Category: memories

Wednesday’s Theme Music

 

Songs often connect me to another place and time. In today’s case, I was connected to another person’s connection to elsewhere.

She was on my team at a San Mateo start-up. I’d moved to Oregon by now but went down to meet with my team once a month. We’d become good friends by then. First, she’d worked for my wife at an advertising agency. When a resource action moved them to the unemployment rosters, I hired her for a temp position and then ended up asking her to join my team. We carpooled for a while, too, and appreciated one another’s humor.

I had a radio in my office, the same boom box that was bought for office use in Germany a decade before, the same one I use now when I’m doing yard work. Back visiting my team in 2006, she was sitting in my office when they played The Killers, “When You Were Young”.

She said, “Oh, can you turn that up?”

Sure. I did.

Her expression acquired that almost reverential introspective gaze that people sometimes gain when they’re privately reminiscing. We started talking about the song. She told me that it reminded her of a friend. This is had happened about ten years before. She’d met this great guy, they got married, and then he cheated on her. Her friend became severely depressed and was going to kill herself but he found her and stopped it. They ended up going to counseling. Unlike the song, though, he cheated again. That was it for her. She didn’t kill herself, but she did divorced his ass.

So I remember her remembering this song as she remembers her friend.

I watched the video later to get a better understanding of what the song was about. It’s a long video, and they take their time getting into the music.

0

Imprint 2

After moving out of Mom’s house when I was fourteen and moving in with Dad, I missed my old home and Mom’s cooking.

Dad, a bachelor, was in the military. He’d just returned from an assignment in Germany. Besides his military day job, he had a second job running the small base’s all-ranks club, so I rarely saw him. That lasted three months. Then he retired and we moved to southern WV.

I’d mentioned missing Mom’s cooking to her on one of our phone conversations. Mom bought me Betty Crocker Cook Book as a present so I could make the stuff she had.

It was a humbling lesson. Mom usually used a recipe in her head. I had to plod their detailed instructions. Whereas her measuring skills were fast and effortlessly, I labored through cups, tsp, tbs, and their incremental differences.

But I weathered it, making myself stuffed green peppers, meat loaf, pot roast, spaghetti and meatballs, along with side dishes, and eventually baked cakes, cookies, pies, and other desserts. I never made fried chicken, odd in retrospect. I preferred roasting or grilling my chicken. In fact, my favorite meal became over-roasted thighs with buttered red potatoes and broccoli.

Don’t know why I never made the fried chicken. Maybe I was lazy, or maybe, subconsciously, I knew that some things couldn’t be duplicated.

5

Tuesday’s Theme Music

Memories come like tides, in private cycles. In today, I cycled back to Feb, 1991. I’d just come back from an assignment with the USAF in Germany. Enroute to California, I passed through WV and Pennsylvania on leave, visiting family, and then arrived at SF, CA.

Rain was pouring in the Bay Area that day. Ted, my sponsor, picked me up at the airport. California had been in a drought, he said, hard to believe since the great deluge was making Highway 101’s traffic a slow-moving shit show.

A little later, I was in the military hotel at Moffett just outside of Mountain View. Up the road was my new assignment, a place called Sunnyvale Air Station, a.k.a., the Blue Cube. The name was changed to Onizuka Air Base to honor Ellison Onizuka, an astronaut killed in the Challenger disaster.

Onizuka turned out to be a good assignment and my last. I retired there four and a half years later. The base closed down in 2010 and the Blue Cube was demolished in 2014. I blamed myself because the base probably wasn’t the same after my tenure (ha, ha).

It was a complete unknown to me when I arrived, though. Bored and tired, I flipped through channels in my hotel room, rediscovering American pop culture after four years in Germany, and saw a video by R.E.M. called “Losing My Religion”.

Somehow, it fit the moment.

 

4

Imprinted

We heard a story…

Everyone had grown up and left the home, nurturing their lives, careers, and dreams. Somehow, though, they began having Sunday dinner together every week. Mom was so overjoyed that she made their favorite every week, which was southern fried chicken.

I immediately recalled watching Mom go through her fried-chicken process in our little ranch style home in the mid 1960s. Starting with a whole chicken, she would wash it and rub it down with cold water and then burn the remains of the feathers off over the gas burner. Truthfully, I never saw any feathers. I don’t know if Mom saw any, either, but this was her process.

Next, she washed the chicken again, and then dried it, and cut it into pieces. The pieces were dipped in egg, and then rolled in white flour with salt and pepper. She fried it in grease from her drippings collection in a big electric skillet. (Crisco later replaced the drippings.) The chicken was vigilantly watched and turned. When judged ready, they were removed and put on paper towels so excess grease could drip off.

