Except for the unexpected two and a half hour nap this afternoon, today was one of the fuller days I’ve had in over a week. I didn’t mean to sleep for that long, really, I didn’t. I finished watching part four of “The Invasion of the Daleks” and closed my eyes for what was only going to be ten minutes or so. Imagine my utter surprise when I woke up and it was almost half past six. Well, so much for today being the day to get back on my normal schedule.

I’m quite pleased with all I accomplished today, the two most important tasks being submitting paperwork for unemployment and making calls to people I knew through my former employer. It would be fair to say that across the board, everyone with whom I spoke was beyond puzzled about the turn of events and wondered if the company was up against more than just simple cutbacks. I sort of dished with one of them, the wife of a customer with whom I’ve always had a connection. Actually, she wanted to dish more than I did and so I did, but very cautiously, never forgetting what I said could get back to the factory. Not that I think she would do that, but strange things are known to happen with gossip. All in all, it was strangely uplifting, to speak with these guys I’ve known for almost four years, to hear their bewilderment, their total dismay I lost my job and in the process, lost the one person they could count on to get things done and done correctly the first time around, in most cases.

Inspiration struck me while talking with one of them: I very honestly told him the (wo) had taught me a lot in the time we had together and that we had a great run, but in the end, the universe was telling me in its own mysterious way that it was time for me to move on, because in the end, the universe and its plan for me, for you, for the guy down the street is much larger than any of us can begin to fathom. It’s so much more than a job, a relationship, how much money is in the bank. It’s more than all of us in the world combined.

Yeah, I know. It’s mumbo-jumbo, child of the universe crap and all that, but I sincerely believe it’s true, despite the cynical and more practical side I show to the public. And although I don’t think Max Ehrmann, the author of The Desiderata necessarily had in mind the picture I’ve used to accompany this post, but I really dig it much more than the frou-frou examples I found. This was found at 8images; click on the image for a larger version.

One of the guys actually asked me if I would be moving to be closer to Star and Bar and I answered him more honestly than I thought I would. My options are so open right now that it would be quite easy for me to pick up stakes and get out. As of tomorrow, I’m two years into my five year plan and time, she’s not slowin’ down. I’ll confab with the sister while I’m there and see what she thinks honestly about the pragmatics of the scheme, the express wish we lived closer notwithstanding. One of the big roadblocks is the real estate market and how fast I could unload my condo. Bettie P has suggested renting it out; the sister’s expressed the same idea. But with all the painting I’ve just done and finally liking the villa again, I’m not sure that’s the thing I want to be doing at the moment.

So, I’ll leave you with two lines from Glenn Frey’s song, “Part of Me, Part of You,” which I’m slightly obsessed with at the moment, sort of like when I heard it for the first time in “Thelma and Louise” and then a few years later, when it was, very briefly, the song that * and I considered ours.

We can never know about tomorrow
Still we have to choose which way to go

Does it ever happen to you that there’s a particular singer you absolutely adore and can no more imagine a life without that singer’s music than you can a life without, oh, I don’t know…your head? Eventually adoration interruptus takes place and the singer you believed would play in your walkman/CD player/tape deck for the rest of your natural life is shoved to the back burner for a year, two years, maybe more, like, well, more years than you’d like to admit.

Then one day, you’re listening to a k-RAY-zee mixed CD you’ve burned that includes one song performed by this particular musician and you’re thrown back to a particular time (or times) in your life as if you’re almost reliving them, but as an observer and not as a participant. You remember peeling up the driveway and out to the road, squealing the tires because you’re so angry with your parents for what seemed a life-shattering incident at the time, but now, some years later, you realize it totally wasn’t.

Or perhaps you remember pulling out of a certain midwestern city on a Greyhound bus, earphones clamped to your ears, your eyes filled with tears because you’re leaving the one person in the world you think understands you and loves you for you. Later on, this same artist would play a huge part of the soundtrack to a deeper relationship with that person when it was still in its infancy. Maybe there was a particular birthday you don’t remember as being especially noteworthy, except one of the gifts you received was the newest album by this very much adored singer.

How about the time in college when you might have been poking around a cheesy chain record store in a little podunk mall in a little podunk northeastern town and happening upon the singer’s first album. You’re very green in the admiration you feel, for that’s what it is at this point: admiration. Adoration is still a ways off. You know you don’t have the cash to buy it…but you do have a credit card. Of course, the credit card is linked to your parents’ account and you wonder if your father will ask why you’re spending the little bit of money you might have on something as frivolous as a CD. But you throw caution to the wind and snap down the credit card and the CD (still packaged in the old-school cardboard boxes).

