I have about three minutes to write. No, I should already be packing to get out the door. I need to meet the carpenter at my house in eight minutes. It is a fifteen minute drive and I am just on my first cup of coffee. I'm no good in the morning. I'll be late. I'm not sure I want him to do the job anymore anyway. He calls me everyday with more problems, both about the house and his health. Yesterday he called to ask me what symptoms I had when I was sick. I guess he was ready to blame me for his illness. But no, my symptoms were nothing like his. He can't poop, he says. Then he launched into a long complaint about what we are going to need to do, the problems we face, his uncertainties. . . but don't worry, he says. Today I plan to confront him about his abilities to do this. I have a fear that we will open up the kitchen floor and then he will call and tell me he is too ill to continue.
I am paralytic. It would be nice to have someone to succor me. To friends, outsiders looking in, it is just something to get through. It would be easier if I had a loving touch. I want to lie in someone's lap and have my head scratched until I fall asleep. Everyone looking in from the outside has someone to scratch their heads.
I think.
The only thing worse than being alone in hard times is having a partner who no longer loved you, who wouldn't touch you or scratch your head. Yea. . . that can be worse.
But I'm a mess all on my own.
"You've always been a loner.."
"I've always been a lover."
I made boiled shrimp and yellow rice with chopped olives for my mother last night with a shredded cabbage and carrot salad to go along. It was awfully good. When we were done, before I cleaned the kitchen, I poured a whiskey and turned on YouTube to something my mother could stand to watch. The sea, the hills, gentle hikes, etc. Eventually, as I let the algorithms choose, music videos popped up. The first was "Watchhouse," the music duo that was originally "Mandolin Orange." We had watched several Mandolin Orange videos the night before, but here they were now, older by a decade, maybe, now married parents.
"Good god, ma, look at what time does to people. It is terrible. I hate it. I'm against it."
"Yes."
They played on without the vitality they once had, desultory in appearance and movement.
"This is what he has done to her. It's his fault. She was so wonderful. I would have married her," I said.
"You would?"
"Yes, straight off, just from seeing the videos."
It was definitely his fault. He was one of those passive/aggressive ideologues, I'm certain, and she just fell in love with him like falling down a deep well. And then they did what people do, a hitched mule and donkey team pulling their wooden cart down the little dirt road of life.
One day, they will wake up and wonder, "What went wrong?"
It's not just them. It is the inevitable tragedy of life. First you are young, and then you're not. And then, if yo are like many people, you watch the re-boot of that show about the women in NYC with a character named Carrie or Kerry, I think. Now they are in their fifties and sitting around with their group of friends. I have never seen the show, but it is unavoidable. It was popular. It was everywhere.
And that is what many people do, too, as if they are in some time-stamped fraternity or sorority.
Or some live alone in horror at the way life inevitably goes.
So now. . . do you want door number one or door number two?
"What's behind door number three?"
"You don't want that one, I promise."
Then a long documentary on what it claimed were the Beatles in rare footage playing at the Indiana State Fair in 1964. They made, it said, two million dollars for their American tour. They got $100,000 for this appearance. Can you imagine that that made them tremendously wealthy back then?
And then. . . the concert. Holy shit--all I could think of was the uproar about Epstein. The Beatles were living in a teen fever dream. The crowd was almost nothing but hysterical screaming girls apparently approaching orgasm. There can be no other explanation.
"What made them scream like that?" my mother asked. "What was special about the Beatles?"
"Nobody knows," I said. "It was just the confluence of almost everything. It was the seismic shift in culture."
It looks crazy now, like somebody had drugged the water supply. But The Beatles were a really good band. There is no denying that.
It turns out, though, that the documentary is wrong. It was not 1964. The Beatles had already made their first film, "A Hard Day's Night."
Their first American appearance was on the Ed Sullivan show on February 9, my birthday. I watched them that Sunday night. The next day, I didn't comb my hair. I was a Beatle.
You don't need to watch it all, but fast forward to the concert just to see the crowd, and ask yourself a question or two.
"Oh, but times were different then."
That's all I'm saying.
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