Just over a year ago, he was sick and just lying around; finding food he’d want to eat was not easy. He kept going, though, and we even thought he might recover and keep living in his senior state for a good while longer. It didn’t happen, though, and I came home a year and a day ago for his final moments.
This is one of the songs I was listening to yesterday, one that I was listening to a year ago. It’s all out of context from their original intention, but the lyrics here still make me think of him lying there, and thinking he might turn around. I hadn’t said goodbye, but the pain and doubt and wondering if this was the end or if he’d recover made me feel these words:
Don’t even say you’re turning around again Don’t try to walk back into my life I fall for it every time, I fall for it every time
I lose my will I turn toward you still It’s a bad dream where I Can’t raise my hand to wave goodbye
Don’t even say you’re turning around again Don’t try to walk back into my life I fall for it every time, I fall for it every time
Applying my movie list idea to TV shows before the movie list is even released! One show for each year of my life. Unlike movies, there have only been a few years of my life sans much television. Those busy times were great, and so were the dinners mixed with TV and bits of family conversation from the 70s to present. Here, a nod to different program genres so as not to overwhelm or monotonize the brain. Roughly, the first twenty-five were viewed in my younger years, the second group viewed in my older, more adult years.
I’ll add a new one every year and maybe tinker by adding links and other stuff as the weeks pass.
Despite lengthy inactivity due to other commitments, this blog still crops up in my thoughts and will continue. I originally planned to focus on music here, which I considered one thing I knew something about, and that the things I knew about it were fading. This led me to think that the “younger generation” or the international set might get something out of what I was writing, that maybe my personal recollections and opinions, and a healthy dose of links and images might bring some joy of discovery.
Now, I have often strayed from the blog’s intent into the personal realm, often thanks to the thoughts music has dredged (or conjured) up. Apart from these more meditative (or cathartic) entries, though, music remains the focus. It struck me the other day, though, how instinctively resentful I can be when someone recommends music to me. Music takes less time than a book or even a movie, so a music recommendation is easier to pursue, and there’s a broader pallet of music I want to spend time on than for books or movies, but there is still that knee-jerk reaction.
This resentment is not universal and it is not historical—a lot of my early musical taste came thanks to others and people to this day, especially if I like them, can send me in wonderful directions. I recently met someone who has had just this effect. There is great joy in discovering something for one’s self, but it doesn’t need to always happen that way.
So, when it comes to this blog, I am not necessarily recommending music to people when I write about it: I am mentioning it in the context of my life and tastes and if people latch onto it so be it and fantastic! I discovered a lot of music incessantly listening to the radio and poring over entertaining reference books on the subject, and people now allow some music service to shower them with similars. I prefer the album format, and will continue to push that here, but otherwise I am looking forward to just continuing to recount my personal taste and experience and letting it be for whomsoever.
After thoroughly enjoying both, I wondered which was better. Then I realized, of course, that luckily it doesn’t matter. Both are awesome!
So, back to the old station wagon car and little transitor radio tunes. Sometimes it seems it would have been good if the world had frozen sometime around then, but maybe the past can be much more thoroughly enjoyed when it’s pretty deeply buried, so I get luckier and luckier as the weeks and months move along.
Okay, logically-unsound-and-not-thought-through thought for the time being. But another post and a couple of great songs for whoever sees this.
“Crawley recalls how during recording of the plaintive ‘I May Never,’ she burst into tears during one take, while during the second one the studio engineer did exactly the same.” A quote from an affectionate article in The Guardian on Shelleyan Orphan, the undertones (overtones? both?) of my musical back and forths between the city and suburbs, each of their four albums accompanying me for their assigned seasonal three-month span each year. My sister and I both played reed instruments, and the oboe and bassoon add the right touches to Shelleyan Orphan songs, especially here.
The song perfectly encapsulates the heaven-sent and now to-heaven-returned voice of Caroline Crawley.
I may never see your face again Rabbit’s down a hole, he’s already gone Life came between us and just for a day You’re the one who was standing in the door I will love you, no matter even what you say or do I will call your name out loud I will love you, no matter even what you say or do I will call your name.
So, this morning is the last I might see him. Yesterday I knelt by his big bed as he half-dozed, luxuriating in a head and ear rub while I cradled his tiny, scraggled head in my palm. This morning he was cleaning his paws sputtering a little as he did so, cheeks puffing out, then walking a little, went out and made the perfect poop, even ate half a carrot stick. Every snort and snore from him reminds me of all his little ways, many so lost now.
“I May Never” followed by “Beamheart,” the perfect finish to a career, perfect tones for a finish to a life that I can keep in my head while I think over the seventeen years of wonderful memories.
The Ranger Rick trio comes to a close with this Squirrel of the Week post on the first magazine I ever received from the National Wildlife Federation (NWF). Jam-packed with nourishment for the budding conservationist, plus some fun vocab, like “nacre”! I hope you enjoy it.
Willie the White-throated Wood Rat (aka, Pack Rat)
The Year of the Ox continues, this time with the uncelebrated creature pictured above and much much more in my new post on the Squirrel of the Week blog. At least here we have a rodent! I hope you enjoy it.
Turns out it’s the Year of the Ox, and how happy a coincidence that an issue of Ranger Rick explored in a new post at my Squirrel of the Week blog features one—a Musk Ox in Canada—on its cover! I hope you enjoy it.
