Steve Tyler

Good morning, fellow bloggers.

There is great sadness in the land today (or yesterday, or last week, or whenever it happened.) Steve Tyler quit as the frontman for Aerosmith.

To be honest, I don't suppose Steve Tyler has ever struck me as the poster boy for good decision making.  You gotta love the boy, but I don't believe he's overburdened with personal filters. And he made more money than I will ever dream of making and went bad-ass flat broke doing it, frankly admitting to his adoring public that most of it went up his nose... Still, for me, Steve Tyler is the "Oh, yeah???" comeback to my mother's lectures about how sex, drugs and rock & roll would lead to an early, tragic death. He's 61. And I think, for a drinking, drugging, rock & rollin' wastrel, he looks pretty good.

Recently he quit his day job.

Apparently he never mentioned this to his coworkers, who are currently a little less than thrilled with the man.

I know next to nothing about the particulars of Tyler's life. He quit the band he's been working with for 40 years--which means they were kids when they started. I listened to an interview with the band, oh, probably 20 years ago--they talked about how in the beginning they all living together in the same house and slept on mattresses on the floor because they were so broke. Somehow it seems that if you could stand these guys for 40 years, 61 would be an odd time to throw in the towel and strike out on your own, but...I'm not Steve Tyler. Not even close. I could listen to him talk for hours because I like his voice, and because his life is just so far from anything I've ever done. Do I think we could ever have been friends? Oh, hell no. I don't move anywhere near fast enough for this man, no matter how you choose to take that observation. I think he's a vicarious daydream, at least for me--don't wanna live it, sure as hell don't want to pay the bill for it, but hey. I'll listen to him talk about it for as long as he wants to talk.

Although.

Without your band...

...and that whole messy question of who gets the music, now that you've split...

...who's going to give a shit about what you have to say?

What the hell were you thinking?

(Sorry.)

Go on: you were saying...? 

Lima Beans and Wooden Hats

Good morning, fellow bloggers.

New week. Traces of sun in the air. According to the back fence, it's almost 60 degrees outside. The Good Dog has gone to work with Nancy, the Bad Cat is curled up around my feet. (He has always been the Bad Cat. In fact, his favorite song goes, "You are a bad, bad, bad, bad BAD cat..." It makes him just squirm and purr and cuddle with pleasure. He doesn't speak English.)

Saturday evening was my sister's Barn Party. We all trucked down to Union City to the old homestead (our Dad's parent's farm) where The WeeOne and her husband bought 40 acres of the farm and erected Lee's Barn, a building which now even has a woodburner installed. He pretty much lives there on weekends (his life desire has apparently always been to live in Union City) but he is gracious enough to share it with all of their friends and family once a year, and he builds a bonfire. So Saturday night sacrificed a tree (or two or three) to the gods of self-entertainment. We sat around the fire in lawn chairs, toasted marshmallows and told jokes about our parents.

Lima beans were a recurring subject of conversation.

Lima beans were required eating in the Peck household.

Hours and hours and hours of our youth were spent huddled around the kitchen table while small children actively scorned lima beans. We could not leave the table until our lima beans were eaten. Scott claims to hold the title as the Longest Holdout.

He also claims that if someone were to study the chemical composition of the family dog, they would discover he was comprised almost exclusively of handfed lima beans.

The problem, of course, is that if you cannot swallow lima beans you must continue to chew them, and the longer you chew a lima bean, the thicker, nastier and more grainy a lima bean becomes. There is a point where an over-chewed lima bean turns to a pea-flavored lump of cement and simply cannot be swallowed.

To this day if you find someone eating lima beans, you can rest assured they are probably not a Peck.

Scott has secured his new job, which is his old job under new ownership, with the new ownership now in Texas. (We/He live/s in Michigan.) However his job involves a great deal of traveling around the country, solving problems, so he continues to live in Michigan. Daniel (and his wife Felicia) are managing the new Firekeepers casino in Battle Creek.

Sunday Nancy and I hung around the house. She made a Decadent Peanut Butter Pie which was to die for. I carved on my project for some time without doing any bodily harm to myself. (Following my brother-in-law's (firm) suggestion, I now wear a leather glove on my thumb and associated left appendage.) Many, many years ago a friend of mine gave me an Xacto carving set, so I dug those out and played with them. Unfortunately they are not particularly sharp, which could simply be a function of time and of being stored away in a box with minimal care.

