Three speeds of Baby Thumbelina

Belle Epoque: The most beautiful girl in the world

An animation made of photos of the stunning Edwardian actress, Arlette Dorgere.

Maybe some people DIDN'T evolve: The Vintage News discusses evolution

Nothing is more entertaining than an evening of perusing the Facebook page for The Vintage News. The Vintage News has nothing whatsoever to do with ANY kind of news, vintage or not. It's a chopped-up mixture of Weekly World News/Believe It or Not-type article, with some random quasi-historical/scientific stuff culled from other Facebook pages and just sort of glommed in.

Usually the articles are boring and kind of pointless, except for the fact that most of them are written with atrocious grammar and spelling and seem to be bad translations from some other language (which I love dearly). But the comments! The comments are something else again, and are often highly entertaining because of the mentality of the readers - or lack of same.

I didn't even include the article, which was about Charles Darwin marrying his cousin, but oh MY - what a "discussion" it sparked about how the theory of evolution is "just a theory", there is no evidence for it, it has never been proven, so therefore IT CAN'T BE TRUE. There's also lots of indignation about how we don't "come from monkeys", which reminds me of Spencer Tracy thumping the Bible in that old 1950s movie Inherit the Wind. Things haven't come  so very far since then - I don't mean the 1950s, but 1925 when the Scopes Monkey Trial took place:

The Scopes Trial, formally known as The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes and commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was an American legal case in July 1925 in which a substitute high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which had made it unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school.The trial was deliberately staged in order to attract publicity to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, where it was held. Scopes was unsure whether he had ever actually taught evolution, but he purposely incriminated himself so that the case could have a defendant.

Scopes was found guilty and fined $100 (equivalent to $1395 in 2017), but the verdict was overturned on a technicality. The trial served its purpose of drawing intense national publicity, as national reporters flocked to Dayton to cover the big-name lawyers who had agreed to represent each side. William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate, argued for the prosecution, while Clarence Darrow, the famed defense attorney, spoke for Scopes. The trial publicized the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy, which set Modernists, who said evolution was not inconsistent with religion,[4] against Fundamentalists, who said the word of God as revealed in the Bible took priority over all human knowledge. The case was thus seen as both a theological contest and a trial on whether "modern science" should be taught in schools. (Wikipedia)

I've taken a few university-level anthropology courses, though I'm aware the field has exploded since then. The fossil record, which becomes more rich and complex with each new find, is slowly but surely illuminating the mystery of human origins, tracing them back to a COMMON ANCESTOR (not a monkey, you dummies!) which split into two groups before they even looked like monkeys. We looked sort of like lemurs back then, and before that, we were tree shrews. 

We had to start somewhere.

But the point is, connection led to connection in a multi-branched, incredibly complex pattern with many dead ends. The fact that people still blather on about "the missing link" just infuriates me, because that idea was completely invalidated in about 1918. It's just a "thing people say" because they know nothing whatsoever about anthropology or the evolutionary process. To rant against Darwin by thundering that "we didn't come from monkeys" is so simple-minded and the idea still so apparently prevalent that I honestly wonder if Trump will ever run out of supporters.

Ron Waid Lizzie Campbell - It's still just a theory, not proven fact. If natural selection were true, Eskimos would have fur to keep warm, but they don't. They are just as hairless as everyone else. Also, if natural selection were true, humans in the tropics would have silvery, reflective skin to help them keep cool, but they don't. They have black skin, just the opposite of what the theory of natural selection would predict.

Keith Blackwell Lizzie Campbell so if you have a baby with a deformed hand or no legs... is that evolution?age

Ronald Redman Maybe you did fall out of a tree and landed on your head,their is no factual evidence man derived from a flipping monkey you twit

Rastko S. Ilić  His empty heretical theory had only one purpose: to separate humanity from Holy Christianity. As always

Nancy McIlrath Ok Vintage here you go again. How many times are you going to post this? I have seen 4 so far. I am a fan of Darwin but I suspect something else is going on here.

