Under The Boardwalk
Oh, the sun beats down and melts the tar up on the roof,
And your shoes get so hot you wish your tired feet were fire-proof.
Under the boardwalk, down by the sea,.
On a blanket with my baby….is where I’ll be.
From a park you hear the happy sounds from a carousel.
You can almost taste the hotdogs and French fries they sell.
Under the boardwalk, down by the sea,
On a blanket with my baby….is where I’ll be.
Under the boardwalk, out of the sun,
Under the boardwalk, we’ll be having some fun,
Under the boardwalk, people walking above,
Under the boardwalk, we’ll be falling in love,
Under the boardwalk! Boardwalk!
It’s really Summer now. June 21st has come and gone, the afternoon showers (more often thunderstorms) are a daily occurrence and it’s HOT, man. The training horses are going out at 7:30 in the morning these days to make it easier to cool them out and all the yard work and mowing around here is getting done before noon. Siobhan is sprucing up her garden so that all is in readiness for the July 23rd Bentler ashes-spreading ceremony, which Siobhan has taken to calling The Event. Elf is back to jogging on the grass track and Wilson is shipping to Calder tomorrow. Juno is working forwardly for her first start, hopefully before month’s end.
We took our new pal, Norm, and our old pal, Allen, to the Hippodrome in Gainesville a few nights ago to see their annual summer musical—this year it’s Suds, which somehow manages to cram about fifty old songs into a two-hour play. Norm said he knew them all and Allen said he was all ready to Do The Locomotion if he could have just found a willing partner. For the large number of you in the Gainesville-Ocala corridor that pay any attention to our advice, give Suds a shot, be a patron of the arts for one night out of 365.
The Bear Went Over The Mountain, Not To Mention The Tourist
Our gym pals, Bruce and Barbara just came back from a two-week vacation in Yellowstone and the Tetons. Just in time, apparently. A day or two after they left, a couple of tourists came upon a mama grizzly (no, it was not Sarah Palin—we don’t think, anyway) while hiking in Yellowstone and, to quote the old song, “We fought the bear and the bear won.” One dead 57-year-old tourist and one slightly more fortunate wife. The bear merely picked her up by the backpack and dropped her. There are somewhere between 600 and 1000 grizzlies in Yellowstone and environs so you’d think bear encounters would be more frequent, but this is the first bear-related death since 1985. Being avid hikers (although not so much lately), we’re always hopeful of seeing bears….what?....oh, Siobhan says maybe not her….but we seldom do and when we do catch sight of them they are off in the distance. Which, all things considered, might be just the place for them.
Good Neighbors
The other day we got a weepy phone call from our neighbor, Candy, who we occasionally spot across the fence while mowing and the like. Her cat was in bad shape and could Siobhan please come over and put her down? Sure, anything for a neighbor.
While Siobhan was over there, Candy began running down a litany of her recent misfortunes, ending with “and know my kitty is dying on the very anniversary of Hugh’s death….”
“Um….who’s Hugh?” asked Siobhan, tenderly. Turned out he was Candy’s husband, for God’s sake and we never even heard he was sick. So much for all your illusions of the closeness of good old country neighbors. Geez.
WHAT? NOT GUILTY???
All the professional Casey Anthony trial watchers are in an uproar over the jury’s unlikely verdict of innocent on almost all counts (she did lie a little bit to the cops, but who doesn’t?). Gutterballs like Nancy Grace, whose job it is to predict outcomes in these sordid exhibitions, are outraged that the jury didn’t agree with her (she said Casey Anthony would be pounded), not unlike just about all the other trial prognosticators who were huffing and puffing all over the TV networks the past couple of days. And don’t even ask about the reaction on the streets, where gigantic angry women, often with brood in tow, were carrying misspelled signs demanding justice and venting to TV saps who kept lobbing softball questions to provoke even more rage. In between, they slapped their misbehaving kids around, in a marvelous display of irony.
Casey Anthony is, to say the very least, an unsympathetic figure. Colin Cowherd would call her a “dumpster fire.” Widely disseminated photos of her partying and getting tattooed while her daughter was missing led many to believe that she had hired the wrong P.R. agency. Mothers, particularly, despised her and wanted her found guilty on general principles. Unfortunately, however, all the evidence was circumstantial and the jury bravely acquitted. In a television interview right after the trial, an alternate juror—who seemed fairly intelligent, by the way—said that interminable hours of sitting up close, listening to all the evidence and heeding witnesses closely convinced the jury that Caylee Anthony had died due to some horrific accident and the death was covered up, not an unreasonable assessment.
