Melsville

Everytime You Go Away

Alessandro


I took photographs of Emma at her boy, Alessandro’s party, but I missed the one I really wanted.  She and Alessandro are both dressed for a pool party; an Indiana Jones pool party.  She’s wearing a rose-printed one-piece bathing-suit, and he’s got on his Indiana Jones jacket and hat worn above a black and white Speedo.  They are kissing good-bye., an almost real good-bye.

I met Sando’s father in the parking-lot the next morning.  Both of us were hoping the other had taken a photograph because neither of us had.

Alessandro and Emma hadn’t been in the same class for almost a year,  but they never stopped being the best of friends.   They didn’t have to see each other to stay tight.  Alessandro and Emma just got each other, whatever that means for four-year-old kids. He was a big part of that life of her’s I never saw, her playground life. 

Many of Emma’s buddies are starting Kindergarten today, and we all thought he’d be one of them.   She’s in Pre-K., and she was already planning ways she’d get to hang out with her friends in that class.  On the playground,  during shared activities, while visiting the shared bathroom,  Emma was already making plans to hang out with these buddies.   She figured she’d be right next door to Bella, Sandro, Oliver and Charlotte; a great year lay ahead.

Just before not taking the picture, I’d found out that Sandro wouldn't be returning to Emma’s school; not at all.  While I dug around in my bag for my photographing phone,  I wondered what I’d tell Emma.

The bathing-beauty moment was the big good-bye.  In the last few days, they hugged in the hallway and waited for each other in the parking lot so they could walk into the building together.  She knows he’s not going to be around, and I wonder when she’s going to miss him.

Isaiah

In my head,  I’ve pieced together a movie of Liam and his best friend Isaiah during the last week of their Summer vacation.   Two boys diving into the waves on one of our two beach days, that’s an image i’ve collected.    Bobbing through the waves on boogie boards , I’ll keep that.    The way they were together, alone in the big sea, I didn’t worry when I couldn’t see them.

This Summer, those two boys went to the pool as well as the beach.  They attended Magic the Gathering tournaments.   They stuffed themselves with peking raviolis and chicken wings from the buffet at Liam’s fave Chinese restaurant.  They watched as many James Bond movies as they possibly could, and recommended this to their friends.  They slept over at each others’ houses.  They had to grab whatever time they could.

Yesterday, Isaiah started at a local charter school, but Liam began a new year at their old school this morning.     Isaiah’s Mom and I promise they boys as often as they possibly can; we’re dedicated to it.   I don’t know if they miss each other today, but they will.

Those boys  are 100%  birth -to-earth bestest buds.   I’m expecting they will still have movie marathons on weekends.  They’ll keep hanging out on Isaiah’s porch talking about stuff, even while the stuff they talk about changes.  They’ll be each others’ after-college roommates, I can see it now.  They’ll stand up at each others’ weddings.    They just can’t partner-up for science projects .

Liam’s not here.  He scurried off after school with the coolest remaining boys in the 5th grade.  It might be days before he tells me how it feels not to have his best friend in his class and not to see him in the hallway, or we might have a long chat about it tonight.

Liam doesn’t need for me to tell him that doesn’t matter  where he and his friend go to school; he knows it.  Knows it, but he has to learn to trust it.     I stayed with many of the same kids ( the girls anyway ) from Pre-School up through 8th Grade.   My kids are learning something I didn’t have to know until I was much older than they are.

Hair Power!

In the morning, Emma has a very simple beauty regime.  I spit clean her face, and use a hair-pick to give her hair a good fip-fip-flip.  As do I, Emma has curly hair.  Curly hair just springs from our heads, and does what it wants.  All there is to do is toss it around a bit, and hope that’s enough.  Toss-toss,  and Emma and I are chugging down the sidewalk toward school.

Emma rocks short hair, but most of the girls in her class keep their hair long.  Their mothers keep it; Em’s friends arrive with braids, ponytails, barrettes, headbands, and hair combed smooth.  Somebody put real effort into these ‘dos, and I doubt it was the fathers.  In our house, it would be; if Emma wants braids,  I’ll be sending her over to Jamie.  I’m one of those Moms who says,  keep it short until she can take care of it.   As I said, Emma has the short look working for her,  so that’s good.