Ronald Redman Imagine you're a monkey playing in a tree, now you're a homosapian, wow...you can believe what ever floats your boat but sorry mam didn't come from a monkey.you have no proof whatsoever, to observe the truth look at his sponsors and channels of funds for his work and all will be clear.

Ronald Redman But still no evidence of evolution

Robinson Yost No, because science is not about proving things with absolute certainty, that’s not what science is about. So saying the theory of evolution means it’s unproven shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the word theory and the scientific process itself.

Nancy McIlrath troll

Baby elephant chasing birds

Elephant video of the week

Three speeds of Elizabeth Holmes

An experimental gif featuring my favorite Silicon Valley sociopath, Elizabeth Holmes. A little small, due to the varying frame size/speed.

Kung Fu Kitty

"Shrink! Shrink!" Instant weight loss miracles

I want to subtitle this, "When I came, my brain was loose. . . "

There are some truly strange phenomena in religion. This is right up there with Mormon magic underwear: the belief that a simple prayer will instantly peel 20 or 30 pounds off your body, so that suddenly your skirt is literally falling off. Even the needle on the scale is shown edging down and down, right on camera. It seems ludicrous, and it IS ludicrous, and I can't help but be sad, because people who believe this will believe anything. They will believe anything because they make the evidence fit. Either it's a downright hoax and they're sucking in their gut or have a hidden tuck in their waistband, or they're trying so hard to believe in the miracle that they delude themselves into actually SEEING results on their own body.

Part of it is just - may I say laziness? Losing weight is hard work, it takes effort, commitment, and an endless dedication to keeping the weight off even when your body insists on putting it back on. But what if God was willing to do all this for you - no effort - no energy - and in only seconds?

It scares me because this guy, this evangelist, is very slick. He's one of these charismatics, and he's there to fill the holes in people's lives. Most of this audience (and I believe the church is in Zimbabwe) are poor and black, and most are middle-aged or older women. No doubt this instant weight loss has another kind of cost, a more literal cost, in having to pony up big bucks to line the preacher's pockets.

It's what used to be called cheap grace. Jesus will do it all for you. Just believe in him, surrender to him! It seems like another lifetime that I not only belonged to the United Church, but was a lay minister for years and years. It wasn't so much waking up one morning realizing it had all been a sham. It was a slow crumbling, an eroding, a gradual realization that this just couldn't be true. What was I having "faith" in? Was there a God, a separable force from brute nature, that cared about us? After a while, it just didn't make sense any more. In the eyes of the church, it had to be something benevolent that was kind of hanging above us, watching over us, counting the hairs on our head, etc. If I doubted, people would try to hook me back by saying, "Oh, but it's just something that lives in your heart." But that's not it. An atheist could (and many do) embrace this idea. I could believe in human goodness without believing in a separable, personal, unconditionally loving God. 

That time I thought I caught a dazzling glimpse of the power of the universe, that dizzying force was completely indifferent. Quite simply, it didn't care about us. This was the raw force of nature, and of all that is. If there's something more personal going on, then we must provide it for each other.

So where is God in all this?

Videos like this one, in which trusting people are duped and bled dry of money they can't spare, only erodes my sense of the Big Guy in the Sky even more. How many crusades were fought in the name of God, how many people tortured and executed - and on a more intimate level, how many people were shamed and blamed, how many innocent, trusting children sexually abused and emotionally destroyed by priests who were God's representatives on earth?

It's a grim scene. I had to learn to do without God, and it was a loss, and still is, now that I am grieving the loss of my best friend. He was a believer for years, but I am not sure what happened at the end, because it looks like his former church is not going to do a memorial for him. So much for the graciousness of God and his followers! When it comes right down to it, Christian forgiveness is practically never followed, though an awful lot of people play at it. So I am left pretty much alone with my grief, and it's bloody painful. Sometimes I feel him on the other side, sometimes I even hear his voice, but if  I made the mistake of telling a psychiatrist, I'd be given medication for it and have a note written on my chart: delusional. And it would be on my record forever. Don't start that God business, whatever you do, or it will follow you around forever.

