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. ©

Levi and the Music in my Life

Levi had to go back to the vet recently for a recheck of the pus pocket on his lip. It cleared up nicely on the antibiotics but he was still digging and scratching the area constantly. This time we were able to see a 'skin tag' we didn’t see before and it freaked me out when I discovered it a few days before the appointment because I thought it was an embedded tick. Between the veterinary, her tech assistant, me and Levi’s cooperation the vet was able to pronounce that what I thought were legs coming out of the ‘thing’ were not. We were also able to see that the salivary gland near the upper lip where the pus pocket was two weeks ago was enlarged and the vet was guessing it’s plugged and that’s the source of the annoying itching Levi was experiencing. 

She put him on a twice a day drug for itching and it’s been like a miracle. I’ve only seen him digging at his mouth three times in four days since starting the pills. The plan is to reduce the drug down to once a day after a two week trial, hoping to give the salivary gland a rest and chance to correct itself. Going into surgically open it up or remove the gland would be costly and an unnecessary risk at his age. Better to do it with his annual teeth cleaning next summer, if the pills give him enough relief to wait and he's not running a fever. As Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say, “It’s always something.” 

Changing topics: I’ve been in the car a lot lately which means I’ve been hearing a lot of music. I don’t listen to it in the house but I’ll explain that later. Yesterday Thomas Rhett came on The Highway XM radio channel singing the last choir of his latest song, “Now I'm twenty-five and I'm drinking wine with my wife at home. Got a couple of dogs and a couple of songs on the radio and we sit around and we laugh about how we used to be when all we cared about was turning sixteen.” The song progressed from looking forward to sixteen, then to eighteen and twenty-one…always looking forward to the next benchmark. That’s what I’ve done my entire life, never happy with the here and now. That is until I got so old the next benchmark is dying and I find I don’t know how to live in the here and now.

Honestly, I don’t understand why people don’t like Country Western music. The songs are mini stories about looking back and looking forward and enjoying where you’re at. They’re about crying and laughing and loving. Sure, a few of the songs are about pickup trucks and hard drinking but more talk about things like skipping rocks on a river and watching sunsets with the one you love. And there’s a lot of practical advice in Country Western songs like in this one Kenny Chesney sang to me yesterday: 

“Scared to live, scared to die

We ain't perfect but we try

Get along while we can

Always give love the upper hand

Paint a wall, learn to dance

Call your mom, buy a boat

Drink a beer, sing a song

Make a friend….”

I don’t listen to music in the house is because 1) it makes me too moody, and 2) I get lost in the song writer’s creativity and that stifles my own if I’m trying to write. Getting lost in their storytelling makes me forget to eat, pay bills and wipe my…dog’s feet when he comes inside. You thought I was going to say something else, didn’t you. I thought about it but I pride myself on not being crude enough that I’d say “wipe my ass” in public. 

When I was in college I took a class on Music Appreciation and we studied classical pieces side-by-side with those written by the new-at-the-time Beatles. The professor predicted that the Beatles music would be around in four hundred years. Years later I got to hear an entire concert of Beatles music played by a full orchestra and I was blown away. The professor was right and I loved his class but the only time I listened to classical music after that was when I was plowing snow. Rachmaninoff’s Flight of the Bumblebee and Beethoven’s 5^th Sympathy could keep me awake like no other tip or trick of professional truckers. I still have my old cassettes but no way to play them without my pickup truck. 

Music played an important part in a different stage of my life. After my husband’s stroke I was back to singing childhood songs in the car everywhere we’d go. Songs learned before the age of five are stored in a different part of our brains, his speech therapist said, so singing them is a way to try to kick-start lost speech to come back. It didn’t work and after a year that "homework" faded out of our world but for the rest of his life Don often belted out, “Jesus likes me. Yo, you know” and every time I’d reply, “I think Jesus loved you when you were a kid." At that point he’d switch the only other song he could (almost) sing, Happy Birthday. Of all the things I’ve written over the past nearly two decades of writing on the web, my favorite humorous essay was about Don and his two songs. If interested, you can read it here. But be warned, the word ‘ass’ does come up. ©

1967, a Year of Lost Innocence

Re-reading copies of letters I wrote back in 1967 I hardly recognized that starry-eyed, flag-waving girl I was back then when 'she' was on a mission to write to as many guys stationed in Vietnam as she could. Troops over there, that year, increased to a total of 475,000 and peace rallies turned into war protests erupted around the world, becoming more and more intense and frequent. I was clearly on the side of Uncle Sam and by the end of the year the country and many of us in it had lost our innocence---me in more ways than one.

