Candy girl

 “Whenever the devil harasses you, seek the company of men or drink more, or joke and talk nonsense, or do some other merry thing. Sometimes we must drink more, sport, recreate ourselves, and even sin a little to spite the devil, so that we leave him no place for troubling our consciences with trifles. We are conquered if we try too conscientiously not to sin at all. So when the devil says to you: do not drink, answer him: I will drink, and right freely, just because you tell me not to.”
― Martin Luther 

Now this is advice I can follow, my man Martin.  No problemo.  Okay, okay, I drink root beer and just sip a little bit of the happy juice to avoid taking the off-ramp to Barf City, but the "sport, recreate and even sin a little" (a little? #Clears throat# You want to define "a little"? -- our definitions may vary)  I can definitely go for. Anyway,  it's always something.  God didn't give us life just so we could mope, look down at the floor and sigh.  We should be like pixies dancing on a leaf in a ray of sunshine and enjoy our flash of light between the two great darks.

“Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall."
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 “A person who does not regard music as a marvelous creation of God must be a clodhopper indeed."
― Martin Luther 

"I want to be pure in heart, but I like to wear my purple dress."
―Anne Morrow Lindbergh

 This may seem like a frivolous post, but reality is tough and often disappointing, sometimes bitterly so, so from time to time you need to break out of your harness, kick down the stall door and make a dash for freedom, exulting in living, simply being alive.  You'll be back under the yoke soon enough.  There's no escaping that.

 

A raw gray, stormy day, the wind driving the rain at a steep angle into the thrashing trees. What happened to summer? Stuck in the house, wearing a sweater and crossing my arms against the cold curling around the windows and seeping under the doors, I have plenty of time to think, time to grow melancholy, to remember, regret and wish.
 
Deep in our hidden heart
Festers the dull remembrance of a change...
~ Matthew Arnold 

Life is first boredom, then fear.

Whether or not we use it, it goes,

And leaves what something hidden from us chose.
~ Philip Larkin 

I often give way to self-pity.

“Do I deserve this? I suppose I must.

I wouldn’t be here otherwise. Was there   

a moment when I actually chose this?

I don’t remember, but there could have been.”   

What’s wrong about self-pity, anyway?
~ Elizabeth Bishop

Who would want to be a stay-at-home mom?

 Or as they used to say, a homemaker.  You are not supposed to want this.  I don't know why.  It used to be considered the happiest life. 

"The most disturbing picture since the Mona Lisa"

 

Les mecs...

 

Happy Anniversary

 

My grandparents were married for 68 years before my grandfather passed away.  They were fruitful and multiplied, producing children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  And isn't that what it's all about?  Everything else is just static.

My baby-boomer parents got married years later in life than did my grandparents so my grandparents had years more of life together than it is likely that my parents will.  I've often wondered whether it is better to spend your early adult years checking out the world, having various adventures, trying different things, experiencing the hedonistic life, the ascetic life, the gregarious life, the contemplative life, and so on, or whether it is more rewarding to find a good person that you have deep affection for as early a you can and just make your own little universe together, creating and raising a family and letting the rest of the world go by.  I've never been able to decide.

Just ask!

 

I took my uncle, the handsy one skilled in making up colorful lyrics to old pop ditties, to see his ophthalmologist the other day.  I didn't have to, someone else could have, but I wanted to put certain events firmly in the past and make it clear there were no lingering ill feelings.  I also had a reason of my own:  I'd read that a nightclub was having a big band night, featuring a locally famous band and I wanted to go.  I love big band music and the dances that go along with it.  El Jefe is overseas or he could have taken me.  But I knew my uncle loved dancing. Most men these days don't, and if they are willing they aren't skilled.  But my uncle loves to cut a rug.  He taught me swing dancing and foxtrot when I was knee high to Ginger Rogers.  He could also do the stroll and the twist and other later-era dances, right into the disco and house music of his own youth.  I can do all sorts of dances thanks to him.
So anyway, I told him I would drive him to his doctor's appointment if he made it for late in the afternoon and that after we would have a light dinner or something, marking time till the club opened and then go and dance, dance, dance! 
He was a bit surprised and seemed a little abashed, looking down and away for an instant before looking back at me and asking if I really wanted to go dancing with him.  I said, "I wouldn't ask if I didn't want to."  He looked earnestly at me, scanning my face.  I stuck my tongue out at him and he burst into a big grin, saying, "You scamp!" and started to hug me then stopped himself and pulled back.  So I hugged him.  He didn't respond until I called him the world's biggest goofball and then he hugged me too and we stood for a minute.
The day before his appointment, I asked him to pack a bag with a nice suit and accouterments and good dancing shoes and I would also put together an ensemble suitable for tripping the light fantastic.  I reserved a hotel room for us to change in and refresh after he had seen the doctor, and the next day off we went, both of us in a happy, anticipatory mood.  His visit with the eye doc produced better news than expected, so we had that to celebrate. 
I thought we could eat at an inexpensive chain restaurant, but my uncle asked the hotel concierge to recommend a first-class dining establishment and made reservations for us and treated me to a swell feed, as they would have said back in the Forties.  Then we took a walk through a nearby park that had a small lake where boats could be rented and enjoyed the sunset and a cool evening zephyr after the heat of the day.  Then it was back to the hotel to get into our dancing duds and we were off to the club, which was within walking distance.
The band did not disappoint, but the number of other dancers did.  Only a few couples ventured onto the dance floor.  But that gave us room to strut our stuff, which we certainly did. I had no idea my uncle could be so energetic.  But he had led an active life asea and ashore and he was not ready to