I don’t know that the boys I know would tell me  hair is for freedom, but it is.  It’s one up on shoving the tee-shirts their mothers like but they don’t to the bottom of the pile,  one up on keeping the button-down shirts at the back of the closet until they are well and truly outgrown.  His hair is something over which a boy has some control.  He can keep growing it until it drives someone  with scissors crazy.   It’s there, right out there, and the first instance of  It’s My Body. 

I like long hair on boys.  Love it actually.  Long hair,  skinny braids, mohawk,  dreads, hair that used to drive parents nuts looks right to me.   Buzz-cuts, now those give me the raving heebie-jeebies.    It must be conditioning I suppose; freedom-of-expression hair is what I know.   Anyone who has seen old pictures of my brother, or even my father, knows Liam comes from a line of follicle freedom-fighters. 

All that being said,  if my son were my daughter, I’d be heartily lobbying for a haircut.     It has been fourteen months  since his last haircut, so it’s grown past his shoulders, and that’s fine.  If Boyo wants it that long, he has  to start taking care of it.   He needs to get the spilt ends trimmed  then go to with a little conditioner.   And start using a comb or hair-pick, but that goes without saying.  With freedom, comes responsability.

I wish I could a picture , any picture, of my brother and I together when we were young kids.   We look like my kids, I had  this cutie-pie “pixie cut”, and Jono’s  hair cascaded past the shoulders.   Older adults asked my mother, which one is the girl?:; and acted surprised when she told them.  We all laughed it off,  my kids and I will too.

Meeting Ziggy Stardust

On a family vacation in 1982, my brother, Jonathan, slipped me something that blew up my inner world.    It was a mistake on his part, or at least a misstep.  It wasn’t exactly what  he imagined, but it worked.

While my back was turned, Jono took the tape I’d made of Tea for the Tillerman out of my Walkman and replaced it with a reggae tape of his selected songs.  It was time, he decided, to shake things up a little.  He was my brother, it was his job.

I pulled on the headphones and sank back against the pillows of the hotel bed, expecting something from the soundtrack of Harold and Maude, my first real favorite movie.   What I heard was the opening bars of “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust.”  I sat bolt upright and my hair stood on end.  After twenty-eight years, I still swear that’s almost what happened;  that’s exactly how it felt. It felt like a cartoon of surprise. ,  I rewound the tape and played the song a second time before I said anything.  What the *&%$#@ is This?  Do you have any more!!?!

Ooops,.  Jono had included that song on the tape to fill some space.  Yeah, well, he’d meant for me to hear the Toots and the Maytels , but this was good too.

Good? It was great.  My first kiss is shaky ground.  Which was the real first anyway?  This moment; that is clear as day forever.

Three months later, I was in the hippy haven that was my summer camp.  This was where, a year before,  I’d learned to give friends hello hugs,  the place where I had a boyfriend named Stephen whose brother, Larry, was my best friend.   This was the summer-camp where they screened Harold and Maude and Spare Change on movie-nights.

My second year at camp, I met Alyxx who wore all black, even in July.  She loved David Bowie just as much as I did.   She played me  songs I had not heard on the boom-box in our cabin . She was my little big dangerous friend.   After we came home from camp, we talked to each other more than once a week, and sometimes daily.  Alyxx invited me to her parties where I met and kissed cool boys.

Before Christmas break my Freshman year of High School,  I was locked in the tight  embrace of black miniskirts, enveloped by big sweaters..  I felt pretty wearing blue-green liquid eye-liner.  I sometimes carried my Walkman to school with my homemade copy of  Aladdin Sane inside.  My love of David Bowie was the first thing people knew about me. 

 I attended meetings  of the Poetry Club,  where I learned about Adrianne Rich.  My senior year, I swore to edit a magazine we never wrote.   I tried out for ( but was never cast in)  plays. I roped an unsuspecting Freshman into playing Ernest Worthing to my Lady Bracknell in a Theater class assembly.  I got kicked out of Chorus because I just plain sing badly.   People learned lots of things about me, but my love of David Bowie was right out there in front.