1967 was also the year when Twiggy was a fashion sensation that started women on a path of viewing our bodies in an unhealthy and unrealistic way and we are still dealing with her legacy all these years later. It was also the year when 7,000 National Guards were sent to Detroit to put down the race rioting and looting in the streets and those scenes were repeated across the nation, including right in my own back yard where one of my co-workers couldn’t go home for nearly a week because her whole neighborhood was blocked off by the police.  

In 1967 the Beatles came out with their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band album and I have two hats in my closet, bought in the ‘60s that I affectionately call my Sgt. Pepper hats. One hat is white fur and the other is red velvet and the latter one is what I wore when I got my picture taken so I’d have photos to send the servicemen I was penpals with. By the second or third letter I received from a G.I. a picture was usually requested. Also requested was the name of the perfume I sprayed on my envelopes. It was Avon’s Unforgettable and I could probably write an entire essay just quoting the various comments I received about that perfume. One guy said at Mail Call the guys would pass my letters around before he could even open them. Another guy said any girl who "smells like that and has such beautiful handwriting has to be pretty." Several guys said they carried my letters around in their helmets so they could smell the perfume---in one case, when the smell of jungle rot got too much and in another case, the guy wanted to “remember what girls smell like.” One guy said he was charging ten cents for a quick sniff---probably a joke since the guys don't use cash in the military.

Yes, I’ve been staying up way too late reading the letters I’ve decided to send off to the Center for American War Letters. The servicemen’s letters are in good condition, but unfortunately my letters will all have to be redone because they are carbon copies on cheap paper that did not fare well over time. But since the curator of the legacy project said they will welcome the back and forth of pen pals, and since they do accept copies, that’s what they’ll get from my side of the exchanges---if my fingers hold up with all the typing I’ll be doing over winter.

After I read a complete set of letters between me and a particular guy, I look him up on the index of names listed on the Vietnam War Memorial. What a heart-pounding task that’s turning out to be! With one guy out of the thirty I've read so far, I took it a step farther and found him on the internet living about fifty miles away. We had a brother/sister like exchange of eight to ten page letters about every subject on earth including Twiggy. He had a girlfriend back here in the States who was planning their wedding and he had his whole life plotted out. Near the end of our letter exchanges, he was giving me dating advice. (I wasn't give guys a fair chance. Who knew.) Re-reading his letters brought on an urge to send him a note with no return address on the envelope. I’m not sending it until Christmas---IF I do it at all, a full circle kind of thing since our penpalling started at Christmas 1966. I can’t decide if a note could cause trouble for the guy, or not. What do you think? I’ve never been the jealous type so it’s hard for me to predict how a wife would react. If I do it, this is what I'll say:

"If you’re not the ______ _______ who was stationed at Da Dang in 1967 please disregard this note. If you are, you may (or may not) remember a brother/sister type penpal friendship we had back then. Either way, recently I went to a lecture about war letters and it reminded me of our exchange and that I’ve owed you a letter for the past fifty years. That war was a defining era for so many people. I hope the plans you had for your post-military life came to pass. As for me, I found my soulmate a few years later and as they say, we lived “happily ever after.” I hope you find the intended humor and sentimentality in me sending this note all these years later. Sincerely, Jean _______ (the floral designer)"    ©

 

P.S. 8/2025 I decided against trying to connect with any of the guys I'd been pen pals with, this guy included. I look some of them up on the Vietnam War Memorial though to see if they made it home or not.

 

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My Sgt. Pepper Hat, 1967