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Going back in time with movies and music has really been hitting the spot. Yep, the guy who grew up on "bad hair" bands has been getting into music his grandparents listened to - Glenn Miller and the like, and other stuff.
Sad to say, but this past weekend I had to spend Saturday night and Sunday with a cold from hell, which resulted in, because I was laid out and did too much sitting around, a re-aggravated sciatic nerve issue which has had me limping for the past two days. Yes, I would be very easy to track in the snow amongst other human tracks - mine is the set where the right leg is dragging...I have to say, though, that the chiropractor is doing an awesome job of getting straightened up. I'll be back out the trails in no time. That is, if free time can be found.
Anyway, while laid out this weekend, I got to watching The World At War marathon on the military channel, and memories started drifting back of my grandfather watching these same documentaries on public television until the wee hours of the morning. I didn't get to see any episodes that detailed the North Africa campaign of WWII, where he served, but am inspired to do more looking into it (which may show up here someday). And in kind of a weird twist of whatever, I have been absolutely bored with a lot of the entertainment options offered nowadays. Going back in time with movies and music has really been hitting the spot. Yep, the guy who grew up on "bad hair" bands has been getting into music his grandparents listened to - Glenn Miller and the like, and other stuff. Easy, it was, for me to be taken back...
My grandparents owned a small two bedroom bungalow, through which they raised seven children, being the good Catholics they were. Christmases in particular, and maybe a couple of St. Patrick's Days, and the little house would be crammed with my aunts and uncles and their kids. Smoke, loud voices, laughing, children weaving in and out and between all the tall folks. But space was always made out in the living room where the record player was, some sort of Sears model, with a fantastic set of speakers, this being the 1970's and all. (Kiss, Aerosmith, Nazareth, Boston and Ted Nugent SCREAMED over this system - and grandpa didn't like it!)
Later in the evenings, after a few beers and glasses of wine, a Glenn Miller album would be put on, and grandpa and grandma would do some dancing. They loved the music loud then! A few of their older kids and their spouses would join them. Us kids 10 years and younger would just laugh at them all bumping into each other in such a small room. Yet, those were good and happy times, as I remember. The acoustic bass lines in that music really got 'em moving!
There was no way back then, that I could fathom what that music meant to my grandfather. My grandmother passed away in 1988, and grandpa spent the next several years mostly alone and slowly being taken by Alzheimer's. It started with his forgetting where he was at or telling his kids the repairs the house needed, though they had been taken care of years before. Then he started forgetting people he knew, and then his own children's names.
I made my last visit with him in the hospital when things were very bad. His brain had gotten to the point that it could no longer tell his body to swallow food. We knew grandpa's end was near and he became practically a "vegetable," for lack of a better word. But on his room's window sill was a small CD player that was almost constantly playing a Glenn Miller disc. It seemed to us, when he heard those horns hitting those melodies, he would look toward the window, like he remembered the music.
A man of the earth whose solace is found along paths under tress and along running waters of NE Iowa, and in a jar, to be sure. Believer in He Who Gives Breath, husband, father of four, duck and small game hunter, walker, fisher, beginning brewer, beer appreciator. This blog has no point, other than I like to follow blogs, so figure "why not have my own?" I spend my free time outside.
You may read a post where the pics don't match the post content at all. Well, you're not the one that is a little confused. I just like to take photos. Where they end up? Who knows...