Why am I telling you this?  Reading a book called Fantasy Freaks and  Gaming Geeks  has made me take a longish look at how I came to this be myself.  Well, there was the being raised by transplanted Brits.    There was my education, which included five years in all-girls school.    These were happening in the 1970s-1980s, so that has to be worth something.  There’s the books I read, the things that have lead me to read Faulkner for sheer fun.   Whatever else there was, there is David Bowie; can’t leave him out.

Color Wheel

As I write this, a second coat of purple paint is being applied to my house, bright purple  and bright teal trim.  Those colors are out there, and they will not be denied, or ignored.  For the foreseeable future, our street-mates will give directions to visitor based on how near or far their house is from, “the purple house”.  It's our house, and we love the color.

Some of our neighbors agree.  We've heard that some people always wanted a purple house, and that one neighbor painted her bedroom those exact colors. The neighbor on the other side wanted to know why we didn't go with our second choice and pick orange.  Emma and the other little girls on the street love it.

My mother-in-law hates it.  She doesn't even have to say the word; hate is clear.  She came by just as the first strokes were going on, and she insisted  we  put on a little of the eggplant-hued paint she had brought for us to consider.  Jamie and did consider it, but not for very long.  One of the builders stopped in before he left to tell me that he preferred the darker color.  Liam finds the bright color  mortifying and dreads the day his friends see it.

From the start of this whole extension / renovation project,  Liam has said that he wanted to paint his room orange, red and green.    With the painters on ladders all around our house, he says it louder.  Orange, red, green; nothing else will do.  

When we arrived at the paint store yesterday, our boy found quickly found what he wanted.  He picked “Orange” and “Dark Lime Green” from the rack so quickly, it was as if he hadn't needed to look for them.   He wanted three orange walls, and one green one.  He was going to draw his own Manga posters and hang posters of international soccer teams with red shirts and some martial arts pictures too.  Colors all picked;  could we just go now? 

Jamie and I felt our eyes burning when we looked at those colors.  They didn't just clashed, they crashed.    After Jamie had given up and moved to asking Emma if she really wanted to paint her room dark red and dark purple, I took my seat beside Liam and said everything Jamie had already said.

When I saw the young saleswoman, I begged for her help.  Could she show me, please oh please, a bright green and deep orange that could share the same walls?    She didn't think so, and neither did the machine she carried into which color numbers could be entered and matched.  Maybe if Liam saw the two together in a picture of a room, maybe that would show him the folly of his thoughts.  We walked to a computer in the back of the store saying the boy just needed occular proof.

And it worked.  They worked, I mean.   It looked great.  The walls looked like they could stand up to any art that Liam chose.  Add the black bean-bag chair Liam wants, and it only gets better.  For a kid who draws mainly in black and white, he did a hell of a job picking those colors.  If it were up to me,   I might replace the dinosaur quilt with something darker, but it's not up to me.  The dinos are staying.  Less and less of what he chooses has anything to do with me, and I'll just adjust.

Helping Emma pick what she wants for her room might be easier, and it might be tougher.   What she sees, she wants.  Scooby Doo, Dora the Explorer, they look good when they are right in front of her. This morning, I asked her what she might want in her room, and she gave it a think before saying “dinosaurs”;  the favorite things of two of her close buddies. Five minutes later, she wanted animals, and fairies, and flowers, and maybe a dino or two. 

Right now, I'm imagining how her room, with its fuzzy lavender bedspread pink comforter and bright green pillow, would looked all groovied up with Peter Max “Yellow Submarine” pictures and big flowers on the walls.  If I could show it to her, I bet she'd eat it right up.   She'd mix in dinos, kitties too, and a fairy or two.   That's the danger, and the delight of Emma, she isn't a one-note kid, no kid really is.     She wants to stir it all together.  She could test the patience of any interior-designer, but that's my girl.