I know her process well, and know how her fried chicken tasted as well. Nothing like grabbing a cold piece of fried chicken out of the refrigerator for a late-evening snack. Like many things she made for us to eat in those years, it ruined things for me later. I’ve always been looking for something that tastes as good as Mom’s. When you’ve had the best, it’s imprinted.

0

Monday’s Theme Music

I’d not thought of this song – or heard it – in a while, but Kalliope mentioned it on another post, and naturally the song was sucked into the stream.

Here’s Vanessa Carlton with “A Thousand Miles” (2002), a good song to begin a week, and an excellent song to stream as you walk-about and wonder.

Weirdly, it always bothers me that she doesn’t cover the piano up when she’d done with the song and has gone back home in the video. I think it’s a statement, things are not finished, but my inner tidy guy thinks, it was covered when you started, you should cover it when you’re done.

0

Sunday’s Theme Music

Today’s music choice began with a Billy Collins poem.

I don’t know what neuron decisions forced the stream of a Billy Collins poem to intersect with a 1989 song, but after a bit of that music, the Billy Collins poem moved aside, like a little Fiat 500 moves aside for a semi-tractor bearing down at seventy-five, its horn blowing like a child with a toy.

Wondering about the switch, I wondered if it was about faith and expectations running up against experience and reality. Maybe that was far-fetched.

For the record, the Billy Collins poem is “Nostalgia”. I can’t say that it’s my favorite B.C. poem because I like so many of them so much. I think that if I had to recommend just one B.C. poem, it would be “Forgetfulness”. It begins,

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

h/t to PoetrySoup.com

Love that poem. Anyway, here’s the song, “Personal Jesus” by Depeche Mode.

0

Saturday’s Theme Music

You get a twofer today.

This photo on Facebook reminded a friend and I of a conversation we once had about the songs, “Our House”. One version is by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Madness did the other. We just chatted about how different these songs were as we went about something else.

I haven’t seen him since around 2003 but I remember him fondly. FB connects us, so sometimes FB works as designed.

2

Friday’s Theme Music

I was in bed, in the overlap between being awake and asleep. Still hazy with fever, I felt a cat land on the bed. Quick, light steps followed.

If it’d been Tucker coming, the steps would have been slower and plodding. Boo’s bed approach is light but slow. No, this had to be Papi.

Feeling the steps stop by my head, I opened my eyes and looked left. The sweet ginger boy was studying my face. I put a hand out toward him. He began purring and rubbing his head against my fingertips.

In response, I sang in a soft whisper, “Consider yourself at home. Consider yourself one of the family.”

Yes, it was “Consider Yourself” from Oliver!, the film, because I’ve never seen the live stage production, from 1968.

I don’t know why my stream pulled it up yesterday. Like a few other people — the movie took best picture and other awards — several scenes and songs remain memorable to me, like “Pick A Pocket or Two” and “Food, Glorious Food”,which sometimes is sung as, “Floof, glorious floof. Long tails and whiskers.”

So, consider yourself to have a theme music suggestion.

0

Monday’s Theme Music

Sunshine lit the valley from the west, splashing through lazy swatches of stretched grey clouds outside our windows. Could’ve been early summer by its deceptive appearance, but it was March 3.

Ill with a sore throat and dribbling nose, I alternated between reading (Fear: Trump in the White House, Woodward) and napping whereupon a song found the stream and played in my brain.

You see, she was gonna be an actress
And I was gonna learn to fly
She took off to find the footlights
And I took off to find the sky

I couldn’t fathom why Harry Chapin’s “Taxi” (1972) was streaming in these circumstances. I often don’t understand how my mind words but I decided that “Taxi”, about the dreams that age into nostalgic memories, would be today’s theme music.

Cheers

0

Sunday’s Theme Music

Nathaniel Taylor, an actor who I knew from his role as Rollo on “Sanford and Son”, passed away a few days ago. He was eighty.

Many actors, politicians, writers, and sports and rock stars have passed away throughout my lifetime, along with cats, friends, family members, and people that I didn’t know. Some of them were killed in ways that we don’t like to think about.

Nathaniel Taylor’s death was another death. We all understand that death is gonna get us. Now, what happens beyond the door that death opens, well, we don’t know. We have a lot of theories, and we think that we have intangible proof that once we die, that’s it, game over. Then again, many ancient people believed that the sun revolved around the Earth, until we learned how to prove otherwise.

The death of someone who acted on a show when I was young triggered a stream of thought about how time seems to pass and prompted me to think, wow, 1969 was fifty years ago. Ain’t that somethin’?

Not really, right? It’s as arbitrary as weather in March, 2019, predictable but still surprising. Thinking ’bout all that nonsense kindled reflections on the music from then. Pop goes the song and out came the Rolling Stones with “Honky Tonk Women”.

Seems ’bout right.

0

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