Steely Dan "Green Earring"

The good karma of not sucking . . .

My wife lost her favorite earring.

Now I know, losing an earring is the kind of thing that happens all the time, but this was a bit of a big deal.

Last Spring, we had taken a family vacation to Ocracoke Island in North Carolina, a tiny enclave that has little beyond a few restaurants, some artisans and miles of empty beaches.

My wife, and artist herself, fell in love with the work of a particular jeweler and the one-of-a-kind earrings she made.

But she couldn't bring herself to buy a pair.

It's a funny thing that happens to mothers.  They give and they give and they give, but they also feel enormously guilty about taking.

"Go buy them.  It's totally fine by me," I said, several times.  But she couldn't.

She wanted to, but she couldn't.

On the very last day we were on the Island---on the very last hour of the very last day we were on the Island---as we were packing the car to race to catch the ferry, she said, "I have to get them."

She walked down the street to the jewelers (it's a small island) and I finished packing the car, loaded in the kids and picked her up in front of the store.

From that moment on, for the next 7 months, she wore those earrings every single day.


About 2 months ago, she lost one.

Honestly, losing something is not that uncommon in my household.  My wife is one of those people who loses her car keys, her phone, her ipad, etc, etc, on a regular basis.  They always turn up.

But the earring didn't, and she was really upset.

Every day she'd get dressed and say out loud (not expecting and answer) "Where is that earring?"

Long gone, no doubt.  We'd tried to work out when she might have lost it, and the possibilities weren't good. 

She knew that she wore it to work (teaching), but she didn't know if she'd lost it at school, or on the way to her car, or at any of the couple of stops she'd made (the store, the gas station) on her way to pick up the kids.  If it wasn't in the car (it wasn't), then it was probably on the ground somewhere.  Gone.


When it wasn't showing up, I decided I would take a picture of the remaining earring, and send it to the jeweler.  Maybe she could reproduce her original, one-of-a-kind work.  A custom job like that wasn't going to cost half as much, no doubt, but it would make a good present.

Too close to Christmas to get it done, I decided to wait until January to make contact, in hopes that maybe I could give it to her for her March birthday.


Our finances are often as disorganized as the rest of our lives, so it was with great pride that I was carrying a check to my son's daycare.

We pay quarterly for his (awesome) pre-school, and it's always a bit of a financial wack.  Sometimes it requires juggling the finances to make it work.  Often, we have paid late.  Occasionally, really late.  It never feels good.

But my wife had done some good planning this quarter, and we were ready with a check the day it was due.  I was proud to be paying on time.

As I was tacking the envelope to the cork-board at daycare (which I otherwise never look at), I let out a yelp.

There was the earring.

It had been found, but no one knew who it belonged to.

For a minute, I toyed with the thought of giving it to my wife and telling her I had contacted the jeweler and had it made for her.

Instead, I gave my boy the glory.

He and his teacher taped up the earring in a bright red jewelry box, and he dictated a letter that said, "Here is your earring!  Don't lose it!"  And he presented the surprise at the dinner table that night.

I think my wife was actually shocked, speechless at the surprise.  I thought she might cry (but she didn't), but she was truly, truly thrilled.


I feel like I finally saw that earring that had been tacked to the corkboard for two month, as a reward for doing what shouldn't be a big deal, but was---paying the bill on time.

It's the good karma of not sucking.


Hear the song on Youtube.

Elvis Costello "Good Year For The Roses"

I played this song last week when I heard that George Jones had passed away.

Not growing up with country music here in the Northeast, I had no awareness of Jones’ music.  This Elvis cover was my introduction.

The song was part of a story of mine.

Back when I fancied the idea of writing short stories as a way to understand and explore my life, I wrote this story about how I had split with a girlfriend, had moved out, but was having trouble moving on.

In the story (as it happened in real life), as I’m moving out, she gives me a set of 5 coffee cups.  She had mail ordered a set of 6 cups but when one of the cups arrived broken, they sent her a full set as a replacement.  She gave me the incomplete set, and that’s all I really took from the relationship as I left.

In the story, I’ve left behind “The Best Of Elvis Costello.”  But I like to listen to "Good Year For The Roses" on her birthday/when feeling melodramatic:

“Or the lip print on the half filled cup of coffee that you bought but didn’t drink.  But at least you thought you wanted it, but that’s so much more than I can say for me.”

The story goes jumps forward in time to vignettes with various new girlfriends where, in each scene, a coffee cup breaks.  The story ends with me contemplating the fate of the last coffee cup, hopeful that when it does break, it will mean I am finally over the original girl.

So last week I played Elvis Costello’s version of “Good Year For The Roses,” and I thought about the girl and the story and young love and how sad I was in those years.  And I thought about the story, and something struck me funny.

In the story, I left behind “The Best Of Elvis Costello.”  I wrote that into the story, because I loved “Good Year For The Roses,” and because the lyric worked with the coffee cup plot device.

But in reality, I didn’t lose that record in the relationship.

No, in reality, I was always bummed that I had left behind my copy of “A Decade Of Steely Dan.”

So why the wistfulness at hearing Elvis Costello, if that part of the story was complete fiction?

I’d spent a long time writing this story.  Worked on it for months on end.  Told it and retold it and revised it and reshaped it.  To the point that the story was how I explained my feelings, with more clarity than the facts could have.

The story became the reality.

It's not what happened, but it best explained what happened to me.

And for a moment, I felt kind of like a songwriter.

The narrator of "Good Year For The Roses" (made famous by George Jones, but written by Jerry Chestnut) probably did get his heart broken by a woman.  But did he really see a lip print on a half-filled cup of coffee?  Probably not.  But that's what it felt like, to have his heart broken.  And maybe, forever more, if he saw a half-filled cup of coffee, discarded, he thought of his heart-ache, whether the original image was real or not.