Beatle Dream 1.01

Old Clothes

Two nights ago,  I dreamed about giving the jacket from my father’s white suit to Goodwill.   I did that years ago of course, I pitched it in one of my twice-a-year closet purges, it had been there, lonely and stained, for years; good-bye  again Old Chum.

Somewhere, there are probably twenty-five-year-old photographs of me wearing that jacket.   I wore it over my black-white-and-red U2 tee-shirt ( the one with the WAR cover) and my David Bowie  “SCARY MONSTERS AND SUPER-CREEPS”  tee-shirts,  with jeans, black, pants and the hand-remade trousers of one of Daddy’s old pinstriped suits., miniskirts and tights.   I even owned a grey suede skinny tie to go with it.  Can you tell how cool I felt when I wore it?  If you look at my   student ID from 11th Grade, you’d see my pouting out at the camera with lipstick, eyeliner, and that jacket.   Nobody was more fabulous than me.

Some people don’t love their pets as much as I loved some of my clothes.   There have been a few that never even made it into the Goodwill pile; pieces that died noble deaths before I had the heart to get rid of them.

My black-leather jacket got moved from the coat-hooks to the back of my closet.  Broken main zipper and all, it still hangs there in almost-retirement.  When I took Liam to the U2 concert last year, I pulled it back into service as the most rock-and-roll thing I own.  A few weeks ago, I wore it over my shoulders like a short-cape walking through Cambridge.   “Great jacket,” the weathered fellow standing by the motorcycle told me;  Black Beauty has life in her yet.

That jacket goes to the kids.  While he can fit into it,  Liam can have it.   He’ll pass it to Emma someday, provided the jacket hasn’t totally disintegrated.

After sixteen years, the rose-printed button-down dress Jamie gave me for my birthday lay slung over the banister for months before it made it into the trash.  Sixteen Summers, two-and-a-half pregnancies, that sweetheart never got pushed to the dusty back of the closet.  I always said that I’d wear her until she fell apart in my hands, and that’s what finally happened.  Heading out for the first Spring afternoon party, I pulled it on, and heard that exhausted cotton rip.   That dress deserved a decent burial, so I didn’t lump her in with the shorts I’d expanded out of or the fading tee-shirts.

What do I miss most this Summer; my madras capris of course.   I pulled them off the rock-bottom Sale rack at Marshel’s thinking that they had to be worth five dollars.  All Summer, for a few Summers, I wore them everywhere.

I wore them to the funeral of my dear friend David.  “David, my gay ex-boyfriend”;  I’d called him that since college.   He was the handsomest Preppie boy you could imagine, and the sweetest too.  His sweater collection rivalled for splendour Jay Gatsby’s closet-full of shirts.   David’s dream-date was afternoon tea at the Ritz Carlton.   I showed him the door when I realised that he drank to heavily and I sure as hell didn’t need that.

Somehow, David and I stayed friends.  Through his waking up in the closet and coming right out, through his owning up to heavily he drank and what it had done to him.   Through my years at Vassar with their assorted crushes, though two hospitals stays and my falling in love with Jamie,  I could give David a call.  We went to see “Au Revior Les Enfants” and escaped from our families once or twice.  Good old David!

About two weeks after Liam was born, a friend of Jamie’s who worked with David and knew that I knew him told me that David was in California dying with AIDS.  Just sat at my dining-room table and blamed it on too much casual sex.  I wanted to kill that messenger, or at least kick him to the curb, but he had brought me dinner so I didn’t.

A week later, I got up the nerve to call David, and to my surprise, his father handed him the phone.  Not in California and not dying of AIDS, dear David was living in Sudbury with cancer that just wouldn’t quit.     We talked for ten minutes, maybe less, until I had to leave.  He begged me to call back, and I said I would.
For the next eighteen months, I called when I could; always when he couldn’t make it to the phone.  I’d talk to his mother; she’d tell me how her son was doing, and I’d tell her how my son was doing.  I listened to that dear lady for half an hour at a time.   Because I knew her voice, she barely had to say anything the one time she called me.