Of course, by this time, you actually own a CD player…very much not like the time the summer previous when you bought a new CD by another performer on your short list of absolute favorites and had to buy the cassette tape, too because you didn’t have a CD player yet.

And then, the years pass, music comes and goes with a few performers cementing themselves onto your psyche in more than a crumbling and weeds-growing-through-the-cracks cement type way. Most music becomes transitory, brief obsessions whose fuses are burnt out as quickly as they start.

Then one day, you’re listening to a k-RAY-zee mixed CD you’ve burned that includes one song performed by this particular musician and all you want to do is immerse yourself in the music they’ve recorded for days. You want to drown yourself in it, in the words, in the music, in the memories. The singer is brilliant and quirky and has a beautifully strange and unique voice, as well as a way with words not many have and you realize you love this performer as much now as you did then, maybe even a little more because life has taught you more than you’d like to know sometimes. It’s a bittersweet reunion almost, for it speaks to you as you once were and you can never again regain the you from then.

…you know who you are.

Once upon a time
Once when you were mine
I remember skies
Reflected in your eyes
I wonder where you are
I wonder if you
Think about me
Once upon a time
In your wildest dreams

Once the world was new
Our bodies felt the morning dew
That greets the brand new day
We couldn’t tear ourselves away
I wonder if you care
I wonder if you still remember
Once upon a time
In your wildest dreams

And when the music plays
And when the words are
Touched with sorrow
When the music plays
I hear the sound
I had to follow
Once upon a time
Once beneath the stars
The universe was ours
Love was all we knew
And all I knew was you
I wonder if you know
I wonder if you think about it
Once upon a time
In your wildest dreams

And when the music plays
And when the words are
Touched with sorrow
When the music plays
And when the music plays
I hear the sound
I had to follow
Once upon a time

Once upon a time
Once when you were mine
I remember skies
Mirrored in your eyes
I wonder where you are
I wonder if you
Think about me
Once upon a time
In your wildest dreams
In your wildest dreams
In your wildest dreams

–The Moody Blues, “In Your Wildest Dreams”

Do you?

This time of year is understandably difficult for me and will only continue through May, until the anniversary of my dad’s death passes for the second time. And as I did then, I’ve put myself on a pretty much exclusive aural diet of KaTe Bush, because…well, because. That’s for another post, methinks.

Although I’ve been giving some serious thought to trawling through the Strange Cousin Susan archives from spring 2006 and reposting them, I don’t think I will. It’s more than a little maudlin and would prove of no great value to me, nor to anyone else, although I’m of the mind some of my best writing was done then.

Here. Instead of that, let me reminisce very briefly on an exchange I had with my father the week before he died. He was lying in his bed, pretty much dead and gone but for the shouting, when he called me in. “Mickey Glitter, I need to write a sales order. Can you get me the form?”

This short scene plays over and over in my head and has for almost two years now. This, and a handful of other such times were the last I saw of my dad as I’d known him for thirty-five years. And as such, they are precious to me like almost nothing else in my life is. They are more precious to me than the Rolex watch, the Antarctic certificates, the Navy ribbons…certainly, memories are not tangible; they cannot be held or worn or looked at. They are, as KaTe’s song says, moments time has given as a gift to those who will survive.

But they are much more than that…no one can ever take them away and so I’ll have them for a lifetime. The watch may break. It may get lost or stolen. The pictures may be damaged somehow. The memories, although their clarity may fade over time, will always be in my head. The good memories of that last week continue to comfort me. The bad memories of that last week continue to haunt me. But regardless of comforting or haunting, I never want to lose them.

Some moments that I’ve had

Some moments of pleasure

I think about us lying

Lying on a beach somewhere

I think about us diving

Diving off a rock, into another moment

The case of George the Wipe

Oh God I can’t stop laughing

This sense of humour of mine

It isn’t funny at all

Oh but we sit up all night

Talking about it

Just being alive

It can really hurt

And these moments given

Are a gift from time

On a balcony in New York

It’s just started to snow

He meets us at the lift

Like Douglas Fairbanks

Waving his walking stick

But he isn’t well at all

The buildings of New York

Look just like mountains through the snow

Just being alive

It can really hurt

And these moments given

Are a gift from time

Just let us try

To give these moments back

To those we love

To those who will survive

And I can hear my mother saying

“Every old sock meets an old shoe”

Isn’t that a great saying?

“Every old sock meets an old shoe”

Here come the Hills of Time

Hey there Maureen,

Hey there Bubba,

Dancing down the aisle of a plane,

‘S Murph, playing his guitar refrain,

Hey there Teddy,

Spinning in the chair at Abbey Road,

Hey there Michael,

Do you really love me?

Hey there Bill,

Could you turn the lights up?

©1993 Kate Bush Music Ltd.