Category: memories

Mom’s Dislikes

Since we’re coming up on Father’s Day, I’m thinking about the things that used to anger Mom that amuses me now. It’s a short list, but each of these earned a sharp word, snapped fingers, threats, or warnings, all delivered with “the evil eye.”

Mom’s threats were usually about giving us away, sending us to an orphanage, or putting her in the nut house. We weren’t a very P.C. household in the fifties and sixties.

Here’s the list:

  • Fighting, arguing, swearing and talking back. Her idea of talking back and our idea didn’t always align. We would protest, “What was I doing?” That is talking back. Don’t do it.
  • You’d better come when called…or else.
  • Cracking your gum, blowing bubbles with your gum, or clicking you spoon against your teeth.
  • No slurping! Do not slurp your soup or your cereal. Don’t you dare suck up the final fluids of a soda or milkshake through a straw, either.
  • Don’t sneeze too many times, definitely a peculiar irritation. You can see that Mom had a thing about noises. More than three sneezes would irritate her. Sneezing too loud would also annoy her. All that exasperated us. How are we supposed to control the number of times we sneeze, or how loudly?
  • Eat all your food. That was rarely a problem for me but one sister had issues. Food items couldn’t be touching one another. That just sickened her. But Mom would order her to eat her food; she would refuse, and would sit in the darkening room, refusing to eat, until Mom relented and took her plate away. That was a battle of wills.

A short list, and nothing too terrible. As children, we’d forget, and absently do these things until Mom voiced her irritation. As adults, we find it funny, and laugh about it. We’re also aware of these matters that irk Mom. If someone starts sneezing and goes more than three times — or loudly — in Mom’s presence, one of us is certain to say, “Here we go.”

What about you? Anything that your Mom did that amuses you in memory?

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Today’s Theme Music

“Time Won’t Let Me” is a song by a group called The Outsiders.

In nineteen sixty-six, I was ten years old, part of a small group of neighborhood children on McNary Boulevard in Wilkinsburg that included Tracy and Carolann, and Mike and Richard. The group fluctuated as people moved, went on vacation, or attended Bible School. Technically, I’d moved away to Penn Hills, but I came back to visit friends.

I don’t know who, exactly, bought this record, or the rest. We listened to them on a little portable turntable. The record was part of a stack of forty-five R.P.M. singles. Setting up in someone’s basement during the summer months, we listened and danced to these records while pretending to sing the songs and play the instruments. The Monkees began dominating the stack, although Johnny Rivers had a strong presence. Others included Herman and the Hermits, Paul Revere and the Raiders, and Nancy Sinatra. As the summer passed, our interests and musical tastes shifted. But for a while, we had our forty-fives.

Now, watching this video, I laugh.

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Today’s Theme Music

Today’s music is provided by Eric Burdon and The Animals, so it’s an old song, yeah?

I remember that Mom was really excited about Eric Burdon and The Animals coming on to television. I’m not sure what show they were appearing on, as I was about eight years old. I think it may have been “The Ed Sullivan Show.” I lived in Wilkinsburg, PA, on Laketon Road, across from Turner Elementary School. That’s how vivid this memory is of that week. Mom was talking about it while ironing and dressing to go to work at her job as a telephone operator.

Eric Burdon and The Animals’ appearance hugely disappointed Mom. Somehow, in the course of the advertising, she thought it was to be singing animals! My older sister laughed and laughed over that.

This song is an old stand-by for me. “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” was often selected as a theme song when I was down, depressed, frustrated, or bitter, which seems to be quite a bit. I would sing it to my self, my wife, my cats, my work teams, whatever. There’s something freeing and invigorating about singing, “We gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do.”

Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. Whether it’s physical, emotional, or intellectual, if there’s a place you gotta get out of, this song is ideal for fortifying your determination to do so.

Here they are, from nineteen sixty-five, Eric Burdon and The Animals, with all the glory of nineteen sixty-five technology.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

We’re experiencing unseasonably strange cold, wet weather in Ashland, southern Oregon, this week. It feels like late November, an odd juxtaposition against the full green trees, lush grasses and arrays of colorful blooms. It feels like it might snow, your mind whispers to itself, setting you into a groove of wondering what this rain is doing to the seasonal snowpack. Perchance this colder, wetter weather will diminish the wildfire season. Maybe, this year, we won’t have drought and water rationing.

But on a Sunday morning, it also settles coziness. What better things are there for cold summer weather but leisurely breakfasts inside, reading books by a fire while sipping coffee and tea, and, for us, going to an afternoon movie?

All this kicks the mental streams into retro-mood. From that morass of signals emerges an album from nineteen seventy-six.

Married less than a year and separated from my wife, nineteen years old, and experiencing my first overseas assignment in the Philippines, this album helped me keep my focus and balance. “Year of the Cat” wasn’t Al Stewart’s first album, but the song by the same name was one of his highest charting songs. Its piano-heavy folk-rock sound with mystical lyrics spoke to me as I walked around Clark Air Base and the surroundings Filipino cities and towns.

It’s a good song for a cold, quiet morning. Here’s “Year of the Cat.”

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Today’s Theme Music

This song began streaming into my thoughts yesterday afternoon. It’s a a song about struggling with yourself as you struggle through a situation. I like the singer’s voice and style, which strikes me as projecting authenticity and vulnerability while being strong.