Now, what was I talking about?; oh yes,, the best Summer pants in history.  I ended up wearing them to David’s wake because Jamie and I drove there straight from my mother’s house.  A yellow tee shirt, the pants and pearls;  I wore the same thing I’d been in all day. I had a black dress hanging in the back of the car, but I’d totally forgotten it was there until I was standing in the parking-lot.  The only dressing-up I’d done was the necklace which I’d put on that morning because I knew I’d have no time to go back for it. I had no choice but to walk on in and as was.

One more thing about David, he always thought I could stand a little preppying-up.  He agreed with my with my Mama, I wore too much black.  He would have loved those pants.  In the car going home, I imagined what he might have said,  “oh Mel, you look so pretty!  Finally a little color; and pearls too!”    Those cheapo pants always reminded me of a well-dressed friend who never did see them, and they always made me smile.

My Mornings

The house has expanded.   Our space is contracting. 

Last week, last Tuesday, the builders knocked out our kitchen-wall and started uniting the house and the extension.   The grimed-up white wall fell, and opened up to a contained grey space filled with light by all the many windows and coated by the dust of destruction.   Space, light and dust, that’s all there is. 

I walk through the space in the evening.  I look at the new beams holding up the second.  I enter the rooms that now look like rooms.  I see it all in the evening because it’s only then that I pass through the heavy plastic curtains that cordon off where the kitchen used to be,  Across the end of the hallway and the threshold of the dining room hangs thick plastic sheets.  Barely transparent, they make the old kitchen into a nether world.  During the day, I see the builders walking through the old kitchen and into the new one.   Passing in and out of focus, the guys could be shades, shadows, or reflections.  I recognise each of them, but don’t really see anybody.  When I leave in the morning, I shout good-bye, and always say hello when I get home.

On my side of the curtain, there isn’t much room.  All the disconnected kitchen appliences have been pushed into the diningroom.  Some weeks ago, our  beautiful , new Italian leather sectional couch was deposed in livingroom.  Right in the middle of the room, in front of the world-weary old couch, still in pieces.  The fastest way though the livingroom means climbing from one couch to another.  The diningroom table is inaccessable, and covered in paper anyway.  At home, we eat on the floor.

During the day,  I stay out of the house as much as I can.  Last Monday, I said to Moe and Jay, (the two who are in charge of the project in which I live) that I was tempted to stay home on Tuesday to watch the walls come down, to enjoy the spectacle.  Don’t do that, they both told me.  Dust, noise, dirt and more noise, I was told that I should get out.  Just go, Matt ( who may be older than he looks),  go eat lunch in the North End,   Something, I wouldn’t want to be there.

Well, I haven’t headed for the North End, not yet.  I’m an urban nomad with a laptop.  I look for places to spend my time, and it always starts with breakfast.   I enjoy eggs  or oatmeal or eggs benedict at Rene,s Cafe where everyone wishes me good-morning and asks me about the kids before they let me sit as long as I like.  I eat the tasty wildberry scones at the cafe in Porter Square Books and read until I’ve had enough.   This morning, I’ve been writing in Starbucks,  and I’ve stayed here two hours after finishing my inferior raspberry scone.    The music here is dull and filled with good songs covered by the wrong people or good singers sing the songs they should never have touched.  There aren’t any books to tempt me, and the barristras don’t have kids who go to school with mine.   Being in the bookstore would be a treat, and I love everything about Renews but I wrote plenty this morning.   Now, I must be on my way to keep keeping out of the noise.

Liam Hits the Streets

We did it.  On Sunday, Liam walked into Davis Square with his friend Zakwani, and I let him go.  I didn’t even watch them go up the street until they left my sight.   I offered him my cellphone to carry with him in case he needed to reach us,  but he said he had money for the pay-phone; the one by the subway that I never thought he’d noticed.  They just wanted to walk to the park; I shouldn’t worry.

I said I wouldn’t worry, and went back to washing the dishes.   I washed dishes for a solid hour, and didn’t stop thinking about Liam’s walk to the park.  He was going to the park that I hate; the one where drunks sat just outside the fence and yell propositions at the Moms; but I totally forgot that part.  Good thing I did.

