An Aries Knows (this site is more fun when people read and comment)
A very sweet friend sent a strand of wooden Whirly Pigs for my birthday. She knew and loved Aaron, making this a perfect addition to Aaron’s Garden.
I forgot to take pictures during the daylight after Tom hung it, so the lighting isn’t great. When the wind blows, the feathers become spinners. I can’t wait to see it in action when we get a good breeze. I’ve collected pigs most of my life, and feathers are a reminder of Aaron that his mother once shared with me.
Thank you so much! ❤️
Time to browse the book that inspired this weekly feature, and today I chose this prompt:
I’ve recently taken out my wee keyboard to see if I can still play any of the easy piano music I learned WAY BACK WHEN. Turns out I can (falteringly); it’d probably be a lot easier on an actual piano. The electronic keyboard really is wee, having only 26 white keys (natural music notes) and 18 black keys (sharps and flats). For comparison, a standard piano of 88 keys has 52 white keys and 36 black keys.
Still a lot of fun though, and coincidentally, this favorite old classic my parents liked to dance to is in the music book, so I took a (very slow) run through it.
Sounds better when Ella sings it.
Where would your sentimental journey take you?
I’ll just trot out my old Easter Beagle button that I’ve used before, along with a new photo of the bunny from the last Easter basket my mother ever gave me (it was in the early 2000s so clearly I was an adult, but you can’t be too old for an Easter basket or a parent’s kindness–and speaking of a parent’s kindness, some of these eggs were gifts from my mother-in-law, many of which she made herself).
Thank you, too, for sticking with me for the month, especially when/if you commented or shared your own artists and songs for the challenges. If I helped you remember some favorites of your own, I’m glad.
Seldom seen
A scarecrow’s dream
I hang in the hopes of replacement
Castles tall
I built them all
But I dream that I’m trapped in
The basement.
And if you ever hear me calling out
And if you’ve been by paupers crowned
Between the worlds of men and make-believe
I can be found.
Plans I’ve made
A masquerade
Fading in fear of the coming day
Heroes’ tales
Like nightingales
Wrestle the wind as they run away.
And if you ever hear them calling out
And if you’ve been by paupers crowned
Between the worlds of men and make-believe
I can be found.
Garden gate
An empty plate
Waiting for someone to come and fill
Scarecrow’s dreams
Like frozen streams
Thirst for the fall
But they’re running still.
And if you ever hear me calling out
And if you’ve been by paupers crowned
Between the worlds of men and make-believe
I can be found.
Current Photo Friday theme: Wet
Marina del Rey, California
This was shot on film in 1998, and I uploaded it and another photo from the same place to Flickr in 2008, but I don’t think I ever published either photo on my LiveJournal or this blog.
If there’s a place that haunts me, it’s this one. Maybe, as Stevie Nicks sings,
Well, I’ve been afraid of changin’
‘Cause I’ve built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
And I’m getting older, too
Maybe.
Today’s song challenge is “a song someone sang to you once.” How about sang to me too many times to count? If I was in a bad mood or just feeling playful, and Riley was there with his guitar, I made the same request: “Play ‘Rocky Raccoon,’ please!” I’ve shared on here before how one time when I made that request, he gave me a reproachful look.
Riley and other musicians were doing a tribute in a local bar to John Lennon in December 1980, days after the former Beatle was murdered. As much as everyone there loved playing and hearing the music, there was such a pervasive feeling of sadness among us. I couldn’t take it anymore and mouthed my request: “Rocky Raccoon.”
“That’s a McCartney song,” he answered off mic, not wanting to embarrass me.
“I know,” I said. “Please play it anyway. For me.”
He couldn’t refuse me. I don’t know about anyone else in the bar, but hearing Riley play and sing a song that always made me laugh was what I needed to keep my equilibrium that night. Whether or not John Lennon liked the song, as he once told us in a different song, Whatever gets you thru the night/It’s all right, it’s all right.
I thank Riley, always, for all the days and nights he got me through with his music and poetry, all the other artists’ music he introduced me to, his friendship and love, for sometimes testing me almost to the ends of my patience and endurance, his emotional support during my hardest times, and his ability to make me laugh.
In 2022, on the 42nd anniversary of John Lennon’s death, a group of musicians and fans gathered at the Strawberry Fields/Imagine memorial in Central Park, and there’s a video of them doing the song. I guess I’m not the only one. =)
Here’s the album version by the Beatles.
Today’s song challenge is “a song that breaks your heart.” For me, that song is the Carole King composition “You’ve Got a Friend.” I own it by at least three artists, and I no longer listen to it. There’s nothing at all wrong with the song; it’s as beautiful to me as it ever was. But a moment came in my life when hearing “You’ve Got a Friend” evoked a lyric from a different song, the Jackson Browne composition “These Days”: Please don’t confront me with my failures/I had not forgotten them.
I’m not linking to either song. I had a great birthday yesterday, and today I’d like to pick up where I was in my manuscript. I don’t want to be derailed by melancholy.
On a lighter note, in February, I received “The Beatles Coloring Book” from Nurse Lisa in Iowa. Below are a series of photos showing the evolution of the first picture I colored from it and finally finished this week (working on it sporadically for the last five-plus weeks).
The cover of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album.
The cover of the coloring book Lisa sent.
My first coloring included the title and the Volkswagen.
Finished page!
Framed and hanging on the wall in the writing sanctuary, a little birthday gift to myself yesterday.
