♫And I'm gonna wear a pink tux to the prom♫

As I've said before, I don't have an issue about turning 50 later this year. It actually represents a major achievement in a sad sense- our oldest sister only made it to 49, and if you count the months up, I've already outlived her. Still, there's the occasional misfortune in the precise era in which my odometer WILL turn over the 4 and all those 9.9's:

I'm close enough to the 1980s that I still remember them, but I'm not young enough to be able to say that I was really a part of them.

Not that there was anything wrong with the decade on my personal calendar. Both of my degrees, my choice of career, and our marriage all came out of those years. I lost that sister, a father and a father-in-law, but gained an equal number of in-laws, two of who remain in our lives.  Our first two cats, both only recently departed, came into our home in 1988 and 1989. The Mets last won- oh, never mind.

But the decade as a phenomenon? Lost on me now, and probably lost on me at the time. I watched very little television in that era, went whole years sometimes without buying new records (the Clash and Talking Heads were about my only exceptions, and they'd both seen better years in the late 70s), and missed whole trends of popular culture that mark the decade in most peoples' minds.

Still, enough got stuck in there to resonate today under the right circumstances. Earlier today, I issued a summons and complaint against a guy named (and this is a deliberate misspelling) Garry Newman. Misspelled or not, it was all I needed to get THIS burned into my brain for the four hours since then:

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Sometime yesterday, Don Henley's End of the Innocence came on the Lake, with its singular putdown of the Reagan years in referring to "beating plowshares into swords for this tired old man that we elected King." Years later, but still in the 80s, we saw Bruce Hornsby do that song (that's him on the piano in the original, and he co-wrote it) with the line changed to "this tired old man who is no longer King." That may have been true then, but can we even say now that his kingship has passed? Since his election, a whole generation has been born, raised, graduated and is rapidly heading into marriage and family- a generation which never knew Ronnie other than, well, gee Mommy, a Great Communicator and a Wall-Tearer-Downer.

Fuck that.

Back in the day, WE knew him as a mean-spirited frontman for a bunch of racist, power-hungry GOP southern strategists who, at the end of two decades later, are still playing the same old tune. And that's something I'll remember a lot more, and a lot longer, than my favorite band being Tears for Fears.

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Related to that, only by the passing references here to the dead, is my choice last night to see the finale of Pushing Daisies. Thank you, Bryan, and Lee and Anna, and Kristen and Chi, and Ellen and Swoozie, and even Digby the Dog who may have had the final on-screen moment- for making us believe, and keeping us alive, and hopefully finding your way back to life again someday soon.

Thump. Thump. Thump. Thumpa. Thump.

Eleanor came home from work just as I was feeding the cats and bringing up a load of wash. She asked if I would haul a load of her own warsh to the cellar for her. I duly dood so.

Dinner and the Nurse Jackie premiere (we LIKE this show- very Dexter-like in its wit and twists), then I switched the wash to the dryer.

We then both puttered on puters. The dryer was making distinct thunka sounds during its rounds. Nothing unusual, what with wet towels in there.

Now it's bedtime. I just retrieved the dry from the dryer. One of these items was hotter than the others, one of the items just wasn't the same:

Eleanor's cell phone had been washed, dried and seriously fluffed up.

No signal at the moment, although the battery is accepting a charge.

It was the last Cingular phone in the house. We were due for an upgrade.

Bets are being accepted on whether it will work in the morning.


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