Fibber & Molly Are Back Tomorrow

 

Well, I'm very glad to be able to get back to 1940 once again. It seems the radio seasons ran a bit differently than we are used to from television today. I think it's relatively recent that TV Fall seasons began so early, come to think of it. Summer replacement programs usually ran a full third of the year. And that was the case with Meredith Wilson's musical variety program which was the Summer replacement for FM&M in 1940. Today, with cable TV, and such a flood of independent production companies churning out all kinds of... stuff(?) it's not like networks are starved for a choice. It used to be there were the three networks and between them they produced everything. At least everything that was heard nationally. Two shows I would like to be able to get my hands on are Jim and Marion Jordan's appearances on the Lux Radio Theater series of dramatic programs (also 1940) and their appearance on the popular CBS mystery show "Suspense!" which featured thriller vignettes - kind of high end stuff with Hollywood stars in scripts written by some heavy hitters or adapted from recognized thriller classics.

So anyhoooo, every Tuesday we're back in Wistful Vista. We'll follow Fibber and Molly, and Throckmorton P. Guildersleeve, Mrs. Uppington, the Old Timer, (and whoever else the inestimable Bill Thompson wants to voice), through the Holidays and the New Year. What I'll do is make the show active on Tuesdays, and write whatever I feel like writing - as usual - and keep my ever changing song widget handy so if you like you can stop FM&M and click on the music. If you do choose this option, however, you should know that while I will still love you I will not think as well of you. And I will know who you are. The wood tells me things. I have ways.  

My favorite things.

Something about McCoy Tyner’s contribution to the song. I wrote a poem now I don’t remember. It was a Lady poem but I used her name in the poem so I never posted it because I believe in being anonymous. Why? I don’t know. I’m a writer. I put my name on everything I write, otherwise people won’t know who they are coming to hear.

A shopping cart full of hummus
A copy of the Narcotics Anonymous book
What the hell is hummus?
Hot pepper cast iron night is long
The genius of McCoy Tyner’s contribution to the song
Benefits cards and belly rings
And these are a few of my favorite things…

I don’t know the rest. It no longer exists. Actually I despise belly rings – jewelry in general. Finger rings are OK – they don’t dangle. I hate having dangly things in my mouth. Who would want to kiss a belly pierced with a piece of metal? Perhaps I was traumatized by swallowing a dime when I was a child. Ah! – dimes! I hate them! I hate buttons, zippers. Ooh – I’m getting the willies just thinking about such things. Small things. Metal things. Coins, keys, tiny crosses on a girl’s neck. Oh please get a really, really big one – flaunt your faith. The idea of having a cross fall into my mouth during the act of love is unbearable.

I hate jewelry. I really do. I have no idea what possesses people to have holes punched in their ears, noses, eyebrows, tongues, nipples, navels… It is the least aphrodisiac of things.

That reminds me the White Tornado showed me the bruises she sustained on her upper body in her recent car accident – (from which she is making a full and complete recovery, God be praised) – and I noticed her navel was torn. I said, “What happened there?” She told me her belly ring was ripped right out in the accident. Yuck! Not that it was gone – that’s a good thing – but that it was ever there in the first place. Not that it’s my business, she’s married – or is like married, being joined in a legal way to a fellow she adores. I respect that. I respect good intentions. No, I wouldn’t call it Adultery to pull a girl who’s married outside the Church, but I would call it foul play.

Well, isn’t that the whole business with civil unions? All marriages that happen in the mind, in the intentions, and on paper, without happening also in Heaven, are merely civil unions. They mean what they mean – that people intend to be committed to each other. It’s like being forever engaged, betrothed. But let’s not get carried away. You need the church to be married. Nothing can change that.

OK – repeat after me: “People are gonna do what they’re gonna do.” If you can’t kill ‘em you might as well love ‘em.

