O happy day

As TGOTS mentioned in her post, we are both about to bail for a few days of, as the lovely Karen Carpenter so oddly put it, “Christmasing.”

I’m generally sort of cranky about Christmas in the weeks leading up to it; my family is big, there are a lot of presents to buy and wrap and mail, all that shopping doesn’t fit with my general anti-consumption mindset, and so forth. But once in a while I get a fleeting moment of genuine glee, an actual bit of pre-Christmas happiness wafting through my heart.

I got one of those moments last night. We were socked with snow this weekend, with a good 18 inches landing on our lives. Last night was trash night, so I had to shovel a route for the trash cans to travel down our long driveway (which we generally ignore in winter, parking at the end close to the road). So there I was, in the dark, alone, just my breath and the scrape of the shovel and the thwump of the snow — and I looked up, and my neighbors’ houses were twinkling and colorful, and the stars were out, and the night was crisp, and I just beamed. “Christmas!” I said aloud, to no one in particular. Then back to the shoveling.

I found more joy this morning, courtesy of the radio. Not Christmas music, but two happymaking songs: “Dancing Queen” — which will forever take me back to the living room of my dorm, junior year of college, and an incredible lip-synch performance by three of my dearest friends at our dorm talent show, an episode that deserves fuller description at some later point — and “Up Around the Bend.” The latter just makes me happy in the way that most CCR songs make me happy, and I drove along in the sun and the snow and it’s my last day of work before a nice few days off and — well. Christmas has its moments.

TGOTS and I will be back next week, unless she gets itchy while she’s with her family. My family has dial-up, so I’ll be blogging only in my mind.

Over the river and through the woods

Friends, tis Christmastime, and both MK and I will be traveling in the coming days. HENCE: some sporadic posting for the next little bit.

I’m hitting the road first thing tomorrow, so I thought I’d post about what I will be listening to, music-wise. (I will also have some books on CD in tow, as well as some awesome podcasts like Downstage Center and BackStory.)

Here is my wintry/Christmas-y mix for 2009:

Baby It’s Cold Outside (Lady Antebellum)

White Winter Hymnal (Fleet Foxes)

The Snow It Melts the Soonest (Sting)

Hazy Shade of Winter (Bangles)

Donde Esta Santa Claus? (Guster)

January Wedding (Avett Brothers)

Houses on the Hill (Whiskeytown)

For the Beauty of the Earth (Beth Nielsen Chapman)

Winter Song (Sara Bareilles)

Please Daddy Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas (Decemberists)

A Snowflake Fell (Glasvegas)

Rudy (The Be Good Tanyas)

I Wanna Drive the Zamboni (Martin Zellar)

Buffalo (Kathleen Edwards)

Red Ribbon Foxes (A Fine Frenzy)

River (Indigo Girls)

Beautiful World (Dierks Bentley/Patty Griffin)

Christmas Is Going to the Dogs (Eels)

Happy times and safe travels, all.

Really want to know you

When it comes to singin’ pop songs ’bout g-d, there are a few roads you can go by: the rockin’ road (see: Norman Greenbaum), the whimsical road (see: Joan Osborne), or the lovely road. See George Harrison.

Growing up, I was never all that aware of Harrison’s early solo music. Oh, I did hear “My Sweet Lord” plenty, on the radio, and did not like it. But I was more taken with his 1987 release Cloud Nine — the first cassette I bought with my own money! “Got My Mind Set On You” was an inescapable and deeeee-lightful FM hit in those days, and “When We Was Fab” struck me as a moving tribute to an era I was just beginning to appreciate. To be honest, I couldn’t tell you a single other song that was on that cassette, despite the fact that I loved it so well it bore a crack down the front, right across George’s mullet and mirrored sunglasses.

It wasn’t until I started dating my fella that I heard more of George’s early work — specifically, All Things Must Pass. This is just a beautiful recording, rambling from perky to pensive and  back again, and some of the songs have become favorites of mine. There are love songs that I get all caught up in, to the point where I want to get married just so I can have one of those songs play at the wedding, and then I remember that they’re mostly love songs to g-d — or, more accurately, to Krishna.

Good times, the early ’70s, when you could score a pop hit with a song about your Hindu enlightenment-seeking. Not so good when you then got sued for unconsciously copying “He’s So Fine,” a hit from the previous decade. But now that I think about it, maybe George’s act was more conscious tribute than unconscious plagiarism. After all, the lyrics to the Chiffons hit could easily fit in one of his own goddish hits: “He’s so fine/Gotta be mine … We gotta get together/The sooner the better/I just can’t wait, I just can’t wait/To be held in his arms.”