When I wrote A Coventry Wedding, I scattered Easter eggs (an “Easter egg” is defined as “a little extra something that authors hide in their books for readers to find”) throughout the book. In A Coventry Wedding, the Easter eggs were allusions to Beatles’ lyrics meant as gifts for Riley to find when he read the novel. Sadly, Riley died before the book’s release, five months before my mother died in 2008. The novel came out later than scheduled because the editor gave me an extension so I could focus on Mother during her final months while I was also grieving Riley’s loss. It doesn’t require a therapist to recognize that I haven’t tried to get another full-length work of fiction published since 2009 or that it took me ten years to even begin writing novels again.
Some of the Easter eggs in A Coventry Wedding alluded to songs on Abbey Road. Off the top of my head, those include “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window” and “Mean Mr. Mustard.” From that album, here’s my deliberately-chosen song “Carry That Weight” (in which the Beatles sample another song from Abbey Road, “You Never Give Me Your Money”). All kinds of writers have a little fun with their work sometimes. In fact, I’ve just written a scene with a character analyzing Easter eggs in a screenwriter’s music video.
Here I am, celebrating another turn around the sun today, and the song challenge is “a song that makes you think of falling in love.”
At my birthday party many years ago, a joint event with two other women with birthdays that same week and an open invitation to a horde of friends and acquaintances, theirs, mine, and ours, I danced for the first time with a man I’d only recently met. He seemed like one of the good guys, but I was coming off one of the worst years of my life, with terrible losses in my family, a broken relationship, some friend betrayals, and the consequences of many, many bad choices and bad judgments on my part. The last thing I wanted or needed was a relationship with a man, no matter how nice he was. I needed to deal with my messy life and make hard decisions about what to do next.
Two years later, I’d marry that good guy, and a few months after that, we would move to Houston. We’ve had quite a life together–the good, the bad, and the ridiculous–and I can’t imagine celebrating all the birthdays since I met him with anyone else.
I think Fleetwood Mac’s “Crystal” is the first song Tom and I danced to at my birthday party that night. He may remember differently–that’s just part of having a few decades together. =)
ETA: Coming back after the fact because of the dreams I had last night–so vivid that after the dream began, I woke up briefly, went back to sleep immediately, and the same dream picked up where it left off. It was about a key person in my life story and evoked an array of memories and feelings. Mostly it reminded me that sometimes it’s good not to get what we think we want and that we–I–need to acknowledge, to myself, the better things about my nature instead of being hard on myself for my mistakes and flaws.
Art posted here previously was George Michael Singer, acrylics and mixed media on canvas, 2018, by artist Melanie D.
When Jim was here, we talked about the WHAM documentary that’s airing on Netflix. I haven’t seen it, though it’s one of the things I intend to watch.
Today’s song challenge is “a song you like by an artist no longer living.” It was a shock when George Michael died on Christmas Day 2016–too young at 53. In my music television watching heyday, a video with George Michael would stop me in my tracks. I’ve done a lot of research about the evolution of music videos from the 1960s forward (why else? for the Neverending Saga) though of course, they weren’t called “videos” then and were usually shot on 35mm film even after video tape came into existence and “music videos” became part of the common vernacular. George Michael’s videos were art, and I remember them well.
I also haven’t watched The Super Models on Apple TV+, but the holdup on that one for me is that it features the female models who were in George Michael’s “Freedom” video: Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, and Christy Turlington. However, Tatjana Patitz, born on this date, March 25, 1966, in Hamburg Germany, was also in the “Freedom” video, died last year in January, and isn’t part of the documentary. Because of the video, she became my favorite of the group, so I haven’t had the heart to watch it yet.
Why doesn’t George Michael appear in the video? He told MTV, “I made decisions a couple years ago to change the way my career was going and my life was going by not appearing in the videos, by not being interviewed, by not doing press. Basically, letting my music kind of do what it’s going to do.”
We don’t see him, but his presence still dominates the video (also, probably a lot of people gasped when his leather jacket gets set on fire).
Today’s song challenge is “a song by a band you wish were still together.” It became impossible that Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young could reunite after David Crosby died, but even before, it was an unrealistic idea. There were too many fractured relationships among them for it to happen. I chose the button for their album So Far deliberately because it includes what I think are two key songs from a certain time in the band’s evolution. Here’s the full cover from my drowned album.
Graham Nash’s “Teach Your Children,” an admonition for parents and children to love each other despite their differences, was on the March 1970 release of their album Déjà Vu. Nash said he wrote it because of his complicated relationship with his father, and is quoted as saying, “The idea is that you write something so personal that every single person on the planet can relate to it.” Young wasn’t present in the studio when Nash taught the song to the others and they recorded it.
After Déjà Vu’s release, as “Teach Your Children” was moving up the charts, the Kent State shooting took place on May 4, inspiring Neil Young to write “Ohio.” To Nash, this song may have seemed like the consequences when the wisdom of “Teach Your Children” went unheeded. The band rushed “Ohio’s” release as a single, and it, too, climbed the charts.
David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and Neil Young created an impressive body of work as individuals, as members of CSN&Y, and as members of other bands, and for me, the four together created a voice for any turbulent time and every generation. A Stephen Stills quote from last year sometimes haunts me: “Part of me misses David Crosby dreadfully. Part of me thinks he got out of here just in time.”
ETA: For my own personal reference, I’m linking to an account of Déjà Vu’s cover photo because it shows how research persistence really pays off!