POST-BLOG GLOB! Predictably, I just found a news article from a Zimbabwe paper about  this Prophet Emmanuel Makandiwa, claiming that his church will soon be shut down (though I am sure that, like a poison mushroom, it will pop up somewhere else in short order. As P. T. Barnum famously said, there's one born every minute.) 

The fortunes and survival of UFIC leader, prophet Emmanuel Makandiwa, is hanging by a thread, with the prospect of an ultimate shutdown of his tricky church, after the already talked about Ghanaian pastors have sent an explosive letter to President Robert Mugabe, to be hand delivered by a local delegation of clerics representing them in Harare next week, the Telescope News reported.

Makandiwa had appeared to take the gospel in Zimbabwe by storm five years ago, with sugarcoated teachings bordering on a heap of what his critics say are "lying miracles", such as penis enlargements, miracle money, miracle babies, weight loss on live television, and dubious financial summits to empower men right in the House of The Lord, they charge. However, the letter sent last night to Zimbabwe, calls on Mugabe to immediately arrest Makandiwa without hesitation when Grace passes away, as evidence that he is a fake prophet, thus God has hidden this sad prophecy just to expose his wickedness, and alleged ties with the occult and voodoo magic, the pastors lead by Lawrence Ajoba, said.

The Telescope News claims that it has a copy of the letter, which is embargoed until 6 April 2014, thus we shall be publishing the full text of the letter on Monday, the 7th of April, as part 2 to this interesting saga fast approaching "Judgement Day".

Ironically, Makandiwa is preparing for a much hyped "Judgement Night" on April 19, at the National Sports Stadium in the capital. Some 150 000 people are expected to attend his meeting, including foreigners, which could be his very last shot at fame and crowd pulling. The Ghanaian pastors, as will be read next week also want Mugabe "to set bulldozers" on the UFIC Chitungwiza church.

(I'm afraid they lost me at the penis enlargements.)

Which way did he go?

In the land of Dairy Queen

I consider this to be a thing of great beauty. We seldom see such beauty in the world anywhere, let alone in a commercial for Dairy Queen. We had treats then, and not many people were fat. We were impressed with less. But was it less?

This is a piece of art. Art and commerce meet and blend with such incredible grace. No seams show. This came right out of the brain of an animator and on to our TV set. The black and white gives it an unearthly, even otherworldly quality. And the Dairy Queen fairy descends from space to bring her curly-topped treats to sleeping children.

We still have the Land of Dairy Queen, but it isn't the same. It's no longer an astral destination, but just a place to go to for blizzards and chocolate-dipped cones and frozen birthday cakes. We're no longer transported. The imagination is becoming blunted. We don't even know the ways in which things are slipping away, because they have already slipped away.

This man is having a bad day

HIT IT JOE!

Joe is playing a sort of modified orchestrion, which is an organ played with paper rolls like a player piano. This rendition has something of the 1812 Overture about it. For some reason the instrument is called an American fotoplayer, an odd name for something acoustic rather than visual. In this case, his highly physical enhancement of the piece is downright maniacal. These keyboard instruments were popular in the parlour in the early 20th century. They provide such a workout that it's a wonder Joe isn't more slender.

I have a fascination with mechanical musical instruments - I could go on and on, but I have to be somewhere - their hokey artificiality, out-of-tune-ness, and outlandish methods of propulsion, such as the steam-driven calliope popular with travelling circuses and Mississippi steamboats. Like bagpipes, which also utilize hot air, they're outdoor instruments, too deafening to be played in the parlour. These were instruments on the move, in circus wagons or on steamboats (or marching bands in kilts). 

It was technology of a sort, though analogue/manual. Obsolescence interests me, for reasons which kind of frighten me, sometimes. Like so many of my generation, I am slouching not-so-slowly in the same direction.