If I had a million dollars

1. I would pay off all the debt I accumulated while accumulating useless degrees.
2. I would establish college funds for my niece and nephew and a retirement fund for my parents.
3. I would knock out the dining room windows, put in French doors, and build a pretty deck on the back of my house.
4. I would set aside enough to take a vacation someplace tropical every winter.
5. I would buy a cabin on a certain lake in Maine. And a boat.
6. I would build a time machine to take me back to college and remind me how exactly I first heard this song and learned of the Barenaked Ladies. I half think the a cappella group with all the dreamy boys performed it — that is how I discovered a lot of music in college, whilst swooning – but maybe I heard it on the radio. Can’t recall.
7. I would buy five extra copies of the Gordon album, so that when I went back in my time machine to early 2001 and offered my copy to MamaKitt’s sister, I would not then be embarrassed by finding it impossible to locate.
8. I would buy you a green dress. But not a real green dress. That’s cruel.

Pat your own

[Holly Jolly Burl Ives Count: 5,692,088]

Summer of 1988. On the twisty mountain roads outside Rangeley, Maine. Squashed in the backseat of the family station wagon. Probably just pulled up the eyelids of my sleeping sister. (You know, for sport.) Walkman playing a cassette of songs taped off the radio. Deciding Pat Benatar’s “All Fired Up” — of all things — was like whoa, deep:

Now I believe there comes a time

When everything just falls in line

We live and learn from our mistakes

The deepest cuts are healed by faith.

WORD. I so copied those lyrics into my diary.

For a couple of summers when I was in junior high and high school, my family would rent a cabin in Rangeley — a lovely town in the mountains of western Maine. It is the kind of vacation that I would now find enchanting: all trees and lakes; days full of canoeing and swimming and sitting on porches reading books.

As a surly 13- or 14-year-old? I was rather less than enchanted. In fact, I was downright bratty about the whole enterprise. I KNOW YOU WILL BE SHOCKED.

OH you HORRIBLE parents, taking me away from my friends! How AWFUL of you to shut me up in the woods when there is a Boy of Interest at home! How RIDICULOUS for you to think that UNSPOILED NATURE and FAMILY TOGETHERNESS were important! Pfft.

Yes, it is true, I had a wretched adolescence, thanks to parents who wanted the best for me and my sisters, and worked hard to give us a week of fresh air and good clean fun. I will bear the scars of that horror forever.

Anyway, how strange it is that this one little song — not even one of the ones you’re apt to think of when you think (as I know you do) of the Benatar oeuvre — can conjure up such a specific stretch of road. It’s a song I have probably heard no more than two or three times since the late ‘80s, and yet when it came on the radio this morning my first thought was 1988 OUTSIDE RANGELEY WALKMAN WROTE LYRICS IN DIARY.

Pat, if you only knew.

PS It is apparently Riding in Cars with Sisters Day! Who knew?

If you insist on knowing my bliss

Oh, Hall. Oh, Oates. What a magical duo you made. And still I’m not sure which is which, when pressed.

Two things about “Your Kiss Is On My List”: I always think the lyric is “your kiss is on my lips” — which is only logical, right? I sing it wrong, I just wrote it wrong and had to correct it, it is just forever wrong in my brain.

Second, these dapper gents for me are forever associated with one of my sisters, who was in her prime in the ’80s. The music thrilled her: Hall and Oates, Corey Hart, Bryan Adams. She wanted to be a singer, so she would often launch into their songs very earnestly. And I lost track of the number of times she played the beginning of “Heaven” on our piano. But at other times, we goofed along to the music — mostly on long car rides in the back of the Chevy Suburban. I have a mental snapshot of being at a gas station and singing “I Wear My Sunglasses at Night,” mugging our way through it and cracking each other up.

Lord, we had fun. And she was so ’80s! I was forever giving her these beautiful, beautiful pieces of jewelry, mostly huge plastic earrings in pink and aqua and violet hues the likes of which you rarely find today. She has of course moved on in her sartorial selections. But some part of my brain is still programmed to shop that way. Just a week or two ago, I saw a gigantic, gaudy bracelet and picked it up with her in mind. I had to say, out loud to Junior, “Oh wait, it’s not the ’80s anymore, and your auntie doesn’t dress like this.” I bought her something much more practical instead — but it’s still purple.

A tangled stay-be-my-baby web

Oh it’s a momentous day. I have untangled a cobweb that’s lingered in the back of my brain for years and years and years.

To wit:

1. Eddie Money references “Ronnie” in “Take Me Home Tonight.” Ronnie Spector commences to sing, “Be my little baby …” Good times roll.

2. Jackson Browne and crew bust into “Stay” in “The Load-out,” and there’s the fab falsetto that I always thought was him but is apparently guitarist David Lindley. Whoever is singing, in my mind it is also a tribute to Ronnie.

3. Eddie Money and Jackson Browne and Ronnie and “Ronnie” never fail to summon each other’s songs for me,and also bring vague thoughts of Dirty Dancing to mind.

That is because — and this will surprise no one who has the proper regard for DD that I pretend to have — both “Stay” and “Be My Baby” are on the soundtrack. (“Stay,” of course, being performed not by Ronnie nor any other woman of that era, but by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs.)

I feel so relieved to have figured this out. Incomprehensible post notwithstanding.

