Friday, March 3, 2017

birthdays

In winter's hibernation, things slow and drip and dry up ... and there are birthdays.

My stepmother reached 92, I believe, and informed me, with telephone evidence provided, that the toilets in her house had begun moaning. There was no need to touch the apparatus ... it/they moaned without interference or inspiration and she couldn't get to sleep. So there was the adventure of the moaning toilet(s). Fixed now.

My younger son reached 23 and is gearing up for a National Guard two-week-exercise followed by a 8-9 month deployment in one of America's undeclared wars against inadequately-defined terrorism. Now and then, the reality of it washes over me and, like other parents, perhaps, I feel a desire to kill anyone responsible for supporting a war in which he might be hurt. A hypocrite when it suits me? You bet.

My 77th birthday is next week and with winter inching by, I reread books I find pleasant (Thomas Perry adventure for one) and rewatch TV serials I like ("Peaky Blinders" eg.) because the people don't require knicker-twisting and yet can make me cry or laugh from time to time. In the obituaries, a nice guy who liked to be known as "Grumpy" because his deceased wife had dubbed him that died himself. I knew and liked him. He was up in his 90's. Patches of desire to take on and write about a topic come and go, but are so sporadic that I hesitate to re-don those threads. There is sunshine that gets tantalizingly warm from time to time, but it's still winter ... I'm old enough to know that. I use a nebulizer twice a day and remember like a mental bookend the fortune teller who said I would die between 83 and 85. The closer it comes, the more sensible it sounds, though I do perk up when a good conversation gets going. So much of the conversation centers on the latest U.S. president, Donald Trump ... what a shameful, shaming guy ... he is, in some part of me, a 'man worth dying for.' I apologize to my kids, but there's nothing I can do about it. They will have to confront the assholes I did not.

2 comments:

  1. "We Didn't Start The Fire"

    Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray
    South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio
    Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, Television
    North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe

    Rosenbergs, H-Bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
    Brando, The King And I, and The Catcher In The Rye
    Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen
    Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye

    We didn't start the fire
    It was always burning
    Since the world's been turning
    We didn't start the fire
    No we didn't light it
    But we tried to fight it

    Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev
    Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc
    Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron
    Dien Bien Phu Falls, Rock Around the Clock
    Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team
    Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland
    Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev
    Princess Grace, Peyton Place, Trouble in the Suez

    We didn't start the fire
    It was always burning
    Since the world's been turning
    We didn't start the fire
    No we didn't light it
    But we tried to fight it

    Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac
    Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, Bridge On The River Kwai
    Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball
    Starkweather, Homicide, Children of Thalidomide...

    Buddy Holly, Ben-Hur, Space Monkey, Mafia
    Hula Hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go
    U-2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy
    Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo

    We didn't start the fire
    It was always burning
    Since the world's been turning
    We didn't start the fire
    No we didn't light it
    But we tried to fight it

    Hemingway, Eichmann, Stranger in a Strange Land
    Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion
    Lawrence of Arabia, British Beatlemania
    Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson

    Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British Politician Sex
    J.F.K. blown away, what else do I have to say?

    We didn't start the fire
    It was always burning
    Since the world's been turning
    We didn't start the fire
    No we didn't light it
    But we tried to fight it

    Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again
    Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock
    Begin, Reagan, Palestine, Terror on the airline
    Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan
    Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide
    Foreign debts, homeless Vets, AIDS, Crack, Bernie Goetz
    Hypodermics on the shores, China's under martial law
    Rock and Roller Cola wars, I can't take it anymore

    We didn't start the fire
    It was always burning
    Since the world's been turning
    We didn't start the fire
    But when we are gone
    It will still burn on and on and on and on
    And on and on and on and on...

    We didn't start the fire
    It was always burning
    Since the world's been turning
    We didn't start the fire
    No we didn't light it
    But we tried to fight it

    We didn't start the fire
    It was always burning
    Since the world's been turning
    We didn't start the fire
    No, we didn't light it
    But we tried to fight it

    We didn't start the fire
    It was always burning
    Since the world's been turning
    We didn't start the fire
    No, we didn't light it
    But we tried to fight it

    Billy Joel

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  2. Namo Gautama Buddhaya.

    ReplyDelete