Debbie Harry rises above the hammering and talk-radio outside my house. It’s good friends, it’s very good. Ear-candy with an edge from eye-candy with an attitude.
“Parallel Lines” was the greatest things my father ever brought home; better even than lamajeun from the Armenian bakery. On a drive home from work, he heard “Heart of Glass” and was enraptured. He sang the song for me and asked if I knew it. Tried to sing it anyway; mostly he la-la-laed and hummed as well as he could. I was twelve, and had neither a radio nor any idea of what I wanted to hear; I was useless.
I’ve always imagined that Daddy spent the next few days humming to record-store employees until someone could help him. n He was a born performer, and could probably have worked up the high-notes for the chorus. One way or another, that album was on our turntable by the end of the week.
Did you ever see that cover? Pretty girl, starlet blond hair dyed perfectly imperfectly over dark roots and ends, strappy white dress. Arms akimbo, she stands over black and white stripes flanked by men in black. Everything is black, white and red. No girl in my class had ever seen anything like this.
My father loved his music one song at a time. If he found a song he liked, he played it over and over. Once the song was over, he was right at the turntable to re-play it. If anyone actually could wear out the grooves on a record, my father could.
Me?; I seized what chances I could to play the whole record, start to finish. I lay on the floor of the study half-reading and ignoring whatever Math was due in the morning. Parallel Lines was not the siren song that lead me into the realm of tweenie underachiever, everybody travels there sometimes; it was just part of the soundtrack.
What does Debbie sing these days; Jazz? Torch-songs?; my father would have approved. Daddy loved Linda Ronstant too, and never more than when she worked with Nelson Riddle.
Mattel has made a Debbie Harry Barbie dolls. Thanks to a link posted on Facebook by a friend of mine, I’ve seen this doll. Not right, it’s just not right. Mattel made a decent job of the hair, but they’ve dressed her in neon pink. If you ask me, she needs that white dress.
After listening to Parallel Lines twice, I’ve moved on to Bob Marley. A big Thank You to the builders outside my window. They’ve reminded me that loud music can be the best way to be alone.
I’m still feeling very early Beatles. My Youtube jolt of the morning was them singing “Komm Gib Mir Deine Hand” dubbed over a film of them singing, “”I Want to Hold Your Hand”. Liam and I agree that the song might sound better in German. When I hear it, I wonder what the lyrics are word-for word. I wonder that they found a way to make the lyrics fit so perfectly with the music, and that they rhyme.
I get a kick out of watching the old film with Ringo flipping his hair around because he had hair enough to flip. That cute haircut, now worn by young boys , used to be radical. I just laugh.
Every year, Liam’s hair starts too short for my liking and travels non-stop to what most people think is too long. First Saturday of Summer, he goes to the barber for his buzz-cut. When he returns a year later, his hair hangs past his shoulders, and the bangs have grown out completely. I like it now, he can swing it.
I haven’t posted any views from my window in ages. Remember that yawning maw in my backyard?; that sheer drop right up against my backdoor? It’s gone, gone, gone. Above the basement that the pit used to be rises a fully-framed two-storey structure. It has walls and window-frames; the windows should be arriving this week or next. It has a roof. I can walk out the backdoor, Hell, I can climb out my bedroom window, and walk around the spaces where the rooms are going to be.
It’s noisy here. Last week, just being inside this building being built gave me a thundering headache which shouldn’t have kept my away from Kung Fu practice, but which did ( Liam told me I should find the commitment of a ten-year-old and g0 ).
Last week, it poured down rain for days on end. I actually missed the building sounds; they can be more grounding than the rain, but not every day.
The siding I’ve always hated has been ripped from all but the front of the house. Now, we have the pleasure of picking the color of the new siding. When, Jamie, the kids, and I are driving, we pass houses and ask each other if we love, or hate, the color. The kids want red. Jamie and I just agree that it has to be a full-on color, no beige, no apologies.
Shopping for kitchen cabinets and bathroom fixtures offers all kinds of entertainment. You can go around opening drawers to feel how smoothly they slide. You can imagine your kitchen just the way you want it, even though you know that you can’t have every bit of it.
You can laugh at other people’s appalling taste; that’s the best part. I have fun coming up with ways to say exactly how wrong things look. Some over-large shower heads look like the bottoms of spring-form pans nailed full of holes. Some bathroom set-ups have a space-age feel that I just don’t like. “Too ‘ ground-control to Major Tom’’”, I say. I’ve seen some blue-green tiles that are beautiful; a color I’d love to wear, but don’t want to see on my shower walls For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.
In Ikea last week, Liam and I agreed that one sink looked like a urinal. Not what I would want to spit toothpaste into for the foreseeable future, but Liam loved it. Everybody has an opinion.
