I was looking for a bag to pack my travel knitting in. In which to pack my travel knitting. Whatever. Nevermind the sheer optimism of an arthritic thinking that she’ll be able knit. (It’s kind of cute, actually.)
Turns out, the closet where I keep my travel knitting bags is also the closet I never go in. (I don’t like to travel.) Because it’s the closet I never go in, that’s where I put a lot of my Casey memorabilia. Because it’s the closet I never go in, I forgot that all that stuff was in there.
Do you know what a sucker punch to the groin feels like? I imagine it’s something like opening a closet door and seeing life-sized toy dogs which look like the beloved animal you put to sleep four and a half months ago.
Needless to say I took a small break from packing to have a little cry.
One of the odd things about having a blog is that after a few years you get used to being read by the same handful of people. The luckier and better blogs than I have a bigger handful, but it’s still generally the same group.
To this day it weirds me out a little when I get a comment from an Unknown To Me Entity. It usually takes me a minute and then I’m all “Oh, yeah. This is the Internet.”
Apparently one of my Wall*E posts is in the top Google hits for “Wall E Propaganda”, which is why all of these strangers have been dropping in.
The good thing is that I’ve got enough of those type of posts that my blog has become largely self-sustaining. During the weeks when I don’t write anything I can still eke out about 150 hits a day with just the random posts that bring people here.
Not surprisingly the number one self-generating topic is the whole employment service/getting threatened with lawsuits fiasco from a year ago. I get about five comments a week and fifty hits a day from that one. Then there’s the dozen or so hits a day I get on the whole Battlestar Galactica / Bob Dylan mashup. And the Harry Potter’s Penis thing. Other posts, though, surprise me. I don’t know if they’re insecure girls or fetishists or magazine editors looking to make a point, but I get anywhere from five to fifteen hits a day on searches for “fat girl formals“; “what do fat girls wear to formals” and “dresses for fat girls.”
It was a good thing we were in the drive-in, and that I have a sturdy car. Because you could have knocked me over when (Put On Your) Sunday Clothes came warbling over the speakers with Michael Crawford’s familiar voice.
My parents didn’t allow Rock and Roll in the house until I was eleven, and then only grudgingly. (I give them credit for not making it totally forbidden.) But they truly loved music and had one of the best record collections I’d ever seen. I think to this day they probably regret letting me have free access to all that music, seeing as how stacks of vinyl would be strewn around the living room and my odd dj-ing of a peculiar variety of showtunes usually blared everyone out of the house.
Certain things–the smell of vinyl in old cardboard, the scratch of a needle on a record and the slight static hiss of a hi-fi speaker make me feel like a kid again. But none of those things are as evocative of my childhood as some of the songs. “I Got Plenty O’ Nuthin” from Porgy and Bess. “L’Chaim” from Fiddler On The Roof. “The Farmer And The Cowman Should Be Friends” from Oklahoma. If you asked, and you’re probably not going to, I could sing Fiddler, Oklahoma and Hello, Dolly straight through from their opening songs to the Finales. Oh, and Sound Of Music, too. (The Good version from Broadway with “How Can Love Survive” and “Ain’t No Way To Stop It” and without that stupid “somewhere in my youth or childhood” song from the movie.) I used to get up every morning when I was a small child and sing various snatches of those musicals while swinging on the swings. Our neighbours hated it, but my parents never made me stop.
Of those musicals “Hello, Dolly” is the bounciest, cheeriest and most full of fun from beginning to end. There are no Nazis, no lynchings and no pogroms. Just out and out hysterical optimism. The goofiest optimism comes from Barnaby and Cornelius’ virgin hopefulness and bubbles over in “Sunday Clothes” and “Elegance”. I realise now that I can’t sing to save my life, but over the last few years I realised that dogs are a captive audience and they don’t really mind my singing. So nearly every morning while I get dressed I sing either “Sunday Clothes” or “Elegance” to the dogs. Well, now it’s just “dog”. In fact, before he died Casey loved to hear me sing “Elegance” especially. Every time I’d break into it with the enthusiastic “Yes! New York it’s really us!” that goofy dog would give me the biggest grin and wag his tail.
Because I’ve been singing those songs for so long and in private I think I fooled my brain into thinking that they belonged to me. To hear Sunday Clothes bounce through the opening of the movie just made me glad.
I am almost insanely excited about visiting…the Midwest.
You don’t read much nostalgia for the endless flat land, the sky that goes on forever like the sea. The straight roads plaiding the countryside in orderly sensibleness broken only occassionally by the river roads which wend like ribbon, parallel to the water. There are few people wistful for driving the endless miles of eastwest, blurring past corn and soy, slowing down only for Amish buggies and the Dar-i-Twist.
Part of me seems to lie dormant when I’m outside Indiana. I run just fine, like a cell phone off the charger, but that extra juice–the jolt of being Home–kicks in once I get back.
I never planned to leave, but life being what it is sometimes the plan gives way to a different story, like turning pages in a book–on the next chapter. Whichever chapter I’m in, though, I hold the heft of those first pages in my hand like a comforting weight which keeps me grounded.
My husband, being generally more optimistic than I, really wanted to believe that the preachiness of Wall*E would be trumped by the general cuteness and maverick goodtimesness that Pixar is known for. His disappointment was palpable as we left the drive-in, the few initial moments of pensive silence gave way to a stunned disbelief and, eventually, an angry and disappointed rant against all that was bad about the movie. Continue Reading »
I promise you, though, that this is really a song about getting up again, after the worst has already happened. Even after you feel responsible for someone’s death, say. Getting back in the ring is hard to do.
And of course this is why I keep Warren in my heart, always. Any other person would say “get back on the horse” or “try, try again.”
Not Warren.
That’s why, whenever I have to gird my loins I instead say “Hurry on home. Boom Boom Mancini’s fighting Bobby Chacon.”