Bits of Echo & The Bunnymen’s “My Kingdom” looping in my mind while a sequence of overbearing buzzes, alarms, whirrs, and beeps, reminiscent of 1980s Atari games—the Combat cartridge springs to mind—take their turn. It ends with mighty, stabbed organ chords that are really impressive and appealing. It’s my right hip MRI, the quest for diagnosis making headway.
Afterwards, I played the rest of the Cure tape my sister had given me long ago by way of introduction to the group, over 30 years ago, driving down Ogden past vacant stores now torn down replaced by vacant lots bringing who knows what. It’s much-changed, even Ogden Avenue. Other than the familiar looping of the street, parts are becoming unrecognizable even though I traverse it often. At least I know where I am going even if there’s few places I want to stop along the way.
I head directly to the snowscape of Arrowhead Park, home to park district soccer games as a kid. I park with windows all down slightly to hear any birds. No sound, just the empty snowy field and hill and creek, with what looks like a raft of flood ice in the distance. Now I see it’s traversed by two sleek, bundled up figures. No sound, but my head pictures my sister and her best friend as those two out on the icy snowfield. The latter lived a block away from this park, and she’s the reason my sister can’t return here when I want to walk it for bird and nostalgia. How has 30 years passed? The breeze blows into the rolled-down window, I view the field through a snag of hair the color of the gray sky and think of that time, their friendship, what they might have been talking about. I drive home to “The Perfect Girl.”
A week later, back for the left hip MRI, this time spent singing the guitar lines of Will Sergeant and insistent, urgent, defiant choruses of Ian McCulloch in my head—”Over The Wall,” “Show of Strength”—thinking of just re-viewed Donnie Darko and a more than pleasant dream I had of a friend. And back to Arrowhead, with one finch sweetly singing somewhere in the trees behind where I parked, the ones you see below.
But this blog is called Music and More, so I will get back to music soon. More music, less more: A Promise.
Well, the year didn’t start as I’d hoped, but started it did, and I got some of what I’d hoped to done, some left undone thanks to ill health and what became of my Epiphany plans. Closer to the first of the year, I chatted with a long lost acquaintance, and with an old friend, but when it came to my little projects or reading my books, less than planned. Volunteer commitments for the group I’m leading always crop up, so some of those needed tending, leaving longer-term ones undone. My shedding of a title from another organization has not been forthcoming, so that threw off my mindset. Some decluttering decisions, a study of sparrows with a buddy of mine, revamping a profile, set aside for now.
There was just not the appropriate air of renewal over the year’s start, however much our calendars and minds try to tell us to make it so. I managed a quiet celebration on the morning of January 7, but that was more a sense of relief from what had happened the day previous. But on the morning of the 9th, still asleep, some magic came to me.
A glimmer
My mind had been in a quiet stir, writing emails to the bird club board in my head, contemplating a friend’s question about “eco-fascism,” which led me to think about environmental justice and corporate fascism, subconscious angst about the DC stuff still being unresolved, the death of Tommy Lasorda, one of the comforting, colorful baseball figures of my youth. Then my ex-gf showed up in a dream for the first time in years. I scribbled this down soon after I woke up:
In a waiting room at a big mall with lots of loud hijinks going on outside this waiting room. Kept forgetting to pull my mask up, wear my mask, but did so some of the time at least. There were a couple of other people I either knew or was at least chatting with a little amid the ridiculousness of seemingly endless waiting. It was all quite a chaotic scene, rich with the more raucous side of mall life. At one point I went to the bathroom and that was a strange scene too. Time and much else didn’t seem to matter.
Anyway, she was there suddenly and we both laughed heartily over an exchange of comments we made, and a bit later she was kind of chatting with a couple of guys in somewhat jocular fashion. I put my right hand to her forearm and said, “I can’t take this anymore. I miss you and wish we were back together” or “think we should be back together.” And I walked away, she following calling after me, “What do you mean? What did you mean by that?” (It gets a little weird to detail after that, but a transmogrification worthy of minor Greek mythology occurred and the discussion continued, hurt but still loving.)
After that it is unclear, I know we exchanged a few more words, me reiterating that we should be together, she not rejecting the idea at least. (More positive than I’d imagined and that it would ever be in real life, unless this world holds more surprises than even I can imagine, but my imagination’s not as exercised as it once was.)
I keep a record of these occurrences, and maybe one happens every other year on average. They have featured this ex, a serious crush, an actor, a singer, a generic someone in a place I’d visited. And “knowing” is the word I describe them with—a warm feeling of love and affection shown in a clever exchange or tender gesture, but not explicitly spoken, like you might see in a wonderful old movie. Although these are not old movies, me viewing a couple of movies I’d missed the first time around that now hold a nostalgia—Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion, Legally Blonde, and the best of the lot, Clueless—maybe these put me in the mood as well for this dream.
A little sad to think how these moments don’t come to me in my waking life; it’s been years since I’ve had these kinds of interactions, that rising of the blood, beating of the heart. Thank goodness for the glimmer though.
Because, otherwise I meet this year with some disappointment at my situation and what continues or transmogrifies into worse in this world. It brings to mind something that came to me in a May dream in 2018. Something with the melody and lyrics of a Smiths song: “I never thought the world could be so sickening, who ever thought the world could be so sickening.”
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