Any day now, my closet will be gone. With all the construction that is happening literally right outside my bedroom window, that’s easy to believe. No matter how long it actually is before the closet gets knocked out, it’s easy to believe that it could be any time now and this is good. I could put off clearing out my closet until the last moment, but now I think the last moment could happen any day now; time for action.
I knew I had boxes and bags of paper in that closet, and I dreaded even starting on them. I needed to be ruthless, and I pitched out bales of articles for classes I’d taken. I gathered up pages that I must have been saving for some reason, and threw them into the trash bag I’d carried up with me. If I needed to ask myself if I should keep something, I threw it straight out. Very liberating.
Four of the things that I kept were books. I’m not sure how they came to sink into my closet, but now they are safe.
1.) The Snapper. Don’t ever forget that Roddy Doyle can be a very funny writer; it’s one of the things that makes him as great as he is. What is there to say about a book about an unplanned pregnancy that begins with a young woman’s father asking, “Yer WHAT?”
2.) 1990 , a book of poems by my dear Michael Klein. I have no idea how this small volume got into the bag in the closet, but I am so happy to have found it. I remember Michael reading his poems at the Goddard residencies where it was always cold. He read in a voice that could make the telephone-book a thrill to hear. I always felt his poems to be urgent, loaded and beautiful. I can read them again, and almost hear your voice Michael. So good to hear it again.
3.) A stapled-together book that Liam and I wrote when he was four. It’s about a cyclops and some knights. He drew the pictures, told me the story, and I wrote it. We stapled the pages all out of order. The last page reads, “Once upon a time there was a mean cyclops walking around in the street. Nobody did good things for him because he looked so scary. This made him mean”. I could put the pages in order; but why should I?
4.) I found two journals of mine, oversized sketchbooks from the years when I wrote in my journal nearly every day. I drew almost as much as I wrote, using oil- or chalk pastels which I love for all their lush smearable colour.
The first volume dates from 1998, a time when I rode the train three hours a day three days a week to a difficult job with an impossible supervisor. On the train at the end of the day, I would just sit and write it all out. I drew landscapes, figures, flowers otters and spirals.
The second journal was written when I was pregnant with Liam. I drew lots of figures in the second journal, nude pregnant figures. I haven’t read either of the journals yet, but it feels good to have them.
One folded page fell out of one of the journals. It was what I had read at my father’s funeral. Never thought I’d see that again.
How could I have known what I would find today? I’m so glad I started in on that closet.
Last week at a local restuant and club called Johnny D’s, I remembered that “Stand By Me” is, whenever I hear it, my favourite song. You know what I mean. When you hear a song, it’s suddenly exactly what you wanted to hear and you remember just how much you love it. Even if you get the same little thrill two songs later, it’s your favourite then and there. Sitting with Emma while she sifted through the books and toys Johnny D’s keeps for its youngest diners, I knew that the musicians on the stage were doing the best they could together.
That thrown-together band’s gift to me was that hearing them put John Lennon’s version of “Stand By Me” at the top of the next day’s playlist. The best version?; well, maybe not to you. John uses a sharp, shallow voice here, and I think it works. After breakfast in my empty house, I went to the Songza.com web site, and found it instantly.
I love sites like Youtube and Songza when I’ve got a song that won’t give me any peace. I type in the song title, and the site finds it for me quickly. I don’t have to troll through my CD collection or cue up the song. I don’t have to listen to other songs before I hear the one I want. Just type it in, and there it is; instant gratification. For what I want in the moment, sites like Songza are great.
Another thing that these sites have going for them is that they help me educate myself. Until I typed a few words into a Songza search, I didn’t know that Tom Jones sang “You can Leave Your Hat On”, on the soundtrack of “The Full Monty.” Mere minutes after I discovered this, I knew that Joe Cocker had written the song and that his version totally kicks Tom’s variant down the stairs. Score one for search-engines!
Ah, but all is not perfect. These music sites are also rife with people who own video-cameras and instruments and who want to be seen. On music site, a selection may be labelled, “ JOE COCKER, YOU CAN LEAVE YOUR HAT ON” and be mislabelled. Only when someone innocently clicks on it do they discover that the video-clip’s full title is “JOE COCKER, YOU CAN LEAVE YOUR HAT ON (by Frank)” and that it presents the viewer with a skinny young man singing straight at the camera. Other clips bearing the song title and artist’s name feature musicians earnestly offering chord-by-chord lessons on how they feel the song should be played.
Sometimes, however, the need becomes too great, and I’m grateful for what I get. This afternoon I wanted to hear the old Eric Clapton song “Promises.” Amid the covers and the guitar-lessons, I found only one clip that featured Clapton playing and singing. What set this gem up as the strangest music-clip I’ve found on Youtube? The three-and-a-half video featured an ageing man jumping rope and sweating while the song played in the background. The saddest, stangest part? I watched the whole thing, more than once. When a song gets into my head, what I’ll do shocks even me. Search-engines are both blessing and curse to me.