Joe has an entire YouTube channel of fotoplayer performances (link below). They are extremely intense, even noisy, so listen to them at your own risk.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEWQTsDz39znxWbohaQPoKw

I love you THIS much!

Dream of Betty Crocker

I dream of Betty Crocker (an animation from an old ad).

Overture 1812 finale Ernie Kovacs show

PLEASE STAND BY

Keith Morrison: "And then. . . well. . . you know what they say. . . "

Oldest sex symbol on network television. Face like the Gobi Desert, but that's why we love him. This speaks volumes about Dateline's age demographic. He also speaks in a certain language I call Keith-ese, with lots of low-pitched "well"s, and slightly archaic Canadianisms like "anna-thing" for "anything", and "rec-coards" for records. His pauses are more than pregnant, they have already given birth and are running around.

Click on bottom right corner, you can't watch this without the sound!

Can't Help Falling in Love (on a kalimba)

I had never heard of a kalimba before, but I sure recognized the sound. It's the tinny, plinky sound of my first toy, an old tin jack-in-the-box (old even when I inherited it from my older siblings).

It looked and sounded something like this:

POP goes the synapse! And memory that is no more than a nearly-invisible, hairlike trace among the neurons once again begins to sizzle.

Sense memories, mostly. I remember the jack-in-the-box and its rusty chipped paint, rubbery plunks and scary pop-up man, the pictures of clowns on the sides. I remember associating it with the smell of pee, or a urinous scent that makes no sense unless I wasn't potty trained yet. These are OLD memories, you must realize, as old as I am. I remember sitting in the middle of the living room floor alone, my fat little legs stuck out in front of me, watching a flickering blue screen, a magic box that had come in the door the same day my mother brought me home from the hospital (upstaging me so completely that no one paid any attention to the new baby). The surreal, dreamlike, smudgy black-and-white images somehow pushed the record button in my infant mind, so that I remember - very distinctly - a man with a moustache, twisting his face around this way, then that way:

Something like this.

Exactly like this, because this IS it, this IS the exact image I saw on TV in my infancy, one of my very first memories! I didn't know what it was, who it was (though of course I recognized it as a face), and it was years or even decades later before I realized it was the wildly innovative comedian my older brother always talked about - THE SAME MAN - Ernie Kovacs! Even later than that, in adulthood, I saw some rare kinescopes of Kovacs' TV show (most of the videos erased by the networks to record game shows like To Tell the Truth and What's My Line. Remember Bess Myerson? ). Even now it gives me a strange, not too comfortable feeling. Kovacs only seems to exist in this grey phantom world, scary, sometimes even off-putting  as it seems to have a mildewed, obsolete quality. But his madness seemed to keep pace with my own, with ideas and thinking that might have been original but were forever out of step.

Sputnik. I remember Sputnik, everyone talking about it, though I was three years old and had no idea what it was, what it was about. No one ever explained anything, but there was an uneasy feeling that I should know, that I shouldn't NEED it explained, because everyone else got it, didn't they? As usual, since I was the youngest by over a decade, everyone else towered over me. I do remember going up some spooky steps at the back of my father's store in pitch darkness to stand on the flat roof with a telescope, trying to see Sputnik. I always thought I imagined that part, that there was no way anyone could see a suitcase-sized sphere hurtling across space from a store roof, but just last night I was talking about it to my son and he said, "Oh, yes, it was visible in the night sky." Jesus Christ!

I remember moving. I hate moving, and maybe this is why. This one is even earlier than Sputnik: I was probably in my two's (toilet trained? Who knows) and being hauled around to look at a new house. A new house where we were going to live. What was wrong with the  old house? These thoughts weren't even verbal, just deep uneasy feelings. If we could move for no reason, then anything might happen.

I was trundled around this huge, empty, cavernous place while everyone murmured and talked. There was no furniture, not even any rugs. I assumed this was how we were going to live. No one told me otherwise. Waffling confusion like a cloud system, never quite clearing up. 

