Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Mother Nature sent me a free sample of old-age hearing loss back when I
was a mere young sprout. I went for a long noisy car ride and, when I
got out, a whole bunch of neurons inside my left ear had decided to quit.

There are some good sides to this problem (and there are some good
reasons my children occasionally tease my by singing Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”)
For example:

• I can sleep in a noisy bedroom just by pointing my right
  ear into the pillow.
• Sometimes I “hear” some truly remarkable
  things–like a radio ad for a restaurant with “ballet parking.”
• And I
  get lots of practice on filling in the blanks.

At Harvard Square’s Boston Chowda* the other day, I kept
overhearing the cellphone talk of a 6-foot-tall blonde goddess at the
next table.

And so on — I’m giving the Mad Lib
version, of course, because my polka-dot hearing kept cutting out every
time she lowered her voice. So I got to fill in the blanks with my own
idea of what would be a fun story–for example, that the
wrong-party-clincher was Julie Christie and Johnny Depp told the
goddess she looked good.

In real life, it was probably much less glamorous–but who cares? Certainly not my optimistic imagination.

A Hollywood party like the one I pictured–hey, it probably even has ballet parking!

The first Thanksgiving I cooked for was the hardest. Amity was a tiny
baby–Frank and I both had flu. I managed to stagger into the kitchen
and heat up a can of Campbell’s chicken soup with rice for us to
celebrate with. We were both thankful we could keep the soup down that
day, a sign that we were finally getting better.

I remember the Thanksgiving when I was 10, when my Aunt Mary let me
help make the giblet gravy. It was delicious. She and I kept tasting it
in the kitchen, and when it was time to serve it we had none left.

I remember the many holiday meals I shared with Frank’s grandparents.
Grandma Wilczek would cook an authentic Polish feast with lots of
kielbasa. Then we would all drive over to Grandma Cona’s for an Italian
super-spectacular–turkey plus pans of lasagne, meatballs, and sausage.
It’s a wonder we have any arteries left.

I remember when I realized, 10 years ago, that my computer could help
me stage-manage Thanksgiving. I created timetables, lists of dishes and
recipes. I don’t know how people did all this before they had printers.

This year, we’ll be 12 around the table (pardon my elbow!) No canned
soup, but plenty of veggie pot pie and killer brownies along with the
turkey and gravy for carnivores like me.

Now I better get cooking!

In a move “sure to ignite debate“, Rolling Stone Magazine just picked 500 top rock songs of all
times–their number one choice is Bob Dylan’s 1965 “Like a Rolling Stone.”

What a great choice–the song that kicked down the wall separating
“folk music” from the excitement of rock.  How gorgeous it felt,
to the folk purist I had become, to get
Dylan’s permission for music I secretly longed for.

Even more important were the lyrics–and not
just because Dylan rhymes “didn’ you” with “kiddin’ you.” He was yelling a wake-up call to a generation of kids drifting
into deep water, all telling each other that nobody ever drowned.

I can remember so many kids from my generation who just went under
and never came up again. I
remember the doctor’s son in my grammar school class, one of the
cute-naughty boys the rest of us sighed for. He decided to “try” Viet
Nam, died there of a heroin overdose. I remember Linda, teaching her
parents a “lesson” by hanging out with wild and crazy guys–I was
in college when I heard one of them shot her. Less
spectacularly, I remember many kids who partied away four (or five, or
six) years of college, until Mom and Dad decided to stop wasting money.

I
remember Lucinda*, the night before a test, telling me, “I wonder if my
middle-class fear of failure will force me to study.”

It would have, if she’d been listening to Bob Dylan.

* She was a psych major.

My favorite color, when I was a little kid, was red–as in bright, bright, bright fire-engine red.

And all my life, if somebody asked me, “What is your favorite color?”, I’d say “Red.”

Then I discovered a scientific paper that said most people liked red the best when they were children. When they were children? Do you mean I get to make a different choice now that I’m grown up?

Yes, you do get to re-think your favorite color, whenever you want to. You get to re-decide how hard you want to party. You get to re-decide whether or not to have kids.

You get to re-decide whether you want to grab every opportunity to travel to some exotic spot on this planet. That’s one I’m right now re-thinking myself.

I love the person I was as a little kid. I love her boldness, her curiosity, the idealistic way she expected the best from every single person she happened to meet.

But she, who loved freedom more than almost anything else, would be the last person to want me enslaved to her choices.

Years ago, when I lived in California, I bought a dark red beach towel, whose best feature was that it almost matched the velvet upholstery on my elderly couch.*

My dog Marianne used to love to nap on top of that towel, on top of that couch–beginning each nap by digging a hole for herself in imagined dead leaves. (Beach towels stand up to dog-digging better than velvet.)

Not any more. Tonight as I pulled that towel out of the dryer, I realized–Marianne hasn’t slept on the couch in more than a year. Even when I remember to lift her up, she’s no longer at home there.
Once, she used to launch off the edge of the couch like a white fuzzy rocket. Now, she peers over the edge and whimpers, as if the floor is no longer reachable.

I hope that I never get that old–I hope I never get to the point where anxiety and caution are more important than the impulse to do something I really enjoy.

Tonight, I put the clean beach towel into my old dog’s travel cage, the place where she hides when she wants comfort and security. As I did so, I noticed the towel had faded and its edges had frayed. My living room has been much funkier than I realized.

Damn, why can’t the world be more like the rosy-edged picture in my imagination? Marianne, sleeping happily on her towel, thinks that question is stupid–she’s probably right.

*When I was a little kid, that couch belonged to my Victorian “aunts.” It was a dark pink or pale red velvet. When I was twelve, my mother brought that couch to our living room, upholstering it dark green, her favorite color. A few generations of puppies and kittens later, she offered me that couch for my living room. (I had it upholstered in Laura Ashley-ish chintz botanicals.) More puppies and kittens ensued before I got it re-uphostered one final time, in about the same reddish pink I remember from childhood.

I just created a new blog category, “Sister Age,” inspired by the book by MFK Fisher. Because so many of my friend bloggers are younger than I am, I thought I might play your Sacajawea in time, marking out the trail through a human lifespan that I’m discovering for myself.

Do you still have mental images of “book people” you loved when you were a child? Many of my own favorites come from the work of Garth Williams. Stuart Little yearning for Margalo. Fern Arable “up at dawn to rid the world of injustice.” Little Bear planning a trip to the moon. All these images still give me great pleasure.
The most magical, in every sense, are his full-color images of elves and fairies in a huge mass-marketed “Golden” picture book. (Jane Werener Watson, The Golden Books’ Treasury of Elves and Fairies, Golden Books, 1951, reprinted 1999.)

Some other books illustrated by Garth Williams:

• E.B.White, Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web.
• Laura Ingalls Wilder, “Little House on the Prairie” books.
• Russell Hoban, the “Frances” books.
• George Selden, Cricket in Times Square.
• Margery Sharp, The Rescuers.

Up the aery mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go ahunting
for fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, Red cap
And white owl’s feather….

(Poem by William Allingham,1824-1889)