Remember what your dream house used to be? I do: fourteen years ago, Jamie and I moved into ours We didn’t pay rent to live in our dream house, we owned it. We could decorate it, paint it, do anything we wanted. We could make any changes we wanted; but why change it? In our house, there were enough rooms for Jamie and I to have our own little offices. We could look out upon our decently-sized yard and imagine our children playing in it. The subway, the cheap movie-theater and decent restaurants were a quick walk from the front door. Did I say “dream house”?:; well it was. Jamie and I didn’t dream big house-wise, so the house could be small.
I still love this house. It’s my family's history. Both my kids came home to this house. My children are city children; they walk places because so much of life is within walking distance. They know kids on this street. Their yard is the best yard, climbing structure and all.
This is our home, and we’re bursting out of it. Those two offices? They were perfect places for desks and filing cabinets, Once they became the kids’ rooms, they got smaller. Now that Emma is sleeping in the cozy little office where it wrote for hours on end, it looks smaller than a hotel coat-closet. It is, and always was. Liam’s room is jam-packed with Legos. The kids need bigger rooms. I need a second bathroom because, first thing in the morning, desperately wants the only one we have. The half-bath, the guest-room, the laundry-room up where all the laundry is; yeah, we need them.
The house has us, it really does. The porch has been torn down, and the cement steps got demolished yesterday. The back-door opens straight into nothing. Step outside, and you’d drop into a hole that’s as deep as our basement. The only way out of the house is through the front door. We’ve got nowhere to go but forward.
Emma turned four today. Four, she told her teachers and every kid in the Red Group as soon as she walked through the door. The same age as her bestest buds , this seemed to be bigger news than all the cupcakes we brought, even the ones she frosted. Tonight there are new books to read and a new game ( Chutes and Ladders, which Jamie remembers fondly ). Some rainy day, there will be a new puzzle to try. Indulgent?; hard not to be with my little girl.
Six years ago, while we watched our sons run around the park, my neighbour, Paul, noted that four-year-old girls are the most self-confident people on earth. If allowed, they would, and could run the world. Paul had never lived with a four-year-old girl, but he knew people who did, and he’d heard them holding court around the jungle-gym. I’ve seen little girls in full command of two different day-care-centers. Emma knows the world belongs to her.
Yesterday, I watched Emma and three of her girls around a pink tea-table make big plans to wreck havoc. When our girls are dressed up in pink tulle with crowns and sparkly shoes, they rule the kingdom, and there’s not a king in sight. Emma loves Cinderella, she loves the magic and the transforming; when she plays it, the Prince never even enters the story.
Last year, I wondered how I was going to handle fairy tales. Last year, I imagined a Cinderella who took a break from the party to check out the castle library. That’s where she meets the very shy Prince;; they discuss literature and science. before hitting the dance floor. Okay, sometimes I tell the story “by the book”, but I’ll try and remember to tell it my way more often.
It might be easier to bring out my Ella if I could show her off in a picture-book. Any artist out there want to work on one with me? I’m not kidding; my drawing style is a little too modern and cartoonish than I think this beauty needs. Interested?; be in touch.
In that park that morning with Paul and the boyos, I hadn’t spent too much time with little girls. It is easier to wonder where all the girl-power goes if all you know is that theorists say it goes. Many of the ten-year-old girls I know play soccer and practice Kung Fu like they have something to prove. My mother-in-law (former Biology teacher) always said that the best group-projects were the ones where short teenage girls headed the groups. Those girls wanted good grades, and no lazy boys were going to stop them dammit!
Maybe it’s good that some girls think about their appearance before boys do. Some boys I know leave their houses in black sweatpants and dirty navy shirts, and I’m sick of looking at them. Stop embarrassing your mothers boys, before we stop chalking it up to “boys being boys”
My Emma is tough, powerful and loves loves pink. She turned four this morning.
When I was seven or eight, I met my childhood hero, the one who pulled me into the 19th century. On a rainy Sunday afternoon, my father took us into Boston to see the 1939 film “The Hound of the Baskervilles”. You may know it, the brittle brilliant Holmes, his dottering Dr. Watson, and 200 pounds of sinew, teeth and fur. Piece by piece, clue by clue, it all came perfectly together; how could I resist? Why should I?
From that afternoon on, Holmes was my number one, over-the-top hero. Comic books, space-operas, they meant nothing to me. Other detectives were mere, dim shadows. Holmes solved crimes on the London street and in country homes in that big costume-drama, the Victorian era, where I dreamt. At night, on the school-bus and during Math lessons, I invented crimes to solve with Holmes by my side.