Debby Carey made me come into her playhouse (an awful tippy thing with a cracked linoleum floor) and dared me to pee on the floor. I think I did, and it was hot and the smell was disgusting, but we giggled.

Sandy, the neighbor's bad-tempered cocker spaniel, bit me behind my knee. I think I was four, as it was before kindergarten. When the dog pooped hugely on our front lawn, the kids made up a song to "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow": "Sandy went to the bathroom, Sandy went to the bathroom. . . "

They go back farther, more soft-bordered and woozy like the feeling just before you faint. Being in "the gulley" somewhere around my grandmother's house in Delhi. My sister towering over me as I lay in the weeds and saying, "Are you wounded?" I don't even know what the game was, though I was often (being the smallest, and powerless) taken prisoner.

The tent, being tied to the pole, a reek of canvas. Playing war. Eating sweet peas from the garden, war provisions. Summer noises, cicadas. Long, sizzly, tambourine-like arcs of hot summer sound.

And the skeezix bird, the night hawk that produced a weird booming noise that no one else seemed to hear, so that I assumed I was the only one, or was crazy like everyone told me. Some of them (not many) noticed the call, but not the strange noise that followed it, which my brother claimed was the sound waves bouncing off buildings. (This video finally explained it to me, some fifty years on.)

And just a hair of memory, something that came up in hypnosis, a disastrous session in which I felt I stood before God, but what led into it was a memory of  being newborn and in a crib, my mother opening the door of my dark room - a gigantic exploding rectangle of yellow light, then a figure fifty feet tall, looking down at me with indifference tinged with a certain grim sense of duty.

Shake shake shake (animation)

What makes you sleep so sound

Wake up, wake up darlin' Corey 

What makes you sleep so sound 

The revenue officers are coming 

Gonna tear your still house down. 

Go 'way, go 'way darlin' Corey 

Stop hanging around my bed 

Bad liquor's ruined my body 

Pretty women’s gone to my head.

I’m going across the deep ocean 

I’m going across the deep sea 

I’m a-going across the deep ocean 

Just to bring darlin' Corey to me. 

Go dig me a hole in the meadow

Go dig me a hole in the ground 

Go dig me a hole in the meadow 

Just to lay darlin' Corey down. 

Don’t you hear them blue birds a-singing 

Don’t you hear that mournful sound 

They're a-preaching Corey’s funeral 

In some lonesome graveyard ground.

Wake up, wake up darlin' Corey 

What makes you sleep so sound 

The revenue officers are coming 

They’re going to tear your still house down.

Burl Ives 1941

It took me a while to figure out why this song is such a work of genius - that is, as Burl Ives sings it, with one endlessly-sustained, finger-picked chord. It's the minimalism of it, the stripped-down quality, like a pine board silver-greyed and punched full of knotholes. He uses only the barest minimum of his incredible voice, just the edge of a single vocal cord, and whispers the ending in a way that chills the blood. 

I was only familiar with that other version, the one all the folkies sang in the '60s after Harry Belafonte made it famous. I don't remember stills being torn down and "Darlin' Cor-ray" being buried in a "medd-a" in that one. Belafonte homogenized it somewhat, tamed the lyric, took the coldness, the whiskery scarecrow quality out of it. 

Ives was a strange one, walking out of a schoolhouse one day saying he had had enough of education, then walking just as confidently into a totally unique lifelong career as an actor and a folksinger. He had a sort of effortless, artless tenor that could wrap itself around any kind of song - remember Little Bitty Tear? But then there was that chiller That's all I Can Remember (which see):

It took me a few decades to catch up with this amazing jailhouse ballad again, sung in his usual downplayed, straightforward way. But ah, the way he sings, "Then they turned on the juice, and I felt something a-burnin'. . . " Like Johnny Cash, who was never in the service and never spent a single day in jail, Ives somehow presented himself as a man who had been everywhere, done everything, and lived to sing the tale. 

