Shoving It Down

Last night I was talking to Janey for a very long time (Thank you, Verizon). I was laying out all my angst for her, and she was listening in the way she can, knowing that in the past she has laid out all her angst for me. When it was all laid out, labeled and categorized, we shared a pause and she said, "Well, I don't know what to tell you to do about all this except maybe you should just Shove It Down. You know, Shove It Way Deep Down. Wad It Up Tight and find a spot and just Shove It. Down. Deep."

This caused us both to laugh uncontrollably for several minutes.

Laughing really hard always feels good. So does the idea that Shoving It Down is always an option, however dysfunctional. While I'm not planning to Shove all of this, Shelving it may be a practical option. Especially when it boils down to Getting Something Done vs. Being A Spasming Pool of Inactivity.

In totally unrelated news, I've always felt out of sorts with conventional seventies nostalgia because I have no affinity with roller skates and pointy collars. For me, nostalgia of the late seventies and early eighties has to do with a certain kind of pastoral hippiness that is alway set in fall and involves cableknit and shearling and Gordon Lightfoot songs with a verse for each of the four seasons. (I remember singing this song in the elementary school choir, but they must have changed that line about "naked limbs"? I love the idea of getting an elementary school choir to sing popular folk music) In fact, I think that a lot of my nostalgia for this era comes from music my parents listened to and things in our house. My mom's cookbooks that were those spiral photo albums the covers of which were beautiful colour photos of autumn leaves or pristine alpine lakes or snowy mountains. They look a lot like those beautiful wall-sized photos that people had actually wallpapered onto their walls in the late seventies. God, those are beautiful. I'd like to have one of those in my house eventually. Maybe with Japanese Maples.

Certainly my mom had a lot of super-hot outfits for that era and season. The concept that brown is best-looking colour you can wear, especially if you wear it with bright red and cream is fixed in my mind, as is the supremacy of drapey sheer blouses and paisly neck scarves. And I do love Gordon Lightfoot. Also John Denver, especially in that hat, or squinting-smiling into the sun while holding his guitar (woven shoulder strap).

I think when I was a five-year-old one sunny afternoon in September 1983, I looked at my mom and loved and idolized her so much that all my ideas of what is beautiful were crystallized in that moment and it has never worn off.