By the time I was ten and attending the yearly meetings of the Friends of Irene Adler, I had probably heard every story thanks to a public radio station that ran the half-hour radio plays of the Sherlock Holmes stories made by the BBC in the 1940s. My father and I saved each story on an old tape recorder we placed by the speaker. Dad and I liked these better than the movies because they got the whole stories just right and showed Watson the way he really was; as Holmes’ intelligent contemporary. Listening to those plays with Dad was the best part of Sundays.
Every December, Dad put on his tux and escorted me to the dinner-meeting of The Friends of Irene Adler. Here, all members worked our way through a nearly impossible quiz on Holmes and his work before dining on roast goose and sherry trifle. At my first meeting, I got up and proposed a toast to The Baker Street Irregulars. The Irregulars were the street-kids whom Holmes paid shilling to ferret out clues and information. Queen Victoria, Irene Adler, Holmes and Watson had been thusly honoured I didn’t want my boyos to be forgotten. Nobody had thought to toast them before, and that became my yearly responsibility.
I loved Holmes because he proved that being smarter than anyone else really counted for something, Sometimes, it was all you needed.
When I was a kid, I liked Irene Adler just fine. It took me years to fully appeacuate her power. She stopped Holmes in his tracks so completely that he had to admit defeat, even to himself. It’s only after watching men lock themselves into some pretty stupid mistakes because they can’t own up to making mistakes that I realise what an achievement that is.
Another hero from my childhood was Oscar Wilde. He never solved a crime or prevented an innocent woman from being mauled by mastiffs, but Oscar could nail a situation, or an adversary, with a few well-chosen words. Oscar would probably have made a better dinner-companion.
So, did I like the new Sherlock Holmes movie? Oh, yes I did!!! It’s a big concoction of 19th century adventure. This is still the kind of get-away I need.
And so this is Christmas. The Asian lady from the Davis Square T stop is in Harvard Square singing Christmas carols. For months, this lady, with her wooden guitar had always been in the Davis Square T stop whenever I was there. Always there, and always singing “Annie’s Song” without hint of irony or satire. She seems happy, so I’ve always liked her. Now, as I’m running from Davis to Porter, Porter to Harvard and home again, I hear her in another station singing other songs.
In Concord, when the center of town was the site of two holiday traditions. The first was the night when they kept the shops open into the night. Not a very eventful event, but it was fun. We walked through the bright, dark, cold streets seeing friends, visiting stores, and shopping. And then, there was Christmas Eve.
On Christmas Eve, people gathered to sing christmas carols in Concord center. It was always cold, a thin, sharp cold, and the cold, and I was usually wearing a dress and party shoes. My family stopped in the center on our way to friends’ home for a traditional Feast of the Seven Fish. We sang, “Joy to The World,” or “We Three Kings” from out of booklets that we’d hung onto over the years. Everyone sang loudly, not everyone sang well. Remember all the Whoes in Whoville singing hand in hand? That’s what it was.
Toy cars never interested me, and I never imagined they would. Who would know that a trip to a toy store would set me dreaming of driving through a glittering mod-tropilos? And yet, there she was. In the crowed parking lot, actually shining like an actual new penny was a copper-colored Austin Mini. An original Mini, a car older than I am, the sister of the car my mother learned to drive. This car had obviously lead an eventful life, but she was so beautiful.
You’ll never know how large a Mini Cooper is unless you’ve see an Austin Mini. They are the perfect little toy car. They look like something you could pick up and carry home, and that’s what I wanted to do. It didn’t matter that I can’t drive; that car and I could share a funky, young, girl-about-town life. I hated turning my back on that lovely, but I had Christmas shopping to do.
This is my third Christmas with a daughter, and it hasn’t gotten any easier. It’s harder actually, since she’s exposed to more TV commercials than she did last year, and she can see what they are selling; some are selling passes to girldom. Mini-ovens, castles for twirling Barbie princesses,; Emma asks, “can we get that?” When I ask her what she likes about it, all she sometimes says is, “ It’s a girl-toy”.
Now, I’m a girly-girl, I and I was one when I was four. When I was four, I loved dressing up, caring for my dolls and animals and having tea-parties. I would never pull Emma away from enjoying these things. It’s all about exploring girlhood , figuring out what she likes and what she can totally do without for now.
Our job that day was to follow Emma around toy stores and see what she liked. Baby dolls, when Emma saw that shelf filled with baby dolls,, she headed right for it. She seemed to want to play with them all. The next morning, she was pretty clear when she told me she really wanted a baby-doll; a baby-doll and a spinning top. Add books, Legos and a few other bits of fun, and there’s Emma’s Christmas goodies
Standing in front of the Austin Mini, Jamie said, “look Emma! It’s your size!” Oh, she thought it was cute alright, but it wasn’t love at first sight.
