"They rain and snow on everyone"

A cyber-friend sent to a little discussion group to which we both belong a hyperlink to a Last Quarter Joni Mitchell singing "Clouds." Years, ago, it seemed so much safer to write about my Wing-tipped shoes that were gathering dust in the bottom of my closet ... I wondered then how a totally impersonal time takes "a man and turns him to lore." Some details have accumulated in the twenty years that have, since, gone by.

Here's the hyperlink

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKQSlH-LLTQ

My friend reported how moved she was by the depth of the older "Joni" ... 'even if her performance now lacked the high notes.'

Joni, I guess your clouds don't only "rain and snow on everyone" ... much more. We watched you when you -- and we -- were kids, playing and frolicking in your youth and ours. Indeed, "They rain and snow on everyone." When I was very young, we moved about, as my Dad was seeking to earn a living and as my Mom took care of her brood ... spread out over eight years ... born from 1940-1948 ... all now grandparents ... all now orphans. We lived in places with stoops and then in houses with porches ... places from which neighbors could be heard and spoken to. 

I've pissed and moaned a lot about shoveling -- I called these storms -- 'The Snows of Killa-ma-Mojo" in honor of the back-aches and arrhythmias my shoveling managed to produce.... Curious, though, how it takes bad weather, these days, to emancipate many of us from our heated and air-conditioned homes into the social street.

                                                            "Some storm, aye?"

                                                                 "Lotta snow."

                                                              (It's mid-February)

                            

                              "Did I get a chance to wish you and yours a Happy New Year."

                                                "Aw. Things just got busy, I suppose."

M talks often about her wish for a big wraparound porch. Her childhood house was built in the mid-1950's with a porch built in the back ... a screened-in porch from which neighbors could barely be seen. That's not the porch which, I suspect, she has in mind.

Don't know. Woke up this morning with a memory from the post-9/11 Winter or Spring, I can't recall. M and I were to pick up my Mom and Dad and take them to a wedding. My parents, in their Last Quarter and Overtime, lived in Northern New Jersey and the wedding was in Brooklyn ... a half hour to the Lincoln Tunnel and then over one of the midtown crossings from Manhattan to Brooklyn.

We arrived early ... Dad was in a huff. Mom, already pretty bald and lost in the haze of beginning dementia, got something ... maybe pleasure ... out of hiding things from her husband of 60+ years, at that time. This time, she flipped and hid her wig. I think M found it but Mom refused to put it on. Dad was beside himself ... dissociated with helplessness and frustration and, I can only imagine, disappointment. It's hard to keep in mind that clouds really do "rain and snow on everyone."

Told my Dad:

                                                            "Let's go. I got it."

Dad had not been there (ex-WWII soldier boys left a lot behind in their theaters of war) and, other times, had been there. 

                                                             "I got it, Dad." 

I put on Mom's wig and gathered everybody into the car, chauffeuring them through cities and towards tunnels and bridges protected by young men bearing automatic rifles ... soldiers keeping our streets safe, as Joni also reminded us of years ago, "for our wives and our daughters."  

New York, I guess, is New York. No one stopped the guy in the wig driving his accomplice and two old farts through these "hard targets." 

"All's well that ends well," I suppose. When we arrived at the venue, Mom willingly donned her wig and, now, "wigged out," as she assuredly was, went in to see her great niece get married. Mom walked in on her own steam and on the arms of her husband and son, escorted by her daughter-in-law who by now was far more daughter than in-law.

Perhaps ... just perhaps ... sleep is disrupted in the Last Quarter in order to permit us quiet time to remember. This morning I remembered driving through the Lincoln Tunnel with more hair than I've had -- or likely will have -- in these days, and months and years that have followed.

                                            Life rains and snows on every living thing.