Here is “I Try,” by Macy Gray, from two thousand.

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Today’s Theme Song

Accumulating steps and miles for my Fitbit in Ashland’s downtown yesterday, I heard a busker belting out an acoustic version of “Simple Man.” Remembering it from my high school years, I started singing along to myself. Lynyrd Skynyrd was part of the rising southern rock movement in the seventies, along with ZZ Top, the Charlie Daniels Band, and the Marshall Tucker Band.

The song, with its clear vocals and power guitars, reminded me of those years and a simpler period of life when my main concerns were getting gas money and passing tests in school. When the song stopped abruptly yesterday, I hunted the busker down in an unused business entrance on Main Street where he was changing a guitar string. We chatted a bit and I donated a few bucks to his cause.

The song, of course, hijacked my mental stream and stayed, so I pass it on to you. Here’s Lynyrd Skynyrd with “Simple Man,” from their first album in nineteen seventy-three.

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Today’s Theme Music

Today’s music constitutes sober reminders of how we affect others, and how deeply others can be hurting, and not fully display it.

“Jeremy,” by Eddie Vedder and Jeff Ament of Pearl Jam, was about a high school sophomore, Jeremy, who committed suicide by putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger in front of his class one day. They based the song on the short newspaper article telling about it.

The video progresses from slower, more abstract ideas about the news, the world, and Jeremy, until Jeremy is shown as the only person in motion as he shouts at others. Meanwhile, Pearl Jam’s music is rising in volume and intensity, until the climax.

Not a fun fact, and a disheartening reminder. But sometimes, reminders are required.

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Today’s Theme Music

This song was written in nineteen sixty-six, and released in nineteen sixty-seven. The lyrics, though, speak to our times now as much as they did to the era which produced them.

There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware

I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down

There’s battle lines being drawn
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind

It’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down

What a field-day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our side

It’s s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away

h/t to MetroLyrics

What’s interesting about that song is that Stephen Stills wrote it about a curfew on Sunset Strip. While they speak to the mood in America in the nineteen sixties and the twenty-first century, they speak to the life and times in the U.S.S.R, Nazi Germany, and other places ruled by fear, paranoia and oppression. People seek rights and freedoms; others squash them to preserve their status and wealth. It’s a cycle as old as humanity, except, instead of a man with a gun, there was a man with a rock, spear, bow and arrow, or other weapon.

Let’s listen to Buffalo Springfield and “For What It’s Worth.”

 

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Today’s Theme Music

Yes, I know what the calendar says. According to it, it isn’t summer. But we have one of those hot, humid weeks in our little city brewing where you feel the sweat, heat and grit on the back of your neck.

Here’s the Lovin’ Spoonful in nineteen sixty-six with “Summer in the City.”

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Today’s Theme Music

Call me cynical.

I believe people reside on a personal spectrum of being fucked up. Where you appear to reside depends on several factors:

  1.  Your self-awareness;
  2. Others’ awareness and acknowledgement;
  3. Your attitude toward being fucked up;
  4. The desperation level.

You can be aware that you’re fucked up, but then your attitude kicks in. You can decide:

  • You’re not fucked up; it’s the world that’s fucked up;
  • You’re fucked up, but who cares? Just make it work for you.

Of course, some people lie to themselves about anyone or anything being fucked up. They’re the scary ones.

This song reminds me of being fucked up. I’d just returned to America after a four year plus tour of Germany for the U.S. Air Force. The evil Soviet empire had ended its reign, so much of what my military career was about, launching nukes against the evil empire and spying on them, was no longer a factor. While others turned their attention to Southwest Asia and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, I wasn’t allowed to participate, being deemed as mission critical for the now defunct mission of spying on the Soviets. I couldn’t participate in local activities to help the ‘war effort’, either; while my company grade officers who were pilots and navigators and junior NCOs and airmen were busy helping to erect tent city in the mud of Rhein-Mein Air Base, or working in the post office or chow hall, it wasn’t acceptable for me as a senior NCO to do such menial tasks. My offers to help were denied, then I was rotated back to America.

This all left me feeling pretty isolated and frustrated. I remember listening to this song in nineteen ninety-one while sitting in traffic in Peninsula traffic on Highway 101 in the SF Bay Area during a rain storm and having a mini-breakdown. The song is an introspective ode to self-pity, loss, realization and acceptance, so it was perfect for that era of my life. Although outwardly, I was fine by all the normal social measurements, I was an internal mess, drinking too much and having marital problems.

All the factors and your attitude about being fucked up are usually fluctuating. I’m still pretty fucked up, but I know I can shift my attitude a few points in either direction with fluids such as beer, wine and coffee, and activities like writing and walking. I’ve never been so desperate, angry and frustrated about being fucked up that I’ve contemplated suicide or killing others to make everything better, nor have hard drugs or an outlaw life attracted me. That doesn’t change my basic issues of being an arrogant, cynical, egotistical asshole with emotional problems, but it does adjust my attitude toward myself and the world.

Yet, I love this song. Here’s Gary Moore with “Still Got the Blues (For Your),” from nineteen ninety. He was such a talented guy. R.I.P.

 

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