Wonderland

Woke today to find the best kind of snow falling from the sky: light and flaky, accumulating gently on the frozen ground, turning everything — even the suburban sprawl and urban blight through which I make my way to work — charmingly frosted and picturesque.

The snow and, I would guess, an accompanying general reluctance to commute any earlier than necessary, made my drive to the office uncommonly muted and peaceful today. The radio gods were in on the serenity plan too: I was treated to a lovely piano rendition of “Angels We Have Heard on High” on one station; heard a little James Taylor on another. I kept the volume low, hugged my coffee cup, and enjoyed the ride.

Then, about fifteen minutes into my twenty-minute drive, things changed. Friends, I succumbed once more to the Gaga.

Scanning as always, the channel changed just as I realized I was hearing the opening of “Bad Romance.” I jammed the scan button, skipped back a few notches, and there was the Lady herself. Down went the coffee cup, up went the volume, and a-singing and a-car-dancing went The Girl on the Swing. Tis no longer a question or a secret shame: I cannot pass up a Lady Gaga tune.

I have little doubt that, when the time comes that I have moved on from my current fair city, I will remember Lady Gaga as the sugary pop soundtrack of my time here. Just as a Hanson, Sugar Ray, or Fastball song takes me back to my time living with MamaKitt in Portland, or as Ricky Martin makes me think of the Minneapolis years, the good Lady will, I imagine, forever recall my current city. And I will remember the gently falling snow, being stuck behind a city bus a few blocks from my office — and TOTALLY rocking out in my Hyundai to “Bad Romance.”

Gaga still kind of annoys me, but there is no denying my enjoyment of her tunes. “Bad Romance” I think is not quite so good as “Poker Face,” even though (or because) it diverges rather too little from that earlier hit. It’s weird, it’s grandiose, it would be right at home in any number of Broadway shows. It’s a little bit sinister, too (which, I’m convinced anew after reading this interview with Angela Lansbury and Stephen Sondheim, is a quality of some of the best musicals). And SO MUCH FUN to sing in the car.

Don’t judge me! I defy you to resist the Lady and the poppy crack she peddles. Embrace the age of Gaga!

I closed my eyes and I slipped away

This is a story about losing your virginity. Not my virginity, to be precise. Actually, it’s a story about being drunk late at night in a bar with a couple of people, one of whom is a woman you went to college with but didn’t meet until after you had both graduated and moved to the city, and having Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” come on the sound system, and having her close her eyes, raise her hands in the air, smile, and shout, “I lost my virginity to this song!”

Yes she did. And all the patrons in Charlie’s that night knew it.

I spent a good two to three years in my mid-twenties getting drunk. I always think of it as an era when I made up for lost time. After all, I never acted out in any realm as a teenager; while TGOTS was fooling around with boys in cars, I was more likely to be home watching The Golden Girls. During and right after college I did drink a bit, developing a liking for beer and an intolerance of tequila. But I really ramped things up when I moved to the big city. I worked at a non-profit with a lot of other young, single people. Great gangs of us would venture out after work, intent on squandering our meager earnings on pool games and beer.

I will neither confirm nor deny that there were episodes involving handstands in a crowded bar, public vomiting, and four-mile walks home after midnight because the subway had stopped running and the money necessary for a cab had been spent.

Oh, I’m not proud. Not proud at all. In fact, it got to the point where I almost thought I had a problem. But then I grew up a little, and settled down a little, and handstands in bars seemed somehow less appealing, and things normalized.

Still, I harbor some fondness for that stretch of time. “More Than a Feeling” brings it back to me, as does Nelly’s classic, nuanced love song, “It’s Getting Hot in Here, So Take Off All Your Clothes.” There are other pub songs with pounding beats whose titles I can’t summon, but that also act as triggers that send me right back there. The Drunkocene Epoch. Don’t try this at home.

I could be hurtful, I could be purple

One of my best recent memories of my siblings (two of them, anyway) took place the weekend of my grandmother’s funeral.

I know: Inappropriate. But so it is.

The week of my grandmother’s death a year and a half ago, and the weekend we all assembled for her funeral and burial, were horribly sad. She had had Alzheimer’s for about a decade, and had hardly known any of us in all that time, so our sadness was mostly about the cruel unfairness of that wretched disease than about the loss of our grandmother — we had lost her, for all intents and purposes, long ago.

Sad as the whole thing was, there were some truly wonderful moments that weekend. Old men in coveralls who had worked on my grandfather’s farm decades ago showing up at the funeral home to pay their respects. My uncle’s first wife, an employee at the funeral home, helping my dad and his siblings through the whole awful process. The deeply moving eulogy my great-uncle gave, this stoic Yankee tearing up in grief. The burial in a little family cemetery in the Maine woods, sun shining through the pines, laying my grandmother to rest by her husband and second son.

And, at some point in the weekend, driving too fast through the countryside with one of my sisters and my brother, the three of us singing Mika’s ridiculous, joyous “Grace Kelly” as loud and dramatically as we could. Inappropriate, I guess, but probably cathartic; a small moment that I still think of all the time, and imagine I’ll remember always.