Eight miles out of Memphis and I've got no spare. in anticlimatic

Eight miles, straight up, downtown somewhere.

That’s Kenny Rogers, in case you were wondering. Might remember it from The Big Lebowski. I remember it from the radio in my dad’s truck in the 80s. Oldies 92.5 WAIR. You know how radio stations have kind of a playlist that, if you listen to them long enough, you start to pick up on? I still remember a handful of songs from that station that must have played on it all the time, that I never hear anymore. In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight. To everything there is a season, turn turn turn. Operator, can you help me place this call? And an odd one- I like bread and butter, I like toast and jam. A song my dad told me was my mom’s favorite. I asked her once when it came on in her car, and she looked at me like I had lost it. My dad lied to me about it, and I always wondered why. Thought he was trying to be funny. Upon listening very recently, it’s a song about a woman who doesn’t cook. Just makes her man bread and butter and toast and jam. Which is about all my mother was capable of cooking in the 80s. At the end of the song she’s suddenly making all this fancy food for some other guy, and he’s finally off the hook on the bread and butter. Makes me wonder if she cheated on him, and he vented to me in his own way without realizing it.

Pure speculation of course. But it wouldn’t surprise me. It’s easy to forget that our ancestors were anything other than whole people with closets full of skeletons and pathologies. It’s easy to forget that it is absolutely the baseline norm. “Normal” is a miracle- and often just a lie.

The weirdest thing about Christmas to me, which pairs oddly well with the much overplayed Christmas Story movie (the one they run 24/7 on christmas), is despite how much of the magic of the season I can directly thank my mother for- all the details, the sparkling lights, the music playing on cassette, the candles, the holiday scents, the amazingly thoughtful gifts- all the warmth and the luxury- the entirety of the magic always came down to just a few moments with my dad at 8:00 am, in a cold kitchen with the holiday stripped down to it’s most flannel pajamas wood stove smoke roots. He’d make me breakfast, eggs and toast and bacon, and we’d listen to christmas carols on low and enjoy the anticipation of the day to come.