Recollection

I can't remember when exactly it happened, but I know that we were watching a movie with Kevin James, (whose name is wasted on a non-porn performer) called Here Comes the Boom, a movie about a teacher who competes in mixed martial arts and crafts to raise money for the school for some noble reason that I don't remember and don't want to look up. At one point in the movie, they are picking out music to be played as he makes his way to the octagon. Hype music I think it is called. Henry Winkler's character suggests a Neal Diamond song, Sweet Caroline (bum bum buum) and the song echoed in my subconscious until I decided to write down where the song took me, and the memories associated with the song. Casting a wide net from my stream of consciousness.

Sweet Caroline was on a Neal Diamond album my family had when I was very young. My mother told me that she used to dance with me to get me to nap, back when I took them. Cracklin' Rose was another one and I pulled up YouTube and I was back in Akron, Ohio, and it's summertime, and went to the drive-in theater. I remember wearing these cool sandals that made me think of the Planet of the Apes and that was a lot like the comic book Kamandi, with the blonde young man running around in the post-apocalypse shirtless wearing Daisy Dukes style shorts and combat boots and was the only human on Earth, everyone else was some evolved animal, like his friends one of whom is a dog that was a lot like the Playskool peg people dog, and another a leopard who smoked with a cigarette holder and wore a monocle and cravat. Later in my life, I would read about the Knights of Wundagore who served the High Evolutionary, also by Kirby, but for Marvel. The issue had an Ape city, with cables that commuters would use Tarzan-style, swinging to get around the city. Kamandi pissed off one of the apes and made a David and Goliath reference when he beaned the ape with a rock launched with a sling. It only made him mad. Then, out of nowhere, there are these two guys who have uniforms with a badge-like button over their hearts. One had black hair in a Caesar style with a modern goatee. I forget about the other guy. A few pages later, they activate their powers and turn into Silver Surfer types with shiny featureless forms. They were chasing the giant yellow radioactive bug. I turned the page and there it was, huge and the spread was covered in Kirby crackles, and the whole place agitated and unstable. Kamandi warned that Ape and I distinctly remember the image of a gorilla wearing red trunks and headband beating his chest and talking like the Hulk about being strong before attacking the big bug in the collapsing building/cave the issue ended with Kamandi walking away in silhouette. I had no idea what was going on then and I still have no idea what the issue was about, but it sure was exciting. I would push an imagined button on my shirt to activate! Charging bravely into the fray.

Song Sung Blue came up on Youtube and was one of the other tracks on the Neil Diamond album, and I am at the drive-in playground beneath the huge screen in the summertime dusk waiting for it to get dark enough to watch the movies. There's an ad for a local brand of potato chips and it's a fat guy potato in a crown and the whole graphic had the modern early 60s aesthetic that I recognized then but hadn't the understanding to categorize at the time. Like the skinny and sharp suits and ties with shorter styled hair and thick eyeglass frames that were all over the television and nowhere else. Everyone I knew was flared and wide and colorful and the "dirty hippies" look was big. My Dad a civil engineer wore houndstooth suits and a London Fog trench coat and he looked like Patrick Macnee playing John Steed opposite Diana Rigg's Emma Peel on Saturday afternoon, right before the Superhost show, which played the kind of science fiction that the Rocky Horror Picture Show would homage, imprinting on me a fondness for curly hair and makeup and French Maids with nihilist overtones. But that happens later, in Columbus, Ohio in the late 70s and the beginning of the 80s.

The only other person who wore anything more formal than jeans and chinos would be my mom's best friend's boyfriend, Jimmy. Mary Ann was my mom's best friend and had black hair and makeup on her porcelain skin, a sharp contrast to my tanned red-headed mother. She was dating the only black guy who I had seen in person, everyone else was in the movies or on tv. He was the height of cool, afro, sideburns and a gold tooth, his eyetooth, just like my grandpa and wore a single-color suit of leisure and the low-rise boots with a zipper on the inner side. I still think those are the coolest things that I have never been able to pull off.

Whenever we would visit they played jazz and Motown. I watched Santa Claus versus the Martians and a Gamera movie on their tv while the adults would sit around, talking, drinking, and smoking. Ugh, I am thankful for how repulsive smoking was presented to me at the time because I have never thought it was cool or to try it myself. The chiaroscuro clouds look cool, but I can't separate it from the secondhand nastiness of the smell and taste that I had to put up with. I think it may be why I like the idea of the outdoors. I have been on enough farms and later deployments to know better than romanticism. Nature's dirty, using most of the definitions of the word.  The yards and parks are enjoyable, except in the summer when it was hot and sticky sweaty or in the winters with the great lakes heaping snowdrifts and black icebergs hanging from the wheel wells of every car and the streets had mountain ranges of the nasty snow thanks to the snowplows that you never saw, but you always seemed to be in the spread of the salt and sand trucks. Winter was wet socks, stuffy noses cured by slathering Vicks VapoRub on your chest, and the stale air inside everywhere you go. The nice thing about being plopped in front of the TV was being close to the floor and the clouds of atmosphere were at a higher altitude. Spring brought itchy eyes and sneezing and why do the dandelions hate you? You wonder that because everyone else can get away with sniffing and blowing the dried ones, but not you. It was fun to watch the bees during the day and the fireflies at night. The firefly is magic and it's a great sin to bottle them. They need freedom as much as air to live. Even when I learned to put holes in the lid, they became listless. They taught me to understand the interconnectedness of things. Correct framing of the situation solves most problems. Troubleshooting wisdom of how the properly worded question is already half of the solution. That was much later in life, at least clarity of the maxim. My viewing angle always seems to be a bit askew when compared to others. The time I deduce that the people were naked at the end of the movie of the week, an edited for tv version of Whatever happened to Rosemary's Baby. I remember talking about it and saying that of course, they were naked, they only showed above the shoulders, and they were bare. I don't know why that would stop the general conversation everyone else was having. That would happen a lot more in life, I swear I hear the needle scratching the record to a complete stop.

"What's going on", the album by Marvin Gaye, was one long track on each side. I remember the noble-looking cover photo of the artist with rain droplets in his beard and hair. I don't remember listening to the album much because we had to go outside whenever the album was brought out. I bought this album as a CD while I lived in then-West Germany,  and was very disappointed by the cuts to the different tracks of each song. I wanted a belly rubbing inducing album, but the gap between songs was distracting, like the "um" in people's speech. It was there that I saw for the first time the Birkenstock sandal. The locals wore them, usually with socks, a style that reminds me of Roman soldiers. I  bought my first pair of Birkenstocks in 1995, and like the caligulae, mine has an ankle strap. I have sprinted while wearing them often while trying to catch up with a bus. They remind me of those cool sandals from when I was a kid in Akron, Ohio. I still own a pair and they are overdue for an overhaul. The soles have been worn down, but the leather and buckles are still great. Built to last.