Tag: links

Show a little faith…

There are two songs that have always vied to be my favorite song of all time. But I always come back to this one and know it will kick the other one’s ass because a tough little Jersey guy can do that. I taught this song as poetry to my college classes for its “carpe diem” theme. This version makes me smile because the audience is a very cool audience. Plus: harmonica. I’ll love you always, Boss, since 1973 when you made a believer out of me and not one friend of mine got it. They got it a few years later.

Unrelated, I think, maybe not, maybe there’s some thread I haven’t picked up yet, sometimes reading what other writers say about writing makes me want to give up because I will always be breaking someone’s damn rule about what it’s okay and not okay to write. Ultimately I just have to shut that shit down and write what I write. It’s all I can do.

Passing secret messages

To Elle from DFS.

You looked like a princess the night we met
With your hair piled up high
I will never forget
I’m drunk right now baby
But I’ve got to be
Or I never could tell you
What you mean to me

I loved you the first time I saw you
And I always will love you Marie
I loved you the first time I saw you
And I always will love you Marie

You’re the song
That the trees sing when the wind blows
You’re a flower, you’re a river, you’re a rainbow
Sometimes I’m crazy
But I guess you know
And I’m weak and I’m lazy
And I hurt you so
And I don’t listen to a word you say
When you’re in trouble I turn away

But I love you, I loved you, the first time I saw you
And I always will love you Marie
I loved you the first time I saw you
And I always will love you Marie

Sometimes I just need to have a little fun. And really, there’s nothing like a Randy Newman song.

Transport Thursday!


This is Rocky with his foster mom Susan. Susan has been an amazing fundraiser for the rescue’s Fund the Shelter Challenge. Rocky just knows she’s a great foster mom.

The challenge goes until Thursday, May 9 at 1:59:59pm ET…and I just happen to be part of it if you’d like to donate. NO AMOUNT IS TOO SMALL, and please don’t pay the fee if you make a donation to my team (linked info redacted because campaign has ended). Thank you!

I cry foul on my naysaying friends!

Once again, sorry to my Instagram followers for being repetitive, but let’s talk for a few minutes about Somewhere in Time. I mentioned on Instagram how surprising it was that I’d never seen this 1980 movie because who’s more beautiful on film than Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve and they are together! And it’s romance. And it has love that transcends time and separation. But mostly, it was surprising because I have listened to the score of the movie for decades and love it.

Oh, everyone said, YOU MUST SEE IT. (Except Puterbaugh, such a film geek, but he hadn’t seen it either.) So I ordered it. It came on Valentine’s Day, and from the moment Tom started the DVD, I wanted to cry. Okay, maybe I did cry. I didn’t even know how things would play out or what would or wouldn’t happen, but it’s that MUSIC.

SORT OF SPOILERS AHEAD (because you won’t see the actual end of the movie and I won’t provide it):

Near the end, when anybody’s heart would be breaking, and I definitely was crying… well, here. Here’s a four minute and something clip. Go ahead. Watch some heartbreak.

Now as I was watching that, there was no way I couldn’t think of another scene from another movie and how many times my friends who’ve been forced to watch it with me complained and carried on about how LONG it was, how torturous to see, oh, she should snap out of it. Let’s view the scene that makes them squirm and carry on.

It’s not that long! Christopher Reeve’s adult Richard Collier is grieving a love of like two days that he thinks is lost forever. Kristen Stewart’s teenaged Bella Swan is grieving a love of what, a year’s duration?, she thinks is lost forever. And though three months may pass in Bella’s scene, it’s just a little over TWO MINUTES on the screen.

If we can cry through four minutes of Richard’s agonizing sense of loss, Bella should get at least two.

I do wonder if Chris Weitz the director of New Moon thought of Christopher Reeve/Richard Collier at the window. It IS a truth internetly acknowledged that author Stephenie Meyer cites Somewhere in Time as one of her influences.

Also, I have imagined with some amusement Superman time traveling to Forks and making Vampire Girl forget Mr. Sparkles.

I ship them.

Charmed: Heroes often fail

When I was a little girl, people began giving me charms. The first was silver (a car); the second, gold (a round disk engraved with the date of my baptism). My parents gave me two charm bracelets to start homes for my collections, one for silver, and one for gold, and as I grew up, went to high school, then to college, there were many more gifts of charms from my father, mother, boyfriends, and also there were school-related charms.

My first year of graduate school, my apartment was broken into and most of my jewelry stolen, including the two charm bracelets. These are things you can never replace. I don’t think I was the buyer of a single one of the charms. All gifts. All gone. My heart was broken.

Lynne had a really nice charm bracelet, and I was looking at it a few years later and wondered, Why can’t I buy my own charms? I’ll get ones that mean something to me. Maybe I’ll even find replacements for some of those lost. So I began collecting again, and other people began giving them to me, too, and suddenly there were too many for a bracelet. So I moved them to a necklace, and the charms kept coming.

Recently I decided the necklace was too heavy. I rarely wore it. It was so cluttered with charms, SERIOUSLY cluttered, that they didn’t sparkle and tinkle as charms should. I decided to move the charms to bracelets, and each bracelet would have a theme.

In all, it has taken seven bracelets to divide the charms to full advantage. (And that is leaving another eleven charms to remain on the necklace.)

I have two bracelets that I call “character charms”; that is, they are based on the first two (unpublished) novels I wrote. The wishing well charm that began this post is not on either of those bracelets. However… here, will you listen to this song and then keep reading?

This was a song that taught me early in life that songwriters are storytellers. I’d listen to this over and over and create different stories from Gordon Lightfoot’s words. And though the song wasn’t literally translated into something I wrote, when I hear it now, I understand how all the sadness and emotion and yearning and regret it evoked became a central part of two of my most important characters. There are even details from this song woven into who they are to each other, which I only recently realized as I stared at the charm and tried to recall when and where I got it.

I don’t remember. But I remember them. They remain with me for all time and I’m grateful for Gordon Lightfoot’s beautiful song as a reminder and this charm as a memento of them.

This starts a new series in which I’ll occasionally use my charms as the focal point of what I write here. Hope you enjoy.

Tiny Tuesday!

Something on Twitter took me to an older article about a cafe in Japan where various stuffed “Moomins” can sit with you if you’re dining solo (“nobody has to eat alone”) or if you just want a companion to join you and your family or friends at your table. Of course there was a chorus of, “THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH EATING ALONE!” and “Sure, everybody wants to call attention to their loneliness.” I didn’t read it that way at all, I guess because I have never minded having a solitary meal, seeing a movie alone, etc. I just thought it was a fun and engaging thing, even though I didn’t know what the heck a Moomin was.

So I Googled (of course!) and found out Moomins are “the central characters in a series of books and a comic strip by Swedish-speaking Finnish illustrator Tove Jansson, originally published in Swedish by Schildts in Finland. They are a family of white, round fairy tale characters with large snouts that make them resemble hippopotamuses.”

When I was telling Tim about this, he knew immediately what I was talking about–he knows the books.

I’ve atoned for being the last to know by getting this little guy into my menagerie as soon as I could. Welcome to Houndstooth Hall, Moomin!