BOUND TO THE PAST: SHOPPING AND READING WITH ME MA

I have vivid core memories (seem to be thinking on these a lot lately) of riding around with my Mom pre-kindergarten as she ran errands.  Hustling about town to my pediatrician (Kenosha legend, Dr. Heck), the dentist, Jo-Ann Fabrics, Kohl's grocery stores, K-Mart (they had that nifty grill in the center of the store, ya know!)

Anybody remember Cal's Roast Beef?  Kind of like an Arby's when they didn't have the meats yet?  I don't remember what it is I ate there on lunch visits, but I still have the little Looney Tunes comic book that came with one of those meals.  See the title image up above.  I still like to leaf through it. I still love the Looney Toons to this day, and that'll never change.  I grew up reading comics, and the combination of the two is something I think is pretty cool.  It's a keepsake, and bordering on heirloom, as far as I'm concerned. 

We ate silver dollar pancakes at the unfortunately named Sambo's.  Kind of like Denny's, but I don't remember K-town having a Denny's.  I remember the backlit pictures of the little boy and his tiger (reminiscent of Jungle Book) that adorned the wall above the window to the kitchen between menu items.  It eventually changed to the tiger only.  Click on the video below for some history. 

Anyway.

As I've mentioned before, Mom was a huge supporter of her kids reading because it would mean you were wicked smaht.  At a Kohl's grocery trip, shortly after Dad passed, she bought me one of those miniature staple-bound impulse buy biographies of John Wayne.  Was I a John Wayne fan?  No, I had seen one film of his before Dad died and it was the 1977. flick, The Shootist.  That stung shortly after seeing it, as Wayne played a gunslinger battling cancer in his last days, and the proximity of painful fact was not lost later.

I'd sit in the chill fall air with my back against the garage that Dad used to work on rebuilding the Ford (Ol' Abe), and the ancient tractor (Josephine) he had.  The shop was adjacent to the backyard, and had me facing west and reading the little book, learning what I could and enjoying the black and white photos of John Wayne, knowing nothing else about him. I felt like I needed to do that to draw a little closer to the old man. 

I knew Dad loved The Duke, and having that knowledge I carried the book around in my back pocket until it came apart.  A talisman, of sorts.  Mom shared stories of Dad's John Wayne fanhood with me.  Another one of those movie connections that I carry around. 

I guess The Duke was a putz in real life, but I didn't know that at age 9. 

I've already discussed Ma and the Paperback Exchange in the oft repeated Salem's Lot story.  Click on that if you've been living under a rock in terms of this blog and are unfamiliar. 

Ma bought me books at rummage sales all the time.  George Llanos' Sharks and H. David Baldridge's Shark Attack (250,000 copies in print!)  These were books that were obviously long-read and published during the post-Jaws mania.  I loved her for that shit.  Still have them.  Priceless little items.  There's a picture in the photo array in the center of Sharks that Frani thinks looks like the shark is smiling. 

She's not wrong.  I think that fish was posing.

I could list the books bought and read to me during my childhood (some I still have) such as the Road Runner little kid books like A Very Scary Lesson and Tumbleweed Trouble or the Winnie the Pooh ones, that I mention here, but I don't want to bore you.  How about the classic comic book paperback adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back that I kicked this series off with some years back, or the Batman book and record combo that I think I irritated her into buying for me.  Check it out below if you got 15 minutes.

 

I could be a pain in the ace.  Ma, I love you, and I'm categorically sorry.

Today, I just want to give props to my Ma for the sharing of the written word.  She was a reader in a major way and thank the lord she passed it on down.

THOSE QUIET MOMENTS: UNDER THE SKY

Photo by Gregoire Jeanneau on Unsplash

Sometimes when I take my dogs out at night to use the puppy restroom, I take a long gander up at the sky.

And I often fixate on Mars.

There's been talk by rocketheads for decades about an expedition there.

But what if something went wrong?  What if there was no return from the red planet?

Looking up, that grips my chest.  It takes my breath away a bit.  Even though I won't even remotely approach being in that situation, someone else may be.  I know that in the big picture of the galaxy, in the chessboard that is existence, Mars is in the square right next to us. 

A goddamn neighbor, really.

So that puts things in a darker perspective.  In and amongst the monstrous maelstrom that is the universe, we are all but an infinitely insignificant dot in a massive pointalism painting.  A grain of sand in a vast beach.

So, with the incredible size of our current political situation, peppered with the apocalyptic fuel of what despotism and authoritarianism may mean to all of us, including mutually assured destruction, it all seems so...

petty. 

It means nothing in the grand context of the universe.  

The wrong side of history?  Who will be reading that book in 1,000 years?  And as I'm still gazing up, maybe still at Mars, maybe a guest appearance by Jupiter, I realize it.

I'm terrified.

Horrified by my own insignificance.  

And when my thoughts go down that rabbit-hole, I don't have the slightest clue on how to dig my way out. 

Its been asked.  "What does all of this mean, this life?"

Does it matter?

You have figures crushing other people, inflicting hurt and loss for their own gain.  Dancing to an evil song with its notes written on the sheet music of the wrong side of history, indeed.  Taking us back instead of forward, pockets filling as they step on the throats of others, the helpless, the innocent, who they profit from regardless.  These people are elected to represent us, to benefit us.  And they take it to the bank.  A bank they can't take with them.

And if they were to do the unspeakable.  To hit the launch codes, to be the matching hand that is needed to hold the other key to make nuclear war possible, don't they see the stupidity?

Nothing gained. 

Just a flair on Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot that wouldn't be noticeable anywhere in the cosmos. In the event of the remote possibility that there were an intelligent and sentient being out there to witness it? It would be nothing more than what a sunstorm looks like to the rest of us. 

And we were lucky enough on this sphere to be given awareness, life; life that grew from the lowest levels.  Life that figured out the wheel, the boat, languages, the printing press, commerce, science, medicine, the telephone, television, and eventually?   

Religion and Politics.  Climate ignorance.

And we are capable of destroying thousands of years of human history, over what?  Profit?  Protection from accountability?  We have the first trillionaire, and he's not capable of even the most remote displays of philanthropy.   Somehow this country elected TWICE a guy with designs on nothing but self-improvement, and avoiding being held responsible.   We may be teetering on the brink.

I'm not even coming close to saying we are the only living beings out there....

But what if we were?  

We could wreck it all on account of a handful of overpampered despots who want to have it all.  We all fight, and we all lose due to the thinking of a few.

We are the stewards of that existence?  In all of that infinite eternity out there, we may fuck it all up because of human vanity and greed.

And the only record of us would be the recording thats headed out toward the heliosphere aboard Voyager 1 that stopped its time capsule before Reagan took office.  And really, that's appropriate.  It was the Reagan administration that started the spiral we're in now.  A slow rambling gait, that is now in a full-on sprint towards the cartoon character kakistocracy that is now in the driver's seat. Anyway, that space probe that is so far away, it can't be seen.  And it signal takes 22 hours to get here and a ridiculously powerful antenna to translate its information.

That's what I think about under the stars at night.