Liam was with Zakwani, the most sidewalk-savy kid I knew; Zak who took cross-town buses, Zak, who arrived at Martial Arts alone.  He’s the most level-headed kid I know, the only one I thought could take care of himself better than Liam could.   Any other kid, and Liam would have to lead the way.

Within 90 minutes, Zak’s father brought Liam.  My boy was very impressed with himself.   

On Tuesday, I was washing dishes again, and Liam was itching to head up Holland Avenue to the site of our home-park.  Because I was up to my elbows in water and suds,  I said he could just go without me.   Again, I didn’t go to the door,  I knew where he was going, and so did he.   Right in front of the construction site that our park has become, a friend, his mother,  and two other kids were running a lemonade stand, and they’d asked him to come on down and give them a little business.  He’d headed  down there on a mission.  A few minutes later, I called the mother at the lemonade stand to ask for a ride to a Parents’ Council meeting night.  She could see Liam, she told me, barrelling toward them right then;  but it hadn’t occurred to me to ask.

Liam obviously thinks he’s the mannish boy of the neighbourhood.  Yesterday, as we drove through Cambridge with the same friend and his mother,   Liam started a sentence with the phrase, “Now that I’m walking around on my own. . . . . “   He was the Holland Ave, from the pizza shop on the corner all the way up to the store that sold Magic Cards.   The most important straight line path in Somerville belonged to him alone. 

“Now that I’m walking around on my own,”   I cut in right there and asked how many such trips he’d taken.  Three, he admitted, two with Zak.

Mostly, I did that for the benefit of the other Mom.  She didn’t need to have her son start asking when he would have that kind of freedom.  I did it for me because I didn’t need her telling people I was the most irresponsible Mom in Somerville.   I did it to remind Liam that the last word was still mine.

Have I told you lately just how proud I am of the boy my child is becoming?  He’s learning to be someone I trust to get where he’s going and bring himself back. 

Sprintime in the Park

Spring is settling over Somerville.  The store across the corner from Hodgkin's Park again sells six flavours of Richie’s Old Fashioned  Slush Lots of good that will do the kids on my side of Davis Square; the bunch of boys who ran across the park, across the baseball field and through the hole in the fence while their mothers lagged behind them, walking through gate.  The slush store is open, but the park is closed for renovations.  The climbing-structure, swing and slides have been dismantled.  The sand has been trucked away.  The baseball field is blocked, and the city must have fixed the fence-hole.   It’s all well and good that we can buy a lemon-cherry mix on the corner, but slush would taste better in our park.


The city of Somerville promises that our park will be open this Summer, but I’ll believe that when I’m sitting in a renovated park.  The kids and I will be park nomads this year, hunting always for scooter-ready surfaces and water-jets. Hey, if we have to wander the park wilderness, there is nothing wrong with looking for something better than our home-base.

I go to the park with ten-year-old boys and four-year-old girls, but school kids and mothers aren’t alone in the park. Older kids hang out around the edges, getting the evil eye from some mothers  and puzzled glances from younger kids. If it’s a big enough park, older kids and families give each other a little space.

One Summer  afternoon two years ago, when Emma and I arrived at Hodgkin’s park, a clear line had been drawn; teenagers were playing on the park-equipment while mothers and their young kids headed for the field.  There were lots of backwards glances from the Moms as they packed up snacks and water-bottles.

“Do you want your park back?”  a boy called out to me while Emma and I cut though the sand on our way to the store. I must have looked more friendly than other mothers.

“Excuse me?”

He looked like a good kid. A smile, hair hanging in his face liked he’d forgotten to get it cut.

“Do you ladies want the park back, you and your kids?”
“It’s a public park, not like we own it or anything.”
“See, thing is,” I’d  told him he didn’t need an excuse, he just gave me one. 

“This used to be our park.  We’d all come here when we were little.  School got out today, and we thought we’d come out here, like we used to, you know.”

Fine by me, I told him.  I said it sounded like fun.

Emma and I ate our slush in the teenagers played in the part.  The girls rode double on the swings and piled onto the wooden motorcycle and sidecar that wobbled on big springs.  Even with three on each, I doubted they could break anything.  The boys chased ear other, and all laughed and swore.