Nancy and I have now begun studiously watching a wood turning program on PBS. When the pros on the show use the lathe it looks so easy (and I grew up with a lathe in the barn, and the language these pros use is quite different from the language I heard, growing up--so I am suspicious that making a hat out of a block of wood may not be quite the cinch the guy who has made 2,000 of them made it seem to be.)

And now it's Monday. Time for fresh new projects. Creative ambitions.

And the sun is still shining. 

The Viewing

Good morning, fellow bloggers.

I met one of my idols last evening. I adored this man: he did screen prints (an artist!) which his mother loving showed us during a family visit. I wrote novels during this same time period, which was while I was in high school, he was probably in college. (Swoon.) My mother may have bragged about my writing while I was not around (I learned later that she did,) but she certainly would not have hauled out my manuscripts to show houseguests. Lee's mother did. He was blonde and gorgeous and had little or no patience with high school girls, which, for some odd reason only made me admire him more.

He is related to me. I leave you to determine the name of this relationship: his father was my grandfather's brother. He is....roughly 5-7 years older than I am.

"You would know him," Martha (my father's little sister: she is +/- 5 years old than I am) said, "This is Lee."

In my mind I am somewhere around 40 and parts of me are much younger than that. This age-disassociation is more pronounced when I am around my 'elders', who are now more or less my peers, but who at one time were significantly older than I was. I have seen Lee probably 5 times in my entire life and the last time was almost 30 years ago. So I turned to greet this idol of my youth...and he's older than I am. Which he always was, but in anticipation of greeting him I had reverted instantly back to about 15, expecting him to be 20, and he is, in fact, in his mid to late 60s.

I'm sure he thinks I'm a complete fruitcake, but then, I'm fairly sure he always did. Or, perhaps like much of the baggage we carry around as extended family, someone in my family suspected some sort of class difference perception on his family's part and the dance continues, even if all of the dancers have changed.

It always astounds me, when the family gathers, how much of our interactions are beyond the scope of words. Feelings. Impressions. Habits. Presumptions. This is not to imply in any way that I am any less likely to rely on these instincts than anyone else: it implies that I often feel helpless, confused, and oddly childlike when surrounded by people I have known my entire life and in many ways, do not know at all.

I attended the viewing last night. I am not entirely sure what this practice does for the mourning. I will not be attending my own.

I do not do funerals well. (I suppose there must be people who do.) The first sign of trouble is my appetite, which runs amok in the face of death. At my mother's funeral I remember the expressions on the faces of those women who materialize out of the mist to host a meal (I'd never seen one of them before, I have no idea where they came from) and it occurred to me that they were probably impressed by the volume of food I was putting away. I had to sit down and say to myself, "Apparently you're never going to feel 'full' today, so perhaps you should just stop." On the way to the viewing I realized I was going to arrive at the funeral home six minutes before the event began, and I worried this might make me seem 'too eager', so I drove 32 miles round trip to a McDonald's in Battle Creek. I was starving. Which I wasn't, I understood as soon as I got the meal. Funerals are a trigger for whatever disorder I suffer from that links feelings of deprivation with food.

And yes, you're right. I am writing about attending the viewing of my recently deceased aunt and it's all about me.

She was very close to her children and grandchildren and they are devastated by her loss. They had collected a series of photographs of her in almost every stage of her life, which was put on a disk (I assume) and played on a flat screen TV above our heads. We discussed the photographs a lot. I don't remember that dog. Oh, look, she's sleeping and holding her grandson. That's the...dress for that dance...her husband...her retirement party...

The funeral is this afternoon.   

Onions

Good morning, fellow bloggers.

I just finished a blog here. As I was composing my last line, my computer turned itself off to complete it's updates. Of all of the quixotic things that Vista does, that is the most annoying because it does it without warning. It warns me 18 minutes in advance, mind you--it just doesn't mention its intention anywhere near the time it's actually going to shut down. And you can hit 'delay', but sometimes it delays, and sometimes not...

Anyway. I'll see if I can recreate this.

My aunt--my father's sister--died Monday.

I am including her obituary from the funeral home for family members who might not have any other way to see it.