Then there was the acting. His Big Daddy was downright frightening, malignant, cold-eyed, the polar opposite of his grandfatherly self, chuckling away on that wretched Christmas show he was in. I am sure I watched it, listened to Holly Jolly Christmas, Little White Duck, and that incredibly stupid song about The Whale, which my smart-ass/pain-in-the-ass family endlessly, pretentiously quoted:

I have to admit to being both drawn and somewhat repulsed by Ives, by his bulk, his scary tremorous voice, his heartiness backed by a surly rage that scares the hell out of me. He was too many things at once, but there is no beating or repeating that voice. It's one of those but-he's-not-doing-anything voices. He does not seem to be putting any effort into it at all, and chances are he wasn't. It was just a genius voice. Not a mountain voice at all, not a holler or a howl. It was actually kind of refined. Some of his oeuvre was not to my tastes - he did a lot of bland, country-ish stuff that I remember listening to a lot as a kid, the same way I listened to Andy Williams.

But then he starts whispering to us about Darlin' Cor-ray, and a chill works its way up, or tingles on my scalp so my hair seems to stand on end. This is one of those minimalist things, a few brush-strokes expressing a world. Van Gogh could dab his brush on a canvas a couple of times and paint a recognizable human figure, a person with an attitude, a mission and a soul. Minimalism has died out; cacophony is king. We have to go back to the records, because they're all we've got left.

Neon rider

Four riffs on a film leader

We could not ask for more

This is one of the most amazing videos I've ever seen. The horses are so utterly calm, perhaps due to the skill of their riders. If one of them panicked, it might all be over.

It has been, incredibly, almost two months since I lost my best friend David. Right now it's a lonesome trail indeed, for I don't even know if he will have a memorial. I have to wait to hear, there's nothing I can do. Things were complicated with him in his small community, with his relationships, with his church. He may have been excommunicated for doing some sort of bizarre healing. (Imagine, trying to heal someone!). For a while he was involved with a druggie, and had a very hard time scraping her off. Yet he was a genius in his own way, and his calm acceptance of me in my time of hell was a balm when no one else seemed to understand or care.

I hope I offered him similar solace. But the trail remains teetering, narrow, requiring or demanding a faith I just don't have. David had it in spades, and I honestly don't know how he sustained it in a too-short, too-difficult, largely solitary life. 

Some people seem to come from nowhere, to have no one, no "people". Certainly he had no roots, or else they were vague. When someone I know on Facebook finally found David's great-aunt (or someone like that) and told her David had passed, the answer was, oh, thanks for telling me. I'll pass it along to his half-brother.

Families can be, as Sylvia Fraser once famously said, "killing fields". Friends are, as the saying goes, God's way of apologizing for them. I spent Saturday at a soccer game trying not to weep, while my granddaughter, glorious Caitlin, she who had been so close to me for so many years, literally turned her back on me and would not speak to me or even look at me or say hello. Raw from the loss of David, I felt my heart drop out.

What had I done? I must have done something. At half-time I couldn't stand it any more and switched chairs with Bill, sitting next to Jim, her other grandpa. He asked me what was wrong and I told him. "Well, maybe she's not so much turning away from you as turning toward her phone." It was a wry observation, but it gave me pause.

At one point I thought I heard my daughter whisper to her, "This is embarrassing!" But you can't physically turn a 15-year-old kid around and force her to speak a few words to her grandma. And adolescent girls - you can hear them ticking, you know? Just waiting for hissing pinwheels and Roman candles to explode.

It was awful, but my husband kept saying, don't take it personally, she's just being a kid. But how could I feel so wretchedly alone in my own family, my only refuge in the whole world?

Today, totally unexpectedly, she agreed to have lunch with us (maybe, just maybe, prompted by her mother?), and for a half-hour chattered away in her usual, delightful, wry, funny way. A totally different person? Or two sides of the same person? Maybe she was just honest enough with herself on Saturday to say: I don't want to talk to Grandma today, so I won't. Most of us don't have that luxury with people.

Or she was just being a hopeless brat, selfish and inconsiderate. There's that.