Codependent no more – it can be taught. What a load of hogwash we flush through our minds each day. It’s no wonder we cut ourselves up with bits of metal. I would hate myself too if my mind was full of the sort of crap the world offers and nothing else beyond it.

“Right click to display grammar suggestions?” Oh that’s much too funny. I’m writing this in MSWord today. Green squiggly lines and red squiggly lines are appearing here n’ there on the ‘page.’ It’s so Christmassy.

You know, I can’t read my own handwriting? Long before the advent of desktop and laptop computers I wrote – just as I do today – every day. I wrote a little every day. It’s what I do. In those days I wrote on a writing machine too, but it was called a typewriter. I love technology. I love ‘delete.’ I love putting Liquid Paper out of business. Don’t worry – those people will find other jobs. Stop bloody whining and start some kind of business! No one takes care of us here. We’re free. That means we take care of ourselves.

I’m sure I was writing on my old typewriter how I hate jewelry. No such thing as a belly ring in those days of relative sanity – least outside the pages of National Geographic – but of course it was the breasts I was looking at. Why? I have no idea. They ceased to be interesting in that heart fluttery way as soon as I got through the awkward years. Oh, my poor sons! – the crap they will have to endure!

Note to self: Stop relying on exclamation marks. It’s lazy writing.

I don’t feel like being educated today. I feel like being serious. I can only be silly to the extent that I am deadly serious.

So, why the anonymity? I suppose I must believe that anonymity gives me freedom of expression - that the Internet is what it is and that’s what it’s for. My book will certainly have my name on it. (Oh – I actually took a suggestion, and corrected punctuation above. I’m such a nerd.) But The Lady will be The Lady. The White Tornado, Sister Midnight, Juicy Lucy… I’ve no right to mess with them. They’re innocent of any wrongdoing except knowing me when I’m at home. I like to write about all the things that bring me to my knees.

And some of these
Are Holy.

There are no pictures available to depict anything like the beauty I encountered on my country drive just now. I was gone for several hours. Crossing Interstates can be a bit dodgy. You know there were once cross roads spanning the valleys that are now dead ends, houses and farms where there is now nothing but overgrowth in the shadow of a highway little dreamed of by the people who once inhabited them. Entire communities were displaced to make way for the big road with its exits every 20 miles or so. Northtown was once connected to Southown by a bridge over the creek, and those people were neighbors. Now they are half an hour's drive away. It reminds me of how travelers in the old days had to find a place to ford the river. If the river was in your way you might have to go many miles out of your way to find a safe place to cross it. As it happens, nothing was out of my way today, having no real idea of where I wished to end up. I was moved to tears by one beautiful house in particular. I wanted to buy it and paint it, and then find another, buy it and paint it, and then...

Springs gives me the wanderlust as you may recall from my writing then. That has been the case each year for many years. Fall gives me a course of the weepy lonelies. In the spring I want nothing more than to drive forever alone into an infinite vastness where nothing ever happens. In the fall I want to be home, and I want visitors. I think it's seasonal. I think it's quite natural. In the fall a traveler has to start thinking about heading back home from wherever he has been because the winter is coming and the wood wants splitting.

Time keeps going. It seems like yesterday I discovered Blogstream quite by accident and went through the motions of creating an account with no particular expectation that it would be more than an afternoon time killer. It's like buying a toy for a child that costs only a dollar. If it keeps him busy for an hour before it breaks you're money ahead. Well, then every now and then you find a toy that keeps going.

All I have done here is search for images tagged "In The Middle Of Nowhere." What I discovered is that there is an inexhaustible supply of places which some person or persons believed fit that description. What I also discovered is that none of the places depicted actually are nowhere - to the contrary, they are all somewhere. Many are in very beautiful somewheres. (There's quite a few in Australia, many here in the US as well.) Try as I may, I could not find a single picture of nowhere, and I begin to seriously doubt that such a place exists.

 

They all look so very inviting. Well, most of them anyway. Someone says to me, "Where do you want to live?" I'll say, "In nowhere." That's funny.

