Sixties Chick

Boy, it’s been tough getting this entry out.  I’ve started at least ten times on four different topics, all four stopping about two or three paragraphs down the page. Thoughts on the creative process, on listening to my gut, on being oblivious to the obvious, nothing seemed to jell, nothing felt quite right. And to tell you the truth, I didn’t feel like staying the course, slogging through to the finish line. Just didn’t feel up to it. Lethargy, I’d say.

Anybody else out there feeling a bit lethargic these days? I imagine I can’t be alone. Always anxious to find reasons for my behavior (anything besides laziness), I chalk it up to the never-ending rain we’ve been having lately. It is said that barometric pressure can be quite debilitating. No doubt.

It could, of course, be a reaction to the state of the world which is pretty intense, getting more so with each passing day.  I don’t linger on the news much, can’t watch it on TV, and find I can hardly read more than the headlines in any paper or on-line news. I catch snippets.  Bankers Pay Soars, Americans Struggle to Pay for Health Care with 40% Delaying Treatment, Unrepentant Rumsfeld Slams the Media, Nokia Provided Regime’s Censoring Technology, End of Line for Jon and Kate. Among the talking heads, the pundits, politicians, the power people – there are far too many egos having at one another. There’s no respite. It’s exhausting. It’s TMI.

Add to that the constant emailing, cell-phoning, texting, skyping, facebooking, youtubing, tweeting and linking in. It’s so pervasive that even if you’re only doing a quarter of it, it’s more than enough frenetic, electromagnetic energy swirling about  for any one planet.  Frankly, I’m too tired to even think about it. Stay in touch with whom exactly? How many? And why? It can take a lot out of you.

Perhaps there are other possible explanations for this lack of get-up-and-go, but I am feeling far too weary to even come up with any. All I know is that I want to sit quietly. I do not want to be disturbed. And as Dietrich so fetchingly once said, “I vant to be alone.”

With a list the length of my arm of things I needed to do this past Saturday, I plopped myself down on the sofa instead and read a wonderful book, 289 pages cover to cover, in one sitting except for an occasional snack and a quick bolt to the bathroom. It felt so luxurious. So good. To detach from all the noise and lose myself in the magic of a beautifully told story.

Today, after I minimally apply myself to a “pressing” work issue (after all, this family does have to eat), I am headed for the library for yet another one of those books. My hope is to be able, shortly thereafter, to head for that oh so soothing, horizontal position, head and feet elevated, and  lose myself in the lyrical yet compelling narrative of someone else’s world.

In the meantime,  if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll just go lie down for a quick…

There is nothing like slow dancing to old tunes to stir up romantic yearnings. You know, the “I can’t sleep for thinking about him” kind. Yes, dance to any of those old songs from decades past, and I dare you not to feel 15 or 16 once again, melting with a longing for love so powerful that palms go clammy and knees weak. Songs like At Last or Can’t Help Falling in Love can conjure up feelings you thought you put away in the closet with the rest of the high school memorabilia. Those songs and the goose bumps they cause must be part of my cellular memory I’m thinking.

Last Saturday night while attending a most wonderful birthday gala, I danced to one such song. And there they were, once again, those same dewy-eyed, dreamy feelings I had known long ago, sparked the minute the music started. As the Righteous Brothers sang out, “Baby, baby, I’d get down on my knees for you. If you would only love me like you used to do,” my dance partner commented that if this guy had to get down on his knees, it was probably too late. “It’s over,” he said. I had to stop and think about it. Who knows anymore?

I am out of practice in the romance department. Love in that particular form is a little like the foreign country I haven’t visited in a long time. I can still recall some of the sights and sounds, and I know I had a wonderful time, but it’s all a bit hazy. My dance partner continued, “You know,” he said, “a Nigerian once told me that love is a Western concept.”

Rabu would agree. He’s one of the Indian IT guys I worked with at my last job. Rabu went back home for the sole purpose of meeting and marrying the woman his parents had found for him. In two weeks, he was back at work after a huge henna-ed wedding, busy making arrangements for his new bride’s arrival in the U.S. He had only just met her, but Rabu was giddy with happiness.

No question about it, it probably pays to be practical when it comes to love. Maybe that’s how couples make it to a fifty, sixty, even a seventy-year anniversary. They learn acceptance, forgiveness, compassion – all very practical tools when sharing a bathroom with someone over a long time. They might well up at the voice of Etta James, but they certainly know that making love last is not about moonbeams and lollipops, dew drops and roses.  And it’s a good thing.

No doubt I’d have been better off coming at love from a more practical point of view, a less fanciful state. Instead of always being drawn to the artist, the poet, the radical, the guy who searched, the one who struggled – perhaps I should have listened to my father. For one thing, all those years I spent worrying about paying the bills would have been completely unnecessary if I had only been a little more practical and a lot less willful.

Perhaps like Rabu, my mate should have been chosen for me. Even if the “chosen one” had been someone like Hershel Finklestein, who came complete with brains and BO, you just never know. I may have had to let go of that lovin’ feelin’, but today I might be singing a very different tune. This one, a voce alta, to Hershel, and this time, it’d be My Guy.