I have become fascinated by my memories lately (probably a mid-life thing). This afternoon I remembered one day back when I was a boy when I wandered away from my grandparent"s farm. I walked across the fields, probably at least a mile, toward an old house where in fact my mother and uncle had been born in the "30s. After a while I spotted a pickup truck driving toward me across a dirt road. It was my grandfather; after pulling up beside me he jumped out and spanked me (but not too harshly). In the movies adults who are reunited with their children after some peril of some kind always hug each other and vow never to let such a thing happen again. Not my family; punishment was the cure for damned near everything it seemed. Now that I have a small boy of my own (still in the crawling phase and not able to get into too much trouble just yet) only now can I imagine the fear that must have gripped my fifty-something grandparents when they realized I was nowhere nearby. I"d have to guess that as he saw me walking along the road my grandfather, generally a kind and loving man, realized that I hadn"t been run over or drowned in a creek or fallen down an abandoned well or bitten by a poisonous snake or electrocuted by a bare wire or whatever.
On a similar note, music has a strong link to my past. I was in a pool store buying a replacement part for the little machine that rolls around the bottom of my pool sucking up leaves (it needs a $30 part just about everyweekend, but that"s another blog post). Today"s errand was to buy a new backup valve, the thing that make the sweeper back out of the enivitable corners it winds up in; to make things worse, the only place in town that had the part was miles from home and in an ugly part of town (not bad or dangerous, just ugly). The price was about $60 this time, but as I was walking out I heard on their sound system the beginnings of a song I hadn"t heard in years (Skin Deep by The Stranglers). I stopped under a speaker in the middle of the store to the mild distress of the staff, who were in the process of closing the store. Finally a girl asked if I needed anything else (maybe a big chlorine sale!) but I told her "no", and that I probably hadn"t heard that particular song in twenty or so years (I"m thinking it on was on 91X back when I was stationed in San Diego in 1988). She responded that it was playing on statelite radio (kind of a no-brainer, really, since over-the-air radio in Orlando is as bad, as, well, everywhere else), and gave me That Look. There was a movie some time back where Bruce Dern plays a Vietnam vet who in his later life works in the beauty pagent business. At one point at the end of the movie there"s a Marine color guard at a pagent and he askes what unit they"re from. When he learns they shared some of the same lineage he responds that once in combat their unit held a during a particularly fierce battle. The Marines look like reservists who can't relate and one of them just comments on the breasts of one of the contestants. Dern looks away, like, "oh, what's the use . . . "
