, it undoubtedly gave Barbie more time to organize Pogo’s run against Nixon. And Carter. Forget Jim, honey. He wasn’t that big, anyway.

Other selections from the tape came from the soundtrack of The Pink Panther. Henry Mancini was a big part of my life. “If you’re ever going to kiss me, it had better be tonight/while the mandolins are playing and stars are bright.” We used that stuff in the basement when we’d set up the family room as a cocktail lounge. Still the same red-cellophaned light revolving, but now we had set up wood-grained TV trays around the room, with cups of soda and Pepperidge Farm crackers and mixed nuts. I got into trouble more than once for sneaking the adult snacks downstairs. If my friends weren’t over, Pooh bear and Raggedy Ann were the audience. In retrospect, I realize that the cocktail lounge was patterned after the only nice restaurant we ever went to when I was a kid. It was called the Flaming Pit, on 66 in Crestwood. It was the kind of place with dark lighting, a miniscule but expected dance floor, Muzak, gin and tonics, and a deep male voice over the intercom saying “Number 32” as orders came up. I don’t have a sense of what happened in any other sort of restaurant in the 1970s, except Howard Johnson’s. Hojo’s was not the effect I wanted.

On occasion, the family room was a coffee house, and I eased the Morton Salt girl mugs off the umbrella in the kitchen, and tried to play my dad’s huge guitar that he couldn’t play, or my brother’s tiny ukulele, if he let me. He usually didn’t. I wasn’t too successful at either one of those, anyway, so the electric organ was another option that I actually did know how to play. It just wasn’t the effect I was looking for. In fact, I had little idea what kind of music I was supposed to be playing, anyway, beyond “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” and the Coke song “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” and other things that didn’t openly criticize the war or glorify drugs by sending representatives to Woodstock. Hell, I didn’t even know what Woodstock was when I was a kid; I just knew that it caused a lot of uproar around the house when it was mentioned. I had an older half brother who smelled funny (I recognized that same smell later at a reggae concert) and wore a headband and a leather vest with fringe and had something called VD, and a motorcycle that I burned my leg on. He was also a source of heartache for my dad, even before he started jumping from airplanes. Still, for some reason, it was all right to sing about going to San Francisco with flowers in my hair. Mostly, I played from the Girl Scout Handbook.

My ideas about post-Woodie Guthrie folk music were not to unfold until later. That had to wait. When my brother made the tape, I was innocent. The music we listened to was early REM, the Police, stuff like that. It wasn’t until I started dating older men that I got to hear a lot of Dylan. Bob Dylan, that is. Dylan Thomas was in a poetry anthology up in the living room, and I used to copy “Fern Hill” for calligraphy practice. Still love the stuff.

Wow. What memories…