Category Archives: Music

September 2, 2013 · 0:00

A Fiery Mystery in Maine

Dum Dum Dum, Dump Dump Da Dom

Dum Dum Dum Dump Da Dom

Storm Clouds Comin' In

Storm Clouds Comin’ In

There are some songs that shouldn’t leave the shower.

There are some songs you just don’t want to have stuck in your head.

There are some songs that you just don’t want to have become part of your life.

 

Smoke on The Water is one of them.

Our little retirement/vacation cottage in Maine caught fire in July.  Spontaneously combusted.  Burst into flame for no reason anybody has ever figured out.

We weren’t there.  Nobody was there, luckily.

Even more luckily, it burned just a little bit.  The nice part, naturally.  Not the kitchen which I would have been happy to replace.  Not the bathroom that has pink 60s tiles with cute pink fishies.  Nope.

The nice part by the living room burned – the picture window that overlooks my masthead and “No Point.” [That’s the bit of land in the picture that looks like the first point.   John dubbed it “No Point” because from our angle it looks like a little point, but it isn’t a point at all.]

Interior ceiling

And even more luckily, it happened at lunch time, when a guy who was renting a cottage across the cove was relaxing outside with a sandwich, noticed smoke and called the fire department.  The fire chief, a volunteer, was working construction two doors down.  He arrived within minutes and the damage was kept down to mere pain in the ass status, as opposed to total devastation.  So we are lucky.  Very lucky.

Volunteer Firemen -- Risking their lives

Volunteer Firemen — Risking their lives

Nobody can figure out what happened.  There were no bad wires, no combustibles in the attic.  No evidence of vandalism.  Nada.  A flamin’ mystery.

Danielle exterior roof

We are still trying to find the person who reported it, so we can thank him.  He was renting a house across the way, and we don’t yet know who he was or how we can get in touch with him.

So John and I up here in Maine, looking at a different angle, trying to get work going on our house.  And saying thank you to a whole lot of folks.

Special thanks to the firefighters who arrived so quickly and saved our cute little place.  And to the mystery man who saw it and saved it.

Huge thanks also Doug and Renee, who have done so much in the immediate aftermath and ever since.

To Danielle and to Ella for breaking the bad news.  To Annette and Danielle for the pictures.

Thanks to Bill and Ken and the other insurance folks who are helping us rebuild.

And I’m thanking my lucky stars that it wasn’t worse.

 

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Filed under Huh?, Maine, Music, Mysteries

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August 5, 2013 · 0:00

Five Hundred Miles

Four years ago on a gray August day in Cleveland, nobody knew what to do with my sister Beth.  Except me.  I knew exactly what to do with her.  Nobody listened.  But I’m tellin’ you, I was right.

My sister Beth was a born wanderer.  Wherever she was, well, she wanted to be somewhere else.  For nearly 20 years following her divorce, Beth worked as a traveling nurse.  She criss-crossed the country, falling in love with California wine country, Albuquerque, Florida and points in between.  Just when she seemed to be settling in one place, she’d get that urge to go again.  And go she did.  She wanted to see all of America.  She said she never wanted to stop traveling.

So when Beth died due to complications of a stroke and kidney failure on August 11, 2009, I knew just what to do.

“She wanted to be cremated,” I informed my nephews, Dave and Chris.

“Why didn’t she tell us that?” Dave asked.  “Are you sure?  Nobody else has been cremated in our family.”

“Worms,” I responded simply.

They both laughed, realizing just how well I knew my sister.   Creepy crawly things?  Beth wouldn’t be caught dead with a worm anywhere near her, dead or alive.  Cremation it was.

“But what do we do with the ashes?” Chris wondered aloud.

That was a dilemma, because Beth hadn’t filled me in on the second half of the plan.

“Well, she really hated it when she could no longer travel,” I said.  “Let’s pour her into a cardboard box, poke a small hole in it, and tie it to a freight railroad car.  Let the train scatter her ashes across America.”

Sadly, and to my regret, Dave and Chris didn’t take me seriously.  They flatly refused to break all kinds of laws and get arrested for terrorism or littering by letting their mom wander like Marley’s ghost, only without the chains.

So poor Beth is still in Cleveland – the one city in America she lived in that she hated.

When I read this story about a woman who placed her husband’s ashes into a bottle and threw it into the ocean in Florida, where he got to visit parts of the state that I’m sure he never would have visited otherwise, well, I was delighted.  Finally, I’d found a different sort of after-death experience for Beth.  Naturally, I sent the story to my nephew Dave.

“But Lease,” he responded.  “She has a new great-granddaughter.  She’d never want to leave Cleveland now!”

Ellyana, Sitting in a Bug

Ellyana in a Bug

Beth never did like the beach much, anyway.

*     *     *

Thanks to Diatribes and Ovations for their post which inspired me to share this story with my Word Press Family.

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Filed under History, Music, Stupidity, Traffic

July 24, 2013 · 0:00

Birthday Board

There are some songs that just make you smile.  There are others that make you think of people.  There are some that get stuck in your head.

There are people like that too.  People who make you smile, who make you laugh, who make you hit yourself upside your own head and say to them in the most embarrassing moments,  “You’re Nuts!”

This song is like my son, Jacob.  He makes me smile, makes me feel good.  Sometimes he keeps me up all night swimming around in my head, thinking, “He’s Nuts!”  And you know what?  He IS!

Happy 22nd Birthday to my favorite longboarder (see Mom shudder.  Shudder Mom Shudder).

Holding up the Tower in 1999

Holding up the Leaning Tower in 1999

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Filed under Childhood Traumas, Family, Holidays, Humor, Music

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June 9, 2013 · 0:00

Wedding Poo-poo

Men really don’t understand the importance women put on their wedding day.  I mean, we can’t help it.  From the moment we are born, everyone is telling us that our wedding day will be the happiest day of our lives.  And since we tend to do it at a relatively young age, well, then that means life is all down from there.