There's no point to this, at all, except to say that I had to wait it out, not fuss (for surely that would have made it worse, made her NEVER want to talk to me). I had to find an atom of faith in me somewhere. With my harrowing family history, estrangement seems to almost disembowel me. I know that it is generally irreversible, and to lose any more of my tiny band of kin might be fatal.

But it was just some mood, wasn't it? Why the change of heart? Or did Shannon really take her aside and say, look, you wouldn't talk to her at the soccer game and it was embarrassing, so TALK TO HER this time - ?

At this point, I don't even care. I'm just glad this wasn't a crying day, but tomorrow might be. I just hope I hear something. I hope I get to stand with people who loved David too. The trail is lonesome, and it is long. But please, just don't let it go cold.

Outward bound upon a ship that sails no ocean
Outward bound, it has no crew but me and you
All alone when just a minute ago the shore was filled with people
With people that we knew

Outward bound upon a journey without ending
Outward bound, uncharted waters beneath our bow
Far behind, the green familiar shore is fading into time
And time has left us now

So farewell, adieu, so long, vaya con Dios
May they find whatever they are looking for
Remember when the wine was better than ever again
We could not ask, we could not ask for more

Outward bound upon a ship with tattered sail
Outward bound upon a crooked lonesome trail
Things we learn, we'll just be satisfied in knowing
And we'll tell it to our kids as a fairy tale

So farewell, adieu, so long, vaya con Dios
May they find whatever they are looking for
Remember when the wine was better than ever again
We could not ask, we could not ask for more

So farewell, adieu, so long, vaya con Dios
May they find whatever they are looking for
Remember when the wine was better than ever again
We could not ask, we could not ask for more
We could not ask, we could not ask for more

Elizabeth Holmes: "her eyes are part of her magic spell"

Just some Sunday music ( I kept adding to this!)

                     

When will this strong yearning end?

Weekend in New England

Barry Manilow

Last night I waved goodbye,
Now it seems years
I'm back in the city
Where nothing is clear

But thoughts of me holding you,
Bringing us near

And tell me, when will our eyes meet?
When can I touch you?
When will this strong yearning end?
And when will I hold you again

Time in New England
Took me away
To long rocky beaches
And you by the bay
We started a story
Whose end must now wait

And tell me, when will our eyes meet?
When can I touch you?
When will this strong yearning end?
And when will I hold you again

I feel the change comin'
I feel the wind blow
I feel brave and daring
I feel my blood flow
With you I could bring out
All the love that I have
With you there's a heaven,
So earth ain't so bad

And tell me, when will our eyes meet?
When can I touch you?
When will this strong yearning end?
And when will I hold you
Again

This is the song I almost couldn't find. It needed a post of its own, not to be tacked on to a piece about garden snails! When I set out to find a good YouTube version to post here, I heard ten-year-olds sing it on those big splashy TV talent shows, and even if they could hit all the notes (always over-decorated, as all singing is now), they fell flat because they had never experienced ANY of this. They simply had no idea what they were singing about. Most were too strident, too screamy, and trying too hard to get a "wow" effect, a thumbs-up or high-five or whatever these people get when they win on those shows. They were all getting in the way of the song.

I finally found this one, presumably by an amateur, but exceptionally well sung, so I used it. A simple karaoke version, sung by someone I've never heard of, a man who has a Malaysian accent. It came closest to what I was hearing in memory. Now that I hear it again, the sweet overtones in his voice are phenomenal, not anything that can be created by a machine. 

It was in the middle of all this listening that the line, "When will I hold you again?" triggered something, and I began to sob. It was like a cloudburst, just unexpected, out of nowhere, except that it was somewhere. My dear friend David, someone I loved for 27 years, died two months ago, and it has been a strange time as I've passed in and out of the revolving door of grief. And this is the first time I have cried.