slow down. At one point, we did the Big Apple, incorporating into it the Charleston Swing, Truckin' and the Suzy Q moves. Other dancers paused to watch us and applauded. When we sat down to catch our breath, the waiter brought us a bottle of champagne, compliments of the band leader.  We toasted him and his players and when the band took five he came over and chatted with us, sharing a glass.
The evening ended with a series of slow dances that saw us the only couple on the floor.  After the last number, we went up to the band and thanked them all for providing such a wonderful evening.  My uncle bought them all drinks and when they finished them I was surprised to realize it was 2am and the club was closing.
It was too late to drive home and neither of us were really in any condition to do so, being both exhausted and a little tipsy.  So we walked back to the hotel along the deserted boulevard, stopping to look in a few shop windows, greeted the doorman, who had been dozing on a baggage cart in the lobby, got our room key from the sleepy front desk man, who also handed me a message from home, so I called and left a voice mail explaining all was well and we'd be home the next day.
Then we went to bed*

 

*

Oh, please.  Unc was on his best behavior and besides was so beat by the exertions of the evening that he was asleep the minute his head hit the pillow.  So was I.

XyWrite!

One of my relatives was what he called "a newsman" for a career spanning decades.  I have written about him before, recounting his adventures as a draftee army clerk in Viet Nam -- no Rambo he! -- where he got his start in journalism writing for a division newspaper, his only qualification being that he could type.

Anyway, after he retired he wanted to convert all his notes and article files from the obsolete format they were originally composed in to a modern word processor and I helped him with that, giving me a chance to listen to his stories of the long, long ago, which I absorbed with intense interest.

Anyway the second, the format his copy was originally written in was Xywrite.  I quote from Wikipedia: "XyWrite is a word processor for MS-DOS and Windows modeled on the mainframe-based ATEX typesetting system. Popular with writers and editors for its speed and degree of customization, XyWrite was in its heyday [1989~93] the house word processor in many editorial offices." 
After he passed away, I inherited a lot of his stuff that nobody else wanted and was headed for the dumpster.  This included his old boxes of notes, the original Xywrite floppy disks, big ones and small ones, and the converted files he and I had worked on, saved on thumb drives.  It pained me to see how little any of his close family cared for his life's work and as I picked through the remnants of his career I couldn't help hearing his voice in my head telling me of his early days as a police beat reporter covering bank robberies, warehouse heists and car chases, jewelry store shootouts....  Then on to politics and business as he matured in his profession.

Anyway the third, among things I found was this Xywrite instruction manual. It's no mere pamphlet but about 300 pages -- no lie!  It looks practically new but it has post-it notes scattered through it, and some lines of instruction highlighted here and there.  It looks like he needed to know how to do a certain few thing and a lot of the rest didn't concern him, so when he couldn't figure out how to do one of those things he would look it up in the manual, a case of, "When all else fails, read the instructions," I guess.

Anyway the fourth, I got a kind of uncanny feeling looking up what he had once looked up all those years ago, reading his margin notes, noting a 30-year-old coffee stain splotching a page, some cookie crumbs of the same vintage.  I felt as if he were right beside me looking at the pages with me, recalling how he figured out this newfangled computer stuff.  "Why can't I just use my old Royal Standard and hand in the copy like before?" I could almost hear him wondering.  And I wondered why his own children didn't have any interest in experiencing this one last opportunity to be close to him, to get a sense of his life before it all dissolved into the ever-receding past.