Some Quick Shots

We were visiting some friends of ours, Don McPhereson and his wife Jean. Don was playing a Matt Monro cd and I remarked that I didn’t know another person who even knew who Matt Monro was. That led to a discussion of other singers and our likes and dislikes, John Gary and Vic Damone and Frank Sinatra among them. He and I seem to have very similar tastes. But then Jean asked me how I liked Elvis and I told her I thought the day the music died was the first day he stepped on stage. I don’t think she cared much for my remark.

A few years ago on the news we saw a 92-year-old lady who had walked across the country from California to D.C. to show her displeasure with what was going on in the Oval Office. She was interviewed about how she had withstood the rigors of her walk and she said, “The days go by and the miles go by, and before you know it you’re there.” Wow! There’s a statement that applies to just about everything.

A show from the past that I really enjoyed was Ed. For those of you who don't remember it, Ed was a lawyer whose practice was in a bowling alley he owned, and he had an on-again off-again romance going with a local school teacher. I remember the last episode and the feeling it left me with. It was the perfect story of love lost, love pursued, love gained, and it ended with that curious wedding and the final words from Ed about how desire and achievement sometime come together in a serendipitous union. And he was lucky enough to have such happen to him. I cried like a baby.

In perusing one of my journals from 1993, I found this about the rain we used to be subjected to in western New York. In nearly every summer entry from that year I mention either the rain falling or the threat of rain to come. On the last day of April, 1993, I had this to say about the weather: “I think I’ll be glad to get done with April. According to T. S. Eliot, ‘April is the cruelest month.’ I agree, although in western New York we get a whole lot of cruel months, months that just break your heart because you assume they’ll be nicer than they really are, just like a woman that promises with the eyes and then doesn’t come through, sort of a climatic prick-tease.”

I think often about the relativity of time. I found this that sort of reinforces what I feel about time, the old thief, from Crying Heart Tattoo by David Martin: “When I was twenty, I thought forty was old, was when you sort of start to uncrank and settle down and go to church and wait to die. Whatever age you are, I have observed, someone twice your age seems old. When you’re four, eight seems incredibly old and worldly. When you’re ten, twenty represents that exotic state of adulthood. And when you’re twenty, forty seems old—just as when you’re forty, eighty seems old. I suppose the opposite is true, too, someone half you age seems incredibly young; I know that, now, twenty-five-year-olds strike me as being childlike. I’ll tell you something else I have observed: The older women I slept with when I was in my thirties (although, come to think of it, our liaisons were marked by a distinct lack of sleep) now are collecting Social Security. The only observation I can make that’s ghastlier than that one is this one: By the time the younger women I now sleep with (and we do a lot of that) are old enough to hold a civilized conversation, I’ll be collecting Social Security.”