Nostalgia

I have been feeling nostalgic, lately, for the music of my youth. Not 80's pop or Thrash Metal, but the music of my parents. This music shaped me, molded me. It began the summer that I was twelve.

Looking back, it is easy to sugar coat the lyrics, remember them with fondness. It doesn't matter that some songs were unfit for a child, I listened and loved them regardless. As a child born of a closet hippie and a staunch "follower of law and order", music was diverse.

When my father, Mr. Law Abider, was around, we listened to limited amounts of Country and Western, as God clearly intended. While he was at work, however, the doors to the music world swung wide open. Poetry, in all its forms, invaded our house.

There was John Denver, CCR, spoken word poetry, you name it. Music and rhythm in all forms resonated through the airwaves. The more creative and oddball, the better.

It may not surprise you that, as a small child, only Joy to the World by Three Dog Night or Time in a Bottle by Jim Croce were suitable as lullabies. Even in my thirties, when tired and panicked, the words "Jeremiah was a bullfrog..." relax me immediately.

My longtime favorite, however, was Rod McKuen. I could listen to his music for hours. I remember it clearly: the temperatures were a tepid 70, long considered hot in Northern Maine. As we had no air conditioning, windows were wide open with fans shoved in them; the smell of fresh cut grass hung in the air. I would lay in the middle of the living room floor - linoleum- allowing the fans- and the music- to wash over me.

Rod was a poet, a musician, a comedian, a beatnik hippie protestor, a playwright. I would play The Mud Kids, a song about the disaffected youth of the 60s, over and over again. My mother, who introduced me to this, would beg relief from the bizarre, somewhat morbid lyrics. I would comply, only to bring on the syrupy, crazed music from the McKuen/Anita Kerr production Joanna! [sidenote: I Googled 'Joanna' for a picture/link. It is in the genre Blaxploitation!] This cycle would continue until my father returned from work. I would quietly put the records away, knowing that, within 12 hours, I could bring them out once again.

When I moved out on my own and got married, my mother gave me her two McKuen records - The Earth and Joanna. I no longer own a record player, so the records sit, unused, in my living room. I look at them with great fondness, remembering the smell of summer in Maine, the blackflies, and the freedom of being twelve.


The Mud Kids

Out of the curious foraging rain
moving over the lawn like evening,
one by one they come,
the mud kids.

Carrying their mud in buckets
sometimes hardened into bricks
or molded into Ken and Barbie dolls.

They're the ones who claim we never understand them.

So they BB gun the street lights.
Roll the old bums in the park.
And build doll houses out of sugar cubes
instead of Lincoln Logs.

We blame it all on Freud,
the Madison Avenue cult of youth,
the decline of moral standards in the neighborhood,
urban non-renewal,
Dylan songs that taught them how to think,
England.

Anything but what it is.
The turning from homes that weren't quite right
the getting up from TV dinners to eat the snow,
the playing with each other
instead of dolls.

We can't be Batman to all the Robins of the world.
There are some that want more than
an all purpose super-duper utility belt.

Mary Poppins is alive and well in Argentina.
She sends her regards.
Tinker Bell has joined the Jet Age...
she flies economy class.

They may yet find a way to bottle Phyllis Diller's laugh.
A brand new penicillin for a frowning world.

Let the mud kids make their mud pies
and throw them at the world.
It could be a better place to live in.
Maybe they'll make it better.

-from the album "The Earth"