So it makes some sense that I would listen to "Good Year For The Roses" and feel what I felt, even if it isn't attached to my actual story.

It makes more sense than feeling sad about "Peg."


Hear the song on Youtube.

Steely Dan "Peg"

Steely Dan came on the radio, and, unusually, I did not change the channel.

If I'm in the car with my wife, and Steely Dan comes on, I instinctively either turn down the volume, or surf to the next channel.

My wife does not like Steely Dan.  At all.

But it was Christmas Eve and we were going to my Aunt Peg's house, so when Steely Dan's "Peg" came on, I left it on.

My wife was into something.  Looking at her iPad.  Talking to the kids.  I can't quite remember.  But whatever the distraction, "Peg" did not register with her.

But I couldn't help singing.

"It's your favorite foreign movie . . ."

"Steely Dan!?!  Ugh.  I hate Steely Dan," she mock moaned.

She didn't have to real moan, because she we've been married long enough to know that she knows that I know that she hates Steely Dan.

"Yeah," I said, "but this is the most mainstream/tolerable of their work, right?"

"Yeah it is."

"Plus, we're going to Auntie Peg's house, so . . . I had to keep it on."

"Yeah."

"It's a good song."

Long pause.

"It just takes me right back."

My wife's father loves Steely Dan.  And back when records like "Aja" and "Katy Lied" were out, he LOVED Steely Dan.

She can't hear a Steely Dan song without being instantly transported to the 1970s of her childhood.

But even then, she didn't like them.

Something about the weird tension in the songs.  The creepy, oblique lyrics.  The overly pristine sound.  Something about Steely Dan rubbed her the wrong way in the 1970s.  And still does.

And yet, she knows every song.  Every word.  Every inflection.  Because her Dad listened all the time.

It made me think about my own kids.

Yes, today we'll play Mumford And Sons and The Beatles and Janelle Monae and who knows what else, ad finitum around our house and in our car.  And we'll be thinking we're doing the kids a favor by sharing our awesome jams.  But inevitably, they're going to silently hate some of it.

And in the year 2045, my daughter will be driving with her spouse (or perhaps flying with her spouse in her space hover craft), and some old song will come over the transom and she'll find herself singing along, awash in a mix of nostalgia and resentment for her lovely childhood and her parents' terrible taste in music.

"Peg, it will come back to you . . ."
 

Hear the song on Youtube.

Steely Dan "Black Friday"

Uh . . . if you've been awake for hours and hours already, trying to get to those doorbuster sales . . . do you have this one on the brain?


Hear the song on Youtube.

Steely Dan “Cousin Dupree”

About 5 minutes after welcoming Spring weather, I start cursing the arrival of unwanted bugs in my home.

Last week, inchworms started spinning silken strings from the trees in my front yard. And yes, I picked more than a couple of the tiny worms off my back, and out of my wife’s hair, as the little buggers descended from the branches onto us, the moving targets.

This week, it’s ants. They’re only coming in by the back door slider, but that’s where the kitchen is, so they’ve probably chosen wisely. It’s open season on any scrap of food left on the counter---and let’s face it, when you have a 2 year old, your life is crumbs.

Nothing feels more skeevy, than picking up, say, an delicious apple, biting into it, and then pulling the apple away from your face, to see an bug scurrying away from its near miss of your mouth.

And that’s basically how I feel about this song. I’m casually, somewhat absently, enjoying the catchy tune, and suddenly I figure out he’s singing about having skeevy, sexual fantasies about his underage cousin.

Ewwwwww.

The Eagles “Hotel California”

All Time Top Five Songs About Motel Rooms . . .

(I’ll just say up front: today’s entry gets graphic. So if you’re the kind of person that covers your eyes during horror movies and/or sex scenes, best skip today’s post)

I remember the disquiet I felt as a kid, hearing “Hotel California.” At 8 or 9 years old, I certainly could not have gleaned that the song was about the excess of the West Coast Music industry and the trap that the “Everything, all the time” (to quote a different Eagles song) could become.

Even at that tender age, I understood that The Hotel wasn’t a really place, but a spooky, spectral metaphoric location of the soul. The line, “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave” was like a line from a horror movie to my young self.

And the line “They stab it with their steely knives” was just more Slasher-movie imagery, for my early understanding of the song.

Much later, as I moved into my Song Nerd phase, I learned that “Stab it with their steely knives” was a playful reference to Steely Dan. The Dan had mentioned the Eagles in one of their songs (“Everything You Did”), so the Eagles returned the favor, by slipping in a sly reference.

My hazy 20s brought me to that part of your life where you discover Carlos Castaneda, Lester Bangs and Lenny Bruce, and William Burroughs. It was a Burroughs fan who filled me in to the fact that Steely Dan took its name from “Naked Lunch.”

In that book, the Steely Dan is a metal dildo. Which, in my 20s, was pretty funny, to think that this mainstream band was named after a self-pleasuring device.

But it wasn’t until many years later that I put all of this information all together, to form one, very disturbing image, that makes it hard for me to listen to “Hotel California” without feeling queasy.

“They stab it with their steely knives.”

If the steely knife is actually a metal dildo, and there is stabbing involved, then . . . well it’s just too graphic to describe any further. Sorry. Hope I didn’t permanently ruin the song for you.




Hear full live versions of "Hotel California" and "Everything You Did", here

From time to time on Every Day I Write The Blog, I do a week’s worth of my five favorite songs on theme. For the All Time Top Five rules, see this previous post.