On the first teasingly warm Sunday this year,  Emma and went to a Cambridge park with her buddy. There, all in black with big boots, was a pod of young goths.  Pod of goths, clot of goths, goths in the park, park-goths; the words rolled around in my head.  One girl had hot-pink hair falling to either side of her face, bangs that had grown out. The Goth style is always new to kids, always all their own.   All their own, even though I’ve been seeing it for twenty-five years. 

Liam tells me that his friend Zack wants to be a goth; wants to be, he’s ten and planning his future.  It all be new to Zack too.

Just for now, Emma and have found our new park.   While Liam practices soccer and Jamie coaches, Emma and I play in the attached park.  This park has what we need; swings, slides , monkey bars, a climbing wall, and enough platforms to hold it all together.   Emma runs in, sometime she barely glances back at me.  When she wants me to follow, I climb, run, and slide.  On Saturday, she discovered that, if I twist together the swing’s chains and give one good push, she spins while she swings.   She  discovered it, so it must be my own invention. 

In the park, everything is new to somebody.  By the swings, one tweenie girl tells her friend that she danced with some boy at a big party.  “But, it was just a fast dance, so that doesn’t mean anything.”  Her friend assures her that it does mean something.    I’m glad to hear that some girls still are thrilled about who asks them to dance.

Another thing that these park-girls still do; they still pull themselves on bars not as high as their heads  and turn somersaults around the bars.  They challenge each other; how many can you do? 

Those girls made me dare myself.  I can turn a somersault around a playground bar;  can you?    Here's my goal; by the end of soccer season, I want  to turn somersaults one after the other,  to hang like a sloth and to hold myself up on my arms.   A lofty goal; playground play didn’t used to feel this tough.   A fancy gym would make money offering “The Playground Workout” on fancy chrome-shiny equipment.   It’d be a day in the park to our kids.





















 

Over the Noise

Debbie Harry rises above the hammering and talk-radio outside my house.  It’s good friends, it’s very good.  Ear-candy with an edge from eye-candy with an attitude.

“Parallel Lines” was the greatest things my father ever brought home; better even than lamajeun from the Armenian bakery.   On a drive home from work, he heard “Heart of Glass” and was enraptured.   He sang the song for me and asked if I knew it.  Tried to sing it anyway; mostly he la-la-laed and hummed as well as he could.  I was twelve,  and had neither a radio nor any idea of what I wanted to hear;  I was useless. 

I’ve always imagined that Daddy spent the next few days humming to record-store employees until someone could help him. n  He was a born performer, and could probably have worked up the high-notes for the chorus. One way or another, that album was on our turntable by the end of the week.

Did you ever see that cover?  Pretty girl,  starlet  blond hair dyed perfectly imperfectly over dark roots and ends,  strappy white dress.  Arms akimbo, she stands over black and white stripes flanked by men in black.  Everything is black, white and red.  No girl in my class had ever seen anything like this.  

My father loved his music one song at a time.  If he found a song he liked, he played it over and over.  Once the song was over, he was right at the turntable to re-play it.  If anyone actually could wear out the grooves on a record, my father could. 

Me?;  I seized what chances I could to play the whole record, start to finish. I lay on the floor of the study half-reading and ignoring whatever Math was due in the morning.   Parallel Lines was not the siren song that lead me into the realm of tweenie underachiever,  everybody travels there sometimes; it was just part of the soundtrack. 

What does Debbie sing these days;  Jazz?  Torch-songs?;  my father would have approved.   Daddy loved Linda Ronstant too, and never more than when she worked with Nelson Riddle.

Mattel has made a Debbie Harry Barbie dolls.   Thanks to a link posted on Facebook by a friend of mine,  I’ve seen this doll.    Not right,  it’s just not right.  Mattel made a decent job of the hair, but they’ve dressed her in neon pink.   If you ask me, she needs that white dress.

After listening to Parallel Lines twice,  I’ve moved on to Bob Marley.  A big Thank You to the builders outside my window.  They’ve reminded me that loud music can be the best way to be alone.