Thursday, June 12, 2014

This One Was Mostly For Me

It is so peaceful here in Lloyd this evening. Mr. Moon has gone to the island and I have swept the floors and finished and put up the laundry and washed all the dishes and emptied the compost and tidied and no toilets are in desperate need of scrubbing and I've retrieved the dogs from the groomer who is a friend of mine whom I love because she is who she is and she, too, is an old hippie and we are growing older and have all of these memories and issues in common and we don't even have to discuss certain things- we know. We just know.
Also, she does not overtly judge me for telling her that I am SO ready for my dogs to die, even though she loves her old dogs with a love that knows no bounds.
We are older now, we are wiser, we know when to judge and when the fuck not to.
"I love you!" I call as I leave her yard, my freshly shorn old blind deaf dogs in tow.
"I love you too!" she calls back as she hangs her newly filled bird-feeders from their hooks.
Yes. When you get old, you start to love birds if you never did before. It is as much a sign of aging as are aching joints, arthritis in the spine, loss of memory and a love of Lawrence Welk.
I just made that last one up. I still hate Lawrence Welk and if I could clear my memory of certain things to make room for others, the Lawrence Welk show would be one of them along with the commercials that ran on his show for Serutan, Which Is Nature, Spelled Backwards! 



I mean, I was raised on shit like this:




Which explains a lot.
But Beverly and I, we may have grown up on the Lennon Sisters but we both remember when this happened:





And we were hurtled from one one incredibly predictable world (and if your life wasn't predictable, you could just take a shot or two of Serutan which would produce regularity) to a completely different reality where women weren't something that men could say about, "I think I'll keep her," to "I'll satisfy your every need." And the men singing about those needs had big juicy lips and wore tight black pants and even if we were prepubescent, we had an inkling.

Which led to things like this.



Yeah. Beverly knows all about that and she used to front a band herself as a vocalist and she was hot. We went from the Lennon Sisters to Janis Joplin in about the time that it's taken Justin Bieber to rise to the highest heights and burn the fuck out.
No wonder we're crazy as shit and love our cardinals, our sparrows, our bluebirds, our woodpeckers, our finches.

Time to put the chickens up.

Love...Ms. Moon




12 comments:

  1. I love it :) And yes, there is absolutely some sort of biological correlation between age and birds. My parents (both sets) are absolutely obsessed with their backyard birds!

    Love you!

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  2. Am I not yet old since the bird fascination hasn't yet kicked in? Or maybe I just live where there's too much concrete and not enough nature.

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  3. I adore birds. I'm now a snowy plover docent, for god's sake. Um, can I talk to you about the snowy plovers.....

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  4. somewhere out there there's a video of Lawrence Welk playing a Vox Continental combo organ. how cool is that?

    I found Welk's show to be a pleasant experience, but I never saw it during its first run--I watched it on PBS, that stalwart bastion of hipness...

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  5. I should add that I watched it more from a musician's perspective than anything. For what it was, that was a good band, and I should think Welk was a good bandleader to work for.

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  6. The transformation in America from the Lennon Sisters to Janis Joplin -- and all the political and cultural shifts that went with it -- must have been the most thrilling and terrifying time. I'm a little too young to really remember it, but I always wished I'd been able to experience it first-hand.

    Actually, as Lawrence Welk numbers go, that one wasn't so bad. At least it wasn't Bobby and Cissy dancing in some terrible '70s pastel disco suits to an orchestral version of ELO, which is the kind of Lawrence Welk I used to see!

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  7. "We are older now, we are wiser, we know when to judge and when the fuck not to." AMEN

    I'm reading this at work (don't judge) and since I work for The Man, I can't see videos. I feel very left out :)

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  8. I love you more each day :) I too hated L.W.,still do. I was forced to watch him and other shows and they leave a bad taste in my mouth.Oooh birds,any bird any where.They never fail to make me smile even my little mousy sparrows.What Jill said. Have a lovely day! Please say hello to my chickens for me dear...

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  9. SJ- It is as true as true.

    Angella- I have no idea. Let's wait and see...
    You're still pretty young yet, honey.
    I hear there are AVID birders in NYC.

    Denise- You know what I'm talking about.

    Asheville Cabbie- I think he was probably a dirty old man. I just read online yesterday that Joanne Castle was arrested for child molestation. Can that be true? GAWD. And she was my favorite performer on that show.

    Steve Reed- It was a confusing time, I'll tell you that. We went from one planet to another in an incredibly short time. I'm still pondering it.

    Jill- Yep. I am opinionated as hell but I try not to judge too much. Well, except for Republican politicians. Those I freely judge.

    Mary i- Your chickens are well, I think. I'm about to go feed them some grapes. Another show we watched on Saturday nights when I was a child was the Jackie Gleason show which was actually, pretty genius. Did you watch that one?

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  10. The endurance of the family to watch Lawrence Welk took more than it did for Shackleton's expedition. I hated the whole thing, especially the polka which makes me cringe to even think about.

    But Janis, Jim, The Stones, Dylan, Jimi, Floyd were my saviors, listening to far away radio stations with the little transistor held to my ear after the parents had gone to bed. I countered the Lawrence Welk crap and the Billy Graham brimstone by rock and roll.

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  11. Syd- It was SO cringeworthy, wasn't it?
    And yes, yes, YES on what you said about "our" music. Saved my life.

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