Songs of old

A couple of weeks ago Carole King was in town campaigning on behalf of Kerry. A friend (well, not a complete friend or she would have told me about this BEFORE rather than after the event) let me know that she had attended, thoroughly enjoying Carole King’s impromptu performance of, you guessed it, “I feel the earth move.” That song is primed for a political campaign.

What a month for old music! Beatles, Rolling Stones, Carole King, Stylistics, Beach Boys – it puts me right back to the years where the record player never rested, working the same groove again and again, and the biggest, the only issue was whether the phone would ring with the voice of THAT person, and, when it became clear that HE (the saintly but somewhat oblivious HE) wasn’t calling that night, then it would be time for another ten repetitions of Don’t Worry Baby or whatever else was there, all ready to tear you apart. Life was so dramatic in its simplicity.

It is touching that so many of these songs did jump the ocean, creating (or maybe just accompanying) havoc in matters of the heart here and there (..and everywhere. Beatles, 1966), stirring up the passions, playing to sweaty palms, facilitating pain and sometimes, in moments of magic, GAIN, as it all then would fall into place, seemingly in an endless moment of pure, uncomplicated, profoundly felt love –before it all crashed and put you right by the record player again to relive your pain for a few more rounds.

Songs of old. Simple words with a strong melodic theme, stuck way in the back of your head until the moment when some odd circumstance prompts you to listen again. And again.

Correction needed

Empty house this evening leads me to turn on the evening news. Do I regret it? Indeed I do. The TV announcer talked of the celebratory “doughnut like” pastries sold in Poland at this time of the year. In Milwaukee, they appear to be sold on Mardi Gras, which, of course, always falls on the Tuesday (today) before Ash Wednesday.

Being among the 1% of Poles that are not Catholic, I never quite understood why our own Polish (meaning IN Poland) Mardi Gras wasn’t really on ‘Mardi’ at all, but on ‘Jeudi’, or Thursday and we called it “Fat Thursday” (this year it fell on February 19). Maybe Poles need more than one day in the year to feel fat and happy. I don’t know. But this confusion wasn’t addressed in the news story. All our local broadcast did was show many un-Atkins Polish Americans buying the gloppy pastries today, meaning Tuesday, in celebration of our ‘Polish’ holiday, which, of course, is all wrong in my mind because that fell on last Thursday. But this in itself was not offensive. I am used to religious confusion of this nature.

What bothered me was the anchorman’s enunciation of the word itself. In Poland, we call the pastries “paczki,” pronounced Pawn-chkee. On our local Madison TV station I heard “poon-chkee.” Say it out loud. Laugh-out-loud ridiculous, isn’t it? Correct pronunciation is everything.

Way to go, Newsweek

For once a thoughtful article appeared about a candidate’s spouse. Newsweek describes Ms Edwards as a once spunky law student, a knows-her-own-mind lawyer, an energetic mom (she grew grass – the green kind – on her son’s Halloween costume by misting seeds daily until they sprouted and he and his pals could go out dressed as a golf course), an older parent (her last child was born 3 years ago, when she was 50), a moral person (something tells me she would not be in the predicament of our state AG, who today is on the front page of the local paper with a ticket for drunk driving –how stupid was that, Peg?).

One paragraph about past political spouses did cause me to be concerned. Newsweek states:

Often a presidential contender’s spouse is defined by the way she complements the candidate, and is seen as providing some supposedly missing ingredient: Tipper was Al’s heart,…and Laura tells George what’s in the morning papers. (The story then goes on to say that John and Elizabeth Edwards are very much alike.)

That’s worrisome, isn’t it? Did George fall through the cracks in school? Was he pushed forward? Is he one of the growing number of adults who have managed to conceal the sad fact that they cannot read? It would explain a lot.

How many mistakes can I make in one day?

Calling my mother in Berkeley from my office was a mistake. The thought was: I’m in between tasks, I can take 10 minutes to catch up and see how she is. The reality was: I was late for all other appointments for the rest of the day because the call did NOT take 10 minutes. As my cell phone minutes ticked away at $.45 each, I was entertained by a run through every unhappy event that could be reasonably woven into the conversation, occasionally interspersed with connecting phrases such as “mind you, I’m not complaining.”

And she really wasn’t entirely complaining. But when you are eighty, the stories get longer and more numerous and repeated for added emphasis. I mean, why tell the one about how mental illness is rampant in this country, in her apartment building, in our family, among friends only once when you can repeat it, with abundant illustrations, at an interval of every 5 minutes? A happy spin: I was glad that she was basically okay, and that there were no more hard feelings about my trip to the desert. Moreover, she guessed that I had voted for Edwards and seemed resigned to possibly doing the same, though she was still toying with the idea of casting her vote for Dean since his name would appear on the ticket. I figure I have seven days to convince her that sending a “sympathy card” might have greater therapeutic value for the guy than handing him a useless, solitary “sympathy vote.” Though I suppose her vote might not stand alone: in Berkeley Dean may still win even though he’s not running.

Leaving my ATM card in the ATM machine was a mistake. The thought was: I am so efficient! Watch me drive up to the machine at Hildale and reenter the traffic pattern at virtually the same place – how cool and speedy is that! The reality was: I was so inefficient that I didn’t even notice that I had left my card behind; in fact, I am not sure that it is in the machine. It could be anywhere. The one place it is not is in my wallet, so that later on at the grocery store, I caused a collective gritting of the teeth as I did the classic dumping of purse contents on the counter while everyone waited not-so-patiently behind me. A happy spin: I will get a new card and a new pin number. My old pin was an assortment of the most irrelevant to my life digits you could imagine. For example, it didn’t have a single 4 in it, but for some reason it included such numbers as 7. Everyone knows I have no good vibes around 7.

Day is still young, so many hours to mess with. Stay tuned.

Comings and goings

My office neighbor is packing his files, furniture and toys and leaving (this week) for Seattle to pursue a job opportunity that he felt he couldn’t pass up. A stream of well-wishers has been steadily trickling in, most offering good wishes for a bright (if drizzly) future. One colleague, however, did no such thing. She poked her head in and said to him “don’t worry, you’ll be back.” Being rather nosy and having overheard this, I asked where this prediction was coming from. “No one ever leaves Madison permanently” she stated confidently. She used herself as one example of a person who went elsewhere to teach, but came back with her tail between her legs, taking back the lesser job just to be again in Madison. She listed others who had done the same.

I thought that the premise of this whole discussion was flawed: if you leave and never come back, you will eventually be forgotten and written off. If you do come back, you’re smugly lumped into the returnees camp. Maybe every town has its handful of returnees. Maybe people even go back to Beaver Dam (earlier post: home of the “busy beavers”).

As I was dismantling her assertion in my head, I noticed that my moving office-neighbor had that look that we get when we stare out our windows (our offices look out on Bascom Hill) – a pensive kind of look, taking in the melting snow, the incongruously bright red doors of the Education building – and I have to admit to recognizing in that gaze the seeds of a possible future return.