I’ve read (on Kindle) just today….

A good fast read. I recommend it as gift to friends and enemies.

I’ve seen a video in which Penn Ji fucking lette does a good job justifying his stint as a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice.

Then I remember that he used to star in a show called Bull Shit.

I’ve listened to Bert Jansch’s cover of Angie, and Amy Winehouse’s cover of Will You Love Me Tomorrow, thanks to the various In Memoriam posts at Starmaker Machine.

[See post to listen to audio]

Will You Love me Tomorrow.

I will miss 2011. It was good to me.The Year of Living Dangerously no obstructions. It didn’t get in my way. 2011 gave me what I wanted — no obstacles.

Peace

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The food was good, the wine better, though one really shouldn’t drink wine on a hot night because it provokes a giddiness that gin never does. The lone disturbance through most of our meal was a diner with iPhonitis, a condition for which I demand a cure or jail time. The lone disturbance that is, until, without warning, and luckily for my stomach, at the conclusion of the meal and the bottle of wine, an elderly man outside our window seat collapsed on that unyielding sidewalk.

The short story is, someone started CPR and I saw an Automatic Defibrillator used. The restaurant next door was an approved public access center for AED’s, and the owner and staff are trained. The ambulance came, the victim appeared to partially wake up, though he didn’t look great he was moving, once the ambulance came they were off — the hospital being only minutes away.

The whole experience was enough to make me feel nervously inadequate, so as the evening wore on I started texting people who knew people, who knew people, who knew people, and Sunday afternoon I was in a CPR class. It was the one for health care workers because it was the only one available. It was an all day event from which I emerged with a resusitation facemask kit (this exact one as a matter of fact but for 12 dollars less), and confident that if the life could be saved I’d be able to save it.

As Bone said, summer is waning, and though Autumn does not feel as close here I’ve noticed the shorter daylight. It makes me feel more desperate, like those closer to the autumn of their life must feel. Like the man on the sidewalk might have felt. I’m sure there are better poems and songs about increasingly shorter days and autumns of life, but I think only of this verse from an old show song lyric sung by my grandmother through one summers visit when I was 8. She told me it was about love. I always thought it was about death.

But if I’d ever leave you,
It couldn’t be in autumn.
How I’d leave in autumn I never will know.
I’ve seen how you sparkle
When fall nips the air.
I know you in autumn
And I must be there.

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My parents met and dated for a year or so when they were undergrads, but the relationship ended and they had moved on. My father, after graduating from The University of Pennsylvania School of Design and before heading back to get a second Masters in engineering, traveled to Iran with his more steady post grad GF and few American friends, including one of his best friends.

Iran was becoming a bit of a political time bomb. Already there was a unified anti-shah movement, the unifier Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. There had been some incidences/murders at a Bazaar in Tehran, but Americans were still there and not in small numbers. What did they know. There was no Twitter, no Facebook, Google. The shape of things to come was as veiled as all Iranian women would soon be.

My father spent some extra time in Tehran, then headed to the Caspian Sea to meet up with his then GF and his friend, both had left for the sea a week earlier while my father attended to some obscure business. When Daddy dear arrived at the seaside resort he discovered that his friend and his GF to all intents had become a pair. My father, always practical and not particularly possessive, held no protest, and the now old GF and best friend took off for Greece.

My father stayed on for a couple of weeks, but left in July for home.

After debarking his plane he headed to an airport bar, those bars weren’t much back then, but playing on the radio was a song from from the newly released first album of a group called The Cars. “Perfect”, he thought.

A couple of nights after his return my father came across a former college friend of my mother’s, he made some polite conversational inquiries as to what mother was doing — she had gone on to grad school at RISD. He ended up getting all the information he needed, called my mother later that evening, told my mother he was heading up to Newport before school in the fall and why didn’t he detour and take her out to dinner one night. He of course had no previous plans for Newport and had fabricated the plan once he heard her voice. She agree on dinner.

He remembers her opening the door to her apartment and this song resounding from inside of the apartment.

Though they were apart after that, they were ever after.

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