I Saw Yesterday, Yesterday

I was lying in bed, dead tire when I looked up to where the smoke alarm usually flashes a green light. Only this time there were green lights flashing all around the smoke alarm. Here, there and everywhere within a three foot radius of the alarm. I thought I was having a medical emergency and that I’d better turn the light on, make sure the phone was close by to dial 9-1-1 should something else develop. When I turned the light on I discovered there was nothing wrong with my vision. I turned the light off and the erratic flashing was back again. After a few more lights on, lights off I noticed a firefly was resting on the light of my smoke alarm. I got the fly swatter, not intending to kill it but to nudge it to where I could catch and release it outside. But I must have nudged too hard because it ended upside down on the floor its wing damaged, its little butt still flashing which caught the attention of the dog. I yelled at Levi not to eat it, grabbed a tissue and apologized for having to end its life. I felt bad that an innocent bug that brought forth fond childhood memories had to die at my hands. The dog felt cheated out of a treat. The firefly, I want to believe, died happy after doing a mating dance with my smoke alarm. 

The 1st (and 3^rd) Mondays of the month are always my Gathering Girls lunches and sometimes we throw in a movie afterward. This week we met for Mexican food and got caught up on everyone’s activities. One of the ladies just finished up the last of her chemo treatments for ovarian cancer. But it will be a few weeks before she knows if she’s out of the woods. Over the course of her chemo she moved in with her daughter and they both put their houses up for sale, downsized their belongings and bought another house together. In the beginning, I had my doubts about her doing all that while going through a medical crisis but it’s working out well for them. She’s happy not to be living alone any longer.

 As for me, since I dominated the conversation the last time with my surprising news about buying into the Continuum Care Complex, so I did my best to keep my mouth shut this time and only asked questions about the other women’s activities. We were just getting ready to place our orders when the lights went out in the entire area with the exception of the movie theater across that street. We made the best of the sunshine coming in the windows, ate mostly taco salads and other stuff that didn’t need cooking and suffered through them trying to prepare our checks the old school way. I was probably the only one “suffering” because I hate waiting for checks and it was taking two of them forever to do the math and I just wanted to go before I ate the rest of the community chips and salsa on the table. It's a 'clean your plate' thing left over from childhood that still plagues me today. No matter what anyone was talking about I was distracted by the stupid chips on the other side of the table. Two more minutes and I would have asked someone to pass them over.

Yesterday, the movie we saw, was something I looked forward to seeing. Not only did I need the change of pace, my love of Beatles music keeps growing as I age. The title song is one that brought tears to my eyes every time I heard it for years. “Yesterday, All my troubles seemed so far away, Now it looks as though they're here to stay, Oh, I believe in yesterday…” Its melancholy tone still has the power to transport me back to a five year period when my brother and I shared care of my dad. Dad had this little organ with programed songs in it, Yesterday being one of them. I played it every day I was staying with him and I cried each time. Driving out to the boondocks to stay with dad part of the week was one of the most difficult periods of my life. At least my husband was supportive of what my brother and I were trying to do, to keep Dad in his own home/the family cottage but I can’t say the same about my sister-in-law. 

Back on topic: Rotten Tomatoes wrote this about Yesterday, the movie: “Jack Malik (Himesh Patel, BBC's Eastenders) is a struggling singer-songwriter in a tiny English seaside town whose dreams of fame are rapidly fading, despite the fierce devotion and support of his childhood best friend, Ellie (Lily James, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again). Then, after a freak bus accident during a mysterious global blackout, Jack wakes up to discover that The Beatles have never existed... and he finds himself with a very complicated problem, indeed.”

Reviewers are all over the map on this film but I thought it was a fun movie, a light romantic comedy with a twist and lots of great Beatles music. Not nearly as good as Rocket Man but a nice way to spend the afternoon. We all had a little trouble understanding the British accents but one reviewer I read dinged the film because it didn't include a dissertation on the evils of plagiarism. That's crazy, in my opinion. If you buy the premise that a world-wide power outage could wipe the Beatles and their music out of everyone’s memory and computers is it really plagiarism for Jack to recreate their music? Damn reviewer! I don’t want to think that hard today to puzzle that out. But I do want to claim the power outrage at the strip mall where we ate is responsible for me forgetting where I parked my car at the theater. ©