I wondered why I hadn't, but I knew there was no schedule for it, no timetable for any of it, because grief is its own country and has to be traversed, travelled through. The ground is bumpy, rocky, with sheer drops. There are oases, green spaces. But these are only lavish memories, things which now must be stored away, without the presence of the one who meant so much to you.

So it's over.

When will I see you again? Never. It's not enough in the mind's eye. Memories are not enough. Right now I feel shredded, as if my heart has been through a mower.

He may have been the one person in my whole life who "got" me, quite apart from people in my family whom I know love and accept me with all my quirks. But he was what L. M. Montgomery called "of the race that knows Joseph", more than kindred, even though he wasn't kin. No one "got" me more than David, ever, and vice-versa, and it lasted for years, and years, and years, through everything.

This is pain, intense pain, and though I don't want it, I have known people who have traversed all of life and never once felt this, this heart-torn-out feeling, snapped strings dangling. I feel sorry for them, safely entombed while their hearts are still beating. They tend to die relatively young, and leave a bad trail, strewn with fragments from the casual damage of others.

I don't know what to do now, and the rest of the day will be lousy and I will feel tired and defeated, with raw eyes from crying so much, run over. But I'd rather have this. I'm not sure why, but I'd rather, perhaps because if he could see this, I know he would appreciate the fact that someone mourned him to this depth. I would not be without that certainty.

A garden is a lovesome thing? What rot!

My Garden by T. E. Brown

A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!

Rose plot,

Fringed pool,

Fern'd grot --

The veriest school

Of peace; and yet the fool

Contends that God is not --

Not God! in Gardens! when the eve is cool?

Nay, but I have a sign;

'Tis very sure God walks in mine.

My Garden by J. A. Lindon 

A garden is a lovesome thing? What rot! 

Weed plot, 

Scum pool, 

Old pot, 

Snail-shiny stool 

In pieces; yet the fool 

Contends that snails are not - 

Not snails! in gardens! when the eve is cool? 

Nay, but I see their trails! 

'Tis very sure my garden’s full of snails!

How many pests are likely to infest
An English country garden
I’ll tell you now of some that I detest
Those I miss you’ll surely pardon
Cabbage worms and spider mites. 

Things that give you nasty bites.
Snails, spiders, snakes and bees.
Aphids and locusts are really quite ferocious
In my English country garden

I will confess that I have no success
With my English country garden
I’ve thought it through and decided what to do
My result I hope you’ll pardon
Cover it with broken bricks.

Fill it up with ready mix,
Wait for it to harden.
I’ll cultivate a nice cement estate
Not an English country garden.

AFTERWORD. I know. This is sort of lame. But here's how it started. I kept thinking of the line, "My garden's full of snails!", and knew it was from something, somewhere, so I just had to chase it down. Turns out it was a parody of another poem, equally lame, about God walking along in the garden, presumably leaving some very large footprints.

Then I thought of, for some reason, a TV special I watched eons ago, with Cleo Laine and John Dankworth (and for some reason I remember Karen Morrow singing a beautiful version of When Will I see you Again?). They did a take on English Country Garden which was really quite funny, all about snails and slugs and things infesting the shrubs and eating everything in sight. I couldn't find it anywhere, but there were various parodies of it on YouTube and elsewhere. I was too lazy to write my own, so adapted one of the many lyrics (which included some rude and disgusting ones I didn't want to use), leaving half the verses out because it was Australian. Nothing against Aussies, I just don't have any wallabys in my yard. 

Because some of my thousands of readers might not be familiar with the original song, I found a lovely and very short version sung by Nana Mouskouri. So if any of this hangs together, great! 

(Later!) Oh my God! I DID find that song, the one Karen Morrow sang on the Cleo Laine special years and years ago, but it wasn't called When Will I See you Again at all! It was called Weekend in New England, of all things, and it was written by Barry Manilow. The only reason I found it at all was because I remembered the line, "When will this strong yearning end?" The wonders of the internet yielded me the rest.

So somehow or other, I've gone from garden pests to Barry Manilow. Sorry. But this one deserves a post of its own.

Stay tuned.