Tag: Carol

Anniversary eighteen

The bottom landing and the first two or three steps have become a fire hazard

It was March 12, my parents’ anniversary as it turns out, when I mused how is it my bride and I were approaching anniversary 18. How is it that we’ve been married so long, since we obviously drive each other crazy?

Now, how I drive HER crazy is for her blog, which she doesn’t have. Sidebar on that: I’ve been in relationships where I had to argue both my side AND my significant other’s, which is REALLY exhausting, and thank goodness my wife does NOT do that.

The stairs to the attic: they are steep and narrow and have a 180 degree turn, so a real pain to traverse. Our modus operandi was that we put stuff inside the door to the attic, so that it would be carried up the stairs next time we have to go up. Instead, the bottom landing and the first two or three steps have become a fire hazard, the new home of boxes, but I don’t know what they are.

I hate that they are located there because, while I can see them OK going up, if I’m carrying something DOWN, I may not be able to view the obstruction at all, and am likely to literally kill myself. She carried some suitcases that had been in our bedroom up the stairs just fine, but I insist on dealing with this other issue.

“What’s in this box?” I ask. It turns out it’s knickknacks that had been found by the Daughter in the Wife’s closet.

“What do want to DO with this stuff?” “I don’t even know if I want it.” So up the stairs I take it. As I work on this project, she apparently doesn’t see my issue as a problem. And I’m doing this in lieu of dealing with the clutter in our bedroom – the ORIGINAL project, which we both acknowledge IS an issue.

The difference between this conversation and ones I’ve had in previous relations is that I see this as just one of life’s little irritations, rather than bemoaning, “Why doesn’t she understand me?” or some such drama. Even in the midst of a temporary difficulty, we know that, somehow, we will work it out.

Somehow, my parents made it to 50 years, before my dad died in 2000, so I’m looking forward to 2049.

In case you wondered, garnet is the traditional gift for anniversary, and porcelain the modern one. (No, I’m not angling for gifts.)

Flintstones – Happy Anniversary

M is for Mill Valley, California

The song spent only a couple weeks on the lower rungs of the Billboard pop charts, peaking at #90 in 1970.

Me writing about Mill Valley is the fault of Mexican food and a famous director.

For dinner during the last week in December 2016, my bride made tacos. We hadn’t had them, either at home or in a restaurant, in months. And I – as is my wont – started singing The Taco Man, actually The Candy Man, but with a word change. You may know the 1972 hit by Sammy Davis Jr. That made her think of I’d Like To Teach the World to Sing by the New Seekers from that same year.

She also recalled a song called Mill Valley. I know LOTS of songs from the late 1960s and early 1970s, but I didn’t know this one. She even knew the lyrics!

I’m gonna talk about a place
That’s got a hold on me,
Mill Valley
A little place where life
Feels very fine and free,
Mill Valley
Where people aren’t afraid to smile
And stop and talk with you awhile,
And you can be as friendly
As you want to be.
Mill Valley!

As it turns out, a teacher named Rita Abrams wrote the song and recorded with children at the school where she was teaching, released under the name Miss Abrams and the Strawberry Point Third Grade Class. The song spent only a couple weeks on the lower rungs of the Billboard pop charts, peaking at #90 in 1970.

But it must have done better with those easy-listening stations that weren’t playing Mama Told Me Not To Come by Three Dog Night or Ball of Confusion by the Temptations, because it’s been referred to as a radio staple.

There were stories in Newsweek, Life Magazine and Rolling Stone. “Annie Liebovitz stood on top of the piano to take our picture,” the educator recalled. An album, which referred to the students as 4th graders, which they were by then, was released.

Ironically, there were 2014 stories suggesting the teacher-turned-songwriter could no longer afford to live in her Mill Valley condo because of rising real estate costs.

Rita Abrams and her class had a 45th reunion in 2015.

And the director who made the video? An obscure young director named Francis Ford Coppola, who, two years later, would be directing the film that would win the Oscar for Best Movie, The Godfather.

ABC Wednesday – Round 20

Never heard of that band – oh, THEM!

Lonely People was used as the sign off song for a Washington, DC TV station for a time in the late 1970s or early 1980s, back when TV stations actually signed off.

I was reminded that back in the early 1970s, the student government at the State University College of New York at New Paltz put on a bunch of concerts, many of which I attended. But I remember reading about one in the Fall of 1971 by some group I had never heard of. The show cost only 50 cents, but I passed.

That group was America, whose A Horse With No Name went to #1 the very next year. In penance, I bought that first album and played it regularly. They’d later have hits such as Ventura Highway, Tin Man, and Lonely People, which I wrote about here.

In 1995, my girlfriend at the time, Carol – now my wife – and I were meeting my old (as in since kindergarten ) friend Karen and this guy from a local (Albany area) radio station named Johnny. As it turned out, Carol and Johnny were acquainted because they’d lived in the same area. After dinner, Karen and the radio guy invited Carol and me to see this musical act which I had never heard of. I might have gone, but Carol was tired so we opted out.