Margaret E. (Peck) Gates
November 2, 2009

Union City
Margaret E. (Peck) Gates, age 79, of Union City passed away Monday November 2, 2009 of natural causes with her loving family at her side.
Margaret was born on April 7, 1930 in Union City to J. Harold Peck and Lena Lucille (Gwinn) Peck. Margaret graduated from Union City High School in 1947 and attended Michigan State College. She married Lyle A. Gates in Angola, Indiana he preceded her in death in 1975.
Margaret was preceded in death by her parents and a son Ray E. Gates in 2005.
She is survived by two daughters Lois (David) Johnson of Niles, Michigan, Doris (Jeffery) Priest of Union City, Michigan, one brother Robert Peck of Haleyville, Alabama, one sister Martha (Donald) Shipe of Ashley, Indiana, 5 grandchildren and 7 great grandchildren.
Margaret retired from Coldwater Community Hospital dietary department in 2002 after 36 years of employment. Margaret enjoyed helping 4-H children with their craft projects. She was an avid crafter.
Margaret and Lyle ran Hill Top Gardens Greenhouse for 10 years. She was well known for her green thumb.
Friends may call at the Spencer Family Funeral Home in Athens where the family will be present from 6:00 - 8:00 p.m. Thursday November 5, 2009.
Funeral Services will be 2:30 p.m. Friday November 6 at the funeral home with Pastor Collin Seitz officiating.
Burial: Riverside Cemetery, Union City, Michigan.
Memorials may be directed to the charity of your choice.
Arrangements by Spencer Family Funeral Home, Athens.
To share memories please visit www.spencerfamilyfuneralhome.com

A few years ago my aunt and I had a brief spurt of communication outside of the normal family gatherings and she wrote me a note that stated, in part, "I like to be called 'Meg'."

I never knew that.

In my imagination this conjures up a whole inner being struggling to be acknowledged, a private self hidden, like the inner layers of an onion, struggling to expose herself to the people she had known all of her life.

Whether that is true of my aunt or not, I would have no way of knowing.

I was in my fifties before I knew her name.

Grrrrr

Good morning, fellow bloggers.

This is driving me crazy. I don't see well just now anyway. I have a cataract on one eye and for some reason I am limited to fine focus in a very tiny slit in my progressive lenses with my good eye and yesterday, for no reason I can determine, Internet Explore went from about a 14 type size to about 9. Everything--Xanga, my email, everything is minuscule. I am now hunched up over the keyboard, trying to read what's on the monitor.

And I cannot figure out how to fix it. I don't know what I did.

No one picked up our trash Monday. We have no idea why we're being shunned.

And I would call them to ask, but our phone doesn't work.

I called the phone people. They recently made some sort of adjustment to the service. Sent out letters. I have called several times. I am to "unhook the connection from the box and plug it into the wall." Between the phone, the satellite TV and the wireless internet we must have four boxes and I have no idea which one they're talking about, but more significantly than that, one phone is a drone or second or whatever they're called and CAN'T be "hooked to the wall' and the base...already is. Always was.

If I could find my cell phone, I wouldn't need the landline at all. Very few people use it. I'm sitting here right now waiting for someone to call me so I can find the cell phone.

Edit: found cell phone.

Onward.

I hate feeling stupid. I have been negotiating this phone adjustment for probably a month now (although, truthfully, with big gaps of time between efforts.) They make it sound so simple--"Just..." do this, and the phone will work. In the meantime, the phone still doesn't work.  The service provider does not own the phone lines, so when the 'fix' fails, they call Verizon. Verizon shows up, looking baffled and confused and knocks on my door to tell me, "I have no idea what they're doing, but I did what they told me to do." And the phone worked, for three days. And stopped again.

I never thought I would age out of electronics, but it appears I did. At one time I could sit down and hook up my stereo using nothing but logic. My baby brother once told me, "Electricity flows like water," and that was enough to get me through. Goes in there....comes out here... Now when the TV goes out we call the Philippines and compare weather stories for an hour while she says, "Okay--now press this button..."

I fired Comcast probably two or three years ago and I'm still mad. To call for help we called Minnesota or New Brunswick or somewhere, they looked out the window, said, "Can't be the weather--your box is bad, unhook it and take it in..." Unhooked the box, hauled it into the local store, and she jabbed her finger over the counter at me and said, "You take that back home and hook it back up--your service will be back on in about an hour." So when your service went out at Comcast you called Nova Scotia for assistance, and then you said, "well, it's probably not that..."

I have to find my cell phone. Perhaps I'll take the 'box' I unhooked from the phone down to the store, show it to them, say, "Is this yours?"

It can't belong to the dish because I unhooked the box last night around 6pm and then watched TV all evening. And the internet works...

The bottom line: don't sell me a service that involves more than one vendor. Don't even try. If you have a service failure and the service involves more than one vendor, it's always the other vendor's fault.

I can save both of them a lot of trouble.