Newspapers and dust

I'm settled in.  The house has curtains, trash cans (more expensive than they deserve to be...or at least feel like they should be), a microwave, and rhythm.  It's all going so well until I realize that it's not.  I work two jobs, which while is preferable to being in debt or feeling like I can't quite hack it (my mother is quite pleased with the notion that she won't have to pay my bills or see me back on her door step), is providing very little time for me to think about typing things.

I put curtains up this week.  It was a great stepping stone in to making the house finally feel like the home it's becoming. The entire time I was thinking about the fact that I should be blogging. I did not then go and blog.  I went and ate a pizza, played Sims 2 Pets and went to bed with a purring bedwarmer on my chest. Bedwarmer has bad breath.  I know this because BedWarmer wants to rub not his face but his teeth on me a lot. Almost all the time.  I started thinking about that and I stopped worrying about a blog.  I started worrying that BedWarmer was going to realize that I don't think of him by his name. He'll realize this and then he'll start talking/crying about how I don't use his name and then he'll not play with his new toys to boycott my non-use of his name. Eventually, I'm sure he'll tear in to the newspapers in the kitchen.

And poof. I'm not even thinking about blogging now. I'm thinking that when he tears in to the newspapers, I'll be super mad and super sad at the same time and despondent, because really the fact that he hasn't yet is probably only due to the fact that they smell of 26 year old newspaper, dust and nicotine - they smell of my dad's closet.

The newspapers are ones that my dad saved from when the Cardinals made a run for (and I'm guessing they won) the World Series in '85.  (My brother mentioned this and now I can't not think it: Isn't it a bit pretentious to call it the World Series when it only accounts for the US leagues? I mean, the World Cup actually competes on a global stage.... why not the World Series. Time to rename it.)  When we were growing up, Dad told us about the papers, but none of us cared that much about baseball. Now that Dad's gone... well... now we want to see what was so important.   I've only just started rummaging through, but he's got papers from other major events too from 9/11 to "the Flood of '93", which in St. Louis and most of Missouri was almost the end of the world.  All of those newspapers reminds me just how important newspapers, real newspapers, are to being able to tell our tales to our posterity once we're gone. Our grandparents saved papers, and so have our parents. It's a snap shot of history well worth remembering.

Once I finally get done sorting through these papers I'm going to explore my own attic. It's blocked off and I want to know why...

 Song for the Day: the Number one today in '85. Careless Whisper by Wham!

The Silence...

Andrew Belle - Make It Without You

Silence terrifies me. Seriously, and absolutely terrifies. I can not, for the life of me, think of a time when I have been surrounded by silence. If I found myself in the house alone with the t.v.s miraculously off, I would hear the sound of the dogs or I would quickly break out my walkman/iPod/radio and put something on. If somehow I wound up awake when the rest of the family was a sleep, I'd hear the steady off-beat snores from everyone in the house.  If I found myself in the middle of a glen in the woods surrounded by no one I'd hear the life and the wind around me. In a car with no radio, I'd hear the hum of the road and the roar of the engine. Even in my solitude there has always been sound.

Until this past week.

My father was the ultimate champion of a game without a name, a game we referred to as "Name the Artist." And that was the game. Walk in to a store, catch a commercial, turn on the radio and 95% of the time Dad would look at the people he was with, pick the person he thought was least likely to get it right and pose the question as a challenge. "Name the artist."

By the time I was 15, I was right the vast majority of the time. The last five years, I've been right so often my Dad stopped asking as a challenge but as an opening to a conversation to talk about music as it was, what it turned in to and who or what could save it. (He didn't have high hopes, and all of my offerings fell short... but then what can a 20 something pop hipster say to a 50 something rocker that's meaningful?)  To know enough of music to win at this game that often, I've spent the majority of my life with a radio on, my nose in a music magazine, or watching music documentaries.

So when he passed, I wracked my brain for an appropriate song to be the first song I heard to try to fill the void he left.  He was forever talking about the lasting power of classical music, he loved the Eagles, Dan Folgerberg, Pink Floyd and Supertramp, his song for me was by Cat Stevens, I've got a slew of favorite bands who all have fitting songs about loss.  I was wracking my brain for the one that was just right.  I couldn't come up with it in the time it took to get from the hospital room to the car. I couldn't come up with it for at least a solid 24 hours. Somehow, my never silent family managed to not play the radio or sing until a day or two later when we went shopping and finally turned on the radio.


The rest of the week was rather the same. Periods of silence punctuated by ill-fitting songs and stories.
I've never been afraid of turning on the radio, I've never been afraid of having a song that didn't fit get stuck in my head. I've never embraced the silence for fear of sound -even the right sound- tearing apart whats left of my heart.  But then, I've never been this alone.