Archive for March 2015
“A knife wound heals, but a tongue wound festers.”
March 24, 2015No weather report today. Day after day is always the same. It’s depressing. The only bright spots are the large numbers of green shoots in my front garden. They give me a bit of hope.
When I was a kid, we lived in what we called the project. The houses were all duplexes, one side the mirror image of the other. Living there was only open to veterans and their families. Kids were everywhere. We first lived around the small rotary which the last of the duplexes circled. Below those duplexes was the field surrounded by woods. A long fence in the backyards separated our houses from the privately owned houses behind us. I used to climb the gate by the parking lot as it was a shortcut to my aunt’s house. I never once, in all the year’s we lived there, see the gate opened. No car ever used it. No car ever really used the parking lot either. Most cars were in front of the houses. My dad always parked his on the side road as our house was on a corner with the hill on one side.
Most times nothing much happened in the project. In the summer you could, now and then, hear people yelling at each other through the opened windows. We always listened. At supper time, mothers yelled out the doors for their kids. Once there was a fight between two men who were neighbors. I remember one man was a photographer who took pictures for the local newspaper. I don’t remember who the other man was. I do know the fight started because the wife of the photographer was German. He had met her while he was in the service on duty in Germany. This was in the mid 1950’s, and most of the men in the neighborhood had served in World War II. The guy I don’t remember called the wife a Nazi and a few more choice names and then the fight started. They rolled and wrestled on the grassy hill, and I remember the photographer’s sweater vest was pulled over his head so he couldn’t see to defend himself. Everybody was out watching. I don’t remember how the fight was ended. I figure neighbors must have grabbed the fighters and separated them as I would have remembered the police coming.
That fight was the talk of the neighborhood for the longest time. The men never spoke to each other again. The photographer and his wife and son eventually moved. That is the only time in my life I have seen adults physically attacking one another. Burned in my memory is the image of the two men rolling down the hill trying to punch one another. I remember the sweater vest had the argyle pattern popular in the 50’s. The son of the photographer wore glasses.
It is strange what our memories hold on to and what is lost over time.
Where Are You Now: Jackie Trent
March 23, 2015The early 1960s saw the arrival of a new wave of British female pop singers, but one led the field in combining her talents as a vocalist with those of a songwriter. She was Jackie Trent, who wrote or co-wrote more than 400 numbers.
Trent, who died on 21 March 2015, aged 74, topped the charts almost exactly 50 years ago with her rendition of Where Are You Now, which she co-wrote with her first husband, the composer Tony Hatch.
Africa: Toto
March 23, 2015Mike Porcaro, the longtime bass player for Grammy-winning rock band Toto, died early Sunday morning at 59 following a battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s Disease).
“Dear beautiful Spring weather, I miss you. Was it something I said? “
March 23, 2015If I’d only looked out the window, I’d have thought sunny, warm day, and I’d be mostly wrong. The sunny part is right, it’s difficult to miss that one, but warm it isn’t. It is really cold, winter cold, hat and heavy coat cold. It was 23˚ this morning and will stay this way until Thursday when it will reach 50˚, but there’s a kicker. It will rain all day Thursday. It is like getting a beautifully wrapped gift which is empty when you open it.
As I get older, I get a bit grumpier and far less likely to abide extremes. Too cold-I’m complaining; too hot- I’m complaining; too much snow- massive complaining. We haven’t had much rain so I’m holding off on the complaining probably until Friday. Given I live alone, I complain but no one hears me except the dog, and I don’t get a lot of responses from her. She just wags her stub tail and hopes for a treat.
Being a kid was so much easier. I didn’t care if it was hot or cold or rainy. I’d wear the least amount of outside winter clothing I could and hope my mother wouldn’t catch me. Coming home from school in winter usually meant my hat was in my pocket, my coat was unbuttoned and my mittens were probably still in my sleeves. I just didn’t notice the cold. In summer, I didn’t notice the heat. Even the hottest days didn’t stop me from playing softball or horseshoes or walking to and from the pool on the other side of town. I didn’t have a fan or an air conditioner at night. I was exhausted from the day, and that was enough.
Even in Ghana I accepted the world as it was. Complaining seemed discourteous. I was a guest. The lack of rain for months in the dry season was just an opportunity to say, “Looks like rain,” to my friends or for them to make the same observation to me. It wasn’t going to rain, and we chuckled at the humor of it all. Day after day would be over 100˚, but we’d find ways to adapt. When it finally rained just about every day, we never had an umbrella or a raincoat. We just got wet. The cold nights in December were wonderful, and we burrowed under wool blankets, happy for the sensation of feeling cold.
I miss the days of snow angels, of catching snowflakes with my tongue and of building snowmen with twig arms, but I’ll just wax nostalgic and stay inside warm and cozy. I still love puddles and seldom pass one by without whacking it with my feet and watching the water spray. I guess there are some things you just don’t outgrow.
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