If anybody thinks Casey Anthony made out like a bandit in this little episode, think again. After collecting a modest sum from books, interviews, etc., much of which will be subtracted by her friendly attorneys, she will have to find a place to live which is not somewhat dangerous for her considering the circumstances. Ulan Bator comes to mind, or maybe Nairobi. Anyplace in this country will be a struggle. Those mama grizzlies are everywhere.
Gulp!
Just a word here about these Eating Contests, which annually blight the 4th of July and other holidays. Are you as annoyed, nay, disgusted by these things as I am? Particularly bothersome is a sports network like ESPN elevating this churlish gluttony to Sport status and devoting several hours of perfectly good television time to perpetrators like piehole-cramming king Joey Chestnut, as they mindlessly force hotdogs and other exotic delicacies down their gullets. What’s next, anus stuffing?
Hit Me With Your Best Shot
It’s almost hysterical. The headline above one of last week’s newspaper articles read, Should mentally ill get gun rights back? What the hell, why not? The NRA wants everybody else to have weapons, why not crazy people? And not just nice little handguns, either. They’d like you to have howitzers, maybe even tanks and warplanes.
Hey, I’m no gun prude. I always had guns to help stack the odds when somebody broke into the Subterranean Circus at night. And when you live in the country where the Sheriff is maybe a half-hour away at best, a well-placed shotgun is probably a good idea. But the National Rifle Association, with its scare-stories and nitwit-militia inciting fables of “secret government takeovers” has carried this country so far into the ethers there may be no return. The organization owns a majority of politicians, all so terrified of NRA retribution that they vote for ludicrous laws like the recent ones permitting guns on campuses.
When you consider the society fostered by powerful groups like the NRA, by influential deniers of climate-change, by the large majority of politicians who refuse to attempt any national benefit that might remotely compromise their retaining a political seat, you start giving some serious thought to moving to Ulan Bator yourself.
Alice
When we were growing up, my sister Alice and I were not big buddies. Oh sure, we had to muck about together when school was out for rain days or when our parents took us to Salisbury Beach or rented a cottage for a week or two at Canobie Lake. But we didn’t have a lot in common. I spent a lot of time playing the sport of the month with my crew and Alice, no sports fan, went her own way. We both went to St. Patrick’s elementary school and even if the schoolyard did not separate the girls and boys with that fat white line down the middle, we would have separated ourselves.
When it came time for high school, I went to all-boys Central Catholic, the better to gain entry to a decent college, and Alice, not interested in higher education (but very interested in boys), went to Lawrence High. Alice was a smart kid and always had good grades at St. Patrick’s but apparently decided continuing the practice in high school was not cool. Smoking was cool, however, so she started that and gradually developed the look and wardrobe of a slightly edgy teenager. When my father died, Alice decided she could do whatever she wanted and respected no discipline from my mother, an overly emotional women prone to tears who constantly told Alice that she hoped her own kids would treat her the same way down the road (Alice said they did).
To everyone’s great surprise, Alice started going out with a really nice guy named Sonny. Everybody liked Sonny, although some wondered what the hell he was doing with Alice. Anyway, they dated for years, went to the prom together, and, just when it seemed they were partners for life, Sonny disappeared. Next thing we knew, Alice was hooked up with a guy named Bob Richards, they were getting married and going off to California together where, I think, Bob had a job waiting.
Alice has been in California ever since, raising children, falling under the spell of the dreadful Republicans and holding a long-time respectable job with the school board. During all this time, Bob has been right there, a companion of almost 50 years. Together, they travelled all over hell, Alice finding more ways to finagle cheap trips than an LSD devotee with Owsley coupons. Anybody who is married for this length of time has their problems and so did Alice and Bob, but some people take “as long as they both shall live” more seriously than others so their marriage stood the test of time.
A few years ago, Bob was visiting daughter Renee in Eugene, Oregon, awaking one morning to find her dead in her bed, an asthma inhaler close by. Renee, like Alice, suffered from the heinous disease and though no cause of death was ever discerned, it was assumed asthma was the culprit. Alice said Bob was terribly wounded by the catastrophe (as was she) and never really recovered.
On July 1, I got a call from my other sister, Kathy. Bob, who had been in the hospital for some time with pneumonia and a raft of other ills, had been given six months to live by his doctors. He asked to go home and he did. The doctors, as often seems to happen in our experience, were wrong by 5 months and 29 days. Bob died the first day he was home.
My sister, Alice, is a tough woman, but losing a child and a husband in short order is a stiff sentence. Fortunately, she has a cadre of friends and her two beloved granddaughters, Kelsey and Nichole, to aid in the transition. She is still going to Ireland, a trip long-planned, with the assurance “Bob would want me to go.”
God bless you, Alice. Evidence to the contrary, I do love you and feel your heartaches. And I also know that your grand spirit will carry you through these waves just as it did the others, long ago at Salisbury Beach.
That’s all, folks….
