Blast from the Past

Funny how things pop into your mind. And what provokes them. I have been having a lazy day. Got up late. Talked to my Aunt Teri, the last of my mother's three sisters still alive, who called from Manhattan, which is already seeing snow and wind of the Blizzard of 2016. Had just decided to take a late shower and thought I'd switch on one of the DIRECTV digital stations in the 800s on the dial for some music background for my ablutions.

Wasn't feeling in a classical mood. Nor was I of a rockin' disposition. And then I lighted on the instrumental station. I went into the kitchen to see if one of the hummingbirds that have taken to the feeder was whisking about. I could hear them. Their wing sounds are palpable to the ear. The TV was playing "Send in the Clowns". I found myself tearing up and harking back to many years ago when I was a child in New York, in the Bronx, in that little apartment near the Grand Concourse. 

It might have been a day off from school, because of a snow storm, relatively rare in the city (just as this weekend in the City I left 35 years ago) but always welcome. And with my mother puttering around, windexing the many mirrors, dusting, making a list for the A and P, the background sounds were the instrumentals of WPAT. They came to call it elevator music, something you pay no attention to these days. But it was my mother's favorite station. And pretty much the only one allowed in our house when dad wasn't accompanying his vinyl Latin or Italian records on his mandolin.

When I think of it, I think of her, as I did, standing in the kitchen 50 years and 3000 miles away from that place and time. 

Cozy wouldn't be the word I'd use to describe life with my mother, but in those moments, warm and safe in the large tri-part five story brick building in that 50.00 one bedroom apartment with my mother silently shuffling around, cozy is the only way to describe the feeling then, and now, as I remember it.

My mother has been dead 42 years. I can hardly conjure that life of ours any longer, so much has happened since then, until I heard a little instrumental and there was WPAT, and my mother, as they were. As another song says, "The Way We Were". 

Back to California on a hazy sunny January 2016 day, and the shower I put off to bask in a serene sensation of the past.

Thoughts (Out of Left Field) about Janis Joplin

The other night I was flipping the television dials. How many channels do I have? Still, I could not find anything I wanted to watch. So I went on the paid DirecTV menu and found a documentary on Janis Joplin. For $5.99.  I could have seen it when it came out for free on PBS on American Masters. Well therein lies a lament for another time.

Anyway. I don't know what it is about Janis Joplin. She has been dead since 1970. I was 16 years old, and one would think that she was part of the tapestry of my baby boomer life of those days. She wasn't. Oh, I was aware of her. The sixties were not a decade to be ignored and neither was the change from what some might have called traditional and staid, to anti-establishment and free wheeling without impact on the most overprotected teenager. Still, at that point, as a Sophomore in high school, I was just starting to catch up to my generation. Well, truth be told, I never caught up. I was one of those few of my generation who stayed staid, as it were, while my peers were free wheeling it.

I probably, no, I did, mimic, my parents' disdain for rock and roll, while secretly wanting to partake in that small taste of the "illicit". Well, for a while. But I was immersed in the culture, even with all the boundaries placed by Catholic School and strict parents and the music at least leaked into my bedroom and onto my portable vinyl turntable. But I started in bubble gum, like The Monkees, not in blues inspired screaming (in Joplin's case) rock and roll.

But as the years have passed I realize that I have absorbed the music of my generation and much of it I like. When I had a career, I used to drive up to San Francisco to teach classes at our office up there, and as I drove on the 5, I reveled in singing along, as loudly as I could manage, to Janis' rendition of "Me and Bobby McGee".

I knew the story somewhat. She left home pretty young, feeling penned in by her small town family and their small town values. Now there was a girl, about 11 years older than me, so likely more easily captured by the changing culture, who bought it all. Free love and drugs. Lots and lots of both. She had her last meal at Barney's Beanery (which is probably still on the Hollywood Van Tours) and then went back to the Landmark Hotel where she overdosed and died beside her bed. She was 27.

But I would occasionally see clips of her, one in particular, that just made me so sad. She told Dick Cavett that she was going back to her high school for the tenth year reunion. It became clear that she was hoping to go back triumphant to a student body that had rejected her for being different. She didn't want the traditional. She didn't want the ordinary career. She just had to give in to her inner energy, call it even her inner animal. They thought her a fool when she came in her odd headdress and slightly addled presentation. There is a clip of her unwelcome visit. And she hurt again. And all that success, all that love on the stage from her millions of fans could not compensate. Did she have a spiritual life? There is no mention of religion in the documentary, old time or otherwise. Would that have given her succor?

In conversation, she seemed nearly shy and exhibited a lingering old school girlishness. When she sang, she exploded, and truth be told, watching her I was just a little wistful that I didn't, just a little, rebel when I had the chance (if I had the chance which I am not sure about).

I just couldn't take my eyes off her cavorting in these 45 year old clips. Such a walking contradiction this girl. I wish I could talk to her. I would ask her if it was worth it, burning through her life. 27 is very young. I cannot imagine that the answer would be yes. She had a brother and sister who lived, it appears, ordinary lives. Would she have wanted that, finally?

We have nothing in common right? We are all human. Of course we do. Paradoxically, perhaps, as the 60s concluded and the 70s began, those of us who did not join the rock train (with all its life style connotations and denotations) found ourselves unwelcome to members of our own generation. We weren't "groovy", or "cool". We were "repressed".  Well, maybe they were right about that. It hurt to be rejected. But I found my niche in this world. And am grateful for things as they happened in largest part.

I was whatever one calls a female nerd. Still am, truth be told. Do I regret being so determinedly a rule follower, now that I am approaching a senior hood that Janis never did? Yeah. Sometimes I do. It is ever so transient, but it is palpable. And then I dismiss it. I am alive. And there is still time to have adventures. I don't need to use drugs to have them. I just need to let go of long standing fears. There is something between staid and reckless.