So since there really is nothing left to live for, we should be excused from being a little bit weird in the planning.

For our wedding, we tried to be low key and keep craziness to a relative minimum.   John really didn’t care about anything except for the fact that he did not, I repeat, did not want those sappy “LOVE” stamps on our wedding invitations.  So we picked stamps that we both liked:

Arctic explorer stamps

Yes, we had pictures of Arctic Explorers on our wedding invitations.  Surprisingly, I did not hear a single joke about my being or becoming frigid.  Nope, nobody, not a soul commented on it.  [Had I gotten an invitation with that stamp on it, I would still be making jokes about it, 26 years later.  Our friends and family are way nicer than I am.]

There are a few things surrounding my wedding that I do feel bad about, though.

John and I got married in 1986 in September.  I feel guilty about the fact that it was really hot out that day.  John had wanted to get married in October, but that coincided with a big work project of mine, so I said no, we’ll do it in late September.  It’ll be very cool by September 20, I assured him.  It was approximately 180 degrees “cool.”  In many of our pictures, John is sweating bullets and I’m pretty sure he was not terrified of marrying me.  I don’t think.  Although it never occurred to me to ask him.

I also feel guilty about the fact that our church and our reception hall were in different states.  You see, we got married in the church where John’s parents had been married 41 years earlier.  It seemed like a good omen.  Plus it is a beautiful stone church.  I was game.  But it was a long way in between the two places.

 

wedding map

It was a loooooonnnnnggg way from A to B

Our reception was also in a really beautiful place.  Plus we could afford to rent it out on our tight budget.  It didn’t occur to us that the fact that the two places were a zillion miles apart might be a problem.  But we have good friends and they made the trek.  Family did too, but they had to.  They were family.

If it had been up to me, I also probably would have had regular music, but, remember, John and I have different tastes, and he chose the music.

 

Yes, we had a bagpiper, although not this one.  And John, who went to college in Scotland threatened to wear a kilt.  Having a piper was OK, though.  We didn’t know anybody in the neighborhood.

But we didn’t really demand much of our guests.  We wanted them to share our day, have a good time, and enjoy themselves and each other.

Isn’t that what most people want from their wedding guests?  Isn’t that why we invite them?

It would never have occurred to me to make other, more, well, personal requests.

Today I had lunch with my old friend Keily, who was one of my bridesmaids.  Her son recently got married in Brazil and she was showing me pictures of the festivities.  So it got me thinking about weddings, naturally, and about mine.

And then I happened upon this article about a bride who is asking way more of her guests than I certainly would have asked.  She want’s them to do a three-week colon cleanse before her wedding day so that they will all look their best.

“Health guru” to the stars Rainbeau Mars will soon tie the knot with Hollywood business manager Michael Karlin, and she’s making one huge request: Each of her guests must do a three-week cleanse before her Big Day.

According to an email from her publicist, “Rainbeau hopes that by requesting her guests try out a vegan, and subsequently live food diet for 21 days, everyone will look and feel their best for HER big day.”

So I’m going to stop feeling bad about making people drive so far and about the heat and the piper.  Because I stopped short of requiring bowel cleansing in my guests.  I was, apparently, the perfect bride.

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Filed under Childhood Traumas, Conspicuous consumption, Family, Humor, Music

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April 22, 2013 · 0:00

Earth Day/Birthday — The Recycled Edition

Today, April 22, is Earth Day!  It’s the 43nd Anniversary of the very first Earth Day.  Here for Angie of Childhood Relived (because I am her primary new source) is Walter Cronkite’s report on the first Earth Day, 1970:

It would also be my late sister Judy’s 61th birthday.

Whoever made the decision to turn Judy’s birthday into Earth Day chose wisely.  Judy was a born environmentalist and recycler.

On the first Earth Day, Judy was a new, very young mother who believed in saving the planet.  She was the first “environmentalist” I ever knew personally, and well, I thought she was nuts.  There was a recycling bin in her kitchen for as long as I can remember.  And this was back when recycling took effort.  She believed in gardens, not garbage, and she made life bloom wherever she was.

“I’ve got kids,” she’d say.  “It’s their planet too!”  

But years later, Judy took recycling to a whole different level when she helped people recycle themselves.  In the 1990s, Jude, who was then living in Florida, began working with the Homeless, assisting at shelters.   Then she actively began trying to help homeless vets find food, shelter and work — to enable them to jumpstart their lives.

When she died in early 2000, the American Legion awarded her honorary membership for her services to homeless vets.  A homeless shelter was named in her  honor.  So she’s still doing good works, my sister is.  That would make her wildly happy.

Jude also gave me the Beatles.  So it is very appropriate that they wrote a song for her.

You see, the night the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, it was MY turn to choose what we were going to watch.  And we were going to watch the second part of The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh starring Patrick McGoohan on the Wonderful Wide World of Disney.  My four (all older and MUCH cooler) siblings were furious with me.  But I was quite insistent.  You might even say that I threw a Class I temper tantrum over it, but I wouldn’t admit to that.  But hey, I was seven.  And it was my turn to choose.  Fair is fair, especially in a big family with only one TV.

Somehow, Judy talked me out of my turn.  She was always very persuasive.  Thanks Jude.

Hey Jude, Happy Earth Day-Birthday.

*     *     *

If this looks/sounds familiar, it’s because I recycled this post from last year.  Because you should never use fresh when you can reuse something already written.  And you can never get enough of “Hey Jude.”

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Filed under Family, Global Warming, History, Holidays, Humor, Music

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