Things Can Only Get Better

Have you ever heard a song out of the blue that you hadn't heard in years but always liked even though you didn't know the name of the song or who did it? That's the way it was with me when I recently re-heard the 1985 Howard Jones hit, "Things Can Only Get Better." Subsequently, I had it running through my head to the point where I had to download it from iTunes (Napster didn't have it). So for you my reading public I give you the YouTube rendition.

So maybe now you are listening to it, or maybe not. I don't suppose it's really important. But I would like to put in a plug for Trisha too for whom I am indebted for her 98 song playlist that I listen to on a regular basis. Here is the link for her blog. easily amused... hard to offend I urge you to check it out for her clever posts and great taste in music.

Here's something new: I've been urged by a friend in the literary field to write my memoirs. I had that idea years ago, but it floundered just like my blog is today. What would I write about? The days up at the Grant Memorial with my dad when I was a preschooler where he took photographs of school groups? And our days with my mom out on the boat? That would be a start. Those were some wonderful times.

What about working for my uncle at White House Sightseeing? He had a class souvenir counter that I worked behind, and I would peak glimpses down women's blouses as they bent over to look at the display pieces. I was only nine or 10, but my interest in the opposite sex was firmly rooted.

It may be genetic -- I'm guessing it is -- as my dad was a notorious womanizer, much to my mother's dismay, but whatever it is women surely turn my head. I'm not one to treat women as sex objects, but I do have sex on the brain sometimes. Maybe it's hormones. I'm sure that's the case when I was 12 at Expo 67.

My dad had driven us all that summer to Niagara Falls where we crossed over to the Canada side. That was my first foray into a foreign land, and I was excited at the prospect of seeing the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum. As you enter the place, this was the way it was back then anyway, you see this giant faucet in the air with water coming out of it with no apparent means of support. I mean this thing was 15 feet in the air and 6 feet long. It just hung there in midair with a steady stream of agua coming down. That took a little figuring out of how it was done. The only other thing I can remember from there was their collection of shrunken heads.

But getting back to my overpowering desires for the feminine form as they manifested themselves that fateful year, there we were in Montréal, Québec at what would otherwise be known as a world's fair. There were lots of exhibits, lots of lines, and lots and lots of young women. I would take advantage of the lines to place myself strategically behind some buxom young lass, and accidentally bump into her with my hand. Yes, I was grabbing ass at 12 years old.

I got some interesting looks, and some angry glares, as women removed my digits from their derrière. I was having a grand old time. It was like an addiction, but there didn't seem a downside. Somehow I went from being a crazed little kid to super shy. I started seventh grade in junior high that year, and part of the social concern was dating, and I turned morbidly afraid of the opposed gender.

My first date: Sid Jenkins wanted to take out Cindy Crabtree, and so my being his best friend, I was set up with Betty Hinz. We met the girls halfway at the intersection of Glebe and Ridge Roads where Mount Vernon Avenue goes into Arlandria (so called, I suppose, because it was part Arlington and part Alexandria). And of all the movies, we go to see Dr. Zhivago. Did I ever get up the nerve to put my arm around her, or did I just worry about it for three hours?

I never did get lucky until I was 17. And this was, according to my father, during a period in history when women were "giving it away."

So what do you think? Do I have a future in the memoir business?