I was driving yesterday through several nowheres every bit as nowhere as these. I wanted to stop at a house in one nowhere in particular because I just got this feeling the people who lived there were my kind of people. Where do you find people like that? In nowhere - obviously.

Come up and see me. We'll light a fire and sit around, and burn our polaroids of former lovers and our tiny plastic telephones. The air is heavy with love and sweet-smelling smoke like the eternal summer of being very young, and someone will always go skinny dipping, and someone else will tell us jokes until the Judgment comes. (I am at one point a ruin, guarded by ravens, and in the following moment a husband, holding your purse and your sword while you shop.)

Friends of mine when I was a tadpole told me the Beatles song "Nowhere Man" reminded them of me. I despise the Beatles anyway - except perhaps "Run For Your Life." That wasn't bloody well intended. I don't know why I had such friends to begin with. I think because I lived on a hill and I happen to be a fool the song "Fool on a Hill" would have been even more appropriate. But, in any event, fuzzy terms may be applied wherever they seem to be indicated. Fuzzy thinking, however, is a terminal illness from which many do not recover. I don't really give a rat's end.

Oh Lawdy! Resentment is the number one offender... 

When you live in a place for a long time it can seem like you are never going to leave, and if there are things about where you are living that are unsatisfactory, and there are reasons to stay that are too compelling to allow you to move any time soon, it can be most frustrating. But at last you move away. Ten years later, you return - just for a visit. You wonder at how you once believed yourself to be a prisoner there, a prisoner of circumstance perhaps, the burdens of responsibility you had taken on. Perhaps you resented having those burdens. But now you are free. Or, now you have new burdens, different burdens, compelling you to be where you are now. But, in any event, you visit the place you once lived, the old neighborhood, the place you lived for so many years and once knew so intimately well. Have you had this experience? Suddenly, you find yourself hopelessly lost in a damned crazy maze. Everything is familiar but nothing is as you remember.

Exactly that sort of thing has happened to me. I don't know what on earth made me think of that this morning. My dreams were dominated by a customer emerging partially nude from a sun porch in a new home I just purchased, and then we made chit-chat about how that sun porch was excellent for dressing and undressing but particularly with music playing. That is completely unrelated to thinking about revisiting my old stomping grounds and finding them changed, and getting lost there.

Well, I have been back "home" several times now. Little has changed physically about the place where I grew up and lived for most of my life. It was quite overdeveloped while I was still rather young, so it is not as though I am now finding shopping malls where a farmer's fields used to be. I was eight years old when they built the shopping mall. So - physically little has changed. The landmarks are much the same.

The second time I went back I was still quite disoriented in the place I once had known so very well, but I found it was much easier to get around if I stopped trying to remember where to go, where to turn. When I stopped trying to remember the names of roads and simply let my hands on the steering wheel do the remembering I found myself, turn by turn, coming ultimately to wherever I was supposed to be.

This is an analogy for something - yessirree. An analogy for what? I have as little an idea as you do. I can't tell you how to get from Point A to Point B in that place. I can't rattle off exit numbers on the Long Island Expressway as if they were prices of eggs and fish the way I hear some people do. I can't tell you, but I can take you. I can only show you the way by taking the way; it is impossible to explain.

The funny thing is I tried this method. I tried having a passenger with me and allowing that strange autopilot feature of my body's memory to guide us wherever we were supposed to be. It didn't work - not with another person in the car. We got lost. She was laughing. We were were hopeless. She said, "I thought you lived here!" I said, "I guess that wasn't me, after all."

Before long this type of experience may be entirely eradicated by on board GPS. Had we taken her car, for instance, we would not have gotten lost. But - good heavens - that's cheating. When it comes to revisiting experience with that sense that surpasses understanding, that deep knowledge you cannot describe, using satellite technology takes all the fun out of it.

We ended up in a good place, despite ourselves.