The artist turned out to be Moby, a descendant of Herman Melville, BTW, who had a massively successful album at the end of the decade called Play. What put me in mind about this story was Pantheon Songs’ tribute to a Moby tune that had come out a few years before that dinner, but I had not heard at the time.

Health Report: January/February 2017

It was particularly disappointing timing too.

A few weeks ago, a reporter for our local newspaper posted on Facebook, trying to find out whether this stomach flu – is THAT what they call it? – was around the area. Subsequent to that, I’ve been reading anecdotal tales about the nasty bugger that has hit several of my friends.

On Martin Luther King’s holiday, after coming home from seeing Hidden Figures at the movies, we realized the crockpot had been disconnected prematurely. But we thought the meat, rice, and carrots that had cooked in there would be OK. I’m known for having an iron stomach, consuming even some long-in-the-tooth that my wife wouldn’t touch. I think it’s the Protestant ethic of not throwing out things unless absolutely necessary.

But a couple of hours later, I’m having digestive distress. I figure it’s food poisoning, and that it would pass. But I visited the bathroom two or three times overnight. And the Daughter was likewise stricken at some level. We were both home on Tuesday and Wednesday that week. We all went to school/work Thursday, and I was about to head out the door for choir that night when I had a recurrence.

I went to work on Friday, but at noontime, suffered yet again, coincidentally when the new President was being inaugurated. I felt so poorly that I actually had to STAY at work, because I wasn’t sure I’d make it home. I missed the local Women’s March that Saturday because I was still feeling woozy.

Then at the beginning of February, the Wife was felled by not one, but two, ailments simultaneously, the stomach flu PLUS some upper respiratory thing with a sore throat. The combo made her looked more washed out than I had ever seen her but once. I would have stayed home with her that Thursday except for The Daughter, with a return of her own stomach flu, but still in better shape than her mother, stayed home and brought fluids and light food.

It was particularly disappointing timing too. The Daughter went on a church ski trip over that first February weekend, and The Wife and I were going to a play, a movie, maybe dinner; didn’t happen. And Monday, she still felt weak.

The potential of a snow/ice delay was on the minds of both the females in the house this past Tuesday, but it didn’t happen. But they DID get Thursday (yesterday) off, and I know they were glad for the rest, though my wife spent a goodly amount of time doing paperwork for school.

We all had gotten flu shots, so what we’ve been suffering from must be something else, unfortunately.

Being sick, then the extra cooking and cleaning I did has made my blogging output quite pathetic recently, for instance, two posts in a week. I guess why I write ahead.

 

Clarinet

I ordered a CD from Amazon that had two Mozart pieces.

Benny Goodman, 400 Restaurant, New York, NY., ca. July 1946
Benny Goodman, 400 Restaurant, New York, NY., ca. July 1946

The Daughter played the clarinet for about two years. The added benefit was that The Wife took HER clarinet out of retirement – she had played in high school – and started practicing. They even played a brief duet at one of the family reunions.

Unfortunately, when the Daughter quit, her mother did as well. Still, she loves the instrument.

The Wife is a notoriously difficult person to buy presents for. There have been a few things that had been reliable choices for a time. A few Glee TV soundtracks early on. Her “K girls, Diana Krall and Alison Krauss, when they’d put out a new album. The six
seasons of Downton Abbey on DVD.

This year, uncharacteristically, she actually asked for a classical album featuring clarinetist Benny Goodman. I was unaware that he even played in a classical setting, hearing him entirely in the jazz genre.

Nevertheless, I ordered a CD from Amazon that had two Mozart pieces, Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra in A major, K. 622 and Quintet for Clarinet and String Quartet in A major, K. 581, the former with the Boston Symphony, conducted by Charles Munch, the latter with its String Quartet.

It arrived at work the Friday before Mother’s Day. At church that evening, it was First Friday, and the Capital City String Quartet was playing pieces by Mozart and Brahms with a clarinetist. You can guess that the Mozart piece was the very same K. 581 that had just been delivered to me!

And the K. 622 The Wife had played in a performance in high school, which seems to have been her greatest musical accomplishment.

Happy birthday to my bride, who is turning…some age younger than mine. Hope I have figured what to get you THIS time. In honor of her natal day, listen to Mozart, Quintet for Clarinet and Strings in A major K. 581.

VALTER VÍTEK: Clarinet, KUBIN QUARTET : L.CAP, J.NIEDERLE, P.VÍTEK, J.ZEDNÍČEK, Ostrava 1989

Nairi-Quartet: Soo-Young Lee (Clarinet), Narine Nanayan (1st violin), Zhanna Harutyunyan (2nd violin), Gohar Mkhitaryan (viola), Vladislav Kozin (cello)

Mozart Clarinet Concerto in A major K 622

Cleveland Orchestra. Clarinet: Robert Marcellus Conductor: George Szell

Ramblin' with Roger
Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial