Anniversaries

It gets dark so early now that I almost always wind up walking the dog by streetlight. I’m always struck by all the big blue screens I see flickering in the households I pass on our nightly hike. I get to thinking about how everyone is plugged into the same soporific. We must be entertained. We must be amused. We must be isolated.

We share a common popular culture though. We all watch reruns of Friends, Seinfeld (even if we never saw these shows when they originally ran). There are reality shows that resemble nothing in my particular world; lots of home makeover programs; and channels running old black and white movies and last year’s blockbusters. We just have regular old cable—no hundreds of channels for us—there is plenty for us right there without NFL Ticket or that other stuff. I do wish I could see “Six Feet Under” and some of those other great HBO shows, though. I have to wait for a business trip to a hotel to catch that.

Some people have these huge TV’s—I saw one tonight that must have been four feet wide. And what were they watching? Beavis and Butthead. Sigh.

My mother used to do that in her writing. Make on observation on some subject and remark, “Sigh”. The seventh anniversary of her passing was this week. Hard to believe. She used to mix in all sorts of bits of Irish wit and wisdom, 40’s cultural stuff, snatches of songs into her speech and writing. Just now I was listening to “Prairie Home Companion” and they closed the show with what sounded like an old country song. It had the line “Beautiful beautiful brown eyes—I’ll never love blue eyes again.” Mom used to sing that one line, but I’d never heard the song it came from till now. Kathy says Mom is talking to me…maybe!

Since we only have blue eyes and green eyes in our family, just who was Mom singing to? I remember now--she'd croon that one line to the dog.

Another anniversary slipped past me this week as well—it’s been six years since my artificial heart valve was installed. Woo-hoo! I love that clicking sound. Very comforting, especially at night when I crawl under the quilt and listen to it reverberate through the waterbed. I always send the surgeon a thank you card on the date along with a photo illustrating something I can do thanks to his work (and His work as well). Lately it’s been a photo of Max and me having fun. Gotta get to the card shop tomorrow.